Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  Joel said, “Like me, you mean.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “I always wondered what your secret was. Like, it wasn’t just that you could walk up to people. But it seemed like you scored every time. I was always amazed.”

  “Ah.” Ron chuckled. “You want to hear my secret?”

  “Sure.”

  Ron looked around, then stage-whispered: “I didn’t score every time. Maybe you only noticed the times I scored.”

  “Oh. Maybe.”

  “I must have batted, I don’t know, two hundred back then. And now, jeez, I’m probably batting point oh-oh-five.”

  “But you still go out.”

  “I’m not dead. When I’m batting zero I’ll stop going out.”

  Joel didn’t say anything, concentrated on cutting his very last shrimp into many little morsels. Ron said, “You think that’s pathetic.”

  “I think it’s hard.”

  “What else are you going to do? You’re just going to jerk off the rest of your life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there’s always hustlers,” Ron said. “Or the peeps.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Oh, you’re too fine for the peeps? You remember being too fine for the peeps. You’re barely up to standard.”

  Joel dropped his fork.

  “I’m kidding,” Ron said. “No, I’m not. Look at you. You’re not taking care of yourself at all.”

  “Somebody else said that.”

  “You ought to listen. Go to the gym. Get some clothes. And God, where do you get your hair cut?”

  “House barber shop. It’s a bargain.”

  “I bet.” Ron shrugged. “I’m sorry. Look, it’s your business.”

  “No, no, I’m sure you’re right,” Joel said. He wasn’t irritated, exactly, just tired. Suffering that deep weariness that can overcome you when you receive advice that you know is right, all but irrefutable, and that you know you aren’t going to take. Go to the gym, Jesus. Even the thought of finding a new barber made Joel tired.

  Joel’s plate was empty. He said, “Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?”

  “No, go right ahead. Unless you want some of these onion rings?”

  “I guess I shouldn’t.”

  “Oh, have some. Pull yourself together tomorrow.”

  Joel had some and looked around. The place was almost empty. One gay couple and two straight families of identical demographics: youngish Mommy and Daddy, infant in high chair. One infant playing with a strand of spaghetti, the other screaming to be let down. Probably in a few minutes they would reverse these roles.

  “You and your wife,” Joel said. “Did you have kids?”

  “Uh-huh, two. All grown up now.”

  “Do they know about you?”

  “Oh, Helen made sure of it. ‘Your daddy’s leaving the house because he’s a fairy.’”

  “Jeez.”

  “Hell, she even called my mother. My mother must have been eighty, and Helen just calls her out of the blue and tells her that her Ronald is funny.”

  “That was sweet.”

  “Oh, she got hers. My mother just snapped right back that if Helen had been any kind of woman I’d still be there.”

  “Good for her.”

  “It wasn’t fair,” Ron said. “But yeah, good for her.”

  “How did your kids handle it?”

  “Learning I was gay? My daughter was okay about it, right from the start. Ron Junior …”

  “You named your son Ron Junior?”

  “What? Anyway, he doesn’t … we hardly ever see each other. I thought he could handle it. I mean, when it happened I tried, you know, to talk to him about it. He’d just kind of hear me out, politely, and when I asked him how he felt he just shrugged. Like it was no big deal.”

  “But it was a big deal.”

  “I don’t know. Whether it was that in particular or my breaking up the house or … I guess there can be a lot of reasons sons don’t talk to their fathers.”

  This was certainly true. What amazed Joel were sons who did talk to their fathers. “I wonder sometimes, what it’s like,” Joel said. “Having kids.”

  “Expensive. By the time I finished paying off Helen and putting them through school—well, I’ll be lucky if I retire before I’m ninety.”

  “But worth it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like a deal you make. It just happens. You screw, you pay.”

  “I never did.”

  “You mean with a woman. Not once?”

  “I tried a few times, I just couldn’t.”

  Ron smiled. “You should have done what I did. Closed your eyes and thought about your roommate.”

  “Is that really what you did?”

  “No. Did you want to get dessert?”

  “How about you?”

  “Just coffee, probably. I need to get home and make myself beautiful.”

  “You’re going out?”

  “It’s like they say on the lottery ads,” Ron said. “You gotta play to win.”

  Joel ascended from the Metro and made his way home through streets clogged with men who had made themselves beautiful and were just on their way out to party.

  He could go to the gym. He could get a new haircut, new wardrobe. Facelift, tummy tuck, liposuction. He had even read somewhere that guys were getting abdomen implants—some kind of plastic six-pack actually inserted under the skin, substituting for a million crunches. Easier to sneer at the manic and grotesque than face up to the simple fact: he could go to the gym.

  Joel’s living room looked enormous when he walked in, big as an armory. It took him a second to register that there was only one club chair. Sam had come with no notice at all and taken away the Sam chair. He had a right to one of the chairs; they’d split the bill fifty-fifty. But he could have called; this way it was as though he had stolen it. As he had stolen everything else.

  The May 1964 man about town was on the coffee table where Joel had left it before heading out to the Hill Club. It was open; somebody had been looking at it. Probably not Sam; Sam would have put it back exactly as he’d found it. Kevin, then, along to help. Sam went to use the bathroom, Kevin picked up the magazine, leafed through it. He must have wondered why Sam’s ex had this old magazine from before he was even born. Kevin was of the generation that scarcely believed the world had existed before they were born.

  Joel sat down in the remaining club chair, lit a cigarette, and started to read the magazine. He didn’t turn at once to the back, even though now he could look at the picture indefinitely without fear of discovery. He meant to read the magazine as carefully as he had when he was fourteen. Page by page, trying to put out of mind what was on the penultimate page. As if he could make it catch him by surprise again, that surprise from which he had never recovered.

  The magazine was huge. Some time around 1970 they changed the postal regulations and it became prohibitively expensive to mail the giant magazines: Esquire, Holiday, man about town. They all shrank to the size of Time or Newsweek, and something was lost. They had been like monthly presents, celebratory albums, with their dramatic graphics, their glossy photo spreads by Avedon or Penn. Their lavishness was really their entire content: it said money, sophistication, money, elegance, money.

  On the cover, Sean Connery, in Goldfinger that year. The top of his head obscured part of the logo, so that it read man ab t town™. Always the same, for the forty years or so the magazine ran, always in a jaunty, mid-century lower case. As in archy and mehitabel, the epic typed by a cockroach who couldn’t manage the shift key. Or e. e. cummings, the lowercase modernist who was still presented as the dernier cri when Joel was in high school, forty years after his efflorescence. That, too, would have been 1964, when Joel first read “anyone lived in a pretty how town … he sang his didn’t he danced his did,” and thought he had discovered something daring and new. Those years when Joel awoke to the world were, maybe, closer to the twenties than to the sevent
ies: the end of something, not consciously the beginning. When the new world came along, it swept man about town away with it.

  How Joel had loved man about town, waited for it every month. Most boys he knew preferred the other men’s magazines, Esquire or Playboy. Playboy for the obvious reason, Esquire because it was then, as now, targeted at bright but randy adolescents, man about town was less leering, more selfconsciously elegant and arty. Its implied reader was the man of its title, a wealthy bachelor who dined at fine restaurants, went to Broadway first nights and gallery openings, and still found time to keep up with Sartre and Bellow and Kubrick.

  At the front, before the featured articles, were what would be called now the lifestyle columns. A cookery piece featuring a menu for two to be whipped up by a guy who couldn’t boil water: a can of crabmeat and one of cream of mushroom soup, a jar of pimentos, sherry. Pour into chafing dish, stir. Serve over toast. A travel piece about where to stay in Venice if you could afford a staggering $100 a night. All punctuated with ads for jet travel, stereophonic high-fidelity systems, and, above all, liquor and cigarettes. The romance of liquor and cigarettes, the delusion Joel had never entirely outgrown.

  How cheap and smarmy it all seemed now, man about town’s vision of sophistication, of manhood itself. A whole world of consumption that was, for the intended reader, nothing but a prelude to getting laid.

  But of course the intended reader did not exist, there were no such men. The real readers must have been gay men, or boys like Joel who were drawn to the life depicted in man about town for reasons they didn’t yet understand. The editors must have known it: column after column was peppered with assurances that elegance was masculine, that you were cooking a seductive dinner for your lady friend, that you cared about clothes because the fairer sex wanted to see you looking your best. The anxious tone made Joel think of Fred Astaire or Cary Grant, men who had gone just exactly, to the micrometer, as far as a man could go without being called a pansy. That was the razor’s edge on which man about town skated, only the Santa Fe boy buried in the back of the book hinting at the great deception.

  Joel got to the fashion pages. Gray suits and golfing outfits. With the peacock look and Nehru jackets still a year or two away, how ever did they fill the clothing section month after month? Perhaps with oddities like the feature in this issue, a long, precious article on the glories of the seersucker suit. “Surely its foremost proponent was the memorably dapper Damon Runyon, who once said [continued 174] …”

  He never had found out what Damon Runyon once said. Nor did he now. This was how it happened. Joel sitting in his room, a child reading an article about Damon Runyon’s seersucker suits. Flipping as instructed to page 174, and never a child again.

  He closed his eyes, opened them. He had never, he supposed, looked at the picture for more than a few stolen seconds at a time. Thirty years ago, guiltily peeking at it maybe a score of times in the few weeks before the magazine vanished, victim of one of his mother’s cleaning frenzies. He waited for the June issue, but the ad wasn’t there, nor in July, nor ever again.

  Even at the time Joel had suspected that man about town had decided not to carry any more ads from Simms of Santa Fe, as if that little box of innocent flesh somehow sullied the last pages of the magazine. He was sure of it now, having read through this issue: someone was distressed about what the ad implied about the typical reader and excised it. Just as, a few years ago, the management at GQ suddenly realized who was buying their swimsuit issue and remade the whole magazine to drive the faggots away.

  So Joel had seen the Santa Fe boy for, cumulatively, a minute or two three decades earlier. He remembered the smile and the swimming trunks. He had not remembered the body.

  Joel was inured now to the sight of men’s bodies. In the underwear and perfume ads, in the videos and the magazines, everywhere now images of stupefyingly perfect men. It was hard to recover what he must have felt, encountering the Santa Fe boy so long ago. Really, the boy wasn’t, by current standards, remarkable. His was not, like the bodies in the underwear ads, a wrought thing, end product of presses and crunches and steroids. The belly was flat, but not a washboard; the chest and shoulders and arms were powerful but not enormous. The front of his trunks was flat, without today’s obligatory bulge, natural or enhanced.

  The body was not perfect, it was merely beautiful. Which must have been enough to astonish Joel back then. He mustn’t, until he turned to page 174, have known there was even such a thing as a beautiful man. There were handsome men, tall, strong, with cleft chins and broad shoulders. But. the sultry open grace of the Santa Fe boy defied everything a man was supposed to be like, and opened to Joel’s vision everything a man wasn’t supposed to see. Joel hadn’t just stumbled upon something he in particular wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t supposed to know about. He had happened on what no one was ever supposed to know: no one was supposed to know that a man could be so vulnerably lovely, that his full arms could hang so loosely, candidly, that his pelvis could tilt just so, that a man could have a body every inch of which was an invitation.

  An invitation, most basely, to kiss, to lick, to bury your face in those hips. All of those ways into it foredoomed: the touch of lips or flesh to flesh would only remind you that you were two different people, sealed in your separate sarcophaguses of skin, impermeable carapaces through which a soul could not pass. What he had wanted—wanted and would never get, he had known that even as a kid—was somehow to pass into those hips, enter through that intraversable route, and inhabit the body of the Santa Fe boy. Be at home in that body and smile the smile of the Santa Fe boy.

  He could go to the gym. He could have gone to the gym at fourteen, or at twenty-four, he could go tomorrow morning and possibly—even at his age, with a patient trainer and hefty doses of testosterone, conceivably forge some passable facsimile of the body in the picture. But he would never stand the way the Santa Fe boy did, so proud, so innocent, never smile so broadly. As if his body were a gift he was giving. Here it is, that smile said, and isn’t it something? He looked straight out at Joel, from a world where a body was a gift.

  Joel must have known it was impossible the instant he first saw that picture. He had known what he would never get and had somehow understood—at fourteen, had seen so clearly—that nothing he could do or have or be would make up for that impossibility. And that he would never want anything else.

  The boy had disappeared. Joel had been looking at him for so long he was just a bunch of black dots. Which was all he had ever been. Dots. Well, what was anybody? What was Sam, but a continuing series of sensory impressions, less orderly than the dots on this page, that Joel had somehow pieced together into a lover?

  Just a picture, the boy was just a picture. A fragmentary image: you couldn’t even see his knees, the likelihood that he had a back was an untestable hypothesis. Joel knew there was, or had once been, an actual Santa Fe boy. He stood in a room somewhere, under bright lights. The light bounced off him, through a lens, burned an image onto some film. Through some even less comprehensible process, the image was somehow turned into a pattern of dots, ink on a page. In Joel’s very distant room, light hit the page and bounced into Joel’s eyes. It was the white he saw. The black dots were the places from which no light was reflected. Absences: he conjured the Santa Fe boy from gaps in the light.

  This was the kind of insight Joel had had the couple of times he dropped acid. Which was one of the reasons he only did acid a couple of times. The other being that the cheap hits he bought from the campus pusher were so laced with speed that he spent both trips racing along, about as paranoid as Richard Nixon. It was time for bed.

  He glanced one more time at the picture. The smile wasn’t quite as broad as he had thought. Maybe there was some sorrow, or at least tension, around the eyes—as if Joel could interpret the expression in eyes the size of a period. And maybe—you could hardly tell, but it was just possible—the boy wasn’t looking straight out at the camera. No, he wasn’t: he wa
s looking off to one side, beyond the edge of the frame. As if he had been caught unaware; or as if he were receiving direction.

  The boy was, yes, looking away. Smiling for the camera, but not looking at it. Only his body smiled straight at you.

  Whether or not Joel was going to embark on the course of self-improvement Ron had mapped out for him, he could at least floss. Usually he flossed only in the last few days before a dentist’s appointment. So when the dentist looked in his mouth and said reproachfully, “Have we been flossing?”, he could answer, “Some.”

  He clicked on the TV in the bedroom and went to the bathroom to see if, through some oversight, Sam had left the floss behind. While he hunted through the jumble in the cabinet beneath the sink—Ajax, shoe polish, tanning lotion, abandoned stop-smoking programs, and a marital aid that he had never noticed before and that Sam certainly should have taken with him—he listened to the news. The local news, murders and fires and accidents and about ten minutes of weather.

  There was some floss. Probably ten years old, but what could happen to floss? As he went back into the bedroom with it, the news broke for an ad.

  A woman of about seventy put down her newspaper, looked at the screen, and shook her head. A kindly but puzzled smile on her echt-grandmother face. “Jim and I went through a lot. The depression, the war. Raising our kids. Good times and bad times, we worked hard and we stuck together. Jim’s gone now, but he’d be so proud of the kids. The kids turned out fine, and my grandchildren! And one thing that really matters to me is that they don’t have to worry about me, what would happen if I got sick. Because there’s Medicare. It’s not a giveaway, we earned it, all our working lives, and I’ve felt so secure. My kids, too, knowing they wouldn’t have to worry about how they’d pay my bills.”

  She looked down at the newspaper, then up again. “But now I read that Medicare’s in trouble. The way things are going, it might not be there for me. And one of the reasons is that it spends a billion dollars a year—one billion dollars!—paying for …” She glanced sideways, a little abashed. “Well, for young people who did dangerous things, when they ought to have known better. I’m awfully sorry if they’re sick.” Her brow furrowed; you could bet that, as soon as the ad was over, she was going to pop right into the kitchen and make the poor young people some chicken soup. “But you know, it’s not too much to ask that people take some responsibility for their lives. Jim and I always did, and we taught our children to live the same way.” She shook her head again. “If they take Medicare away, we’ll get by somehow, my kids will help out. But it isn’t fair, when they’ve worked so hard, raising their own families. When they’ve done the right things all their lives. It just isn’t right.”