Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  Joel was emboldened to say, “I’m Joel Lingeman from OLA. I briefed you a couple months ago. About immigrants and Medicare?”

  “Oh. Oh, sure,” Harris said, certainly not recalling him. “That was very helpful, uh …”

  “Joel.”

  “You’re always, OLA, you’re always very helpful. You know, some of this stuff is pretty complicated; I’m impressed you guys know so much,”

  Joel shrugged. “Well, you know, we specialize. You’re the guys who have to know everything.”

  Harris nodded, frowning a little to suggest what a burden it was to have to know everything. It was impossible to overtax a senator’s tolerance for sycophancy. “You know, I’ve got a Medicare bill in myself.”

  “Yes, sir. I … uh, I helped draft it.”

  “Oh, did you?”

  “Well, I mean, Melanie drafted it, I just made a few comments.”

  “Sure. We appreciate your help.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Harris glanced at the open magazine to the left of Joel’s plate, squinted a little. Joel put his arm over it. Probably Harris already suspected that anyone working for OLA was an undercover leftist; he didn’t need to see that Joel was reading The Nation.

  “I was wondering,” Joel said. “What got you interested in that issue?”

  “Hm?”

  “AIDS and all?”

  “Oh. I was just—I read an article somewhere, about how they, you know, the gays, started doing stuff again. This article said they stopped for a while, but then they started again.”

  “I guess I heard that,” Joel said. About them, the gays.

  “So if they want to kill themselves, fine. But I don’t see why families should have to pay for it.”

  If they had been in Harris’s office, Joel would have nodded. But they were in a bar, they were talking to each other like normal people. “Well, you know, here I am having this glass of wine, and for all I know I might get cirrhosis some day.”

  “What? Oh, I see.”

  “I mean, I guess we all do some risky things. And they might cost Medicare money sooner or later.”

  Harris nodded. “I see what you’re saying. That’s interesting.” Joel was elated and amazed. Maybe Harris really was, as Melanie had said, educable. Joel was about to lead him gently into Lesson Two when his donkey burger came.

  “Gosh, look at the size of that thing,” Harris said. Joel wondered if he naturally said “Gosh” or if he monitored himself all the time, even here where no one could hear him. No one who counted.

  “Probably full of cholesterol,” Joel said. “Sooner or later Medicare will pay for that.”

  Harris didn’t answer, didn’t even look at Joel, just frowned a little as he poured ketchup on his fries. It was just a joke, Joel wanted to say, but he knew he had gone too far. The senator would decide when jokes were to be made. Still not looking at Joel, he said, “There’s a difference between eating a burger and … doing the things they do.” He lifted his burger, but didn’t bite into it at once, just looked at it for a few seconds, puzzled.

  Joel was through with his own burger, and he had recovered from the momentary delusion that he could single-handedly transform this moronic bigot. Eight-thirty, and he had had only a few glasses of wine; a splendid night to head to Zippers and see if he could, at last, find somebody who wanted to do stuff. The stuff they had stopped doing and were now doing again. He signaled the bartender for the check.

  Harris grunted. His mouth was full of donkey burger. When he had swallowed, he said, “Hey, stick around, let me get you another drink.”

  “Um … thanks.” He couldn’t say no; when in twenty years on the Hill had a senator offered to buy him a drink?

  “The family’s already in Montana for the summer, and I can’t get out of here till the August recess.”

  “Right.”

  “So the house is empty.”

  “Uh-huh.” This was, Joel knew, an insufficient response to this sudden, almost embarrassing intimacy. My house is empty, too, he might have said; I’m lonesome, too.

  Harris took another enormous bite of his burger. While he chewed he peeked at Joel, looked away again. Peeked: as men peeked at Zippers, the series of millisecond glances that preceded a pick-up.

  Could he possibly have been gay? Or at least on the edge? God knows it wasn’t unprecedented for a closet queen to compensate by publicly attacking homosexuals. Roy Cohn. J. Edgar Hoover. Robert Bauman, the congressman who had practically invented the use of “family” as a weapon. Until it was revealed that, after a hard day of fag-baiting, he would go and get drunk at the Chesapeake House while feeling up the go-go boys. Maybe it was even a rule: maybe if a politician spent his time lashing out at queers, he was declaring himself.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Joel said.

  “No, no, go right ahead.”

  No way: Harris raised not the tiniest blip on Joel’s radar. All of those others—once you found out, you could see it. The fussiness, the languor, the effortful heartiness; you should have known all along. Harris was just a straight guy whose family was gone, whose empty house was way the hell out in Virginia, who was amusing himself talking to a pushy nonentity in a theme bar.

  Harris said, “I don’t know if you should get Medicare.”

  Joel was alarmed; it took him a second to realize Harris was talking about the smoking. Echoing Joel’s own little joke.

  “Oh,” Joel said. “Actually, I’m saving you money.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Somebody figured this out: smokers cost more for medical care, but they don’t live long enough to take out of Social Security everything they paid in.”

  “No kidding.”

  “It’s probably true about people with AIDS, too.” This was about as close as Joel had ever come to calling a senator an idiot to his face. And he wasn’t sure it was so. What if Harris called tomorrow and wanted the numbers? Memo to himself: do not have three glasses of wine and chat with a redneck senator about AIDS.

  Harris, though, seemed to be thinking. He gobbled a few fries, shook his head, and said, “It doesn’t matter, it isn’t the money.”

  A chance to hedge. “I wasn’t sure about the money anyway.”

  Harris waved the money away. “I don’t care about the money. It’s just … I don’t know, maybe they’re born that way, maybe they can’t help it. I don’t want to put them in prison or anything. I just don’t think they deserve anything special. Like we don’t have to give them some kind of prize. You understand?”

  Joel said, quietly, but he could not keep from saying: “Giving people health care when they’re dying isn’t exactly a prize.” A career-ending remark. While he waited for the explosion, he wondered when he had last updated his résumé.

  Amazingly, Harris just shrugged. “You’re entitled to your opinion.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to have an opinion.”

  “Hey, you can’t help but have an opinion. Listen, we’re just in a bar, talking. It’s okay. I guess we’ll find out what the American people think.”

  After they had seen the ads. Harris must have known who was paying for them, who the Citizens for Personal Responsibility were. If he hadn’t shot off his mouth he might have gotten Harris to tell him.

  “I think I’m going to get some coffee,” Harris said. “You?”

  “I can’t drink coffee this late. Anyway, I need to be getting home.”

  Harris nodded. “You got kids?”

  “No.”

  Now Harris turned to look straight at him. “You married?”

  “Um …” This was when Joel was supposed to strike a blow for honesty and understanding. Look, I’m gay, he was supposed to say, and we just had a normal conversation. If that’s what they’d had. See, we’re not like you think. “Divorced,” Joel said.

  “Oh. Well, then, what’s your hurry? This was interesting.”

  “I … I’ve got sort of a date.”

  “Ah.” Harris
winked. “Then you’d better be shoving off.”

  “Yes, sir. It was good talking to you, sir.”

  “You, too. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Joel weighed the chances that if he went to Zippers, he would be presented with an opportunity to do something Harris wouldn’t do. They were slim, and he was tired. Maybe he would just rent a video Harris wouldn’t rent. Or that Harris would rent: how was Joel to know? Maybe the man was passing after all, maybe he had even been trying—as hard as he could, without blowing his cover—to pick Joel up. If you looked closely enough, you could find the signs in anyone. Weren’t Harris’s suits a little too flashy for a straight boy from Montana, wasn’t his hair just too perfect? But if these things spelled g-a-y, how come Joel was such a slob?

  Joel wanted Harris to be gay because that would account for his animus, his nasty bill: all about self-hatred. All about punishing people who did what he couldn’t do, because he couldn’t face himself or because he had made a calculated decision to live a lie so he could be a senator. This was a satisfying way of explaining the world. There were others: Harris was jealous because gay people didn’t have kids and could party without looking for a babysitter. Modern straight men were uncertain of their masculinity and were threatened by gay men. It was all Cardinal so-and-so’s fault, because he failed to speak out against gay-bashing and so fomented an atmosphere of …

  There had to be a reason, some pathology. It couldn’t be that happy and well-adjusted straight people were just plain bewildered by Joel Lingeman, bewildered and disgusted. To admit that would be to say that he was still bewildered and disgusted by himself.

  Which he was, maybe. He knew it: some part of him had never really gotten over it, had never expelled the poison that had been fed to him—that he had swallowed eagerly enough—when he was a kid. He didn’t believe anymore in the tooth fairy or the dangers of touching doorknobs, he still believed the ugly things he had been taught about himself. And if he still felt in his gut that being gay was wrong and sick, how could he expect vacuous Joe Harris to have heroically thought his way through to some other conclusion?

  Twenty years out of that morass and he was sinking into it again. Because he wasn’t getting any. This was why he had been chewing so much on his boyhood lately. Trying to imagine that there had been something else he wanted, something more elevated than sucking and fucking and whatever other stuff Harris had heard “they” were doing again. Something transcendent. Just because he was alone, Sam was gone and he wasn’t getting his rocks off. Telling himself again, the way he used to when he struck out twenty years ago, that he didn’t belong in the gay world, that he wasn’t anything like those creepy faggots who had turned up their faggoty noses at him.

  He needed to get over this. He needed to do whatever had to be done—even find a new barber—and get over it.

  Yet: before he went to bed, Joel looked at the Santa Fe boy. He had taken to doing this, the last few nights. He looked at the Santa Fe boy before he turned out the light, the way other people said prayers.

  There was a text, to which he hadn’t paid much attention.

  Of course at fourteen he wouldn’t have understood the code word “cruise.” Probably he must have wondered just exactly where someone would keep a boat in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For he was always quite sure the boy actually lived in New Mexico. That if he went to Santa Fe, the boy would be there, hanging out at the back of the Simms store, or maybe in the parking lot washing his Mustang or his Corvette. He was a creature whose only function in life was to be beautiful in New Mexico—to swim, lounge, and somehow cruise. Somewhere nearby was Mr. Simms. Just outside the picture frame: maybe it was Simms the boy was looking at, instead of straight at the camera.

  On the block where Joel grew up there was for a little while a man who owned a Rolls-Royce. Joel’s neighborhood was solidly middle class, not wealthy; it was remarkable that there should have been a Rolls-Royce parked right down the street. Joel never, not that he could recall, saw the man who owned it, a Mr. Ryder. But he did sometimes see a boy washing and polishing it, or two boys. In their late teens, probably—they would have seemed like grown-ups to Joel—and hoody: duck-tail haircuts, cigarette packs in the rolled-up sleeves of their T-shirts. He spoke to them only once. They let him sit in the back seat of the Rolls-Royce, open the little bar, wonder at the burled wood and the leather. They told him that they lived in the house with Mr. Ryder. No, he was not their father, not their uncle.

  When Joel got home he told his mother all about it; she said that he must never go anywhere near those boys again. A few months later Mr. Ryder, his car, and the boys who lived with him were gone. Joel was well into adulthood before it dawned on him exactly why two delinquent-looking youths should have lived with a man to whom they were not related and who had a Rolls-Royce. But he knew, just from the vehemence with which his mother warned him away, that there was something special about that ménage, something scary and alluring. Even after Mr. Ryder had moved away and a … normal family had moved in, the house always seemed haunted to Joel. He wished to heaven he had ignored his mother and gone inside. He wished it even now. How different his life might have been if, at eight or nine or whatever he was, he had gone into that house and learned everything.

  This must have been in his mind when he looked at the Santa Fe boy and thought about Mr. Simms. He could not have formed the concept that the boy was being kept. But he knew that something forbidden and exciting was going on in New Mexico. Something hinted at by those few words accompanying the picture. A message from a mysterious place where beautiful men wore tiny garments, lo-rise and with a dashing contour fit, and lounged in the sun under the protective eye of Mr. Simms. There was another place.

  The true prince has been sequestered in the tower; the gruff but kindly guard brings lunch. When the prince cuts into his blackbird tart he finds … a note! Do not despair. That is all it says: nothing about how he will be rescued, or by whom. Only that there is a world outside the walls and that someone out there is already planning his escape.

  The Today show was on while Joel shaved. He heard the weatherman—he couldn’t tell by listening if it was the fat white guy or the fat black guy—say that everyone should count their blessings and send their prayers to the Lord on behalf of the good people of Okumchee. The fat white guy, then, always a moment of piety before he started the commercial. Where was Okumchee, and how had the Lord made known His displeasure with its people? Tornadoes, locusts, drought?

  Count his blessings. He made a lot of money, some multiple of what the hunky bartender at Corcoran’s made. He was healthy, if pudgy. He had a roof over his head. He—

  Maybe it was just too abstract. At the Thanksgiving table, when the same injunction was issued, you could at least survey the hypertrophied bird and its attendant vegetables and literally count the dishes, the rich harvest bestowed on you by the god Safeway that you were going to eat up this very minute. While the blessings Joel was counting up now were ongoing states of being. Or negative states, really: he was not homeless. He never got AIDS. He wasn’t blind or lame or certifiably crazy. Of course, if you went on in this way, there would be no end of blessings to count. Hurray, I’m not in Bangladesh, or even Okumchee! Lookit, four, count them, four limbs!

  After the commercial, they had the Vice President on, describing a bunch of initiatives. Lately the White House had been trotting out the Vice President every time they wanted to announce a piece of pork, so that people would remember him as Santa Claus when it came his turn to run. Disaster relief for Okumchee. Toxic waste treatment for Nevada. As if all these things were his idea. He wound up talking about something so wacky it could very well have been his idea. Biotechnology innovation zones. Companies would get some kind of tax credit if they did biotech research and manufacturing in places like Newark.

  Right. All those unemployed biochemists loitering on street corners would drop their quart bottles of Colt 45, troop into the shiny new labs, and start collect
ing stock options while they combined snake and human genes so people with psoriasis could shed their skins. Katie Couric listened with undisguised boredom and then asked him about his cat.

  Oh. This was that … that thing Mullan and the chief of staff were mentioning, the break for the pharmaceutical companies that Joel wasn’t supposed to hear about. All wrapped up as some kind of welfare-to-work proposal. The companies would build something in the ghetto or the barrio they were going to build anyway. The workers would come in on the train, they’d be met at the station by an armored car labeled Merck or Glaxo, they’d toil away in the bunkers, they’d scurry home to the suburbs at night and the drug companies would get to write off all their profits. Nifty.

  Joel was always stupidly thrilled when the news covered something he already knew about. He would say to Sam: “That bill they’re talking about. I worked on that.” Sam would say, “Uh-huh,” strangely unimpressed, wait politely until the story was over, and then turn the channel.

  The Vice President’s cat had had kittens. Great. Maybe they’d be eligible for the child health insurance plan.

  Huzzah, he thought, as he walked down Q Street to the Metro. I have four limbs and lunch money. I sit in important meetings and am privy to the innermost workings of the corporate welfare system. The fog is burning off and it’s going to be a beautiful day.

  All of this was true. In the immeasurable ocean of suffering that was the world, how tiny Joel’s complaints were. He ought to have been ashamed of himself, he ought to have practically danced down Q Street on his way to the Metro every morning. And the homeless guys he stepped over ought to have been happy they weren’t in Calcutta.

  He knew that his discontent—and that of all the fat, desolate Americans around him—had something or other to do with their loss of faith. But he couldn’t just turn into … Willard, that was the weatherman’s name, beaming pious Willard, who knew the world was wonderful and people were wonderful and God was in Heaven and one day Willard would be up there giving the unchanging celestial weather report.