Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  Here was the truth: because Joel did not believe in Paradise, an eternal life, he was left believing in New Mexico. To be there with the Santa Fe boy, swimming, lounging, cruising forever. Just dwelling with him, as so many people have dreamt of a timeless dwelling with the altogether less attractive and unsmiling deity they have conjured up. Joel at least had incontrovertible evidence that the Santa Fe boy existed. Or that he had existed once. More than anyone could say about Jesus.

  For an eternity they would wash his Mustang, each of them wearing his little lo-rise trunks, then take a dip in the pool to cool off, pop a couple of brews and lie in the sun. They wouldn’t touch. But he would look over at Joel from his chaise longue, raise his hips and adjust his wet trunks, lie back. Still looking at Joel, that sad impenetrable smile dawning on his face. Joel would smile back. They would not touch. For ever, Joel would live in that moment that was so much more intense than mere touching, that instant when you knew you were going to touch.

  Through aeons he would be with Him in Santa Fe and would be about to touch Him.

  Santa Fe. Holy faith.

  six

  Ron was a lawyer, so Joel thought he’d know the name of a detective.

  “What’s up?” Ron said. “You’re going to have Sam followed?”

  Joel glanced around. No one at the Hill Club seemed to have heard. “Of course not. There’s just someone I’m trying to locate.”

  “Who?”

  “I— Well, you know, I’m still trying to settle my mother’s estate. And there was this one kind of personal thing she wanted to leave to an old friend. So I’m trying to track down this person.”

  “Isn’t there a lawyer handling all this?”

  “Yeah, but this—it wasn’t something in the will, it was something my mother told me.”

  Joel waited for a bolt of lightning. None came; most of civilization consists of lies about the dead.

  “So, anyway, you know any detectives?”

  “Urn, a few. Let me …” There was a silence while, presumably, Ron flipped through his mental Rolodex. “Why don’t you try this guy named Bate. Gordon Bate. I think that’d be the best one for you.”

  “He’s good, huh?”

  “He’s … a little less like a detective. Call me tomorrow, I’ll get you his number. Or he must be in the book.”

  “Okay. Are these guys expensive?”

  “Relative to what?”

  Relative to just taking the picture out one more time, gazing at it for a minute, and tearing it up. “I mean, do they charge by the hour or …”

  Ron wasn’t listening, he was staring over Joel’s shoulder. Joel turned to see what might have transfixed him. Sure enough, a boy of stupefying beauty had inexplicably stumbled into the Hill Club. He sat alone at a table and read the specials on the blackboard, his lips moving only a little. Joel thought: five, maybe ten minutes, and Ron would be sitting at that table. Or, more probably, Ron would be told to scram; the guy might as well have had “straight” tattooed on his forehead. But Ron would at least try, while Joel sighed and made a beeline for the only vacant stool at the bar.

  “Hello, hello, hello.” Francis, the ex-seminarian, was especially manic this evening, as if he had skipped a dose of whatever kept him out of St. Elizabeth’s. Joel thought of escaping, but a stool was a stool. “What’s new?” Francis said, with an urgency that meant he had some terrific news of his own to spill.

  “Not much,” Joel said. Then, just to get it over with, “What’s new with you?”

  “We-e-e-ll. I’ve been— Mercy!”

  “What?”

  “There is a positive angel at that table by the window.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Francis went on looking for a few seconds, then shook his head and turned away. Frowning, as if beauty made him angry.

  Well, beauty made Joel angry sometimes. He thought again of destroying the picture, and felt a brief homicidal thrill. Some part of Joel did want to annihilate the Santa Fe boy. The way he smiled, smiled with his whole body: who would not wish to obliterate such a smile, shred the little swatch of paper that was the only evidence of his mocking existence? And why shouldn’t Francis, biting his lip and staring at the bar, savor a momentary vision of, say, hurling a firebomb at that table by the window? Where a creature whose very existence was somehow a reproach sat innocently, trying to decide between a burger and a cheese steak.

  “So,” Francis said. “Are you in touch with Sam at all?”

  “I hear from him once in a while:” This wasn’t so, Sam hadn’t called in weeks. Possibly because of an annoying habit Joel seemed to have developed, of crying over the phone.

  “Is he still with that kid?”

  “Kevin. I guess.” Speaking of candidates for annihilation.

  Francis leaned in so close Joel could see the veins in his eyes. “They say he beats Sam up.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I heard from somebody. I don’t know.”

  Should Joel credit this not altogether ungratifying bit of intelligence? Amplified, probably, in its transit on the wires of rumor, so that what might have been one spontaneous blow became the ongoing “beats Sam up.” He couldn’t, really, picture it happening even once. Trying, he got only a cartoon: Kevin’s skinny arm thrust forward, Sam reeling and bouncing back like an inflatable punch-me doll. Kevin was expressionless, not angry; Sam was wide-eyed but kept bouncing back.

  “Sam wouldn’t let somebody beat him up,” Joel said. “I mean, he’d leave.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Joel had no idea if it was so. Fifteen years with somebody, you ought to know everything about them. But hitting Sam was an experiment Joel had never conducted. Maybe Sam just took it, accepted the occasional—slap? punch?—as the price of Kevin. Affordable, unlike whatever price he couldn’t go on paying for Joel.

  Or maybe it was part of what Sam wanted: not a bad habit offset by the kid’s many virtues, but an integral part of Kevin’s appeal. Under the languor and the childlike freshness Joel had seen the day they visited, some ferocity. Joel could understand, in the abstract, that it would be exciting to be with a man who could potentially hit you. But only if it were merely potential. And even then: to spend your time avoiding, any word or deed that could provoke it—it would be the same as being hit all the time.

  Could this be what Sam had always wanted? Not to be hit, necessarily. But to be with someone so aware of him, someone who felt the frictions and snags of being with him so intensely as to have to strike out. Someone who paid that much attention to him. Instead of, say, blithely going on for months unaware that he was cheating.

  Joel didn’t think people could get through fifteen years paying that kind of attention, caring that much.

  “Look who’s sitting with that boy,” Francis said.

  On his way out, Joel picked up the gay paper to do his weekly scan of the ads. He skimmed through them on the Metro and was done by the second or third stop. Practically all repeats this week, and none of the handful of new contestants in the Win-a-Night-with-Joel competition had submitted the winning jingle.

  He flipped to the front part of the paper. He usually skipped this section, all the solemn stories about which candidate the Eleanor Roosevelt New Democrats were endorsing for Registrar of Wills, or the latest standings in the Mid-Atlantic lesbian shot-put tournament. This week, though, they had a big headline: WHO IS CPR? Followed by an article that was mostly a list of all the people who might have known but who hadn’t returned the reporter’s calls by press time.

  The ad Joel had seen had aired a few more times, in DC, a few other markets. And another ad Joel hadn’t seen, apparently the obverse of the first: a young couple worried about Mom. These little dramas were the only traces of the mysterious Citizens for Personal Responsibility. The paper assumed that it was some kind of religious right group, like the Family Research Council or the Traditional Values Coalition. But there was something funny about it. No spokesman, for one thing: usuall
y these groups were fronted by eerily juvenile-looking men with waxy complexions and prominent eyelashes. CPR was faceless, and—even more suspicious—it wasn’t raising any money. What kind of organization never passed the plate and could afford ads that were a full sixty seconds long? An organization whose members also belonged to the Fortune 500. But which industry cared about … ?

  In a sidebar, there were statements by famous gay leaders. Famous in the sense that, when Joel saw their names, he recalled having seen their names before: Geoff Pfeiffer, Adrienne Broom. They were the people who were called when statements were needed. Some were attached to organizations; Adrienne Broom, for example, was the public affairs director of the Association for Lesbian and Gay Advancement and Education. ALGAE: wasn’t that the group that kept pushing for hate crimes reporting, on the theory that if you counted something it would go away? Or were they the people who thought that, when lesbians broke up, courts should arrange joint custody of the cats? Geoff Pfeiffer, on the other hand, was identified merely as “activist.” Suggesting that he got out of bed every morning and embarked on a day of furious, purposeful activity. Joel supposed that made him a passivist.

  Geoff thought gays, lesbians, transgendered and transfigured persons should boycott the TV stations that had aired the ads. Adrienne thought her organization might run counter-ads, and offered an address to which concerned readers could mail their checks. Claude pointed out that gay people were often quite close to their mothers and cared as much about preserving Medicare as anybody else. Absolutely, Joel thought. They ought to get Andrew as poster boy: he was so fond of old people he had acquired a second set.

  The spokespersons speculated about CPR, they wondered what might have motivated an apparently affable man like Harris to introduce his awful bill. No one offered the simple explanation. That it was about personal responsibility. That, to a man from Montana, where people got by on nuts and berries, there was honestly something disturbing about the spectacle of people partying—pumping themselves up, dropping a few chemicals, getting it on in open defiance of every recommended precaution—and then handing Uncle Sam the bill.

  The leaders didn’t talk about this. They didn’t even allude to those kids who were reckless and self-destructive—some of them even trying to get sick, as if seropositivity were a Boy Scout merit badge. Nor did they offer the argument Joel had tried on Harris the other night. That once you started down this line, there was no end to it: smokers, drinkers, eaters of elephant or donkey burgers, the sedentary, the choleric. All kinds of weak people, giving in to temptations and incurring future bills. The leaders must have known what the answer would be when they lobbied the congressmen who were willing to talk to them, the answer that would show up in CPR’s counter-counter-ad. “There’s a difference between eating a burger and … doing the things they do.” The twisted diseased things they did, all those beautiful boys on the—what did they call it? The circuit, as if they were vaudevillians doing the round of the Orpheum theaters.

  Joel didn’t know anybody who went to circuit parties, he had only read about them. Wistfully: what must it have been like to be young and buffed and flying off every weekend to whatever city was hosting the white party or the black party or the masque-of-the-red-death party? He would have gone. The only reason he wasn’t having unsafe sex was because he wasn’t having any sex at all. And if he did, if he got his rocks off and then paid the viral price? He was forty-five. He could go wham at the office any day now. Or he could, if infected, live something close to a normal life span, whatever the actuaries would say was normal for a man with his many unhealthy proclivities.

  Joel wasn’t any more responsible than anybody else. Why should he be: to whom was he responsible, what was he here for? The only responsible person he knew was poor Andrew Crawford, rushing home to take the calls from a couple of people with incipient senile dementia who probably thought he was their sainted son. Only Andrew thought he knew what he was here for.

  Did you have to be invited to circuit parties or did you just sort of show up?

  Joel did not destroy the picture. He carried it in an envelope in his inside coat pocket as, at lunch hour, he went to meet Bate.

  Bate was expensive. They had established this over the phone. He cost, per diem, about what Joel might have had to spend to get an escort to stay with him per noctem. Which would have been crazy, but more rational than hiring a detective to find the Santa Fe boy.

  He was doing something crazy. After so many years of being balanced, like a checkbook whose stubs add up. He went to work and pretty much did his job, he paid his rent, if he talked to himself on a public thoroughfare he did so in a low, conversational tone that bothered hardly anyone. Now he found himself doing something demented. He didn’t feel high or agitated, he just felt that he was doing the next thing. Today it’s a little chilly and I should zip the liner into my raincoat. Today I should do something about that CD that’s about to roll over. Today I should find a detective who will help me locate the Santa Fe boy. He giggled. People on the Metro looked at him.

  Back before Sam, Joel used to get up some mornings, serve a trick coffee, get him out the door, and then go to work. He didn’t know which seemed more implausible now: having tricks or being able to get up after about ninety minutes’ sleep and go to the office. Anyway, he’d arrive at the office and get on the elevator and look around at the gray faces and think: I have a secret. I have this whole other life you know nothing about and that would shock you to your bones.

  He had forgotten this. Of course it was better to be out, he had not forgotten the grind of dissimulation, evading matchmakers, feigning interest in women he and a straight friend passed on the street, eschewing pink shirts, and trying not to hold his cigarette funny. But there had been, he remembered now, the compensatory thrill of having the great secret and knowing that it made him a million times more real and alive than anyone else in the building.

  He smiled at the people on the Metro. You wouldn’t believe what I’m on my way to do.

  Bate was in one of those L Street office buildings from the sixties whose style would probably be classed in the architectural histories as Parsimonious. Every feature, from the ceiling height to the light fixtures to the printed wood-pattern plastic on the elevator doors, was dictated by cost-per-square-foot calculations. The directory behind the unguarded front desk was the typical mix of periodontists and obscure lobbying groups—the Farmgrown Catfish Association, that sort of thing. Bate was in 526.

  A small gold-look plate said Bate Agency and, in slightly larger letters, Please Knock. Joel did, and a voice he recognized as Bate’s called, “Just a minute.” He didn’t have a receptionist, so he had to be pretty small-time. Could he find a missing person? Well, how hard could it be to find somebody in this world where merchants and hospitals and banks and political parties exchanged enormous dossiers on each of us? Joel felt as though it were all but done, they had practically found the boy already.

  Bate looked as though he himself were in the process of disappearing. He was tiny, wearing a gray suit he might have bought in the boys’ department, and bald.

  “Mr. Lingeman?” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re a little early.”

  This wasn’t so. Joel had walked around the block three times to avoid being early. But he said, “Oh. Should I come back?”

  “No, no. If you don’t mind watching me eat.” Bate stood aside and admitted Joel to a one-room office that looked as though Bate’s tenancy had begun twenty minutes earlier. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the desk but a telephone and lunch, which consisted of a few tatters of lettuce in a plastic container and a bottle of water. At a right angle to the desk was a typing table with a Hermes portable identical to the one Joel had taken to college.

  They sat down, Joel in the little visitor’s chair, Bate in a grandiose vinyl executive throne that made him seem even smaller than he was. Joel could barely see around it to the window, which looked dire
ctly into an upper level of an open parking garage; he could almost have touched the cars.

  “So,” Bate said. He fussed at his salad with a plastic fork—didn’t actually eat anything, just shuffled the leaves around, as if hunting for a prize. Finally he shoved the container aside and produced from a desk drawer a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen. He wrote Joel Lingeman and August 5 in a hand so large that he had already used half the page. “So. You’re looking for somebody.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A car with its headlights on careened around a corner in the garage, it looked as though it were about to plow into the office. In the glare Joel discovered that Bate was not in fact bald; he had a corona of preternaturally fine blond hair that seemed to float, like cloud cover, half an inch above his baby pink skull.

  Bate waited, pen poised, for a name, or “my wife,” something like that. Joel could only pull out the envelope, extract the little picture, mutely hand it over. Bate held it daintily, thumb and forefinger at the top, as if afraid of touching the almost naked body. “And who is this?” he said.

  Joel almost said, the Santa Fe boy. Instead he gave the accurate answer: “I don’t know.”

  Bate placed the picture on his desk. Which now contained, in a perfectly straight line, picture, pad, pen, salad, water bottle, and telephone. He regarded Joel for a while. Joel felt like an idiot. A deviant idiot, at that. But Bate didn’t look at Joel as if he thought Joel was stupid or crazy or perverted. Rather as if Joel had told him something very sad. He made Joel sad, just for a second.

  He folded his tiny hands on the desk and said, “This is an advertisement.”

  “That’s right. I’m trying to find the person in the advertisement.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. And where did this appear?”

  “In man about town. May 1964.”