Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

“man about town. Do they even print that any more?”

  “No.”

  “No, I didn’t think I’d seen it.” Bate put a hand over the picture, almost casually. “You don’t know anything else about him?”

  “Sorry.”

  Bate let the faint pencil line of his mouth droop into a frown. “Thirty years is a long time.”

  “So you think he’s not going to be easy to find?”

  “No, I’d guess it will be either easy or impossible. No, what I meant was …” He bit his lip. “You know the man in this picture doesn’t exist any more?”

  “I’m sure he’s changed,” Joel said, quickly. Though of course that wasn’t what Bate had said. “So, um, will you take the case?”

  Another car squealed by. Bate shivered. “I need to— I’m sorry, you seem like an ordinary person, but this isn’t a very ordinary request. So I have to ask: what are you going to do if I find him?”

  “Nothing. Maybe just go see him. Once, I mean. I’m not going to stalk him or anything.”

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  Joel couldn’t explain, he couldn’t explain it to himself. “I don’t know. This is—” How could he have thought that he wouldn’t be asked these questions? That he could just lay his money down and make his not very ordinary request and the man wouldn’t wonder if he was a stalker or a murderer or … He should have thought of some answer. “I don’t know, it seems silly. Maybe we should just forget the whole thing.” He took the picture, started to slip it back into the envelope.

  Bate watched him and must have concluded that, along with the picture, Joel was stuffing into the envelope a potentially large sum of money. “I’m going to need that,” he said.

  “Oh, of course.” Joel had marred the picture, smeared the dots a little. Only on the torso, the face was still intact.

  “If you want, we could go down to Kinko’s and make a copy of it.”

  “That’s okay.” He would have liked a copy, but he didn’t want Bate thinking he couldn’t get through the days without looking at the Santa Fe boy.

  Bate came out into the hall with him. As they were shaking hands, Joel saw under the fluorescent light that Bate had a mustache, almost white gold against his pale skin.

  As he walked through the lobby, Joel heard again: “Thirty years is a long time.” The walls were of that pocked pink-gray stone they used in lobbies thirty years ago instead of the marble of today, a laser-cut veneer not as thick as the butter on Joel’s morning toast. It occurred to him that the building must have been about coeval with the Santa Fe boy—that is, with the photograph, they were artifacts of the same era. He looked up at the building as he stepped outside. Yes, the milky blue glass and the brushed aluminum mullions, it might very well have been 1964. Architecture for the great society. A long time ago.

  The interview with Bate had been so brief. If Joel got on the Metro right away, he could be back in the office without having been gone much more than an hour. Or he could stop and get a sandwich and be more emphatically late. No one in the office cared. August recess was just about to start, nothing was happening. Only his own compulsiveness made him feel guilty if he took sixty-one minutes for lunch.

  He felt exponentially guilty as, already tardy, he ordered a full-sized cheese steak sub with everything on it. In one ear Sam was telling him he was getting too fat, in the other his mother was telling him he was late for the office; if he had had more ears there would have been one to hear—from whom?—that his pursuit of the Santa Fe boy was … breaking what rule? All the rules that had been beaten into him and that he violated, and he had no precept to cover this situation, except maybe a general guideline against doing things that were crazy. What he was doing was crazy but not wrong. There was no rule that said a man couldn’t try to learn where another man was. If he actually knocked on the guy’s door, that might be a minor trespass of some sort, a violation of some right the man had, to be whatever he was now instead of the Santa Fe boy. But Joel hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

  The Santa Fe boy didn’t exist any more. Joel didn’t believe that. He understood what Bate meant. If the boy lived, he was in his fifties. A shapeless nonentity or, maybe worse, one of those men who kept themselves trim, emblems of futility. Joel didn’t care, really, it didn’t matter what the man looked like now. Partly because Joel knew the boy persisted, perfect as ever, in some realm where Bate could not possibly track him down. Partly because … the only way he could learn why he had to see the man was to see him. He had meditated over that picture for hours, days. But he knew he’d never understand anything until they were face to face. The thrill and trepidation that filled him at the very thought of that encounter were, surely, the merest foretaste of how it would actually feel when he—

  Accosted an aging stranger who would, after momentary bafflement, probably punch his lights out.

  Mayonnaise dripped down onto his pants leg. It wouldn’t ever come out, these pants were ruined. Sam and Joel’s mother both scolded him.

  Joel and Ron were going to meet at Gentry and then figure out some place to eat. Joel went straight from work, in the suit he had worn because he thought there was supposed to be a briefing for Congressman Patchen. But the briefing was put off for a day, and this was the only suit he could fit into, so he’d have to wear it again. He needed to try not to spill anything at dinner. And maybe he should eat light, so that in some indefinite future he could fit into another of his suits. This had never happened: his closet was filled with clothes he was going to wear again as soon as he took off just a few pounds. If he could have arranged them in order he would have had, not only a precise gauge of how his waistline had grown, but also a chronicle of men’s fashions he looked stupid in. The Jordache look. The Miami Vice look. The L.L. Bean look.

  His current look, bureaucratic nondescript, was not terribly out of place at Gentry. This was the bar where men came in suits. Mostly young men, Hill boys and PR types, in suits that were vaguely Milanese. A scattering of guys Joel’s age, some of whom had failed to discern that Italian suits require that your shoulders be wider than your waist. Others, like Joel, in shapeless sacks, but with costlier haberdashery than Joel’s: French cuffs, contrasting collars. The Orrin Hatch look.

  The bar at Gentry must have been a hundred feet long. Almost deserted near the entrance—the guys who came to Gentry were out enough to go to a gay bar at happy hour, but not enough to display themselves in the front window—more crowded at the back. Joel was out enough to sit at the front, where sunlight fell on the magazine he planned to read while waiting for Ron. The bartender was so far away he might possibly have been in Maryland. Joel waved, not too frantically. The bartender didn’t notice, but Joel attracted some attention from the throng at the far end. One of their number detached himself, ambled down toward Joel. As he got closer Joel could see that it was Andrew.

  “Hey, Joel,” he said. “I thought that might be you.”

  “Hi.” They shook hands, Andrew grasping Joel’s shoulder. Joel whispered, “Don’t be alarmed, but you’re in a gay bar.”

  Andrew mimed shock, but he also moved around to Joel’s left, so his back was to the front window. “I just stopped by on my way home.” Gentry was categorically not on his way home. He must have seen Joel thinking this; he added, “Well, I … actually, I’ve been going out a little.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Joel said, as casually as he could. Was the hibernation over?

  “Yeah, once in a while. I mean, I’ll come here after work, or I’ll go to the Pledge some nights and have a beer or two.”

  “Uh-huh.” The Pledge: Joel had stepped into the Pledge a few weeks earlier, didn’t even stay for one drink. A sea of tank tops, pumped chests, meticulously sculpted arms.

  “I haven’t, you know, met anybody.”

  “It’s hard,” Joel said. Meaning: you may be in better shape than I am, but it’s kind of uppity to think you could make it at the Pledge.

  “I mean, I meet people, guys try to pick m
e up, but …” Joel saw them: shadowy, slender figures standing next to Andrew as he had one or two beers, leaning toward him, smiling. Shadows moving in on him. “I don’t know, it’s been so long. I’m … ready. I mean, I get horny. But it’s like, after a couple years—it’s like I haven’t met anybody who should be the very first one.”

  Joel thought, I should be the very first one, you twit. And maybe the last. Part of him was saying: if he’s telling me these things, he just sees me as his confidant, I am not on his agenda. Part of him was conjuring up one of those movies in which the hero, having been dumped by the spoiled socialite, is dictating a memo, stops, suddenly realizes that his secretary would be beautiful if she took her glasses off.

  “What have you been up to?” Andrew said.

  “Me? I … you know, I go out. But—what’s the old saying?—the screwing I get isn’t worth the screwing I get.” This was worse than, at their last meeting, inventing a fling with the librarian. Maybe Andrew would think he was trashy. Still, better trashy than Emily Dickinson.

  “We ought to go out together some time,” Andrew said. Uninterpretably. If he had accented the “we,” or even the “out,” he would have been asking for a date. If he had accented the “together,” he would have meant that they should go out cruising together. Sisters. With the understanding that, if one of the sisters got lucky, the other sister got lost. But he hadn’t, really, emphasized any one word.

  Joel said, “Sure.” Not so warmly as to commit himself to sisterhood, nor so coldly as to foreclose a date. Andrew looked a little puzzled. Good: why should Joel be the only one puzzled?

  “You’re not drinking?” Andrew said.

  “Guy never came down here.”

  “Let me try, I’m going to have one more.” Joel thought: really? Don’t you have to rush home for the call from Kenyon’s parents?

  While Andrew sent semaphore signals to the impossibly distant bartender he said, “So what else is up?”

  “Nothing much,” Joel said. “Oh, I ran into Senator Harris a couple weeks ago.”

  “Ran into him?”

  “At—you know Corcoran’s?”

  “Uh-huh. You met Senator Harris in a bar? I would have thought he was a Mormon or something.”

  “If he is, he got some special dispensation to drink Absolut martinis.”

  “Well, I hope you told him he’s a homophobic asshole.”

  “Practically. I told him too much, anyway.”

  Andrew did a take. “You came out to him in Corcoran’s?”

  “No, we just talked about his bill.”

  “Which is going into the chairman’s package.”

  “What?” Joel was, again, dismayed that Andrew should be deeper in the loop than he was.

  “I mean, they’re going to put it in if it saves money. Which it doesn’t so far; the budget people are scoring it at zero.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Give or take a hundred million.

  “Melanie and I keep rewriting it. I mean, we must be on the thirtieth draft, but the budget people keep coming back and saying it’s unenforceable. You can’t get any saving unless you can show there are actually claims that won’t be paid. And nobody ever sends a claim in with a diagnosis of AIDS.”

  “Right.”

  “At one point we had it so if a doctor sent in a bill, he had to check a little box. Like, ‘Was this service HIV-related? Yes/no.’ Melanie says the AMA people just went bonkers.”

  “No kidding,” Joel said. “I can just see physicians checking a box that says, ‘Please don’t pay me for this service.’”

  “Not to mention there are these, you know, patient rights issues. So that’s dead.”

  “Maybe they’ll just drop the whole thing.”

  “Well, like I said. They need the savings for something. I mean, there’s something else they’re trying to pay for.”

  “Isn’t there always?” Joel said.

  Ron came in, wearing jeans and a polo shirt. When he saw Joel’s suit he said, “I thought we weren’t going anywhere fancy.”

  “I just came from work,” Joel said. “Ron, do you know Andrew?”

  “Hi, Andrew. Don’t let me interrupt you.”

  “We were just talking shop,” Joel said.

  “Oh, politics. What do you do, Andrew?”

  Andrew murmured, “I, um … I work for Congress.”

  “Which office?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I hate politics,” Ron said. “I used to be a junkie like everybody else, but I took the cure. Now the only thing I read in the paper is the funnies and Miss Manners.”

  “Probably better off,” Andrew said. “Listen, I was talking to a guy down that way. I’ll let you two guys catch up. Nice meeting you, Ron.”

  Ron watched him as he walked to the far end of the bar.

  Joel said, “I guess he didn’t want you to know where he worked.”

  “I guess not. He’s a nice-looking man.”

  “You think?”

  “I banged him once.”

  “What?”

  “Years ago. It didn’t look like he even remembered.” Ron shrugged. “Where did you want to eat?”

  “I don’t care. We could just stay here.”

  They got a table not far from Andrew’s end of the bar. Andrew saw them and waved, then went on talking to, Joel was happy to see, a fat guy who had to be seventy. So Joel wouldn’t have to watch him leave with some cutie who had passed the entrance exam for the very first one.

  Ron squinted at Andrew. “Maybe it wasn’t him. It was a long time ago.”

  “You sure did get around.”

  “I sure did. Sometimes I walk into a place and it’s like This Is Your Life with Ralph Edwards.”

  A guy emerged from the crowd at the bar and walked up to their table. A black man, maybe in his late twenties, with skin of an even cocoa and eyes that were … possibly what is called hazel, but they looked almost golden. He was wearing gabardine slacks with about a twenty-inch waist; the body above it, flaring to powerful shoulders, was swathed in the kind of shirt that made Daisy Buchanan swoon, the fabric somehow rich and ascetic at the same time. The open collar disclosed the hollow at the base of his neck, the hollow like a well, cocoa and hazel and golden.

  “Hi, Ron,” he said, very softly. “I didn’t see you come in.”

  Ron didn’t look at him. “Hello, Michael.”

  Michael turned toward Joel. Just looked at him, silently. Ron didn’t say anything, and Joel offered, “I’m Joel.”

  “How are you, Joel?” Michael graced him with a meager smile.

  “Uh …” Joel couldn’t remember the answer to that question; he was looking at Michael’s eyes. “Fine.”

  “That’s good,” Michael said. With a trace of condescension? No, patience: he must have been used to aging white boys who looked at him and forgot how to talk.

  He said to Ron: “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “I know,” Ron said. He picked up his menu and tilted his head back, so he could study it through the lower part of his bifocals.

  Michael blinked, his lips parted a little, at this studied rudeness. “I just thought if we talked, if we could just talk about it, maybe …” He ran down: he couldn’t address this appeal to the back cover of a menu. He glanced at Joel, embarrassed. Joel frowned. He went on: “I don’t know why you won’t believe me.”

  “Okay,” Ron said, without looking up from the menu. “I believe you.”

  “All right, then.” Michael nodded gravely, as if those words were all he’d wanted. He turned back toward Joel. Michael’s face was blank, there wasn’t any reason for Joel to feel that he was being sized up. But their eyes locked for, Joel thought, a long time. He imagined there was some meaning in Michael’s parting “Nice to meet you, Joel.” If only because Michael had bothered to remember his name. He watched as Michael walked the length of the bar and out the front door. Michael’s butt should have been designated as a national monument.


  “What are you having?” Ron said.

  “I haven’t looked. Who was that?”

  “Michael? Just someone I saw a few times.”

  “He’s beautiful.”

  “You don’t want to play with that.”

  The menu took about a paragraph to describe each dish. Salsas, infusions, reductions, essences. There was a meat loaf special, probably inserted over the chef’s furious protests. They both ordered it, and a round of drinks, finally: Joel had been just about to go into withdrawal.

  “The only tasty thing here is the waiters,” Ron said.

  “I don’t know what it is about gay restaurants. They try so hard, and you wind up with …”

  “Cafeteria food. Nobody comes here for the food, just the view.”

  “I guess. Why don’t I want to play with that?”

  “What? Oh, Michael. Do you want to play with Michael?”

  Who wouldn’t? But Joel said, “I’m just asking.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Joel shrugged; he wasn’t going anywhere, not till his drink got there.

  Ron began: “I got my Amex bill—oh, a couple months ago, and there were all these charges on it. Bloomingdale’s at Tyson’s Corner, about four hundred in men’s clothing. You know, I never go out there. Couple of restaurants, Red Sage, Obelisk, places like that. Big bills. I thought, oh, it’s some computer error. But, you know, they give you copies of the slips and there they were, the card was imprinted on them. And the same signature on every one. Nothing like mine, my name misspelled even. I guess they don’t even try to match the signature any more, they just ring up the sale. So I looked in my wallet and, sure enough, the card was gone. I never missed it, I don’t even use the thing, it’s just for travel or some kind of emergency. I kept it in an inside pocket, there’s no way it just fell out.

  “So I knew: some trick took it. But I didn’t know who, you know? Not that there’s a stream of traffic through my apartment, but I’d been having … kind of a run of luck. Plus I use the card so little, it could have been months. Except I guess a guy wouldn’t have just held on to it for months and then gone and started using it. Anyway, there were a fair number of suspects, and Michael wasn’t even the main one. He seemed like a really sweet kid, we’d seen each other a few times, I was even thinking we were headed for something. There were a couple of other guys who were … kind of bottom of the barrel, you know. So I figured it was one of them. And what was I going to do about it? I didn’t even know their last names.