Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  “I called Amex, reported that my card was lost and there were all these charges that weren’t mine. They wanted to know, had I lost my wallet? I said no, just the one card. They said, who would have had access to my wallet? And I felt like the criminal. What was I going to say, one of my tricks must have gotten hold of it? I mumbled something about how maybe I hadn’t locked my locker at the gym one day. As if I went to the gym. I was sitting there, on the phone in my office, and I swear I was sweating, like it was Sergeant Friday on the other end and I was getting the third degree. Of course, they didn’t care, it was just somebody filling out a form. They were going to send me a new card, I had to pay the first fifty dollars, that was it.

  “A couple weeks later, I opened a book. It was something I’d started and hadn’t finished, it was already two or three down in the pile. I opened it and there was my card. God, I thought, it wasn’t ever taken, I just misplaced it. Used it as a bookmark for some reason. So I don’t need a new one, I ought to call and tell them. Then I realized: of course it was taken, you idiot, it was used. It hasn’t been in this book all along, someone took it and used it and then brought it back.

  “That kind of narrowed the list of suspects. I don’t have that many repeat visitors, you know? I tried to think: who was over here before the card was used and after? There was just Michael and this one other guy, Bud. And—well, you don’t need to hear about Bud. But there was no way Bud was dining at the Obelisk and handing them an American Express card. It had to be Michael. I felt awful: I really liked him.”

  “So what did you do?” Joel said.

  “Nothing. What was I going to do? I just chalked it up to experience. But then a couple weeks ago he dropped by, out of the blue. You know, the front desk at my apartment called up and said there was a Michael Greeley. I was going to say, no, I don’t want to see him. But I said okay. And then: it’s funny, I was afraid to have him in the apartment. I went and stood by the elevator. The door opened, he stepped out. Grinning. I thought for a second: hey, what difference does it make? I’m horny. And I’ve paid a lot more than fifty dollars for worse times than I had with Michael. What the hell?

  “But I was scared. I thought, if he’d do that, go through my wallet, who knew what he’d do? I didn’t know him, who knew what he could do? We were just standing there, I guess he must have wondered why we’re just standing there. So I told him all about the card. Of course he said no, he didn’t do it. I said, yes, he did, it had to be him. And then, you know: he didn’t shout at me or tell me I was crazy. He just said, ‘Well, if that’s what you think.’ He pressed for the elevator, he was just shaking his head. He got on, turned around and looked at me. Just went on shaking his head, till the doors closed.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I’m not sure. Oh, I am, it had to be him. And, you know, these people can just lie and they don’t show a thing.”

  Joel knew what he meant by “these people,” but he let it pass. Ron would just have said it didn’t mean anything. Joel said, “It’s funny, though. I mean, why would he bring it back and not just ditch it? Why would he keep trying to call you?”

  Their meat loaf came. Joel testily reminded the waiter that he’d never brought their drinks. Ron asked for ketchup. After all these important transactions, it was almost natural for Ron to have forgotten Joel’s questions and say, “I’m thinking of growing a beard.”

  Joel assented to the change of subject. “Oh, yeah?”

  Ron must have caught Joel glancing at his hair, which was a moderately convincing dark brown. “I know it’ll come in gray. I might just go gray all over.” He chuckled. “I’ve got this friend Harvey, looks like Santa Claus, and he has to beat the boys away with sticks.” They laughed. Ron said, “What’s been happening with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Still not scoring?”

  “I don’t even go out. I kind of lost interest.”

  “That’s like saying you’re kind of dead. In which case I’ll finish your meat loaf. Anyway, seemed like you were pretty interested in Michael.”

  Joel blushed a little. “I was just curious.”

  “Or that guy you were talking to.”

  “Andrew? We just know each other from work. His lover died a couple of years ago and he hasn’t, you know, he hasn’t done anything. He’s thinking he might be about ready to dive back in.”

  “And you’ll be the pool.”

  “I doubt it,” Joel said.

  “There’s the fighting spirit. Have you thought about asking him out?”

  “Actually, I think he asked me out. I mean, just, ‘We ought to get together some time.’”

  “What are you waiting for him to do? Hire a skywriter?”

  “It was sort of ambiguous.”

  Ron grunted. The waiter brought ketchup; Ron stirred about a pint into his mashed potatoes until they turned into a pink fluff, like cotton candy.

  They ate in silence for a while. Then Ron said, “Oh, did you ever get in touch with Rate?”

  “Uh-huh.” Joel should have stopped with that; there wasn’t any reason to blurt out the whole story.

  When he had finished explaining, as best he could, Ron didn’t point out that the Santa Fe boy didn’t exist any more. Nor did he ask what the hell Joel thought he was going to do when he found the guy. Ron just said, “Well, I wish you luck.”

  “You don’t think this is crazy?”

  “Oh, of course I do. Rut for forty-six years I thought it was crazy to hope for the life I’m living now.”

  “I don’t guess that’s the same.”

  “I just mean, if you want something, it doesn’t matter much if other people think you’re crazy.”

  “Okay.”

  “What are you hoping for, that I’ll somehow talk you out of it?”

  “You could save me a lot of money.”

  “You want me to fail to,” Ron said. “You want me to tell you this is stupid and you ought to get on with your real life. And then you’ll walk away saying I couldn’t understand, I didn’t get it, it was all over my head.”

  “I don’t know what I want you to tell me,” Joel said. “I don’t even know why I brought it up.”

  “Ron Junior, any time we had a fight he’d go into this dramatic wail about how nobody understood him. And it worked, it always made me feel bad; if I could possibly give in, I would. Recause I knew he didn’t mean that at all, what he was really whining about was that he was understood all too clearly. And I knew just how maddening it was to be excessively understood. I went to a shrink … oh, twenty years ago, when it was clear that Helen and I weren’t ever going to be a real couple again, but I couldn’t see any other life. And about midway through the second hour, he said, ‘You’re gay’ And I said, ‘It’s not that simple.’ Oh, don’t you hate it when people go and-then-I-said, and-then-he-said. But he said, ‘This is all pride. You’re not here to get better, you’re here to be admired for your courageous refusal to live.’”

  “All right.”

  The waiter materialized with a vast dessert tray. “Just the check,” Ron said, without asking Joel. Which was all right; dessert was the only vice Joel didn’t have.

  “Look, I’m not lecturing you. I’m just telling you I’ve been through it. I kept crazy resolutions for a long time, I went on demented quests for a long time. And I wouldn’t be bitter about the years I wasted if I had ever really felt any of it. But I never did. I knew I was being arbitrary, that I had made up all the rules I lived by and could rewrite them any time. I was just playing a game I’d made up, and I was losing it.

  “If you tell me that you’re really not ready to deal with a live human being—it’s too soon or you’re too depressed or whatever—I could respect that. If you tell me that something deep within you needs to find the Elvis of El Paso boy or whatever, fine. But if you’re just putting on a show, all I can tell you is that everybody is very, very busy with their own spectacular dramas.”

  Ron couldn’t understa
nd, he didn’t get it, it was all over his head. They split the check. While they were waiting for the change, Joel suddenly said, “Is Bud black?”

  “Bud? Oh, Bud. No.” Ron looked puzzled.

  Joel didn’t say anything more. He decided he wasn’t going to talk to Ron again. Because Ron was a racist, that’s what he said to himself. But, of course, he had plenty of friends who were racist, in varying degrees. Racist, sexist, every other bad thing. If he started crossing them all off his list, who would be left?

  He wasn’t going to talk to Ron again because he had told Ron something he should never have told anybody.

  Joel was trying to figure out where the computer had stashed the memo he’d been working on all morning. He almost didn’t answer the phone: he had the idea that, if he didn’t track down the file right away, it would disappear. But the ring sounded urgent.

  “Joel Lingeman.”

  “Mr. Lingeman.” It was Bate. Joel felt the way he did when he opened the paper to the page with the lottery numbers. Bate was going to tell Joel that he’d found the boy, or that the boy was dead. Joel discovered that some part of him hoped the boy was dead.

  “I found Simms of Santa Fe.”

  Oh. That was as far as he’d got? “Uh-huh. You went out there?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been to New Mexico?”

  “No, no. They weren’t ever in New Mexico. That was just a post office box.”

  A whole world vanished, obliterated, irretrievable as the memo in Joel’s computer. The boy did not stand under a western sky washing his Mustang, the ring of mountains over his shoulder.

  “The company was actually Leonard Siperstein and Son.”

  “Was?”

  “Was. In Baltimore. They went out of business twenty-eight years ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “I gather ‘and Son’ didn’t want to take it over. So when Leonard Siperstein retired he just shut it down.”

  Over already, this little caprice of Joel’s, or this spectacular drama; the trail was cold. Joel wondered what he had spent for this intelligence.

  Bate went on. “Siperstein is still alive, rather surprisingly. Living in a place called … let me see. Pikesville.”

  “I know Pikesville.” The Jewish suburb northwest of Baltimore. Joel had been there a couple times, visiting his college roommate. Steven, what had become of him? The college magazine was filled with news about classmates he had never encountered, while the people he wondered about just disappeared. Steven: the merry eyes and the perpetual half-smile; the hair, in the style of those years, a helmet of tight reddish-black curls in which he wore an Afro pick like a tiara; the compact, furry body.

  “… didn’t wish to talk to me,” Bate finished.

  “What do you mean? Did you go see him?”

  “I called him. He didn’t want to see me.”

  Joel was nonplused. Perhaps he’d seen too many detective shows, but he didn’t have the idea that the shamus called ahead and asked for an appointment.

  “But you could … you know, go there.”

  “And do what? Spring at him from behind a tree?”

  “What if you had to … I don’t know, give him a subpoena?”

  “I am not a process server,” Bate said. Joel imagined him, with offended dignity, drawing himself up to his full, if negligible, height. “In any case, it’s one thing to give somebody something and quite another to get something from somebody. He most emphatically did not wish to discuss … the subject of our inquiry.”

  “You told him?”

  “I told him. And he recalled the person.”

  He recalled the person! Not forty miles away there was a man who recalled the person. Who had seen him in the flesh. Like the last apostle, able to testify to what he had seen with his own eyes.

  “What did he say about him?”

  “He said—I am reading from my notes: ‘I got nothing to tell you about that goddamn kid.’ Then he hung up.”

  “So what are you going to do next?”

  Bate sighed. “I attempted to find the proprietors of man about town, on the possibility that they might have some record of the agency that placed the advertisement.”

  “And?”

  Bate recited, in a monotone, “man about town ceased publication in 1974. It was put out by a concern named Universal Periodicals, which continued to publish several other magazines, including Crock Pot Cuisine and Modern Dry Cleaning. Universal was subsequently acquired by Supreme Chemicals, which is now a division of National Products, formerly National Tobacco. My informant there demurred at the suggestion that they would have retained any thirty-year-old records from Universal.”

  “So that’s it? You can’t think of anything else?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve explored every avenue. Short of just walking around and showing the picture to people.”

  “I could do that myself.”

  “I suppose so. You surely don’t want to pay me to do it. So, unless you have any other suggestions, I believe I will prepare my invoice.”

  “Yeah, I guess you might as well.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Joel said casually, “You know, I used to have a good friend in Pikesville. Where did you say this Siperstein guy lived exactly?”

  The Times magazine had a cover story about the Harris bill. Written, of course, by Dennis Callahan, the official and ubiquitous thoughtful faggot. His take on the Harris bill was predictable enough. Gay people had to accept adult responsibility for their actions. Gay people wouldn’t ever be tolerated until they married and lived in little cottages with two children per couple.

  Joel knew a few of those couples, guys who had adopted. Little girls, of course, because you could buy them so cheaply from China. Not to mention that people weren’t quite so spooked by the idea of faggots raising a little girl. If they were to acquire a little boy they would keep him home from Little League and make him rearrange furniture.

  Joel didn’t guess there was anything wrong with playing Mi-Lin has two daddies, if that’s what people wanted to do. It was certainly more wholesome than whatever sort of parenting the daddies who advertised in the gay paper had in mind.

  What if he and Sam had done it, would that have held them together? A baby girl with diapers to be changed. Throwing food, sometimes throwing up on one of Sam’s sweaters. Yuck. Joel didn’t have enough nurturing instinct to take care of a goldfish. It would probably just have been another thing for them to fight about. They had hardly been able to change a light bulb together; how could they have raised a child?

  Joel went back to the Callahan article. The Harris bill, while misguided, was a reflection of the larger society’s legitimate concern that extending basic rights to homosexuals not be construed as implying approval of immature and self-destructive patterns of rhubarb rhubarb … It wasn’t the article that got to him, though he knew this was all the debate the Times would countenance on the subject, the designated homosexual having been heard from. What got to him were the illustrations. Pairs of men, under the glare of a streetlamp, their faces obscured in shadows. Planning to do something immature and self-destructive. The underworld.

  He tossed the magazine aside and picked up the news section. The main headline was something about Syria, which he naturally skipped. He couldn’t have cared if the very existence of Syria proved to be an extended practical joke by Rand McNally. Further down there was a piece about how civil rights leaders were objecting to the Vice President’s proposal for biotechnology innovation zones. That silly thing about tax credits for research companies that relocated in the inner city.

  It seemed that the residents of the potential zones weren’t thrilled at the notion of biotechnology innovation going on right down the block. There were murmurings about the Tuskegee experiment, about toxic waste dumps, about how nobody seemed to want all these genomes and clones and stuff in Chevy Chase or Beverly Hills. The report ended with a gratuitous reference by the reporter—no one, apparently, had
brought this up—to the persistent rumors that the government had created HIV in a lab and introduced it to the cities as a way of wiping out black people. Deadpan, but the point was clear: black people were irrational and paranoid, blaming mysterious forces for their own social pathologies and resisting every effort to help them restore the wasteland they had made of the cities.

  The reporter didn’t say that, Joel thought it all by himself. He caught himself, but he also thought it and wasn’t even sure it was wrong. As he wasn’t sure Ron was wrong. Somebody had used his American Express card. Why should Joel have returned a not guilty verdict just because that kid was cute? What was his name? Michael. Ron said “these people.” He was an unrepentant racist, and he could also be, in this one instance, correct.

  Well, and it was—wasn’t it?—crazy of them to think that there was some secret committee working on the final solution for the Negro problem. Or that the Vice President’s plan to give tax breaks to needy pharmaceutical companies was a plot to modify the DNA of innocent black children. Didn’t these self-anointed black leaders have some real issues to deal with, instead of constantly stirring up this imaginary crap?

  These people. Joel sort of wished no one had ever thought up races.

  He was leaving the bagel shop and there was Sam. It wasn’t a big neighborhood. Sooner or later, there had to be Sam. That they hadn’t run into each other before suggested that Sam must have been avoiding it. Which should have been easy enough; Sam should have known better than to pass the bagel shop at nine on a Sunday morning.

  Sam saw him at the same time. They both stopped, didn’t speak for a minute. They were just there, on the sidewalk together. As if they had come to the shop together and Sam had been waiting outside for Joel to get the bagels.