Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  “I talk to my agency, we agree that this garment ain’t for the Town and Country set. They say we should try man about town and, for some reason, Opera News. So we take this little ad, just one time, and we sell a lot of suits. Do we ever sell a lot of swimming suits. And at six ninety-nine a pop. Bernie’s strutting around like he’s Bernard Baruch instead of Bernard Schlemiel. I tell him we need more suits and he says, well, the guy’s bankrupt, there are no more suits. I have to explain to him that this guy was not the last person in the world with a sewing machine, it is possible to make more suits. I’m doing him this favor, I’m going to buy suits from him instead of just going out and finding my own supplier. So he goes off to dig up a supplier but—I don’t remember, I don’t think he ever followed through. And then I shut down just a few months later. So that was that.”

  He sat back, puffed on his cigar, looked at Joel as if he had said everything Joel could possibly want to know.

  “About the model …” Joel said.

  “The model, I don’t know from that model. The agency got him. I guess in New York.”

  “What agency, do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” he said, as if Joel had just called him senile. “Dinkeloo, who could forget a name like Dinkeloo?”

  “D-i-n-k-e-1-o-o?”

  “That’s right.” He chanted: “Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo.”

  “Are they still in business?”

  “Beats me.”

  Joel recalled that he had a taxi with the meter running. “Listen, I better get going. Thank you so much for your time.”

  “What’s your hurry? Your cab pulled away while we were out on the lawn.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll go inside, I’ll call you a cab. Unless you want to wait till my wife comes home, she might take you. Where you got to get?”

  “The train station.”

  “In Baltimore? Forget it, I don’t think my wife has been downtown since the last department store closed.”

  “How about you?”

  He shrugged. “There isn’t any Baltimore any more. Just a fancy stadium and a million schwarzes.”

  Siperstein stubbed out his cigar on the slate beneath his feet—carefully, so he could light it again. Joel followed him into the house. Siperstein’s tennis shoes squeaked on the travertine floor in the living pavilion. While he called the cab, Joel looked at the Steinway. A couple of strings were broken, no one had played it in years. Maybe no one had ever played it, it was just the right thing to have in front of the plate glass window.

  “Probably twenty minutes or so,” Siperstein said. “We can wait in here, they’ll honk.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t know anything about that boy. Except that he sure sold a lot of swimming suits.”

  “Did he?”

  “My distributor, his phone just rang off the hook. Orders, and also …” He looked away from Joel for a second. “Also a lot of people who wanted to know where to find him.”

  “Oh.”

  Siperstein snorted. “There was this one guy, my distributor told me, he wanted the suit the boy was wearing. So my distributor says, you mean same size, same color? No, he wanted the actual suit, the particular suit that boy was wearing in the picture.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joel felt himself blushing, for himself and all of his kind.

  “So I say to my distributor, you get any more calls like that, tell him ‘Yes, sir,’ send him a suit and charge the schmuck fifty bucks.”

  “Uh-huh,” Joel said. “Look, you’ve been real helpful. I guess I better wait outside.”

  “I’ll go with you, finish my cigar. God forbid I should smoke a cigar in my own house.” He smiled. “So some people fall in love with a picture, what do I care? I myself had a terrific crush on Myrna Loy.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I don’t think I ever tried to buy any of her garments. Or went looking for her. She was just a picture.”

  Joel followed him back out, he lit his cigar. Now Joel did have a cigarette.

  “Maybe we better wait out front,” Siperstein said. “We might not hear the cab back here.”

  As they walked around the house, Siperstein suddenly put his arm around Joel’s shoulder. “So, uh …”

  “Joel.”

  “Joel, you’re from where?”

  “I grew up outside Philadelphia.”

  “Your parents are still there?”

  “No. I mean …”

  Siperstein squeezed Joel’s shoulder in silent acknowledgment of his orphanhood. “Did they know about you?”

  “About— Oh. My mother did.”

  “My son was a gay person. My wife—his mother, my first wife—she didn’t know. Or maybe she knew and didn’t tell me, I sure didn’t know. Just that I wanted him to go into the business and he wouldn’t, he wanted to go to New York. He couldn’t stay in Baltimore, he had to go to New York. So I fixed him up with a job at Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo and then I shut down. It broke my heart, he couldn’t stay and he couldn’t tell me why. I never figured it out, not until he came down with this AIDS.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have the AIDS?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s good.” They were in front of the house now. “So anyway, yes, they are.”

  “Sir?”

  “Still in business. Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo. I forget where, Lexington Avenue I think.”

  The cab appeared. Siperstein père took his arm off Joel’s shoulder. “Thank you,” Joel said.

  “I hope you find …” Perhaps Siperstein started to say he hoped Joel found the boy. He studied the end of his cigar. “I hope you find your way back okay.”

  Like and-Son Siperstein, Joel hadn’t gone into the family business, having for some reason no passion for urology. And he hadn’t gone into the family-business, the lifelong enterprise of raising Lingemans so there could be more Lingemans. The cycle of generation was broken: and-Son and Joel would pass nothing on. As their fathers had passed nothing on to them.

  Unfair. Siperstein had tried to pass something on; and-Son had declined. Maybe it was the same way with Joel and his father. I can’t, I won’t: it must have seemed to Joels father that Joel never said anything else. Over the years refusing every companionable, manly diversion his father proposed: camping, sailing, skiing. Joel preferred not to.

  Joel tended, thinking about his father, to recall the few occasions when the man hollered at him. But mostly in those years the poor guy must just have looked at Joel quietly—hurt, confused, at last resigned. Joel wasn’t ever going to be what he wanted. Not even wanted, just expected; when he heard the words “It’s a boy,” he must have had an automatic vision of what lay ahead for the two of them. How could he have known that those words predicted nothing about his son except that the kid would pee standing up?

  In the last couple of years before he died, he and Joel would play pinochle when Joel visited for Sunday dinner. Then Joel would go home and change for the bars. Once they were sitting on the couch together, watching something on TV while Joel’s mother cooked. His father put an arm around him. Tentatively, but with clear premeditation. Joel didn’t squirm away, just let the arm rest on his shoulder. Until his father coughed and removed it.

  All the refusals. He had spent his life saying no, like a cross baby, even to what was good for him. No, you don’t understand, I am special, I am different, my life isn’t anything like yours. Joel’s life was a spectacular drama that had culminated in a heroic quest for a swimwear model.

  Why should it have bothered Joel so much to learn that thirty years ago some queen had tried to buy those lo-rise trunks, the very ones the boy had worn? Like the Shroud of Turin. So he could bury his face in them while he jerked off.

  “Simms of Santa Fe. How can I help you?”

  “Hello, I … uh … I saw your ad in man about town and I … I want to order the swim trunks.”

  “Uh-huh. Name?”r />
  Siperstein’s distributor got the particulars, wrote up the C.O.D. order. “You should have that in a week, ten days,” he said.

  “Great. Oh, I meant to ask. The guy in the ad looks exactly like this buddy I went to high school with. I wondered—I’ve kind of lost touch with this guy—I wonder if you know how I might get hold of him?”

  So many of them. Call after call. Until:

  “Size?”

  “Um … I wonder … what size do you think the guy in the ad is wearing?”

  “I don’t know,” the distributor said. “I’d guess maybe a medium.”

  “Okay. ‘Cause you see, I’m just about the same built as that guy, so that’s what would fit me.”

  “Fine. Medium. Color?”

  “As a matter of fact, you know, if you … if you happened to have the pair the guy was wearing, I’m sure that would …” The caller’s voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Aqua. I want the aqua.”

  How could Joel have supposed that he was the only one captivated by that picture? Obviously the ad had been targeted at gay men. The model—the boy was an anonymous model—had been carefully selected by Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo, because they figured they weren’t just selling swim wear. The ad had been targeted at grown-up homosexuals who knew exactly what they wanted and had $6.99 to throw away, plus 50 shipping. One confused boy just happened to be caught in the crossfire, as a bystander is hit in a drive-by shooting.

  So what? Was a sunset any less beautiful because a lot of people enjoyed looking at it? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Joel and Sam had been to Key West once, and had gone one evening to the pier where a crowd gathered to watch the sun sink into the Gulf. There were vendors selling jewelry and ice cream, clowns, a guy playing the trumpet. The sun went down on schedule, gorgeous as the guidebook promised. The tourists clapped. Joel and Sam, abashed, hurried down to La-Te-Da for the last of tea dance. The sun was the sun, billions of people looked at it every day. You had to have a mighty high opinion of yourself to think you saw anything other people couldn’t see, felt anything other people couldn’t feel.

  To admit that other men might have felt as he did about that picture was pretty much the same as admitting that he felt no more than they did. That he might always have wanted nothing more than to bury his face in the crotch of those lo-rise trunks, sniffing for any trace of the boy who had worn them. Some religious experience.

  Except really: what could possibly be more spiritual, more sacramental, than sniffing a pair of swimming trunks? Straining after the scent of God?

  When he got back to the office, he learned that he had seventeen new voice-mail messages. It was the middle of August recess, and almost quitting time. None of these people could possibly have a problem that couldn’t wait until the morning. So he might as well just head to the Hill Club—as soon as he called Bate.

  He recited what he had learned, proud of his initiative and skill.

  “Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo,” Bate repeated, sounding rather cross. “Spell that, please.”

  Joel spelled it. He had thought Bate would be pleased that Joel had secured this important intelligence. Maybe Bate was jealous, that an amateur should have done his job better than he did. Or maybe he didn’t want Joel to find the boy.

  The last Wednesday in August, Joel had a meeting in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building. Congress was still in recess, but there were a few staffers already back in town. Just enough to have this meeting, called by Cordelia, the Finance chief of staff, and her opposite number from House Ways and Means—on the fantastical premise that they could reach agreement on various minor provisions before Congress came back. Work a few things out before the annual frenzy of trying to finish a budget bill by the end of the fiscal year on September 30. This was a delusion: there was no provision so minor that they could reach agreement on it before they absolutely had to, which would be just before the government shut down. Still, Joel and the rest were dutifully gathered in the House leg counsel’s office to go over the Medicare amendments.

  The health drafter for the House, Jerry Frankel, presided, sitting at his computer terminal; next to him was his Senate counterpart, Andrew. Around the table were Cordelia and a couple of people from Ways and Means, Mullan from Senator Flanagan’s staff, Joel. They were going line by line through hospital payment rules. Every so often someone from Ways and Means spotted a problem, or Joel did. Jerry Frankel would come up with a fix and enter it into his computer. He would look at Andrew, who would just nod, that looks fine. They would print out the corrected page and give it to Mullan, who would say he wasn’t sure the Senator could agree to it, they’d have to come back to it. Because he didn’t understand it and wouldn’t ask Joel to explain it to him, not in front of the House people. This had been going on for a couple of hours.

  Andrew had apparently gone on sunning himself in his backyard all summer; he had reached the Al Jolson stage, startled white-boy eyes staring out from a mask of even mahogany. He looked stupid, in the languid sexy way of a pampered high school boy who didn’t get a summer job and spent the endless afternoons at the swimming club. One of those guys who would show up in September and whose what-Tdid-last-summer essays would consist of the single sentence, “Worked on my tan.”

  Andrew looked stupid, and Joel realized he hadn’t contributed a thing all afternoon. He just agreed with every change Jerry Frankel typed in. “That’s fine. That’s fine.” Joel wondered if he was distracted or maybe just not very good at it. Maybe he never made partner at McCutcheon and Halsey because he was, like, not very smart? But they wouldn’t have kept him, even as an eternal associate. Distracted, then. Maybe by the renascence of his night life.

  They had finished the hospital amendments. That is, they had reached agreement on none of them, and it was time to disagree on something else. Jerry Frankel said, “Should we work on this AIDS thing?”

  One of the House people said, “Why bother? That’s not going into the agreement.”

  Mullan said, “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Well, your guy isn’t supporting it, is he?”

  “He hasn’t made up his mind.”

  This was pretty astonishing news. Matthew Flanagan, silver-haired patriarch of the neoliberals, might be supporting the Harris proposal? Well, he was from New Jersey, there probably wasn’t a big gay vote there, or at least not an organized one. But Flanagan had always been pretty liberal on social issues: abortion funding, hate crimes, all of that. If even he might … For the first time it occurred to Joel—to everyone in the room—that Harris’s gratuitous little sneer of a bill might become the law of the land.

  “Then I guess maybe we better look at it,” Jerry Frankel said. “There were … I saw a couple of problems.”

  Andrew looked attentive and eager. He and Melanie had been working all summer on this language, and now he had to pretend that his ego wasn’t invested in it and he would be delighted to hear about any little problems.

  Frankel ripped him apart. Andrew hadn’t even fixed the mistakes Joel had pointed out in May, and since then he’d added a lot of new language Joel hadn’t seen before—full of circular references, internal inconsistencies, undefined terms, even subsections without sections. Of course, Frankel had been working on this stuff forever; he could probably recite the Medicare statute in his sleep. But Andrew looked like a fool. He took it all stoically. “Yes, I’m glad you caught that.” Or, “Uh-huh, I was kind of concerned about that myself. What would you suggest?” No one in the room looked at him; everyone kept their eyes on the draft and penciled in the changes Frankel dictated.

  Joel wanted to hold Andrew and go, “There, there. Poor baby.” But he also felt a dawning disdain. Andrew might have made everyone else in the room look pasty and flabby, but he was way over his head. He should have studied the Social Security Act, those afternoons he had spent sautéing himself in his backyard.

  Joel peeked up from the draft, met Andrew’s eyes. Andrew was expre
ssionless, and Joel didn’t know what face to put on. He just stared, conscious that Andrew would read that stare as contempt. He looked back down at the paper, resumed marking up the corrections like everyone else at the table. This was just business; there wasn’t any reason Joel should have felt that he was letting Andrew down. But the room now consisted of Andrew and everybody-else. Joel couldn’t detach himself from everybody-else.

  “Why don’t we print it out and see what we’ve got now?” Frankel said.

  “Um,” Andrew said. “I’m a little late for another meeting. Is it okay if we go through this next time?”

  It was almost six o’clock on a Wednesday at the end of August recess. He couldn’t possibly have another meeting. Frankel began, “Well, if we could just …”

  But Andrew had already gathered up his papers. “I’m really late, sorry,” he said. “Next time.” He glanced at Joel on his way out, but Joel still couldn’t read his expression.

  Frankel rolled his eyes. “I guess we’ll come back to this. Should we move on to the claims processing rules, or do we need a break?”

  “Let’s just keep going,” Mullan said.

  Joel stood up. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes.” They didn’t need Joel to help them make up rules about how hospital bills received in September should be paid in October, or how HMOs should get their October check September 30, thus moving expenditures from one fiscal year to another. Did the nation know that Congress met its deficit reduction targets by kiting checks?