Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  “What were we talking about?” Michael said.

  “About, I don’t know, how Ron felt about you.”

  “He did tell you … the whole story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe it?” Michael asked this neutrally, as if he were just taking a poll.

  It wouldn’t have cost Joel anything, or not very much, to say no. Of course not, how could I believe such a thing? But he felt cornered by the question, summoned for jury duty in a case he knew nothing about. Maybe even conned somehow. A facile No would mark him as an easy touch, or at least as a man who would say what he needed to get into Michael’s pants. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, how would you? You mind if I take just one more cigarette?” Joel slid the pack over, didn’t offer his hand to be touched again. “So, Joel: tell me about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. You got a boyfriend?”

  “No.” Joel was almost prompted to tell his story, but caught himself. “Not just now.”

  “You live by yourself?”

  “Yeah. Up near Dupont.”

  “Uh-huh. But you work around here, Joel?”

  “Yes. How about you?”

  “No,” Michael said. “No, I don’t work around here.”

  That studiedly uninformative response was not unusual in Washington. Even in the 1990s some gay men wouldn’t say where they worked, as if their interlocutor might, next day, call their boss and unmask them. But it did raise again, in Joel’s mind, the question: then what are you doing here? He had the momentary idea that Michael was trolling, had come here just to hook a Joel. This was silly: he could hardly have chosen a more barren fishing ground than Corcoran’s. If he wanted to reel in a rich white guy, he would have been at Gentry. Where, come to think of it, Joel had first encountered him.

  “What exactly do you do, Joel?”

  The insistent use of his first name bothered Joel. It was a salesman’s way of establishing intimacy. “I work for Congress.”

  “Oh.” Michael nodded, his brow furrowed a little. Possibly he was speculating about whether people who worked for Congress made any money.

  The elephant burger wasn’t so enormous that Joel should have felt like Henry VIII, but he regretted ordering it. As if his belly wouldn’t have been obvious without the evidence of its cause, as if Michael wouldn’t have noticed the smoke if he hadn’t seen the fire. Still, it was impossible to eat an elephant burger without picking it up with both hands and burying your face in it. While Michael took birdlike pecks at his healthy little salad.

  “How is that?” Michael said.

  “Just, you know, a burger.”

  “Wish I could eat a burger. But I got to watch it.”

  “Oh, like you need to.”

  “Honey, I work out two, three hours a day.”

  Not a routine Joel thought of as compatible with continuous gainful employment. But he supposed some men managed it, at the cost of everything else. In any event, the results were evident.

  “You should see my family,” Michael said. “My mother, my sisters, they’re all big as houses.”

  Joel nodded. He resisted the vision of Michael at home, surrounded by steatopygic black women. “I should start watching it myself.”

  “Come on, you’re in good shape for your age.”

  Even with the qualifying phrase at the end, this wasn’t so. Joel was conscious of being hustled. And maybe that was okay so long as he didn’t kid himself. It would only be pathetic if he kidded himself.

  “Your family,” Joel said. “Are they … are you from around here?”

  “New Jersey. Trenton.”

  “I’ve never been to Trenton.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “All I know is that big sign.”

  Michael recited: “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Trenton doesn’t make anything any more.”

  Joel almost said, “It made you,” but stopped himself. Not just because it was corny, but because it was pushy and lubricious. The kind of pick-up line an old man would use.

  Trenton had made Michael. Joel pictured the blasted war zone Trenton must be now, and little Michael darting through the streets, dodging gang members, sidestepping abandoned needles, to get home to some hovel filled with his enormous mother and sisters, growing enormous somehow on food stamps. The thrifty food plan. Or maybe Michael’s life had been nothing like this, maybe his mother was an overweight neurosurgeon. But Joel didn’t think so. Michael had come from nothing and battled his way here, made the unimaginable journey here, where he sat in his crisp suit and ate rabbit food, holding his fork correctly. How, exactly, did Joel expect him to hold his fork?

  The bartender cleared their plates and said, “Will there be anything else?” Michael looked over at Joel, as if he were supposed to answer for both of them. So he did: “No, I think that’s it.” And then, spontaneously but also feeling somehow steered to it, “I’ll take our check.”

  Michael had done nothing to steer him to it.

  Outside, Michael carried his jacket over one shoulder, hooked on his forefinger in that Sinatra way Joel had never been able to carry off,-his other hand in his front pants pocket. Under the streetlight his white shirt glowed.

  “Where are you headed?” Joel said.

  “Home, I guess.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Near Twelfth and T.”

  “Oh. We could share a cab.”

  “Great.”

  Joel waited for Michael to hail one. He sort of owed Joel, after dinner. Michael said, “A cab won’t stop for me.”

  “You have a suit on.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Twelfth and T was closer than Joel’s place. It should have been their first stop, but Michael insisted they should drop Joel off first. Maybe he didn’t want Joel to see where he lived, or maybe he was planning to get out when Joel did.

  The turbaned driver was talking over the two-way radio, in whatever language Sikhs spoke. He and the dispatcher were having some kind of argument; when it was the driver’s turn to speak he became so impassioned that he almost brought the cab to a full stop. When he was listening, he drove with the speed of deliberation.

  And what was Joel’s hurry? If they had taken all night to get to Joel’s place, that would scarcely have been long enough for Joel to decide what to do. When they finally arrived, though, there was nothing to decide. If he couldn’t, under these extremely promising circumstances, manage a simple “Would you like to come up,” he might as well have entered a convent.

  “Would you like to come up?” Joel said. Realizing that the Sikh had ended his conversation; wondering if he would ever be far enough along not to care what a cabdriver thought about him.

  “You bet,” Michael said.

  Not just “Okay,” which would have left another bridge to cross up in the apartment, but the unequivocal “You bet.” Unambiguous, maybe a little scary.

  It used to be, before Sam, Joel would bring a trick home and they’d sit in the living room. Joel didn’t even have the brains to buy a second-hand sofa; he had two Breuer chairs at the ends of the big table he used for a desk. He would sit down on one, as if he were about to type, and the trick would sit on the other, a good six feet away. They would supply the usual, instantly forgotten details about where they’d gone to school or what they did for a living. After some painful silence, Joel would at last say something lame like, “Can I show you the rest of the apartment?” And then they would go to the other room.

  Later, some sleepless nights, Joel would lie next to Sam and think about how he might have done things differently in the pre-Sam years—about how he really should have bathed more in his early twenties, even if he was a bohemian; about how he couldn’t have batted much worse if he had just walked right up to cute guys and gone “Hey,” instead of mooning at them until someone else picked them off. When he rehearsed how he
might have lived gay life more competently while he had the chance, he arrived at the conviction that he should have grabbed the trick the minute they got inside his apartment and he closed the door.

  So this is what he did with Michael. Shut the door, grabbed him, tried to kiss him. Before Joel knew it, Michael was about fifteen feet away, arms in front of him in some sort of improvised martial arts pose. Joel felt like Senator Packwood.

  Michael was almost as embarrassed as Joel was. “Sorry, I … uh, you kind of took me by surprise.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I know what you were thinking. I was, too, I just … Why don’t you offer me a drink?”

  “Michael, would you like a drink?”

  “I’d love one, Joel. What do you have?”

  “I don’t know. Wine. Scotch. And—I think there’s some beer in the icebox.”

  “The icebox?” Michael said. Joel felt a hundred years old. Even though he just said icebox because his mother did. “I’ll take a beer if you find one.”

  Joel hobbled geriatrically to the kitchen. There was a beer. Neither Sam nor Joel had ever drunk beer, it must have been bought for some guest. They didn’t have many guests their last couple of years together; the beer had to be getting kind of antique. Did beer stay okay? You never heard about auctions of 500-year-old cases of Löwenbräu. Now a glass. But all the glassware had been Sam’s, Joel had six highballs he picked up at Woody’s, and they were all in the dishwasher, unrun. Michael didn’t need a glass, Joel could drink wine from the least besmirched highball.

  What were they going to do, just … minutes from now? Michael had been pretty clear about what he’d done with Ron; even the bartender at Corcoran’s knew what Michael had done with Ron. But Joel and Sam hadn’t done that for a long time, not since the time Sam threw his back out. Years. Joel wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle it. He should have been practicing, maybe, with the marital aid Sam had left behind.

  An opener. Joel fished through the utensil drawer, trying not to make a panicky clatter. There was a tea ball. There was a lemon zester, a melon bailer. Every requisite for occasions that would never arise, but not for this occasion. Joel finally got the cap off the beer by sticking the point of a knife under the edges and prying it away crinkle by crinkle. When he brought their drinks out to the living room, feeling that he must have been in the kitchen half an hour, Michael was gone.

  “Michael?”

  No answer, but in a moment Michael emerged from the back of the apartment. “I had to pee like a racehorse,” he said.

  This simile alarmed Joel. He handed over the beer, then they were both aware that Joel had only the sibling-bereft club chair and the sofa. Michael took the club chair, a little smile on his face: he would teach Joel patience.

  Patiently, Joel said from the sofa, “So what do you do?” Michael’s mouth opened; he didn’t speak. “I mean for a living.”

  “Oh. Right now I’m working at Hecht’s.”

  “Oh, yeah? Which store?”

  “Downtown. In men’s wear.”

  “I go there sometimes.”

  “About every ten years?”

  “I guess I’m not too into clothes.”

  “I’d like to dress you up,” Michael said. Joel shrugged. “You’d feel better.”

  “Would I? I don’t feel bad.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Actually Joel had been feeling good, he thought this was how good felt. Attractive, something imminent.

  “I can tell by the way you dress,” Michael said.

  Joel was irritated. Not that this was going to spoil anything, the way a trick used to be able to kill everything with a single fatuous word. Joel wouldn’t have cared at this point if Michael had announced he was a member of the Nation of Islam, he had not made his last visit to the back of the apartment. But Joel disliked this facile assumption that Michael knew something about Joel and was called upon to share it, that this was somehow helpful. When really he was just a clothing salesman; if he were a car salesman he might have said Joel would feel better if he got an SUV.

  All right, of course Joel had heard that depressed people let themselves go. But he had always been a slob, in good times and bad. It couldn’t be that he’d been depressed his whole life.

  It could be. “What should I wear?”

  “I don’t know. Stand up.”

  Joel stood up. Michael looked at him. He tried to put out of mind what an unprepossessing figure he must have cut. Michael had already seen him, and was here anyway. But Joel felt the special ungainliness he had always felt with clothing salesmen. He would come out of the cubicle wearing the suit, the unfinished pants legs gathered up above his shoes. The salesman would look at him, the way the coat barely buttoned over his belly, the lapels hovered over empty air where Joel was supposed to have a chest. The salesman would start talking alterations, and Joel would feel that it wasn’t the suit that needed altering. He always had to leave when they started talking alterations, which was why he hadn’t actually bought a new suit in ten years. Because he couldn’t get it into his head that it was just a bit of cloth that could be unstitched and restitched; it was a template for the standard man he would never be.

  Michael tilted his head, looked at Joel gravely. “You ought to get some better slacks. What are those, Dockers?”

  “I guess.”

  “About a size …”

  “I don’t know. Thirty-four, I think.” As if he could fool a clothing salesman.

  “Uh-huh. You know, once the size gets up there … uh, gets a little larger, they start leaving a lot of room for … I mean, that’s why they’re kind of baggy at the crotch.” Joel looked down. His pants were baggy at the crotch. There was a stain on the left leg. A forensic lab could probably have traced it to an elephant burger. “You shouldn’t get these ready-made khakis, you need to get real slacks so they fit you.”

  “I guess I’m just cheap.”

  “You can afford real slacks,” Michael said. Joel felt a little chill. How did they get into what Joel could afford? How did Michael know what Joel could afford? “And, I don’t know, have you thought about changing your glasses?”

  “I just did.” Not four months ago, just before Sam went. Trifocals, for reading the Congressional Record, playing solitaire on the computer, and gazing listlessly into the distance.

  “Take your glasses off.”

  Joel did. He was about to explain that there was no way in hell he was getting contacts when Michael was out of his chair, he was close to Joel, he brought his face into Joel’s field of vision, and they kissed.

  Joel woke up in the morning alone, on Sam’s side of the bed.

  After a minute he remembered: waking in the night, reaching an arm out to his own side of the bed, warm but empty. He looked up; by the ribbon of streetlight edging around the window shade he could just make out Michael—fully clothed, even his jacket on—standing, his back to Joel, before the dresser.

  “Hey,” Joel said. Michael turned, startled, then produced a smile Joel could see in the dark. The same smile he had worn all the time they were making love.

  “Hey.”

  “You’re leaving.”

  “I gotta. I got a staff meeting real early. And, I don’t know, I don’t sleep real good with strangers. I mean the first time.”

  “Oh.” This was better than no excuse. But only a little: if it were true, he might have said it earlier, and he wouldn’t have tried to sneak out while Joel dozed. Only when Joel had thought all this did he hear: the first time.

  “I’m going to leave you my card. With my number at the store. Call me at … I guess eleven, it’s real slow at eleven.”

  “Okay. Um … are you sure I should call you at work?”

  “People call all the time. You know, is my suit ready, that kind of shit.”

  Joel got up, they kissed, Michael held him for a minute. Naked, in the arms of a man in a suit: a wonderful slutty feeling.

  Michael pu
lled away. “Call at eleven, I’ll be sure I’m on the floor. So we can figure out what to do tonight.”

  Joel lay in bed in the morning on Sam’s side, remembering Michael’s going, then remembering earlier. Michael had smiled the whole time, smiled and kept his eyes open. Sam was always serious: he clenched his eyes tight—was this only (and understandably) in their later years, or always?—and had the sort of frown a man wears when he is about to lift a heavy weight. Michael smiled the whole time.

  Joel was touching himself, then he thought he’d better not, not if they were getting together again tonight. He got up and went to the dresser, picked up the card that was next to his wallet.

  About the size, if you turned it on end, of the ad in man about town. And as dense with meaning. Its bourgeois respectability, its square-edged whiteness, such an inconsonant thing, really, to have been left behind by the live brown creature who had warmed Joel’s side of the bed for a while. The last name he had forgotten. Michael Greeley, Sales Associate. A whole life beyond this bedroom. Staff meetings, people calling to see if their pants were ready. The call at eleven.

  It used to be, when the phone rang in a department store, it gave off a single clear tone: Ding. Ding. That was the sound of a department store when he was little, the dulcet intermittent bell, and he was quite grown before he realized that it was the phone and not some mysterious signal to the sales associates. Twelve dings for a nuclear attack.

  Joel would call, Ding, and Michael wouldn’t be there. Or he wouldn’t recognize Joel’s name. Or he would be astounded by Joel’s naïveté and gall, calling him at work. What Joel held in his hand was no more consequential, made no more promises, than a salesman’s business card.

  For lunch Joel went to a place with a salad bar that was really about two or three little bins of wilted greens and then all kinds of Chinese stuff. His plastic tray had one big section and two smaller sections. He dutifully loaded salad into one of the smaller sections, filled the other with sparerib chunks, and packed’ the big section with kung pao chicken and sesame noodles. At the register he looked in his wallet and found three singles.

  The night before he had paid his and Michael’s check at Corcoran’s, then the taxi, and, after getting his change and leaving the tip, he had put three singles back in his wallet. Next to a twenty. There had been a twenty left.