by Mark Merlis
The bill compartment of his wallet was always filled with junk: ATM receipts, reminders of dental appointments, lots of paper. The twenty could have been buried. He hunted for it, conscious of the growing line of ravenous salad-eaters behind him, and of the worried face of the cashier-matron. “Look,” he said. “I, uh … can you hold on to my salad? I need to run to the bank machine.”
As he waited at the bank machine, he saw himself quite clearly, sticking the three singles next to the twenty and even thinking, Good, I won’t need money tomorrow, twenty will be enough for lunch and the Hill Club and I can stop at my bank when I get back to the Circle.
The cashier-matron looked as surprised to see his return as, say, Pat Robertson would be if there really were a Second Coming.
It was a million degrees out. He had meant to eat his nearly vegetation-free salad back at his desk, in the air conditioning. But he would have been interrupted, and he wanted to think hard about questions like: (1) when, exactly, Michael took the twenty; (2) what ineradicable germ of racism deep in his cortex made him think Michael took it; (3) whether someone who took the twenty would actually keep the dinner date they’d made when Joel called at eleven; (4) if he could have given all three twenties to the bartender and the shit just pocketed the excess; (5) where might be a good place to hide his money when he took Michael home and excused himself for a moment; (6) whether Michael was more likely to keep seeing him if maybe he failed to hide one twenty each time.
He sat on the low wall in front of the Madison Building, a good distance from his new pal the homeless guy. As he twirled sesame noodles around his little plastic fork, he watched the parade of staffers going to and from lunch. Serious young Republicans in their well-fitting khakis and blue shirts. If all the congressmen were straight, how come the staffers they picked were so uniformly cute, buffed and perky-looking, like the guys who won the scholar/athlete award in high school? Cute and malignant, working overtime to unravel the social safety net, going to their bars at the end of the day and bragging over their nachos about how many people lost their food stamps today. But maybe it was only because life had never rubbed their perky little noses in any contrary idea. Sound bites ricocheted in their vacant skulls: there was still room for experience, some might graduate all the way to the summit of ambivalence and immobility Joel had reached long ago.
Joel tore himself away from the staffers and returned to the subject of Michael. Of course, unless you had the seven habits of highly credulous people, you didn’t actually sit down and work through lists of numbered life-issues. He found instead that he was remembering their call that morning. The way Michael just took it for granted that they would meet that night, was even a little short with Joel on the phone—the way you can be short with somebody when everyone understands that you just have to get back to work. “Baby, I have to get off, I’ll see you at seven,” and he was off before Joel heard “Baby.” Just a habit of speech; except Joel heard in it the smile Michael had worn all night.
Joel wasn’t sure that smile had anything to do with him. He thought it was just about loving life, and then he thought at once that this, too, was a racist idea: that he was turning Michael into some sort of happy-go-lucky Negro. Only Michael did smile. In a here-we-are, grateful-for-the-moment sort of way that was not incompatible with, in the next moment, gratitude that Joel’s wallet should contain a twenty. Joel pictured him, standing before Joel’s dresser in the half light. Thumbing through the oddments of paper in Joel’s wallet, feeling the distinct crispness of the buried twenty. Smiling.
The picture didn’t displease Joel at all.
Joel looked up to see his boss Herb approaching. Wearing a jacket, despite the heat, which meant that someone had just taken him to lunch. He had a bow tie on today, so there was nothing to punctuate the tundra-like expanse of flimsy white shirt beneath it. Joel wished Herb would wear an undershirt; it was disconcerting to see your boss’s nipples.
Joel said, “Hey.”
Herb said, “Joel, how’s it going?” and sat next to him on the wall. This was an enormous incursion; Joel didn’t want to talk to Herb in the middle of his lunch hour. Actually, he didn’t want to talk to Herb ever.
Herb had been a GS-15 in the Social Security headquarters, having reached that eminence through longevity and a prodigious ability to kiss ass. After the Incident—whose details Joel had never quite been able to piece together, but which apparently involved a truly catastrophic misplacement of a decimal point, one that had darkened the golden years of many an annuitant—Herb had bid farewell to the executive branch and somehow found shelter as a Social Security analyst at OLA. There his gift for sycophancy had once again secured his promotion, so that he had become Joel’s boss without the tiniest inkling of what exactly Joel did.
They only had two kinds of conversations. Ones in which Herb exhorted Joel to keep up the good work, whatever the hell that was. And ones in which Herb tried to assert himself, remind Joel who was boss by giving him some disastrously incorrect instructions. Joel would explain why he couldn’t do what Herb wanted; Herb would smile indulgently, like a Mother Superior correcting an unruly but amusing novice; Joel would do what Herb wanted.
Herb had not interrupted Joel’s lunch to present him with a meritorious service award. They were going to have the other kind of conversation.
“I just had lunch with Randy Craven,” Herb said.
“Oh, yeah?” An old friend, with the Commerce Committee for years, then … Joel couldn’t remember where he’d wound up. “What’s he doing now?”
“He’s with Hygeia.”
“Right,” Joel said. A pharmaceutical company. Where else? “So where’d he take you?”
“Le Dome. Oh, uh, he didn’t take me,” Herb lied. Technically, he and Joel were subject to the same ethics rules as staffers: they weren’t supposed to accept fancy lunches from people like Randy Craven. But no one cared very much, because they weren’t in a position to exercise much influence. For the same reason, they were rarely taken to lunch.
“What did he want?”
“He didn’t want anything, we were just schmoozing. The child health plan, that kind of thing.”
“Oh, that. Are the drug companies still opposing it?”
“I didn’t know they ever were,” Herb said. “Randy seemed to be all in favor of it.”
“I guess they changed.”
“Why would they be against it? Everybody thinks it’s a good idea to cover children.”
“Right.”
Some Marines ran by. One of the miracles of that neighborhood: the ceremonial platoons—from the barracks near Andrew’s house, down on Eighth Street—running toward the Mall. Ten or fifteen at a time, loping by in nothing but red shorts, their brown torsos gleaming with sweat. Maybe all the congressmen who picked cute staffers weren’t gay, but surely the commandant at Parris Island or wherever, who selected these matchless beauties unerringly for the honor guard …
Joel tore himself away from this spectacle and found that Herb was staring at him. Of course Herb knew he was gay, even used to ask sometimes how Sam was—didn’t ask any more, so someone must have clued him in. What did Herb think about, as he watched Joel watch Marines? What was it like to be Herb, to sit on the wall and be presented with that sudden vista of beauty, red shorts and brown bodies flashing by like a gift from heaven, and be entirely unmoved? Like being color-blind, Joel thought, or unable to smell: going through a lifetime oblivious to a whole dimension of the world.
“Randy did mention this one thing,” Herb said. “He thought you might be doing some more work on the AIDS bill. The Harris thing.”
“Uh-huh,” Joel said, warily. Melanie had called him that very morning, asking if he had any numbers on how many people were having unsafe sex. Just that morning, and Randy Craven already knew about it. Sometimes Joel thought these guys were telepathic. He knew they were merely networked and not psychic; but this was in its way even more wonderful, to be so firmly and manifoldly linked to
the world. At the center of a web, attuned to the tremor of every distant event. While Joel didn’t even know what was happening in his own bedroom.
“What are you doing on it?” Herb said.
“Well, you know, the budget people keep telling them it doesn’t save any money, because there’s no way of enforcing it. There’s no way of knowing who did something high-risk. So now Melanie’s trying to persuade them that the rule will have a deterrent effect.”
“You mean …”
“People won’t have unsafe sex because they’ll be afraid they won’t get Medicare later.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that makes sense.”
Maybe it made sense to Herb. Joel had some trouble picturing it: two guys hopping into the sack, one of them abruptly sitting up, shaking off the trance induced by some horse tranquilizer, and saying, “Oh, we better be careful. Remember our health insurance!”
Joel went on: “So anyway, she needs some estimate of how many people are doing high-risk things now. And then she has to say that some number of them will stop doing it, and then they won’t get sick, and then they won’t need Medicare, and we’ll save all this money.”
“I see. Are you getting her what she needs?”
“I haven’t … you know, I’ve been working on a couple other things. So I was going to look into it next week some time.” Or next lifetime, since Joel really hadn’t the slightest idea where he would get an estimate of how many demented faggots were barebacking. That was the word Melanie had used; Joel had never heard it before. He had been a little shocked to hear, over the phone, little Melanie casually tossing out this crudely self-explanatory neologism.
“Randy thought he might be able to help you,” Herb said.
“What?”
“He said he thought you needed some numbers and he might have some.”
“Why would a drug company want to help with the Harris bill?”
“They’re supporting it,” Herb said. “You didn’t know that?” Herb straightened the ends of his bow tie; he was plainly delighted to know something Joel didn’t. “You must have seen their ads.”
“What ads?”
“The ones with that old lady who frets about losing her Medicare.”
“Wait,” Joel said. “Citizens for Personal Responsibility is the drug companies?”
“Who did you think they were?” As if Herb had known who they were before Randy Craven evidently blurted it out at lunch.
“Oh, I thought it was probably them,” Joel said. “I just wasn’t sure.” He tried to imagine what possible reason they would have for pushing a bill that had no effect on them at all. Medicare didn’t even cover drugs, there wasn’t any reason they should have cared one way or another.
Joel couldn’t figure it out. He could preen himself on his access: the badge that hung from a chain around his neck, that let him wander the secret hallways of the Capitol, that admitted him to closed hearing rooms while reporters and lobbyists milled around in the corridor, yearning to be inside. Like the other members of his fraternity, he wore the badge in his shirt pocket: that was how they could tell one another, the chains running around their necks and into their shirt pockets. But he was still a spectator, watching the intricate movements of the mechanical figures called members and staffers and lobbyists without, very often, getting a glimpse of the hidden clockworks that drove them.
Herb said, “You ought to call Randy this afternoon and get his numbers.”
“Herb, I— You know, I guess Randy can make up numbers. But that doesn’t mean I can just supply them as if they were real. I can’t just take numbers from him and put OLA’s name on them.”
“Well, you can qualify them.” Meaning Joel could send Melanie a table with a long footnote explaining why the numbers were garbage. Then she could reproduce the table without the footnote.
Joel wanted to say: you get the fancy lunch at Le Dome, and I’m the one who has to spread his legs? He said, “I’ll see what he’s got.”
“Good. Don’t forget the staff meeting at two.”
One of the astoundingly brazen squirrels from the Capitol grounds—the kind that would saunter right up to you with a gimme-your-goddamn-lunch expression—was loitering on the wall next to Joel. Joel had finished his kung pao chicken, so his salad was down to a few shreds of actual greenery. He surrendered it.
He had been thinking something important before Herb came. Oh: that he was, in fact, not at all dismayed by the picture of Michael rifling through his wallet. What was he discovering? Some sort of pathetic fifties thing, the John secretly pleased that the rough trade has robbed him, savoring the tingle of danger? No, something more elusive.
He thought back to those abortive romances he had had in the years before Sam. What is he really like, what does he think of me, when will one of us do something so profoundly uncool that it kills it, and which one of us will do it this time? You couldn’t be yourself, you tried to be finer than you were—wittier, better dressed, hotter in bed than you really were—you tried not to do anything you wouldn’t want the other guy to do. Even after fifteen years, years in which he and Sam had pretty much uncovered each other’s most appalling traits—he couldn’t ever just be, he had to try to be better than he was. Because it was a mystery why Sam was there, he didn’t really think anyone could just love him. And he had been right, hadn’t he? He hadn’t, in the end, been good enough.
But Michael had either taken the twenty or he hadn’t. If he had, then he was just hustling Joel and they would go on until Michael got tired of it or found some more promising quarry. If he hadn’t taken the twenty, they would go on until Michael got tired of it or found some more promising quarry. Joel would never know which it was: a commercial transaction of necessarily limited duration, or a romance of necessarily limited duration. At the end he would not have to feel that he hadn’t been good enough. He and Michael were just two people coming together for a minute, or maybe for longer: good enough wasn’t part of the equation. Somehow the twenty had factored it out.
Joel felt for a second a wash of calm.
He was a person. A person having an actual experience, in the present tense. One that could not hurt him and that might—if last night was any indication—be kind of pleasant for a while.
He felt this for a second. And then—he couldn’t quell it—he felt the tiniest hope that Michael hadn’t taken the twenty, that they were getting together tonight because Michael actually liked him. He hoped he was good enough.
It was a special bonus day: a second platoon of Marines came running by. Chugging along in twos and threes, then one astounding guy running by himself. Not even breathing hard, just calmly loping toward Joel, his golden perfect abs glistening with sweat. Joel stared. The guy noticed; possibly Joel’s tongue was hanging out. The Marine looked back at Joel with the perplexed, faintly troubled expression of the Santa Fe boy. He was proud of his body, surely—these guys didn’t pick the most crowded possible route to the Mall because they didn’t want anyone to watch them. He just didn’t want to be watched by Joel. As if it were an incursion somehow, as if Joel were violating him simply by peering at him. When it was just that Joel was here on this planet, and the Marine was, and Joel couldn’t help but look.
When he got back to the office, there was a voice mail from Bate. No information, just, “Call at your earliest convenience.” A day earlier Joel would have been thrilled—not elated, maybe, but excited and anxious. Were they closer, had they hit a dead end? Today he was taken aback. Joel’s life had resumed, he was having an experience in the present tense, and Bate had called to say: remember, just yesterday you were a loony embarked on a manic quest for something you know perfectly well doesn’t exist.
He was too busy for the Santa Fe boy. He needed to call Randy Craven and get the numbers, and then he had a staff meeting, and then he had to hurry home and get dressed for an honest-to-God date with a three-dimensional man. His life had resumed; he was busy.
eight
Joel had
the TV on, the Lehrer news hour, while he dressed. He was in the bathroom, looking over Sam’s library of abandoned colognes and wondering if Michael would prefer Wall Street or Feral, when he heard Senator Harris’s voice. He scurried out to look. Yes, there was Harris, on remote from somewhere in Montana, his talking head in a square box on the left side of the screen. In a box on the right side the Secretary of HHS, Charlotte Bergen.
Harris did his three minutes. Grinning—though he knew he should be somber, and modulated his voice appropriately, he couldn’t help grinning because he was on the Lehrer hour. He had found a way into the spotlight, a little technical amendment had raised his head above the pack an inch. If things kept going, he could find himself chatting with Katie Couric. Then trips to New Hampshire, exploratory committees … Secretary Bergen listened gravely. She actually inclined her head toward the margin of her box, as if Harris were sitting next to her.
Harris wound up: he wasn’t attacking responsible homosexuals, he wasn’t sure if they could help the way they were or not. “Jim, this is really about a chosen, self-destructive life style. Let me read you some numbers that have really startled me, and I think will startle the American people. Last year as many as twenty-three percent of homosexual men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four—”
Lehrer cut him off. “Senator, I’m sorry, but I did want to give the Secretary an opportunity …”
Amazing: Joel had given Randy Craven’s spurious numbers to Melanie just that afternoon, and Harris was already spouting them on national TV. Wasn’t Joel important?
Now it was the Secretary’s turn. In that whiskey baritone, so surprising in such a tiny woman, she would explain how awful the Harris bill was, promise that the President would veto it as soon as it hit his desk. She began: “Jim, as you know, one of the themes of this President, this Administration, from the very beginning has been personal responsibility.” She uttered that phrase in the mandatory italics. “That’s been the cornerstone of our welfare reform, our work in education and job training, countless policy areas. And we think it’s very important to carry that concept over into health care. That people need to take an active role in maintaining their own well-being: diet, exercise, stopping smoking of course. And possibly there does come a point when people have to begin considering the consequences of their own actions.”