Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  She paused. Now she would bellow, “HOWEVER …”

  No, she wasn’t pausing, she had come to a full stop. Lehrer took a couple of seconds to realize this. Then he hurried to fill the dead time. “Madam Secretary, are you—does this mean the Administration is supporting the Harris bill?”

  Bergen looked down, swallowed, looked up again, straight into the camera. “We are studying this issue closely,” she said. “We think if there are safeguards to assure that the focus is on behaviors, what people do and not who they are, then there may be something we can support.” All this said rather wearily; it was a script she had not written. This was an argument she had lost, overruled by some White House operative or other.

  “Senator Harris?” Lehrer said.

  Harris was as dumbfounded as Joel was, and not much more gratified: if the Administration went along, the whole story could vanish from the papers overnight. “Well, of course I’m pleased that the Administration is willing to work with the Congress to tackle this very important issue. I’m sure if we sit down together, we can arrive at a solution that’s best for the American taxpayer and the American family. I’m just happy to have been able to play some part in bringing this critical problem to the attention of the American people.”

  The Secretary offered the obligatory, “The Senator has filled an important role in bringing this issue to the table, and we look forward to working with him.”

  “Thank you, Madam Secretary,” Lehrer said. “Senator Harris.” The segment was over.

  Joel could hear the hubbub at the Pledge before he even rounded the corner. Thursday night before Labor Day weekend, the place was packed. Everyone who hadn’t gone away, to Rehoboth Beach or wherever, was here looking for someone who might last through Monday night. The crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk, a sea of men in their twenties and thirties, wearing tank tops and drinking cosmopolitans out of little plastic cups—No Stemware Outside.

  Michael had insisted they meet here. Joel had thought Gentry, or even Zippers, but Michael wouldn’t have it. Maybe because they would run into too many of Joel’s predecessors. Joel wasn’t sure if he should try to shove his way up to the bar for a drink or if he should look for Michael first. The Pledge had three floors: the street-level bar, a lounge upstairs that showed instructional videos, and a cellar bar called Initiation, whose backroom was once famous. Michael could be anywhere—except, Joel hoped, in the still-extant backroom—or, as Joel was precisely on time, probably hadn’t even arrived yet.

  He got his drink, after an epic struggle; what a small thing it was, a little plastic cup of brown liquid, that he should have had to clamor so hard for it. Then he wandered around—down to the cellar, out onto the sidewalk, finally up to the video bar. There was a seat! He grabbed it and watched the movie for a while, a classic from the seventies—he could tell, not just from the grainy film and the bad lighting, but because some of the men had bellies without ridges; others had body hair, or organs that didn’t make Joel think of livestock. And, of course, because none of them had any protection.

  The video was, in its way, a snuff movie: these men were killing one another, right in front of the camera. Yet there was a prelapsarian innocence about them. They were utterly unaware that they were—he still could not stomach the word—barebacking. As, of course, Joel had done in those years, just as innocent and unprotected. He was, as always, conscious of the injustice: that he should still be here, unpunished, while they were gone. As always, he had to suppress the thought that this wasn’t unfair at all, because the men on the screen had had a good time in those years and he hadn’t. Then he felt guilty watching them, as if he himself had killed them, just because sometimes he had a nasty thought he couldn’t help. He didn’t want to watch any more.

  Halfway down the stairs he ran into Sam. Sam’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak. “Hey,” Joel said.

  “What are you doing here?” Sam said, crossly, as if the place were an actual fraternity Joel hadn’t been invited to join.

  “Meeting somebody.”

  “Really?” Sam could at least have masked his surprise—even if Joel, too, was astonished to be meeting somebody.“Who?”

  “A guy I met.”

  They were blocking the stairs; crowds had already massed behind each of them, guys above and below who thought true love was to be found on whichever floor they weren’t on. Joel let himself be pushed downstairs. Sam turned and followed him.

  “Who is this guy?” Sam said.

  “I told you, just somebody I … you know …”

  “Oh.” Sam leered encouragingly. As if he were a tennis pro and Joel had just managed to get a ball over the net. “Well, that’s good. What’s he like?”

  “He’s …” Of course the very first word anyone would have used to describe Michael was “black.” To withhold it would be as phony as one of those newspaper stories that reads, “The alleged assailant, Leroy X. Washington, was described as six feet tall, with black hair and brown eyes.” Practically shouting what it will not say. Joel did not say it. “He’s … I don’t know, kind of young, nice-looking. He’s in, um, sales.”

  “Kind of young. What’s that exactly?”

  “I don’t know. A little older than Kevin.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You still seeing Kevin?”

  “No. When’s this guy coming?”

  “He—” Joel was about to say, “He should be here by now.” But he was afraid Sam might think what he himself, just that instant, was thinking: Michael really should be here by now. He said, “Oh, pretty soon, I guess. We left it kind of loose.”

  “Well, I hope I get a chance to meet him.”

  Joel didn’t hope, not at all, that Sam and Michael got a chance to meet. He wasn’t ashamed of Michael, exactly. He was just afraid of the conclusion Sam would draw, seeing Joel and Michael together. The entirely unfounded conclusion that Joel was a deluded old white guy being taken for some kind of ride by a gorgeous black guy half his age. “I hope you do, too,” he said.

  He wanted to know more about Kevin; that is, he wanted to hear Sam say that Kevin had dumped him. He was trying to think how to compel this admission when Sam said abruptly, “Catch you in a minute,” and was off. In pursuit of a kid with dark hair on the sides of his head and exploding strands of platinum on top, like fireworks drifting down in a night sky.

  Joel found a place to lean at the bar directly across from the front door, so he would catch Michael the minute he came in. Many other people came in, not Michael, and the very first thing they saw was Joel. This was surely disappointing: they hadn’t taken off early from work to groom themselves for hours, then caught the Metro or a taxi to the Pledge, in order to see Joel. Most averted their eyes and veered away from him. A few stared for an instant, with the chagrined expression of a child who has waited an eternity in line for Santa Claus and now beholds him. Joel’s complementary chagrin was allayed for a while by the cheering thought that, while he might look like a loser, he was in fact a winner, who would be leaving with a beauty while most of these guys were still hunting. But he began to wonder what expression he might find on Michael’s face, when Michael arrived and first caught sight of him.

  Perhaps it would be better, when Michael showed up, if Joel weren’t right there at the door, poised to jump on him like a starving predator. If Michael showed up. Almost an hour late already, this was tardy even by gay standards. Joel surrendered his space at the bar and wandered some more, arriving in the cellar just as Sam emerged from the backroom, his arm around the boy with the fireworks hair. Sam saw Joel and stopped short. The boy kept going, slipping free of Sam’s encircling arm and skating past Joel with a beatific look that must have been chemically induced. It couldn’t, in Joel’s experience, have been induced by anything Sam had done.

  What had Sam done? Nothing, probably. The backroom was not, as it had been so long ago, pitch dark; and the bouncers every so often patrolled it to make sure no one got much past heavy petting. The spac
e referred to the seventies, like the disco oldies on the sound system, without allowing for a full-undress reenactment. The things that Joel imagined went on there once—he had never ventured in, not even in the old days—might be going on somewhere else; Senator Harris’s statistics affirmed this. But it had been a chamber of insouciance, of the innocence Joel had seen in the video upstairs. Whatever venue had replaced it must be quite different: a party of cold deliberation, with Dr. Kevorkian as master of the revels.

  It was pathetic that Sam had gone in there, with a boy so drugged he might as readily have gone in with anybody—Ron, say, or Joel. It was pathetic that Sam had groped some strange kid and had made so slight an impression that the kid had slipped away the minute they came out into the bright light.

  It was pathetic that Joel was standing there alone, having boasted that he had a date.

  “Hey,” Sam said. “Weren’t you meeting somebody?”

  “I got here kind of early.”

  “Uh-huh. How many drinks have you had?”

  “A couple.”

  From which Sam understood: three. “You better slow down. You know how you get.”

  Joel knew how he got. But it didn’t matter, did it? As he had conclusively been stood up.

  “Talk to you,” Sam said. He hurried upstairs, probably in the hope that the kid was still there and might remember who he was.

  Joel got a fourth drink. Stood up. If it had been twenty years earlier, Joel wouldn’t have been surprised—on the contrary, he would have been more surprised if Michael had appeared. He hadn’t kept score, but probably a majority of the repeat engagements he had made with tricks had not been kept. Until he came to see no-shows not as particular instances of rudeness directed personally at him but as emblematic of the gay sensibility: improvisatory, unfettered. To be gay was to acknowledge the primacy of impulse, so a date meant, if we both feel like it tomorrow at five …

  Of course it never helped, telling himself this.

  First thing Friday morning Joel called the only person he knew in the White House. That is, Kristen wasn’t actually in the White House, but just up the street, close enough that her business card declared THE WHITE HOUSE and bore a little gold presidential seal. He reached her voice mail and told her he had a question about the Harris bill. Maybe she would call him back.

  While he was waiting, he decided that he might as well find out what Bate had to say. That was how he put it to himself, casually. Even if the quest had seemed silly just yesterday, he had paid for Bate’s time; he might as well hear whatever Bate had discovered, or failed to. But—as the phone rang twice, three times with no answer—the depth of his frustration betrayed just how deeply the hunt still mattered. This was real; it was Michael who had been the fantasy.

  “Mr. Lingeman,” Bate said, when he answered at last. How, in that tiny office, could it have taken him six rings to answer? “I have some amount of information.” He managed to say “some amount” with no vowels at all, as if to illustrate the paucity of whatever information he had acquired.

  “Great.”

  “Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo is, in fact, still in operation.”

  He paused. Joel supplied the inevitable: “However …”

  “Needless to say, there is no record of transactions involving a minor account they stopped handling thirty years ago.”

  “Needless to say.”

  “However, my informant did suggest that in those years male models were ordinarily secured from either of two agencies, Talent International or Kennedy-Sexton.”

  He paused again. Joel jumped ahead. “Both of which are defunct.”

  “Both of which are defunct, Kennedy-Sexton only quite recently. I was able to trace one of the principals, Mr. Sexton, in fact, who is still living in New York City.”

  Yet another pause. Joel realized suddenly that Bate didn’t do this for dramatic effect: it must have been that, given his enormous handwriting, each of these factules was on a separate page of his notes.

  “Mr. Sexton recalled the model in question. I was rather surprised, actually.”

  Joel was not surprised: how could someone fail to recall the model in question? Still, a guy who ran a modeling agency had probably encountered his share of beauties over the years. The Santa Fe boy would have been just one of the stable: there was the cowboy for the cigarette ads, the debonair man with the eye patch for the shirt ads, the guy with the smirk who let women run their fingers through his hair goop. There was the guy with the blinding torso and the shy smile whom Mr. Sexton could recall after three decades.

  “He asked me what my interest was. I didn’t know what to answer. I had planned to say that I was with the Bate Agency in Washington, and that I thought the model might have the look we needed for a new campaign. But it occurred to me that he might find this …”

  “Implausible.”

  “I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t answer at all. Finally he said, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ and concluded the conversation.”

  Joel sighed. “Of course you couldn’t go see him.”

  “New York, that would be travel.”

  “I’ll pay for the travel.”

  “Mr. Lingeman, this gentleman lives at Four Fifth Avenue in New York City. I’m not going to find him out watering the lawn. I would have to go to the front desk and ask to see him, and he would say no.”

  “So you’re just not going to do it.”

  “It’s a wild goose chase.”

  “But if I’m going to pay you …”

  “If you pay me, I’ll report that I tried to see him and couldn’t. And how would you know that I even tried? I just want to save you the expense.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I should have saved you the expense when we started. I almost told you: you can’t trace somebody without a name. You have to start with a name.”

  “But look how far you got already. This guy must know the name, we’re practically there.” They were practically there. This time, positively, someone who knew the boy. “I’ll go myself if I have to.”

  “Mr. Lingeman …”

  “If I get the name, will you be able to find him?”

  “If it isn’t something like John Smith, there’s a possibility.”

  “I’ll get the name.”

  “Mr. Lingeman, I should tell you. What the gentleman said.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “He said, ‘I’m dying. I don’t have time for this.’”

  As long as he was making phone calls he could make one more. Almost eleven, Michael would be at work. Ding, the phone would go, ding: a little carillon of self-abasement.

  “This is Michael Greeley, how can I help you today?”

  “Hi, this is Joel.”

  During the ensuing silence Michael was either constructing an alibi or trying to remember who Joel was.

  “Joel! Oh, God, Joel, I’m so glad you called. I didn’t have your number. I had to work overtime, and I couldn’t meet you, and I didn’t have your number, and I’m so sorry.”

  This was not incredible. “No problem,” Joel said.

  “Listen, I really want to see you again, but I can’t tonight. How about tomorrow?”

  “I—” Tomorrow, Saturday, Joel was going on an excursion. He hadn’t actually formed this plan, became aware of it only as an impediment appeared. An impediment? A possible date with a live human was an impediment to a silly journey in quest of someone who no longer existed?

  What was it that Kevin had said to Sam? “You have to choose.” The choice was obvious, he didn’t have to take out a sheet of paper and make two columns headed Michael Greeley and Santa Fe. In the firsf column: has three dimensions.

  “We could meet at … maybe nine-thirty or so, get a bite to eat.”

  “Why so late?”

  “I, uh … I have a dinner date.”

  “You’re going to dinner and then you’re going to meet me and have dinner?”

  “The President sometimes has three or four dinn
ers.”

  “And he looks like it.”

  “I’ll just have a salad or something.”

  “Right,” Michael said. He knew Joel’s pants size.

  Joel first saw New York the year of the Santa Fe boy: 1964. Joel’s father had a meeting, he took the family along. Joel could still remember, after the eternity of the New Jersey Turnpike, that first glimpse of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building. Then they plunged into the Lincoln Tunnel. Everything was magnified there: the bright tile, the echoing noise, the exhaust fumes, the heightened sense of velocity as they sped through that narrow space like blood rushing through a vein, sucked headlong toward the heart of the world.

  They stayed at the Prince George, on 28th Street just off Fifth. The doorman wore livery and a powdered wig. Joel had a room of his own next to his parents’. While his father was at the meeting, his mother took him to Scribner’s, that golden temple of books, then to lunch at Toffenetti’s on Times Square, then to a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The next day they went to B. Altman’s, which his mother for some reason preferred to Macy’s, and then up to the Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle, where Huntington Hartford had assembled a collection that only a fourteen-year-old could truly appreciate:, late Dali, Magritte. In the evening, while Joel’s parents dressed for dinner, Joel sat in a wing chair in the lobby of the Prince George and thought he looked grown up. One night they went to the Café Madrid and had paella. He couldn’t remember where they went the other night, maybe the Stockholm for smorgasbord. Joel would surely have been dazzled if it had just been Schrafft’s.