by Mark Merlis
Today he was coming into New York by train: another tunnel, but pitch black, and he hardly felt that he was moving at all. He had been to the city maybe a hundred times since that first visit, and still, as the train came out of the tunnel into the patch of gray light, before it dove into the bowels of the post office, still he felt some flicker of what he had felt at fourteen. Even if he knew the Prince George wound up as the biggest welfare hotel in the city, even if every other place they visited had since disappeared, even if he had come to realize that How to Succeed was not the summit of the American musical theater: he still felt that he was coming into a city that was big enough for him. Big as his dreams were back then, the adult life ahead of him in the city of man about town: the big show, the late supper, the penthouse.
The feeling was gone by the time he came up the escalator and emerged into the cauldron of Seventh Avenue on a hot day in August. It was just a crowded, dirty city through which he needed to make his way. He walked to Four Fifth Avenue—mostly down Sixth, which had turned into a suburban mall, except not as glamorous—and he cruised the hot Hispanic boys. They were the only landmark here that aroused him now. Where were the Hispanic boys when he thought the most exciting vista in town was a billboard that blew smoke rings?
The woman at the front desk said Mr. Chambers Sexton was out. There must have been five hundred apartments at Four Fifth, how could she possibly know who was in or out? No, Joel didn’t want to leave a message, he just happened to be passing by.
He decided to wait. This was idiotic: who knew how long Chambers Sexton would be out, and how would Joel spot him if he came back? But Joel had the impression he would just know, as if someone who had once been in contact with the Santa Fe boy would give off some kind of aura. And perhaps he also supposed that a man who characterized himself as dying wouldn’t venture out for very long.
Flanking the marquee out front was a pair of marble-walled boxes, each holding a bit of ivy, empty soda bottles, newspapers. Joel sat on the edge of one of them. The doorman said, “You can’t sit there, mister.”
Joel said, “I was supposed to meet Mr. Sexton. I guess he’s running a little late.”
“You can wait in the lobby.”
“I just wanted to have a cigarette.”
The doorman frowned, but a taxi pulled up, and he had to leave Joel to greet one of those ninety-year-old New York ladies, with the hat, the gloves—in this heat!—the designer dress with a very short hemline, to show off her astonishingly preserved gams. By the time the doorman had helped her hobble into the building and came back out, he had accepted Joel as part of the landscape.
Chambers Sexton had been in contact with the Santa Fe boy. Could this have been literally so? Joel would have liked not to think so. But there were an awful lot of pretty faces in the world, more faces than ads. He didn’t suppose Mr. Sexton chose among them by playing eeny-meeny-miney-mo.
The doorman glanced at Joel now and then as he had a second cigarette, a third, watched the crowd on Fifth Avenue.
The Prince George was—what?—maybe a mile uptown. It occurred to Joel that when he and his parents got back from dinner and he went to his very own hotel room with a television set he could watch from his bed all by himself, at that very instant, Mr. Chambers Sexton was in another bed just a mile away, holding a private audition for the next vacancy in his stable: the cigarette man, the man with the eye patch. The adult life Joel would actually embark upon was already there, all around him. The hustlers loitering near Toffenetti’s, the chorus boys in How to Succeed, maybe the waiter who brought the paella: the real city that was Joel’s future was all around him, and he hadn’t seen it.
The doorman was looking at Joel steadily, a little perplexed. From which Joel understood that the man just walking into the building must have been Chambers Sexton; the doorman was wondering why he didn’t stop for Joel. Joel hurried inside and got to the front desk just as the receptionist was saying, “Oh, here he is now, Mr. Sexton.”
Sexton turned to look at Joel. His head was hairless, his cheeks sunken. Chemotherapy or fashion, wasting or just old age? There was no way of knowing. His sweater—in all this heat—was draped over his back, the sleeves knotted in front like an enormous cravat.
Joel veered into the sitting area of the lobby and murmured, “Mr. Sexton.” As he had hoped, Sexton came over to him, so that he would not have to endure his rebuff under the very nose of the receptionist. “Mr. Sexton, can I talk to you just one minute?”
“What?” Sexton said, with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance, perhaps also a hint of trepidation.
“I … I know you don’t want to talk about this, I understand, but I’ve got to—”
“Oh, shit.”
“Sir?”
“It’s about that boy, isn’t it?”
“Um …”
Sexton fluttered his hands in front of his eyes, as if to make Joel disappear. “This all stopped years ago, you’re the very last one.”
Joel was too stunned to answer. The last one: there had been some procession of deranged faggots like Joel, all on the same fatuous quest. He felt like an Egyptologist who opens a tomb and finds, amid the hieroglyphs, Kilroy Was Here.
Sexton lowered his hands and looked at Joel, one eyebrow raised. “Huh. You are the very last one, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“I suppose there must be a last living member of the Rudy Vallée fan club. It must be lonesome for the poor dear, to be the only one who remembers what they all saw in that queen.”
Joel chuckled with him. Hoping that he would think of Joel as a fellow queen who happened to be in an entertaining predicament. Rather than as a pathetic loser who had missed the last bus to Santa Fe thirty years ago.
Sexton stopped chuckling, shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember his name.”
Joel looked down at the floor. There could have been no more conclusive put-down than to tell Joel that the figure who haunted him was so unmemorable to someone who had actually encountered him. When Joel looked up he found that Sexton was staring into space. Trying to remember the name? No, he had the expression, not of someone searching, but of someone struck with a vision. He was remembering something other than the name.
Sexton shook his head again, brought Joel back into focus. “We could look it up.”
When Joel stood behind him in the hall and he put his key in the lock, Joel had a clear vision of the apartment they were about to enter: a couple of pieces by Corb, the windows bare, on one wall a huge painting—maybe a Warhol Elizabeth Taylor, maybe a Haring.
Sexton opened the door, stood aside. Joel walked into a room that might have been decorated by his own mother. Pale green wallpaper punctuated by a few reproductions of hunting prints; the windows looking but on Fifth Avenue framed by drapes in a beige, nubby fabric; a sofa with an ill-fitting gold slipcover; before it a coffee table that held a glass ashtray and a copy of TV Guide. The table had a couple of rings where Sexton or a guest had put a glass down without a coaster.
Sexton seemed to be waiting for Joel to say something. Joel walked to the window and said he liked the view, even though they were only on the seventh floor and the view was basically of the seventh floor of the building across the street. When Joel turned around Sexton was much smaller than he had seemed in the lobby: just a short, slender, bald man who looked as though he was expecting someone to punch him.
“The office is back this way,” he said. He led Joel down a hallway with the same green wallpaper. Joel caught a glimpse of the bedroom, with a faux-bamboo five-piece suite from about 1960, then a bathroom with sky-blue tile. The office was the tiny second bedroom at the end of the hall. There was a steel desk with an electric typewriter and a couple of long boxes with cards in them, like the drawers of a library catalogue; one wall had shelves on which were row after row of loose-leaf binders marked with letters of the alphabet.
Sexton sat at the desk; there was nowhere for Joel to sit. “What
was the name of the client again?”
“The client? Oh, Simms of Santa Fe.”
“Right, right.” As he thumbed through his card files, he said, “You know, I have never done this, not once, I had an absolute rule. All the years I was in business, people tried to get me to put them in touch with my boys. Friends mostly, they’d corner me and ask, ‘Who is that dreamboat in the Vitalis ad?’ I’d just tell them I wasn’t a pimp. But this one, this one I got calls from perfect strangers. Mostly right around the time it ran, when was that?”
“Nineteen sixty-four.”
“Right. But for a while after that, too. And one queen, I remember this, one queen screeched at me: ‘What’s it to you? If he doesn’t want to see me he doesn’t want to see me, but what’s it to you if I call him? Can’t the guy take care of himself?’ And I said no. No, I didn’t think he could.”
He looked up at Joel. Possibly they were both framing the same question: why was he breaking his rule for Joel? Maybe because, if the guy was still alive, he must have learned how to take care of himself.
“Here we go. Peter Barry.”
Peter Barry. Not exactly John Smith, but there must have been plenty of Peter Barrys in the world. How was Bate ever going to find him, and what would it cost?
Sexton got up and pulled down the first of several B binders, started thumbing through it. Page after page of head shots, interspersed with yellowing typed sheets that must have been résumés or lists of assignments. All different kinds of men, young and old, cute and distinguished and elegant and rough. His card file was the catalogue of a library of beauty. Except that the words in books didn’t get older, while all of these faces had.
“Barr, Barrett, Barrow, Bartlett. Funny, he should be after Barrow.”
“Maybe it’s Berry. With an ‘e’.”
Sexton looked at Joel coolly: he didn’t make mistakes. Then he started flipping backwards through the pages. At last he paused. Joel could see, over his shoulder. It was the boy. A glossy photo: the boy unsmiling, wearing a jacket and one of the absurdly skinny ties of those years, his hair in a pompadour instead of the brush cut in the ad. Joel could see, as he couldn’t in the tiny photo in man about town, that the boy had a cleft chin. He was lit from one side, to emphasize his sculpted features, and his forehead had an even sheen that hinted at airbrushing, to hide a blemish or two.
Sexton flipped the photo over and studied the typed page that followed it. “Oh, here’s why,” he said. “He wasn’t really Barry, he was … I can’t even say this.”
He handed the binder to Joel.
7/19/63
Name: Petras Baranauskas
Address: 1693 Bridge Street
Roseville, New Jersey
Phone: KL 5–9732
Born: 5/11/40
Hair: Blond
Eyes: Blue
Height: 6′0″
Weight: 180
Suit: 46R
Waist: 32
Shirt: 16–34
Shoes: 10 1/2-D
Below this, handwritten: “10/8/63. CL: Simms of Santa Fe. AG: Dink & Dink. PH: A. Markey.”
“Baranauskas,” Joel said.
“What kind of name is that?”
“I don’t know, Greek? He doesn’t look Greek.”
“He looks like a Polack.”
Joel turned back to the photograph. He didn’t like the guy in the photograph. The guy was sleek and ordinary. A model. “Maybe it’s Lithuanian or something,” Joel said.
“Uh-huh.”
Joel flipped through some of the other pages. Some of the models had five or six handwritten entries, some had so many they ran over to extra pages.
“It looks like you only used him once,” Joel said.
“Yeah, just that one shoot, with Andy Markey. When does it say?”
“October of sixty-three. Kennedy would have been alive.”
“Would he? I remember now. Peter wasn’t right for most work, you know? Forty-six chest, he couldn’t do suits, he wasn’t rough enough for cigarette ads or smooth enough for liquor, his eyes were too sad for soft drinks or convertibles. So this swimsuit thing came up, and I sent him out on that.”
“And that was it?”
“I knew that would be it. Once he’d done that ad—practically screamed, ‘fairy’—I knew I wasn’t going to get him any other work. I … I guess I sacrificed him. I threw him away on this job.” He took the book away from Joel, looked at the photo. “After a while, he kind of got the picture, and he asked me if there was any more of … that kind of work. But the client—I think the client was already out of business.”
“That’s right,” Joel said.
“I was beat, and guilty, and I gave him the name of GMA.”
“Who?”
“The Grecian Modeling Association.”
“What was that? Porn?”
“Sort of. I mean, it was as racy as things got. God, ‘63 or ‘64, they were probably still using the posing straps.”
“So did he do it?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t into that stuff back then.” Sexton smiled. “Back then, I didn’t need to look at magazines. I don’t know if he did it or not.”
Maybe he did? Maybe Peter Barry had become one of the oiled figures in the physique magazines, in a posing strap and possibly wearing a sailor’s cap, leaning on a plaster column, behind him a clumsily draped curtain. So if Joel had gotten up the nerve in those days, if he had ever dared to walk up to a cash register and buy one of those magazines, he might have had pictures of the boy … not much more revealing than the one in man about town. Except maybe Joel would have gotten to see his butt.
“I hope not,” Joel said. “I hope he went back to Roseville, New Jersey.”
Sexton had been looking steadily at the picture for a while. Joel asked—he had to ask: “Did you … you and … Peter Barry, did you ever …”
“What? Oh.” Joel expected him to be angry, but of course he wasn’t. Joel had been out of circulation too long, he’d forgotten how casually one used to be able to ask that question. As one might ask, have you ever been to the Cafe Madrid? “I don’t think so,” Sexton said at last. “It wasn’t, you know, part of the job description.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t mean that no boy ever found that the road to stardom ran through my bedroom. But I didn’t force myself on them.”
“Ah.” Joel was still chewing on the “I don’t think so.” How many boys must have passed through that bedroom if the man couldn’t even recall whether Peter Barry had been one of them?
“No, I’m pretty sure this one was straight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So he should be especially displeased when you appear on his doorstep.”
“Well … who said I was going to do that?”
“My dear, you’ve chased him down across thirty years. Are you trying to tell me you’re going to stop here?”
“No.”
“No, you’re going all the way with this lunacy. It’s funny, you don’t seem especially demented.”
“I’m really not.”
“You really are.” Sexton put the book back on the shelf and ushered Joel into the hallway. “I should be alarmed. I mean, here I’ve let you upstairs, I don’t know what I was thinking of. You could be … oh, John Hinckley, or—who was that one who stalked Lennon?”
“I don’t remember.”
Sexton was urging Joel toward the front door; his grip on Joel’s shoulder was strong for a man alleged to be dying. “You could be one of those. And I’ve helped you. What are you going to do when you find him?”
“I hadn’t even thought that far.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I haven’t.” Joel managed to shake loose the claw on his shoulder. He wanted to acquit himself of dementia. “There isn’t anything to do when I find him. I know that. Just look at him, I guess. Or maybe tell him …”
Sexton waited, as if there were some possibility Joel could finish that sentence. After a
minute he sighed. “Before I throw you out, you might as well have a drink.”
“No, thanks,” Joel said, but Sexton had already drifted into the living room.
“I don’t drink any more, but I think there’s some kind of whiskey.”
“Really, it’s okay, I’ve got a train to catch.”
“Well, sit just a second.”
They sat on the sofa with the gold slipcover. Sexton produced, from his shirt pocket, a pack of cigarettes and a plastic holder. He held up the holder. “This is phase two of a stop-smoking program. I’ve been at phase two for ten years.”
“I know how it is,” Joel said, lighting a cigarette of his own.
“I won’t be getting to phase three.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When I found out I was … sick, I started calling people. People I hadn’t talked to in years. My college roommate. My cousins in Iowa. My first lover. ‘Hi!’ I’d go. ‘This is Chip! Chip Sexton!’ They’d go, ‘Oh.’ Just like that, and then there’d be this long silence, while they decided just how deeply they wished they hadn’t picked up the phone. Finally, they’d say, ‘Hi, Chip. Been a long time.’
“It was funny, when I asked them what they’d been doing, people didn’t recap the whole last thirty or forty years or whatever it had been since we’d talked. They’d say what they’d done last week: Bunny and I went to the flea market, or Suzie got admitted to Dartmouth. Then they’d ask what was new with me. I’d say, ‘Nothing much. Just happened to be thinking of you.’ Pretty soon we’d hang up.
“I wasn’t calling to tell them I was sick. I had this notion that I ought to tell them how much they meant to me. That I shouldn’t … go without having told them that, it was important for them to know. But it wasn’t. Maybe it was important for me to know. But if I had told them, it would have been a lie. The person at the other end of the phone didn’t mean anything to me. Do you understand?”
Joel nodded wearily. He recited in a monotone: “It wasn’t the same person. That person didn’t exist any more.”
“What? Oh, no. No, that’s not what I’m saying. Of course it wasn’t. I mean, for God’s sake, Bunny—I don’t even know what gender Bunny is, how could my first lover have wound up with a Bunny? But what I’m saying is … how old were you when you, whatever, fell in love with that picture?”