Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  “Hey,” Joel said to Melanie.

  “Hi.”

  From down the hall, Flanagan’s stentorian, “Gentlemen, how very good of you—” The door closed.

  “Who else is coming?” Joel said.

  “I’m not sure. Leg counsel, and I’m not sure who else.”

  “Oh, Andrew’s coming?” Joel felt himself blushing.

  “I think.”

  He hadn’t seen Andrew since their encounter in front of the Library. Hadn’t thought of him, really, in all these weeks. But of course they were going to run into each other; of course sooner or later Joel would find himself in a meeting with a man he had thrown himself at. Thrown himself: as if he had gathered his pride into a ball, hurled it, it had fallen short like a missed lay-up. For the rest of his working life, maybe, he would go to meetings and there would be Andrew.

  “We think we’ve fixed it,” Melanie said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mullan and I, we— Oh.”

  There was Andrew, his preposterous tan unfaded; was he touching it up? “Hey, Joel,” he said, with a big smile, and he punched Joel’s arm. How butch. “Melanie.” He sat down between them, then turned to Melanie and whispered something. Even Joel didn’t suppose it was about himself, but he was annoyed. They couldn’t have any business Andrew needed to whisper about, it was just a way of making Joel feel out of the loop.

  Andrew had a hickey—on the right side of his neck, toward the back, barely discernible against the field of tanning-booth mahogany. Obviously, Andrew hadn’t gone and deliberately acquired a hickey as a message to Joel. Look, I’m dating someone so young he gives hickeys. But Joel wanted to say: I’m getting mine, too, you’re not the only person getting any. Although possibly whoever Andrew was getting it from wasn’t routinely rifling his wallet.

  The door to Flanagan’s sanctum opened, and Mullan appeared. “You guys ready?” The lobbyists must have left some other way; Joel pictured Flanagan’s office with a dozen doors, characters popping in and out as in a French farce. But it was, when Mullan ushered everyone in, a standard-issue senator’s office. The huge desk, the New Jersey and US flags, the photos of Flanagan and Kennedy-Johnson-Humphrey-Carter-Mondale, the certificates of appreciation from the Plainfield VFW and the Livingston Hadassah. The only exceptional feature was the bookcase to Flanagan’s left, with stacks of Flanagan’s own remaindered books and a copy of Ulysses.

  Flanagan didn’t get up. Possibly he couldn’t, as it was the middle of the afternoon. He had probably had lunch with the Irish ambassador, as his staff cutely put it. Lunch with the ambassador could make him expansive or petulant or just sleepy. “Good afternoon,” he said. He folded his hands on the desk, like a schoolteacher. “Thank you all so much for coming.”

  There was nowhere to sit. Joel and Melanie and Andrew and Mullan stood lined up before Flanagan’s desk like delinquent pupils, and Flanagan didn’t even seem to notice. “Mr. Mullan has suggested that we might at last come to some resolution of the matter of Medicare and the human immunodeficiency virus.” The last phrase uttered as if he himself had discovered the damn thing.

  “Sir,” Mullan said, his voice half an octave above its normal register. “Maybe I need to find some seats.”

  “Oh, yes, do.” While Mullan and Andrew moved furniture, Joel stayed where he was. Flanagan stared at him for a moment, expressionless, then swiveled around and looked out the window, with its view of the Capitol grounds. “Isn’t it the most lovely autumn afternoon?” he said.

  “Just beautiful,” Melanie said. “Have you been outdoors?”

  Flanagan swiveled around, looked querulously at Melanie. What would he have done outdoors, toted the Irish ambassador around in a paper bag?

  When everyone was seated, Mullan began, “This is Joel Lingeman from OLA and Andrew Crawford from leg counsel. And I think you’ve met Melanie, from Senator Harris’s office.” Flanagan nodded benevolently. “Melanie and I think we might have the answer.”

  “To wit,” Flanagan said.

  “That is, we kind of rejected this early on, but there really doesn’t seem to be any other choice. We just have to make it apply to anybody diagnosed after the date of enactment.”

  “I thought it did that.”

  “No, sir, right now it applies to somebody’s who’s infected after the date of enactment. That’s why we have to wait all these years for the … consequences. The deterrent thing. But if you just say anybody diagnosed after enactment, then you get savings right away. You can just start denying claims right away.”

  “I see.”

  Joel put in—sweetly, trying to sound helpful, though he really just wanted to embarrass Mullan: “I thought the budget people said you can’t really score anything for that, because the medical claims never say they’re for AIDS. I thought the deterrent was the only thing they’d score.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we fixed that. You don’t have to go by what’s on the claims. Because to get Medicare they have to have applied for disability in the first place. And to get the disability they have to show they have AIDS. So it’s already in the record.”

  “Oh,” Joel said.

  It was real, the Harris amendment was real now. The Social Security offices knew who had AIDS, they could tell Medicare, real people could get a letter telling them they’d been naughty and would they please die. “But—”

  Flanagan stared at Joel again, still with no particular expression.

  Joel went on. “But you still—even if they’re diagnosed after the effective date, they could actually have been infected years ago. You can’t take away benefits for something that’s already happened before you pass the bill.”

  “You can’t?” Mullan said.

  Flanagan nodded. “That is a difficulty, Mr. Mullan. I’m rather afraid we have caught you in the act of proposing an ex post facto law.”

  “What’s that?” Mullan said.

  Andrew piped up, “The constitution says you can’t pass a law retroactively punishing things people have already done.”

  “That would be Article One,” Flanagan said. “Section … ah …”

  “Section nine,” Andrew said. This was pretty impressive. He went on. “I’ve been looking into that, sir. The courts have been fuzzy about whether denial of a benefit is really an ex post facto law. For example, in Flemming versus Nestor—this was about cutting off Social Security for a guy who’d been a Communist—in that case, Justice Harlan found—”

  Flanagan shook his head. “Perhaps you could summarize.” A shame; Andrew had been studying so hard. “Can we do this retroactively or can we not?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “A very lawyerlike response. I think …” He shut his eyes for a moment. “I think, constitution or no, it would be ungracious to make the provision retroactive. No, I think we shan’t do it.”

  During the ensuing silence Flanagan kept looking at Joel—as if Joel knew the solution to their problem but was perversely refusing to supply it. Joel wondered: if he really did know the solution, would he supply it? For some crumb of approval from Matthew A. Flanagan, or just to make the man stop looking at him, would he help perfect this guided missile aimed straight at the hapless circuit boys, or at himself? Luckily he would never know the answer to this question, as he didn’t have the solution to their problem.

  Andrew did. He looked down at the floor and said, “I don’t know that you … I mean, I’m not exactly sure that anybody knows when something happens.”

  He didn’t say any more. After a few seconds Flanagan smiled and said, “Was that merely a phenomenological observation?”

  “Sir?” Andrew said. Flanagan smiled more broadly. He loved saying things that went over people’s heads. Possibly he had never drawn the connection between this pastime and the fact that he had never, in twenty years, passed a major bill. Andrew was undaunted. “I just mean that, you know, this is all about, really, the incubation period of the virus, or whatever. I mean, the budget people are using th
is assumption of five or six years. That somebody who shows up now must have been infected years ago. But that’s a factual question. Congress can make its own findings of fact.”

  “Mister … ah …”

  “Crawford.”

  “Mister Crawford, I could insert in the preamble to a piece of legislation an assertion that the world was flat, and Congress could enact it, but I should not thereby have made the world flat. Nor can I legislate the incubation period of a virus.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean—nobody can really know, in any particular case, just how much time goes by between somebody getting infected and when they start getting symptoms. It must vary. So what you could do is write a rebuttable presumption into the law.”

  “A rebuttable presumption,” Flanagan repeated.

  “Right. Anyone who shows up with symptoms after the effective date would be assumed to have been infected after the effective date, but they’d be allowed to rebut that.”

  Joel looked over at Andrew. Who was leaning forward, hands gripping the arms of his chair as if he were about to be ejected from it, he was that excited. And proud. See: he wasn’t stupid.

  “How would they rebut the presumption?” Flanagan said.

  “By … I don’t know, showing some evidence that they, whatever, had it before the effective date.”

  “Well, that isn’t so burdensome, is it?”

  “No, sir. They’d just have to have a positive test result or something.”

  Joel couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Nobody has that,” he said. “People don’t get a piece of paper that says ‘John Smith has HIV.’”

  “They don’t?” Flanagan said.

  “No, the way it works is you go and get tested and they just give you a number. And then you go back with your number and they tell you the result.” From the way Flanagan looked at him, Joel supposed that he had betrayed an excessive familiarity with the process. He went on anyway. “They don’t hand out little certificates.”

  “Very well, then, perhaps it will be a rather difficult presumption to rebut.” Flanagan turned back to Andrew, beaming. “Just how would you propose to draft this?”

  “You’d just … uh … you’d just say that anyone determined to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus after the effective date would (a) be deemed to be infected as a result of an act performed after the effective date unless (b) they could demonstrate in a form to be prescribed by the Secretary that they were infected before the effective date.”

  Flanagan clapped his hands. “There we have it.”

  They had it. Andrew had fixed it all by himself. Did he understand this, that he had personally crafted a door that could be slammed in the face of whatever kid from the Pledge had given him his hickey? Could be slammed in Andrew’s own face, unless he was being a very good boy. Maybe he was, maybe he never slipped for an instant, maybe he thought he was galaxies away from the circuit boys. Them. Or maybe he just didn’t think it was real. Here in this office with its view of the dome, it was so easy to string words together, recite your (a)s and (b)s, and imagine that they didn’t refer to anyone. How many times had Joel himself played this game?

  “Except,” Joel said. “Except you don’t get Medicare until you’ve been on disability for two years. So the earliest you’d get any savings would be two years from now.”

  Mullan said, “That’s still in the budget window.”

  “It is,” Flanagan said. “Indeed it is.”

  “So we’ve got our savings. As long as it’s any time in the first five years.” Mullan, in his exuberance, had the temerity to pound Flanagan’s desk. Andrew himself was smiling modestly at his triumph.

  Joel was not smiling. Flanagan noticed. “Sir, I take it you disapprove of this proposal.”

  Joel stammered, “I … I’m not supposed to say. I mean, I’m with OLA, we’re not supposed to give you our opinion.”

  “I’m on your oversight committee. I dispense you from that vow.”

  “Okay, I guess I don’t much like the bill.”

  “And don’t like working on it.”

  “Oh, well, you know, I don’t necessarily like every proposal I help with.”

  “What is your concern?”

  “I—” If his concern wasn’t obvious, how could he possibly convey it? He wished he could somehow bring the world into the room. Or just one person, one living person determined to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. “I just think … this might hurt some people.”

  Flanagan nodded. “I should hate to do that. I am able to support this undeniably rather odious piece of legislation with only transitory regret because—to tell you the truth—I suspect it will have no practical consequences whatsoever. No matter what savings might be attributed to it by the budget office.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Flanagan leaned forward. “It is all paper, Mr. Lingeman.” He had registered Joel’s name; he had sensed something about Joel the minute they had all walked in. “You and I and the budget office, we all perform the dance of legislation on paper. We shall score a paper savings, our act will be enshrined in the volume of public laws for this year, the executive branch will, in its usual dilatory way, fail to execute it. We shall receive, some years hence, a report from the Comptroller General dolefully informing us that the expected savings did not materialize. Do you understand? No one is going to die in the streets.”

  Joel glanced around him. Everybody was looking at the floor, everybody was embarrassed for him. “Paper is important,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if nothing ever comes of it, maybe it’s even worse if nothing ever comes of it. Because then it’s just an insult. If you don’t save any money, it’s just a gratuitous insult.”

  “Insult to …”

  “People had rights. The whole idea of Medicare was that everybody earned it, everybody paid in all their lives and they had a right to it when they needed it.” Joel needed a job. It was absolutely time to shut up. “It’s the only thing that made us one country, Medicare and Social Security. It said we were all in this together. And this bill, it … it says we weren’t. We weren’t after all.”

  Flanagan opened his mouth, ready to let forth some torrent of polysyllabic abuse. Or two syllables: you’re fired. The man was on the goddamn joint committee that oversaw the OLA, he could make it happen just by picking up the phone. Joel sat up straight, ready to be fired, proud as he had ever been. Flanagan closed his mouth, just looked at Joel for a while. His bloodshot eyes, above the rim of his half-moon reading glasses, fixed on Joel. At last he said, “Are you of the affected persuasion?”

  “The what?” Joel said, although he knew the what. He glanced over at Andrew, who was still staring at the floor, as if there might be an escape hatch in the carpet. “You mean am I gay?”

  “I’m sorry, I withdraw the question.”

  Joel swallowed. He didn’t mind saying he was gay: of all the things he’d said in the last five minutes, it was the one he couldn’t be fired for. He minded that Flanagan would think that was the point. That Joel’s objections had nothing to do with any grand vision of American solidarity, but with a selfish and parochial desire to go on indulging in high-risk behaviors without consequence. He minded that Flanagan was looking at him and picturing him engaged in an act or pattern of acts performed voluntarily by an individual and determined by the Secretary …

  “As it happens,” Joel said.

  “I truly am sorry. It’s of absolutely no importance to me. As you may know, I have consistently supported measures to prevent discrimination against homosexuals.”

  “Yes, sir.” It was true, he had. “That just—”

  “That just makes it harder to understand how I could support this bill. How could I be so—you may select the epithet—inconsistent? Hypocritical? Pharisaical?” He sat back, as if actually waiting for Joel to pick one. Then he took off his half-moon glasses, folded them, placed them precisely on the desk before him. Joel recognized this gesture from a hundred c
ommittee meetings. It meant Flanagan was about to give a speech.

  “I was elected to the House in the year nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-four.” He intoned the year as if chiseling it on a cornerstone. “The following year, President Johnson escalated—in the word current at the time—escalated our involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. A year after that, or perhaps two, there was a large manifestation in the capital by citizens opposed to the war.”

  “The march on the Pentagon,” Joel said.

  “That is correct. As it happens, I was one of the very first members of Congress to speak out against the war and to predict the inevitable outcome of our misadventure.” Maybe this was so; though, even more than most senators, Flanagan tended to recall only those predictions that came true. His epitaph would probably read, “I told you so.”

  “Accordingly, I was asked to participate in the march. I pointed out to the organizers that they were gathered pursuant to ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Congress for a redress of grievances.’” This was only a slight misquotation. “I therefore regretted that I could not join them, as I would have been in the paradoxical position of petitioning myself.” Flanagan raised his eyebrows, the way he always did when he turned a phrase he thought was destined for Bartlett’s. Joel felt himself smiling admiringly. He had practically called the man an asshole, and the sycophancy region of his brain stem was forcing his face into an involuntary smile.

  “This was not merely a witticism,” Flanagan said. “Although I had made my opposition to the war plain, I was a participant in the body that continued to fund it. Indeed, I myself had voted for the defense appropriations bill that very year. You might say that this was hypocritical.”

  Joel did not say this. Flanagan went on. “In fact, I voted as I did under some duress. There is in my old district an installation named—you might find this rather amusing—Fort Dix.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Joel said. Under torture he would not have admitted that it was amusing.

  “Fort Dix was, at the time, the Army’s principal basic training facility in the northeast, and a source of not inconsiderable revenue for my constituents. That year, however, the Pentagon suggested that the temperate climate of New Jersey made Fort Dix a less than suitable venue in which to condition young men for the rigors of counterinsurgency in the jungle. They might be better acclimated, in a word, if they were to spend their initiatory weeks in, say, South Carolina. Which happened to be the home state of the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a gentleman of stupefying seniority named Mendel Rivers.