Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  “Bridge Street? Why, honey, that’s Bridge Street right out there. Why would you want a taxi to take you to Bridge Street?” She shook her head—this was one stupid white boy—-and probably went on shaking it as Joel made his way through the parking lot, packed tight with commuters’ cars, and out to the street.

  The bridge for which the street was named crossed the New Jersey Transit tracks. It led from the right side to the wrong side. Joel had never fully understood this expression until he saw how, to the west of the tracks, Victorian piles were scattered on a gently rising hill with oak and maple trees; in their driveways were Range Rovers and Mercedes station wagons. To the east, Bridge Street marched straight by a couple of blocks of three-story shingled tenements, then softened into a curve as it entered a sea of ranch houses. A development from the fifties, probably, the houses bought with GI loans. Each still had an antenna on the roof, though cable must surely have got to Roseville by now. Joel guessed Petras Baranauskas had not grown up in one of the big houses on the hill. He headed east.

  It was Indian summer, if that phrase was still permissible. Native American summer, then; anyway, warm enough that Joel took off his jacket before he’d gone half a block. He was right, the house numbers were ascending: 1261 when the tenements gave way to what a faded sign declared was Roseville Meadows, 1507 after a bend in Bridge Street that made Joel lose sight of the station. Probably 1693 would be past that next bend.

  Joel stopped, trying to ready himself. For what was he planning to do? It wasn’t just that he hadn’t thought what to say, in the second or two he was likely to get before the door slammed in his face, what few words might sum up everything. He wasn’t even sure whom the words would be for. Was there really something he wanted Petras Baranauskas to know, to carry away from this encounter? Or was it that he was trying to craft in advance his own memory? I stood before him and I said … Whichever, he was already thinking past the moment. He was walking toward Petras’s house with no intention except to walk away from it, not to be there but to have been there. This calmed him, oddly. In a few minutes, he would have been there and would be walking back toward the train station. Unless Petras actually, say, shot him, nothing was going to happen in the next few minutes that he couldn’t walk away from.

  He heard singing behind him, or sing-songing, and turned to see a dark, Latino-looking woman holding the hand of a little boy with blond hair. She was walking briskly, the babbling kid could barely keep up with her. Joel realized that she was hurrying to get past him, because he was a stranger, a pedestrian in streets not meant for them. The little boy went “Hi.” Joel answered “Hi there!” in the bright voice he used with children and the occasional slower congressman. The woman glared and tugged the boy along still faster.

  Joel was a stranger on a pilgrimage, like some movie star passing through a village on his way to visit a lama. Except the way to a lama was much clearer. First, you saw some guys with saffron robes and horn-rimmed glasses, they gave you yak milk while they instructed you in the appropriate way to approach the sage, you passed through this portal and that vestibule and at last came before him. Both of you were ready, the sage nodded calmly, prepared to deliver an inscrutable answer to whatever question you had come so far to ask.

  Sometimes, when he was young, Joel had thought about going to see some holy man. Auden, except he died. Kerouac, except he died. He never went: maybe he was smarter when he was a kid, maybe he knew these great men would have nothing to impart to him except Scram. Perhaps it was, objectively, risible that Joel had journeyed at last only to see a man whose great achievement was that he took his clothes off once. But the guy would probably say Scram as eloquently as Auden would have done.

  Joel continued up the street, rounded the bend, and saw, just a couple of houses away: in the driveway, a young man, wearing only cutoffs, hosing down a Mustang. His muscular back was turned to Joel, he was facing an uncovered front porch on which stood the dark woman and her toddler. Next to them an old man sat in an aluminum lawn chair. The woman was saying something. The young man shut off the water and listened to her. The woman pointed straight at Joel: there he is. The young man turned.

  For one vertiginous instant, the split-second it took the young man to turn around, Joel thought he was going to see the Santa Fe boy. As perhaps some believers, in the moment of their death, must be giddily confident that they are about to see the pearly gates—Joel was just that certain. If you flipped to page 174, you would unfailingly be presented with the smile, the golden immaculate torso. Joel had, only for that instant, the sensation that life was as sure, as fixed in its order, as the pages of a magazine.

  The young man turned, his coarse, stupid face unsmiling, his torso—a good third of which was blazoned with a tattoo whose argument Joel could not decipher from so far away—tensed. Not a gift he was giving, but a threat. Joel didn’t belong on this street, strangers didn’t walk down streets in Roseville Meadows. On the porch, the old man stood up to get a better look. He folded his arms across his chest, a powerful chest for such an old man.

  Everyone was looking at Joel, even the little boy stood quite still, looking. Joel looked back. At the Santa Fe boy, at his son in the driveway, at his grandson, who reached up now to take his hand. The hand of a patriarch: he and his generations of men looked intently at Joel, who had come into their world like some kind of virus.

  Joel called out, “I was trying to get to the train station.”

  No one said anything for a minute. Ridiculous, obviously he wasn’t near the train station, he might as well have said he was looking for the Eiffel Tower.

  The Santa Fe boy stepped forward to the edge of the porch and said—so gently and seriously, in a low voice Joel could scarcely hear: “You’ve come the wrong way.”

  In Penn Station, Joel passed a newsstand that had an electronic ticker in the window:

  … REDS 11, METS 7 … FRIDAY: SUNNY, HIGH 78 … PRESIDENT, CONGRESS BREAK BUDGET IMPASSE … NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE TO …

  President, Congress Break Budget Impasse. They’d done the deal—suddenly, it always happened suddenly. This was the night they’d write up all the technicals, so the bill could go to the floor in the morning and all the members could fly home. This was the night, and Joel wasn’t there; probably Herb had been frantically calling him all afternoon. He was in big trouble, but if he caught the five o’clock Metroliner he could be on the Hill by eight or so. People would just be buckling down, finishing off the free pizza brought in by the Lutheran Hospital Association or the National Academy of Proctology, ready to put the finishing touches on the rural hospital amendments or the Harris—Flanagan amendment on HIV. He could still get there in time.

  He sprinted for the ticket counter, stopped short. There had to be fifty people in line. They all looked like the kind of people who wanted to go to Nebraska and would try to negotiate with the ticket agent in Croatian. Joel would stand behind them, watching as the digital clock flashed 4:50, 4:55, and his head would explode. He ran to the machine where you could buy a ticket with a credit card, but there was a sign: it was out of order, thank you for riding Amtrak.

  A sign: he was not supposed to catch the Metroliner. He was supposed to stay in New York and tomorrow he was supposed to go back to Roseville and blurt out some inanity at Grandpa Baranauskas.

  As he rode up the escalator to the street, he thought: he wouldn’t lose his job, not for one truancy. Not to mention that he didn’t need the job, as there would no longer be any particular reason to keep his wallet stuffed with twenties. Maybe Michael had just been in a hurry? No, he would at least have called to Joel through the bathroom door. He was gone, gone.

  Eighth Avenue was one-way the wrong way. If he wanted a cab to Sheridan Square he should have gone out the other end of the station. But it was still beautiful out, and what were twenty blocks or so?

  At each cross street the sun, low over New Jersey, seemed to burn a path for itself straight across the island. In between, Joel saw fathers
. A million other people, but he noticed only the fathers—this one holding a kid by the hand, this one with a kid on his shoulders, this one lecturing a dark, gawky son who was … almost ripe, a few years short of legal, and already a knockout. Old man, do you know that your son is beautiful, do you know that there are predators ready to jump him as soon as you let him out of your sight? Probably he did know.

  If Joel had thought about it, he would have expected that Petras was a father. That if Petras had accomplished nothing else these thirty years, he would—even if just inadvertently—have managed to breed. Why should this have made Joel feel so sad, marginal, useless? So his particular complement of chromosomes would not be replicated. So he had missed all those wonderful experiences, changing diapers, paying college tuition. Hell, he could still have that experience if he wanted—if not with Michael, then with some other kid. There were plenty of guys at Gentry ready to suck an old man dry. He could adopt any one of them and have both the cardinal joys of fatherhood. Writing checks. Knowing somebody would jump your kid as soon as you let him out of your sight.

  South of Twenty-third Street, he stopped looking at fathers and started looking at non-fathers. A scattering at first, then little gaggles, by Eighteenth Street whole herds of men who would have made the young Peter Barry look like the sucker who gets sand kicked in his face. They wore baseball caps and T-shirts; many had shaved their heads; nearly all had pierced themselves in multiple places. As if their own meticulously sculpted bodies were voodoo dolls: if I stick it here, Daddy will get such a migraine.

  Any other day Joel might just have looked around and thought: my, all these hot boys. He might have been a little sad that he couldn’t have all of them or, probably, any. Or he might have felt some little stab of regret—nothing so sharp, more the momentary surfacing of the numb regret that was always there, that he hadn’t lived the life when he was younger. The life! Going from work to the long mandatory hours at the gym, home to an apartment the size of Joel’s kitchen, stopping only to pick out just the right baseball cap, and heading out to the bars. Ending the evening in some sort of random coupling, hardbodies in collision.

  If he had dared, if he had dared, if he had lived: he would be dead. He could have come here and joined the great party he always knew was going on without him, and he would be dead now, as surely as if he’d been shot down in some rice paddy. Instead he had won the lottery; he was still here. Still here, for no apparent purpose. Here: his whole vision darkened, as he scanned the pageant of Chelsea boys, by a thun-derhead of despair and loss.

  They were all so grim, wary, their eyes turned a little sideways, or half-inward. It looked as though they were … trying hard to remember something. That was the look. As sometimes you will see a walker suddenly stop, his face stricken: where was I headed? They were lost, constantly looking about for some sign, anything that might remind them of where they originally were headed. And at the same time knowing where they were headed, where everyone is headed.

  What on earth was as mortal as these faggots? Young and beautiful and sterile as mules. And running headlong to death. These guys would have Medicare when they were thirty. If they were quick about it, if they hurried up and got their certificates before the budget bill passed tomorrow. They were burning themselves up, squeezing everything out of the time they had. And why shouldn’t they, if the alternative was to grow old and turn into Joel? No wonder they averted their eyes as they passed him. He might as well have been striding down Eighth Avenue in a black robe, brandishing a scythe. There was nothing else ahead of them, they would live and die and leave nothing.

  Because they didn’t make babies, for Christ’s sake? Did he really think that Petras Baranauskas, sitting on his front porch and vacantly watching his son wash a car, had a life full of meaning and fulfillment? That he was any less bewildered about what he was here for, or any less scared of leaving, because he had seen to it that there would be a few more Baranauskases in the Roseville, New Jersey, phone book?

  Maybe, when he didn’t look straight at the camera, when he looked a little sideways, he was seeing what everybody else did. Maybe he trembled like everybody else.

  Joel checked in at the Sheridan Square, left his briefcase in the room, had dinner at the bar in a Belgian place that served baskets of pommes frites and mayonnaise for dipping them in. He had two baskets, and then some mussels. There was no one around to call him a piggy.

  When he got back to his room, the message light on the phone was blinking. Who? Herb, probably, saying they were close to agreement, Joel had better haul his ass back tonight and pitch in or said ass would be on the street. But of course it couldn’t be Herb. There was only one person who knew where Joel was.

  “Hey. I guess you’re out whoring around. Just kidding. Just wanted to see how your … mission went. And … uh … tell you I miss you. Call me as soon as you get home.”

  Joel played it back a couple of times, went to the window and looked out into the airshaft. Michael, what you need to do is hop the train up here, become a Sales Associate, Men’s Apparel, at Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s, and head straight to the clubs. Pierce yourself, tattoo yourself, throw yourself into this world while you’re still young. Stay away from old white guys, because they are piggy and will devour you.

  He played the message again. Was there some way of preserving it, could the hotel give him a copy on tape or something? No: it would just be erased when he checked out. It was a gift for this one night only; when he left this room, he would leave it behind. He played it over and over, so it would stay in his head. So he could play it in his head when he got old.

  On the train the next morning, the local to Newark, he read: “President, Congress Reach Budget Compromise.” They had done a million things to taxes, Medicare, welfare. A whole inside page was full of bullet points and pie charts, and then facing that another half page, labeled “NEWS ANALYSIS,” about this or that new loophole—ornaments on the Christmas tree, as they said on the Hill—and which corporation had paid which member to obtain it. He read both pages through a second time and still couldn’t find anything about the Harris amendment. But they did say the drug companies had gotten their tax break. So maybe the Harris amendment was in the package, or maybe they’d found some other way to pay for biotechnology innovation zones. He’d better find out by Monday. Staffers would be calling, wondering what their members had voted for.

  What he should do when he got off in Newark was catch the next southbound Amtrak, get over to the office and see if anybody had the conference agreement yet. Or maybe skip it, just go straight over to Hecht’s and let Michael pick him out a new pair of pants. Because he had Belgian mayonnaise on these and hadn’t brought a change.

  When he got off in Newark he transferred to the Kilmer line.

  Petras Baranauskas was on his front porch again, reading the paper. So he didn’t see Joel’s approach—or rather, failure to approach: Joel stood a long time, maybe fifty yards away, looking at Petras. Not, on this second foray, nerving himself, or trying to think what to say. Just looking, at Petras and at the banal landscape that surrounded him. Trying to take it all in, consciously prolonging the moment. Trying to pay attention, to everything, for just one minute of his life.

  He couldn’t: there was too much to see, even here in blasted New Jersey. Houses, trash cans, parked cars. Trees, shrubs, grass. Human artifacts, inorganic, dead; vegetable life filling in every empty space with futile exuberance; a man on his front porch. No reason for the eye to be drawn to any one of these things instead of another. The figure of a man on his porch did not reward Joel’s attention any more than, say, the tricycle on the sidewalk, the crabgrass on the lawn, the clouds in the sky. Except that he happened to have come all this way to see the man. This journey was about his having intended it, somehow.

  He finished the journey, walked closer to Petras. Actually thinking: now I am a hundred feet away, now fifty. He could, with each stride, cover some part of the distance between them, he could ne
ver get all the way. All the way: that would have meant being inside Petras. Anything less was to be at some distance from him.

  The distance just a couple of yards now. Petras lowered his paper and looked at Joel through the upper part of his bifocals. He didn’t get up, just sat looking calmly.

  What was he doing home, didn’t he have a job? Maybe he was retired already. Or disabled. Fifty-five, he would have been, about the age when lots of working stiffs wore out. After five months they could get Social Security. Then, twenty-four months after that, Medicare.

  Joel reached the porch steps, climbed the first one, stopped.

  Petras said, “Hey,” not in greeting, but as you might say it to a child or a pet, a gentle warning.

  Joel didn’t answer. He found himself looking, not at Petras, but at the newspaper. President, Congress Reach Budget Compromise. That seemed more real to him than the present moment.

  “Can I help you?” Petras said.

  Joel shook his head. No, you can’t possibly help me.

  Petras scratched his chest. “You still looking for the train station?”

  “I—” Joel watched: Petras’s liver-spotted hand scratching the little tangle of silver wire that showed above the V of his shirt collar. “I’m looking for Peter Barry.”

  Petras shivered. Joel heard Bate saying: you have no right.

  “I haven’t used that name in a long time.”

  “But you were Peter Barry?”

  “I was.” He didn’t ask how Joel knew, or what Joel wanted from him. “For a little while.”

  He didn’t need to ask what Joel wanted from him. He had been Peter Barry for a little while a long time ago. Whatever this stranger wanted from Peter Barry, there was no Peter Barry to give it to him.

  “You were—-” Joel began. He had thought he might just say, baldly, the only thing there was to say—you were beautiful—and hightail it back to the train station. But he had no right. Why? What kind of transgression was it to tell a man he was beautiful? Other than the obvious, that no one would be especially happy to hear this so emphatically in the past tense: you were beautiful. Still, wouldn’t it be better to know that you had been beautiful even for an instant, and that there was someone who remembered? If Joel had been Peter Barry for one instant, wouldn’t he want to know that someone had seen him and remembered? He finished: “You were in a picture. I saw it when I was a kid.”