Man About Town
Page 36
“When you were a kid.”
“And I always remembered it. I don’t know why, there was something about the picture.”
“You don’t know why,” Petras repeated. With no particular inflection, nothing in his voice to say that he and Joel both knew damn well why. “So you come to see me because I was in this picture?”
“Yes.”
Petras almost smiled. “You took your time.”
“I did.”
Petras let his paper drop to the porch floor, scratched his chest again. He sighed. “What do you want to do, suck my dick?”
Joel was so shocked he stepped backwards. Into air—he had forgotten he’d gone up one step—then landed heavily, almost falling.
“No, Jesus,” he said. Though of course he had to wonder, one last time, if that was what he really wanted, if it had always been as simple as that.
“No?” Petras said. “Cause there was guys used to want to do that.”
“No kidding.”
“Lots of guys. I wound up—I stopped going into the city for a long time. I’d be walking down the street and some guy would … look at me. I’d been in the city enough, I knew there was guys that looked at you. But I mean somebody would stand still and just look while I walked by, like I was a parade or something. So I’d know they seen that picture. I’d feel like punching them out. They seen that picture and they probably whacked off to it. And it was like they owned me, or like they took something from me.”
“I never did,” Joel said. He added, “Whack off.” He wasn’t sure about the other part, the part about taking something. “I just looked at it.”
“You were a kid, you said.”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen.” Petras shook his head sadly. Not sad, probably, about the time that had passed. Rather at the notion that some lonesome little faggot had looked at his picture. “I was … I don’t know.”
“You were twenty-three.”
“Was I? You know all about me, huh? I got a fucking fan club.”
“I guess.” No point telling him he had a fucking religion.
Petras shook his head again, but he was smirking, maybe a little tickled by having a fan club. “Okay, I was twenty-three, if you say so. It was just some kind of joke, you know? Some girl said I should try modeling, I looked like a movie star or something, and somehow I got hooked up with this guy.”
“Sexton.”
“That was it, I met up with this Mr Sexton, and I thought, hey, I could make some change. Easy money.” He snorted. “He only ever got me this one job. Under those hot lights for hours and hours. Wearing that goddamn little suit and … so embarrassed, and trying to smile.”
“Were you embarrassed?”
“Shit, yeah. Guys didn’t wear things like that. I thought of my friends back home, seeing that picture. I thought of my mother. I mean, I was proud of my built, I used to like showing off, at the beach or wherever, but not like that. And jeez, if I’d known—I mean, I was embarrassed, but if I’d known who was going to look at that picture …” He paused, looked away from Joel. He must just have realized what he had said: if he’d known that sick people like Joel were going to look. He didn’t retract it.
“My buddies found out. I don’t know how, it ain’t like we all read that book—what was it?”
“man about toum.”
“Yeah. Somebody got hold of it, and they gave me shit, like it was a homo picture. So I’d say it was just a picture. I was me, and if homos looked at it, that didn’t make me a homo. So, okay, they knew that. Except some asshole took it to my foreman and he didn’t know that.
“I was working at Cooper-Dowd, you know, over in New Brunswick, they made airplane parts. Gone now. It was defense work, you had to have a clearance, and they started checking up on me. Like, it wasn’t a crime to be in a picture, but I might have ‘questionable associates.’ That’s what they said. And long as they were checking I couldn’t work in the C building. Because I might draw a picture of a goddamn top-secret screw and give it to my homo associates.
“I didn’t even know any homos. Except maybe Mr Sexton, you think maybe he was a homo?”
“I don’t know.”
“I guess he was, but he didn’t try nothing. Anyway, I didn’t know any homos, but they transferred me out of defense work. Which was where the good money was, I was pissed. And then they fucking wrote to my draft board.”
“To tell them you were a … ?”
“To tell them I wasn’t doing defense work. So there went my goddamn deferment. They had my ass in Fort Dix before I knew what hit me. Cause the Army didn’t care if I was a homo, long as I could stand up and get shot at.”
“Oh. Did you … did you go to …” He couldn’t even say the name.
“Sure did. Got a Purple Heart.”
“You did? I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, see.” He stood up, slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Spread it wide, so that Joel could see, on the belly that now sagged a little over the waistband of his trousers, the scar. Jagged and white, starting just below the navel and running down until it disappeared in the trousers. Those few inches of flesh, navel to waistband, that had been to Joel like the sun—torn, years ago, torn, disfigured, healed, the way things heal.
Petras didn’t button his shirt again right away. He let Joel look for a second or two. At his chest, still powerful and firm but matted with silver hair, here or there a wart or a mole. At his white belly with its whiter scar.
Joel turned away, sat down on the porch step.
“What’s the matter?” Joel couldn’t answer; his eyes were filling with tears. Petras bent down and touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
The Santa Fe boy touched his shoulder.
“I’m sorry you got hurt.”
“Shit, it wasn’t no big deal. They patched me up. I’m still here.”
“No, I—” I’m sorry you ever got hurt, that’s what Joel meant to say. He was sorry about all the ways Petras must have been hurt since the day of that picture. But that was the same, wasn’t it, as being sorry that Petras was still here? Because the only way he wouldn’t have been hurt, scarred, the only way he could have stayed the boy in that picture would have been to die the instant after it was taken. Just as the only way Joel could have been the kid who saw that picture would have been to die right then, there in his boyhood room, the magazine slipping from his lifeless hands.
Petras stood up, backed away. Joel got up, too, turned to face him. To look at him one more time—the sleek arms and shoulders almost intact, the spare tire not too gross, just a sort of thickening all around his middle. As if it were a callus, as if he had grown it after being buffeted by all the travails of these decades.
He opened his hands, palms open in the immemorial gesture: I have nothing here. No weapon, no food, nothing in my hands. I have nothing to give you.
“You know, that picture didn’t even look like me.”
“What?”
“I never thought. I mean, you ever seen a picture of yourself and thought, that ain’t me?”
“I guess.”
“Guy must have taken a hundred pictures, I was under those lights for hours. And then he picks this one, this one shot where, just for a second, he caught me with this stupid shit-eating smile on my face.”
Caught him. Froze him there forever, open to the gaze of strangers, predators. Of a baffled kid who turned the page of a magazine and felt the rush of blood to his head and maybe to his loins, maybe he could admit that now. Joel had known, the first minute he came upon that page and that image, when he snapped the magazine shut he had known that he was guilty of something. He had never thought that what he was guilty of was injuring this stranger, as surely as if he himself had torn that innocent, once-perfect belly.
You have no right. There the boy was, caught with his shit-eating smile, the little crinkle about his eyes betraying, as Joel had always thought, some pain: pain at the thought that Joel would look at him.
“You let them take it,” Joel said. “You let them take it, they printed it, there it was. I looked at it.” He had a right to look. He had a right to be in this world and look, take from the world anything it would give him. He had a right to say, out loud, “You were beautiful.”
“Is that what you come to tell me?”
“I guess you don’t like that word.”
“I don’t care. It’s kind of … your problem.”
“Problem,” Joel repeated. He shook his head. “You were put here to be beautiful, that one day, and I was put here to see it.”
“That ain’t what I was put here for,” Petras said. If he had some other theory, he didn’t supply it.
“All right,” Joel said. “It’s what / was put here for.”
What else? He hadn’t made babies, he hadn’t cured cancer or written a novel, he hadn’t even been there to write up the final agreement on the Harris amendment. He had seen the Santa Fe boy. Petras had radiated beauty one day in 1963, and in 1964 Joel had caught a glimpse of it, like a man watching from light years away the flash of a star that had died eons ago. By the time Joel saw it, it was already gone. But that’s what people were here for, the only reason we were on the planet at all: so that a star that flared and died a billion years before we were born would not pass away unobserved.
Petras shivered, buttoned his shirt. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
“No. No, there isn’t anything else I want. I better go catch my train.” Joel started up Bridge Street. When he had gone a few steps, he turned around. Petras was already sitting, opening his paper again. In another minute he would forget Joel had ever been there. Joel called out, “It was good seeing you.”
Petras looked up and replied, with automatic politeness, “Good seeing you, too.”
PRAISE FOR
man about town
“Merlis deftly sketches two distinct societies in Washington: Capitol Hill … and the city’s gay singles scene … compelling.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An unexpected kind of gay fiction, especially with its insider’s look at the legislative process … different and ambitious.”
—The Seattle Times
“Mark Merlis enters into the underexplored landscape of gay middle age with characteristic fearlessness and insight. Yet this is as much a portrait of the U.S. Congress, its insularity and hypocrisy, as it is the story of a man emerging from a vastly prolonged adolescence. A sorrowful, cathartic novel.”
—David Leavitt
“The angst of a breakup novel meets the intractability of the permanent government in Washington … smart.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Merlis’s portraits of Washington’s lobbyists, legislative aides and legislators, and of the city’s gay community (its habits, manners and places) are sharp and convincing … Washington DC, as Merlis portrays it, is too good a character to ignore.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A pungently insightful tale.”
—Washington Blade
“Merlis is a gifted writer. The story moves briskly and contains a veteran’s insight into relationships. A nationally known expert on health care issues, he also shows the banality and bottom-line machinations of politics without preaching … In Joel, he has created a character who is never lovable and never pitiable, but eminently believable. Whatever wrong turns he takes, the reader is willing to follow.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Joel’s quest to capture past passion is the captivating, imaginative core of Man About Town. But Merlis’ novel also has much that’s sage to say about gay men aging gracelessly, the complexities of interracial romance, and closeted hypocrisy in political Washington. This is uncommonly grown-up fiction by a writer with a keen, affectionate eye for gay foibles and failings.”
—Book Marks
“Stinging and insightful … [Merlis] creates a protagonist with broad appeal, proving beyond a doubt that the personal is political and vice versa.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Uncluttered, intelligent … a compelling read.”
—Out magazine
“Merlis is a skilled realist who employs an understated humor—especially in depicting the Washington bureaucracy. For all popular fiction collections.”
—Library Journal
“[Merlis has a] flair for subtle introspection and keen observation. The characters’ outward interactions may seem unremarkable, and the settings—Congress and gay bars—alternately comic and tragic, but Merlis reaches a level of thoughtful reflection that sings with poignancy.”
—Kirkus
About the Author
MARK MERLIS is a prize-winning novelist and author of An Arrow’s Flight and American Studies. He has been a health policy consultant for twenty-five years and currently lives in Pennsylvania.
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Copyright
MAN ABOUT TOWN. Copyright © 2003 Mark Merlis.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © August 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04155-5
First Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2004
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 0-00-715611-1
ISBN 0-00-715612-X (pbk.)
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