Man About Town: A Novel (11 page)

Because they had been not a couple, but a sermon. Their loyalty a standing reproach to all the doubters who insisted it was impossible, no faggots could live like Joel and Sam forever. He had never, he thought, rubbed it in. On the contrary, he had always been half-apologetic about their deviant behavior. As if fidelity were a little idiosyncrasy of theirs. As if it hadn’t cost them anything.

He could already see the faces. After the moment of astonishment,
how Charles and Francis and Buck would marshal their faces, each of them striving to craft the appropriate mask of consternation and empathy. He had done it so often himself. He knew just how the muscles in your face tensed as you concealed your simple delight in unearthing a large uncut gem of misery. He knew how it felt to look straight in someone’s eyes when you wanted to turn away with disdain for his fatuity and richly deserved ill-fortune.

All of these ordinary human sensations would be sweetened in this instance by a special triumph: they had been right all along, it was never possible to be Joel and Sam. If Icarus had pals like Joel’s, they must have had to struggle just so, holding their frowns in place to hide their natural jubilation as he fell to earth.

Oh, and how would they ever keep a straight face when Joel said the most hilarious thing of all? We’re still going to be friends.

“Nothing much,” Joel said. “Um … listen, I just stopped in to say hi. I’ve got to get going.”

“You’re not even going to have one drink?” Charles asked. With honest amazement, as if Joel had announced he was giving up oxygen.

“No, I’m late for something.”

Twelve years late, he thought, as he got into the cab and said, “P and Nineteenth.” Twelve years since he’d been with anybody but Sam. Maybe that guy from last week would show up at Zippers again, or maybe … He found that he was—right there in a taxicab—getting aroused, just thinking of that guy, remembering their kiss. He could almost feel its traces on his lips. The thought of simply repeating that kiss made him short of breath, he didn’t have to think beyond it to what would happen when they got to … the apartment. Not some hotel; they could go to the apartment. All the better if, improbably, Sam were there when they came in, picking up more
stuff. You see, you’re not the only one who …

Sam’s catch, his Kevin, was twenty-three. And cared for Sam, didn’t give up a kiss because he’d just been handed forty bucks. So what? It wasn’t a contest. The issue was whether Joel was going to have a good time. But he couldn’t help feeling Sam watching, judging. Even if he weren’t literally present when Joel brought home his damaged goods, Sam would be there somehow. Like an angel: Joel had a sudden picture of him, his face floating near the ceiling in a corner of the bedroom. Just his face, like one of those grotesque putti who show up in Mannerist paintings, a head with wings sprouting from behind the ears.

Would he be there always, that accusatory angel? Maybe so, maybe this was what it meant to have an ex. A Sam in his head, murmuring: Joel, Joel, how could you do something so stupid and degrading?

Joel answered. Because it is my body now, and my money, and my dignity. All of these things were yours and you left them behind and I own them again. I can do anything I want.

Of course, the corollary to this triumphant riposte was that he would need to figure out what he wanted. No sweat. He wanted another kiss. Except that it was one thing to buy a secret kiss while your lover was working late, and another thing to have no lover and buy a kiss.

As it was one thing to sneak into Zippers while your lover was working late, just to see if anybody might look at you, and another thing to sit in Zippers having one drink after another while you waited to see if anybody might look at you. Past eight on a weeknight, lots to do tomorrow, he should just amble out, pick up a little food, go on home and …

Zippers had been almost empty when Joel came in, but it was starting to fill up now. Guys who had finished their errands or their naps, one or two of whom Joel wouldn’t have thrown out of bed in a blizzard. He sat up, sucked in his stomach,
wondered if he was holding his cigarette like the Marlboro man or if, come to think of it, maybe his cigarette was a turn-off now as it hadn’t been fifteen years ago.

He knew it was crazy. Sitting here and feeling that he absolutely had to meet somebody; it was practically a guarantee that he would go home alone. But if he left now, he would go home alone anyway. So he might as well have just one more drink. He wasn’t hunting, he was merely … available. That was how he should feel. No special urgency. He had simply been unavailable for many years, and now he was available, like an out-of-print book that has been reissued.

As the bartender, a kid with a shaved head and a black goatee, refilled Joel’s glass he said, “You just visiting DC?”

“Me?” Joel said. “No, I’m from here. I just don’t go out much.”

“I didn’t think I’d seen you.”

“No.” The bartender must have been about the age of Sam’s Kevin; Joel found himself momentarily entranced by the kid’s Adam’s apple.

“Well, it’s nice to see you now. What’s your name?”

“Joel.”

“I’m Scott. It’s nice to meet you, Joel.” He gave Joel a genuine and quite charming smile. “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a second.”

Joel waited many seconds for Scott to come back before he recalled that a smile from a cute bartender was not a token of incipient devotion. Cute bartenders smiled at older guys because older guys tipped. Joel was an older guy. Of course he knew that, he received a telegram on the subject every time he bent over to pick something up. But he had not been an older guy hanging out in a gay bar. One of those gray objects his eyes used to just automatically pass over, fifteen years ago, when he scanned the bar. Missing from the picture, like a disgraced commissar airbrushed out of a photo of the Supreme Soviet.

He made himself smile. Years ago someone had told him he frowned too much, he needed to smile more. He sat up and
sucked in his belly and smiled. He could do it for only a few seconds before he felt like an idiot. Sitting there at the bar grinning at nothing.

He had meant to leave himself casually open to chance, a calm harbor if the wind should happen to blow a vessel his way. But already he was cruising again, he had fallen back into it as quickly as that. Alive again, as he had wanted, every nerve awake, his peripheral vision lit up by every shift in the crowd around him, every momentary turn of a face. His back feeling each tiny draft that meant someone had just come in, and should he turn now to look?

As if he had never been away at all. If he had not met Sam or any Sam, he might have kept coming here, 33, 34, 35 …

The life here had gone on all these years waiting for him to resume it. And it wasn’t as though he and Sam had been in a foreign country and he was now returning to find his native land surprisingly unchanged. It was as though a parallel Joel had persisted in this world from which he had absented himself, and now the two had converged, they were in the same place now, Joel1 and Joel2.

He had arrived exactly where he would have been if there had been no Sam: just Joel coming into the bar. Still coming into the bar.

As was, uh-oh, Ron. Joel suddenly spotted him, leaning against the wall next to the exit. Part of the Hill Club gang, who hadn’t been there this evening because, undoubtedly, he had taken a nap before changing into his cruising ensemble and coming here. He might as well have come straight from work in his K-Street-lawyer ensemble instead of putting on jeans that were a tad too small, so that his polo-shirted gut stuck out as if it were cantilevered.

Ron was panning the room, his head slowly turning like the security camera in a bank. When he saw Joel, he did a little double take, the head continuing its rotation and snapping back. He did it again, to make Joel smile, and Joel did.
But he was staring at Joel rather sternly, as if he had caught Joel somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

Joel should have figured Ron would show. up. The only guy in their circle who still had the energy, or the doggedness, to go out cruising four or five nights a week. Even though he was—what?—pushing sixty, anyway. Still casting his net out, night after night. As he had been doing since, Joel guessed, late in the Eisenhower administration. He had already been a fixture at Zippers, as much a part of the decor as the jukebox or the smoke-stained ceiling, when Joel started showing up. Late in the Ford administration.

Ron used to be good. He used to scan the room, register whatever new face had innocently manifested itself in Zippers—not uncommonly someone Joel had already fixed on—then just lean back against the wall, expressionless, and suck on his beer. A minute or two later he would be standing next to the guy, already in earnest conversation. Joel never actually saw him cross the room, it was as if he beamed himself over. Sometimes, just before he steered the fresh meat out the front door, he would catch Joel’s eye and shrug. As if to say: it’s tiresome, but somebody had to rope in the little maverick.

Joel wasn’t even jealous, more nearly awestruck. What did Ron say to them? What had he said to Joel, Joel’s first or second time there, when he swooped down and led Joel off for an encounter of which Joel could recall not the slightest detail? Joel could remember all of his good tricks and most of his truly horrible ones, so Ron must have been in that instantly forgettable midrange: both finished somehow, shooting stars were not witnessed, the one who wasn’t home went home at three in the morning.

When they had started running into each other at the Hill Club a year or two later, they had, of course, not alluded to their prior encounter. Two men who had been naked together and had done … whatever they had done, and in all this time neither had ever mentioned it. Because it wasn’t a big thing,
not back in those years; whatever they had done had been about as weighty as shaking hands.

Joel was glad he couldn’t remember what they’d done, but he did wish he could remember what Ron had said, what incantation he had uttered that let him carry Joel off, carry off all the boys so effortlessly it was if he were just entitled, exercised a sort of
droit de seigneur
with every newcomer.

Probably it didn’t work any more. Twenty years ago he was nondescript but in possession of some magic words. Now he was a ruin, no longer a troller but a simple troll. He still talked about going out, but Joel couldn’t remember the last time he had bragged about scoring.

Oh, Joel was jealous, after all. The ugliest part of him thought: Ron shouldn’t still be here, not after a million tricks. He should have paid a price for having been endowed with those magic words.

Ron materialized next to Joel; once again Joel hadn’t seen him cross the room. “Why, look what blew in!” Ron said. “You cruising or just drinking?”

“I don’t know. How about you?”

“You don’t know? You ought to at least know which it is you’re doing.” He thought about that a second. “Yes, I think you ought to at least know if you’re cruising or drinking.” Ron chuckled. “Not to say that you can’t start out doing one and wind up doing the other.”

“Yeah, I think I’m just at that segue,” Joel said.

“So you
were
cruising. I thought you and the hubby didn’t …”

“Um …” Joel was distracted by the annoying “hubby”; for a moment he couldn’t think what to say. But there was nothing to say. Here he was, Sam was his ex, everyone was going to know sooner or later. “We kind of changed the rules.”

“I wish I’d been a fly on the wall at that discussion.”

“We didn’t, uh, have a discussion. It was more a fait accompli.”

“Ah. And which of you accomplied the fait?”

“Which do you think?”

Ron closed his eyes, just for an instant, before pronouncing: “Sam.”

“How did you know?”

“Because, if it was you, you would have said so.”

“I guess.”

“And because I’ve seen him around.”

“You have? Jesus. You never said anything.”

Ron shrugged. Of course he hadn’t. What was he supposed to say? Hey, Joel, guess where I saw your hubby?

“So how’s the new arrangement working?”

“It’s—” Joel swallowed. “It’s not a new arrangement. He’s gone.”

“He’s … Sam left you?”

“For some kid.”

“Uh-huh.” Ron looked away. “Name of Kevin?”

Joel felt himself blushing. Sam hadn’t even been hiding it, probably the whole city had been laughing at Joel for months.

Ron must have understood; he shook his head. “I just bumped into them this one time, over at Gentry. Sam said it was a kid from his office, someone he was training, and they were going to have dinner. I didn’t think anything about it.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t tell anybody.”

“Might as well now,” Joel said. “What’s he like?”

“Kevin? I don’t know. Young.”

“Cute?”

“Oh, sort of.” From which Joel understood that Kevin was a knock-out. He sighed. Ron said,. “Nothing that special.”

“Sam must think so.”

“Maybe. Maybe he was just ready.”

For the first thing that came along, Ron meant. Joel preferred to think that Kevin was a knock-out. That Sam couldn’t have left him for anything less than a knock-out.

“Can I get you another drink?” Joel said.

“I better slow down. You better slow down.”

“What for?”

“What for? My dear, you are back on the rack.” No note of triumph, not even a suppressed one, nor of sympathy. Just matter of fact: Joel was back on the rack. People left the rack, people returned to the rack; it didn’t matter if they were gone fifteen hours or fifteen years.

“I think I’ll get back on the rack some other night.”

“Why? Sam’s getting his.”

“I don’t … I don’t know if I even want mine.”

“You don’t?”

“I mean, it’s not like I’m horny, especially. I’m just here because …”

“You’re just here because Sam is getting his.”

“I guess. Which is stupid. I should just toddle home.”

“Hey, might as well find your own little belly-warmer.”

What an ugly phrase. But what else was Joel looking for? Surely he wasn’t here screening candidates for the next fifteen-year hitch. Just some trick, as in the old days, just take someone home and— What was the despair that gripped Joel as he conjured this … warming scene? That it probably wasn’t going to happen, not tonight? Or that, if it did, he would be back here tomorrow night, smiling and sucking in his gut?