Man About Town: A Novel (12 page)

Joel called out to the bartender: “Scott!”

“Oh, you’ve met Scott. He’s pretty cute.”

“No kidding.”

“There you go. Take Scott home.”

“Right.”

Scott refilled Joel’s glass, took his money from the little stack of bills that Joel had meant for a tip. Maybe Joel would replenish it, even though Scott had forgotten to smile this time.

“Scott’s a little out of my league.”

“You don’t know your league till you try out.”

“I’m not sure I remember how,” Joel said. “You know, I was never very good at this.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Joel was stung, the way you are stung when you feign humility and are told that your estimate of yourself is right on the number.

Ron went on: “I used to watch you sometimes. You’d stare at the same guy for about five hours, you’d work up some line to say to him. Do you know, your lips would move while you rehearsed?”

It was all true, he had been such a jerk in those days. How awful that anyone remembered. It was like running into someone from high school who remembers you only as the guy with pimples. Ron must have recalled it every time they met at the Hill Club. Here comes Joel the jerk.

“It was kind of funny,” Ron said. “Especially when you were so hot. Do you know that?”

“Was I? I never thought so.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“If only I’d known.” If only he had. Then maybe he would have had a thousand tricks, instead of a couple of hundred. In which case he’d probably be dead. Or alive and with a thousand tricks behind him.

Ron said, “The guys who are really hot are the ones who don’t know they are.” He looked around the room, possibly trying to spot one who didn’t know. He spotted something, at any rate. He was gone, as abruptly as he’d arrived at Joel’s side. This wasn’t rude: if two hawks are flying side by side and one sees a rabbit far below, he doesn’t pause to bid the other adieu. He swoops.

Joel craned his neck to see if he could spot Ron’s prey But Ron was already deep in the crowd somewhere, Joel couldn’t find him.

Sunday night—his fifth straight night of striking out at Zippers—Joel stopped on the way home for carryout. A super combo platter from El Toro, with (1 ea.) burrito, enchilada,
taco. Also rice, refried beans, chips, salsa (add guacamole and sour cream 50
ea.). As he walked home he held the foam carton straight out before him, keeping it level so everything wouldn’t smoosh together. He felt silly and conspicuous. Passersby must have been thinking: look how that funny old guy holds his carryout, like Jeeves bringing in high tea. Look at that tacky old jacket he’s wearing. And where did he get those shoes, Thorn McAn?

Dupont Circle wasn’t a true ghetto—it wasn’t the Castro, or West Hollywood. For every guy carrying a gym bag or walking a small, skittish dog, there was a guy pushing a stroller. Or a young woman like Melanie, going home with her carryout on yet another dateless night and mourning that there seemed to be only two kinds of guys in Washington, the ones with gym bags and the ones pushing strollers.

Still, Joel did, on his little journey with the combo platter, pass many many many gay men. Of course, this had always been so; it was what made Dupont feel like home, a little village whose townspeople happened to have shaved heads and tattoos. But he had never really felt that he was one of them. He had been the star of his own life, and all the other gay men he passed on the street had been mere supernumeraries, faceless choristers in the opera of Joel and Sam.

Now they were fiercely particular. Men just heading out to the bars, others hurrying home to their lovers. Others shuffling along, having just struck out at one bar and debating whether they should try someplace else or just … Now that Joel had been demoted to the chorus, he could see that every one of them had a face. He looked at them, they looked back.

They looked away.

“Georgetown Sports Medicine,” the receptionist said.

“This is Joel, is Sam around?” He had said those very words a million times. At first stammering, feeling that he was saying, “This is Sam’s homosexual lover.” After a while realizing that
she had no opinion, that he was just a call to be put through. Or, even if she had an opinion, she still had to put the call through. This small epiphany had been something of a milestone on Joel’s long reluctant crawl out of the closet.

Today she had an opinion: she drew in her breath sharply before saying, “Uh, I—let me see.”

If even she thought it was a bad idea for Joel to call, maybe it was a bad idea. It hadn’t occurred to Joel that Sam would have told everybody in his office what had happened. Of course, he had to: his home number had changed, they had to know where to reach him. Still, he could have just said, “Here’s my new home number,” he didn’t have to explain. But he must have: one by one or collectively they must all have heard, in the couple of weeks since the break-up, that Sam had left Joel and embarked on a new life. How had he put it, Joel wondered. Had he been mournful or jubilant, had he catalogued Joel’s deficiencies or just said softly that things weren’t working out? It was eerie, knowing that you were a character in a story being told to strangers.

All strangers. Joel had never once been to Sam’s office, or met any of the people Sam worked with. His only experience of Georgetown Sports Medicine was the practiced greeting of the receptionist. Sam had told stories, about some doctor’s divorce or the funny thing that had happened to the nurse’s son-in-law. But Joel couldn’t really picture any of these people. He couldn’t even keep their names straight, any more than Sam could follow Joel’s stories from work. Though Joel’s stories were studded with bigger names, they were still just work gossip. A lover was obliged to listen politely, but couldn’t be expected to recall, from one time to the next, the difference between Congressman Miller and Senator Muller.

Georgetown Sports Medicine: Joel couldn’t help conjuring a white-tiled locker room, radiant young athletes frowning stoically as the healers kneaded their wracked bodies. And perhaps Sam’s daily schedule of middle-aged lawyers with
tennis elbows and jogger’s knees was indeed punctuated by the occasional golden youth. The lacrosse player would strip down to his briefs, Sam would give him his physical therapy—whatever the hell that consisted of; in fifteen years Joel had never quite pictured what exactly Sam did. Then Sam would come home and find … Joel. Maybe it was a wonder he hadn’t drifted off years before.

“Joel,” Sam said flatly when he came on the line.

“Hi. How are you doing?”

“Okay.” There was a pause, during which Sam did not say, “And you?” He was just waiting for Joel to state his business. All right, maybe he was with a patient. But it wasn’t as if he’d been in the middle of brain surgery.

Joel said, “You know, it’s the third of the month.”

“So?”

“The rent is due.”

“The—? Oh.” There was a pause, during which Joel actually imagined that Sam was debating whether to mail his half or bring it by in person. “Joel, I can’t keep paying for half of an apartment I don’t even live in. I mean—you know, I can’t keep staying with Kevin, so I’m going to have to get a place of my own, and …”

Curiosity momentarily outweighed indignation: “Why can’t you stay with Kevin?”

“Are you kidding? He has one little room in a slum off Logan Circle with about thirty-seven roommates.”

Well, of course he did: if you chose to start over with a twenty-three-year-old, that’s what you got. “How is that my problem?”

“How is your rent my problem?”

“You’re on the lease. A lot of your stuff is still there.”

“I’ll be getting it out. Look, you know you can afford that apartment.”

“That’s not the point.” Even as he said this, Joel wondered what the point was. He could afford the apartment; with twelve years’ tenure under rent control, they were getting two
bedrooms at the going rate for a walk-in closet. So it wasn’t the money Joel wanted. He wanted the check, the physical object, like a little affidavit declaring that some connection was still there. A postcard from Sam’s new world: Having wonderful time. Coming home soon.

Sam said, helpfully, “Maybe you need to get a roommate.”

A roommate! The only worse thing Joel could imagine would be having to go through eighth grade again. A perfect stranger, haunting the living room, using the shower. Cooking in Joel’s kitchen.

“I guess you’re mad,” Sam said.

Joel considered this. Of course he was furious. But he had somehow lost the right to be furious. It used to be, if one or the other of them got mad, then it had to be dealt with: nobody was going anywhere, it had to be worked out. Now, if Joel was mad, it wasn’t Sam’s problem, any more than if Joel had a rash. There it was: anger now would just be a condition Joel had, an itch Sam had no obligation to scratch. So he said, “No. No, I’m not mad.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m not, you know, mad about any of it. I want you to know that. I mean, if this thing doesn’t work out for you, I …” Joel stopped; he despised himself for having said so much. He had meant it, the door was always open, it had seemed important that Sam know. But just saying it, feeling so pathetic, like a dog that has been kicked by its master and raises a forepaw in submission—something in Joel rebelled. He had thought he would do anything to go back to the life that had been ruptured two weeks ago, yet some mutinous voice inside was protesting. He suppressed the voice, resumed: “If it doesn’t work out, you know—”

Sam cut him off. “Joel, I didn’t leave you for this kid.”

“Huh?”

“I left you. And there was this kid. I was going to leave you if there wasn’t this kid.”

“You keep calling him a kid.” Joel wasn’t changing the subject, or failing to get what Sam had said. Joel got it fine: it seemed as though he could feel the blood jetting through every inch of his skin, as if he were blushing with his whole body.

“He is a kid. I’m … we have a good time, but I’m not fooling myself. I know I’ll never have what I had with you.”

“You still have it. Any time.” Mouthing those words, but already scarcely able to conceive of what
it
could possibly consist of.

Sam said, “I can’t pay the price any more.”

Joel had to keep from laughing. Not just because Sam had thrown at him, with perfect gravity, a line that might have come from some fifties teleplay, but because he was actually living, here and now, in the scene from which that line had been stolen. He felt the strangest elation: drama, however hackneyed, had reentered his life, after so many years of contented oblivion.
Playhouse 90.
He said his line with a gravity to match Sam’s. “What price?”

“I can’t explain it. I can, I don’t want to. You’ll have to figure it out.” Then, on cue, Sam hung up. Without his customary valediction: “Talk to you.”

“Can you believe it?” Joel said. “The price!”

Francis, the ex-seminarian, intoned, “The price,” in his deepest basso, and chortled.

It was funny: two weeks earlier Joel had dreaded telling the gang at the Hill Club what had happened. Of course, Ron had saved him the trouble; by the next time he came in everybody knew. And, so quickly, it had just become a fact about him. Joel works at OLA, he lives up near Dupont, he used to have a lover but now he doesn’t. Already Joel was casually retailing stories about his ex, and enjoying it when Francis chortled with him.

“So I asked him, and he said, ‘You’ll have to figure it out.’ Like I’m supposed to embark on a course of healthy self-criticism.”

Francis opened his mouth, as if getting ready to recite a few of Joel’s deficiencies, just to give Joel a little head start. Then he frowned, as if the project of enumerating Joel’s faults were too daunting, and muttered, “Well, who knows what he meant.”

Well, who did know? What was Joel supposed to do now, stew about it until he could assess the awful price Sam had somehow been paying? As if only Sam had paid anything.

Sam had never heard himself sigh, one of those long sighs that could fill the whole living room on a Sunday morning, squeezing the sunlight out and forcing Joel to put down his bagel and contemplate the abyss. Sam had never, on more jovial Sundays, gone shopping with Sam, those interminable excursions that left Joel feeling he had committed some misdemeanor and been sentenced to thirty days in the mall. Sam had never waited for Sam to get dressed, or sat cringing while Sam sent food back in a diner, for Christ’s sake, or watched as Sam swirled wine from an eight-dollar bottle around his mouth and spat it back into the glass.

Everything Joel had loathed and had overlooked, gritting his teeth, just to keep it going. Love had never blinded him, he had never come to regard Sam’s flaws as endearing idiosyncrasies. On the contrary, the years had magnified them, until even Sam’s most innocuous habits loomed as felonies; a day with him could seem like a crime wave. Joel would have to tell himself, over and over, this is trivial, you mustn’t focus on this when we have it so good.

Until perhaps the main thing they had, that was so good, was their very persistence. Some nights, when they went to bed angry, Joel would lie awake next to Sam, seething, and then recollect that he was lying next to Sam. Next to someone, on this cold night, when at that very moment at Zippers guys were darting around frantically, looking for any kind of connection before last call. This thought had been almost enough, even if it occasionally occurred to Joel that there wasn’t, from this perspective, a great deal of difference between Sam and
an electric blanket. Except that an electric blanket didn’t pay half the rent.