Man About Town: A Novel (16 page)

“We better get going,” Sam said.

Kevin nodded. “It was nice meeting you, Joel. I hope we can get together again.” Quite a protracted utterance; perhaps he had composed it while Joel and Sam were in the bedroom. He held out his hand; this time Joel grasped it and found that it was damp. Warm and sticky as a child’s hand.

He went to the foyer, leaving Sam and Joel facing each other in the living room. Neither knew what to do. Shake hands? Hug? Sam must have been discovering the same thing Joel was. They were indissoluble, and at the same time there was nothing between them, nothing left at all.

Kevin was still in the foyer, stamping his foot a little, like a dog who needs to be let out. Sam went to him, they escaped together.

“A roommate!” Charles was incredulous. Of course, Charles had a whole townhouse to himself on the best street in Capitol Hill; he had one entire room that contained only a colonial highboy that was worth about as much as Joel’s life savings. All this money came from a string of car dealerships in suburban Virginia. The handful of Hill Club regulars who had actually grown up around Washington had spent their childhoods watching Charles’s father on TV, dressed as a clown and screaming about deals! deals! deals! That everyone knew where his money came from did nothing to diminish Charles’s hauteur. “How could you
possibly …
?”

“I was just thinking about it.” Joel had been thinking about
it since Sam and Kevin’s visit. The first time in weeks there had been another soul in the apartment. He hadn’t felt very lonesome until their visit; once they’d gone he’d felt the emptiness for the rest of the day.

He was poring through the Housing Wanted columns of the gay paper as Charles looked on. “You know, I’ve got this extra bedroom.” What he and Sam had sometimes called the exercise room, because the two of them for a few months had religiously pretended to go cross-country skiing on a piece of equipment that had stood in the room as a quiet reproach ever since. “They all seem to be students.”

“What did you think?” Charles said. “People our age aren’t putting ads in the paper looking for a room.”

“I guess not.” Unless maybe they were refugees like Sam. “A student wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Are you kidding? Living in the next room, playing hippity-hop in the middle of the night?”

Even Joel knew it wasn’t called hippity-hop. Past that, he really had no idea what kids were listening to; the first time he learned the names of current idols was when they killed themselves. Sam knew. Sam could distinguish hip-hop from gangstah from house. And he knew all about the Web and stuff, and what people watched on TV, and who those one-named celebs in the tabloids were—everything Joel didn’t keep up with. He must have felt sometimes, coming home to Joel, as if he were entering one of those period rooms in a museum, with the rope across the doorway. Was that the price he couldn’t pay any more, living a life that amounted to a perpetual reminder that they weren’t twenty-three any more? Did he think he could become twenty-three again if he were only freed of the bourgeois accretions—the club chairs from Crate and Barrel, the Mission-like dining room set—that had pinned him to the earth?

Any of the kids in the Housing Wanted section would have been happy enough to come to earth in Joel’s apartment, with
one-and-a-half baths and a washer/dryer and a roof deck Joel never visited and only sporadic guest appearances of vermin. He could probably pick any one of them, call, and have a roommate tomorrow. A live-in Kevin, but wearing a Don’t Touch sign.

“It might not be so bad,” Joel said.

“As if any of these children could afford half your rent.”

“Well, maybe they wouldn’t have to pay half.”

“Ah.” Charles snorted. “Don’t worry about the rent this month, dearie. Just step on back into Uncle Joel’s bedroom.”

Pointless to explain that he was thinking about something entirely different, a chaste, almost paternal relationship with some kid. Some youth he could gently guide and who would in turn make him young again. Make him young the first time.

Through some impecunious guy with an entry-level job he would live that first youth he had squandered in those years when he was afraid of himself. The roommate wouldn’t be afraid of himself: he would be okay about everything, the way kids were now. Okay with being gay, hopeful about his place in the burgeoning global economy, going to the gym uncomplainingly, thinking of a latte as a stimulating beverage, now and then spiriting some mate into the second bedroom. And in the morning seeking Joel’s counsel: about where to put his 401(k), about which health plan he should choose, about whether it was a good idea to keep seeing somebody who wanted to be tied up.

“If I had your house, I’d fill it with a whole fraternity,” Joel said. “Lambda Lambda Lambda.”

“Can you imagine! Flinging beer cans at the highboy. Throwing up on the Kir man.” Charles snatched the paper away. “Let’s give up on the Lingeman Memorial Shelter for Wayward Youth and find you some true love.” He turned to the Men4Men section. “We’ve got, let’s see, Glimpses, Relationships, Dates, Friends, Situations, Masseurs, and Escorts.”

Joel knew what they had. Glimpses, of course, were those
optimistic, almost delusional misreadings of some momentary flicker of interest from a stranger:
Foggy Bottom Metro, 6/14. You: baseball cap. Me: black T-shirt. You looked my way. Java?
Relationships were people who wanted a long-term deal and didn’t say what they did in bed, except sometimes that they liked to cuddle. Dates were people who didn’t want an LTR and said exactly what they did in bed. Friends were people who voiced no romantic or sexual inclinations but merely wanted someone to join them in a healthful activity, like bicycling; oddly, they tended to specify what this companion should look like. Situations were extremely successful and youthful-looking professional people who could offer an appropriate young person opportunities for foreign travel and other broadening experiences. Masseurs, of course, used their hands, while Escorts used other parts.

All of this used to be a joke. Something Joel might page through as he sat in the living room waiting for Sam to pick what sweater to wear. Discovering in the packed columns a whole metropolis of yearning of which he was luckily not a citizen. No, never entirely a joke. Even in the days when he was certain that he and Sam would be parted by death, not some accursed Kevin, he couldn’t help imagining how he might fare if he were hurled back into that world.

He would fold up the paper so Sam wouldn’t know what section he’d been reading—as if there were anything else to read in the gay paper, with its riveting accounts of activists’ meetings with city councilpersons and the latest Toys-for-Tots drive by fat guys wearing leather hoods. He just didn’t want Sam to think he was shopping. He would set the paper on top of the recyclable stack, or sometimes bury it beneath a day or two of the
Times.
But he would know it was there, the chronicle of a whole world that was humming along in perfect oblivion of Sam’s and Joel’s oh-so-fortunate pairing.

A scary world; he must always have wanted to know how he might fare out there. Like any armchair traveler, wondering
if he could survive in the Arctic. Grateful to be in his warm apartment but knowing he had never truly been tested, never had a chance to find out if he had the right stuff.

“So you want a Date or a Relationship?” Charles said.

“I don’t know. How about a Date?”

“Hmm.” Charles ran his finger down the column. “Hmm. Maybe we should go straight to Masseurs.”

“Nothing?”

“Not unless you can pass for thirty-five. It’s amazing, every blessed one of these queens says that’s the absolute cut-off. I personally have had some entirely satisfactory dates with more mature gentlemen.”

“How about Relationships?”

“They do appear to be somewhat more accessible. Do you enjoy going to sporting events and working out?”

“No.”

“Do you want someone discreet?”

“You mean closeted?”

“How about ‘tired of bar scene?’ There’s lots of those.”

“I bet.” Joel was certainly tired of bar scene. Who wasn’t, except the indefatigable Ron? But there was something off-putting about a guy who said it in an ad. Tired of human condition.

“Here’s someone witty. Witty is good.”

“Absolutely nobody who says he’s witty”

“Well, you are one extremely picky faggot. I wash my hands of you.” He folded the paper and gestured to the bartender for another negroni.

Joel took the paper back and flipped idly to Situations. “Here we go.” He read aloud. “Enterprising young man seeks mentor.”

“Right,” Charles said. “Lazy, grasping little brat seeks sucker to pay for his college tuition in return for four years of continually postponed access to his charms.”

“Probably,” Joel said.

Alex, turning to him for help with the algebra problem.
Except a little gay Alex this time, so that there would be at least a chance that their growing closeness would culminate in the day the kid turned, looked at Joel, realized he was in love. Why did Joel resist acknowledging this, why should he have insisted to himself that it wasn’t about sex? When what he was picturing, undeniably, was some shapely youth in a towel, padding from the bathroom to the second bedroom, one night turning to Joel’s bedroom instead.

All right, of course he was picturing that. Why should a lonesome man with an extra room not have peopled it, in his mind, with some hot little roommate? He wasn’t denying that, he just felt that he wanted two different things. To be with the boy, brother father friend, and also to lay him. Two different things that were hard to sort out now, after so many years of living out the possible, performing the acts that are possible for two bodies in a world of matter. So much easier to suppose that there had only ever been the one thing, that helping Alex with the algebra problem was just a pathetic substitute for giving him a blow job. But he was sure of it: he had wanted, still wanted, two different things—neither anterior to the other, not one chaste and one sullied. Just one possible and one not.

Richard had said, when they set up the date, “I’ll be wearing a navy polo shirt.” So Joel already had the premonition, as he walked into the Trattoria Basilico, that Richard would be, if not queeny, a little too precise. The kind of guy who knew what color he’d be wearing two days ahead. The kind who said “navy” instead of just “blue.”

Anyway, there he was at the bar, his back to the door. The bar faced the wood-fired pizza oven. Which was better than if it faced a mirror: Joel could approach him without his knowing, or fail to approach him and get the hell out of there. Joel didn’t know how he would bear the flicker of disappointment that was sure to cross Richard’s face when he slid onto the adjacent stool. Joel hadn’t misrepresented himself; nor, from what
he could see, had Richard. But each of them must have had some frail hope that the other was being too modest.

Richard greeted Joel, when he sat down at last, with a big smile, a warm handshake, a rush of friendly words: Joel looked just the way he’d described himself, Richard knew the navy polo thing was corny but he was so nondescript he had to pick something Joel could identify him by. If he’d known it was so hot, sitting practically inside the pizza oven, he would have worn a tank top. From what Joel could make out, this would have been unwise. Still, Joel was taken with him, started babbling right back. The bartender had to get Joel’s attention, an almost unprecedented reversal.

In the moment it took Joel to order—several moments, Joel was torn between a scotch and some citrus drink like the one Richard had before him—in the moment before Joel turned to look at him again everything cooled down. Just a little. Richard was nice-looking: that was the exact phrase, he looked nice.

“Should we get a table?” Joel said.

“Sure. Let me take care of these.”

“Thanks.”

While Richard paid, Joel looked at the guy who made pizzas. A young Latino with a baseball cap, strewing the toppings on a disk of dough and sliding it into the oven with his paddle almost in one continuous movement, already glancing at the next order slip. Moving very fast, yet with a calm and gravity that made Joel think of somewhere far away, El Salvador maybe, wherever the boy or his people had come from. Joel felt colorless. They were all colorless, Joel, Richard, everybody eating. They might all have been a haze to this dark, graceful boy, a blur of white faces that streamed by while he worked, so quietly. He took off his cap for a second and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a slender brown arm.

Richard must have been watching Joel for a second, watching Joel watch the pizza guy. “All set,” he said. Joel followed him
to the headwaiter’s station. Joel couldn’t help noticing that Richard’s khaki-swathed butt was … rather broad.

Richard ordered a pizza. Joel for some reason didn’t want to be an order slip for the kid to glance at, so he got some kind of pasta with about thirty ingredients. Then, while they waited, they exchanged data. Richard was a librarian in the DC public system. This seemed—Joel didn’t say it—very sad. The one time he’d been to the main library he had counted more bums than books. To be a librarian there must have been like being a lifeguard in the Gobi desert. Joel explained his own job, they established that Richard was from Ohio and had gone to Bucknell and then University of Maryland library school and … here he was.

Joel found himself, uncomfortably, able to see Richard’s entire life, every step on the way to here-he-was. The closeted years at Bucknell, coming out in DC, partying in the seventies, shivering through the eighties and then finding himself, inexplicably, still alive, still here. Across from another middle-aged guy who was also here; however differently they had lived, they were both here.

So this was a date! Not a Date, Richard was from the Relationships column, but this was how a date worked. Joel had never been on a date. People used to ask how he and Sam had met, and Joel would say, rather proudly, “At the baths.” Proudly because, while it sounded so unromantic, meeting at the baths, it was really the most romantic possible start. Something out of a fairy tale, that two people could bump into each other in the half-light and then make a life together.