Man About Town: A Novel (2 page)

Impossible, there was nothing erotic about it at all. Joel didn’t go for straight men. Well, as a practical matter, he didn’t
go
for anyone; he and Sam had been monogamous for years and years. But he never even fantasized about straight men. Funny, when they were all he thought about as a kid. All those years before he came out, dreaming of something one-way with a fraternity jock or maybe a sailor. Trade, they used to call it. He hadn’t heard that expression in years: I did him for trade.

Joel was quite sure he didn’t want to
do
the junior senator from Montana. Whatever species of self-abasement those desires had involved, he had gotten over them. But if he didn’t want sex with Harris, he wanted something. Something ancient
and irrecoverable, something he’d wanted before he’d even known what sex was.

Joel looked up to find that Senator Altman’s LA, a chubby and somnolent guy whose invariable blazer never quite covered his butt, was passing out a whole sheaf of new amendments. He handed a set to Joel, beaming as if it were a birthday present he had made himself. Which he had, sort of: that was pretty much what staffers did, labored all year so their members would have a few amendments. For a senator to come to a mark-up with no amendments at all would have been like showing up at a covered dish party without any potato salad.

Altman had brought plenty to the party, pages numbered Altman Amendment #1 through Altman Amendment #14. Even the chairman—who was either unflappable or brain-dead, it was hard to tell—looked a little dismayed as he riffled through the pages. “Are we going to need much time on these?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t think,” Altman said. “We’ve cleared most of them. Maybe we need to talk a little about number five. Oh, and number seven.” Everyone flipped dutifully to Altman Amendment #5—sharing, perhaps, Joel’s foreboding at the grim words “We need to talk a little.”

Joel closed his eyes again. Something ancient, the thrill he’d felt while talking to Harris, that might not have been sexual, exactly, but was somewhere in the neighborhood. Joel expounding, the cute guy listening intently, Joel out of breath …

Alex.

In high school. They were in an empty classroom, side by side at two desks beneath the open windows. Joel was explaining the math problem. An October afternoon, classes over; outside some guys were playing touch football. Joel glanced at them, but Alex didn’t, just looked steadily at Joel as they went over
t = 1/m
ⁿ
. Joel’s diaphragm tightened. Alex was looking straight
at him—Alex, the golden lacrosse player, who, thirty years on, still sometimes made a cameo appearance in Joel’s dreams.

Funny, he never dreamt of Sam.

Joel could not meet Alex’s eyes, but Alex was
looking at Joel.
And Joel was tingling with excitement at the very fact that he had entered Alex’s consciousness. Alex was listening to him. Alex was sitting next to him, so close that their thighs almost touched. Alex’s thighs, slender and sturdy in the corduroy jeans the cool guys wore that year. Joel’s thighs, in the shapeless flannel trousers his mother had bought at Robert Hall. Almost touching.

They didn’t need to touch. Joel was sure of it, thinking back. He hadn’t wanted to touch Alex. Not even touch, much less … no more than he wanted to kneel in front of Senator Harris. But he had all but exploded with happiness that afternoon in the classroom.

Now he was grown up and had other kinds of explosions; Sam knew where the detonator was and could hit it with gratifying precision. Gratifying, maybe a little monotonous. That was what grown-ups got, and it was plenty. Still, it was nothing like—this wasn’t a matter of degree, but of kind—grown-up pleasures were nothing like the exhilaration, the almost harrowing joy of just
being there,
with Alex, being there in Alex’s field of vision.

How much he had wanted to be seen in those years. Just seen, by Alex and his friends. As though, if they would only look at him, he would be alive, as they were.

Alive, those boys—what did their lives consist of? Going to practice, going out drinking Friday night after the game, making out on double dates, all the rest. Just what was natural to them. Yet their existence, the fact of them, was always on Joel’s mind. Every moment in high school was colored by his continuous awareness of their lives, their instinctual being. The way they could do whatever they wanted to do and feel that it was right. Boys would be boys; whatever they did was,
tautologically, what boys did. And they saw one another. They sat together in the lunch room, they joked together in the locker room, they shared cigarettes out on the parking lot, where you could smoke if you weren’t failing anything. Which Alex was—that was why he and Joel were there together in that empty classroom.

They saw one another, when they wouldn’t have seen Joel if he had shown up at assembly wearing a red suit with braided black frogs. But Alex was there with him. Maybe a little impressed that Joel could figure out what
n
was.

He wondered if he hadn’t spent his whole life trying to impress jocks who couldn’t pass high school algebra. All the years he had spent becoming, for Christ’s sake, the world’s authority on Medicare hospital reimbursement. So that he could for an instant enter the field of vision of pathetic Joe Harris.

Alex. Joel sat in the hearing room and almost spoke the name out loud.

“This changes Medicare for aliens,” Altaian said. Mumbled, rather, as if he were a little ashamed of himself. He went on: “Right now, a non-citizen can get Medicare if they’re sixty-five and they’ve been here five years. This would eliminate that.”

The chairman woke up. “We give Medicare to illegal aliens?”

“No, they’re legally here. But they aren’t citizens.”

“What do you know,” the chairman said.

“We let them get Medicare even though they may never have paid taxes.”

“No kidding.” The chairman turned to his chief of staff, frowning. Why had he never been told about this outrage, larcenous foreigners pouring off the ships just to get Medicare? Why wasn’t
he
fixing it, instead of the junior member from the other party? The chief of staff avoided his gaze and turned to stare coldly at Altman.

“So this would put an end to that,” Altman said.

Joel chuckled. Yes, indeed: some eighty-year-old immigrant would get her goddamn fingers out of the public purse. This had to take the prize for the stupidest and most malignant proposal, in a year when Congress had displayed an unprecedented degree of insouciance toward widows and orphans. And from Gerald Altman, no less, a Democrat who was for some reason regarded as a liberal. Maybe because he looked like a liberal—the UNICEF tie, the hair a hemisphere of tight silver curls—or maybe because everyone just assumed that a Jewish senator from a rustbelt state had to be a liberal.

Joel chuckled, partly because he couldn’t stand up and scream, but also because his revulsion was not unmixed with a sort of simple, sporting pleasure. Was this corrupt, his almost aesthetic delight in the sheer sordidness of the spectacle? Was he altogether too inside-the-beltway, smirking as nineteen unprincipled men got ready to ambush some widow in a babushka who probably lived on cat food?

Because they would, surely, pass Altman Amendment #7. It was too beautiful to fail. Medicare on its way to bankruptcy, a bunch of parasites getting something for nothing. Usually you couldn’t do anything to old people: swarms of Gray Panthers would show up armed with pitchforks and shuffle-board cues. But Senator Altman had found—eureka!—
old people who didn’t vote.
Even the chairman was shaking his
head in frank admiration. Eighteen to one, easy, or eighteen to zero if Flanagan didn’t stagger back from his hideaway in time to thunder what might be the only nay.

Joel found himself thinking once more about high school. Maybe because sitting in a closed hearing while Senator Altman demonstrated that he could name every goddamn subcategory of Persons Resident under Color of Law was not at all unlike being trapped in a classroom on a spring day.

He didn’t just think about high school: he dove quite deliberately into the fantasy he sometimes had—who doesn’t?—of going back and doing it right this time. Waking up one morning fourteen again and able to do it right. What would right have consisted of? Studying harder so he could have gone to Harvard instead of the ivy-deprived backup school he’d had to settle for? Coming out at about the same time as his first pubic hair, and then blowing every boy on the lacrosse team?

Usually these counterfactuals were good for a few minutes’ entertainment as he waited for the Metro or stood in line alone at some movie Sam didn’t want to see. Tonight he couldn’t get into the game, for some reason. Even his favorite scene—the one where Alex put aside the algebra book and whispered that he had something momentous to reveal about himself, something Joel must never repeat to anyone—even conjuring that impossible instant left Joel feeling empty, empty and a little sour.

Pathetic, a forty-five-year-old man sitting in a closed hearing where weighty things were being decided, picking at scabs left over from high school. But maybe it was pathetic only if he called that part of his life “high school,” those years of drama, ambition, burgeoning desire mockingly reduced to a situation comedy of phys ed, 45-records, and pimples. Those long years: whole lives, selves, tried on and abandoned in a single semester. Crushes—Alex only the most memorable in a continuous series, boys whose names he couldn’t remember but whose
faces, bodies were still quite vivid to him, those young bodies alive now only in Joel’s memories. Oh, and vocations—lawyer, architect, actor, concert pianist.

Such plans: when he was older he would have a penthouse in New York and go out every night in black tie, like some guy in a magazine. Or, more domestically: smoke a pipe, wear tweeds, live in a house by Mies van der Rohe. Have strapping sons who played lacrosse and—this part of the picture, tellingly, always a little vague—a wife, wisecracking, petite, adoring. They would go to plays and fine dinners, they would go to Europe. They would somehow produce those sons.

Should it perhaps have been a clue for him, even at fourteen, that while other boys were keenly interested in the mechanics of production, wanted to
do it
—he just wanted
to have done it?
And, having done it, to lie with that terribly indistinct woman in their Mies bedroom, hold her and fall into sleep without thinking, not once, of Alex or Simon or …

So much that hadn’t happened. Thank God: if he even tried to step into the dreams he had once dreamt so hard, he found them immeasurably tedious. A concert pianist—terrific. Whole days of practicing three measures over and over so he could stand in white tie and hear the ovation: “Good boy, haven’t you practiced hard!” A Mies house, with the winter cold coming through all those windows and probably—art being one thing and shelter another—leaks in a million places. Mrs. Lingeman going through menopause by now, and those sons—those sons, what had he been thinking of?

He snorted; all too clear what he had been thinking of. A couple of captive boys, eternally sixteen, throwing the lacrosse ball back and forth on the lawn outside the plate-glass window. Even as a kid, years before he had uttered the word “gay” to himself, about himself, when he had tried to summon up a heterosexual future, he had peopled the conjugal dwelling with two hunks and, consigned to the shadows, the merely requisite Mrs. Lingeman.

He was gay, he couldn’t ever have been anything else. That kid who had had other plans, he was just a laughable little chump. Whose very dreams were a tissue of self-deception and evasion. Except: how could someone lie to himself in his dreams?

Once you made up your mind, once you called yourself by name, then you had to whip the past into line. No unruly memories. But that little chump wanted what he wanted. And he was still crying for it. Sitting in a hearing room and looking at some moronic senator and crying out for it, whatever irrecoverable something he had wanted and never got.

A buzzer sounded, and a little light went on beneath the hearing-room clock. This was some kind of signal—one light for a quorum call, two for a vote, or vice versa. Joel had seen a card once with the code on it, but he could never remember. Though he did seem to recall that twelve buzzers was a nuclear attack. Whatever one buzzer meant, senators were standing up, wearily, like kids shuffling from history to algebra. Some were already heading toward the elevators and the new multimillion-dollar subway that would hurtle them the 400 yards from the Dirksen Building to the Senate side of the Capitol. The chairman was talking on the phone behind his chair. Joel was in suspense. The chairman could announce that they’d all come back and resume after the vote, or he could—

The chairman put the phone down, turned to the room, sighed. “I gather there are five or six votes. And people will probably want some dinner. So if there’s no objection I think we’ll recess until …” Joel’s heart sank; he was going to say ten p.m. or something. “Until the call of the chair.”

It was happy hour.

In the corridor the lobbyists cornered various staffers, trying to find out what had been going on. What had the committee
done about home health payments? Had they gotten to Flanagan’s amendment on teaching hospitals? One guy headed toward Joel, mouth already forming a question. Joel didn’t recognize him; he must have been new, just homing in on anybody with an ID badge. Before he could speak, Joel put a hand up to stop him. “I’m from OLA,” Joel said. Meaning that he wasn’t allowed to talk about what he’d heard; a vow of silence was the price OLA people paid for the privilege of sitting in on exciting sessions like the one he’d just escaped.

Joel felt important: I know what happened to hospital payments in Montana and you don’t. But the lobbyist said, “What’s OLA?” and turned to pursue someone more helpful. Joel waved at a few people, veterans who had waited in this corridor year after year—the guy from the psychiatric hospitals, a couple of people from HMOs. They waved back but didn’t interrupt their conversations with some of the more garrulous and indiscreet staffers.