Man About Town: A Novel (20 page)

“Undignified? You want it dignified?” Ron stuck his nose in the air. “Mr. Joel Lingeman requests the pleasure of your company sitting on his face.”

This rather loudly; Joel glanced around the room. “No, I mean … You must know what I mean. I—anywhere else I go, I’m a person. A solid, middle-class adult, with a decent job and money in my pocket. I go into a store and they’re happy to see me, I go to a meeting and people want to hear what I have to say. I walk into Zippers, and I feel like some homeless guy who hasn’t been taking his Thorazine and hasn’t had a bath since October.”

Ron sighed.

Joel added: “Or like the Ancient Mariner.”

“How do you think I feel?” Ron said. “What are you, forty-seven, forty-eight?”

“Forty-five.”

“Jeez, at your age I hadn’t even come out.”

“You hadn’t? I thought you came out in kindergarten.”

“I was married for twenty-one years.”

“Married?”

“Straight out of school. I didn’t come out till I was—what? Forty-six.”

“Really.” Joel did the math: they’d met, probably, seventeen or eighteen years ago. Ron had to be sixty-four at least. He looked pretty good for sixty-four. “Did your wife know, all those years?”

“Oh, I suppose. She must have, suspected. But she must have thought: we got this far, maybe it just wasn’t ever going to come up. Hell, I thought it wasn’t ever going to come up. Just the peeps, and then going home to Helen, and then the old folks’ home.” He shook his head. “God, was she mad when I told her. She threw stuff.”

“She threw stuff?”

“Like in a movie,” Ron said. “She started throwing crockery.”

“Why would she have been so mad if she suspected?”

“It was … like we had some kind of understanding, even though we never said a word about it. Or that was the understanding, that we wouldn’t say it.”

“Did you … I mean, did you know when you married her?”

“We got married in—what?—1956. The only gay man in the world was Liberace. I knew I was awfully fond of my roommate in law school. I knew I wasn’t Liberace. And … I loved Helen, I kind of still do. I thought I could just put the other thing aside.”

“But …” Joel said.

“But.”

Their food came. Ron had a burger and a stupendous bucket of onion rings. Joel had the fried shrimp special. He hadn’t realized shrimp were an endangered species; there were apparently only four left on the planet.

Joel said, “So you must have been just coming out when we met.”

“I was, I think.”

“You seemed a lot more experienced than me.”

“Did I?”

“Well, more at ease with it. I mean, the way you could just walk up to anybody.”

“I was in a hurry. I’d lost all those years, I couldn’t … wallow in my own insufficiencies.”

Joel said, “Like me, you mean.”

“Did I say that?”

“I always wondered what your secret was. Like, it wasn’t just that you could walk up to people. But it seemed like you scored every time. I was always amazed.”

“Ah.” Ron chuckled. “You want to hear my secret?”

“Sure.”

Ron looked around, then stage-whispered: “I didn’t score every time. Maybe you only noticed the times I scored.”

“Oh. Maybe.”

“I must have batted, I don’t know, two hundred back then. And now, jeez, I’m probably batting point oh-oh-five.”

“But you still go out.”

“I’m not dead. When I’m batting zero I’ll stop going out.”

Joel didn’t say anything, concentrated on cutting his very last shrimp into many little morsels. Ron said, “You think that’s pathetic.”

“I think it’s hard.”

“What else are you going to do? You’re just going to jerk off the rest of your life?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there’s always hustlers,” Ron said. “Or the peeps.”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, you’re too fine for the peeps? You remember being too fine for the peeps. You’re barely up to standard.”

Joel dropped his fork.

“I’m kidding,” Ron said. “No, I’m not. Look at you. You’re not taking care of yourself at all.”

“Somebody else said that.”

“You ought to listen. Go to the gym. Get some clothes. And God, where do you get your hair cut?”

“House barber shop. It’s a bargain.”

“I bet.” Ron shrugged. “I’m sorry. Look, it’s your business.”

“No, no, I’m sure you’re right,” Joel said. He wasn’t irritated, exactly, just tired. Suffering that deep weariness that can overcome you when you receive advice that you know is right, all but irrefutable, and that you know you aren’t going to take. Go to the gym, Jesus. Even the thought of finding a new barber made Joel tired.

Joel’s plate was empty. He said, “Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?”

“No, go right ahead. Unless you want some of these onion rings?”

“I guess I shouldn’t.”

“Oh, have some. Pull yourself together tomorrow.”

Joel had some and looked around. The place was almost empty. One gay couple and two straight families of identical demographics: youngish Mommy and Daddy, infant in high chair. One infant playing with a strand of spaghetti, the other screaming to be let down. Probably in a few minutes they would reverse these roles.

“You and your wife,” Joel said. “Did you have kids?”

“Uh-huh, two. All grown up now.”

“Do they know about you?”

“Oh, Helen made sure of it. ‘Your daddy’s leaving the house because he’s a fairy.’”

“Jeez.”

“Hell, she even called my mother. My mother must have been eighty, and Helen just calls her out of the blue and tells her that her Ronald is
funny.
”

“That was sweet.”

“Oh, she got hers. My mother just snapped right back that if Helen had been any kind of woman I’d still be there.”

“Good for her.”

“It wasn’t fair,” Ron said. “But yeah, good for her.”

“How did your kids handle it?”

“Learning I was gay? My daughter was okay about it, right from the start. Ron Junior …”

“You named your son Ron Junior?”

“What? Anyway, he doesn’t … we hardly ever see each other. I thought he could handle it. I mean, when it happened I tried, you know, to talk to him about it. He’d just kind of hear me out, politely, and when I asked him how he felt he just shrugged. Like it was no big deal.”

“But it was a big deal.”

“I don’t know. Whether it was that in particular or my breaking up the house or … I guess there can be a lot of reasons sons don’t talk to their fathers.”

This was certainly true. What amazed Joel were sons who did talk to their fathers. “I wonder sometimes, what it’s like,” Joel said. “Having kids.”

“Expensive. By the time I finished paying off Helen and putting them through school—well, I’ll be lucky if I retire before I’m ninety.”

“But worth it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like a deal you make. It just happens. You screw, you pay.”

“I never did.”

“You mean with a woman. Not once?”

“I tried a few times, I just couldn’t.”

Ron smiled. “You should have done what I did. Closed your eyes and thought about your roommate.”

“Is that really what you did?”

“No. Did you want to get dessert?”

“How about you?”

“Just coffee, probably. I need to get home and make myself beautiful.”

“You’re going out?”

“It’s like they say on the lottery ads,” Ron said. “You gotta play to win.”

Joel ascended from the Metro and made his way home through streets clogged with men who had made themselves beautiful
and were just on their way out to party.

He could go to the gym. He could get a new haircut, new wardrobe. Facelift, tummy tuck, liposuction. He had even read somewhere that guys were getting abdomen implants—some kind of plastic six-pack actually inserted under the skin, substituting for a million crunches. Easier to sneer at the manic and grotesque than face up to the simple fact: he could go to the gym.

Joel’s living room looked enormous when he walked in, big as an armory. It took him a second to register that there was only one club chair. Sam had come with no notice at all and taken away the Sam chair. He had a right to one of the chairs; they’d split the bill fifty-fifty. But he could have called; this way it was as though he had stolen it. As he had stolen everything else.

The May 1964
man about town
was on the coffee table where Joel had left it before heading out to the Hill Club. It was open; somebody had been looking at it. Probably not Sam; Sam would have put it back exactly as he’d found it. Kevin, then, along to help. Sam went to use the bathroom, Kevin picked up the magazine, leafed through it. He must have wondered why Sam’s ex had this old magazine from before he was even born. Kevin was of the generation that scarcely believed the world had existed before they were born.

Joel sat down in the remaining club chair, lit a cigarette, and started to read the magazine. He didn’t turn at once to the back, even though now he could look at the picture indefinitely without fear of discovery. He meant to read the magazine as carefully as he had when he was fourteen. Page by page, trying to put out of mind what was on the penultimate page. As if he could make it catch him by surprise again, that surprise from which he had never recovered.

The magazine was huge. Some time around 1970 they changed the postal regulations and it became prohibitively expensive to mail the giant magazines:
Esquire, Holiday, man
about town.
They all shrank to the size of
Time
or
Newsweek,
and something was lost. They had been like monthly presents, celebratory albums, with their dramatic graphics, their glossy photo spreads by Avedon or Penn. Their lavishness was really their entire content: it said money, sophistication, money, elegance, money.

On the cover, Sean Connery, in
Goldfinger
that year. The top of his head obscured part of the logo, so that it read
man ab t town™
. Always the same, for the forty years or so the magazine ran, always in a jaunty, mid-century lower case. As in
archy and mehitabel,
the epic typed by a cockroach who couldn’t manage the shift key. Or e. e. cummings, the lowercase modernist who was still presented as the dernier cri when Joel was in high school, forty years after his efflorescence. That, too, would have been 1964, when Joel first read “anyone lived in a pretty how town … he sang his didn’t he danced his did,” and thought he had discovered something daring and new. Those years when Joel awoke to the world were, maybe, closer to the twenties than to the seventies: the end of something, not consciously the beginning. When the new world came along, it swept
man about town
away with it.

How Joel had loved
man about town,
waited for it every month. Most boys he knew preferred the other men’s magazines,
Esquire
or
Playboy. Playboy
for the obvious reason,
Esquire
because it was then, as now, targeted at bright but randy adolescents,
man about town
was less leering, more selfconsciously elegant and arty. Its implied reader was the man of its title, a wealthy bachelor who dined at fine restaurants, went to Broadway first nights and gallery openings, and still found time to keep up with Sartre and Bellow and Kubrick.

At the front, before the featured articles, were what would be called now the lifestyle columns. A cookery piece featuring a menu for two to be whipped up by a guy who couldn’t boil water: a can of crabmeat and one of cream of mushroom soup, a jar of pimentos, sherry. Pour into chafing dish, stir. Serve
over toast. A travel piece about where to stay in Venice if you could afford a staggering $100 a night. All punctuated with ads for jet travel, stereophonic high-fidelity systems, and, above all, liquor and cigarettes. The romance of liquor and cigarettes, the delusion Joel had never entirely outgrown.

How cheap and smarmy it all seemed now,
man about town’s
vision of sophistication, of manhood itself. A whole world of consumption that was, for the intended reader, nothing but a prelude to getting laid.

But of course the intended reader did not exist, there were no such men. The real readers must have been gay men, or boys like Joel who were drawn to the life depicted in
man about town
for reasons they didn’t yet understand. The editors must have known it: column after column was peppered with assurances that elegance was masculine, that you were cooking a seductive dinner for your lady friend, that you cared about clothes because the fairer sex wanted to see you looking your best. The anxious tone made Joel think of Fred Astaire or Cary Grant, men who had gone just exactly, to the micrometer, as far as a man could go without being called a pansy. That was the razor’s edge on which
man about town
skated, only the Santa Fe boy buried in the back of the book hinting at the great deception.

Joel got to the fashion pages. Gray suits and golfing outfits. With the peacock look and Nehru jackets still a year or two away, how ever did they fill the clothing section month after month? Perhaps with oddities like the feature in this issue, a long, precious article on the glories of the seersucker suit. “Surely its foremost proponent was the memorably dapper Damon Runyon, who once said [continued 174] …”

He never had found out what Damon Runyon once said. Nor did he now. This was how it happened. Joel sitting in his room, a child reading an article about Damon Runyon’s seersucker suits. Flipping as instructed to page 174, and never a child again.

He closed his eyes, opened them. He had never, he supposed, looked at the picture for more than a few stolen seconds at a time. Thirty years ago, guiltily peeking at it maybe a score of times in the few weeks before the magazine vanished, victim of one of his mother’s cleaning frenzies. He waited for the June issue, but the ad wasn’t there, nor in July, nor ever again.

Even at the time Joel had suspected that
man about town
had decided not to carry any more ads from Simms of Santa Fe, as if that little box of innocent flesh somehow sullied the last pages of the magazine. He was sure of it now, having read through this issue: someone was distressed about what the ad implied about the typical reader and excised it. Just as, a few years ago, the management at
GQ
suddenly realized who was buying their swimsuit issue and remade the whole magazine to drive the faggots away.