Man About Town: A Novel (21 page)

So Joel had seen the Santa Fe boy for, cumulatively, a minute or two three decades earlier. He remembered the smile and the swimming trunks. He had not remembered the body.

Joel was inured now to the sight of men’s bodies. In the underwear and perfume ads, in the videos and the magazines, everywhere now images of stupefyingly perfect men. It was hard to recover what he must have felt, encountering the Santa Fe boy so long ago. Really, the boy wasn’t, by current standards, remarkable. His was not, like the bodies in the underwear ads, a wrought thing, end product of presses and crunches and steroids. The belly was flat, but not a washboard; the chest and shoulders and arms were powerful but not enormous. The front of his trunks was flat, without today’s obligatory bulge, natural or enhanced.

The body was not perfect, it was merely beautiful. Which must have been enough to astonish Joel back then. He mustn’t, until he turned to page 174, have known there was even such a thing as a beautiful man. There were handsome men, tall, strong, with cleft chins and broad shoulders. But. the sultry open grace of the Santa Fe boy defied everything a man was
supposed to be like, and opened to Joel’s vision everything a man wasn’t supposed to see. Joel hadn’t just stumbled upon something he in particular wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t supposed to know about. He had happened on what no one was ever supposed to know: no one was supposed to know that a man could be so vulnerably lovely, that his full arms could hang so loosely, candidly, that his pelvis could tilt just so, that a man could have a body every inch of which was an invitation.

An invitation, most basely, to kiss, to lick, to bury your face in those hips. All of those ways into it foredoomed: the touch of lips or flesh to flesh would only remind you that you were two different people, sealed in your separate sarcophaguses of skin, impermeable carapaces through which a soul could not pass. What he had wanted—wanted and would never get, he had known that even as a kid—was somehow to pass into those hips, enter through that intraversable route, and inhabit the body of the Santa Fe boy. Be at home in that body and smile the smile of the Santa Fe boy.

He could go to the gym. He could have gone to the gym at fourteen, or at twenty-four, he could go tomorrow morning and possibly—even at his age, with a patient trainer and hefty doses of testosterone, conceivably forge some passable facsimile of the body in the picture. But he would never stand the way the Santa Fe boy did, so proud, so innocent, never smile so broadly. As if his body were a gift he was giving. Here it is, that smile said, and isn’t it something? He looked straight out at Joel, from a world where a body was a gift.

Joel must have known it was impossible the instant he first saw that picture. He had known what he would never get and had somehow understood—at fourteen, had seen so clearly—that nothing he could do or have or be would make up for that impossibility. And that he would never want anything else.

The boy had disappeared. Joel had been looking at him for so long he was just a bunch of black dots. Which was all he
had ever been. Dots. Well, what was anybody? What was Sam, but a continuing series of sensory impressions, less orderly than the dots on this page, that Joel had somehow pieced together into a lover?

Just a picture, the boy was just a picture. A fragmentary image: you couldn’t even see his knees, the likelihood that he had a back was an untestable hypothesis. Joel knew there was, or had once been, an actual Santa Fe boy. He stood in a room somewhere, under bright lights. The light bounced off him, through a lens, burned an image onto some film. Through some even less comprehensible process, the image was somehow turned into a pattern of dots, ink on a page. In Joel’s very distant room, light hit the page and bounced into Joel’s eyes. It was the white he saw. The black dots were the places from which no light was reflected. Absences: he conjured the Santa Fe boy from gaps in the light.

This was the kind of insight Joel had had the couple of times he dropped acid. Which was one of the reasons he only did acid a couple of times. The other being that the cheap hits he bought from the campus pusher were so laced with speed that he spent both trips racing along, about as paranoid as Richard Nixon. It was time for bed.

He glanced one more time at the picture. The smile wasn’t quite as broad as he had thought. Maybe there was some sorrow, or at least tension, around the eyes—as if Joel could interpret the expression in eyes the size of a period. And maybe—you could hardly tell, but it was just possible—the boy wasn’t looking straight out at the camera. No, he wasn’t: he was looking off to one side, beyond the edge of the frame. As if he had been caught unaware; or as if he were receiving direction.

The boy was, yes, looking away. Smiling for the camera, but not looking at it. Only his body smiled straight at you.

Whether or not Joel was going to embark on the course of self-improvement Ron had mapped out for him, he could at
least floss. Usually he flossed only in the last few days before a dentist’s appointment. So when the dentist looked in his mouth and said reproachfully, “Have we been flossing?”, he could answer, “Some.”

He clicked on the TV in the bedroom and went to the bathroom to see if, through some oversight, Sam had left the floss behind. While he hunted through the jumble in the cabinet beneath the sink—Ajax, shoe polish, tanning lotion, abandoned stop-smoking programs, and a marital aid that he had never noticed before and that Sam certainly should have taken with him—he listened to the news. The local news, murders and fires and accidents and about ten minutes of weather.

There was some floss. Probably ten years old, but what could happen to floss? As he went back into the bedroom with it, the news broke for an ad.

A woman of about seventy put down her newspaper, looked at the screen, and shook her head. A kindly but puzzled smile on her echt-grandmother face. “Jim and I went through a lot. The depression, the war. Raising our kids. Good times and bad times, we worked hard and we stuck together. Jim’s gone now, but he’d be so proud of the kids. The kids turned out fine, and my grandchildren! And one thing that really matters to me is that they don’t have to worry about me, what would happen if I got sick. Because there’s Medicare. It’s not a giveaway, we earned it, all our working lives, and I’ve felt so secure. My kids, too, knowing they wouldn’t have to worry about how they’d pay my bills.”

She looked down at the newspaper, then up again. “But now I read that Medicare’s in trouble. The way things are going, it might not be there for me. And one of the reasons is that it spends a billion dollars a year—one billion dollars!—paying for …” She glanced sideways, a little abashed. “Well, for young people who did dangerous things, when they ought to have known better. I’m awfully sorry if they’re sick.” Her brow furrowed; you could bet that, as soon as the ad was over, she
was going to pop right into the kitchen and make the poor young people some chicken soup. “But you know, it’s not too much to ask that people take some responsibility for their lives. Jim and I always did, and we taught our children to live the same way.” She shook her head again. “If they take Medicare away, we’ll get by somehow, my kids will help out. But it isn’t fair, when they’ve worked so hard, raising their own families. When they’ve done the right things all their lives. It just isn’t right.”

The screen went black. Then, in white letters: Citizens for Personal Responsibility. Whoever the hell they were. And an 800 number.

Joel had a late meeting at the Dirksen Building, with the Finance Committee chief of staff and a guy named Mullan from Senator Flanagan’s office, who did health stuff for the minority. Joel was there on time, and Mullan, but the chief of staff was, they were told, in the conference room, just finishing up another meeting. They were left standing in the reception area, which deterred loitering by having no chairs, for ten or fifteen minutes.

Joel despised Mullan. The smart people on Flanagan’s staff had decamped when the Republicans took the Senate and Flanagan lost the chairmanship. All that was left was Mullan, who was one of those managed-competition zealots. The kind who wanted to herd the elderly into private health plans. Once Joel had said, rather meekly, that it might be hard for old ladies with Alzheimer’s to study a list of health plans and pick one. Mullan had just stared, trying to figure out if Joel was a socialist or an imbecile.

Today they didn’t speak, just avoided each other—in a space the size of a powder room—as each tried to eavesdrop on the meeting that was ending. The conference room door was closed, all they could make out was murmuring and occasionally a sharp laugh from the chief of staff. This was reassuring: if
you heard her swearing, business was still being transacted; if you heard laughter, the meeting was in the gossip stage, just about to break up.

Sure enough, the door opened and the chief of staff emerged, followed by no fewer than five pharmaceutical lobbyists. Joel knew all of them from their time on the Hill, and each said, “Hey, Joel,” while filing past him. Nothing more; none paused to chat. They looked cowed; the meeting might have ended with laughter, but they hadn’t got what they wanted.

The Ice Maiden, people called her, with her austere Shaker outfits and her hair in a bun. This was archaically sexist, Joel knew, but even senators called her the Ice Maiden. Even senators were a little afraid of her.

Cordelia, as senators called her to her face, looked over at Joel and Mullan, but didn’t say hello. She was just registering that they were there, and that this meant she had a Medicare meeting she had forgotten about. “Oh,” she said. She led them into the conference room and they waited while she riffled through her organizer, one of those complicated binders with a million to-do lists and project-tracking tables and little inserts with inspirational quotes on them:

While she tried to figure out their task—she couldn’t just ask—Mullan said, “What was that about?”

“What?” she said.

“That meeting?”

She didn’t answer, just looked at him with an expression that would have said to any sentient creature: If you were supposed to know what it was about, you would have been in the room, wouldn’t you?

Mullan didn’t read expressions. “All those drug people. Was this that tax credit?”

“No.” She closed her binder.

“Because the senator was very interested in that…” Mullan looked over at Joel and finished, warily: “That thing we were talking about.”

As if Joel cared about tax credits for pharmaceutical companies. Though Senator Flanagan, being from New Jersey, would care profoundly. All the signs you saw from the train while riding through New Jersey: it was like reading the labels in someone’s medicine cabinet.

To assure Mullan that he hadn’t been cut out of anything, Cordelia had to divulge, “It was about the child health plan. They’re trying to kill it.”

“The drug people?”

“Haven’t they been talking to you?”

“Um … no.”

“They will.” Cordelia closed her binder triumphantly; she had figured out what they were there for. “Rural hospitals,” she announced.

“Right,” Mullan said, wearily.

“We need to go over all these technical amendments. Um … do you all have copies?”

“No.”

“Oh. Me, either. I’ll be right back.”

She left to dig up her amendments. Mullan rolled his eyes, and even Joel kind of had to feel for him. What did he care about rural hospitals? There weren’t any rural hospitals in New Jersey, because technically there weren’t any rural areas in New Jersey. Somehow every place in New Jersey was a suburb of someplace else in New Jersey.

After they’d waited a couple of minutes, they could hear Cordelia’s voice. She was back in her office, talking on the phone. Joel and Mullan shook their heads. She had gone to get the amendments and she had taken a goddamn phone call.
They might be on Medicare themselves before this meeting was concluded.

Mullan got the
Wall Street Journal
out of his briefcase. Joel hadn’t brought anything to read. Well, last week’s
The Nation,
but it wouldn’t do for Mullan to see impartial, nonpartisan Joel reading a commie rag like
The Nation.

Joel looked at the pictures of the chairman on the wall. It was interesting: his wig was of a different color in different pictures, but not in any clear chronological sequence. That is, it wasn’t black during the Nixon years, salt-and-pepper during Reagan, gray during Bush. Instead, he seemed to grow older and younger at random. Possibly the black-hair periods coincided with his several rumored affairs. Joel found himself, queasily, visualizing the chairman
in flagrante,
when Mullan said, “Why would the drug companies care about the child health plan?”

Joel shrugged. He hadn’t been following the child health plan, it wasn’t his area. He just knew from the papers that the chairman, who apparently would think nothing of throwing an eighty-year-old Russian immigrant from a moving train, wanted to expand children’s health insurance. You could say “child” to a politician with a heart as big as, say, Strom Thurmond’s, and he’d just melt. In a budget plan that hacked away at every social program enacted since the Cleveland administration, the Republicans had set aside two billion to cover uninsured kids. Joel wondered when they’d get around to providing health insurance for transvestite prostitutes with a little heroin problem. Probably they’d give insurance to puppies first.