Man About Town: A Novel (24 page)

Right. All those unemployed biochemists loitering on street corners would drop their quart bottles of Colt 45, troop into the shiny new labs, and start collecting stock options while they combined snake and human genes so people with psoriasis
could shed their skins. Katie Couric listened with undisguised boredom and then asked him about his cat.

Oh. This was that … that
thing
Mullan and the chief of staff were mentioning, the break for the pharmaceutical companies that Joel wasn’t supposed to hear about. All wrapped up as some kind of welfare-to-work proposal. The companies would build something in the ghetto or the barrio they were going to build anyway. The workers would come in on the train, they’d be met at the station by an armored car labeled Merck or Glaxo, they’d toil away in the bunkers, they’d scurry home to the suburbs at night and the drug companies would get to write off all their profits. Nifty.

Joel was always stupidly thrilled when the news covered something he already knew about. He would say to Sam: “That bill they’re talking about. I worked on that.” Sam would say, “Uh-huh,” strangely unimpressed, wait politely until the story was over, and then turn the channel.

The Vice President’s cat had had kittens. Great. Maybe they’d be eligible for the child health insurance plan.

Huzzah, he thought, as he walked down Q Street to the Metro. I have four limbs and lunch money. I sit in important meetings and am privy to the innermost workings of the corporate welfare system. The fog is burning off and it’s going to be a beautiful day.

All of this was true. In the immeasurable ocean of suffering that was the world, how tiny Joel’s complaints were. He ought to have been ashamed of himself, he ought to have practically danced down Q Street on his way to the Metro every morning. And the homeless guys he stepped over ought to have been happy they weren’t in Calcutta.

He knew that his discontent—and that of all the fat, desolate Americans around him—had something or other to do with their loss of faith. But he couldn’t just turn into … Willard, that was the weatherman’s name, beaming pious
Willard, who knew the world was wonderful and people were wonderful and God was in Heaven and one day Willard would be up there giving the unchanging celestial weather report.

Here was the truth: because Joel did not believe in Paradise, an eternal life, he was left believing in New Mexico. To be there with the Santa Fe boy, swimming, lounging, cruising forever. Just dwelling with him, as so many people have dreamt of a timeless dwelling with the altogether less attractive and unsmiling deity they have conjured up. Joel at least had incontrovertible evidence that the Santa Fe boy existed. Or that he had existed once. More than anyone could say about Jesus.

For an eternity they would wash his Mustang, each of them wearing his little lo-rise trunks, then take a dip in the pool to cool off, pop a couple of brews and lie in the sun. They wouldn’t touch. But he would look over at Joel from his chaise longue, raise his hips and adjust his wet trunks, lie back. Still looking at Joel, that sad impenetrable smile dawning on his face. Joel would smile back. They would not touch. For ever, Joel would live in that moment that was so much more intense than mere touching, that instant when you knew you were going to touch.

Through aeons he would be with Him in Santa Fe and would be about to touch Him.

Santa Fe. Holy faith.

Ron was a lawyer, so Joel thought he’d know the name of a detective.

“What’s up?” Ron said. “You’re going to have Sam followed?”

Joel glanced around. No one at the Hill Club seemed to have heard. “Of course not. There’s just someone I’m trying to locate.”

“Who?”

“I— Well, you know, I’m still trying to settle my mother’s estate. And there was this one kind of personal thing she wanted to leave to an old friend. So I’m trying to track down this person.”

“Isn’t there a lawyer handling all this?”

“Yeah, but this—it wasn’t something in the will, it was something my mother told me.”

Joel waited for a bolt of lightning. None came; most of civilization consists of lies about the dead.

“So, anyway, you know any detectives?”

“Urn, a few. Let me …” There was a silence while, presumably, Ron flipped through his mental Rolodex. “Why don’t you try this guy named Bate. Gordon Bate. I think that’d be the best one for you.”

“He’s good, huh?”

“He’s … a little less like a detective. Call me tomorrow, I’ll get you his number. Or he must be in the book.”

“Okay. Are these guys expensive?”

“Relative to what?”

Relative to just taking the picture out one more time, gazing at it for a minute, and tearing it up. “I mean, do they charge by the hour or …”

Ron wasn’t listening, he was staring over Joel’s shoulder. Joel turned to see what might have transfixed him. Sure enough, a boy of stupefying beauty had inexplicably stumbled into the Hill Club. He sat alone at a table and read the specials on the blackboard, his lips moving only a little. Joel thought: five, maybe ten minutes, and Ron would be sitting at that table. Or, more probably, Ron would be told to scram; the guy might as well have had “straight” tattooed on his forehead. But Ron would at least try, while Joel sighed and made a beeline for the only vacant stool at the bar.

“Hello, hello, hello.” Francis, the ex-seminarian, was especially manic this evening, as if he had skipped a dose of whatever kept him out of St. Elizabeth’s. Joel thought of escaping, but a stool was a stool. “What’s new?” Francis said, with an urgency that meant he had some terrific news of his own to spill.

“Not much,” Joel said. Then, just to get it over with, “What’s new with you?”

“We-e-e-ll. I’ve been— Mercy!”

“What?”

“There is a positive angel at that table by the window.”

“Uh-huh.”

Francis went on looking for a few seconds, then shook his head and turned away. Frowning, as if beauty made him angry.

Well, beauty made Joel angry sometimes. He thought again of destroying the picture, and felt a brief homicidal thrill. Some part of Joel did want to annihilate the Santa Fe boy. The way he smiled, smiled with his whole body: who would not wish to obliterate such a smile, shred the little swatch of paper that was the only evidence of his mocking existence? And why shouldn’t Francis, biting his lip and staring at the bar, savor a momentary vision of, say, hurling a firebomb at that table by the window? Where a creature whose very existence was somehow a reproach sat innocently, trying to decide between a burger and a cheese steak.

“So,” Francis said. “Are you in touch with Sam at all?”

“I hear from him once in a while:” This wasn’t so, Sam hadn’t called in weeks. Possibly because of an annoying habit Joel seemed to have developed, of crying over the phone.

“Is he still with that kid?”

“Kevin. I guess.” Speaking of candidates for annihilation.

Francis leaned in so close Joel could see the veins in his eyes. “They say he beats Sam up.”

“What?”

“That’s what I heard from somebody. I don’t know.”

Should Joel credit this not altogether ungratifying bit of intelligence? Amplified, probably, in its transit on the wires of rumor, so that what might have been one spontaneous blow became the ongoing “beats Sam up.” He couldn’t, really, picture it happening even once. Trying, he got only a cartoon: Kevin’s skinny arm thrust forward, Sam reeling and bouncing back like an inflatable punch-me doll. Kevin was expressionless, not angry; Sam was wide-eyed but kept bouncing back.

“Sam wouldn’t let somebody beat him up,” Joel said. “I mean, he’d leave.”

“Maybe so.”

Joel had no idea if it was so. Fifteen years with somebody,
you ought to know everything about them. But hitting Sam was an experiment Joel had never conducted. Maybe Sam just took it, accepted the occasional—slap? punch?—as the price of Kevin. Affordable, unlike whatever price he couldn’t go on paying for Joel.

Or maybe it was part of what Sam wanted: not a bad habit offset by the kid’s many virtues, but an integral part of Kevin’s appeal. Under the languor and the childlike freshness Joel had seen the day they visited, some ferocity. Joel could understand, in the abstract, that it would be exciting to be with a man who could potentially hit you. But only if it were merely potential. And even then: to spend your time avoiding, any word or deed that could provoke it—it would be the same as being hit all the time.

Could this be what Sam had always wanted? Not to be hit, necessarily. But to be with someone so aware of him, someone who felt the frictions and snags of being with him so intensely as to have to strike out. Someone who paid that much attention to him. Instead of, say, blithely going on for months unaware that he was cheating.

Joel didn’t think people could get through fifteen years paying that kind of attention, caring that much.

“Look who’s sitting with that boy,” Francis said.

On his way out, Joel picked up the gay paper to do his weekly scan of the ads. He skimmed through them on the Metro and was done by the second or third stop. Practically all repeats this week, and none of the handful of new contestants in the Win-a-Night-with-Joel competition had submitted the winning jingle.

He flipped to the front part of the paper. He usually skipped this section, all the solemn stories about which candidate the Eleanor Roosevelt New Democrats were endorsing for Registrar of Wills, or the latest standings in the Mid-Atlantic lesbian shot-put tournament. This week, though, they had a
big headline: WHO IS CPR? Followed by an article that was mostly a list of all the people who might have known but who hadn’t returned the reporter’s calls by press time.

The ad Joel had seen had aired a few more times, in DC, a few other markets. And another ad Joel hadn’t seen, apparently the obverse of the first: a young couple worried about Mom. These little dramas were the only traces of the mysterious Citizens for Personal Responsibility. The paper assumed that it was some kind of religious right group, like the Family Research Council or the Traditional Values Coalition. But there was something funny about it. No spokesman, for one thing: usually these groups were fronted by eerily juvenile-looking men with waxy complexions and prominent eyelashes. CPR was faceless, and—even more suspicious—it wasn’t raising any money. What kind of organization never passed the plate and could afford ads that were a full sixty seconds long? An organization whose members also belonged to the Fortune 500. But which industry cared about … ?

In a sidebar, there were statements by famous gay leaders. Famous in the sense that, when Joel saw their names, he recalled having seen their names before: Geoff Pfeiffer, Adrienne Broom. They were the people who were called when statements were needed. Some were attached to organizations; Adrienne Broom, for example, was the public affairs director of the Association for Lesbian and Gay Advancement and Education. ALGAE: wasn’t that the group that kept pushing for hate crimes reporting, on the theory that if you counted something it would go away? Or were they the people who thought that, when lesbians broke up, courts should arrange joint custody of the cats? Geoff Pfeiffer, on the other hand, was identified merely as “activist.” Suggesting that he got out of bed every morning and embarked on a day of furious, purposeful activity. Joel supposed that made him a passivist.

Geoff thought gays, lesbians, transgendered and transfigured persons should boycott the TV stations that had aired the
ads. Adrienne thought her organization might run counter-ads, and offered an address to which concerned readers could mail their checks. Claude pointed out that gay people were often quite close to their mothers and cared as much about preserving Medicare as anybody else. Absolutely, Joel thought. They ought to get Andrew as poster boy: he was so fond of old people he had acquired a second set.

The spokespersons speculated about CPR, they wondered what might have motivated an apparently affable man like Harris to introduce his awful bill. No one offered the simple explanation. That it was about personal responsibility. That, to a man from Montana, where people got by on nuts and berries, there was honestly something disturbing about the spectacle of people partying—pumping themselves up, dropping a few chemicals, getting it on in open defiance of every recommended precaution—and then handing Uncle Sam the bill.

The leaders didn’t talk about this. They didn’t even allude to those kids who were reckless and self-destructive—some of them even trying to get sick, as if seropositivity were a Boy Scout merit badge. Nor did they offer the argument Joel had tried on Harris the other night. That once you started down this line, there was no end to it: smokers, drinkers, eaters of elephant or donkey burgers, the sedentary, the choleric. All kinds of weak people, giving in to temptations and incurring future bills. The leaders must have known what the answer would be when they lobbied the congressmen who were willing to talk to them, the answer that would show up in CPR’s counter-counter-ad. “There’s a difference between eating a burger and … doing the things they do.” The twisted diseased things they did, all those beautiful boys on the—what did they call it? The circuit, as if they were vaudevillians doing the round of the Orpheum theaters.

Joel didn’t know anybody who went to circuit parties, he had only read about them. Wistfully: what must it have been like to be young and buffed and flying off every weekend to
whatever city was hosting the white party or the black party or the masque-of-the-red-death party? He would have gone. The only reason he wasn’t having unsafe sex was because he wasn’t having any sex at all. And if he did, if he got his rocks off and then paid the viral price? He was forty-five. He could go wham at the office any day now. Or he could, if infected, live something close to a normal life span, whatever the actuaries would say was normal for a man with his many unhealthy proclivities.

Joel wasn’t any more responsible than anybody else. Why should he be: to whom was he responsible, what was he here for? The only responsible person he knew was poor Andrew Crawford, rushing home to take the calls from a couple of people with incipient senile dementia who probably thought he was their sainted son. Only Andrew thought he knew what he was here for.