Man About Town: A Novel (26 page)

Joel thought, I should be the very first one, you twit. And maybe the last. Part of him was saying: if he’s telling me these things, he just sees me as his confidant, I am not on his agenda. Part of him was conjuring up one of those movies in which the hero, having been dumped by the spoiled socialite, is dictating a memo, stops, suddenly realizes that his secretary would be beautiful if she took her glasses off.

“What have you been up to?” Andrew said.

“Me? I … you know, I go out. But—what’s the old saying?—the screwing I get isn’t worth the screwing I get.” This was worse than, at their last meeting, inventing a fling with the librarian. Maybe Andrew would think he was trashy. Still, better trashy than Emily Dickinson.

“We ought to go out together some time,” Andrew said. Uninterpretably. If he had accented the “we,” or even the “out,” he would have been asking for a date. If he had accented the “together,” he would have meant that they should go out cruising together. Sisters. With the understanding that, if one of the sisters got lucky, the other sister got lost. But he hadn’t, really, emphasized any one word.

Joel said, “Sure.” Not so warmly as to commit himself to sisterhood, nor so coldly as to foreclose a date. Andrew looked a little puzzled. Good: why should Joel be the only one puzzled?

“You’re not drinking?” Andrew said.

“Guy never came down here.”

“Let me try, I’m going to have one more.” Joel thought: really? Don’t you have to rush home for the call from Kenyon’s parents?

While Andrew sent semaphore signals to the impossibly
distant bartender he said, “So what else is up?”

“Nothing much,” Joel said. “Oh, I ran into Senator Harris a couple weeks ago.”

“Ran into him?”

“At—you know Corcoran’s?”

“Uh-huh. You met Senator Harris in a bar? I would have thought he was a Mormon or something.”

“If he is, he got some special dispensation to drink Absolut martinis.”

“Well, I hope you told him he’s a homophobic asshole.”

“Practically. I told him too much, anyway.”

Andrew did a take. “You came out to him in Corcoran’s?”

“No, we just talked about his bill.”

“Which is going into the chairman’s package.”

“What?” Joel was, again, dismayed that Andrew should be deeper in the loop than he was.

“I mean, they’re going to put it in if it saves money. Which it doesn’t so far; the budget people are scoring it at zero.”

“That’s what I thought.” Give or take a hundred million.

“Melanie and I keep rewriting it. I mean, we must be on the thirtieth draft, but the budget people keep coming back and saying it’s unenforceable. You can’t get any saving unless you can show there are actually claims that won’t be paid. And nobody ever sends a claim in with a diagnosis of AIDS.”

“Right.”

“At one point we had it so if a doctor sent in a bill, he had to check a little box. Like, ‘Was this service HIV-related? Yes/no.’ Melanie says the AMA people just went bonkers.”

“No kidding,” Joel said. “I can just see physicians checking a box that says, ‘Please don’t pay me for this service.’”

“Not to mention there are these, you know, patient rights issues. So that’s dead.”

“Maybe they’ll just drop the whole thing.”

“Well, like I said. They need the savings for something. I mean, there’s something else they’re trying to pay for.”

“Isn’t there always?” Joel said.

Ron came in, wearing jeans and a polo shirt. When he saw Joel’s suit he said, “I thought we weren’t going anywhere fancy.”

“I just came from work,” Joel said. “Ron, do you know Andrew?”

“Hi, Andrew. Don’t let me interrupt you.”

“We were just talking shop,” Joel said.

“Oh, politics. What do you do, Andrew?”

Andrew murmured, “I, um … I work for Congress.”

“Which office?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I hate politics,” Ron said. “I used to be a junkie like everybody else, but I took the cure. Now the only thing I read in the paper is the funnies and Miss Manners.”

“Probably better off,” Andrew said. “Listen, I was talking to a guy down that way. I’ll let you two guys catch up. Nice meeting you, Ron.”

Ron watched him as he walked to the far end of the bar.

Joel said, “I guess he didn’t want you to know where he worked.”

“I guess not. He’s a nice-looking man.”

“You think?”

“I banged him once.”

“What?”

“Years ago. It didn’t look like he even remembered.” Ron shrugged. “Where did you want to eat?”

“I don’t care. We could just stay here.”

They got a table not far from Andrew’s end of the bar. Andrew saw them and waved, then went on talking to, Joel was happy to see, a fat guy who had to be seventy. So Joel wouldn’t have to watch him leave with some cutie who had passed the entrance exam for
the very first one.

Ron squinted at Andrew. “Maybe it wasn’t him. It was a long time ago.”

“You sure did get around.”

“I sure did. Sometimes I walk into a place and it’s like
This Is Your Life
with Ralph Edwards.”

A guy emerged from the crowd at the bar and walked up to their table. A black man, maybe in his late twenties, with skin of an even cocoa and eyes that were … possibly what is called hazel, but they looked almost golden. He was wearing gabardine slacks with about a twenty-inch waist; the body above it, flaring to powerful shoulders, was swathed in the kind of shirt that made Daisy Buchanan swoon, the fabric somehow rich and ascetic at the same time. The open collar disclosed the hollow at the base of his neck, the hollow like a well, cocoa and hazel and golden.

“Hi, Ron,” he said, very softly. “I didn’t see you come in.”

Ron didn’t look at him. “Hello, Michael.”

Michael turned toward Joel. Just looked at him, silently. Ron didn’t say anything, and Joel offered, “I’m Joel.”

“How are you, Joel?” Michael graced him with a meager smile.

“Uh …” Joel couldn’t remember the answer to that question; he was looking at Michael’s eyes. “Fine.”

“That’s good,” Michael said. With a trace of condescension? No, patience: he must have been used to aging white boys who looked at him and forgot how to talk.

He said to Ron: “I’ve been trying to call you.”

“I know,” Ron said. He picked up his menu and tilted his head back, so he could study it through the lower part of his bifocals.

Michael blinked, his lips parted a little, at this studied rudeness. “I just thought if we talked, if we could just talk about it, maybe …” He ran down: he couldn’t address this appeal to the back cover of a menu. He glanced at Joel, embarrassed. Joel frowned. He went on: “I don’t know why you won’t believe me.”

“Okay,” Ron said, without looking up from the menu. “I believe you.”

“All right, then.” Michael nodded gravely, as if those words were all he’d wanted. He turned back toward Joel. Michael’s face was blank, there wasn’t any reason for Joel to feel that he was being sized up. But their eyes locked for, Joel thought, a long time. He imagined there was some meaning in Michael’s parting “Nice to meet you, Joel.” If only because Michael had bothered to remember his name. He watched as Michael walked the length of the bar and out the front door. Michael’s butt should have been designated as a national monument.

“What are you having?” Ron said.

“I haven’t looked. Who was that?”

“Michael? Just someone I saw a few times.”

“He’s beautiful.”

“You don’t want to play with that.”

The menu took about a paragraph to describe each dish. Salsas, infusions, reductions, essences. There was a meat loaf special, probably inserted over the chef’s furious protests. They both ordered it, and a round of drinks, finally: Joel had been just about to go into withdrawal.

“The only tasty thing here is the waiters,” Ron said.

“I don’t know what it is about gay restaurants. They try so hard, and you wind up with …”

“Cafeteria food. Nobody comes here for the food, just the view.”

“I guess. Why don’t I want to play with that?”

“What? Oh, Michael. Do you want to play with Michael?”

Who wouldn’t? But Joel said, “I’m just asking.”

“It’s a long story.”

Joel shrugged; he wasn’t going anywhere, not till his drink got there.

Ron began: “I got my Amex bill—oh, a couple months ago, and there were all these charges on it. Bloomingdale’s at Tyson’s Corner, about four hundred in men’s clothing. You know, I never go out there. Couple of restaurants, Red Sage, Obelisk, places like that. Big bills. I thought, oh, it’s some
computer error. But, you know, they give you copies of the slips and there they were, the card was imprinted on them. And the same signature on every one. Nothing like mine, my name misspelled even. I guess they don’t even try to match the signature any more, they just ring up the sale. So I looked in my wallet and, sure enough, the card was gone. I never missed it, I don’t even use the thing, it’s just for travel or some kind of emergency. I kept it in an inside pocket, there’s no way it just fell out.

“So I knew: some trick took it. But I didn’t know who, you know? Not that there’s a stream of traffic through my apartment, but I’d been having … kind of a run of luck. Plus I use the card so little, it could have been months. Except I guess a guy wouldn’t have just held on to it for months and then gone and started using it. Anyway, there were a fair number of suspects, and Michael wasn’t even the main one. He seemed like a really sweet kid, we’d seen each other a few times, I was even thinking we were headed for something. There were a couple of other guys who were … kind of bottom of the barrel, you know. So I figured it was one of them. And what was I going to do about it? I didn’t even know their last names.

“I called Amex, reported that my card was lost and there were all these charges that weren’t mine. They wanted to know, had I lost my wallet? I said no, just the one card. They said, who would have had access to my wallet? And I felt like the criminal. What was I going to say, one of my tricks must have gotten hold of it? I mumbled something about how maybe I hadn’t locked my locker at the gym one day. As if I went to the gym. I was sitting there, on the phone in my office, and I swear I was sweating, like it was Sergeant Friday on the other end and I was getting the third degree. Of course, they didn’t care, it was just somebody filling out a form. They were going to send me a new card, I had to pay the first fifty dollars, that was it.

“A couple weeks later, I opened a book. It was something
I’d started and hadn’t finished, it was already two or three down in the pile. I opened it and there was my card. God, I thought, it wasn’t ever taken, I just misplaced it. Used it as a bookmark for some reason. So I don’t need a new one, I ought to call and tell them. Then I realized: of course it was taken, you idiot, it was used. It hasn’t been in this book all along, someone took it and used it and then brought it back.

“That kind of narrowed the list of suspects. I don’t have that many repeat visitors, you know? I tried to think: who was over here before the card was used and after? There was just Michael and this one other guy, Bud. And—well, you don’t need to hear about Bud. But there was no way Bud was dining at the Obelisk and handing them an American Express card. It had to be Michael. I felt awful: I really liked him.”

“So what did you do?” Joel said.

“Nothing. What was I going to do? I just chalked it up to experience. But then a couple weeks ago he dropped by, out of the blue. You know, the front desk at my apartment called up and said there was a Michael Greeley. I was going to say, no, I don’t want to see him. But I said okay. And then: it’s funny, I was afraid to have him in the apartment. I went and stood by the elevator. The door opened, he stepped out. Grinning. I thought for a second: hey, what difference does it make? I’m horny. And I’ve paid a lot more than fifty dollars for worse times than I had with Michael. What the hell?

“But I was scared. I thought, if he’d do that, go through my wallet, who knew what he’d do? I didn’t know him, who knew what he could do? We were just standing there, I guess he must have wondered why we’re just standing there. So I told him all about the card. Of course he said no, he didn’t do it. I said, yes, he did, it had to be him. And then, you know: he didn’t shout at me or tell me I was crazy. He just said, ‘Well, if that’s what you think.’ He pressed for the elevator, he was just shaking his head. He got on, turned around and looked at me. Just went on shaking his head, till the doors closed.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I’m not sure. Oh, I am, it had to be him. And, you know, these people can just lie and they don’t show a thing.”

Joel knew what he meant by “these people,” but he let it pass. Ron would just have said it didn’t mean anything. Joel said, “It’s funny, though. I mean, why would he bring it back and not just ditch it? Why would he keep trying to call you?”

Their meat loaf came. Joel testily reminded the waiter that he’d never brought their drinks. Ron asked for ketchup. After all these important transactions, it was almost natural for Ron to have forgotten Joel’s questions and say, “I’m thinking of growing a beard.”

Joel assented to the change of subject. “Oh, yeah?”

Ron must have caught Joel glancing at his hair, which was a moderately convincing dark brown. “I know it’ll come in gray. I might just go gray all over.” He chuckled. “I’ve got this friend Harvey, looks like Santa Claus, and he has to beat the boys away with sticks.” They laughed. Ron said, “What’s been happening with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Still not scoring?”

“I don’t even go out. I kind of lost interest.”

“That’s like saying you’re kind of dead. In which case I’ll finish your meat loaf. Anyway, seemed like you were pretty interested in Michael.”

Joel blushed a little. “I was just curious.”

“Or that guy you were talking to.”

“Andrew? We just know each other from work. His lover died a couple of years ago and he hasn’t, you know, he hasn’t done anything. He’s thinking he might be about ready to dive back in.”

“And you’ll be the pool.”

“I doubt it,” Joel said.