Man About Town: A Novel (28 page)

As Joel spread out their little picnic, he said, “I didn’t get your kind of cream cheese.”

“What did you get?”

“Scallion.”

“Yuck. Well, I guess I can pick them out.”

“Okay.”

“I always tell you not to get scallion.”

“I don’t expect to be kissing anybody.”

“No, but they get in your teeth, and you don’t even see, and …”

Sunday morning. If they had been together, they would have finished their bagels, then Sam would have said Joel needed to brush his teeth. When he had complied, they would have gone back to bed together.

Joel said, “How’s Kevin?”

“He’s fine.” Sam tilted his head. From which Joel understood that he was thinking: what have you heard about us? So, if Joel could read his mind, why couldn’t Joel detect Kevin all those months before Sam left? Still, he was sure of it, Sam was afraid Joel had heard something. He wished Sam would take off the sunglasses. Not to reveal anything, just so he could look Sam in the eye as they talked.

“We’re going to be moving,” Sam said. “I’ll have to give you my new number.”

“Moving where?”

“I found a little studio near AU.”

“Won’t the two of you be pretty crowded?”

“Oh, no, Kevin’s moving to College Park. You know, school’s starting again pretty soon, he wanted to be closer.”

“So you’re not …”

“We’re still seeing each other, but we couldn’t take that group house any more. And we both, you know, needed our space.”

“Uh-huh,” Joel said. Sam wouldn’t have used that phrase when they were together. He might have wanted to use it, but he would have known Joel would laugh at him. Now, apparently, he wasn’t afraid of Joel’s laughter. Joel, for his part, no longer found the phrase funny; he understood space now. He had too much of it, but he wouldn’t have given it up—not an inch. Maybe not even if Sam were to occupy it.

On the grass a black man in sweatpants and a neon tank
top was practicing, in the slowest of motion, some ancient and exotic form of mayhem. Poised and controlled as a dancer, beautiful if you forgot that every time he extended his leg in a perfect arabesque he was picturing his pointed toes gouging out the eyes of some, probably, white guy. More bad thoughts about
those people,
so many on a single morning. Joel couldn’t help it. He could imagine where the guy had acquired those astounding shoulders: at a gym where the membership was free and lasted five to ten.

Sam was saying, “Actually, we … we decided we could go out some.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I mean with other people.”

“Oh. And do you?”

“Yeah. You know, I meet guys. But they don’t seem as mature as Kevin.”

Where was he meeting these less mature guys, junior high school playgrounds?

It wasn’t, objectively, worse to know that Sam was seeing multiple youths than to know that he had snagged Kevin. Well, yes, it was. Joel felt the way a Chinese peasant must feel when he sees a fat man. He pictured Sam and Andrew at the Pledge, each at his own end of the bar, flocks of young men gathered around each of them like iron filings.

“How about you?” Sam said. “You seeing anybody?”

Joel couldn’t say he was seeing the librarian, whose name he had already forgotten. “No,” he said. Sternly, as if he had made some sort of resolution, instead of just repeatedly striking out.

Sam sighed. “You should, Joel.”

Joel said no again. Maybe he had made some sort of resolution.

The black guy had finished his ballet and was standing still, head bowed; evidently his particular school of self-defense entailed meditation. What did he think about? He looked up
to find that Joel was staring at him. He returned the stare, impassive; he couldn’t come to work out in Dupont Circle and be outraged that fairies looked at him. He bowed his head again, his hands tightened into fists.

Sam was only on the second half of his bagel. He had spread cream cheese on it and was, as promised, picking out the seal-lions and flicking them down on the ground. Joel lit a cigarette.

“You’re still smoking,” Sam said. What did he think: he left and Joel was supposed to turn into someone else? Joel didn’t answer. After a minute Sam said, “So how are things at work?”

If Sam asked him how things were at work, it meant that he had exhausted every other conceivable topic. “Okay. Things have kind of slowed down. You know, when the Republicans took over, they were going to remodel the universe in a hundred days. But they kind of ran out of steam.”

“Uh-huh. Did you see they want to take away our health care?”

“You mean this Medicare thing?”

“Medicare?” Sam said. As if, in fifteen years with Joel, he had never heard the word. “I guess. It was something in the gay paper.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just a lot of hot air. They’re not going to do anything.”

“Oh.” Sam finished his bagel, took a long swig from his bottle of iced tea flavored with apricot or something equally cloying. “About Kevin.”

“Uh-huh?” Was he going to tell?

“Sometimes we don’t get along. You know, we fight. It’s funny, you and I never fought.”

“No.”

“We fight, and we couldn’t stay in the same place, and …”

Serves you right, Joel thought. Then he thought it was too bad if Sam was unhappy. That, having lost what they’d had, not even one of them got to be happy. He was annoyed with
himself. Wanting Sam to be happy was just a habit, from their years together: if Sam was happy, there was no bad weather in the apartment. Why should he care now?

Sam went on. “He looks up to me. Right from the start he looked up to me, that’s what it was. Not the sex. It felt good.”

“Uh-huh.” Joel suppressed a little foul shudder of contempt. Vacant Kevin looking up to, of all people, Sam. Sam feeling big.

Sam spoke carefully. “I never felt that you looked up to me. I don’t mean you should have, we were equals. But you looked down on me.”

“No.”

“You did. I know you loved me. But I always felt, like, I was just the best you could do.” Some memory stirred; Joel couldn’t catch it. Sam finished: “You never really thought I was good enough.”

“God.” Joel wanted to put his arm around Sam, but he couldn’t, not in front of the martial artist. “I never felt that way.”

Probably Sam was insulted by this pointless lie. But what else could Joel say? Yes: you were never good enough, I spent the whole time waiting for the goddamn Santa Fe boy. Had Sam known it, all those years? How it must have hurt. That was the price, then: all those years loving Joel enough to pay that price.

Defiantly, Joel put his arm around Sam. “I loved you as well as I could.”

“I know you did.”

“I do.”

“I know,” Sam said. “I still love you, too.”

Sam stood up, slowly, and looked down at Joel. The way, a century ago, they might have been reading or watching TV in the living room. Sam would stand up, Joel would look up from the paper, Sam would have a tight but genuine smile on his face, and they would race down the hall to the bedroom.
Here they were, a couple of blocks from the bedroom.

They looked at each other for a long time. Perhaps they were both thinking the same thing, the way they used to think the same thing. They could go to Joel’s place, Joel could brush his teeth, they could make love; if Joel was especially attentive and adept he might make Sam forget for a few seconds that he “was merely the best Joel could do. Which he was: the dearest man Joel would ever know, and he had thrown him away.

Joel broke the look first. Sam understood. “I better get going,” he said.

“Kevin will wonder where you are.”

Sam smiled. “He doesn’t wonder where I am much. He’s got a pretty full calendar.”

“Oh. I hope you’re being safe.”

“What? Oh, sure.”

“Because some of these kids, you know, they’re not very careful.”

Sam shrugged. “Talk to you,” he said.

The black guy had resumed his ballet. As he went through his motions, he occasionally glanced at Joel. Was this permissible? Wasn’t he supposed to be concentrating? But he was showing off for Joel. Maybe that was why he came to this of all parks. So he could show off for Joel. Who imagined for a second what it would be like to bring back to his apartment this prepotent creature, who might kiss him or might kick his teeth in.

On the train to Baltimore, Joel tried to read. But he kept coming back to the Simms boy—must he now call him the Siperstein boy? He had no landscape to put him in now. The vague, paradisiac vision of Santa Fe was dispelled, giving way to an image of his roommate’s ranch house in Pikesville. With the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard: Steven was rich, his father was a tax lawyer. Joel tried to place the boy by that pool. He was on the lounge chair with the plastic webbing; behind him, on the patio, Steven’s mother and her friends were playing mah-jongg. This ludicrous picture was not improved when Joel replaced Mrs. Bosoff with Leonard Siperstein. By the pool, some middle-aged garment manufacturer with a bald head and a cigar knelt in front of the boy, pulled down the quick-drying tank trunks. The boy looked off, with that sad fixed smile, into the middle distance.

Baltimore. Abandoned factories loomed to the left of the tracks. Joel could imagine, on one of them, the faded lettering:
Siperstein and Son. Swimwear. Foundation Garments. Then a tunnel, so they were almost at the station. Joel thought about just turning around and getting the next southbound train. He had plenty to do, this was pointless, he really ought to go back.

Outside, he gave a taxi driver the address. “That’s in the county,” the driver said. “I’m gonna have to charge you double.”

“What’s the county?”

“There’s Baltimore City and there’s Baltimore County. So I gotta charge for the return because, see, I can’t pick up in the county.”

“Can you wait and bring me back?”

“Yeah, that I can do, probably cost about the same. Except I gotta leave my meter running while I wait.” After what Joel had already spent on Bate, this didn’t seem like a big deal—until they pulled onto some kind of expressway. The cab groaned and clanked, they stayed in the slow lane, maybe going forty, but the meter turned over so fast Joel could hardly keep track. The meter was deep into four digits before they turned off onto something called Stevenson Lane.

Joel hadn’t thought about what he was going to say. He would need to have some reason for wanting to find the boy. He’s inherited a fortune. He’s my long-lost half-brother. He’s wanted for something. All silly: none of them explained why the only thing Joel knew about him was that he had been in that ad. Joel was going to have to tell the even sillier truth. Siperstein was going to laugh at him, or more probably turn away with bewilderment and disgust.

They passed a synagogue, an early-60s Quonset hut with soaring wings, manner of Eero Saarinen. Had he seen this place before, visiting Steven? So long ago—jeez, twenty-fifth reunion next year, was it conceivable that Steven would show up? An excellent reason not to go. There were plenty of reasons: that Joel wasn’t rich or famous or even well-preserved. But he surely did not want to find himself having to talk to Steven. He had nothing to say to Steven, there had been nothing left to say
after that last afternoon, by the kidney-shaped pool, when he had haltingly spilled out those things he had meant never to tell anyone.

The cab turned off onto a street lined with tall hedges. At the breaks for driveways Joel caught glimpses of enormous houses, mostly Georgian, with porte cocheres at their sides harboring large German cars. If Siperstein lived here, he must have done pretty well in the rag trade.

The driver slowed. “3568,” he said. “What is that next one, 3546? It’s gotta be right along here—yeah, right here.”

“Don’t turn in.”

“What?”

“Wait here, I’m going to walk up. I’ll be back in … ten minutes.”

“Right. Why don’t you leave me twice the meter so far, then I’ll wait.”

The driveway curved in front of a long brick wall. There was a roofline, this had to be the front of the house, but a good hundred feet of umber brick was punctuated only by a blank redwood door, next to it a single narrow panel of frosted glass. On the doorstep was a newspaper, still rolled up in its blue plastic wrapper. No one was home, and the meter was running.

Joel pressed the doorbell. He couldn’t even hear, through the slab of redwood, if it rang. While he waited he was already thinking about the ride back, the memo he had to finish. Between him and the boy was a long brick wall with a door no one was going to open.

From around the far corner of the wall a man appeared, carrying a hose. He aimed it unsystematically at a shrub here, a patch of grass there, not so much watering as “watering,” in the desultory and ironical way Joel used to do chores as a kid. Mrs. Siperstein had sent him out to do this, maybe just to get him a little sun. Siperstein was a sphere with no shirt on, shorts sagging so you could see a few inches below his navel.

He noticed Joel, shut off the hose, then just stood eyeing Joel, not speaking. Joel called out, “Hi.” He didn’t answer, so Joel had to tramp over the lawn to him. “Mr. Siperstein?”

“Who are you?” Not hostile, but not interested.

Joel looked fixedly at his face, rather than look at his teats with their shag of white hair, the white globe of his belly. He looked back at Joel through glasses with heavy black frames and the sort of lenses that are supposed to change color with the light but are always a jaundice yellow.

“Joel Lingeman. I rang, I didn’t think anybody was home.”

“I’m home. I’m always home.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Twenty years, I went to the club every day. I pretended to play golf, five or six holes, and then I went to the bar and had lunch with my buddies. But all my buddies are dead. So I stay home.”

“Uh-huh. Um … It’s a nice house.” An inane thing to say about a brick wall.

“I hate this house. My second wife read some magazine, she had to have the most modern house in Pikesville. Can you guess what it costs to heat this house?”

“No, sir.”

“So you’re not a furnace salesman. What are you selling?”