Man About Town: A Novel (31 page)

“Bless you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Your man sure go to a lot of trouble to look like a brother, don’t he?”

They smiled at each other. “He sure does,” Joel said.

Joel had been gone from the meeting how long, ten minutes? Too long for a cigarette. He was sweating a little, from running after Andrew; he had the odd notion that, if he went back to the meeting, they would know what had happened. He had chased Andrew, Andrew had escaped. Anyway, there was every chance the meeting had broken up by now. There wasn’t much point in their running through a bunch of claims payment amendments just to hear Mullan say he wasn’t sure about them.

He was just a block from the Hill Club, but he decided to go to Corcoran’s, up on the Senate side. Confident that no one he knew would be there—not even Harris, home in Montana for the recess—and he could mope in peace. He walked up First Street, past the east front of the Capitol. There was some kind of concert, one of those summer things by the Marine Band. They were playing swooping arrangements of Bodgers and Hammerstein for a sparse crowd. Joel tried to conjure up some indignation, something about cuts in the National Endowment while there was unlimited funding for this crap. But he couldn’t get worked up. There was a sort of innocence about the scene, a deep communion of futility. The musicians—hardened pros for whom the Marine Corps was just one extended gig—dutifully honking out the overture to
Carousel,
the audience of old people and a scattering of heat-whipped tourists with wandering brats clapping wearily. This event was not so much occurring as referring, to some never-was summer not even the
old people had ever seen, a bandstand in the square of a town no one had ever dwelt in. That world wasn’t gone, it had never existed.

Behind the band loomed the deserted Capitol. Maybe only Washington—only the Hill, really—could feel so empty in August, emptier than Paris. The offices didn’t shut down any more, the way they used to before air conditioning. Not everyone went away, but those who remained moved through the heat with purposeless calm. Most of the year nothing was actually happening on the Hill, but it
could
happen: the general indolence could be broken by some sudden mysterious directive—”We will bring this to the floor Thursday …”—and there would be a sudden turmoil. So there was, in any other month, a waiting-for-the-shoe-to-drop feeling in the air. But in August the shoe could not possibly drop. Joel slowed down, strolled past the Supreme Court and the Methodist Building as if he were in no hurry to get anywhere, as if he had nothing special to do.

Inside Corcoran’s, sunlight poured through the front window onto the ranks of empty tables; sugar bowls and ketchup bottles cast long shadows on the checkered vinyl tablecloths. The air conditioning battled the heat, but could not leach out all the dampness of August in the swamp capital. There were only two or three people at the bar. So the beefy bartender, whose eye Joel could never catch on an ordinary night, turned at once from his ball game and was elaborately polite. When Joel asked for white wine, he didn’t just pour Joel the house swill but enthusiastically described their new pinot gris, which he said as “grease”; he wanted to give Joel a taste. Tonight the bartender’s sleeves were rolled up to display his great golden-fleeced forearms; yet with what delicacy he reached above him for the glass, brought it down with the stem poised between two fingers. Joel tasted the pinot grease and said “Fine,” though he knew it had to be two bucks more than the jug chardonnay. Because he wanted the bartender with the golden arms to think highly of him.

Only when this transaction was done did he realize that the black guy a few seats down from him was the one Ron had been seeing. Michael, that was it, wearing a suit, preternaturally crisp in defiance of the heat and damp, and drinking some kind of ice-cream confection. After a second, Michael saw Joel, but turned away with no sign of recognition. Instead he sat up straight and sipped his pastel cocktail with deliberate and unwelcoming dignity. Joel reached down for his briefcase, meaning to get out this week’s
The Nation,
and found himself instead grabbing the briefcase and the pinot grease and moving to the seat next to Michael’s.

Found himself: he didn’t even begin to think about why until he was already sitting next to Michael and saying “Hi.” Michael was startled but managed a rather dismissive “Hey.”

Of course Joel imagined that, if Michael had dated Ron, he might not be altogether out of Joel’s league. But this conjecture alone would not have driven Joel to the very daring gesture of changing seats in a bar. Something else: a gut lonesomeness that had to do not with Andrew but with the Marine band and its deflated listeners, and with this vacant theme bar whose replicas darkened the continent. A whole fraudulent nation, got up on purpose, as if someone had thrown a party and hadn’t invited Joel—had in fact thrown the party expressly in order not to invite Joel. So maybe it was just that he thought they hadn’t invited Michael, either. Sitting stiffly in his suit, in a bar that—in this part of the Hill—was about as integrated as a Birmingham lunch counter in the fifties.

Joel needed to say something. “Um … I think we met at Gentry.”

“Yes.”

“I was with Ron.”

“I remember, Joel.”

This was, perhaps, encouraging; but some people just remembered names more readily than others. Joel couldn’t think what to say next. He came up with, “It’s hot out.”

Michael looked at him, perhaps with a flicker of pity, but didn’t answer. Joel was trying to think of some equally snappy follow-up, perhaps about the humidity, when Michael said, “You know Ron long?”

“Yeah. Well, yes and no. I mean, I’ve known him for years, but we haven’t really been friends. We just, lately we’ve had dinner a couple times.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You … I guess you dated him, huh?”

“Dated,” Michael said, as if trying out how this euphemism felt on his tongue. “We saw each other a few times.”

“That’s what he said, yeah. But—I don’t remember, it seems to me you had some kind of disagreement?”

Michael looked down at his ice-cream drink. “He didn’t tell you about it?”

Joel wanted to say no, so he could hear the story directly, not as a refutation of Ron’s. But he didn’t dissemble very well; he would have given himself away somehow. “He said there’d been … some kind of misunderstanding about money.”

“Yeah.” Michael grimaced. “We misunderstood each other.” He looked at himself in the mirror over the bar. Smoothed an eyebrow with a finger, a paleolithic swish gesture that didn’t, when Michael performed it, seem effeminate. Just attentive: he was attentive to himself.

He swiveled a little on his stool—not actually turning his back on Joel, just shifting a degree or two, the way men did at Zippers when they wanted to let Joel know he shouldn’t waste his breath. And why not? Joel might as well have said, “Hey, Ron told me you robbed him.” He had killed it already.

Joel was already thinking about getting the check when Michael murmured, “We kind of misunderstood each other all along. You got another cigarette?”

“Sure.” Joel held out the pack. Michael wrapped one hand around Joel’s, while with the other he extracted the cigarette. His hand still rested on Joel’s as he reached for Joel’s lighter.
Joel glanced over at the bartender, who immediately turned to look up at the baseball game. Michael smiled at Joel’s skittishness and removed his hand.

“It was only a couple weeks, we saw each other a couple weeks. But he must have thought all along that I was … there for his money. Like he even had any money, like I was too stupid to see how he was living. He must have thought I lived with rats and garbage on the floor and shit.”

“He never went to your place.”

“I don’t take people to my place.” This sounded mysterious and forbidding, though of course it was merely prudent; Joel had learned this rule in his tricking days. If you went to somebody else’s place and he, say, killed you, he would at least have to go to the trouble of disposing of you. Whereas if you went to your own place he could do it and just walk away.

Michael went on: “The money thing—it was like it was the only way he could make sense of me. He’s an old guy, and here somebody thirty years younger than he is wants to fuck him.” This said quite loudly, Joel thought. Joel peeked again at the bartender. He looked back at Joel impassively, made no effort to pretend that he was watching his ball game. Joel was chagrined; Michael had blown his cover. As if he’d had any cover, as if he and Michael weren’t quite plainly two gay men who had somehow popped up in a sports bar. Joel relaxed. Yes, they were, that was just what they were.

“I guess …” Michael said. “I guess he had to tell himself a story about it. Some guys—you know, they see a black face, there’s only one story they can tell about it.”

Some guys like me, Joel thought. He looked at Michael’s beautiful eyes and felt that he could not imagine what was behind them. Or, rather, that he could, that some ineradicable core of viciousness that must have been imparted to him as a child was ready to tell the same story, to fill in the space behind those eyes with elemental Negro feelings. Resentment. Laziness. A propensity to steal people’s money to buy drugs. All
in a broth of indiscriminate, animal sexuality- Joel hated thinking these things, but they were there. Michael must have known they were there. What was it like, to go through life knowing that, to everyone you met, you were just a cartoon?

Joel was staring. Michael allowed him to, looked back calmly for a minute, then turned and called out to the bartender, with summoned-up brazenness, “Hey, honey, could you freshen me up? And get my friend one.”

“That’s okay,” Joel said. “I …” He caught himself. Let Michael make his point, even if he couldn’t afford it. And who said he couldn’t afford it? He was wearing a suit, for Christ’s sake. “Thanks.”

What was Michael doing there, sitting in a suit in a straight bar on Capitol Hill? Joel had been so gratified to happen upon him that he hadn’t even thought about this puzzle. He was about to ask—”What brings you to this neighborhood?”—when he realized that he would be as much as saying that Michael was in the wrong neighborhood. Instead he said, “I was thinking about getting something to eat.”

“Oh. Me, too, I guess.”

“You want to get a table?”

The two of them turned to look at the tables, bathed in fire from a Key West sunset. “Let’s just stay at the bar,” Michael said.

They studied the menus in silence. Joel wound up getting his usual elephant burger, Michael a caesar salad with grilled chicken.

“What were we talking about?” Michael said.

“About, I don’t know, how Ron felt about you.”

“He did tell you … the whole story?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe it?” Michael asked this neutrally, as if he were just taking a poll.

It wouldn’t have cost Joel anything, or not very much, to say no. Of course not, how could I believe such a thing? But he felt
cornered by the question, summoned for jury duty in a case he knew nothing about. Maybe even conned somehow. A facile No would mark him as an easy touch, or at least as a man who would say what he needed to get into Michael’s pants. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, how would you? You mind if I take just one more cigarette?” Joel slid the pack over, didn’t offer his hand to be touched again. “So, Joel: tell me about you.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You got a boyfriend?”

“No.” Joel was almost prompted to tell his story, but caught himself. “Not just now.”

“You live by yourself?”

“Yeah. Up near Dupont.”

“Uh-huh. But you work around here, Joel?”

“Yes. How about you?”

“No,” Michael said. “No, I don’t work around here.”

That studiedly uninformative response was not unusual in Washington. Even in the 1990s some gay men wouldn’t say where they worked, as if their interlocutor might, next day, call their boss and unmask them. But it did raise again, in Joel’s mind, the question: then what are you doing here? He had the momentary idea that Michael was trolling, had come here just to hook a Joel. This was silly: he could hardly have chosen a more barren fishing ground than Corcoran’s. If he wanted to reel in a rich white guy, he would have been at Gentry. Where, come to think of it, Joel had first encountered him.

“What exactly do you do, Joel?”

The insistent use of his first name bothered Joel. It was a salesman’s way of establishing intimacy. “I work for Congress.”

“Oh.” Michael nodded, his brow furrowed a little. Possibly he was speculating about whether people who worked for Congress made any money.

The elephant burger wasn’t so enormous that Joel should have felt like Henry VIII, but he regretted ordering it. As if
his belly wouldn’t have been obvious without the evidence of its cause, as if Michael wouldn’t have noticed the smoke if he hadn’t seen the fire. Still, it was impossible to eat an elephant burger without picking it up with both hands and burying your face in it. While Michael took birdlike pecks at his healthy little salad.

“How is that?” Michael said.

“Just, you know, a burger.”

“Wish I could eat a burger. But I got to watch it.”

“Oh, like you need to.”

“Honey, I work out two, three hours a day.”

Not a routine Joel thought of as compatible with continuous gainful employment. But he supposed some men managed it, at the cost of everything else. In any event, the results were evident.

“You should see my family,” Michael said. “My mother, my sisters, they’re all big as houses.”

Joel nodded. He resisted the vision of Michael at home, surrounded by steatopygic black women. “I should start watching it myself.”

“Come on, you’re in good shape for your age.”

Even with the qualifying phrase at the end, this wasn’t so. Joel was conscious of being hustled. And maybe that was okay so long as he didn’t kid himself. It would only be pathetic if he kidded himself.

“Your family,” Joel said. “Are they … are you from around here?”

“New Jersey. Trenton.”

“I’ve never been to Trenton.”