Man About Town: A Novel (33 page)

It used to be, when the phone rang in a department store, it gave off a single clear tone: Ding. Ding. That was the sound of a department store when he was little, the dulcet intermittent bell, and he was quite grown before he realized that it
was
the phone and not some mysterious signal to the sales associates. Twelve dings for a nuclear attack.

Joel would call, Ding, and Michael wouldn’t be there. Or he wouldn’t recognize Joel’s name. Or he would be astounded by Joel’s naïveté and gall, calling him at work. What Joel held in his hand was no more consequential, made no more promises, than a salesman’s business card.

For lunch Joel went to a place with a salad bar that was really about two or three little bins of wilted greens and then all kinds of Chinese stuff. His plastic tray had one big section and two smaller sections. He dutifully loaded salad into one of the smaller sections, filled the other with sparerib chunks, and packed’ the big section with kung pao chicken and sesame noodles. At the register he looked in his wallet and found three singles.

The night before he had paid his and Michael’s check at Corcoran’s, then the taxi, and, after getting his change and leaving the tip, he had put three singles back in his wallet. Next to a twenty. There had been a twenty left.

The bill compartment of his wallet was always filled with junk: ATM receipts, reminders of dental appointments, lots of paper. The twenty could have been buried. He hunted for it, conscious of the growing line of ravenous salad-eaters behind
him, and of the worried face of the cashier-matron. “Look,” he said. “I, uh … can you hold on to my salad? I need to run to the bank machine.”

As he waited at the bank machine, he saw himself quite clearly, sticking the three singles next to the twenty and even thinking, Good, I won’t need money tomorrow, twenty will be enough for lunch and the Hill Club and I can stop at my bank when I get back to the Circle.

The cashier-matron looked as surprised to see his return as, say, Pat Robertson would be if there really were a Second Coming.

It was a million degrees out. He had meant to eat his nearly vegetation-free salad back at his desk, in the air conditioning. But he would have been interrupted, and he wanted to think hard about questions like: (1) when, exactly, Michael took the twenty; (2) what ineradicable germ of racism deep in his cortex made him think Michael took it; (3) whether someone who took the twenty would actually keep the dinner date they’d made when Joel called at eleven; (4) if he could have given all three twenties to the bartender and the shit just pocketed the excess; (5) where might be a good place to hide his money when he took Michael home and excused himself for a moment; (6) whether Michael was more likely to keep seeing him if maybe he failed to hide one twenty each time.

He sat on the low wall in front of the Madison Building, a good distance from his new pal the homeless guy. As he twirled sesame noodles around his little plastic fork, he watched the parade of staffers going to and from lunch. Serious young Republicans in their well-fitting khakis and blue shirts. If all the congressmen were straight, how come the staffers they picked were so uniformly cute, buffed and perky-looking, like the guys who won the scholar/athlete award in high school? Cute and malignant, working overtime to unravel the social safety net, going to their bars at the end of the day and bragging
over their nachos about how many people lost their food stamps today. But maybe it was only because life had never rubbed their perky little noses in any contrary idea. Sound bites ricocheted in their vacant skulls: there was still room for experience, some might graduate all the way to the summit of ambivalence and immobility Joel had reached long ago.

Joel tore himself away from the staffers and returned to the subject of Michael. Of course, unless you had the seven habits of highly credulous people, you didn’t actually sit down and work through lists of numbered life-issues. He found instead that he was remembering their call that morning. The way Michael just took it for granted that they would meet that night, was even a little short with Joel on the phone—the way you can be short with somebody when everyone understands that you just have to get back to work. “Baby, I have to get off, I’ll see you at seven,” and he was off before Joel heard “Baby.” Just a habit of speech; except Joel heard in it the smile Michael had worn all night.

Joel wasn’t sure that smile had anything to do with him. He thought it was just about loving life, and then he thought at once that this, too, was a racist idea: that he was turning Michael into some sort of happy-go-lucky Negro. Only Michael did smile. In a here-we-are, grateful-for-the-moment sort of way that was not incompatible with, in the next moment, gratitude that Joel’s wallet should contain a twenty. Joel pictured him, standing before Joel’s dresser in the half light. Thumbing through the oddments of paper in Joel’s wallet, feeling the distinct crispness of the buried twenty. Smiling.

The picture didn’t displease Joel at all.

Joel looked up to see his boss Herb approaching. Wearing a jacket, despite the heat, which meant that someone had just taken him to lunch. He had a bow tie on today, so there was nothing to punctuate the tundra-like expanse of flimsy white shirt beneath it. Joel wished Herb would wear an undershirt;
it was disconcerting to see your boss’s nipples.

Joel said, “Hey.”

Herb said, “Joel, how’s it going?” and sat next to him on the wall. This was an enormous incursion; Joel didn’t want to talk to Herb in the middle of his lunch hour. Actually, he didn’t want to talk to Herb ever.

Herb had been a GS-15 in the Social Security headquarters, having reached that eminence through longevity and a prodigious ability to kiss ass. After the Incident—whose details Joel had never quite been able to piece together, but which apparently involved a truly catastrophic misplacement of a decimal point, one that had darkened the golden years of many an annuitant—Herb had bid farewell to the executive branch and somehow found shelter as a Social Security analyst at OLA. There his gift for sycophancy had once again secured his promotion, so that he had become Joel’s boss without the tiniest inkling of what exactly Joel did.

They only had two kinds of conversations. Ones in which Herb exhorted Joel to keep up the good work, whatever the hell that was. And ones in which Herb tried to assert himself, remind Joel who was boss by giving him some disastrously incorrect instructions. Joel would explain why he couldn’t do what Herb wanted; Herb would smile indulgently, like a Mother Superior correcting an unruly but amusing novice; Joel would do what Herb wanted.

Herb had not interrupted Joel’s lunch to present him with a meritorious service award. They were going to have the other kind of conversation.

“I just had lunch with Randy Craven,” Herb said.

“Oh, yeah?” An old friend, with the Commerce Committee for years, then … Joel couldn’t remember where he’d wound up. “What’s he doing now?”

“He’s with Hygeia.”

“Right,” Joel said. A pharmaceutical company. Where else? “So where’d he take you?”

“Le Dome. Oh, uh, he didn’t
take
me,” Herb lied. Technically, he and Joel were subject to the same ethics rules as staffers: they weren’t supposed to accept fancy lunches from people like Randy Craven. But no one cared very much, because they weren’t in a position to exercise much influence. For the same reason, they were rarely taken to lunch.

“What did he want?”

“He didn’t want anything, we were just schmoozing. The child health plan, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, that. Are the drug companies still opposing it?”

“I didn’t know they ever were,” Herb said. “Randy seemed to be all in favor of it.”

“I guess they changed.”

“Why would they be against it? Everybody thinks it’s a good idea to cover children.”

“Right.”

Some Marines ran by. One of the miracles of that neighborhood: the ceremonial platoons—from the barracks near Andrew’s house, down on Eighth Street—running toward the Mall. Ten or fifteen at a time, loping by in nothing but red shorts, their brown torsos gleaming with sweat. Maybe all the congressmen who picked cute staffers weren’t gay, but surely the commandant at Parris Island or wherever, who selected these matchless beauties unerringly for the honor guard …

Joel tore himself away from this spectacle and found that Herb was staring at him. Of course Herb knew he was gay, even used to ask sometimes how Sam was—didn’t ask any more, so someone must have clued him in. What did Herb think about, as he watched Joel watch Marines? What was it like to be Herb, to sit on the wall and be presented with that sudden vista of beauty, red shorts and brown bodies flashing by like a gift from heaven, and be entirely unmoved? Like being color-blind, Joel thought, or unable to smell: going through a lifetime oblivious to a whole dimension of the world.

“Randy did mention this one thing,” Herb said. “He thought
you might be doing some more work on the AIDS bill. The Harris thing.”

“Uh-huh,” Joel said, warily. Melanie had called him that very morning, asking if he had any numbers on how many people were having unsafe sex. Just that morning, and Randy Craven already knew about it. Sometimes Joel thought these guys were telepathic. He knew they were merely networked and not psychic; but this was in its way even more wonderful, to be so firmly and manifoldly linked to the world. At the center of a web, attuned to the tremor of every distant event. While Joel didn’t even know what was happening in his own bedroom.

“What are you doing on it?” Herb said.

“Well, you know, the budget people keep telling them it doesn’t save any money, because there’s no way of enforcing it. There’s no way of knowing who did something high-risk. So now Melanie’s trying to persuade them that the rule will have a deterrent effect.”

“You mean …”

“People won’t have unsafe sex because they’ll be afraid they won’t get Medicare later.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that makes sense.”

Maybe it made sense to Herb. Joel had some trouble picturing it: two guys hopping into the sack, one of them abruptly sitting up, shaking off the trance induced by some horse tranquilizer, and saying, “Oh, we better be careful. Remember our health insurance!”

Joel went on: “So anyway, she needs some estimate of how many people are doing high-risk things now. And then she has to say that some number of them will stop doing it, and then they won’t get sick, and then they won’t need Medicare, and we’ll save all this money.”

“I see. Are you getting her what she needs?”

“I haven’t … you know, I’ve been working on a couple other things. So I was going to look into it next week some time.” Or next lifetime, since Joel really hadn’t the slightest idea where
he would get an estimate of how many demented faggots were barebacking. That was the word Melanie had used; Joel had never heard it before. He had been a little shocked to hear, over the phone, little Melanie casually tossing out this crudely self-explanatory neologism.

“Randy thought he might be able to help you,” Herb said.

“What?”

“He said he thought you needed some numbers and he might have some.”

“Why would a drug company want to help with the Harris bill?”

“They’re supporting it,” Herb said. “You didn’t know that?” Herb straightened the ends of his bow tie; he was plainly delighted to know something Joel didn’t. “You must have seen their ads.”

“What ads?”

“The ones with that old lady who frets about losing her Medicare.”

“Wait,” Joel said. “Citizens for Personal Responsibility is the drug companies?”

“Who did you think they were?” As if Herb had known who they were before Randy Craven evidently blurted it out at lunch.

“Oh, I thought it was probably them,” Joel said. “I just wasn’t sure.” He tried to imagine what possible reason they would have for pushing a bill that had no effect on them at all. Medicare didn’t even cover drugs, there wasn’t any reason they should have cared one way or another.

Joel couldn’t figure it out. He could preen himself on his
access:
the badge that hung from a chain around his neck, that let him wander the secret hallways of the Capitol, that admitted him to closed hearing rooms while reporters and lobbyists milled around in the corridor, yearning to be inside. Like the other members of his fraternity, he wore the badge in his shirt pocket: that was how they could tell one another, the chains
running around their necks and into their shirt pockets. But he was still a spectator, watching the intricate movements of the mechanical figures called members and staffers and lobbyists without, very often, getting a glimpse of the hidden clockworks that drove them.

Herb said, “You ought to call Randy this afternoon and get his numbers.”

“Herb, I— You know, I guess Randy can make up numbers. But that doesn’t mean I can just supply them as if they were real. I can’t just take numbers from him and put OLA’s name on them.”

“Well, you can qualify them.” Meaning Joel could send Melanie a table with a long footnote explaining why the numbers were garbage. Then she could reproduce the table without the footnote.

Joel wanted to say: you get the fancy lunch at Le Dome, and I’m the one who has to spread his legs? He said, “I’ll see what he’s got.”

“Good. Don’t forget the staff meeting at two.”

One of the astoundingly brazen squirrels from the Capitol grounds—the kind that would saunter right up to you with a gimme-your-goddamn-lunch expression—was loitering on the wall next to Joel. Joel had finished his kung pao chicken, so his salad was down to a few shreds of actual greenery. He surrendered it.

He had been thinking something important before Herb came. Oh: that he was, in fact, not at all dismayed by the picture of Michael rifling through his wallet. What was he discovering? Some sort of pathetic fifties thing, the John secretly pleased that the rough trade has robbed him, savoring the tingle of danger? No, something more elusive.

He thought back to those abortive romances he had had in the years before Sam. What is he really like, what does he think of me, when will one of us do something so profoundly uncool
that it kills it, and which one of us will do it this time? You couldn’t be yourself, you tried to be finer than you were—wittier, better dressed, hotter in bed than you really were—you tried not to do anything you wouldn’t want the other guy to do. Even after fifteen years, years in which he and Sam had pretty much uncovered each other’s most appalling traits—he couldn’t ever just be, he had to try to be better than he was. Because it was a mystery why Sam was there, he didn’t really think anyone could just love him. And he had been right, hadn’t he? He hadn’t, in the end, been good enough.