Man About Town: A Novel (39 page)

Michael was behind him, waiting. He turned around and said, “This is nice.”

“It’s not like your place.”

“It’s a lot cleaner.”

“Yeah, you’re kind of a slob,” Michael said. loel flushed—a little surge of pleasure at hearing himself characterized by Michael, at being noticed. “But I bet you could be trained.”

Practically a marriage proposal. Another little wave of warmth, overtaken almost instantly by a wintry No, a refusal from somewhere deep inside.

Zero, Michael was zero. A cipher. Not the way a newborn baby is a zero, but the way you can get to zero through subtraction, effacement. Wipe away Trenton, wipe away race, fail to add in Shakespeare or Schubert, and you got this apartment.

So: he was expecting to find an open copy of
Middlemarch?
When he had first walked into Sam’s apartment, he had found stacks of science fiction novels and framed copies of M.C. Escher prints. Tokens of a sensibility that was alien to his own and for which he felt—had never stopped feeling—a certain contempt. He had admired Sam, too, for his calm, his self-possession, his certainty that he was doing the right next thing. But always, also, this contempt—or rather, simple snobbery, about Sam’s various pockets of ignorance, his failure to partake of the deep grounding in Western culture Joel had acquired in the freshman great books course.

This was different, scary somehow. He had never been afraid that, if he spent too much time with Sam, he would find himself one morning reading science-fiction novels. But he could imagine that, if he spent too much time in this apartment, he would slip into the vacuity it represented. A show with no actors in it at all. They would lie together on that bed, the clock radio would digitally flash out the minutes, they would feel each other’s hearts beating in time with it.

Michael was waiting for him to say something. He managed, “Urn. You want to stay here, or … ?”

Michael blinked. The words had just come out, Joel hadn’t understood how cruel they were. Michael had shown him the
enormous courtesy of bringing Joel to this sanctuary where he brought no one, and Joel had as much as said that he couldn’t wait to get out.

Michael said, “I think I’ll just change into what I’m going to wear tomorrow, and then we can go back to your place.”

“No, no, why don’t we stay here?”

Michael didn’t answer. He opened the wardrobe, which held no fewer than five suits and, neatly aligned on hangers, dress shirts beyond reckoning. Michael stood looking at all these garments, as if overwhelmed by the difficulty of selecting just the right ensemble for tomorrow. There were advantages to having just one suit you could still fit into.

Joel ambled over to inspect Michael’s CDs. Patti Labelle, Donna Summer, a scattering of gospel and, bizarrely, one disk of Sousa marches. The framed certificates above the entertainment center were Sales Associate of the Month awards from Hecht’s. These made Joel sad. He turned to find Michael naked, his back to Joel, browsing through a stack of boxer shorts as if even this selection mattered.

His back, his butt, so beautiful. The serious way he pondered his underwear so heartrendingly sweet. The plaid he selected at last so exuberant. Joel watched him step into the shorts, slip them up over his butt; they were like a banner heralding coming days or months of beauty, gaiety. Life.

Joel knew this was all you got. He’d had it with Sam, all those years: contempt and boredom and frustration and, just often enough, something—a word, a pair of boxer shorts … Not even often enough to redeem everything. It wasn’t worth it; it wasn’t as though everything balanced out. It was just all you got. And if he obeyed the impulse he had right now, to bolt out of the apartment and run alone through the scary streets, then he would get nothing.

Michael’s back was still turned to Joel. Was he really thinking so very hard about which shirt to wear, or was he sulking? Was Joel in for another fifteen years of sulking? Of
trying to figure out what a stranger wanted, trying to give him what he wanted, if only he’d stop sulking?

Maybe he wasn’t sulking, maybe he was just quiet, contentedly surveying his many fine shirts. Or maybe being with someone who cared enough even to sulk was better than being alone.

It was a couple of weeks before Kristen from the White House called Joel back. If he had multiplied out the number of, say, five-minute calls she could have completed in ten working days—fourteen-hour days, of course, that was what she paid to have the presidential seal on her business card—the product would have been Joel’s exact rank on the health-policy ladder.

“I was wondering about the Harris bill,” Joel said.

Kristen sighed. “What about it?”

“Why, uh … why the Administration is …” He couldn’t think of any neutral way of putting the question. Even to ask it was to suggest a judgment.

He was presuming too much; he didn’t really know Kristen. He had been in meetings with her a few times. Once, during the coffee break at some interminable policy forum, she had asked him something about Medicare physician fees, preventing him from running outside for a cigarette. He couldn’t remember what the question was, or what he had answered, but just by approaching him she had certified that he was on her list of people who might possibly supply a credible and disinterested answer to a question. Which had raised his opinion, not only of himself, but of her. In that brief and impersonal exchange, there had passed between them the understanding that, in a city where most people were stupid or corrupt or both, they were neither. When they went back to their seats, she would occasionally catch his eye, favor him with a small, one-sided smile as a speaker said something especially fatuous and self-serving. When she herself was called
on to explain the Administration’s position, she seemed to aim her presentation straight at Joel, as if wanting his approval.

So he thought he was in a position to ask. Kristen said, “I suppose you don’t want the official answer.”

“Well, I guess I ought to hear the official answer, in case anybody asks. But I …”

“Okay. I hear you’re likely to get involved again anyway.”

“I am?”

“You’ll probably be getting a call from that guy on Flanagan’s staff.”

“Mullan?”

“Right, Mullan.” She said the name wearily, as if lately she had been seeing too much of Mullan. “Anyway, you know that break we’re proposing for the pharmaceutical companies?”

“Oh, the … uh, tax credits for biotechnology innovation zones?”

“Right. Well, that has to be paid for. We have to find some offsetting savings.”

“And the Harris bill is it?”

“If we can ever get the scoring up. That’s what Mullan’s working on.”

“I see.” He did see. It was pretty elementary: under the budget rules of the time, Congress couldn’t reduce revenues without doing something to reduce spending. If they wanted to give the drug companies a tax cut, they had to find some saving in the same amount. Medicare was the biggest item in the budget; if you needed to find some money it was the obvious place to look. “I see that the credits have to be paid for, but—why is the Administration supporting the credits in the first place? Don’t the pharmaceutical companies have enough?”

Kristen recited: “We feel that biotechnology innovation zones represent an important opportunity to revitalize the economies of our inner cities.”

“Oh.”

There was a silence—during which, perhaps, Kristen considered
whether she owed Joel anything more than that official utterance. Joel was nobody. If she went on, it must have been because she didn’t want even a nobody to draw the obvious inference: that someone from the drug companies had given someone in the White House a bag of money.

“We— Look, I’ve probably said too much already.”

“I won’t tell anybody,” Joel said. “I’m just curious.”

“Okay. You know the drug companies were opposing Kiddie Care.”

“Yeah, I never understood that, either. Why do the drug companies care one way or the other about the child health insurance plan?”

“It’s some complicated pricing thing. Kiddie Care is a public program, they’d have to give it some kind of discounts. And that somehow affects what they can charge other people. There are these formulas, I’ve never figured it all out. I just know the drug companies were against it and now they’re for it.”

“Because you gave them this tax break.”

“That’s it. You know, they’ve got a lot of clout, they could just have killed the kids’ plan. We had to give them something.”

“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Joel said. “You cut Medicare for people with HIV, and that pays for the tax credits, and that keeps the drug companies from killing the child health plan.”

“QED.”

Joel was so pleased to have been granted this little peek at the real world, like someone liberated from Plato’s cave, that it took him a few seconds to work out what this clever transaction added up to. “You’re taking coverage away from sick people so you can cover kids.”

“What?” Kristen said. Not sharply; rather as if the simple equation hadn’t occurred to her. “That’s not …”

“It’s what you’re doing.”

“Huh.” Another silence, while she pondered this. Joel was
already sorry to have said it. Not just because it was unlikely that Kristen would ever return another of his calls. Because she was probably a decent person trying to get something done, trying to do something good in a zero-sum world, where you couldn’t give anything to kids without taking away from somebody else. Robin Hood didn’t have to get elected: else he would never have robbed the rich, or even the middle class, just robbed the poor to feed the poor. In the most prosperous realm the world had ever seen, the titanic budget had only one lifeboat for steerage. There fell to Kristen—who could have taught somewhere, or worked for some foundation, who had instead come to the White House to work overtime saving the world—there fell to her the dreadful daily task of deciding who could get on the boat. If she cried out, “Kids first,” who was he to scorn her?

Kristen said, “You know, the Harris bill doesn’t actually hurt anybody. I mean, it’s prospective, it only applies to people who do unsafe things in the future. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if people changed their behavior and didn’t get sick.”

“I don’t guess,” Joel said. “It’s hard for people to change their behavior.” It had, for example, been impossible for a middle-aged man, just last night, to abstain from behaviors likely to be on the Secretary’s list.

“They always leave us with no place to stand,” Kristen said. “We try to do something for them—the military, job discrimination, whatever—and right in the middle of it they show up on TV dancing naked in the streets.”

“Gay people, you mean.”

“That’s right.” They scarcely knew one another, he thought maybe he should fill her in on this one little detail she had missed about him. He let her go on. “This is the first administration that ever even said the words ‘gay people.’ We’ve done everything we could. And the voters don’t care so much, except the real nuts. The voters can live and let live as long as … as long as nobody reminds them just exactly what gay people
do in bed. As long as nobody rubs that in their faces.”

“Which the ads did.”

“Which the ads did. Look, I’ve got a million other calls to return. Is there anything else you needed?”

“I don’t guess,” loel said. “Oh, what is it Mullan’s going to want?”

“Like I said, they’re still working on trying to score some savings. Everybody thought you might be able to help.”

He might be able to help. This was his job, as much as Kristen’s. And if he didn’t help, it would get done. Congress would get its work done with or without functionaries like Joel. They had managed to pass the Fugitive Slave Act with no staffers at all; they could finish the Harris amendment in their sleep. It didn’t matter if he helped.

He could almost persuade himself. Congress would do whatever it did and Joel wouldn’t be guilty of anything, because he was entirely dispensable. It would all have happened if he had never existed. Of course, the corollary to this splendid rationalization was that it didn’t much matter if Joel was on the planet or not. Didn’t matter to Mullan or Harris, didn’t matter to Sam anymore. Probably didn’t matter much to Michael; if he had never lived, Michael would have found some other old white guy. The planet was crawling with old white guys.

It didn’t matter if he had ever lived. Lived these thirty years while Petras Baranauskas, maybe, rotted in some rice paddy. He could go down to the Mall right now and check it out, visit that black granite scar in the Mall and maybe trace with his fingers the name of Petras Baranauskas. He had been once, years before, been to the wall and cried the way everybody else cried. The way he cried at movies. The waste, the waste, all those young lives thrown away. So they couldn’t, like Joel, throw their own lives away.

He had been spared. He hadn’t gone to Vietnam, he had
—quite undeservedly—evaded AIDS. Evaded children or a dead lover’s demented parents or any other kind of personal responsibility. Until at last he could tell himself that he wouldn’t be responsible if he helped Mullan a little with the Harris amendment.

He would help because he liked having this job, so that he could afford to take Michael to dinner, could afford to keep Bate hunting for a dead man, could afford all the perks and superfluities to which he was entitled as a member of the New Class. And it wasn’t his fault, was it, that society had turned out this way? That everything revolved around the needs of the drug companies and all the other companies, that there weren’t any citizens any more, just shareholders and consumers and a few leftover losers who were clambering to get into the only lifeboat? He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t done anything ever. Just somehow drifted into the world that already favored him, it was too hard to make the other world.

Maybe Petras wasn’t the one who was dead. What was this living he had done, all these years Petras had been hiding or buried? Hearing someone’s heartbeat nearby, or not hearing it, that was all his life had come to. All he had to look forward to was one more night with Michael, maybe one more after that, maybe … Until he was dead. So he might as well have been dead already. The boy who had been, at fourteen, dumbstruck by a vision of the transcendent had been alive. The man he’d turned into, who had settled for the possible, had been dead all this time.