Man About Town: A Novel (5 page)

“A few years.”

“That’s nice.”

“Listen,” Joel said. “I want to help you out.” He took out his wallet.

“No, jeez,” Paul said.

“I want to.” There were two twenties. He pulled one out, because he needed the other for the Safeway. He pulled the other out; he could go to the bank machine.

Paul didn’t protest again. Joel gave him the forty. While with one hand he pocketed the bills he put the other hand on Joel’s shoulder in silent gratitude, then their faces were so close, then they kissed. The guy pulled Joel closer, their tongues met, jousted for … how long? Long enough for Joel to think, we’d better stop. Long enough after that for Joel to wonder how he was going to get through life, the rest of his mostly wonderful life with Sam, and never feel this again.

Joel pulled away. Paul smiled, a little one-sidedly—as if to say, you liked that, didn’t you?

“I better get home,” Joel said.

“Okay. I might stay here and have a couple more drinks.”

Instead of hurrying out and getting something to eat, he who hadn’t eaten all day. So that part wasn’t true. He was going to stay at Zippers and look for another Joel. So he could be with someone, or so he could score another forty, or both. There would never be any way of knowing.

There was still a chance he could beat Sam home. He went to the nearest bank machine—not his own, that would have meant a detour of a couple of blocks. When the monitor declared that he would be charged a fee and asked if he wished to proceed he punched the YES button, feeling like one of those big spenders in the movies who lights a cigar with a fiver. A buck for this bank and a buck for his own, just so he could save five minutes. Not twenty feet away, bedded down on newspapers in a doorway, was a guy who could have used two bucks.

As he hurried down Q Street to the Safeway, Joel saw everything. He saw the pictures on the walls of living rooms with
uncurtained windows, and the fireplaces and the bookshelves. He saw the parked cars, each radiantly distinct under the streetlights, each with a Chinese take-out menu tenderly placed under its left windshield wiper. He saw the young couple who passed him without, of course, seeing him: but he saw them, heads lowered in earnest conversation, one chuckling now at a joke Joel couldn’t hear.

He couldn’t remember when he had felt so alive. As if, all these years, he had been under a spell that could be broken only by a forty-dollar kiss. He wasn’t too exhilarated to remember that the forty dollars had preceded the kiss. But he didn’t forget the kiss either. Something had happened. Not a tryst. Not even the ugly little ego boost he had planned on—just the opposite, really. But even the opposite was something after so long. Time had started again.

In the Safeway he got ground turkey, imitation cheese slices made from some petroleum byproduct, hamburger buns, and a can of baked beans. A little Independence Day picnic, but not too unhealthy. When he cooked real food—a couple of nice lamb shanks, say, or just once last year a duck—Sam would act as if Joel were injecting fat into his arteries with a hypodermic needle. He would clean his plate, but sullenly. Tonight he would have nothing to reproach Joel for. Not if he knew everything. Just a kiss, people kissed all the time.

Maybe Joel would even tell Sam about it. Leaving out the Latham and the forty dollars. Just that a cute guy had been trying to pick him up and he hadn’t gone. Yes, a good story to tell, illustrating Joel’s fidelity and at the same time reminding Sam that he shouldn’t take Joel for granted. Or no, not a good story, as it would have to begin with some recitation of just what Joel had been doing in Zippers.

Joel looked over at the guy waiting in the next check-out line. Maybe a couple years younger than Joel, too old anyway to be wearing a baseball cap, but still kind of cute. The guy looked back only for a second before he turned away and
scanned the tabloids lined up next to the register. Then he turned toward Joel again. Joel at once focused on the tabloids in his own aisle.

He didn’t know anything about the people in the tabloids. He saw the same names in the headlines every time he went to the store, but—except for Princess Di, about whom each paper carried a weekly shocker—he had no idea who they were or why they were celebrated. Who was Kathie Lee, and why was she always furious? And Demi: he had a vague idea she was married to somebody famous, but to whom? He might as well have been in the magazine store up on Connecticut reading the headlines on the foreign newspapers. The tabloids were from a country he didn’t live in. Of course, their readers would have been just as baffled if they were to come across
The Hill
or the
Congressional Weekly,
with their captivating accounts of the goings-on at the Commerce Committee. People Joel thought of as suns and moons were invisible to the rest of the country. So which was the real country, or was there no paper about the real country?

The guy in the next aisle had paid, gathered up his bags; on his way to the door, he gave Joel one last glance, then he was gone. Would he linger outside?

The woman ahead of Joel in line was paying with food stamps. This always took forever: the change from her big food stamp, with which she had purchased a cornucopia of junk food, had to be in the form of lesser food stamps, lest this parasite somehow get her hands on actual currency. Joel got agitated—the guy in the baseball cap would be gone—then he took a couple of breaths. Obviously he didn’t mean to do anything with the guy in the baseball cap; he was categorically going straight home and making turkey burgers.

It was enough that the guy had looked at him three times. Just because someone who was probably hustling had lit on him at Zippers didn’t mean that he was of interest only to hustlers. Any more than being bitten by a mosquito meant
that you were put on earth to be mosquito chow.

This formulation was less reassuring than he had meant it to be. What else was he on earth for?

Sam wasn’t home yet, thank God. Joel could have just one more drink. He could cook dinner without Sam leaning over the damn counter scrutinizing everything: that’s cooking too fast; you’ll burn it; jeez, you shouldn’t cook when you’ve been …

Sam wasn’t home, Joel hadn’t been caught. If he had opened the door and found Sam sitting there, waiting, then he would somehow have been guilty, as much as if Sam had found him with his pants down at the Hotel Latham. Not that Sam would have suspected anything; Joel could just have said he had lingered too long at the Hill Club and Sam would have believed him. But this way he didn’t even have to tell a lie. His trivial transgression had not occurred at all. He was exactly where he was supposed to be, and nothing had happened at all.

He got his drink and turned on the radio. It took a second to warm up, then hip-hop exploded from it—as if he were a passenger in one of those cars that goes by late at night, its stereo turned so high that you hear the bass from blocks away, thudding toward you like Godzilla. He almost spilled his drink before he recovered enough to change to the classics station. Some pianist—probably one of those interchangeable young Russian athletes—was in the middle of Liszt’s
Funérailles.
He had always thought of that as violent music; after the hip-hop it was about as threatening as the tinkling of a music box.

Not hip-hop, maybe, maybe it was house music. Joel had never been too clear on which was which. Sam always kept up. He was a couple of years older than Joel, approaching fifty asymptotically, but he knew what the kids were listening to. Sometimes Joel thought this was kind of pathetic, the way the forty-year-old in the grocery store with the baseball cap was kind of pathetic. Other times Joel wondered if he himself was prematurely dead.

The pianist was doing the rumbling triplet figure, all octaves, in the middle section with about as much feeling as if he were doing a set of chin-ups. It was the only hard part of
Funérailles.
Joel had always promised himself that some day he would practice those few bars for an hour or two, he was sure he could get them down. Then he’d be able to play
Funérailles
all the way through. But for whom? Once or twice he had played for Sam. That is, he wasn’t just making noise while Sam did something in the next room; he had sat Sam down and implored him to listen. Then he played badly: the shanghaied audience of one made him as nervous as if he were at Carnegie Hall. At the end Sam went, “Wow, great,” with his patented mixture of affects: the voice warm and enthusiastic, the eyes wandering. He never asked for an encore. When they’d moved to this apartment there hadn’t been room for the piano. Though there was somehow room for Sam’s rusting exercise machine.

Joel had always thought it would be nice to have a lover who would play duets with him. Instead of just making the beast with two backs, they could also have made the creature with four hands. The Schubert Fantasy, the Mozart symphonies. Surely there were couples who did that. And who probably had arguments about who got the top part and who the bottom. Nobody shared everything; he just sometimes wished he and Sam shared a little more. Oh, and Sam probably wished he had a lover who knew the difference between house and hip-hop. But he came home to Joel.

Except tonight he wasn’t home yet, and it was past ten. Where the hell was he? Sam was never this late—or so seldom that, when he was, Joel’s thoughts naturally ran to catastrophe. Maybe he’s had an accident. Maybe he’s dead. Joel didn’t, when these conventional, spousely thoughts came to him, tremble. Instead he found himself imagining how things would be. Dealing with Sam’s family, then with the lawyers. Finding a smaller place he could afford by himself. Maybe quitting his
job, going off to Provincetown, getting a piano again, practicing Liszt or, more probably, drinking himself to death. He could spin out a future without Sam and not focus at all on the words
without Sam.
Just construct sentences in which “Sam” did not appear.

Sam was leaving the office, the yellow flash of a cab, a crowd gathered around him.

Instantly Joel would rebuke himself. This wasn’t the future he wanted. He never thought of leaving Sam. Even when they were fighting and he would list to himself, dared not recite aloud, the thousand ways Sam had destroyed his life, even then he never thought of breaking up. Just once in a while there came, unbidden, these visions of disaster. The call from the airline, the cop at the door. Some act of God that wouldn’t hurt Sam—he never wanted Sam hurt—but simply make Sam disappear, expunge him from the text of Joel’s life. Only when he imagined this, and confronted his own astounding equanimity in the face of it, did he ever wonder if perhaps he really wanted Sam gone.

When Sam would at last arrive—there had been an extra patient, he’d had trouble finding a cab—Joel’s relief and disappointment and contrition would all swell up at once. Joel could never be sure, in this chorus of emotions, which one was singing the lead.

Just now he was contrite, and a little superstitious. He emptied the can of beans into a pan. He shaped the ground turkey into four patties, meticulously evening them out, so that no one could complain about getting the smaller portion. As if these simple acts would propitiate some deity, speed Sam home.

Sam just had to work late, that was all. When he got home he would be irritable. They would have one of those evenings when unspoken disapproval would color every word Sam said. Every vowel would be a nanosecond shorter than it should have been, as if he were saving his breath for some encyclopedic denunciation that was coming, any night now.

Except, of course, it wasn’t coming. People didn’t stay together fifteen years without learning a simple rule: complain about what he’s doing right this instant and maybe he’ll stop doing it. Complain about what he did last week and he won’t even remember having done it.

The phone rang. Joel could tell somehow, from the ring, that it was Sam, not the police or some other harbinger of Sam’s demise. He took a sip of his drink, let the phone ring again, at last picked it up with, perhaps, more than his usual ambivalence.

“Hello.”

“Hi.” Sam’s voice was tired, yes, irritated, yes. They’d been together so long; how much Joel could hear in a single syllable.

“Where are you?” Joel said.

“With a friend.”

An odd locution; he didn’t have any friends Joel didn’t know. Joel said, “Who?”

“Just a friend.”

“Well, are you leaving soon? Dinner’s practically on the table.” This was true. Turkey burgers were practically on the table if you’d bought the turkey.

“Joel,” Sam said. Any sentence that started with “Joel” ended in some kind of rebuke. Sam paused long enough for Joel to wonder what he could possibly have done wrong. No, he didn’t wonder; he knew all his transgressions. He only wondered which one Sam was about to point out. “Joel,” Sam said again. “I …” A long pause.

“Yeah?”

Sam said, almost blurted, “I’m not coming home.”

“What?”

“Joel, I’m with this friend and I’m—I’m not sure if I’m coming home.” His voice filled with sorrow and apprehension, as if he were lost. Or as if he had been kidnapped.

When in fact he had escaped.

When Joel got to the office there were already four voice-mail messages. Two were his favorite kind: a forlorn, anonymous sigh followed by a hang-up.

The third identified the sigher: “Joel, this is Melanie, with Senator Harris. I’ve been trying to get you all morning.” It wasn’t even nine. “The senator wants a briefing about aliens and … some other stuff, but mostly about this aliens thing. He’s free at two o’clock. If you can’t do that, he’s got stuff until seven, but he could do it then. Let me know.”

Joel hung up before he could listen to the fourth message. Seven at night, for God’s sake, didn’t these people have a life? Or maybe they did, maybe being a senator—or even a lowly LA—for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, every day, was a life. Maybe this was enviable. Joel’s work was just a scar in his days, and his nights consisted of being not-at-work: happy hour, happy second hour, dinner, trying to read while Sam watched the Sci-Fi network. The whole routine suffused with a numb
dread, as if some part of him never forgot that tomorrow he would be in the office again. Maybe it was better to be in the office every waking hour.