Man About Town: A Novel (6 page)

He should do the briefing at seven instead of two. That way he could postpone as long as possible the hour when he would go home and find Sam either there or not.

He hadn’t slept much. After Sam’s call he had poured himself another scotch, made his turkey burgers. He watched C-SPAN while he ate them. The House was voting on Mr. DiBrezze’s appeal of the ruling of the chair that Mr. Hadley’s amendment was out of order. While the members voted, by sticking a card in a slot as if they were using an ATM, C-SPAN played Vivaldi. They never carried the sound from the floor during a roll call, maybe because the nation didn’t need to hear what the members said to each other as they stood in line to vote, gossiping and nudging one another like schoolkids waiting to get into the cafeteria. In two corners of the screen the tally of the yeas and nays mounted—the vote very close, Joel wondered which side he should be rooting for. Probably some of the members wondered, too. More than once Joel had got a panicky early morning call from a staffer whose member wasn’t sure just what he had voted on the night before.

He finished his second turkey burger, mushing the last couple of bites around on the plate to soak up the puddle of syrup from the baked beans. It was time for a cigarette, except he didn’t want to go all the way downstairs and out into the cold. Then it occurred to him that he might, just once, violate Sam’s rule about smoking in the apartment. Perhaps it would not be the largest transgression committed that evening.

He lit his cigarette and made himself think about Sam. Not that Sam hadn’t been on his mind in the half hour or so since the call. But he hadn’t
thought
anything, had gone through his routine of cooking and eating almost unperturbed, the echo of Sam’s last words just a sort of background hum. Actually,
he couldn’t recall ever having been so upset by something that he couldn’t eat. Or sleep, for that matter: he could just as easily have gone to bed right then. Instead of, dutifully, trying to focus on Sam, on those words.

“I’m not sure if I’m coming home.” A rather intriguing utterance, really, susceptible of any number of interpretations. The “not sure,” first of all. Which could have meant that he hadn’t made up his mind or that his mind wasn’t a player, he was helplessly being carried along and couldn’t predict what might happen next. Then the “coming home”: it cried out for a modifier. Just now, for a while, tonight, ever.

There wasn’t any ashtray, there probably wasn’t one left in the apartment. There used to be ashtrays everywhere. On every table in every restaurant. In the arm of your seat on the plane or the train or the Trailways bus. In college classrooms and conference rooms and theater lobbies and …

He stubbed out his cigarette in the bean juice on his plate. Tonight, probably; Sam wasn’t sure if he was coming home that night.

That is: he had a trick, but he couldn’t be sure yet whether it would be the kind where you found your clothes in the dark and crept out, praying that some cab was still cruising at three in the morning. Or the kind where you lay together until daybreak and then had a rematch. In which case there wasn’t much point in Joel’s waiting up.

He did wait up, even microwaved the coffee Sam had been in too big a hurry to drink that morning. For Joel, having coffee so late in the evening was about as daring as, say, tricking out. But he needed to stay up: Sam would open the door, expecting darkness, and there would be Joel sitting in the living room: quiet, dignified, ready for a calm discussion. He knew he ought to prepare. He needed to adopt a position, formulate a few key talking points on the issue of Sam’s truancy.

Every time he tried to focus on the issue he found himself
instead trying to picture what was happening at that moment: Sam somewhere in the city, with someone. Doing something. Joel couldn’t picture the partner, just Sam, naked, some shadowy figure in his arms. And he couldn’t, really, imagine what they might be doing. The same things Sam and Joel did? Just the same insertions in the same orifices but with a different set of parts? Or something entirely different, something Sam and Joel had never done? There were things Joel wanted to do and could never have done with Sam, things one could do only with a stranger. Perhaps Sam had a list of his own; and he was with a stranger.

At that very moment. In real time, that was the phrase computer people used. What was unreal time? Their last twelve years, probably; Joel thought it had been that long since Sam’s unilateral declaration of monogamy. This was the real time, the hour or so now since Sam’s call, and all those years were the unreal time. Joel had, more sharply, the sensation he had felt—only a few hours ago!—as he had sat with Paul at Zippers. The thisness, the presentness; the clock of his life had been restarted. He had a present tense, a future tense, a future conditional: possibility, uncertainty …

None of which would be very much diminished by a calm discussion between a coffee-enhanced drunk and someone who, if he came home at all, would be about as alert as a lion after the meat course. Joel went to bed, leaving one light on in the living room. Which was more than Sam would have done for him.

He woke up at around three. He didn’t even have to raise his head to look at the glowing numbers on the clock radio. If he woke up in the middle of the night it was always three.

Sam wasn’t in bed, and there wasn’t any light from the bathroom. So Joel figured he must have been snoring: sometimes, when nudges, admonitions, actual rearrangement of Joel’s sleeping body had no effect, Sam would go to the guest room. The first few times he did this, Joel would discover it in the
morning and protest. Sam should make Joel go to the guest room. No, no, Sam would say; it wasn’t Joel’s fault he snored. Meaning that it was. Sam scored points under so many different categories in this argument that Joel lost count. Finally he concluded that
it wasn’t his fault he snored.
This might have been the biggest victory over guilt in his entire adult life. If he woke up and Sam wasn’t there he would just roll over and return to a no-fault sleep.

As he was just about to do when he remembered that Sam hadn’t gone to bed with him, and why. Maybe Sam had come home and gone directly to the guest room, rather than risk waking Joel and having to discuss things. If Joel had been the one, if he’d crept home in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss things either. Not because the discussion would have been so inherently painful: what had happened had happened, they were going to deal with it. But not that night, no; if it had been Joel, he would have gone straight to the guest room and drifted off to sleep. That’s where Sam was, maybe, with the faint scent of what had happened clinging to his body.

Sam hadn’t come home at all. How did Joel know this? Or rather, how would he have known the reverse, what would have told him Sam was in the guest room? After all, Sam didn’t snore. But Joel could feel it: Sam wasn’t in the apartment. He supposed he ought to get up and check, but he couldn’t move.

He picked up the phone to get his last voice-mail message. Except the mechanical voice-mail hostess now intoned that he had two unopened messages. Someone must have called while he was listening to the others.

The first was Melanie again. “Joel, listen, seven o’clock is out, so we’re going to have to do two. Please, please, please get back to me as soon as you can and—” He pushed 3.

“Message deleted,” Ms. Voicemail said. “Press one to hear
your next message, four to return to the main menu, or nine to exit the voice messaging service.”

It would only be Melanie again, unless …

Ms. Voicemail, with her inexhaustible patience, repeated, “Press one to hear your next message, four to—”

He pressed 1, as if hitting a detonator button.

“Hi, I came over to pick up some stuff, and you’re not here. I thought I might catch you before you left for work, but I didn’t. So … I picked up some stuff. Talk to you.”

“Talk to you,” Sam’s customary sign-off, had always been not a promise but a confident prediction, almost a statement of the obvious. Of course they would be talking, they would be talking together until the end of time.

Joel wondered what stuff Sam had picked up. All thirty-eight of his—to Joel—indistinguishable sweaters? The VCR? Joel’s mother’s sterling? They had a lot of stuff. Early on, when they had first moved in together, each of them had his own stuff. It was possible to say this is Sam’s loveseat, these are Joel’s bookshelves. Even: those are Sam’s candlesticks, Joel’s colander, Sam’s screwdriver, Joel’s toilet brush. Since then, though, every household acquisition had been a joint one. The living-room rug might have gone on Sam’s Visa or Joel’s MasterCard, but it was their rug. How would they ever divide such things? With scissors?

A premature question. Surely, Sam meant only that he had come to get fresh clothes, whatever else he needed for the office. They weren’t at the point of flipping a coin for the china.

He called Sam’s office. The receptionist said, “Georgetown Sports Medicine.” Hitting every consonant squarely; Sam had reported how she’d spent half a morning practicing, sitting at the front desk and murmuring the words, oblivious to the stares from the wounded gladiators in the waiting room. Pretty, they must have thought, but not much of a conversationalist.

“Hi,” Joel said. “I want to make an appointment.”

“What is your name?”

“Um … Joe Harris.” The senator’s name was the first that came to his mind. An errant choice, but there wasn’t much chance the receptionist knew there was a Senator Joe Harris. Possibly she didn’t know there were senators.

There was a long pause while she called his name up on her terminal or, rather, failed to. “You’re a new patient?” she asked. Sounding a little irritated, perhaps because new patients involved work, challenging tasks like entering their address and phone number.

“Yes.”

“Who referred you?”

“Doctor … uh … Jung.”

“Doctor Young?”

“Right.”

“And when did you want to come in?”

“I was hoping maybe Tuesday evening.”

“Evening? Tuesday evening?”

“Right.”

“We don’t have any evening hours. What about next Friday at—”

“Never mind,” Joel said. “Uh … bye-bye.”

Joel played solitaire on his computer for the rest of the morning. Occasionally a staffer would call and ask him to explain Medicare and aliens. It was amazing how fast a silly proposal could become the issue of the day; another couple of days and no one would even remember it. After about the third call he had developed a canned recitation about the matter, one he could deliver without even ceasing to play solitaire. “What’s that clicking noise?” one staffer asked. Joel shifted a little in his seat, so the mouthpiece of the phone would be a little farther from the mouse. “Beats me,” he said, as he resumed clicking at the cards on the screen.

The nice thing about solitaire was that, while it required no
intellection, it took just enough attention that you couldn’t think coherently about anything else. He had a vague sensation of indignation and loss, that something terrible had happened, but he couldn’t focus on it, it was all less immediate than the present task of putting the black eight on the red nine.

When the computer said that he had lost $10,000 at solitaire, he took this as a sign to go and get lunch. What he really wanted to do was go to one of the darker bars on Pennsylvania Avenue and have about five beers and an enormous non-turkey cheeseburger. But he had the briefing with Harris at two. While he could probably have met any intellectual challenge Joe Harris could throw at him if he were comatose, he couldn’t stagger into a senator’s office smelling like a frat boy on a Sunday morning. So he went to Le Dôme, a costly bistro that used to be jammed with lobbyists and their prey. The lobbyist’s menu showed prices; the member’s did not.

Today the place was practically empty. The rules had changed during one of Congress’s occasional ethical seizures: members and staffers couldn’t accept a lunch that cost more than a McDonald’s happy meal. Possibly the committee that set a five-dollar limit hadn’t meant to suggest that a member’s soul could be had for five and a quarter. Anyway, Le Dome was on its last legs. Few staffers, and no members, would reach into their own wallets for a thirty-five-dollar lunch. Joel was shown to the best two-top, the one that used to be Rostenkowski’s, by the window with its view of the eponymous dome.

He sipped a single, prudent glass of merlot, looked out at the Capitol, and let himself think everything from which solitaire had distracted him.

Two months, closer to three: almost three months since Sam had announced his new evening duty. Just told Joel about it, matter-of-fact. Yes, now that Joel looked back, Sam hadn’t been especially aggrieved, had made no show of dismay that two nights a week would be ruined.

So he had been seeing his new friend for three months. And
hadn’t just stolen moments with him: had built him into his schedule. As on the calendar on Joel’s computer you could make an appointment recurring. Every Tuesday and Thursday, 6–9:30: go and fuck with whoever. Once you’d done that, if you scrolled down you could see the same appointment months ahead, years. Unless you set an end date, it would go on as far into the future as the computer could see.

Sam had also, of course, built into his schedule the recurring lie. Not a complicated one. He came home with perfect regularity, and the most Joel would ask him when he got home was, “How was work?” The most he’d answer was, “Okay.” He would look tired. Sometimes his hair would be damp. Joel would imagine he must have run water through it before leaving the office, because Sam was the kind of guy who had to look perfect before he’d step outside and hail a cab.

Not a demanding arrangement at all: Sam could have kept it up indefinitely. He and … whoever, they would have had to be careful where they went, but not very. Joel’s Washington was a very small town, there were whole quadrants he never penetrated. And of course they had to part at nine-thirty; Sam had faithfully observed this rule. Maybe it was the other guy’s rule. But Joel fancied it was Sam’s—Sam had set the boundaries on his own adventure, and had for almost three months gotten up from the bed, showered, come home to Joel.