Man About Town: A Novel (17 page)

If he and Richard were going to make it through the next half-hour, Joel would need to say something. Well, a librarian, he could ask who Richard’s favorite writers were. Richard promptly mentioned Anne Rice. Joel said, “Oh, uh-huh,” perhaps failing to conceal his dismay. What a fool he was, now Richard was sure to ask who
his
favorite writers were, and what was he going to say? All he read any more was the
Congressional Record
and the occasional underwear catalogue.

He was spared: their food came. By the time the waiter had done the peppermill thing and the cheese-grater thing Richard had forgotten the subject. He delicately ambushed his pizza with a knife and fork.

Some while later, Richard coughed. Joel wondered how long he had been staring at the pizza boy. “Urn … this is so good,” Joel said, gesturing with his fork at his gummy pasta. “How’s yours.”

“All right.” Richard formed his mouth into a small, mildly off-putting pout. Joel tried to imagine kissing him, and then …

Would he do? As, in the old days, at the bars, when last call came, you stopped grading people, stopped handing out A minuses and C pluses, and shifted to a pass/fail system. Is this one better than sleeping alone?

Joel’s standards had gone up since those days. In all the years with Sam the only people he’d concretely imagined going to bed with were in porn. So the curve on his pass/fail system had skewed sharply. If Richard had popped up on a video, Joel would definitely have hit the fast-forward button. But this wasn’t a video. If Joel was hoping ever again to date someone other than his fist, he’d better relax his standards.

The waiter cleared their plates. No, no dessert. Nor coffee; if Richard had a sip after noon, he’d be up half the night. So he wasn’t, anyway, planning to be up half the night. Joel wanted another drink, but Richard might find it odd to order a cocktail right after dinner. Joel didn’t want him to think there was some kind of problem.

It was only eight o’clock. Still light out. They hadn’t timed this at all well.

Richard was looking steadily at Joel. To avoid his eyes, Joel craned around the room, as if trying to find out where the waiter was with the check.

Richard was looking at Joel and trying to decide. Grading
Joel according to his own pass/fail system. Joel wanted to pass. It was more important, really, than what he thought about Richard. His difficulty in imagining what they could possibly do together, Joel and this … nice man, didn’t matter. He just didn’t want to flunk on the first date of his life.

Richard insisted on paying, the waiter brought their change fast, because the place was filling up and he wanted their table. So they were hurled out onto the sidewalk, in the bright light. They faced each other: two middle-aged men gazing reciprocally at the possible.

No. Joel could see the No gathering in Richard’s throat and, to forestall it, he said, “Well, it was nice meeting you,” and stuck out his hand.

Richard was aghast. He had thought they were going home.

Was it too late for an amendment? Just kidding, my place or yours. It was too late. Already Richard was shaking Joel’s hand and saying, with a cold smile, “Nice meeting you, too.” Then he rushed down the street.

Luckily, Joel was only a block from the video store. Maybe one of those tapes with the cute Latino boys.

The phone rang. Joel ignored it and went on playing solitaire on the office computer. If he didn’t answer after four rings, the system sent the caller to voice mail. Unless he was pretty sure who it was, he always let this happen. He felt guilty, but it was better than picking up and having to deal with whatever surprise was on the other end: a staffer with a self-declared crisis; his boss, Herb; a former lover. You couldn’t pick up and hear people leaving their voice mail. You had to wait until they were finished and the message light on the phone started flashing. Joel would feel, in the minute or two this took, like a deaf man who can’t read lips, as he helplessly watches someone try to tell him something.

The light came on. The message was from Stanley Hirsch,
who covered health stuff for the
Post.
“Mister … uh … Lingeman,” he said, reading from a Rolodex card. “I had a couple of questions about Medicare. I’ll be around here for a half hour or so.”

Not asking, commanding. Who would fail to return a call from the
Post?
Still, it was always flattering to get a call from Stanley Hirsch, to know that one was in his Rolodex of experts. Joel called back right away, and of course got Hirsch’s voice mail. They played tag most of the day. Finally the phone rang just as Joel was turning off his computer and heading out for happy hour. He hesitated: it might be Stanley Hirsch or it might be some staffer with an emergency that would keep Joel there half the evening.

“Joel Lingeman.”

“Yeah, Stanley Hirsch. Listen, you got a minute to talk about this AIDS thing?”

“What AIDS thing?”

“This bill Senator Harris dropped today.” That was the usual word, dropped. Perhaps new bills really were still dropped into some actual container, but the word always made Joel think of a dog, dropping a couple of bills, kicking some leaves over them, moving insouciantly on.

“Oh, so he finally introduced it? I hadn’t heard.” It had been a couple of weeks since Joel had supplied the numbers for the senator’s floor statement. Melanie had been frantic, Harris had to introduce it the very next day, and then it had just vanished. This was the way things worked: matters of great urgency suddenly disappeared, then became urgent again weeks later, as if governed by phases of the moon.

“You knew about it, then,” Hirsch said.

Oops. This was a serious breach: people at OLA weren’t supposed to say what they’d been working on. “No, I… maybe I heard somebody talk about it. What does it do, exactly?”

“It looks like it cuts off Medicaid for people who—”

“Medicaid? Are you sure?”

“Oh, no, right. Medicare, I meant Medicare.”

How could somebody who’d covered health stuff since about the Truman administration be unable to distinguish between Medicare and Medicaid? Joel sometimes wondered if there was a Stanley Hirsch on every beat—he could spot the mistakes in the health stories, but could it be that every story in the papers was equally misinformed?

Hirsch went on: “It cuts off Medicare for people who’ve done something … I guess risky.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what do you think about that?”

“I …” Joel sighed nonpartisanly. “I think it sounds like it might be kind of hard to enforce.”

“Right. But if they could, would this save a lot of money?”

Joel had given Melanie some numbers, but he couldn’t remember them. “I don’t know. Did they put out any numbers?”

“Yeah, their press release says Medicare spends about a billion dollars a year for AIDS.”

“That sounds right.”

“So that’s what they’d save?”

“No. They … oh, we’re on background, right?” He was supposed to say this at the start of the call, he always forgot. If you didn’t say it you could find your name in the paper, along with a misquotation. Herb didn’t like seeing Joel’s name in the paper. Herb’s boss liked it even less.

“Right, sure, background,” Hirsch said dismissively. He had had no intention of making Joel famous.

“Okay. First of all, they’re just guessing what Medicare spends, because doctors’ bills don’t come in with ‘AIDS’ written all over them. And second, there are these offsets.”

“Offsets.”

“Offsets. If you save money in one program, you may wind up spending it somewhere else.” Joel launched—partly as an experiment, to see how many things Hirsch could get wrong
the next morning, partly just showing off—into a discourse peppered with arcana like SSI and spenddown and the FMAP.

Hirsch pretended to take it all in, even made Joel repeat some of it. At the end he said, “So you think maybe they wouldn’t save a billion?”

Joel sighed. “That’s right. I think, with the offsets and the enforcement problems and all, maybe …” Joel’s message light flashed on, someone else had called. “Maybe a hundred million.”

“That’s all?”

“I’m still on background. And, you know, I don’t do these estimates, the budget office does. But I’d bet they score this at about a hundred million.”

“Maybe I should call them.”

“Maybe so.”

“You got a name I can call?”

He gave Hirsch a couple of names at the Congressional Budget Office. They wouldn’t talk to Hirsch even on background.

When he was through with Hirsch, he got his new message. “Hey, Joel, it’s Andrew. From leg counsel?” As if Joel wouldn’t remember. “Listen, I wasn’t up to anything, and’ I thought I’d see if you’d like to have a drink. But it’s … about six-twenty, I guess you’re gone. I’ll catch you again. Enjoy your evening.”

Now it was past six-thirty, Andrew had to be gone. Joel almost didn’t call, thinking that the sound of Andrew’s extension ringing, ringing, would make him even more lonesome than if he didn’t try.

Andrew was already at a table, at the outdoor bistro on Massachusetts Avenue where they might have dinner if they felt like it. He was deeply tanned, when a few weeks ago he’d been as pale as Joel was. His brown hair was bleached almost blond; even his eyebrows had little flecks of red-gold in them.
The sleeves of his crisp white shirt were rolled up; his forearms, sinewy and dark, were also lightly strewn with gold. When Joel got to his table he stood up. As at their last meeting, he smiled hugely and grasped Joel’s shoulder as they shook hands.

“You got some sun,” Joel said, fatuously.

“Yeah, I was off all last week.”

“Where’d you go?”

“My backyard, mostly. I spent a couple days down with Kenyon’s parents, but then I mostly just hung out.”

“Where are they?”

“Florida. You know Silver Haven? It’s on the Gulf Coast.”

“Uh-huh.” Joel didn’t know Silver Haven, but it had to be dreary. Andrew was an angel to go waste part of his vacation visiting these people.

“What have you been up to?”

“Just work,” Joel said. “Oh, Harris put his bill in.”

“I know. Melanie had me make the last changes a couple days ago.”

“Yeah?” Joel was a little hurt that he hadn’t been consulted. Why, to help perfect a nasty little bill that wasn’t going anywhere? Maybe he just didn’t like it that Andrew was already in on something he wasn’t. Last time they’d met, Joel had played the insider. Already the balance between them had minutely shifted.

The waiter came. Andrew ordered a real drink, so Joel could too. No, they weren’t sure yet if they needed to see menus. Joel was sure.

When the waiter had gone, Andrew said, “So how’s your love life?”

Joel was startled. “Um. I— I was dating this guy, a librarian. A nice guy, but …” That just came out. A harmless fib, but he felt awful. Partly because it was crummy to have walked away from Richard and then invoke him. Partly because, if he hadn’t walked away, they might in fact have dated for a while;
he would have had a little something instead of nothing. Mostly because he was already lying, just so Andrew wouldn’t think he was a loser.

What, after all, was wrong with lying? He and Sam wouldn’t have got through fifteen years on sodium Pentothal. But he was in effect saying: if you knew about me you’d think me pathetic and unworthy. I have to be somebody else to be worthy of you, while you can just be your dazzling, deeply tanned self. “We … actually we just saw each other a couple times.” This was only off by one time, better than the higher if indefinite number implied by “dating.”

Andrew nodded understandingly. Joel wondered what he understood. That is: he had formed some picture of things. Whatever image the word “librarian” conjured for him, then that image conjoined with Joel’s in whatever scenario “dating” would mean, and then whatever revisions he adopted when Joel added “a couple of times.” Not that Andrew was sitting there writing a screenplay, just that a few words from Joel must have left him with some fleeting impression. Every word Joel uttered must have made these pictures in other people’s heads; the people who seemed to know him really knew this movie they ran inside their heads and that had about as much relation to his real life as a Hollywood biopic.

“And how’s your love life?” Joel said.

Andrew shrugged. “Still hibernating. But lately I, uh …” He grinned. “I think about it. I mean, I look sometimes and I … think about it.”

Joel smiled, too. “Think about it.”

“Yeah. One-handed.”

“Oh. I take two.”

“Right.”

The waiter came, sans drinks. “Excuse me, is one of you Mr. Crawford?”

“That’s me,” Andrew said.

“There’s a call for you inside.”

“Oh.” He said to Joel, “I’ve got to take this, sorry. I should just be a couple minutes.”

He scurried inside, leaving Joel wondering who he could have given the number to. Andrew wasn’t a surgeon or a deputy assistant secretary; there wasn’t any reason he’d tell people where he was going to be.

Did he think of Joel, now that he was thinking? Enough to have called, anyway. There wasn’t much chance that, when he thought about it with one hand, the vision that came to his mind was of Joel. Still, he’d brought the subject up, all by himself. So it didn’t seem inconceivable that, when he was ready to emerge from his hibernation, he would …

The waiter came with the drinks, finally Joel nursed his, he didn’t want to get too far ahead, and watched the people go by on Massachusetts Avenue. Staffers in their twenties, lawyers in their thirties, a couple guys Joel’s age—with the fanatical parts in their hair that betrayed them as fellows at the mammoth conservative think tank down the street. Those who had worked late were still in their suits or their Elizabeth Dole dresses; others had gone home and changed into the late June evening unisex costume of polo shirt, khaki shorts or the occasional atavistic madras, loafers worn without socks. As if it were 1964. This had to be the whitest few blocks in the city, or at least the whitest east of Rock Creek; Joel never went west of Rock Creek. These people saw only one another and thought they were America. Even the scattering of gay couples who passed by had a Republican look to them. Their legs, between the shorts and the loafers, so white.