Man About Town: A Novel (22 page)

Joel had never liked children much. Well, he liked them okay until they were two or three and could begin to articulate their world views; after that he would have been happy if somebody froze them and thawed them out when they were hot eighteen-year-olds. He understood in the abstract that they mattered, that it was important to school them and make sure
they got their shots and their Ritalin so they could grow up to be productive adults and keep the GDP humming along so maybe there would be a chance Joel could get his Social Security. He just didn’t want to be anywhere near them. The most welcoming and cheering sign an establishment could have on its door was No Strollers.

It was fortunate, then, that he had never risen to those few occasions that might inadvertently have culminated in progeny. Nonetheless, he found himself more and more living in a paedocentric universe. Everywhere, he saw family restaurants, family entertainment, family communities. In Congress the word had become almost obligatory. Bills didn’t have names like the Tax Cut for Major Contributors Act or the Pointless Subsidies for Superfluous Farmers Act anymore. Instead, they would have snappy titles like the Fair Shake for Working Families Act or the Family Farmers Emergency Protection Act. Joel would draft report language for some committee, and the staffer would cross out “people” every time it appeared and replace it with “families.”

He knew he shouldn’t take this personally. The word was merely a decorative flourish; only a few demagogues really wielded it like a knife, to divide the world into two classes, families-with-kids and deviants. Mostly the family-family-family was just nostalgia, or whistling in the dark, in an era when the average marriage went stale faster than the wedding cake—certainly faster than his and Sam’s had. Still, whatever people meant by it, Joel got the message almost every waking hour: the whole point of human existence was to have children, make a family, pass your name on.

Maybe it was. Raymond J. (Joe) Harris, Jr., had sired Raymond III, not to mention Jennifer and Scott. Even Ron, before he escaped to Zippers, had dutifully produced the resentful and uncommunicative Ron Junior, who in turn would sooner or later overpopulate the back seat of his SUV. Raising his family, doing the right thing, as that grandmother on the
Citizens for Personal Responsibility ad had so sweetly put it. Something to show for his time on the planet, something to leave behind him besides a great many sweaters or the definitive collection of Deanna Durbin memorabilia. Some reason to have been here.

“Jeez, it’s seven-thirty,” Mullan said.

“Uh-huh. Can I borrow part of your paper?”

“No, look, I gotta go. Senator Flanagan doesn’t care about all this rural shit, why don’t you just tell her everything’s okay with the minority?”

“You know, every dollar they give to a rural hospital comes from an urban hospital.”

“What?” Mullan said.

“The way they do hospital payments is zero-sum. They give to Montana, they have to take from New Jersey.”

“Oh.” Mullan’s eyes widened, possibly with a dawning understanding of how the American system of government worked. “Well, I have to leave anyway. I have to pick up my kids at my mother-in-law’s. Tell her we’ll just have to reschedule.”

“You better tell her that,” Joel said. “I’ve got no place I have to be.”

Almost eight. Everybody would be gone from the Hill Club. Joel decided to stay over on the Senate side and get a bite at one of the joints on Massachusetts Avenue. He wound up at Corcoran’s, the kind of bar that served buffalo wings and margaritas in ice-cream flavors and had junk hanging from the foam rafters—oars, photos of baseball teams with handlebar mustaches, war bond posters. Some queen must have assembled this stuff and sold it to bars by the wall-foot. Possibly the same source supplied the equally predictable bartender, a beefy straight boy in the uniform of pinstripe shirt, khakis, apron. The place wasn’t crowded, but he found a million things to do before serving Joel: made a couple of blender drinks,
rang up a check, changed the channel on the TV from the baseball game on ESPN to the baseball game on ESPN2, served somebody an order of nachos. All this probably took only a minute or two, but Joel felt himself flushing with anger, as if the guy were deliberately ignoring him. He made himself calm down; it wasn’t as if he were going into the DTs. When at last the bartender appeared before him Joel asked very politely for a white wine. The bartender said, “Chardonnay?”

“Do you have anything else?”

“No.”

Then why do you ask, Joel thought. He knew he was going to get his chardonnay from a two-gallon jug, but what did he expect, ordering wine in a prefabricated burger joint?

Actually, there was something he found soothing about places like Corcoran’s, even though—or because—they operated with such utter indifference to his needs. He was about twenty years older than the target customer, he didn’t drink beer, he didn’t care which baseball game was on, as long as it wasn’t so loud that he couldn’t read the copy of
The Nation
he pulled out of his briefcase. No one would cruise him here—or rather, fail to; no one would even talk to him. He was just a faceless middle-aged man who would be having a few drinks and a burger.

After his second wine, he ordered what they called an elephant burger and went back to
The Nation.
Maybe he could be a responsible citizen without finishing yet another article on the International Monetary Fund. Or the next, an inspiring piece about how to mobilize labor and bridge the gap between workers and social activists. He lit a cigarette, sipped his wine, and watched as the bartender mobilized himself enough to bring Joel silverware, ketchup, salt and pepper.

Joel felt kind of sorry for him. Maybe he did okay on tips, but he didn’t have health care, retirement, any of that. If he’d had any brains, he would have joined a union, but he probably didn’t see himself as a worker, more as a kind of performer.
When he got a little older, he wouldn’t be the hunky ex-jock the demographics of this place dictated, he would be a middle-aged bartender. They’d kick him down to the day shift, where he’d mostly bus sandwiches instead of pulling drafts. Or they’d just find some reason to fire him, some larceny they were ready enough to overlook when he was still pulling in the customers.

Joel didn’t feel sorry for him at all, this was all a way of feeling superior to him. Joel’s 401(k) versus the bartender’s muscles. Joel was a member of the New Class, the little privileged crust that spent its days analyzing and communicating and making heaps of money while the mass of men brought the silverware and ketchup. Of course Joel deplored this arrangement—hell, he read
The Nation,
didn’t he?—he knew he shouldn’t be paid outrageous sums to sit around in meetings that never even started, while this sucker brought him ketchup. He didn’t even want to imagine how the people who actually made the ketchup must have lived.

Still, if there was going to be a New Class, he was glad to be in it. Just barely in it, maybe, but he didn’t have to worry for a nanosecond about paying another, for Christ’s sake, dollar fifty to add bacon to the elephant burger. More: he was glad that he was in the New Class and the bartender wasn’t. That the bartender’s goddamn Simms of Santa Fe body was at Joel’s service. As if that made up for anything, as if Joel wouldn’t have given his 401(k) to be that bartender for one instant.

Someone sat down on the stool to Joel’s right. Joel glanced over. It was Senator Harris. Joel stammered, “Hi.” Harris nodded curtly and looked away, fixed his gaze on the bartender to keep Joel from saying more. Of course he had no idea who Joel was; probably he was approached by his share of loonies.

Harris raised a finger, as if that would bring the bartender over. The bartender was busy churning up margaritas. How democratic, that he should ignore a senator as blithely as he did Joel. Except of course he didn’t know it was a senator. Even so deeply inside the Beltway as this, people went about their
business oblivious to the great personages who deigned to walk among them. And if the bartender had recognized Joe Harris, he wouldn’t have been impressed, not half so much as if some relief pitcher had walked in.

Only Joel was impressed. He didn’t stare, he kept his eyes straight ahead and nibbled at his elephant burger, trying not to look like a pig. But he felt a faint glow to his right. As if Joe Harris, a mental midget from a nothing state, gave off light. Why should he have felt Harris’s presence so intensely? Some atavistic reverence for senators that had somehow persisted after years of observing at close hand their deep mediocrity? Or just that faint sexual stirring he had felt at their first encounter, his nearsighted libido somehow mistaking the man for Alex Rivers? Perhaps the two sentiments were not in fact distinguishable.

He ought to have hated the man. Here the guy had introduced a bill whose basic premise was that faggots should die in the streets. Probably he was not unacquainted with whatever shadowy forces financed the Citizens for Personal Responsibility. Harris apparently hated Joel; why couldn’t Joel hate back? Maybe because, after so many years on the Hill, he didn’t connect people with the noxious things they said and did. There were people, and there were issues, and there was no connection at all.

In the minutes before a hearing started, senators would trudge into the room, chat with one another or just take their places at the table. This one was measuring Sweet’n’Lo into his coffee and stirring it with childish concentration; this one was reading his schedule for the afternoon, slowly shaking his head with weariness and dismay; this one was whispering with his kneeling LA, trying to figure out what the hearing was about. Once the hearing began, the one who had been stirring his coffee might say the most poisonous things: he might propose mandatory life sentences for flag burners, or wonder what was so wrong with toxic waste anyway. Still it seemed to
Joel as if the words just came out of the man, as if he were possessed like the little girl in
The Exorcist.
And in a way he was: merely the mouthpiece for the accumulated anger or thoughtless greed of the people who had sent him here. Once Joel had seen a senator stirring his coffee, it was impossible to view him as the embodiment of evil, or even as an independent actor. He was just a schmo trying to get through the long days in a place where nothing good could ever possibly happen.

The bartender came over, finally. Harris barked: “Absolut martini, up, and I’ll see a menu.” The bartender looked at him with mild disdain, strolled away, and began to wash a few glasses in order to illustrate that barking was not an effective motivational tool. Joel peeked at Harris. His face was clenched; it relaxed slowly as, perhaps, he reminded himself that the cosmos was not on his payroll.

Joel wouldn’t have guessed the Absolut martini. Not that he had any idea what people drank in Montana, but it complicated Harris somehow.

“Hey, pal,” Harris said, turning toward Joel. “What is that?”

Joel Was almost too thrilled to speak. “It’s the elephant burger. They also have a donkey burger.”

“Sure. What’s the difference?”

“The elephant burger has blue cheese and the donkey burger has Monterey jack.”

“Uh-huh. And it comes with the fries?”

“Yes, sir.” The “sir” just automatic, but it betrayed that Joel knew who Harris was.

Harris acknowledged this: “Well, I guess I’ll cross party lines and have me a donkey burger.”

Joel smiled vapidly at the little joke. Harris’s martini arrived. “Donkey burger, medium rare,” he said to the bartender. He turned back to Joel and raised his glass. “Thanks, pal.”

Joel was emboldened to say, “I’m Joel Lingeman from OLA. I briefed you a couple months ago. About immigrants and Medicare?”

“Oh. Oh, sure,” Harris said, certainly not recalling him. “That was very helpful, uh …”

“Joel.”

“You’re always, OLA, you’re always very helpful. You know, some of this stuff is pretty complicated; I’m impressed you guys know so much,”

Joel shrugged. “Well, you know, we specialize. You’re the guys who have to know everything.”

Harris nodded, frowning a little to suggest what a burden it was to have to know everything. It was impossible to overtax a senator’s tolerance for sycophancy. “You know, I’ve got a Medicare bill in myself.”

“Yes, sir. I … uh, I helped draft it.”

“Oh, did you?”

“Well, I mean, Melanie drafted it, I just made a few comments.”

“Sure. We appreciate your help.”

“Yes, sir.”

Harris glanced at the open magazine to the left of Joel’s plate, squinted a little. Joel put his arm over it. Probably Harris already suspected that anyone working for OLA was an undercover leftist; he didn’t need to see that Joel was reading
The Nation.

“I was wondering,” Joel said. “What got you interested in that issue?”

“Hm?”

“AIDS and all?”

“Oh. I was just—I read an article somewhere, about how they, you know, the gays, started doing stuff again. This article said they stopped for a while, but then they started again.”

“I guess I heard that,” Joel said. About them, the gays.

“So if they want to kill themselves, fine. But I don’t see why families should have to pay for it.”

If they had been in Harris’s office, Joel would have nodded. But they were in a bar, they were talking to each other like
normal people. “Well, you know, here I am having this glass of wine, and for all I know I might get cirrhosis some day.”

“What? Oh, I see.”

“I mean, I guess we all do some risky things. And they might cost Medicare money sooner or later.”

Harris nodded. “I see what you’re saying. That’s interesting.” Joel was elated and amazed. Maybe Harris really was, as Melanie had said, educable. Joel was about to lead him gently into Lesson Two when his donkey burger came.

“Gosh, look at the size of that thing,” Harris said. Joel wondered if he naturally said “Gosh” or if he monitored himself all the time, even here where no one could hear him. No one who counted.

“Probably full of cholesterol,” Joel said. “Sooner or later Medicare will pay for that.”