Man About Town: A Novel (29 page)

“What? Oh, nothing.”

“Did you want to state your business?”

Joel did not want to state his business. “I came to— I came to ask you something about Simms of Santa Fe.”

Siperstein dropped the hose, turned and began walking away. He stopped after a few feet, but did not face Joel. “You’re the guy on the phone. I told you, I don’t want to talk about that model. I don’t know anything about him.”

“I’m not the guy on the phone. I’m his … he was just helping me. It’s real important that I find that … model.” Joel could barely shape the word. He had never thought of the boy as a model. How silly, a kid looking at a hired model in an ad and
making up stories about how he came to be there. “Anything at all you could tell me.”

“It’s important why?”

“I … I can’t really explain it.”

“Ah.” He turned around, squinted at Joel through the yellow lenses. “Come around back, I need to sit.”

Around back were three huge Miesian pavilions of bronze and glass, forming a U the base of which was the blank wall out front. In the center, a slate terrace, from which a vaguely Asian garden, with artfully placed cypresses and stone lanterns, sloped down to a pool built to look like a natural pond. Beyond the pool, the green lawn on which Joel’s strapping sons would have thrown the lacrosse ball back and forth, lazily. Leonard Siperstein and Joel Lingeman sat on matching teak chairs on the terrace of Joel’s dream house. Joel’s chair faced the center pavilion; behind the expanse of glass was a nine-foot Steinway.

Siperstein searched in the pocket of his commodious shorts and brought forth a half-smoked cigar and a book of matches. He lit the cigar, dropped the match on the slate terrace. “I can’t offer you a cigar,” he says. “This is it till my wife comes back with the car.”

“That’s okay,” Joel said. “I’ve got cigarettes.”

“You shouldn’t smoke cigarettes.”

“No.” So he didn’t.

Siperstein looked up in the sky and began. “I wasn’t in swimwear. We made riding outfits, catalog business mostly. A lot of Western goods. You know, for wearing at the dude ranch. That’s where the name came from; I didn’t figure I’d sell a lot of riding outfits if I was Siperstein of Baltimore. So I rented this box in Santa Fe, and I contracted with a distributor out there to take phone orders. You know, so it would be a Santa Fe phone number. We advertised in
Town and Country,
sometimes
Holiday.
A very specialized business, outfitting debutantes with big tushes who rode horses. But there’s a lot of those, or there was.

“So one day my brother-in-law Bernie comes to me and says he’s bought an odd lot of swimming suits. In some bankruptcy. A terrific businessman, Bernie, he can’t figure out that if a concern goes into
chapter 7
maybe their goods were a little hard to move. Bernie was crazy, he got into one stupid deal after another, I must have had to bail him out a hundred times. Anyway, Bernie has a whole goddamn warehouse full of these swimming suits, he brings one to show me. It’s a little schmatte, like skimpy underwear with a stripe down the side. ‘See the stripe?’ he tells me. The moron. He thinks I’m going to buy his swimming suits. So I tell him to go to hell, but my wife nudges and nudges, and-finally I say I’ll handle them on contingency. If they move, I’ll pay him; if they don’t, I won’t.

“I talk to my agency, we agree that this garment ain’t for the
Town and Country
set. They say we should try
man about town
and, for some reason,
Opera News.
So we take this little ad, just one time, and we sell a lot of suits. Do we ever sell a lot of swimming suits. And at six ninety-nine a pop. Bernie’s strutting around like he’s Bernard Baruch instead of Bernard Schlemiel. I tell him we need more suits and he says, well, the guy’s bankrupt, there are no more suits. I have to explain to him that this guy was not the last person in the world with a sewing machine, it is possible to make more suits. I’m doing him this favor, I’m going to buy suits from him instead of just going out and finding my own supplier. So he goes off to dig up a supplier but—I don’t remember, I don’t think he ever followed through. And then I shut down just a few months later. So that was that.”

He sat back, puffed on his cigar, looked at Joel as if he had said everything Joel could possibly want to know.

“About the model …” Joel said.

“The model, I don’t know from that model. The agency got him. I guess in New York.”

“What agency, do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” he said, as if Joel had just called
him senile. “Dinkeloo, who could forget a name like Dinkeloo?”

“D-i-n-k-e-1-o-o?”

“That’s right.” He chanted: “Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo.”

“Are they still in business?”

“Beats me.”

Joel recalled that he had a taxi with the meter running. “Listen, I better get going. Thank you so much for your time.”

“What’s your hurry? Your cab pulled away while we were out on the lawn.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll go inside, I’ll call you a cab. Unless you want to wait till my wife comes home, she might take you. Where you got to get?”

“The train station.”

“In Baltimore? Forget it, I don’t think my wife has been downtown since the last department store closed.”

“How about you?”

He shrugged. “There isn’t any Baltimore any more. Just a fancy stadium and a million schwarzes.”

Siperstein stubbed out his cigar on the slate beneath his feet—carefully, so he could light it again. Joel followed him into the house. Siperstein’s tennis shoes squeaked on the travertine floor in the living pavilion. While he called the cab, Joel looked at the Steinway. A couple of strings were broken, no one had played it in years. Maybe no one had ever played it, it was just the right thing to have in front of the plate glass window.

“Probably twenty minutes or so,” Siperstein said. “We can wait in here, they’ll honk.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m sorry I don’t know anything about that boy. Except that he sure sold a lot of swimming suits.”

“Did he?”

“My distributor, his phone just rang off the hook. Orders, and also …” He looked away from Joel for a second. “Also a lot of people who wanted to know where to find him.”

“Oh.”

Siperstein snorted. “There was this one guy, my distributor told me, he wanted the suit the boy was wearing. So my distributor says, you mean same size, same color? No, he wanted the actual suit, the particular suit that boy was wearing in the picture.”

“Uh-huh.” Joel felt himself blushing, for himself and all of his kind.

“So I say to my distributor, you get any more calls like that, tell him ‘Yes, sir,’ send him a suit and charge the schmuck fifty bucks.”

“Uh-huh,” Joel said. “Look, you’ve been real helpful. I guess I better wait outside.”

“I’ll go with you, finish my cigar. God forbid I should smoke a cigar in my own house.” He smiled. “So some people fall in love with a picture, what do I care? I myself had a terrific crush on Myrna Loy.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I don’t think I ever tried to buy any of her garments. Or went looking for her. She was just a picture.”

Joel followed him back out, he lit his cigar. Now Joel did have a cigarette.

“Maybe we better wait out front,” Siperstein said. “We might not hear the cab back here.”

As they walked around the house, Siperstein suddenly put his arm around Joel’s shoulder. “So, uh …”

“Joel.”

“Joel, you’re from where?”

“I grew up outside Philadelphia.”

“Your parents are still there?”

“No. I mean …”

Siperstein squeezed Joel’s shoulder in silent acknowledgment of his orphanhood. “Did they know about you?”

“About— Oh. My mother did.”

“My son was a gay person. My wife—his mother, my first
wife—she didn’t know. Or maybe she knew and didn’t tell me, I sure didn’t know. Just that I wanted him to go into the business and he wouldn’t, he wanted to go to New York. He couldn’t stay in Baltimore, he had to go to New York. So I fixed him up with a job at Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo and then I shut down. It broke my heart, he couldn’t stay and he couldn’t tell me why. I never figured it out, not until he came down with this AIDS.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you have the AIDS?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s good.” They were in front of the house now. “So anyway, yes, they are.”

“Sir?”

“Still in business. Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo. I forget where, Lexington Avenue I think.”

The cab appeared. Siperstein père took his arm off Joel’s shoulder. “Thank you,” Joel said.

“I hope you find …” Perhaps Siperstein started to say he hoped Joel found the boy. He studied the end of his cigar. “I hope you find your way back okay.”

Like and-Son Siperstein, Joel hadn’t gone into the family business, having for some reason no passion for urology. And he hadn’t gone into the family-business, the lifelong enterprise of raising Lingemans so there could be more Lingemans. The cycle of generation was broken: and-Son and Joel would pass nothing on. As their fathers had passed nothing on to them.

Unfair. Siperstein had tried to pass something on; and-Son had declined. Maybe it was the same way with Joel and his father. I can’t, I won’t: it must have seemed to Joels father that Joel never said anything else. Over the years refusing every companionable, manly diversion his father proposed: camping, sailing, skiing. Joel preferred not to.

Joel tended, thinking about his father, to recall the few
occasions when the man hollered at him. But mostly in those years the poor guy must just have looked at Joel quietly—hurt, confused, at last resigned. Joel wasn’t ever going to be what he wanted. Not even wanted, just expected; when he heard the words “It’s a boy,” he must have had an automatic vision of what lay ahead for the two of them. How could he have known that those words predicted nothing about his son except that the kid would pee standing up?

In the last couple of years before he died, he and Joel would play pinochle when Joel visited for Sunday dinner. Then Joel would go home and change for the bars. Once they were sitting on the couch together, watching something on TV while Joel’s mother cooked. His father put an arm around him. Tentatively, but with clear premeditation. Joel didn’t squirm away, just let the arm rest on his shoulder. Until his father coughed and removed it.

All the refusals. He had spent his life saying no, like a cross baby, even to what was good for him. No, you don’t understand, I am special, I am different, my life isn’t anything like yours. Joel’s life was a spectacular drama that had culminated in a heroic quest for a swimwear model.

Why should it have bothered Joel so much to learn that thirty years ago some queen had tried to buy those lo-rise trunks, the very ones the boy had worn? Like the Shroud of Turin. So he could bury his face in them while he jerked off.

“Simms of Santa Fe. How can I help you?”

“Hello, I … uh … I saw your ad in
man about town
and I … I want to order the swim trunks.”

“Uh-huh. Name?”

Siperstein’s distributor got the particulars, wrote up the C.O.D. order. “You should have that in a week, ten days,” he said.

“Great. Oh, I meant to ask. The guy in the ad looks exactly like this buddy I went to high school with. I wondered—I’ve
kind of lost touch with this guy—I wonder if you know how I might get hold of him?”

So many of them. Call after call. Until:

“Size?”

“Um … I wonder … what size do you think the guy in the ad is wearing?”

“I don’t know,” the distributor said. “I’d guess maybe a medium.”

“Okay. ‘Cause you see, I’m just about the same built as that guy, so that’s what would fit me.”

“Fine. Medium. Color?”

“As a matter of fact, you know, if you … if you happened to have the pair the guy was wearing, I’m sure that would …” The caller’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Aqua. I want the aqua.”

How could Joel have supposed that he was the only one captivated by that picture? Obviously the ad had been targeted at gay men. The model—the boy was an anonymous model—had been carefully selected by Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo, because they figured they weren’t just selling swim wear. The ad had been targeted at grown-up homosexuals who knew exactly what they wanted and had $6.99 to throw away, plus 50
shipping. One confused boy just happened to be caught in the crossfire, as a bystander is hit in a drive-by shooting.

So what? Was a sunset any less beautiful because a lot of people enjoyed looking at it? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Joel and Sam had been to Key West once, and had gone one evening to the pier where a crowd gathered to watch the sun sink into the Gulf. There were vendors selling jewelry and ice cream, clowns, a guy playing the trumpet. The sun went down on schedule, gorgeous as the guidebook promised. The tourists clapped. Joel and Sam, abashed, hurried down to La-Te-Da for the last of tea dance. The sun was the sun, billions of people looked at it every day. You had to have a mighty high opinion
of yourself to think you saw anything other people couldn’t see, felt anything other people couldn’t feel.

To admit that other men might have felt as he did about that picture was pretty much the same as admitting that he felt
no more
than they did. That he might always have wanted nothing more than to bury his face in the crotch of those lo-rise trunks, sniffing for any trace of the boy who had worn them. Some religious experience.