Man About Town: A Novel (34 page)

But Michael had either taken the twenty or he hadn’t. If he had, then he was just hustling Joel and they would go on until Michael got tired of it or found some more promising quarry. If he hadn’t taken the twenty, they would go on until Michael got tired of it or found some more promising quarry. Joel would never know which it was: a commercial transaction of necessarily limited duration, or a romance of necessarily limited duration. At the end he would not have to feel that he hadn’t been good enough. He and Michael were just two people coming together for a minute, or maybe for longer: good enough wasn’t part of the equation. Somehow the twenty had factored it out.

Joel felt for a second a wash of calm.

He was a person. A person having an actual experience, in the present tense. One that could not hurt him and that might—if last night was any indication—be kind of pleasant for a while.

He felt this for a second. And then—he couldn’t quell it—he felt the tiniest hope that Michael hadn’t taken the twenty, that they were getting together tonight because Michael actually liked him. He hoped he was good enough.

It was a special bonus day: a second platoon of Marines came running by. Chugging along in twos and threes, then one astounding guy running by himself. Not even breathing hard, just calmly loping toward Joel, his golden perfect abs glistening
with sweat. Joel stared. The guy noticed; possibly Joel’s tongue was hanging out. The Marine looked back at Joel with the perplexed, faintly troubled expression of the Santa Fe boy. He was proud of his body, surely—these guys didn’t pick the most crowded possible route to the Mall because they didn’t want anyone to watch them. He just didn’t want to be watched by Joel. As if it were an incursion somehow, as if Joel were violating him simply by peering at him. When it was just that Joel was here on this planet, and the Marine was, and Joel couldn’t help but look.

When he got back to the office, there was a voice mail from Bate. No information, just, “Call at your earliest convenience.” A day earlier Joel would have been thrilled—not elated, maybe, but excited and anxious. Were they closer, had they hit a dead end? Today he was taken aback. Joel’s life had resumed, he was having an experience in the present tense, and Bate had called to say: remember, just yesterday you were a loony embarked on a manic quest for something you know perfectly well doesn’t exist.

He was too busy for the Santa Fe boy. He needed to call Randy Craven and get the numbers, and then he had a staff meeting, and then he had to hurry home and get dressed for an honest-to-God date with a three-dimensional man. His life had resumed; he was busy.

Joel had the TV on, the Lehrer news hour, while he dressed. He was in the bathroom, looking over Sam’s library of abandoned colognes and wondering if Michael would prefer Wall Street or Feral, when he heard Senator Harris’s voice. He scurried out to look. Yes, there was Harris, on remote from somewhere in Montana, his talking head in a square box on the left side of the screen. In a box on the right side the Secretary of HHS, Charlotte Bergen.

Harris did his three minutes. Grinning—though he knew he should be somber, and modulated his voice appropriately, he couldn’t help grinning because he was on the Lehrer hour. He had found a way into the spotlight, a little technical amendment had raised his head above the pack an inch. If things kept going, he could find himself chatting with Katie Couric. Then trips to New Hampshire, exploratory committees … Secretary Bergen listened gravely. She actually inclined her head toward the margin of her box, as if Harris were sitting next to her.

Harris wound up: he wasn’t attacking responsible homosexuals, he wasn’t sure if they could help the way they were or not. “Jim, this is really about a chosen, self-destructive life style. Let me read you some numbers that have really startled me, and I think will startle the American people. Last year as many as twenty-three percent of homosexual men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four—”

Lehrer cut him off. “Senator, I’m sorry, but I did want to give the Secretary an opportunity …”

Amazing: Joel had given Randy Craven’s spurious numbers to Melanie just that afternoon, and Harris was already spouting them on national TV. Wasn’t Joel important?

Now it was the Secretary’s turn. In that whiskey baritone, so surprising in such a tiny woman, she would explain how awful the Harris bill was, promise that the President would veto it as soon as it hit his desk. She began: “Jim, as you know, one of the themes of this President, this Administration, from the very beginning has been
personal responsibility.”
She uttered that phrase in the mandatory italics. “That’s been the cornerstone of our welfare reform, our work in education and job training, countless policy areas. And we think it’s very important to carry that concept over into health care. That people need to take an active role in maintaining their own well-being: diet, exercise, stopping smoking of course. And possibly there does come a point when people have to begin considering the consequences of their own actions.”

She paused. Now she would bellow, “HOWEVER …”

No, she wasn’t pausing, she had come to a full stop. Lehrer took a couple of seconds to realize this. Then he hurried to fill the dead time. “Madam Secretary, are you—does this mean the Administration is supporting the Harris bill?”

Bergen looked down, swallowed, looked up again, straight into the camera. “We are studying this issue closely,” she said. “We think if there are safeguards to assure that the focus is on behaviors, what people
do
and not who they
are,
then there
may be something we can support.” All this said rather wearily; it was a script she had not written. This was an argument she had lost, overruled by some White House operative or other.

“Senator Harris?” Lehrer said.

Harris was as dumbfounded as Joel was, and not much more gratified: if the Administration went along, the whole story could vanish from the papers overnight. “Well, of course I’m pleased that the Administration is willing to work with the Congress to tackle this very important issue. I’m sure if we sit down together, we can arrive at a solution that’s best for the American taxpayer and the American family. I’m just happy to have been able to play some part in bringing this critical problem to the attention of the American people.”

The Secretary offered the obligatory, “The Senator has filled an important role in bringing this issue to the table, and we look forward to working with him.”

“Thank you, Madam Secretary,” Lehrer said. “Senator Harris.” The segment was over.

Joel could hear the hubbub at the Pledge before he even rounded the corner. Thursday night before Labor Day weekend, the place was packed. Everyone who hadn’t gone away, to Rehoboth Beach or wherever, was here looking for someone who might last through Monday night. The crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk, a sea of men in their twenties and thirties, wearing tank tops and drinking cosmopolitans out of little plastic cups—No Stemware Outside.

Michael had insisted they meet here. Joel had thought Gentry, or even Zippers, but Michael wouldn’t have it. Maybe because they would run into too many of Joel’s predecessors. Joel wasn’t sure if he should try to shove his way up to the bar for a drink or if he should look for Michael first. The Pledge had three floors: the street-level bar, a lounge upstairs that showed instructional videos, and a cellar bar called Initiation, whose backroom was once famous. Michael could
be anywhere—except, Joel hoped, in the still-extant backroom—or, as Joel was precisely on time, probably hadn’t even arrived yet.

He got his drink, after an epic struggle; what a small thing it was, a little plastic cup of brown liquid, that he should have had to clamor so hard for it. Then he wandered around—down to the cellar, out onto the sidewalk, finally up to the video bar. There was a seat! He grabbed it and watched the movie for a while, a classic from the seventies—he could tell, not just from the grainy film and the bad lighting, but because some of the men had bellies without ridges; others had body hair, or organs that didn’t make Joel think of livestock. And, of course, because none of them had any protection.

The video was, in its way, a snuff movie: these men were killing one another, right in front of the camera. Yet there was a prelapsarian innocence about them. They were utterly unaware that they were—he still could not stomach the word—barebacking. As, of course, Joel had done in those years, just as innocent and unprotected. He was, as always, conscious of the injustice: that he should still be here, unpunished, while they were gone. As always, he had to suppress the thought that this wasn’t unfair at all, because the men on the screen had had a good time in those years and he hadn’t. Then he felt guilty watching them, as if he himself had killed them, just because sometimes he had a nasty thought he couldn’t help. He didn’t want to watch any more.

Halfway down the stairs he ran into Sam. Sam’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak. “Hey,” Joel said.

“What are you doing here?” Sam said, crossly, as if the place were an actual fraternity Joel hadn’t been invited to join.

“Meeting somebody.”

“Really?” Sam could at least have masked his surprise—even if Joel, too, was astonished to be meeting somebody.“Who?”

“A guy I met.”

They were blocking the stairs; crowds had already massed behind each of them, guys above and below who thought true love was to be found on whichever floor they weren’t on. Joel let himself be pushed downstairs. Sam turned and followed him.

“Who is this guy?” Sam said.

“I told you, just somebody I … you know …”

“Oh.” Sam leered encouragingly. As if he were a tennis pro and Joel had just managed to get a ball over the net. “Well, that’s good. What’s he like?”

“He’s …” Of course the very first word anyone would have used to describe Michael was “black.” To withhold it would be as phony as one of those newspaper stories that reads, “The alleged assailant, Leroy X. Washington, was described as six feet tall, with black hair and brown eyes.” Practically shouting what it will not say. Joel did not say it. “He’s … I don’t know, kind of young, nice-looking. He’s in, um, sales.”

“Kind of young. What’s that exactly?”

“I don’t know. A little older than Kevin.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You still seeing Kevin?”

“No. When’s this guy coming?”

“He—” Joel was about to say, “He should be here by now.” But he was afraid Sam might think what he himself, just that instant, was thinking: Michael really should be here by now. He said, “Oh, pretty soon, I guess. We left it kind of loose.”

“Well, I hope I get a chance to meet him.”

Joel didn’t hope, not at all, that Sam and Michael got a chance to meet. He wasn’t ashamed of Michael, exactly. He was just afraid of the conclusion Sam would draw, seeing Joel and Michael together. The entirely unfounded conclusion that Joel was a deluded old white guy being taken for some kind of ride by a gorgeous black guy half his age. “I hope you do, too,” he said.

He wanted to know more about Kevin; that is, he wanted
to hear Sam say that Kevin had dumped him. He was trying to think how to compel this admission when Sam said abruptly, “Catch you in a minute,” and was off. In pursuit of a kid with dark hair on the sides of his head and exploding strands of platinum on top, like fireworks drifting down in a night sky.

Joel found a place to lean at the bar directly across from the front door, so he would catch Michael the minute he came in. Many other people came in, not Michael, and the very first thing they saw was Joel. This was surely disappointing: they hadn’t taken off early from work to groom themselves for hours, then caught the Metro or a taxi to the Pledge, in order to see Joel. Most averted their eyes and veered away from him. A few stared for an instant, with the chagrined expression of a child who has waited an eternity in line for Santa Claus and now beholds him. Joel’s complementary chagrin was allayed for a while by the cheering thought that, while he might look like a loser, he was in fact a winner, who would be leaving with a beauty while most of these guys were still hunting. But he began to wonder what expression he might find on Michael’s face, when Michael arrived and first caught sight of him.

Perhaps it would be better, when Michael showed up, if Joel weren’t right there at the door, poised to jump on him like a starving predator. If Michael showed up. Almost an hour late already, this was tardy even by gay standards. Joel surrendered his space at the bar and wandered some more, arriving in the cellar just as Sam emerged from the backroom, his arm around the boy with the fireworks hair. Sam saw Joel and stopped short. The boy kept going, slipping free of Sam’s encircling arm and skating past Joel with a beatific look that must have been chemically induced. It couldn’t, in Joel’s experience, have been induced by anything Sam had done.

What had Sam done? Nothing, probably. The backroom was not, as it had been so long ago, pitch dark; and the bouncers every so often patrolled it to make sure no one got much past
heavy petting. The space referred to the seventies, like the disco oldies on the sound system, without allowing for a full-undress reenactment. The things that Joel imagined went on there once—he had never ventured in, not even in the old days—might be going on somewhere else; Senator Harris’s statistics affirmed this. But it had been a chamber of insouciance, of the innocence Joel had seen in the video upstairs. Whatever venue had replaced it must be quite different: a party of cold deliberation, with Dr. Kevorkian as master of the revels.

It was pathetic that Sam had gone in there, with a boy so drugged he might as readily have gone in with anybody—Ron, say, or Joel. It was pathetic that Sam had groped some strange kid and had made so slight an impression that the kid had slipped away the minute they came out into the bright light.

It was pathetic that Joel was standing there alone, having boasted that he had a date.

“Hey,” Sam said. “Weren’t you meeting somebody?”

“I got here kind of early.”

“Uh-huh. How many drinks have you had?”