Man About Town: A Novel (36 page)

Sexton stopped chuckling, shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember his name.”

Joel looked down at the floor. There could have been no more conclusive put-down than to tell Joel that the figure who haunted him was so unmemorable to someone who had actually encountered him. When Joel looked up he found that Sexton was staring into space. Trying to remember the name? No, he had the expression, not of someone searching, but of someone struck with a vision. He was remembering something other than the name.

Sexton shook his head again, brought Joel back into focus. “We could look it up.”

When Joel stood behind him in the hall and he put his key in the lock, Joel had a clear vision of the apartment they were about to enter: a couple of pieces by Corb, the windows bare, on one wall a huge painting—maybe a Warhol Elizabeth Taylor, maybe a Haring.

Sexton opened the door, stood aside. Joel walked into a room
that might have been decorated by his own mother. Pale green wallpaper punctuated by a few reproductions of hunting prints; the windows looking but on Fifth Avenue framed by drapes in a beige, nubby fabric; a sofa with an ill-fitting gold slipcover; before it a coffee table that held a glass ashtray and a copy of
TV Guide.
The table had a couple of rings where Sexton or a guest had put a glass down without a coaster.

Sexton seemed to be waiting for Joel to say something. Joel walked to the window and said he liked the view, even though they were only on the seventh floor and the view was basically of the seventh floor of the building across the street. When Joel turned around Sexton was much smaller than he had seemed in the lobby: just a short, slender, bald man who looked as though he was expecting someone to punch him.

“The office is back this way,” he said. He led Joel down a hallway with the same green wallpaper. Joel caught a glimpse of the bedroom, with a faux-bamboo five-piece suite from about 1960, then a bathroom with sky-blue tile. The office was the tiny second bedroom at the end of the hall. There was a steel desk with an electric typewriter and a couple of long boxes with cards in them, like the drawers of a library catalogue; one wall had shelves on which were row after row of loose-leaf binders marked with letters of the alphabet.

Sexton sat at the desk; there was nowhere for Joel to sit. “What was the name of the client again?”

“The client? Oh, Simms of Santa Fe.”

“Right, right.” As he thumbed through his card files, he said, “You know, I have never done this, not once, I had an absolute rule. All the years I was in business, people tried to get me to put them in touch with my boys. Friends mostly, they’d corner me and ask, ‘Who is that dreamboat in the Vitalis ad?’ I’d just tell them I wasn’t a pimp. But this one, this one I got calls from perfect strangers. Mostly right around the time it ran, when was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-four.”

“Right. But for a while after that, too. And one queen, I remember this, one queen screeched at me: ‘What’s it to you? If he doesn’t want to see me he doesn’t want to see me, but what’s it to you if I call him? Can’t the guy take care of himself?’ And I said no. No, I didn’t think he could.”

He looked up at Joel. Possibly they were both framing the same question: why was he breaking his rule for Joel? Maybe because, if the guy was still alive, he must have learned how to take care of himself.

“Here we go. Peter Barry.”

Peter Barry. Not exactly John Smith, but there must have been plenty of Peter Barrys in the world. How was Bate ever going to find him, and what would it cost?

Sexton got up and pulled down the first of several B binders, started thumbing through it. Page after page of head shots, interspersed with yellowing typed sheets that must have been résumés or lists of assignments. All different kinds of men, young and old, cute and distinguished and elegant and rough. His card file was the catalogue of a library of beauty. Except that the words in books didn’t get older, while all of these faces had.

“Barr, Barrett, Barrow, Bartlett. Funny, he should be after Barrow.”

“Maybe it’s Berry. With an ‘e’.”

Sexton looked at Joel coolly: he didn’t make mistakes. Then he started flipping backwards through the pages. At last he paused. Joel could see, over his shoulder. It was the boy. A glossy photo: the boy unsmiling, wearing a jacket and one of the absurdly skinny ties of those years, his hair in a pompadour instead of the brush cut in the ad. Joel could see, as he couldn’t in the tiny photo in
man about town,
that the boy had a cleft chin. He was lit from one side, to emphasize his sculpted features, and his forehead had an even sheen that hinted at airbrushing, to hide a blemish or two.

Sexton flipped the photo over and studied the typed page
that followed it. “Oh, here’s why,” he said. “He wasn’t really Barry, he was … I can’t even say this.”

He handed the binder to Joel.

Below this, handwritten: “10/8/63. CL: Simms of Santa Fe. AG: Dink & Dink. PH: A. Markey.”

“Baranauskas,” Joel said.

“What kind of name is that?”

“I don’t know, Greek? He doesn’t look Greek.”

“He looks like a Polack.”

Joel turned back to the photograph. He didn’t like the guy in the photograph. The guy was sleek and ordinary. A model. “Maybe it’s Lithuanian or something,” Joel said.

“Uh-huh.”

Joel flipped through some of the other pages. Some of the models had five or six handwritten entries, some had so many they ran over to extra pages.

“It looks like you only used him once,” Joel said.

“Yeah, just that one shoot, with Andy Markey. When does it say?”

“October of sixty-three. Kennedy would have been alive.”

“Would he? I remember now. Peter wasn’t right for most work, you know? Forty-six chest, he couldn’t do suits, he wasn’t rough enough for cigarette ads or smooth enough for liquor, his eyes were too sad for soft drinks or convertibles. So this swimsuit thing came up, and I sent him out on that.”

“And that was it?”

“I knew that would be it. Once he’d done that ad—practically screamed, ‘fairy’—I knew I wasn’t going to get him any other work. I … I guess I sacrificed him. I threw him away on this job.” He took the book away from Joel, looked at the photo. “After a while, he kind of got the picture, and he asked me if there was any more of … that kind of work. But the client—I think the client was already out of business.”

“That’s right,” Joel said.

“I was beat, and guilty, and I gave him the name of GMA.”

“Who?”

“The Grecian Modeling Association.”

“What was that? Porn?”

“Sort of. I mean, it was as racy as things got. God, ‘63 or ‘64, they were probably still using the posing straps.”

“So did he do it?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t into that stuff back then.” Sexton smiled. “Back then, I didn’t need to look at magazines. I don’t know if he did it or not.”

Maybe he did? Maybe Peter Barry had become one of the oiled figures in the physique magazines, in a posing strap and possibly wearing a sailor’s cap, leaning on a plaster column, behind him a clumsily draped curtain. So if Joel had gotten up the nerve in those days, if he had ever dared to walk up to a cash register and buy one of those magazines, he might have had pictures of the boy … not much more revealing than the one in
man about town.
Except maybe Joel would have gotten to see his butt.

“I hope not,” Joel said. “I hope he went back to Roseville, New Jersey.”

Sexton had been looking steadily at the picture for a while. Joel asked—he had to ask: “Did you … you and … Peter Barry, did you ever …”

“What? Oh.” Joel expected him to be angry, but of course he wasn’t. Joel had been out of circulation too long, he’d forgotten how casually one used to be able to ask that question. As one might ask, have you ever been to the Cafe Madrid? “I don’t think so,” Sexton said at last. “It wasn’t, you know, part of the job description.”

“No?”

“No. I don’t mean that no boy ever found that the road to stardom ran through my bedroom. But I didn’t force myself on them.”

“Ah.” Joel was still chewing on the “I don’t think so.” How many boys must have passed through that bedroom if the man couldn’t even recall whether Peter Barry had been one of them?

“No, I’m pretty sure this one was straight.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So he should be especially displeased when you appear on his doorstep.”

“Well … who said I was going to do that?”

“My dear, you’ve chased him down across thirty years. Are you trying to tell me you’re going to stop here?”

“No.”

“No, you’re going all the way with this lunacy. It’s funny, you don’t seem especially demented.”

“I’m really not.”

“You really are.” Sexton put the book back on the shelf and ushered Joel into the hallway. “I should be alarmed. I mean, here I’ve let you upstairs, I don’t know what I was thinking of. You could be … oh, John Hinckley, or—who was that one who stalked Lennon?”

“I don’t remember.”

Sexton was urging Joel toward the front door; his grip on Joel’s shoulder was strong for a man alleged to be dying. “You could be one of those. And I’ve helped you. What are you going to do when you find him?”

“I hadn’t even thought that far.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I haven’t.” Joel managed to shake loose the claw on his shoulder. He wanted to acquit himself of dementia. “There isn’t anything to do when I find him. I know that. Just look at him, I guess. Or maybe tell him …”

Sexton waited, as if there were some possibility Joel could finish that sentence. After a minute he sighed. “Before I throw you out, you might as well have a drink.”

“No, thanks,” Joel said, but Sexton had already drifted into the living room.

“I don’t drink any more, but I think there’s some kind of whiskey.”

“Really, it’s okay, I’ve got a train to catch.”

“Well, sit just a second.”

They sat on the sofa with the gold slipcover. Sexton produced, from his shirt pocket, a pack of cigarettes and a plastic holder. He held up the holder. “This is phase two of a stop-smoking program. I’ve been at phase two for ten years.”

“I know how it is,” Joel said, lighting a cigarette of his own.

“I won’t be getting to phase three.”

“I’m sorry.”

“When I found out I was … sick, I started calling people. People I hadn’t talked to in years. My college roommate. My cousins in Iowa. My first lover. ‘Hi!’ I’d go. ‘This is Chip! Chip Sexton!’ They’d go, ‘Oh.’ Just like that, and then there’d be this long silence, while they decided just how deeply they wished they hadn’t picked up the phone. Finally, they’d say, ‘Hi, Chip. Been a long time.’

“It was funny, when I asked them what they’d been doing, people didn’t recap the whole last thirty or forty years or
whatever it had been since we’d talked. They’d say what they’d done last week: Bunny and I went to the flea market, or Suzie got admitted to Dartmouth. Then they’d ask what was new with me. I’d say, ‘Nothing much. Just happened to be thinking of you.’ Pretty soon we’d hang up.

“I wasn’t calling to tell them I was sick. I had this notion that I ought to tell them how much they meant to me. That I shouldn’t … go without having told them that, it was important for them to know. But it wasn’t. Maybe it was important for me to know. But if I had told them, it would have been a lie. The person at the other end of the phone didn’t mean anything to me. Do you understand?”

Joel nodded wearily. He recited in a monotone: “It wasn’t the same person. That person didn’t exist any more.”

“What? Oh, no. No, that’s not what I’m saying. Of course it wasn’t. I mean, for God’s sake, Bunny—I don’t even know what gender Bunny is, how could my first lover have wound up with a Bunny? But what I’m saying is … how old were you when you, whatever, fell in love with that picture?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen, Jesus. So you must be …” Sexton did the arithmetic and, mercifully, didn’t say: You look older than that. “If he were the very same person, you wouldn’t love him any more. That’s really what I mean. My roommate meant something to me when I was twenty, my first lover when I was twenty-three, but I’m not the man who loved them. If there had been a—what do you call it?—a time warp, if through some magic of the telephone switching system I had got, on the other end, the same person I loved, unchanged, no daughter at Dartmouth, no Bunny—it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Then why did you make the second call?”

“I’m sorry?”

“After you called the first person and … made this discovery, why did you call the second one, and then the one after that, however many?”

Sexton smiled. “Good question. I don’t know. I guess I was hoping it would be different. That there’d be someone I still … felt some connection with.”

Sexton put a new cigarette in his holder, looked at it for a while without lighting it. He murmured, “That’s it, I guess.”

“What?”

“I was trying to call myself.”

Sunday morning Joel and Michael had brunch, on the terrace at Hamilton’s. Joel had never done this before: taking your trick to brunch at Hamilton’s, so everybody who was there with his trick would see how much better you had done. You could tell the pairs who had just met, because they talked a lot and they looked at one another, only surreptitiously glancing at other tables. Couples who’d been together a while didn’t talk much, and when they did it was about the people at other tables.

Michael said he was going to have an egg-white omelet with grilled vegetables and no cheese.