Man About Town: A Novel (7 page)

Until last night. Last night he had, for whatever reason, lingered an extra half hour, then an hour. Then he had picked up the phone, maybe even as he picked it up still meaning to say, “Hey, we had a couple extra patients, I’m leaving now.” Then hearing Joel’s voice, looking across at his … lover and hearing Joel say, “Dinner’s practically on the table.” Those harmless words somehow the last straw. Perhaps he had even visualized the turkey burgers and the canned beans. And then saw himself and his lover going out for a bite somewhere, someplace lively, talking and laughing together and then on
the street, Sam not hailing a taxi to go home but the two of them going back to the lover’s apartment; if it was dark enough, maybe even holding hands as they walked.

It was almost Joel’s fault. If he hadn’t said those terrible words.

The waiter brought Joel’s foie gras en brioche, sauce framboise, and plopped it down before him as unceremoniously as if it were a liverwurst sandwich. Joel took a taste. It was, perhaps, better than a liverwurst sandwich. Not fifteen times as good, or whatever the price ratio should have dictated. And at least a liverwurst sandwich wouldn’t have had raspberry sauce. He didn’t mind the money; he had come here to treat himself. Post-trauma treat: as when he was little, stung by a bee once, and his mother took him for an ice cream cone. He hadn’t understood that there wasn’t much comfort in buying yourself an ice cream cone.

Harris’s office was in the Hart Building, the new one built in the seventies that looked like one of the white cardboard office blocks you pass on the way to an airport. This was a mark of his juniority; longer-serving senators were in the Dirksen Building, dreary but less obviously prefabricated. The truly senescent hunkered down in the Russell Building, a Beaux Arts monolith. If you looked at the Russell Building you could imagine that senators were inside it. If you looked at the Hart Building, you were more likely to picture people in cubicles processing mortgage applications.

Joel always got lost in the Hart Building. The offices were grouped around a multistory atrium; no matter which elevator you took, the office you wanted was always on the other side of this chasm. By the time Joel could snake his way around to Harris’s he was a couple of minutes late and almost out of breath. He could barely gasp his name to the receptionist, a beefy youth who didn’t even bother to put down his cold-cut sub when Joel approached. The kid just nodded Joel toward
one of the chairs in the anteroom and took a couple more bites before calling Melanie.

Joel sat a long while. He needn’t have risked a heart attack trying to be on time for a meeting with a senator. Sometimes he would wait an hour or more, only to learn that the senator was backed up and would have to reschedule, or that someone had screwed up and the meeting had never been on the calendar at all. He hadn’t brought anything to read, and the table next to him offered only such dispiriting stuff as
Montana Monthly, U.S. News and World Report,
and, perhaps for the more youthful lobbyists, a Donald Duck comic book. Joel just sat.

One wall of the anteroom was covered with a huge Montana flag. It said “MONTANA” in big gold letters, like the pennants Joel had in his room as a boy, the ones that blazoned the names of colleges he didn’t get into. On the other wall were the inevitable pictures: Harris with George Bush, with Gerald Ford, with Charlton Heston. Harris with assorted Montana luminaries, gaunt men whose suits had Western features: waist-length jackets, or pockets whose openings made little smiles, like the ones on a Gene Autry shirt. In the center of the wall, the sun of this Republican solar system, Harris with Reagan. Harris in profile, trying both to grin and to look adoringly; Reagan looking straight out, of course, oblivious to anything but the camera.

Joel was about to nod off—either from a night without sleep or because he had, what the hell, had a second merlot—when Melanie appeared. She looked down at him but didn’t speak for a minute. Possibly she was noticing that Joel hadn’t shaved this morning. And had he, he wondered, put on that tie with the gravy spot? He didn’t verify this, just drew himself to his feet.

“Thanks for coming,” Melanie said, in the grave murmur a camerlengo might use before ushering you in to see the Pope. “The senator’s just on his way back from the floor. Did Rob offer you some coffee?” On hearing this, the kid behind the
reception desk stood up, disclosing the kind of body you see in half-hour infomercials for exercise machines. Joel thought about dispatching him for coffee, just to humiliate him. But if Joel went into the sanctum with coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other, this would be that rare day when a senator wanted to shake hands.

It was enough of a putdown just to ignore Rob. He turned to Melanie. “You said he might have some questions other than aliens?”

“I think so, some other health stuff. But we haven’t connected all day, so I’m not sure.” She cocked her head. “Oh, I guess he’s in his office.” Joel was always amazed at the way staffers could divine their member’s whereabouts. Maybe if your boss threw things at you, you could sense somehow when he was in his lair.

Harris was on the phone. He must have seen Melanie and Joel come in, but he gave no sign of it, just went on talking. Listening, rather: he frowned and periodically went “Right, right.” His mahogany desk, the size of a Volvo, held no papers at all, just the phone, a nameplate, and a silver scale model of a warplane shaped like some voracious moth. Did they build planes in Montana? Well, they must have built planes everywhere; probably they made one part in each district, so that every member had a little stake.

Harris hung up the phone, but still did not acknowledge Joel and Melanie, who stood worshipfully ten feet from his desk. He stood up and took off his jacket, draped it rather prissily on the back of his swivel chair, faced them again and turned himself on. Smiled as brightly as if Joel had arrived bearing a large check, came out from behind the desk, and held out a hand. “Joe Harris.”

“Joel Lingeman.” They had met the night before. Was it possible? So much had happened. Just the night before and the man didn’t remember him at all.

Harris didn’t exactly shake; instead he offered his hand, flat
and firm as a spade, for Joel to grasp. “Really appreciate your coming over,” he said, as if Joel had had some choice.

Harris gestured toward his standard-issue informal area: two wing chairs facing a loveseat. Joel seized one of the wing chairs. He had learned over the years not to sit in the loveseat. If you did, you wound up with two interlocutors, member and staffer, talking down at you from their chairs. Plus you couldn’t sit normally in the loveseat: you had to resist the impulse to cross your legs, and wound up with your knees touching and your hands in your lap, like a maiden lady. Harris took the other chair, leaving tiny Melanie to sink into the loveseat.

Harris looked at Joel for some seconds with an expression of pleasant interest. Then he must have realized that he had asked for the briefing and ought to pose some question or other. He couldn’t remember what the subject was; he turned toward Melanie.

She said, “Oh. Um … we wanted Joel to come over to talk about aliens and Medicare.”

“Right,” Harris said, as if he had just been testing her. He faced Joel, drew himself up and gripped the arms of his wing chair—a posture of dutiful attention.

“Right,” Joel repeated. “Actually, Senator Altman pretty much summed it up. If you’re over sixty-five and you’ve been legally resident here for five years, you can get Medicare by paying a premium.”

“A premium,” Harris said slowly, as if the word were new to him.

“Yes. A monthly …” Joel couldn’t think of another word. “Premium.”

“Uh-huh. So they’re paying for their own costs.”

“Yes,” Joel said enthusiastically, as if Harris were a bright student. “Well, except …” He could have left it at “Yes.” They’re paying for it, it’s no problem, why don’t you just leave these poor old exiles alone? But someone else would explain it to Harris, sooner or later, if Joel didn’t. “Well, they don’t
really pay all their costs. First, if they’re poor, the states have to pay their premium. And second—”

“The states, yeah, someone this morning said that. What about the states?”

“If somebody’s below the federal poverty level, then—”

“What’s that?”

“Sir?”

“The federal poverty level.”

“Well, it’s this figure that’s put out by … I guess the Census Bureau every year. It started out—this is interesting—they started out taking the cost of what they called the ‘thrifty food plan,’ and then they just multiplied that by three and said that’s what someone needed to subsist on. And since then—”

Joel was wrong; this wasn’t interesting. “No, no, no,” Harris practically shouted. “How much is it?”

“Oh.” Joel had no idea. “I think it’s like … seven thousand or something for one person.”

“Seven thousand!” Harris seemed amazed.

“Yeah, it’s really not very much.”

Joel had misstepped again. “Seven thousand,” Harris said. “There are lots of people in Montana getting by on a lot less than seven thousand. And they don’t come crying to the government for help.”

“Um, right. But it’s kind of a national average, you know? I mean, if you lived in New York, say, or here in DC, seven thousand wouldn’t get you very far.”

“Nobody says people have to live in New York.”

“No, sir,” Joel said, miserably. Five minutes into the briefing and he had Harris thinking he was some kind of communist. You had to be so careful with these guys, the new Republicans who had descended on the Capitol like blow-dried Martians. You could tell them the earth was round and they’d turn on you, snarling that this was just the kind of confused, outmoded thinking they’d been sent to Washington to straighten out.

“Anyway,” Harris said, with a little wave of his hand, conciliatory now that he had made his point. “Anyway, aliens below this … ‘poverty level’ get Medicare and they don’t have to pay anything, the states pay for it.”

“Well, it’s not just aliens. It’s anybody below that level. Citizens, too.”

“Fine, fine, but we’re talking about the aliens. What are they doing here?”

“Doing here?” How should Joel know what they were doing here? Maybe they all crept across the border to get free heart transplants. “Well, they were admitted here … you know, refugees from somewhere or, I don’t know, somebody’s mother, whatever.”

“So why don’t they become citizens? They could become citizens.”

“Um … I guess maybe they can’t pass the test. You know, they may not have learned English all that well, so they can’t pass the test.” He would have liked to see Harris pass the citizenship test. He would also have liked to see Harris subsist for a week on the thrifty food plan.

Rob the receptionist appeared in the doorway. “Senator, excuse me, it’s … it’s those people you were expecting. From—”

Harris cut him off. “Right, right.” He turned to Joel. “This’ll just be a few minutes, if you can stick around. I think we had some other stuff we wanted to go through.”

“Sure,” Joel said.

When Harris had gone, Joel said to Melanie, “I guess I put my foot in it.”

“Better you than me.” Melanie giggled. “I loved that. There are people in Montana living on nuts and berries!”

“Yeah. Proud and self-sufficient.”

“Real Americans.” She shook a fist in the air.

“Anyway, you’d think I’d know better, just keep my mouth shut.”

Melanie shrugged. “It’s kind of … I’m never quite sure
what will set him off. You know, he’s not— He’s more complicated than you think. He really does care about people.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, just that he wanted to know more about this—at least he’s thinking about it, trying to think about it.”

“I guess.”

“I try to nudge him along. And then every so often he bites my head off.”

“Yeah, I hear he’s a bear,” Joel said.

“Oh, that’s talk, mostly. Honestly, I never saw him throw anything. You just have to know when to ease off.”

“Well, I’m sure easing off. Just the facts, sir. That’s if he ever comes back.”

“He’ll be back in a few minutes, he’s just meeting with—He’ll be back unless something happens on the floor. But do you mind if I go make a couple of calls?”

“No.”

“You sure we can’t get you coffee or something?”

“Yeah, coffee would be good.”

Joel stayed in his wing chair for a minute, looking over at Harris’s huge barren desk and the high-backed leather chair on which Harris had draped his jacket. It was just a jacket on the back of a chair; why should the sight of it have left Joel suddenly desolate?

Well, it was half of a thousand-dollar suit, for one thing—distinctly unMontanan; no pockets with openings like smiles. But Joel could probably have paid for a thousand-dollar suit, if he would ever have thought of such an extravagance, about as readily as Harris. Senators didn’t make so much, really; after they paid for two houses and sent their kids to St. Alban’s or wherever, they probably weren’t much better off than Joel was. Except for the ones—more and more of them lately—who had made their fortune someplace else and then bought their
way into office. Becoming senators as a sort of hobby after retirement, the way rich guys used to become yachtsmen. But Harris wasn’t one of those.

The jacket wasn’t, whatever its price tag, an impressive object. Just a jacket, which Harris put on when he went to the floor and took off when he got back to his office. Harris had got up this morning—early probably, around the time when Joel was just realizing that Sam might be gone for good—Harris had got up, showered and shaved. Put on his pants, as they say, one leg at a time, and then the jacket. Walked out of his tract house somewhere in Virginia. Got into his car and idled through the same gridlock as everybody else, to arrive at the Hart Senate Office Building and begin his humdrum day. Draping his jacket on the back of his chair, already a little tired: a day ahead of floor votes on vital issues like flag-burning, punctuated by briefings and little side-meetings like the one he’d run out to now, where he was almost surely begging someone for money.