Man About Town: A Novel (25 page)

Did you have to be invited to circuit parties or did you just sort of show up?

Joel did not destroy the picture. He carried it in an envelope in his inside coat pocket as, at lunch hour, he went to meet Bate.

Bate was expensive. They had established this over the phone. He cost, per diem, about what Joel might have had to spend to get an escort to stay with him per noctem. Which would have been crazy, but more rational than hiring a detective to find the Santa Fe boy.

He was doing something crazy. After so many years of being balanced, like a checkbook whose stubs add up. He went to work and pretty much did his job, he paid his rent, if he talked to himself on a public thoroughfare he did so in a low, conversational tone that bothered hardly anyone. Now he found himself doing something demented. He didn’t feel high or agitated, he just felt that he was doing the next thing. Today it’s a little chilly and I should zip the liner into my raincoat.
Today I should do something about that CD that’s about to roll over. Today I should find a detective who will help me locate the Santa Fe boy. He giggled. People on the Metro looked at him.

Back before Sam, Joel used to get up some mornings, serve a trick coffee, get him out the door, and then
go to work.
He didn’t know which seemed more implausible now: having tricks or being able to get up after about ninety minutes’ sleep and go to the office. Anyway, he’d arrive at the office and get on the elevator and look around at the gray faces and think: I have a secret. I have this whole other life you know nothing about and that would shock you to your bones.

He had forgotten this. Of course it was better to be out, he had not forgotten the grind of dissimulation, evading matchmakers, feigning interest in women he and a straight friend passed on the street, eschewing pink shirts, and trying not to hold his cigarette funny. But there had been, he remembered now, the compensatory thrill of having the great secret and knowing that it made him a million times more real and alive than anyone else in the building.

He smiled at the people on the Metro. You wouldn’t believe what I’m on my way to do.

Bate was in one of those L Street office buildings from the sixties whose style would probably be classed in the architectural histories as Parsimonious. Every feature, from the ceiling height to the light fixtures to the printed wood-pattern plastic on the elevator doors, was dictated by cost-per-square-foot calculations. The directory behind the unguarded front desk was the typical mix of periodontists and obscure lobbying groups—the Farmgrown Catfish Association, that sort of thing. Bate was in 526.

A small gold-look plate said Bate Agency and, in slightly larger letters, Please Knock. Joel did, and a voice he recognized as Bate’s called, “Just a minute.” He didn’t have a receptionist,
so he had to be pretty small-time. Could he find a missing person? Well, how hard could it be to find somebody in this world where merchants and hospitals and banks and political parties exchanged enormous dossiers on each of us? Joel felt as though it were all but done, they had practically found the boy already.

Bate looked as though he himself were in the process of disappearing. He was tiny, wearing a gray suit he might have bought in the boys’ department, and bald.

“Mr. Lingeman?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re a little early.”

This wasn’t so. Joel had walked around the block three times to avoid being early. But he said, “Oh. Should I come back?”

“No, no. If you don’t mind watching me eat.” Bate stood aside and admitted Joel to a one-room office that looked as though Bate’s tenancy had begun twenty minutes earlier. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the desk but a telephone and lunch, which consisted of a few tatters of lettuce in a plastic container and a bottle of water. At a right angle to the desk was a typing table with a Hermes portable identical to the one Joel had taken to college.

They sat down, Joel in the little visitor’s chair, Bate in a grandiose vinyl executive throne that made him seem even smaller than he was. Joel could barely see around it to the window, which looked directly into an upper level of an open parking garage; he could almost have touched the cars.

“So,” Bate said. He fussed at his salad with a plastic fork—didn’t actually eat anything, just shuffled the leaves around, as if hunting for a prize. Finally he shoved the container aside and produced from a desk drawer a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen. He wrote Joel Lingeman and August 5 in a hand so large that he had already used half the page. “So. You’re looking for somebody.”

“Uh-huh.”

A car with its headlights on careened around a corner in the garage, it looked as though it were about to plow into the office. In the glare Joel discovered that Bate was not in fact bald; he had a corona of preternaturally fine blond hair that seemed to float, like cloud cover, half an inch above his baby pink skull.

Bate waited, pen poised, for a name, or “my wife,” something like that. Joel could only pull out the envelope, extract the little picture, mutely hand it over. Bate held it daintily, thumb and forefinger at the top, as if afraid of touching the almost naked body. “And who is this?” he said.

Joel almost said, the Santa Fe boy. Instead he gave the accurate answer: “I don’t know.”

Bate placed the picture on his desk. Which now contained, in a perfectly straight line, picture, pad, pen, salad, water bottle, and telephone. He regarded Joel for a while. Joel felt like an idiot. A deviant idiot, at that. But Bate didn’t look at Joel as if he thought Joel was stupid or crazy or perverted. Rather as if Joel had told him something very sad. He made Joel sad, just for a second.

He folded his tiny hands on the desk and said, “This is an advertisement.”

“That’s right. I’m trying to find the person in the advertisement.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. And where did this appear?”

“In
man about town.
May 1964.”

“
man about town.
Do they even print that any more?”

“No.”

“No, I didn’t think I’d seen it.” Bate put a hand over the picture, almost casually. “You don’t know anything else about him?”

“Sorry.”

Bate let the faint pencil line of his mouth droop into a frown. “Thirty years is a long time.”

“So you think he’s not going to be easy to find?”

“No, I’d guess it will be either easy or impossible. No, what
I meant was …” He bit his lip. “You know the man in this picture doesn’t exist any more?”

“I’m sure he’s changed,” Joel said, quickly. Though of course that wasn’t what Bate had said. “So, um, will you take the case?”

Another car squealed by. Bate shivered. “I need to— I’m sorry, you seem like an ordinary person, but this isn’t a very ordinary request. So I have to ask: what are you going to do if I find him?”

“Nothing. Maybe just go see him. Once, I mean. I’m not going to stalk him or anything.”

“Why do you want to see him?”

Joel couldn’t explain, he couldn’t explain it to himself. “I don’t know. This is—” How could he have thought that he wouldn’t be asked these questions? That he could just lay his money down and make his not very ordinary request and the man wouldn’t wonder if he was a stalker or a murderer or … He should have thought of some answer. “I don’t know, it seems silly. Maybe we should just forget the whole thing.” He took the picture, started to slip it back into the envelope.

Bate watched him and must have concluded that, along with the picture, Joel was stuffing into the envelope a potentially large sum of money. “I’m going to need that,” he said.

“Oh, of course.” Joel had marred the picture, smeared the dots a little. Only on the torso, the face was still intact.

“If you want, we could go down to Kinko’s and make a copy of it.”

“That’s okay.” He would have liked a copy, but he didn’t want Bate thinking he couldn’t get through the days without looking at the Santa Fe boy.

Bate came out into the hall with him. As they were shaking hands, Joel saw under the fluorescent light that Bate had a mustache, almost white gold against his pale skin.

As he walked through the lobby, Joel heard again: “Thirty years is a long time.” The walls were of that pocked pink-gray
stone they used in lobbies thirty years ago instead of the marble of today, a laser-cut veneer not as thick as the butter on Joel’s morning toast. It occurred to him that the building must have been about coeval with the Santa Fe boy—that is, with the photograph, they were artifacts of the same era. He looked up at the building as he stepped outside. Yes, the milky blue glass and the brushed aluminum mullions, it might very well have been 1964. Architecture for the great society. A long time ago.

The interview with Bate had been so brief. If Joel got on the Metro right away, he could be back in the office without having been gone much more than an hour. Or he could stop and get a sandwich and be more emphatically late. No one in the office cared. August recess was just about to start, nothing was happening. Only his own compulsiveness made him feel guilty if he took sixty-one minutes for lunch.

He felt exponentially guilty as, already tardy, he ordered a full-sized cheese steak sub with everything on it. In one ear Sam was telling him he was getting too fat, in the other his mother was telling him he was late for the office; if he had had more ears there would have been one to hear—from whom?—that his pursuit of the Santa Fe boy was … breaking what rule? All the rules that had been beaten into him and that he violated, and he had no precept to cover this situation, except maybe a general guideline against doing things that were crazy. What he was doing was crazy but not wrong. There was no rule that said a man couldn’t try to learn where another man was. If he actually knocked on the guy’s door, that might be a minor trespass of some sort, a violation of some right the man had, to be whatever he was now instead of the Santa Fe boy. But Joel hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

The Santa Fe boy didn’t exist any more. Joel didn’t believe that. He understood what Bate meant. If the boy lived, he was in his fifties. A shapeless nonentity or, maybe worse, one of those men who kept themselves trim, emblems of futility. Joel didn’t care, really, it didn’t matter what the man looked like
now. Partly because Joel knew the boy persisted, perfect as ever, in some realm where Bate could not possibly track him down. Partly because … the only way he could learn why he had to see the man was to see him. He had meditated over that picture for hours, days. But he knew he’d never understand anything until they were face to face. The thrill and trepidation that filled him at the very thought of that encounter were, surely, the merest foretaste of how it would actually feel when he—

Accosted an aging stranger who would, after momentary bafflement, probably punch his lights out.

Mayonnaise dripped down onto his pants leg. It wouldn’t ever come out, these pants were ruined. Sam and Joel’s mother both scolded him.

Joel and Ron were going to meet at Gentry and then figure out some place to eat. Joel went straight from work, in the suit he had worn because he thought there was supposed to be a briefing for Congressman Patchen. But the briefing was put off for a day, and this was the only suit he could fit into, so he’d have to wear it again. He needed to try not to spill anything at dinner. And maybe he should eat light, so that in some indefinite future he could fit into another of his suits. This had never happened: his closet was filled with clothes he was going to wear again as soon as he took off just a few pounds. If he could have arranged them in order he would have had, not only a precise gauge of how his waistline had grown, but also a chronicle of men’s fashions he looked stupid in. The Jordache look. The Miami Vice look. The L.L. Bean look.

His current look, bureaucratic nondescript, was not terribly out of place at Gentry. This was the bar where men came in suits. Mostly young men, Hill boys and PR types, in suits that were vaguely Milanese. A scattering of guys Joel’s age, some of whom had failed to discern that Italian suits require that
your shoulders be wider than your waist. Others, like Joel, in shapeless sacks, but with costlier haberdashery than Joel’s: French cuffs, contrasting collars. The Orrin Hatch look.

The bar at Gentry must have been a hundred feet long. Almost deserted near the entrance—the guys who came to Gentry were out enough to go to a gay bar at happy hour, but not enough to display themselves in the front window—more crowded at the back. Joel was out enough to sit at the front, where sunlight fell on the magazine he planned to read while waiting for Ron. The bartender was so far away he might possibly have been in Maryland. Joel waved, not too frantically. The bartender didn’t notice, but Joel attracted some attention from the throng at the far end. One of their number detached himself, ambled down toward Joel. As he got closer Joel could see that it was Andrew.

“Hey, Joel,” he said. “I thought that might be you.”

“Hi.” They shook hands, Andrew grasping Joel’s shoulder. Joel whispered, “Don’t be alarmed, but you’re in a gay bar.”

Andrew mimed shock, but he also moved around to Joel’s left, so his back was to the front window. “I just stopped by on my way home.” Gentry was categorically not on his way home. He must have seen Joel thinking this; he added, “Well, I … actually, I’ve been going out a little.”

“Oh, yeah?” Joel said, as casually as he could. Was the hibernation over?

“Yeah, once in a while. I mean, I’ll come here after work, or I’ll go to the Pledge some nights and have a beer or two.”

“Uh-huh.” The Pledge: Joel had stepped into the Pledge a few weeks earlier, didn’t even stay for one drink. A sea of tank tops, pumped chests, meticulously sculpted arms.

“I haven’t, you know, met anybody.”

“It’s hard,” Joel said. Meaning: you may be in better shape than I am, but it’s kind of uppity to think you could make it at the Pledge.

“I mean, I meet people, guys try to pick me up, but …”
Joel saw them: shadowy, slender figures standing next to Andrew as he had one or two beers, leaning toward him, smiling. Shadows moving in on him. “I don’t know, it’s been so long. I’m … ready. I mean, I get horny. But it’s like, after a couple years—it’s like I haven’t met anybody who should be the very first one.”