Joel had made it through the crowd and was waiting for the elevator when Melanie caught him. “Do you understand this stuff about aliens?” she said.
“No,” he lied. “Why don’t you call me tomorrow morning when I’ve had a chance to check it out?”
She pouted. “All right. But I know the senator’s going to want to know about this first thing.”
“First thing.”
It was only quarter of seven. Joel could make it to the Hill Club—on the House side, three or four blocks away—in ten minutes. And it was Thursday; Sam had evening hours Tuesdays and Thursdays. He wouldn’t get off until nine or nine-thirty, so Joel could have just as protracted a happy hour as he wanted and still be home in time to fix a late supper. These late nights for Sam were a recent innovation, just the last few months. Sam said the office had to stay open, there were a million lawyers and people like that who wouldn’t come
in for physical therapy during the day, giving up a billable hour; if Sam’s office couldn’t accommodate them, somebody else would. Joel said it was a shame, though he was delighted that, two nights a week, he had a few hours of liberty.
It was warm out, the first really nice spring evening, or the first Joel had noticed; spring was so short in Washington, it was easy to let it slip right by. Joel even slowed down a little, strolled down First Street with the unhurried exuberance of a convict who has just been paroled. Free: free to toddle over to the Hill Club instead of having to rush home to Mrs. Lingeman and the two brats. He had been headed for the Hill Club his whole life.
Everything he had hoped for as a boy was silly. So why did he turn so often to the fantasy of going back and doing it over? It wasn’t about finding and correcting some actual slippage from the course that would have led him to a fuller life. He couldn’t imagine a fuller life. Or he could—not in a child-infested house but in that other fantasy domicile of his boyhood, he and Sam in that penthouse in New York, preposterously wealthy A-list faggots smiling for the photos in the parties-you-weren’t-invited-to pages of the
Times.
But even these fantasies, which he visited regularly every Wednesday as he walked away from the liquor store with his two-dollar Powerball ticket, bored him after just a minute or two. For, if he could even conceive of being some other place right now, then he would also have had to be some other person. Still named Joel Lingeman, maybe, but somebody else. He could furnish the penthouse, but he could not think himself inside the richer, more successful, happier phantom who dwelt in it.
Who was to say, anyway, that Joel could have been any happier? He had a job that paid well and was intermittently satisfying. He’d had the same lover for going on fifteen years, a certifiable miracle for a gay man—people sometimes gasped when he said it. He had friends: losers and geeks, maybe, the grown-up versions of the marginal crowd he’d hung out with
in high school, while he dreamt of being Alex’s pal. But probably about as much fun to drink with as, say, Hollywood stars or New York literati. If there were an Algonquin round table now, George and Dorothy and the rest would just talk about real estate, like everybody else.
He couldn’t imagine another life, another way of being Joel. Sometimes, as tonight, he felt a little itch, but it was the itch an amputee feels in a phantom limb. There was no place to scratch, he had no wants that could be met through work or scheming or even the right Powerball ticket. Things were fine. It was spring, and things were as good as they were going to be.
The peace that came over him—of complacency or surrender, if the two are distinguishable—was broken by the homeless guy who sat on the low wall in front of the Madison Building. Joel had passed this guy a million times; he must have staked out his spot on that wall the day it was built. They always had the same colloquy. The man would say, almost inaudibly, “Spare any change.” Not even asking—he knew the answer—but as if just feeding Joel a cue. Joel would say “Sorry,” without looking at him. Always, ten or fifteen years now, and he felt a little guilty every time. But this guy was just the first in a gauntlet that started in front of the Madison Building and stretched down Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to Eighth Street. Blocks and blocks of them: why would Joel give his change to the first one he encountered? Or to the second, or the last? How was he supposed to pick, as if he were some capricious god singling out one mortal for his favors? Besides, who was to say this guy was really homeless? Maybe he lived somewhere and just came here every day, as if commuting to his job.
The man did his job. “Spare any change,” he said, perhaps more loudly than usual. As Joel said his “Sorry,” he was conscious of the jingling in his pocket. He blushed as he walked by. He had taken a few steps before the guy murmured, not
angrily, almost resigned, “Yeah, you’re sorry, motherfucker.” Joel glanced back, saw him maybe for the first time, or at least the first time in years. A black man, close to Joel’s age, trim and dressed surprisingly neatly: clean flannel shirt, jeans, new-looking sneakers. His face had a sort of befogged nobility; once it was probably handsome. In some other world they might have fucked. In this world Joel was scared, suddenly; he turned away and practically ran the block or so to the Hill Club.
The Hill Club was nearly empty. That is, there were people eating at tables, but nobody at the bar, just one straight couple. And Walter, of course, the besotted old man who seemed to have been propped up at the corner of the bar every night as an admonition. The way, on the Oregon Trail, there’d be the occasional skull to let you know what fate might be yours if you continued on this route.
It used to be that Joel could come into the Hill Club at what they called happy hour—though they didn’t do anything excessively happy, like reduce the prices or give away any food—and he could hardly make it to the bar for all the people. What had happened to everybody?
He ordered a Dewar’s and water from the bartender—even the bartender was a stranger tonight, some substitute, or Joel wouldn’t have had to say what he wanted—and looked around the room. All straight people, eating their burgers and the stuff the Hill Club called chili, a tomato puree you could have fed to a finicky baby. Several tables had, ominously, pitchers of beer. The one bar on the Hill that used to have a sort of gay tincture to it—never a majority of the customers, but a big enough constituency that the bartenders had to know how to make cosmos—seemed to be turning into the kind of place where annoying youths who thought they were still in school ordered pitchers of beer. Pretty soon the place would have a giant TV tuned to the sports network.
Well, it was past seven. If Joel had got there earlier, he
would probably have bumped into one or two friends; but they were a receding wave, a little contingent of survivors. That’s what had happened to the Hill Club. Everybody had died; the straight people were just filling a vacuum. Everybody had died except, improbably, Walter, who was staring deep into his drink.
The couple on Joel’s left were staffers, or at least the boy was. He was trying to impress the girl. The Congressman thinks this, the Congressman wants to do that. As if he were constantly having intimate policy discussions with the Congressman, when he probably spent his days answering constituent mail. Form-letter answers, mostly: “I want you to know how very much I appreciate hearing your views on_______.” The kid would fill in the blank, print the letter out, run it through the signature machine. Which surely qualified him to expound, as he was now doing, on how to save Social Security.
Joel turned toward Walter and said “Hey.” To no effect; Walter just went on gazing into his martini as if he expected to find an oracle there. Joel thought of trying to rouse him, but stopped himself. It was kind of pathetic, wasn’t it, that he should even have attempted to strike up a conversation with Walter. Maybe it was time to find a new hang-out. Or maybe it was time to stop hanging out and go home at night like a grown-up.
Joel chugged the rest of his drink and was about to stand up when Walter said, “How are you this evening?” As if it had taken him a minute or two to process Joel’s “Hey.”
“Okay, how are you doing?”
“Not bad for an impoverished annuitant.” Walter had a sort of trick: just when you thought he was comatose he could sober up sharply, just for a few minutes, and carry on a normal conversation. Joel thought about getting another drink. Except Walter would probably fade again before he was halfway through it.
“Kind of late for you, isn’t it?” Walter said. It was hard to believe that Walter somehow kept track of people’s usual timetables. Probably he just meant that it was kind of late for
anybody. Happy hour was over, unless like Walter’s your happy hour stretched around the clock.
“I had to work a little late.”
“Uh-huh. What is it you do again?”
“I work at the Office of Legislative Analysis.”
“Right,” Walter said, as if Joel had made a lucky guess. “So you work for these Republicans.”
“No, we kind of work for both sides. We’re nonpartisan.”
“Nonpartisan,” Walter repeated. With a little edge, Joel thought, as if the very idea were preposterous.
Joel said, “So what did you used to do?”
“What?”
“You said you were an annuitant. So you used to work for the government?”
“Oh.” Walter made a fluttering gesture; the subject wasn’t worth talking about. “Whatever happened to your friend?”
“Who?”
“That friend of yours, the one you used to come in with.”
“Oh, Sam.”
“Sam, that’s it. I haven’t seen him in ages. You still together?”
“Sure, he just doesn’t come in here any more.”
“Oh.” Walter’s eyes wandered back to his martini. Probably he was going back into his trance again, as abruptly as he had emerged from it. Joel stood up, glad he hadn’t ordered another drink. But Walter turned toward him again. “Let me ask you …”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sit down, sit down a minute.”
“I really have to run,” Joel said. Nothing good ever happened when a drunk told him to sit down a minute.
“Sure,” Walter said, as if he knew Joel had no place to go. “But let me just ask. You and—what’s his name?”
“Sam.”
“Sam. You’ve been together a long time.”
“Fifteen years.”
“No shit,” Walter said, unimpressed. “Do you still have sex?”
“What?”
“Sex. Do you and … what’s his name … still do it?”
Joel was aware that the couple next to him had stopped talking and were unabashedly eavesdropping. He wasn’t embarrassed about it, exactly, but aware. “Um …” There was no reason he had to submit to an inquisition from some senescent drunk whose own sexuality was indeterminate—and, at this point in the slide to the grave, probably academic. But if he didn’t answer, that would be an answer. “Sure,” he said.
Sure, they still did it. Not every night, of course, that must have lasted only a little while; he couldn’t remember. Nor was he certain just when they had drifted down to once a week, after Sunday brunch, or when even this observance became optional. They had never stopped enjoying it, not entirely; if they rarely saw stars, at least they knew what buttons to push. Sex was like … Communion, maybe. He imagined that people who partook of that strange ritual might have felt the same way about it. A routine most Sundays, maybe a few times a year a brief sensation that something faintly miraculous was going on. Except at least he and Sam had the weekly—or nearly so—miracle of, after the act, cuddling, dozing.
Joel said, with some trepidation, but he couldn’t help it: “Why do you ask?”
Walter looked vaguely thoughtful. Probably he wasn’t often asked why he said something; usually the accurate answer would simply have been that the spirits moved him. “Why did I? I guess I wondered why you didn’t go home.”
“I’m just going home.”
“Because if I had someone at home, I’d be there.”
If Walter had someone at home, the guy would have to be drugged or manacled or bewitched. Joel didn’t say this, nor did he explain that he was out because Sam was working late. Which would have been a lie: he would have been out even if Sam hadn’t been working late.
What he couldn’t explain to Walter—as if Walter even deserved an explanation—was that you could have a perfectly happy home and not be in any rush to get there.
He hailed a cab. This was a pointless extravagance. Two hours at least before Sam would be home, nothing to do in the interval except maybe watch the Senate on C-SPAN engaging in their simulated debate and taking their five or six votes—the outcome of each predetermined, the roll calls meant only to get everybody on the record, for or against flag burning, for or against teenage pregnancy. He might as well have taken the Metro and saved a few bucks. But the sunset was spectacular: Washington was made for sunset, its monuments built low to the ground, leaving an open western sky. He wasn’t ready to scuttle down into some tunnel and wait for a train.
He had asked to be taken to the Safeway on Seventeenth Street so he could pick up something for Sam’s dinner. Funny, he thought of it that way—Sam’s dinner—when he was the only one who cared very much whether they ate real food or energy bars. He even said it sometimes, “Got to get home and fix Sam’s dinner.” It was only an expression, maybe half a joke. Just because he did all the cooking didn’t mean he had somehow turned into the little woman, rushing to get something on the stove for her caveman. He cooked and Sam fixed things; they just did what they were good at, everybody wore the pants in their family.
The cab was on Massachusetts Avenue, just ready to turn north, when Joel said no, he didn’t want to go to the Safeway, he wanted to go to P Street west of Dupont Circle. The driver uttered a brief expletive in some West African language but complied. As Joel got out he penitently overtipped the driver, then stood looking at the entrance to Zippers with some bewilderment. What had made him come here?
He hadn’t been to Zippers in years. It hadn’t changed at all:
the place still smelled of spilled beer no one ever mopped up, the ceiling over the oval bar was so mantled in tobacco resin it might have been mahogany. There was no place to dance, no one could really talk over the music, the drinks were minuscule and watery, the bartenders inattentive or surly. But the place was jammed, at seven-thirty on a Thursday night. People came to Zippers, as they always had, because they could be sure anyone they encountered there had come on exactly the same mission. That Joel had even walked into the place was a sort of imposture really. To be in Zippers with no carnal agenda was to violate an unspoken contract.