Man About Town: A Novel (35 page)

“A couple.”

From which Sam understood: three. “You better slow down. You know how you get.”

Joel knew how he got. But it didn’t matter, did it? As he had conclusively been stood up.

“Talk to you,” Sam said. He hurried upstairs, probably in the hope that the kid was still there and might remember who he was.

Joel got a fourth drink. Stood up. If it had been twenty years earlier, Joel wouldn’t have been surprised—on the contrary, he would have been more surprised if Michael had appeared. He hadn’t kept score, but probably a majority of the repeat engagements he had made with tricks had not been kept. Until he came to see no-shows not as particular instances of rudeness directed personally at him but as emblematic of the gay sensibility: improvisatory, unfettered. To be gay was to acknowledge
the primacy of impulse, so a date meant, if we both feel like it tomorrow at five …

Of course it never helped, telling himself this.

First thing Friday morning Joel called the only person he knew in the White House. That is, Kristen wasn’t actually
in
the White House, but just up the street, close enough that her business card declared THE WHITE HOUSE and bore a little gold presidential seal. He reached her voice mail and told her he had a question about the Harris bill. Maybe she would call him back.

While he was waiting, he decided that he might as well find out what Bate had to say. That was how he put it to himself, casually. Even if the quest had seemed silly just yesterday, he had paid for Bate’s time; he might as well hear whatever Bate had discovered, or failed to. But—as the phone rang twice, three times with no answer—the depth of his frustration betrayed just how deeply the hunt still mattered. This was real; it was Michael who had been the fantasy.

“Mr. Lingeman,” Bate said, when he answered at last. How, in that tiny office, could it have taken him six rings to answer? “I have some amount of information.” He managed to say “some amount” with no vowels at all, as if to illustrate the paucity of whatever information he had acquired.

“Great.”

“Dinkeloo and Dinkeloo is, in fact, still in operation.”

He paused. Joel supplied the inevitable: “However …”

“Needless to say, there is no record of transactions involving a minor account they stopped handling thirty years ago.”

“Needless to say.”

“However, my informant did suggest that in those years male models were ordinarily secured from either of two agencies, Talent International or Kennedy-Sexton.”

He paused again. Joel jumped ahead. “Both of which are defunct.”

“Both of which are defunct, Kennedy-Sexton only quite recently. I was able to trace one of the principals, Mr. Sexton, in fact, who is still living in New York City.”

Yet another pause. Joel realized suddenly that Bate didn’t do this for dramatic effect: it must have been that, given his enormous handwriting, each of these factules was on a separate page of his notes.

“Mr. Sexton recalled the model in question. I was rather surprised, actually.”

Joel was not surprised: how could someone fail to recall the model in question? Still, a guy who ran a modeling agency had probably encountered his share of beauties over the years. The Santa Fe boy would have been just one of the stable: there was the cowboy for the cigarette ads, the debonair man with the eye patch for the shirt ads, the guy with the smirk who let women run their fingers through his hair goop. There was the guy with the blinding torso and the shy smile whom Mr. Sexton could recall after three decades.

“He asked me what my interest was. I didn’t know what to answer. I had planned to say that I was with the Bate Agency in Washington, and that I thought the model might have the look we needed for a new campaign. But it occurred to me that he might find this …”

“Implausible.”

“I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t answer at all. Finally he said, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ and concluded the conversation.”

Joel sighed. “Of course you couldn’t go see him.”

“New York, that would be travel.”

“I’ll pay for the travel.”

“Mr. Lingeman, this gentleman lives at Four Fifth Avenue in New York City. I’m not going to find him out watering the lawn. I would have to go to the front desk and ask to see him, and he would say no.”

“So you’re just not going to do it.”

“It’s a wild goose chase.”

“But if I’m going to pay you …”

“If you pay me, I’ll report that I tried to see him and couldn’t. And how would you know that I even tried? I just want to save you the expense.”

“Thanks.”

“I should have saved you the expense when we started. I almost told you: you can’t trace somebody without a name. You have to start with a name.”

“But look how far you got already. This guy must know the name, we’re practically there.” They were practically there. This time, positively, someone who knew the boy. “I’ll go myself if I have to.”

“Mr. Lingeman …”

“If I get the name, will you be able to find him?”

“If it isn’t something like John Smith, there’s a possibility.”

“I’ll get the name.”

“Mr. Lingeman, I should tell you. What the gentleman said.”

“Uh-huh?”

“He said, ‘I’m dying. I don’t have time for this.’”

As long as he was making phone calls he could make one more. Almost eleven, Michael would be at work. Ding, the phone would go, ding: a little carillon of self-abasement.

“This is Michael Greeley, how can I help you today?”

“Hi, this is Joel.”

During the ensuing silence Michael was either constructing an alibi or trying to remember who Joel was.

“Joel! Oh, God, Joel, I’m so glad you called. I didn’t have your number. I had to work overtime, and I couldn’t meet you, and I didn’t have your number, and I’m so sorry.”

This was not incredible. “No problem,” Joel said.

“Listen, I really want to see you again, but I can’t tonight. How about tomorrow?”

“I—” Tomorrow, Saturday, Joel was going on an excursion.
He hadn’t actually formed this plan, became aware of it only as an impediment appeared. An impediment? A possible date with a live human was an impediment to a silly journey in quest of someone who no longer existed?

What was it that Kevin had said to Sam? “You have to choose.” The choice was obvious, he didn’t have to take out a sheet of paper and make two columns headed Michael Greeley and Santa Fe. In the firsf column: has three dimensions.

“We could meet at … maybe nine-thirty or so, get a bite to eat.”

“Why so late?”

“I, uh … I have a dinner date.”

“You’re going to dinner and then you’re going to meet me and have dinner?”

“The President sometimes has three or four dinners.”

“And he looks like it.”

“I’ll just have a salad or something.”

“Right,” Michael said. He knew Joel’s pants size.

Joel first saw New York the year of the Santa Fe boy: 1964. Joel’s father had a meeting, he took the family along. Joel could still remember, after the eternity of the New Jersey Turnpike, that first glimpse of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building. Then they plunged into the Lincoln Tunnel. Everything was magnified there: the bright tile, the echoing noise, the exhaust fumes, the heightened sense of velocity as they sped through that narrow space like blood rushing through a vein, sucked headlong toward the heart of the world.

They stayed at the Prince George, on 28th Street just off Fifth. The doorman wore livery and a powdered wig. Joel had a room of his own next to his parents’. While his father was at the meeting, his mother took him to Scribner’s, that golden temple of books, then to lunch at Toffenetti’s on Times Square, then to a matinee of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
The next day they went to B. Altman’s, which his
mother for some reason preferred to Macy’s, and then up to the Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle, where Huntington Hartford had assembled a collection that only a fourteen-year-old could truly appreciate:, late Dali, Magritte. In the evening, while Joel’s parents dressed for dinner, Joel sat in a wing chair in the lobby of the Prince George and thought he looked grown up. One night they went to the Café Madrid and had paella. He couldn’t remember where they went the other night, maybe the Stockholm for smorgasbord. Joel would surely have been dazzled if it had just been Schrafft’s.

Today he was coming into New York by train: another tunnel, but pitch black, and he hardly felt that he was moving at all. He had been to the city maybe a hundred times since that first visit, and still, as the train came out of the tunnel into the patch of gray light, before it dove into the bowels of the post office, still he felt some flicker of what he had felt at fourteen. Even if he knew the Prince George wound up as the biggest welfare hotel in the city, even if every other place they visited had since disappeared, even if he had come to realize that
How to Succeed
was not the summit of the American musical theater: he still felt that he was coming into a city that was big enough for him. Big as his dreams were back then, the adult life ahead of him in the city of
man about town:
the big show, the late supper, the penthouse.

The feeling was gone by the time he came up the escalator and emerged into the cauldron of Seventh Avenue on a hot day in August. It was just a crowded, dirty city through which he needed to make his way. He walked to Four Fifth Avenue—mostly down Sixth, which had turned into a suburban mall, except not as glamorous—and he cruised the hot Hispanic boys. They were the only landmark here that aroused him now. Where were the Hispanic boys when he thought the most exciting vista in town was a billboard that blew smoke rings?

The woman at the front desk said Mr. Chambers Sexton was
out. There must have been five hundred apartments at Four Fifth, how could she possibly know who was in or out? No, Joel didn’t want to leave a message, he just happened to be passing by.

He decided to wait. This was idiotic: who knew how long Chambers Sexton would be out, and how would Joel spot him if he came back? But Joel had the impression he would just know, as if someone who had once been in contact with the Santa Fe boy would give off some kind of aura. And perhaps he also supposed that a man who characterized himself as dying wouldn’t venture out for very long.

Flanking the marquee out front was a pair of marble-walled boxes, each holding a bit of ivy, empty soda bottles, newspapers. Joel sat on the edge of one of them. The doorman said, “You can’t sit there, mister.”

Joel said, “I was supposed to meet Mr. Sexton. I guess he’s running a little late.”

“You can wait in the lobby.”

“I just wanted to have a cigarette.”

The doorman frowned, but a taxi pulled up, and he had to leave Joel to greet one of those ninety-year-old New York ladies, with the hat, the gloves—in this heat!—the designer dress with a very short hemline, to show off her astonishingly preserved gams. By the time the doorman had helped her hobble into the building and came back out, he had accepted Joel as part of the landscape.

Chambers Sexton had been in contact with the Santa Fe boy. Could this have been literally so? Joel would have liked not to think so. But there were an awful lot of pretty faces in the world, more faces than ads. He didn’t suppose Mr. Sexton chose among them by playing eeny-meeny-miney-mo.

The doorman glanced at Joel now and then as he had a second cigarette, a third, watched the crowd on Fifth Avenue.

The Prince George was—what?—maybe a mile uptown. It occurred to Joel that when he and his parents got back from
dinner and he went to his very own hotel room with a television set he could watch from his bed all by himself, at that very instant, Mr. Chambers Sexton was in another bed just a mile away, holding a private audition for the next vacancy in his stable: the cigarette man, the man with the eye patch. The adult life Joel would actually embark upon was already there, all around him. The hustlers loitering near Toffenetti’s, the chorus boys in
How to Succeed,
maybe the waiter who brought the paella: the real city that was Joel’s future was all around him, and he hadn’t seen it.

The doorman was looking at Joel steadily, a little perplexed. From which Joel understood that the man just walking into the building must have been Chambers Sexton; the doorman was wondering why he didn’t stop for Joel. Joel hurried inside and got to the front desk just as the receptionist was saying, “Oh, here he is now, Mr. Sexton.”

Sexton turned to look at Joel. His head was hairless, his cheeks sunken. Chemotherapy or fashion, wasting or just old age? There was no way of knowing. His sweater—in all this heat—was draped over his back, the sleeves knotted in front like an enormous cravat.

Joel veered into the sitting area of the lobby and murmured, “Mr. Sexton.” As he had hoped, Sexton came over to him, so that he would not have to endure his rebuff under the very nose of the receptionist. “Mr. Sexton, can I talk to you just one minute?”

“What?” Sexton said, with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance, perhaps also a hint of trepidation.

“I … I know you don’t want to talk about this, I understand, but I’ve got to—”

“Oh, shit.”

“Sir?”

“It’s about that boy, isn’t it?”

“Um …”

Sexton fluttered his hands in front of his eyes, as if to make
Joel disappear. “This all stopped years ago, you’re the very last one.”

Joel was too stunned to answer. The last one: there had been some procession of deranged faggots like Joel, all on the same fatuous quest. He felt like an Egyptologist who opens a tomb and finds, amid the hieroglyphs, Kilroy Was Here.

Sexton lowered his hands and looked at Joel, one eyebrow raised. “Huh. You are the very last one, aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“I suppose there must be a last living member of the Rudy Vallée fan club. It must be lonesome for the poor dear, to be the only one who remembers what they all saw in that queen.”

Joel chuckled with him. Hoping that he would think of Joel as a fellow queen who happened to be in an entertaining predicament. Rather than as a pathetic loser who had missed the last bus to Santa Fe thirty years ago.