Man About Town: A Novel (38 page)

What was Michael thinking? Nothing. Joel felt Michael’s heart beating, heard his breathing, and imagined he was thinking nothing at all. Because Joel was a racist, because he could not attribute to Michael any human depth, just dismissed him as some sort of splendid, thoughtless animal? No, past this: because Michael was so entirely other that Joel could not see inside the way he usually saw inside people, by attributing to them his own interior life. Michael was lying on top of him, breathing into his neck, and thinking—what?

Wondering, maybe, how long to continue this tableau. Or, maybe, feeling Joel’s heartbeat and wondering what Joel was thinking, or whether Joel was thinking at all. Maybe Michael was as dizzy as Joel was, spiraling into the mystery of two warm men holding one another and still strangers.

Was this it, was this all you got? Just a couple of bodies twined together, as sleeping puppies interlock in a pet shop window.

Michael giggled.

“What?” Joel said.

“I don’t think you’ve taken a breath in the last five minutes.”

“So I guess we’re almost there,” Joel said, when he spoke to Bate on Tuesday.

“Mr. Lingeman, we’ve only started. What you’ve given me now is the rudimentary information people usually bring in when they retain me.”

“Oh.”

“Except usually they know where the missing person was a month ago, maybe a year ago. Petras … how did you say it again?”

“I’m not sure how to say it.”

“He’s had a lifetime to hide himself.”

What an odd way of putting it: as if Petras Baranauskas had actually spent his life concealing himself from Joel. While Joel, who was It, had to cover his eyes and count to a zillion before he could set off in search of the hidden one.

Being It was expensive. For what Joel had already spent on Bate, he could have gone down to Hecht’s and let Michael pick him a whole new wardrobe, and Bate was only at the starting point. This was expensive and silly and Joel had almost stopped caring about it, almost hadn’t called. No, of course that wasn’t so. Having got the name and the birth date and the last known address, so much intelligence, he could not have kept himself from calling. But he was a little ashamed of it.

He was conscious that this game was something he couldn’t tell Michael about. A deformity he would have to conceal. After a weekend that might still lead to nothing, he was already feeling: I hope Michael doesn’t find out I’m crazy. He pictured himself explaining. Hey, this was just a little pastime. It doesn’t have anything to do with who I really am. Just an odd thing I got into for a while.

He wondered if he should renounce the Santa Fe boy. Meet Michael tonight knowing that the Santa Fe boy was behind him, like a habit he had kicked.

Bate went on. “Do you understand? He could be anywhere. He has lived out his entire adult life since that picture was taken.”

“I understand,” Joel said.

“He could have died by now.”

“I—”

“He could have had cancer or a heart attack or … for all you know he was gay and got AIDS.”

“He wasn’t gay,” Joel said, inadvertently joining in the past tense. He could have died by now.

“He could have gone to Vietnam a few months after that picture was taken and he could have been shot in some rice paddy and he could have been dead all this time.”

Dead all this time: why not? Dead while Joel went to college, got the job at OLA, dead while Joel tricked, found Sam, lost him, found Michael …

“Mr. Lingeman, are you there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want me to continue?”

“Um …”

If a census-taker had canvassed the city in Joel’s head he would have found, dwelling side by side in perfect concord: Joel’s late parents, Sherlock Holmes, Sam, Riff from
West Side Story,
Alex Rivers, the gang from the Hill Club, Senator Harris, his boss Herb, Dorothea Casaubon, Michael, Monty Woolley, the Santa Fe boy. A democracy in which there was really no difference between the living and the dead, people he’d known and people he hadn’t known, people he would never see again and people who had never existed at all. All equal in his head. How could it possibly matter which particular category Petras Baranauskas happened to fall into? Why should Joel spend one more dime to find out?

“Yes. Why don’t you keep going.”

Because—this was the closest he could come—there were, outside Joel’s head, two possible worlds, one in which the Santa Fe boy still breathed and one in which he didn’t. Joel just had to know which planet he was on.

Joel and Michael met at Gentry and walked up to Adams-Morgan, to a place Michael said was good. El Elefante Blanco. Surely Michael hadn’t ventured into a Thai-Cuban fusion joint on his own. Which of Joel’s precursors had brought him here?

Joel wanted to taste Michael’s noodles with jasmine picadillo and offered a taste of his own goat with black beans and lemongrass-plantain fritters.

“I don’t share food like that,” Michael said.

“It’s kind of an Asian place. You’re supposed to.”

“I’m sorry. When I was coming up you ate from your own plate. Tried to eat off one of my sister’s, you’d get a fork stuck in your hand.”

We’re not in Trenton, Joel thought, no one’s going to starve here. Even the quaint “coming up” was somehow annoying.

“Now you’re all huffy,” Michael said.

“I’m not huffy.”

“Food’s a big thing to you. You can have a taste if you want.”

“No. It didn’t really sound very good,” Joel said, just to show that food wasn’t a big thing to him. Then he thought maybe it wasn’t a crime if Michael sometimes understood him. “Just a little taste.”

Michael understood Joel and Joel didn’t understand Michael. He took this asymmetry to be racial: black people had to understand white people, while the reverse wasn’t true. Michael could read him—could read his body, could read his mind now from across the table.

Michael dished a rather grudging sample of the noodles onto his bread and butter plate and slid it toward Joel.

“You want to try some of this?” Joel said.

“No. My church won’t let me eat goat.”

Joel laughed disproportionately. He was still chuckling when Michael said, “I guess you and your lover shared food a lot, huh?”

“He didn’t like to either, not at first. I had to train him.” Joel was about to taste the noodles when he said, “How did you know I had a lover?”

“I don’t feature you buying Feral for Men.”

“No.”

“Or going off by your lonesome and getting a Nordic Track.”

“No.”

“What happened to him?”

“We broke up, a few months ago.”

“How long were you together?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Wow. And then you—you’d think after all that …”

Joel shrugged. He knew he shouldn’t tell any more, the story just branded him as a loser. But not telling it seemed like more effort than telling it. Like standing in a bar the whole evening trying to suck in your stomach. “He walked out. He left for somebody younger.”

“Oh.”

That wasn’t the story, either, or not the way Sam would have
told it. It occurred to him that even the abbreviated account he had just provided didn’t include a character named “Joel.” It was about what Sam had done, it was Sam’s story. Joel could have rephrased it: “He walked out on
me.
He left
me
for somebody younger.” Turning himself into a little pronoun, the hapless object of Sam’s verbs. The other way was better, after all. Sam’s departure was Sam’s story, while Joel’s story was happening right now. One in which he was the subject of verbs. Maybe.

“Yoo-hoo,” Michael said.

“Huh?”

“You went away somewhere.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. You know, you get to be my age, your mind wanders.”

“Okay.”

“Or, in Sam’s case, your body wanders.”

“Sam, that was your lover? How old is this ‘younger’ guy?”

“Twenty-three.”

“He left you for somebody twenty-three?” Michael said, as if this were bizarre.

“I would have left me for somebody twenty-three.”

“Not me.”

“Right, well, you have this thing for old white guys.”

“Not old, I didn’t really mean old.”

“Whatever.” Joel had to ask: “Why is that?” As though, if Michael could just supply some plausible reason for his strange predilection, Joel could stop thinking it was about money.

“You mean, why am I a snow queen?”

Joel hadn’t meant that. He had been thinking about the old part; being into white guys didn’t seem so peculiar. But of course it was the larger question.

“I don’t know. I just am. I always have been. I mean, when I was a little kid, I’d watch TV and—you know who I used to like? On, what was it,
Happy Days
?”

“The Fonz?”

“The father.”

“Tom Bosley? When you were a kid you had the hots for Tom Bosley?” This was sort of reassuring. Compared to Tom Bosley, Joel looked like Brad Pitt.

Michael was looking down at his plate, twirling noodles onto his fork, untwirling them. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. Although he couldn’t possibly. Joel himself didn’t know what he was thinking. “You think I hate myself.”

Yes, of course Joel thought that. There hung between them, as if hovering over the candle on the table, the obvious: that a little black boy who fell in love with a rotund white daddy on TV had embarked on some enterprise of self-negation. Something about magically becoming squeaky white Ron Howard and being swept away into
Happy Days
land, there to be cradled in the arms of pudgy old Tom Bosley.

“I get that all the time,” Michael said. “I mean, from other black guys. That I must hate being black. It’s like … you’re into black guys, right?”

“I— I don’t know if I’d say I’m
into
black guys.” He didn’t think he was: if pressed, he would have said he was into ambulatory guys. But he was also conscious that there was something a little disgraceful about being into black guys. “I’m into you,” he said, feeling sappy.

“Whatever. So does that mean you hate being white?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Bullshit. It’s like you just can’t love somebody else, somebody outside you, it has to be about something going on inside. Like there isn’t anybody else, it’s just you. Some kind of show with only one actor in it.”

Having delivered this frighteningly mature and concise account of Joel’s life tangle, Michael plunged with uncharacteristic gusto into his noodles. He even reached over and speared a chunk of Joel’s goat.

When they left the restaurant, Joel started in the direction of his place, actually took a few steps before realizing Michael
wasn’t with him. He turned: Michael was still at the door of the restaurant, his face striped with bars of neon from overhead. He was frowning.

Oh, Jesus, Joel thought. This is over already. He’s going to thank me for dinner and kiss me on the lips and walk away. Joel went over to him, slowly. Michael said, “I need to go home.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, I’m still wearing my clothes from today, and I have to be in real early for inventory. I have to get stuff. You mind coming? It’s not that far.”

“Oh. Oh, sure.”

Michael’s place was near Twelfth and T. The way there took them through streets Joel would not ordinarily have traversed in an armored car. Storefront tabernacles, grocery stores whose only produce was Lotto tickets. In front of the liquor store a knot of impassive Latinos who stared at them and spat on the sidewalk, probably thinking:
maricones.
A couple blocks later—they must have crossed some boundary—a bunch of black guys who didn’t even spit, just tugged on their beers and regarded Michael and Joel with a sort of listless amazement. Michael strolled on, oblivious. This was his neighborhood, he lived here.

Joel lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Dupont Circle and Michael lived in some hovel in—what did they even call this neighborhood? Ledroit Park? Not a mile distant, but about as far apart as people got in this country; it was a wonder Joel hadn’t had to show a visa. Maybe this neighborhood didn’t even have a name. Realtors gave neighborhoods their names. Places in areas like this showed up in the classifieds as just “NW DC,” signifying that what was for sale was a worthless property in an anonymous wasteland.

To which Michael had brought Joel deliberately. He could have changed before he came out, or he could have stuffed a gym bag with fresh linen and a toothbrush and the cologne he was wearing just a little bit too much of tonight—could
Joel tell him that, were they that far along? He had planned for Joel to see where he lived. No, that was backwards. He was simply not concealing where he lived.

Michael unlocked a blank slab of a door, led Joel up a staircase whose ancient carpet bore countless stains whose origins Joel had no wish to speculate about, then down a hallway with a linoleum floor and two fluorescent lights overhead, one of them blinking as sporadically as a firefly. Michael opened no fewer than three locks on another blank door and admitted Joel to:

A room as spotless and spiritless as one in a Holiday Inn. A little white loveseat and a matching chair angled around a brass-and-glass coffee table that held an ashtray and a single copy of
Men’s Health.
Beyond them a perfectly made bed, a nightstand with a clock radio. On one wall a metal wardrobe with printed oak graining, on the other a particleboard cabinet with a TV, a compact stereo, a handful of CDs, and a vase with a plastic lily. Above it, a large poster of a Corvette, a second depicting several adorable puppies, and some framed certificates Joel couldn’t make out. Nothing else: no books of course, nothing on the counter of the kitchenette but a little coffee maker that looked as if it had never been used. The door over to the right must have led to the bathroom. Joel imagined that, if he went in, he would find a paper band across the toilet seat, Sanitized for Your Protection.

Except for the Corvette poster, there was no evidence that Michael had ever lived here. Or: this utter vacancy was how Michael lived. No history, nor any of those artifacts that
refer,
the scattered objects that say this place is really supposed to be in Soho, or in the hunt country, or in Provence. Zero. Just the domicile of a man who had shed everything and was poised for some kind of leap, into Joel’s apartment or into some finer digs.