Man About Town: A Novel (45 page)

South of Twenty-third Street, he stopped looking at fathers and started looking at non-fathers. A scattering at first, then little gaggles, by Eighteenth Street whole herds of men who would have made the young Peter Barry look like the sucker who gets sand kicked in his face. They wore baseball caps and T-shirts; many had shaved their heads; nearly all had pierced themselves in multiple places. As if their own meticulously sculpted bodies were voodoo dolls: if I stick it here, Daddy will get such a migraine.

Any other day Joel might just have looked around and thought: my, all these hot boys. He might have been a little sad that he couldn’t have all of them or, probably, any. Or he might have felt some little stab of regret—nothing so sharp, more the momentary surfacing of the numb regret that was
always there, that he hadn’t lived the
life
when he was younger. The life! Going from work to the long mandatory hours at the gym, home to an apartment the size of Joel’s kitchen, stopping only to pick out just the right baseball cap, and heading out to the bars. Ending the evening in some sort of random coupling, hardbodies in collision.

If he had dared, if he had dared, if he had lived: he would be dead. He could have come here and joined the great party he always knew was going on without him, and he would be dead now, as surely as if he’d been shot down in some rice paddy. Instead he had won the lottery; he was still here. Still here, for no apparent purpose. Here: his whole vision darkened, as he scanned the pageant of Chelsea boys, by a thun-derhead of despair and loss.

They were all so grim, wary, their eyes turned a little sideways, or half-inward. It looked as though they were … trying hard to remember something. That was the look. As sometimes you will see a walker suddenly stop, his face stricken: where was I headed? They were lost, constantly looking about for some sign, anything that might remind them of where they originally were headed. And at the same time knowing where they were headed, where everyone is headed.

What on earth was as mortal as these faggots? Young and beautiful and sterile as mules. And running headlong to death. These guys would have Medicare when they were thirty. If they were quick about it, if they hurried up and got their certificates before the budget bill passed tomorrow. They were burning themselves up, squeezing everything out of the time they had. And why shouldn’t they, if the alternative was to grow old and turn into Joel? No wonder they averted their eyes as they passed him. He might as well have been striding down Eighth Avenue in a black robe, brandishing a scythe. There was nothing else ahead of them, they would live and die and leave nothing.

Because they didn’t make babies, for Christ’s sake? Did he
really think that Petras Baranauskas, sitting on his front porch and vacantly watching his son wash a car, had a life full of meaning and fulfillment? That he was any less bewildered about what he was here for, or any less scared of leaving, because he had seen to it that there would be a few more Baranauskases in the Roseville, New Jersey, phone book?

Maybe, when he didn’t look straight at the camera, when he looked a little sideways, he was seeing what everybody else did. Maybe he trembled like everybody else.

Joel checked in at the Sheridan Square, left his briefcase in the room, had dinner at the bar in a Belgian place that served baskets of pommes frites and mayonnaise for dipping them in. He had two baskets, and then some mussels. There was no one around to call him a piggy.

When he got back to his room, the message light on the phone was blinking. Who? Herb, probably, saying they were close to agreement, Joel had better haul his ass back tonight and pitch in or said ass would be on the street. But of course it couldn’t be Herb. There was only one person who knew where Joel was.

“Hey. I guess you’re out whoring around. Just kidding. Just wanted to see how your … mission went. And … uh … tell you I miss you. Call me as soon as you get home.”

Joel played it back a couple of times, went to the window and looked out into the airshaft. Michael, what you need to do is hop the train up here, become a Sales Associate, Men’s Apparel, at Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s, and head straight to the clubs. Pierce yourself, tattoo yourself, throw yourself into this world while you’re still young. Stay away from old white guys, because they are piggy and will devour you.

He played the message again. Was there some way of preserving it, could the hotel give him a copy on tape or something? No: it would just be erased when he checked out. It was a gift for this one night only; when he left this room, he would
leave it behind. He played it over and over, so it would stay in his head. So he could play it in his head when he got old.

On the train the next morning, the local to Newark, he read: “President, Congress Reach Budget Compromise.” They had done a million things to taxes, Medicare, welfare. A whole inside page was full of bullet points and pie charts, and then facing that another half page, labeled
“NEWS
ANALYSIS,” about this or that new loophole—ornaments on the Christmas tree, as they said on the Hill—and which corporation had paid which member to obtain it. He read both pages through a second time and still couldn’t find anything about the Harris amendment. But they did say the drug companies had gotten their tax break. So maybe the Harris amendment was in the package, or maybe they’d found some other way to pay for biotechnology innovation zones. He’d better find out by Monday. Staffers would be calling, wondering what their members had voted for.

What he should do when he got off in Newark was catch the next southbound Amtrak, get over to the office and see if anybody had the conference agreement yet. Or maybe skip it, just go straight over to Hecht’s and let Michael pick him out a new pair of pants. Because he had Belgian mayonnaise on these and hadn’t brought a change.

When he got off in Newark he transferred to the Kilmer line.

Petras Baranauskas was on his front porch again, reading the paper. So he didn’t see Joel’s approach—or rather, failure to approach: Joel stood a long time, maybe fifty yards away, looking at Petras. Not, on this second foray, nerving himself, or trying to think what to say. Just looking, at Petras and at the banal landscape that surrounded him. Trying to take it all in, consciously prolonging the moment. Trying to pay attention, to everything, for just one minute of his life.

He couldn’t: there was too much to see, even here in blasted New Jersey. Houses, trash cans, parked cars. Trees, shrubs, grass. Human artifacts, inorganic, dead; vegetable life filling in every empty space with futile exuberance; a man on his front porch. No reason for the eye to be drawn to any one of these things instead of another. The figure of a man on his porch did not reward Joel’s attention any more than, say, the tricycle on the sidewalk, the crabgrass on the lawn, the clouds in the sky. Except that he happened to have come all this way to see the man. This journey was about his having intended it, somehow.

He finished the journey, walked closer to Petras. Actually thinking: now I am a hundred feet away, now fifty. He could, with each stride, cover some part of the distance between them, he could never get all the way. All the way: that would have meant being inside Petras. Anything less was to be at some distance from him.

The distance just a couple of yards now. Petras lowered his paper and looked at Joel through the upper part of his bifocals. He didn’t get up, just sat looking calmly.

What was he doing home, didn’t he have a job? Maybe he was retired already. Or disabled. Fifty-five, he would have been, about the age when lots of working stiffs wore out. After five months they could get Social Security. Then, twenty-four months after that, Medicare.

Joel reached the porch steps, climbed the first one, stopped.

Petras said, “Hey,” not in greeting, but as you might say it to a child or a pet, a gentle warning.

Joel didn’t answer. He found himself looking, not at Petras, but at the newspaper. President, Congress Reach Budget Compromise. That seemed more real to him than the present moment.

“Can I help you?” Petras said.

Joel shook his head. No, you can’t possibly help me.

Petras scratched his chest. “You still looking for the train station?”

“I—” Joel watched: Petras’s liver-spotted hand scratching the little tangle of silver wire that showed above the V of his shirt collar. “I’m looking for Peter Barry.”

Petras shivered. Joel heard Bate saying: you have no right.

“I haven’t used that name in a long time.”

“But you were Peter Barry?”

“I was.” He didn’t ask how Joel knew, or what Joel wanted from him. “For a little while.”

He didn’t need to ask what Joel wanted from him. He had been Peter Barry for a little while a long time ago. Whatever this stranger wanted from Peter Barry, there was no Peter Barry to give it to him.

“You were—-” Joel began. He had thought he might just say, baldly, the only thing there was to say—you were beautiful—and hightail it back to the train station. But he had no right. Why? What kind of transgression was it to tell a man he was beautiful? Other than the obvious, that no one would be especially happy to hear this so emphatically in the past tense: you
were
beautiful. Still, wouldn’t it be better to know that you had been beautiful even for an instant, and that there was someone who remembered? If Joel had been Peter Barry for one instant, wouldn’t he want to know that someone had seen him and remembered? He finished: “You were in a picture. I saw it when I was a kid.”

“When you were a kid.”

“And I always remembered it. I don’t know why, there was something about the picture.”

“You don’t know why,” Petras repeated. With no particular inflection, nothing in his voice to say that he and Joel both knew damn well why. “So you come to see me because I was in this picture?”

“Yes.”

Petras almost smiled. “You took your time.”

“I did.”

Petras let his paper drop to the porch floor, scratched his
chest again. He sighed. “What do you want to do, suck my dick?”

Joel was so shocked he stepped backwards. Into air—he had forgotten he’d gone up one step—then landed heavily, almost falling.

“No, Jesus,” he said. Though of course he had to wonder, one last time, if that was what he really wanted, if it had always been as simple as that.

“No?” Petras said. “Cause there was guys used to want to do that.”

“No kidding.”

“Lots of guys. I wound up—I stopped going into the city for a long time. I’d be walking down the street and some guy would … look at me. I’d been in the city enough, I knew there was guys that looked at you. But I mean somebody would stand still and just look while I walked by, like I was a parade or something. So I’d know they seen that picture. I’d feel like punching them out. They seen that picture and they probably whacked off to it. And it was like they owned me, or like they took something from me.”

“I never did,” Joel said. He added, “Whack off.” He wasn’t sure about the other part, the part about taking something. “I just looked at it.”

“You were a kid, you said.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen.” Petras shook his head sadly. Not sad, probably, about the time that had passed. Rather at the notion that some lonesome little faggot had looked at his picture. “I was … I don’t know.”

“You were twenty-three.”

“Was I? You know all about me, huh? I got a fucking fan club.”

“I guess.” No point telling him he had a fucking religion.

Petras shook his head again, but he was smirking, maybe a little tickled by having a fan club. “Okay, I was twenty-three,
if you say so. It was just some kind of joke, you know? Some girl said I should try modeling, I looked like a movie star or something, and somehow I got hooked up with this guy.”

“Sexton.”

“That was it, I met up with this Mr Sexton, and I thought, hey, I could make some change. Easy money.” He snorted. “He only ever got me this one job. Under those hot lights for hours and hours. Wearing that goddamn little suit and … so embarrassed, and trying to smile.”

“Were you embarrassed?”

“Shit, yeah. Guys didn’t wear things like that. I thought of my friends back home, seeing that picture. I thought of my mother. I mean, I was proud of my built, I used to like showing off, at the beach or wherever, but not like that. And jeez, if I’d known—I mean, I was embarrassed, but if I’d known who was going to look at that picture …” He paused, looked away from Joel. He must just have realized what he had said: if he’d known that sick people like Joel were going to look. He didn’t retract it.

“My buddies found out. I don’t know how, it ain’t like we all read that book—what was it?”

“
man about toum.
”

“Yeah. Somebody got hold of it, and they gave me shit, like it was a homo picture. So I’d say it was just a picture. I was me, and if homos looked at it, that didn’t make me a homo. So, okay, they knew that. Except some asshole took it to my foreman and he didn’t know that.

“I was working at Cooper-Dowd, you know, over in New Brunswick, they made airplane parts. Gone now. It was defense work, you had to have a clearance, and they started checking up on me. Like, it wasn’t a crime to be in a picture, but I might have ‘questionable associates.’ That’s what they said. And long as they were checking I couldn’t work in the C building. Because I might draw a picture of a goddamn top-secret screw and give it to my homo associates.

“I didn’t even know any homos. Except maybe Mr Sexton, you think maybe he was a homo?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess he was, but he didn’t try nothing. Anyway, I didn’t know any homos, but they transferred me out of defense work. Which was where the good money was, I was pissed. And then they fucking wrote to my draft board.”

“To tell them you were a … ?”

“To tell them I wasn’t doing defense work. So there went my goddamn deferment. They had my ass in Fort Dix before I knew what hit me. Cause the Army didn’t care if I was a homo, long as I could stand up and get shot at.”

“Oh. Did you … did you go to …” He couldn’t even say the name.