Man About Town: A Novel (46 page)

“Sure did. Got a Purple Heart.”

“You did? I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, see.” He stood up, slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Spread it wide, so that Joel could see, on the belly that now sagged a little over the waistband of his trousers, the scar. Jagged and white, starting just below the navel and running down until it disappeared in the trousers. Those few inches of flesh, navel to waistband, that had been to Joel like the sun—torn, years ago, torn, disfigured, healed, the way things heal.

Petras didn’t button his shirt again right away. He let Joel look for a second or two. At his chest, still powerful and firm but matted with silver hair, here or there a wart or a mole. At his white belly with its whiter scar.

Joel turned away, sat down on the porch step.

“What’s the matter?” Joel couldn’t answer; his eyes were filling with tears. Petras bent down and touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

The Santa Fe boy touched his shoulder.

“I’m sorry you got hurt.”

“Shit, it wasn’t no big deal. They patched me up. I’m still here.”

“No, I—” I’m sorry you ever got hurt, that’s what Joel meant to say. He was sorry about all the ways Petras must have been hurt since the day of that picture. But that was the same, wasn’t it, as being sorry that Petras was still here? Because the only way he wouldn’t have been hurt, scarred, the only way he could have stayed the boy in that picture would have been to die the instant after it was taken. Just as the only way Joel could have been the kid who saw that picture would have been to die right then, there in his boyhood room, the magazine slipping from his lifeless hands.

Petras stood up, backed away. Joel got up, too, turned to face him. To look at him one more time—the sleek arms and shoulders almost intact, the spare tire not too gross, just a sort of thickening all around his middle. As if it were a callus, as if he had grown it after being buffeted by all the travails of these decades.

He opened his hands, palms open in the immemorial gesture: I have nothing here. No weapon, no food, nothing in my hands. I have nothing to give you.

“You know, that picture didn’t even look like me.”

“What?”

“I never thought. I mean, you ever seen a picture of yourself and thought, that ain’t me?”

“I guess.”

“Guy must have taken a hundred pictures, I was under those lights for hours. And then he picks this one, this one shot where, just for a second, he caught me with this stupid shit-eating smile on my face.”

Caught him. Froze him there forever, open to the gaze of strangers, predators. Of a baffled kid who turned the page of a magazine and felt the rush of blood to his head and maybe to his loins, maybe he could admit that now. Joel had known, the first minute he came upon that page and that image, when he snapped the magazine shut he had known that he was guilty of something. He had never thought that what he was
guilty of was injuring this stranger, as surely as if he himself had torn that innocent, once-perfect belly.

You have no right. There the boy was, caught with his shit-eating smile, the little crinkle about his eyes betraying, as Joel had always thought, some pain: pain at the thought that Joel would look at him.

“You let them take it,” Joel said. “You let them take it, they printed it, there it was. I looked at it.” He had a right to look. He had a right to be in this world and look, take from the world anything it would give him. He had a right to say, out loud, “You were beautiful.”

“Is that what you come to tell me?”

“I guess you don’t like that word.”

“I don’t care. It’s kind of … your problem.”

“Problem,” Joel repeated. He shook his head. “You were put here to be beautiful, that one day, and I was put here to see it.”

“That ain’t what I was put here for,” Petras said. If he had some other theory, he didn’t supply it.

“All right,” Joel said. “It’s what / was put here for.”

What else? He hadn’t made babies, he hadn’t cured cancer or written a novel, he hadn’t even been there to write up the final agreement on the Harris amendment. He had seen the Santa Fe boy. Petras had radiated beauty one day in 1963, and in 1964 Joel had caught a glimpse of it, like a man watching from light years away the flash of a star that had died eons ago. By the time Joel saw it, it was already gone. But that’s what people were here for, the only reason we were on the planet at all: so that a star that flared and died a billion years before we were born would not pass away unobserved.

Petras shivered, buttoned his shirt. “Was there anything else you wanted?”

“No. No, there isn’t anything else I want. I better go catch my train.” Joel started up Bridge Street. When he had gone a few steps, he turned around. Petras was already sitting, opening
his paper again. In another minute he would forget Joel had ever been there. Joel called out, “It was good seeing you.”

Petras looked up and replied, with automatic politeness, “Good seeing you, too.”