Man About Town: A Novel (8 page)

Tonight he would drive to the airport, leave his car in the special members’ lot that the newspapers lately had turned into some kind of symbol of how privileged senators were, how. isolated from ordinary life. Catch a late flight to Montana—several flights, probably, it must have been hard to get to Montana—several legs, riding in coach, because he wasn’t one of the rich senators. Then a weekend of flying around the state on puddle-jumpers and nodding thoughtfully as sheep ranchers bleated their grievances.

Who could have wanted such a life, why should Joel have been filled with sadness and self-reproach that he wasn’t a senator and Joe Harris was? A pretty obscure senator, to be sure, who probably didn’t have to worry that anyone would recognize him on the airplane. But still a somebody, his jacket draped on a senator’s chair. While Joel, a nobody, sat in a senator’s office with, yes, now that he looked, gravy on his tie.

It was about Sam, Sam and the jacket had got all mixed up.
As if somehow Joel had chosen between life as a senator and life with Sam, chosen irrevocably. Sam had cost him everything, and now Sam was gone.

The receptionist appeared, looking sullen. Here he had been a varsity—what?—wrestler, probably, who had graduated maybe a year ago from some school like Southwest Georgia Agriculture and Remedial Reading and had come to Washington planning to work at the White House. Instead he was bringing coffee, in a seldom-washed mug that read “Big Sky Country,” to this geek with gravy on his tie.

“Thank you, Rob,” Joel said.

Rob was a little startled to be called by name. “Uh … sure. Did you want cream or … whatever? Um …” He searched for the concept. “Sugar?”

“No, this is fine.”

“Um … okay.”

Joel regarded Rob’s departing, varsity butt, his vast oxford-swathed back. So beautiful, so young; so dumb. And with infinitely more chance of becoming a senator than Joel had ever had.

Because he was a straight boy.

It wasn’t Sam: being gay had cost Joel everything. Of course he would never have been a senator, not if he’d been as straight as a two-dollar bill. Perhaps there were some other, more plausible vocations that had been closed to him—or had seemed closed—in the early seventies, those last years before the closet doors started to crack open. Law, for example, or the foreign service: he had actually gone to interview at the State Department before he learned that they were still giving polygraph tests to screen out deviants. So he was cruelly prevented from embarking on a career of processing visa applications in, say, Zambia.

The price he had paid for being gay didn’t consist of these specific handicaps. There were other things he might have
been, instead of nothing. But being gay had taken up his whole life. He had devoted the whole of his youth to it, had studied it year after year as intensively as if he had been training to be a neurosurgeon. There hadn’t been time for anything else.

First, of course, the many years of being not-gay. Starting with being not-in-love-with-Alex. Or even earlier, maybe, when he turned a page in a magazine, saw an ad with a little picture of a guy in swimming trunks, and knew. Knew, with hot astonishment, and from that instant devoted himself to the great vocation of not-knowing.

He spent the next ten years of his life not knowing: denying, renouncing, forgetting, explaining. How he explained to himself in those years. Ockham’s Razor, the principle that a scientist should prefer the simplest explanation that will account for the available facts, should have led him quickly enough to the correct hypothesis. However, as a creationist can disregard whole mountains of evidence, waving away every fossil and geologic formation, just as faithfully Joel had dismissed every sign of the simple truth about himself. Every sidewise glance in the locker room, every vision conjured up during his nightly self-abuse, the even more compelling testimony of his recusant dick when he tried to make it with women—nothing was persuasive enough. Not even several years of actual praxis—the twenty or so tricks scattered across his last year of college, the couple of years of graduate school, his first years at OLA. He could account for it all: annotate every feeling, explicate every incident, until he had compiled a veritable
summa theologica
of rationalization and denial.

He knew gay men who had got through all of this by the time they could tie their shoes, and others who had gone to their graves refusing the irrefutable. His decade of resistance was, perhaps, longer than average. Ending abruptly and rather anticlimactically one day when he was twenty-six. He said, “Okay.” Pushed into it, finally, by the crushing burden of the evidence? He couldn’t remember, but it probably wasn’t that
way: would one more fossil make a creationist drop his Bible? Just one day—more exhausted than exuberant—he murmured, “Okay.” It was okay, and stayed okay.

Okay through the next couple of hundred tricks, over about four years. Once a week, then, on average, though an average would mask the dry spells, the bacchanalian intervals, the handful of micro-romances, the longest of which might have lasted about ten days. Once a week Joel summoned up the nerve to talk to a stranger in a bar and then follow him home. Or take him to Joel’s own place, whose pestilential untidiness in those years might, Joel could see now, have contributed to the brevity of his affairs. And of course the nights he scored were outnumbered by the nights he stood forlurnly at the margin of Zippers trying to decipher whether some guy was looking at him or through him.

Either kind of night followed by the mornings when he would drag into the office, sleepy or hung over or both, and try to focus on … whatever the hot issues were back in the seventies. They seemed as far away as his tricks. The Nixon national health insurance plan. David, who turned out to have a wife and a baby. The Carter national health insurance plan. Steven, who saw him for almost a week before asking if Joel would mind co-signing for a little loan. The Gephardt national health insurance plan. Keith, who flirted with him for most of 1979, finally went home with him, and turned out to be wearing a girdle.

By the time Sam came along, Joel was thirty. He had used up nearly half his life, all the years of saying “No” and then the equally taxing years of saying “My place or yours.” How could he have accomplished anything? Gay had been his profession; everything else had been a sideline. Now he was forty-five, Sam was very possibly gone, and he had nothing, was nothing.

Harris returned. He looked dismayed to find Joel still there, but covered pretty quickly. “Um … I guess Melanie will be back in a minute. Why don’t you just go on?”

Go on? What the hell had they been talking about? “Right. I guess … you were asking why these aliens didn’t become citizens.”

“Uh-huh,” Harris said blandly. He had already lost interest in this question. “Listen, let’s hold off on this till Melanie comes back. There was something else I wanted to ask about.”

“Yes, sir.”

“AIDS.”

“AIDS?” Joel’s voice cracked. It was just another health policy issue. Surely Harris just thought: here’s a health guy, I can ask him my AIDS question. Yet Joel felt himself blushing, as if he had given himself away somehow.

“Yeah,” Harris said. “I hear people with AIDS get Medicare.”

“Oh. Some of them do, yes, sir.”

“How come?”

“Because they … you know, if they get disabled and can’t work, they can get Social Security. And then two years after that they get Medicare.”

“They have to wait two years for Medicare?”

“Right.”

Harris was, astonishingly, taking notes. “Then after that they have it until …”

“Until they …” Joel repeated. It was creepy, joining Harris in saying “they.” They were
they,
people with AIDS: to Harris they must have seemed as far away as Eskimos, and as unimportant. But they were
they
to Joel as well. Joel and Sam were negative. So were most of the people they knew, those who were still around by 1995. The epidemic had about finished with Joel’s generation and had moved on to kids, with whom he felt only a tepid kinship.

“So how do they get disability? Just call in and say, ‘Oh, I don’t feel up to teasing anybody’s hair today?’” Harris smiled.

Joel was supposed to smile, too. He was not supposed to say, “We don’t all do hair.” He didn’t, but at least he didn’t smile.
Mr. Integrity. “I … you know, I don’t do Social Security, but I think you’re automatically disabled if you actually have AIDS. If you have HIV but don’t have AIDS yet, there’s a list of, like, symptoms, conditions.”

Harris sighed. Joel had no sense of humor. Joel was boring. “So they … get something on that list and then two years after that they get Medicare.”

“Twenty-nine months, actually. I mean, they have to wait five months for their Social Security and then two years after that for the Medicare to kick in.”

“Twenty-nine months. I guess not everybody … makes it.”

“No, sir.”

“So what do they do in the meanwhile? Buy their own insurance?

“Well, they can’t do that, usually. You know, insurance companies don’t want them.” Joel was encouraged to describe all the insurance problems of people with HIV. COBRA coverage they couldn’t pay for. Limited drug benefits. State programs that required them to impoverish themselves. Probably he went on too long, but Harris listened with surprising attentiveness. Funny that a guy from a rural state should be interested in AIDS. Maybe Melanie was right, maybe the guy really did care about people.

When Joel ran out of steam, Harris shook his head and said, “My.” He looked off into space for a second. “Anyway, the ones on Medicare. They’re all on disability, none of them are over sixty-five?”

“Oh, I guess some are. You know, if they got it through a transfusion or something like that.”

“Uh-huh. But those people just … got it, they didn’t do anything.”

Joel drew in his breath. It had been some time—the late eighties, maybe—since he had heard anyone distinguish between the innocent victims and the guilty. He was wondering if he might dare to point out, gently, that everybody just got
it, it was sort of a no-fault microorganism, when Melanie came in.

“Sorry,” she said. “Where are we?”

“Oh, Josh and I were just chatting,” Harris said.

“Joel,” Joel said.

“Right,” Harris said, unapologetically. “Why don’t we get back to aliens? How many aliens have Medicare?”

“About a million.”

“A million! Gosh.” Harris wrote down “I MIL” in giant letters. He looked over at Melanie and intoned: “Young American families are paying for free care for a million foreigners.”

Amazing. The man actually spoke in sound bites. “It’s not the whole million,” Joel said. “I mean, most of them—”

A buzzer sounded. Buzzers haunted these guys everywhere. There even used to be a couple of nearby bars linked up to the signal system, so a truant member could stagger back to the Capitol and vote.

“Shoot,” Harris said. “Got to get to the floor.” He stood up, put on his jacket one arm at a time, then came over and shook Joel’s hand, actually grasping it this time. “Josh, I really appreciate your coming over on such short notice. It’s been very helpful.” He repeated, “Very helpful, very helpful,” as he left the room.

Joel said to Melanie, “I shouldn’t have told him a million. I mean, there are a million aliens, but most of them just get Medicare like anybody else—they worked, they earned it. I think there’s only a few who are targeted by this Altman amendment.”

“Shit,” Melanie said. “Once he gets a number in his head it’s there for good. How many is it really?”

“I don’t know. I was trying to pin down the number this morning, but I don’t have it yet.” Inasmuch as the number didn’t magically appear on the solitaire screen. “Not very many.”

“Well, keep trying. I don’t want him going around saying a million.”

“Right.”

“What did you all talk about while I was out?”

“Um … AIDS mostly.”

“AIDS? I didn’t know he was interested in AIDS.” She frowned: now she would have to get up to speed on yet another issue.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Joel said. “He wasn’t that interested.”

“No, he has kind of a short attention span. He jumps around a lot.”

“Don’t they all?”

Joel trudged back to his office, a couple of blocks from the Capitol, in what had once been a tacky apartment building. Now the building housed OLA, along with minority staff from especially obscure House committees. He had to pass through a metal detector and let the guard x-ray his briefcase. This nonsense had started just a few weeks earlier, after the Oklahoma City bombing in April—as if, with all the possible targets in Washington, a terrorist would home right in on House Annex 2A, the very nerve center of American democracy.

He crept by his boss’s office. Herb was on the phone, as always, and with his back turned to the door; he was looking out the window his exalted position had secured him, so Joel didn’t have to stop and report how the briefing had gone. In his own office, a windowless cell that must once have been a supply closet, Joel reached for the political almanac to look up Harris. Usually he did this before a briefing, so he would know better than to babble about poor people to some raving Social Darwinist, but he had been too busy all morning.

In the almanac, a Harris campaign photo—shirtsleeves rolled up, no thousand-dollar suit in evidence—and the terse bio:

Politics was all he had ever done, then; if he were ever defeated he’d have to go back to the nothing job in waste management. And he could be defeated: winning so narrowly in the year of the Republican sweep, all those mercurial Reform voters who might go for the Democrat next time. Ray Three would be—what? Twelve or thirteen, maybe. Likely to come home with some body part pierced any day now, and with college application forms not too long after that. So Harris had better stay a senator if he was going to put all those kids through school and get Trudi the Viking range. No wonder he was ready for a little alien-bashing. Safe enough in a state with no ethnic voters: probably the last aliens Montana ever saw were Japanese people in relocation camps.