Man About Town: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

home and not be in any rush to get there.
    He hailed a cab. This was a pointless extravagance. Two hours at least before Sam would be home, nothing to do in the interval except maybe watch the Senate on C-SPAN engaging in their simulated debate and taking their five or six votes—the outcome of each predetermined, the roll calls meant only to get everybody on the record, for or against flag burning, for or against teenage pregnancy. He might as well have taken the Metro and saved a few bucks. But the sunset was spectacular: Washington was made for sunset, its monuments built low to the ground, leaving an open western sky. He wasn’t ready to scuttle down into some tunnel and wait for a train.
    He had asked to be taken to the Safeway on Seventeenth Street so he could pick up something for Sam’s dinner. Funny, he thought of it that way—Sam’s dinner—when he was the only one who cared very much whether they ate real food or energy bars. He even said it sometimes, “Got to get home and fix Sam’s dinner.” It was only an expression, maybe half a joke. Just because he did all the cooking didn’t mean he had somehow turned into the little woman, rushing to get something on the stove for her caveman. He cooked and Sam fixed things; they just did what they were good at, everybody wore the pants in their family.
    The cab was on Massachusetts Avenue, just ready to turn north, when Joel said no, he didn’t want to go to the Safeway, he wanted to go to P Street west of Dupont Circle. The driver uttered a brief expletive in some West African language but complied. As Joel got out he penitently overtipped the driver, then stood looking at the entrance to Zippers with some bewilderment. What had made him come here?
    He hadn’t been to Zippers in years. It hadn’t changed at all:the place still smelled of spilled beer no one ever mopped up, the ceiling over the oval bar was so mantled in tobacco resin it might have been mahogany. There was no place to dance, no one could really talk over the music, the drinks were minuscule and watery, the bartenders inattentive or surly. But the place was jammed, at seven-thirty on a Thursday night. People came to Zippers, as they always had, because they could be sure anyone they encountered there had come on exactly the same mission. That Joel had even walked into the place was a sort of imposture really. To be in Zippers with no carnal agenda was to violate an unspoken contract.
    For he surely had no intention of being picked up. He and Sam hadn’t fooled around in years and years. Fidelity had probably been—he couldn’t remember, but it must have been—Sam’s suggestion. Joel had agreed eagerly enough. There was AIDS, of course, whose modes of transmission had only just been identified. There was his relative contentment with their—back then at least semiweekly—lovemaking. There was the fact that tricking had always been a lot of work for Joel, and why would he go to the 7-Eleven in the rain when he had a cow at home?
    He had agreed, and he had kept his part of the bargain for—what?—twelve years, maybe, so long that the very idea of straying was outlandish and foreign to him. He could no more trick out than he could fly. What had brought him here? Some itch, after the hearing, after the Hill Club. Not an itch for sex, just some need to witness, to take in the smoky air of, a place where everybody was gay and did what gay people did. As if, far as he and Sam had soared away from this life, he needed every so often to touch down here. As if this, and not the apartment where he cooked and Sam fixed things, were home ground.
    It took him a good five minutes to edge his way to the bar and order a scotch and water—generic, no one specified a brand in Zippers. He turned and was scouting for someplacehe could stand that was as far from the jukebox as possible when, right where Joel was, a guy got off his barstool and started fighting his way to the door. Joel sat down without even