Man About Town: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

checking, as he once would have, just whom he was sitting next to. Another sign that he was definitely not cruising.
    Well, maybe a little. First ruling out the guy to his right, who looked uncannily like Peter Lorre, then canvassing the rest of the bar. Straight ahead, a guy wearing a tank top that not only displayed his arduously sculpted shoulders but also disclosed that they were covered with curly black hair. At three o’clock a thirty-something with thinning red hair and a face that was one continuous freckle—not Joel’s type at all, if Joel could still be said to have a type—but slender and with some flicker of intelligence in his gray eyes. At ten o’clock a man at least Joel’s age directing some sort of futile monologue at a sleepy-looking kid who couldn’t have been more than twenty-three and who wasn’t even pretending to listen.
    Joel turned back to the redhead, looked at him pretty steadily until the guy happened to glance Joel’s way and then instantly turned his head. Not peekaboo—first in the series of quick glances that would culminate in a connection—but a decisive and immediate “No way, sucker.” In his real cruising days an abrupt rejection like that would have left Joel shattered; how many nights he had gone home alone because he couldn’t shrug off one disdainful scowl from a stranger. Now he thought: it doesn’t matter what you think of me, buddy, I’ve got mine. You may see before you an unaccompanied faggot on the prowl, but I’m not, I’ve got Sam. This was not, he supposed, mere complacency. It was the whole point of their endurance and their fidelity, that Joel could be sitting there alone and still have Sam invisibly at his side.
    Still, it would have been nice if the guy had looked back, or even hit on him. So that he could have smiled regretfully and said sorry, he was seeing someone. He just would have liked to have had some signal, only for a minute, that a moderatelydesirable man might have seen some possibility in him.
    The old guy to Joel’s right departed, and somebody else immediately slipped into the seat. Joel glanced at him, too briefly even to form an impression beyond registering that he was an improvement over Peter Lorre, then turned away at once. If he didn’t look, he wouldn’t risk being shot down twice in sixty seconds.
    Maybe his glance hadn’t been as discreet as he had intended, because the newcomer instantly said, “Hi, how are you doing?”
    Joel turned as if he were only just now noticing his neighbor. “Fine, how about you?”
    The guy wasn’t exactly Joel’s type either, but—well, for someone sitting next to Joel in Zippers and actually initiating a conversation—not bad. Maybe pushing forty, but still slim. A couple of days’ stubble; Joel sometimes wondered how people managed this trick of always looking as if they’d shaved the day before yesterday. His jeans were torn at the knees. Maybe he was a little old for that particular fashion gesture. Though it was, actually, kind of hot.
    “Great,” the guy said. “You live around here?”
    He might have been asking if Joel lived near Zippers. But, even if the guy meant to pick him up, in the standard course of things this would be the next-to-last question, followed at once by, “You want to go there?” It wasn’t the very first question you asked. So he must have meant, was Joel from Washington?
    “I didn’t grow up here, but I’ve lived here about twenty years.” Joel at once regretted supplying the chronological detail.
    “No shit,” the guy said, as if it were remarkable to live in Washington. Or to live anywhere for twenty years. “I just got here.”
    “Oh, yeah? From where?”
    “North Carolina.”
    “Oh.”
    There was a little pause, during which Joel debated whetherhis next line was “Where in North Carolina?” or,
molto accelerando,
“Where are you staying?” Before Joel could resolve this, he recalled that he didn’t have a next line, much less anything