Man About Town: A Novel by Mark Merlis

he was a blinkered idiot. It struck him that he was calculating what to say to a man he had spent most of his adult life with. It struck him that he had always calculated what to say to Sam.
    “I—maybe I should have told you what was going on. I thought it might go away, you know? I thought it might just be a thing.”
    “Just one of those crazy flings.”
    “What?”
    Joel had spent most of his adult life with a man who didn’t know Cole Porter. “But it didn’t go away.”
    “No. And finally he said, you know, I had to choose.”
    He, the mysterious he, had issued an ultimatum. In bed, turning away from Sam, sullenly. Or over dinner, looking down at his plate, then up again, gravely, sincerely: “You have to choose.”
    “So you did,” Joel said.
    “It was hard. I had to think about it.”
    He could picture Sam thinking about it, the deliberate way Sam worked things out. The vertical line on the sheet of paper, the columns headed
Joel
and
X.
He would dutifully have filled the Joel column, maybe halfway down, with all Joel’s good points. Here fifteen years. Cooks. Pays rent on time. Then he got to X’s column and there was nothing to write down. He was in love, the name at the top of the column was so reverberant there was nothing else to write down.
    “What’s this guy’s name?” Joel said.
    “Kevin.”
    Would Joel have felt the same chill if the name had beenFred? Or Seymour? Kevin was cool, acute, slender and sharp-featured. Hair dark-brown and cut close to the head.
    “Tell me about him.”
    “I don’t know what to tell. He’s …” Sam cleared his throat. “He’s twenty-three.”
    Of course, that’s all he had to write in the column headed
Kevin:
twenty-three.
    “But he’s, you know, real mature.”
    Mature enough to sit across from a man who was pushing fifty and tell him, “You have to choose.” Only a twenty-three-year-old could have been so dramatic. Only a forty-seven-year-old who was head over heels would have thought he really did have to choose. Poor Sam: how long did he think he was going to hang on to Kevin, twenty-three?
    “So, um, anyway.” Sam paused, then said, enunciating carefully: “I’m leaving you, Joel.”
    A senator who has flown to New Hampshire every weekend for two years schedules a press conference. Unless you’ve just flown in from Mars you know what he’s going to announce, and still you might shiver a little when the clown finally says, “I am a candidate for the office of President of the United States.”
    So Joel was thrilled at the sheer expectedness of the words.
I’m leaving you;
he must always have been waiting to hear those words. Hadn’t wanted to, perhaps. If he had made a list of the pros and cons, two columns, he would surely have concluded that it would be better to grow old with Sam. Wind up with Sam in the Lambda Continuing Care Community, rocking side by side and whistling at the cute orderly, if either of them could whistle. There must never have been a chance: that Joel had even imagined their breakup must have made it inevitable.
    Like some virtuoso of the anticlimax, Sam now produced: “I want you to know that I … I’ll always think of you as my best friend.”
    Joel was thunderstruck. Of course, if he had ever imaginedthe scene any farther than that ringing line,
I’m leaving you,
these would have been the next words. But he hadn’t imagined one instant past that line. He would spend the rest of his life on the other side of that line, starting with Sam’s repeating: “You’re my best friend.”
    Joel must have answered, the conversation must have gone on. Yet after Sam’s usual “Talk to you” and the click of the phone he couldn’t have repeated any of it.
    You’re my best friend: it was something a ten-year-old might say. And it might have gratified Joel if he had heard it when he was ten. If he had heard it from the right boy—from Alex, say, or from some ten-year-old imago of Senator Harris. Instead of the