Free Man About Town: A Novel by Mark Merlis

Harris’s huge barren desk and the high-backed leather chair on which Harris had draped his jacket. It was just a jacket on the back of a chair; why should the sight of it have left Joel suddenly desolate?
    Well, it was half of a thousand-dollar suit, for one thing—distinctly unMontanan; no pockets with openings like smiles. But Joel could probably have paid for a thousand-dollar suit, if he would ever have thought of such an extravagance, about as readily as Harris. Senators didn’t make so much, really; after they paid for two houses and sent their kids to St. Alban’s or wherever, they probably weren’t much better off than Joel was. Except for the ones—more and more of them lately—who had made their fortune someplace else and then bought theirway into office. Becoming senators as a sort of hobby after retirement, the way rich guys used to become yachtsmen. But Harris wasn’t one of those.
    The jacket wasn’t, whatever its price tag, an impressive object. Just a jacket, which Harris put on when he went to the floor and took off when he got back to his office. Harris had got up this morning—early probably, around the time when Joel was just realizing that Sam might be gone for good—Harris had got up, showered and shaved. Put on his pants, as they say, one leg at a time, and then the jacket. Walked out of his tract house somewhere in Virginia. Got into his car and idled through the same gridlock as everybody else, to arrive at the Hart Senate Office Building and begin his humdrum day. Draping his jacket on the back of his chair, already a little tired: a day ahead of floor votes on vital issues like flag-burning, punctuated by briefings and little side-meetings like the one he’d run out to now, where he was almost surely begging someone for money.
    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