Free Man About Town: A Novel by Mark Merlis Page A

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 havebeen, 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 thatway: 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