Gossip (5 page)

“I did, Ben. We should talk. You going back?”

“Don’t let me take you away from your lunch.”

“I’m finished here.” She looked kindly at Nancy, then at me. “This has been a pleasure.” She shook my hand as she stood up. “Have a nice visit. And please. Show my best wordsmith some fun while you’re in town. What I want to know, Ben, is why the blazes—”

Nancy and I watched Senator Freeman go. Nancy turned to me with a guilty lift of eyebrows.

“So. What do you think?” she asked.

“I like her. She seems personable. Down-to-earth.”

“She’s not. Not really. But people want that and she puts on a convincing act.”

“I was wondering how real that was,” I admitted. “And also about her ease over your … crush.”

The shadows under Nancy’s eyes crinkled in alarm. “She doesn’t know. She can’t. No way.” She looked over her shoulder, but Senator Freeman was long gone.

“Wasn’t that what this lunch was about? To let you know that it’s okay?” I was surprised Nancy hadn’t even suspected. “Your shop talk didn’t sound so burning. Not to me anyway.”

“It wasn’t. But this lunch was to make amends for Tuesday night and show I’m appreciated. That’s all. She hasn’t a clue about what I was feeling. Let’s go. I’ll sign for this.”

I followed her out to the corridor.

“
Was
feeling?” I said. “Past tense?”

“Yup.” She took a long breath through her nose, as if to smell the idea. “I think. Because now I feel different. Perfectly fine. All she had to do was give me some attention and I’m happy as a clam.”

“It’s not just a temporary fix?”

“I’ll have to wait and see. But when I came in this morning, even before she suggested lunch, my agitation didn’t feel like the L-word anymore. Not really. It was about esteem and ego and insecurity. That’s all.”

“Sounds like the L-word to me,” I gently joked.

She directed us away from the waiting area of the shuttle into a long, futuristic tunnel. We walked inside a tiled megaphone and had to keep our voices low.

“But you felt she knew?” she whispered, worried.

“I assumed she must.”

“You mean it showed in me?”

“No. And I was looking. But I assume women are more alert to those frequencies.”

She laughed, relieved. “Oh no. They can be as oblivious as men. Especially when there’re a million more pressing matters on their minds. All Kathleen knew was that I felt unappreciated. And she may have been right. It was all in my head, not my skin. Thank God. But you untangled all that for me last night.”

“I didn’t do anything except listen.”

“Exactly. Without sneers or pity or making me feel like an idiot. Or making too big a deal of it either.”

I was skeptical that love had been talked away so easily. And oddly disappointed, as if my purpose in coming here were suddenly gone.

We came out of the tunnel into a hall under the office buildings. Other people walked past us.

“To be continued,” she said. “Any plans this afternoon?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Go to the Smithsonian. See what’s playing at the movies. Visit the zoo?”

No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’d remembered the appointment when I woke up, although a meeting for coffee had seemed awfully trivial in the face of Nancy’s drama.

“You poor guy,” said Nancy. “I hope you’re not as desperate as that.”

“I’ll be fine.”

We came to the elevators under the Hart Building. The Senators Only elevator beeped for a new arrival.

Nancy cringed. “Oh God. I hate it when I run into an asshole and have to be friendly to them.”

The bronze doors opened and out stepped a lone fortyish man with a square jaw and enormous shoulders, like a former football player who now sold cars or power tools on television.

“Afternoon, Senator.”

“Good afternoon. Nancy? Am I correct?” His thick Southern accent made his smile seem courtly, even flirtatious.

“Very good, Senator Griffith. Most can’t even remember the names of their own staffs.”

“Well, I try. Have a nice day, Nancy.” And he strolled off, quite pleased with himself.

“Non-asshole?” I asked.

“Who knows? First-term senator from Tennessee. Moderate Republican but we said that about Bush. The religious right is wooing him but nobody knows if he’s in their pocket yet.”

I rode up to Nancy’s floor and we exchanged good-byes in the corridor.

“I don’t know what time I’ll get out tonight,” she said. “You should plan on dinner without me. Unless you want to come back here and we’ll order a pizza?”

“Any cute interns working late tonight?”

“Hmm, maybe.” Then she laughed. “No, Ralph. If you hit on one of those puppies, I wouldn’t be able to work around him with a straight face.”

“Come on. I’m hardly irresistible.”

“Just knowing you were considering it would make me see him in that light. You thinking of anyone in particular?”

“Naw,” I said, thinking of the boy in the pink shirt. “Just being hypothetical. But sure, congressional pizza sounds good. Something different for my political education.”

I promised to telephone later.

I
WENT BACK DOWN
in the Metro, deeper than before. I needed an elevator to return to earth at the National Zoo.

I went feeling nothing except idle curiosity and a strange regret that the high drama of illicit love on Capitol Hill was already over. Lunch with two serious, responsible women left me with an itch to do something queer and frivolous. Coffee with an old closet case would have to suffice if Nancy didn’t want me flirting with interns that evening.

The zoo looked deserted on an overcast afternoon. It was so cold that most of the animals had gone indoors; a lone rhinoceros stood in its pen like a forlorn leather sculpture leaking steam. I found the reptile house, an old brick building with ceramic toads and tortoises around its entrance. The interior was dark, the halls illuminated by the soft glow of sealed habitats. It was as still as a church, as hushed as cyberspace. The mildewed smell of sawdust suggested snake shit.

A sea turtle the size of a lawn mower floated in a murky glass wall. A man with snow white hair turned to stare at me. A little girl came over and rested her face against his leg. They resumed watching the turtle together.

I checked out faces as I walked in. Everyone seemed remotely possible, even the trench-coated Sikh who escorted two women in wool saris. I came to the python case, a roomy terrarium full of artificial sunlight, tropical plants and a set of coils like a mound of brightly painted tires. At the glass stood a solitary six-year-old boy with spooky eyes and solemnly folded arms. I wondered, just for a second, if a child had the computer skills to have faked me out.

Other people wandered through, tourists with strollers, the Sikh again. A Young Dad type walked up to the glass between me and the six-year-old. But it was only the boy’s father, come to break the python’s spell.

When
he
came in, he was so indifferent to reptiles that I knew instantly. He strolled through the hall with a hurried, slap-shoe walk, in black-rimmed glasses and down vest, a large, pink-cheeked fellow who looked my age—no, younger.

He saw me. Our eyes met. He looked away and kept walking, but halted at the other end of the case.

He rocked on his heels, put his hands in his pockets. He pinched a smile to himself and looked at the snake, giving me the chance to check him out. His round face made him seem chubby, or maybe that was only the down vest. He wore a sweatshirt underneath and his brown hair was in a bland straight-boy cut. I’d been so prepared for someone with no physical appeal, however, that he seemed thoroughly plausible.

“Mr. Thersites?” I said.

He stared at me, blankly. Then he broke into a grin of perfect white baby teeth. “Sergeant Rock, I presume?”

We laughed and shook hands. He had a rattly, back-of-the-throat chuckle like the shake of maracas, and long, thick fingers. We quickly looked each other over.

“My word. You are a real New York gay,” he said, taking in my head. “Or do you prefer queer?”

“I prefer Ralph. And you’re—?”

“Bill. My name’s Bill. So. Did you in fact want to see the zoo? Or shall we go somewhere for coffee?”

“Coffee sounds good.”

“Excellent. I’m parked out front. Shall we?”

His boyish face and voice gave his stuffy phrases a likably clunky playfulness.

“There’s something I have to know from the start,” I told him outside.
“Who
is Thersites?”

“Do you know Shakespeare?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“Troilus and Cressida?
I bet you haven’t read that one. Thersites is the truth teller of the play. Toyota has a car called the Cressida,” he added. “Obviously named by people who never read the play. Because Cressida is a nut and slut who betrays the man who loves her. Not qualities one wants in a motor vehicle.”

He unlocked the door of a pearl gray Lexus whose interior smelled like a box of new shoes.

“What do you do for a living, Bill?”

“I’m a writer.”

He was too young to have earned the car with words, and I knew firsthand that “writer” was often a synonym for bum.

“What do you write?”

“Journalism. Freelance. What do you do?”

“I’m a shipping clerk in a bookstore.”

“Truly? Maybe you’ll be selling my book when it comes out.”

“You’ve written a book?”

“A first book. Expanding an old article,” he said dismissively, as if everyone wrote and published such things. “There’s a fine coffee bar nearby. Or, if you like, I have an espresso machine. We could go back to my place.” He smiled, a complex double smile, as if smiling at his own smile.

Yes? No? Why not?

“Espresso sounds good,” I said casually.

“You mean at my place?” He could not believe his luck.

“Why not?” I said aloud. In New York I might not have looked at him twice. Tricking with strangers was not high on my menu and I hadn’t been to bed with anyone in months. But being in another city with time on my hands opened my mind, extended my standards. His nerdy cheerfulness promised a quick yet friendly boff.

“For how long are you in D.C.?” he asked. “Do you get down often? How long have you lived in New York? Where are you from originally? You don’t sound Southern, you realize.”

He peppered me with questions that I answered truthfully while we drove a mile or so, past a Metro stop labeled Cleveland Park—I needed to know the closest public transportation—and swung into the parking lot of a tall, flinty twenties apartment building in a tangled net of bare trees.

The simple sensual act of walking from raw cold into a warm lobby was enough to chub me in my pants.

“Swank place,” I said in the elevator. “What’s the rent?”

“None of your business.” He chuckled. “But I will tell you—it’s a friend’s apartment. His rent is very reasonable.”

I’ll bet, I thought, assuming it was a boyfriend’s apartment, a boyfriend’s car—and the boyfriend was away.

“Home,” he said as he opened the door with his maraca laugh. We stepped into a dark, overheated apartment large enough to have a front hallway. “Take your wrap, sir?”

I waited until he hung my coat and his vest in the closet. Then I laid an arm across his shoulder and turned him toward me. I expected a flinch or a startled laugh, but his lips promptly opened to my kiss.

“Mmm? Mmm.” He took me in his arms. He’d recently brushed his teeth. “You don’t want espresso,” he murmured.

We were all over each other. I was surprised to find he was slightly taller than I, and solid, a six-foot cherub in glasses. We stumbled deeper into the apartment and I noticed three televisions side by side, a printer and an open Powerbook. From software to underwear, I thought, my hand down the back of his pants. High tech, high touch. He had the most muscular lips and tongue.

“You’re a good kisser,” I muttered.

“Played trumpet,” he croaked. “My high school band.”

We were on a sofa, undoing buttons and sliding hands under clothes while our tongues squirreled in a tight, wet room of joined mouths. There was the porno ritual of undressing each other item by item as we necked, the slow unwrapping of gifts. We were down to white briefs—he was more acculturated than he seemed: Calvins—when he stood up to examine me. His baby face, vague and piglet-eyed without glasses, was misleading. He wasn’t fat, but firmly upholstered in plush skin. His arms were thick and his waist narrow, with a neat trail of hair under a knotted belly button and a thick diagonal fold in his cotton.

I didn’t break him into details until later. Sex is like classical music for me in that I never quite hear a piece the first time. I can only rehear it, not comprehending what’s there until a second or third listening. Surprised at how much I’d enjoyed the first hearing, I reassembled him later, when I needed to know what made Bill O’Connor so damn enthralling.

“No tattoos?” he said, pleased with what he saw.

“Too permanent. And I’m too hairy.”

“Hmm. But not
too
hairy.”

He took my hand, pulled me to my feet and led me down the hall, as if to involve more of the apartment in his tryst. He turned on a lamp in the bedroom—it was getting dark outside—and we resumed making out on a very solid, king-sized bed, rubbing and rolling in our underpants. I postponed the electric moment of complete nakedness, often the high point for me of first encounters, not because their cocks proved disappointing but because getting the other guy bare turned out to be all I really wanted. Then he peeled me and I peeled him, and we did not disappear behind our dicks but became acquainted all over again.

The sex was not wild and frantic, but more like ballroom dancing, each of us taking turns, taking our time, enjoying our excitement yet remaining friendly around it. He took me in his mouth without fear. When I went down on him, I stroked his chest with my free hand. I could not touch enough of him. A body can be so three-dimensional with a hard-on. His was wide, almost double-barreled, his balls nearly flush underneath. The hair of his genitals, armpits and scalp was different grades of the same smooth corn silk.

He kept smiling at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. So many men treat sex as work or theater, but this guy gleefully accepted it as something natural as eating.