Read Online Man About Town: A Novel by Mark Merlis - Free Book Online

perhaps, better than a liverwurst sandwich. Not fifteen times as good, or whatever the price ratio should have dictated. And at least a liverwurst sandwich wouldn’t have had raspberry sauce. He didn’t mind the money; he had come here to treat himself. Post-trauma treat: as when he was little, stung by a bee once, and his mother took him for an ice cream cone. He hadn’t understood that there wasn’t much comfort in buying yourself an ice cream cone.
    Harris’s office was in the Hart Building, the new one built in the seventies that looked like one of the white cardboard office blocks you pass on the way to an airport. This was a mark of his juniority; longer-serving senators were in the Dirksen Building, dreary but less obviously prefabricated. The truly senescent hunkered down in the Russell Building, a Beaux Arts monolith. If you looked at the Russell Building you could imagine that senators were inside it. If you looked at the Hart Building, you were more likely to picture people in cubicles processing mortgage applications.
    Joel always got lost in the Hart Building. The offices were grouped around a multistory atrium; no matter which elevator you took, the office you wanted was always on the other side of this chasm. By the time Joel could snake his way around to Harris’s he was a couple of minutes late and almost out of breath. He could barely gasp his name to the receptionist, a beefy youth who didn’t even bother to put down his cold-cut sub when Joel approached. The kid just nodded Joel towardone of the chairs in the anteroom and took a couple more bites before calling Melanie.
    Joel sat a long while. He needn’t have risked a heart attack trying to be on time for a meeting with a senator. Sometimes he would wait an hour or more, only to learn that the senator was backed up and would have to reschedule, or that someone had screwed up and the meeting had never been on the calendar at all. He hadn’t brought anything to read, and the table next to him offered only such dispiriting stuff as
Montana Monthly, U.S. News and World Report,
and, perhaps for the more youthful lobbyists, a Donald Duck comic book. Joel just sat.
    One wall of the anteroom was covered with a huge Montana flag. It said “MONTANA” in big gold letters, like the pennants Joel had in his room as a boy, the ones that blazoned the names of colleges he didn’t get into. On the other wall were the inevitable pictures: Harris with George Bush, with Gerald Ford, with Charlton Heston. Harris with assorted Montana luminaries, gaunt men whose suits had Western features: waist-length jackets, or pockets whose openings made little smiles, like the ones on a Gene Autry shirt. In the center of the wall, the sun of this Republican solar system, Harris with Reagan. Harris in profile, trying both to grin and to look adoringly; Reagan looking straight out, of course, oblivious to anything but the camera.
    Joel was about to nod off—either from a night without sleep or because he had, what the hell, had a second merlot—when Melanie appeared. She looked down at him but didn’t speak for a minute. Possibly she was noticing that Joel hadn’t shaved this morning. And had he, he wondered, put on that tie with the gravy spot? He didn’t verify this, just drew himself to his feet.
    “Thanks for coming,” Melanie said, in the grave murmur a camerlengo might use before ushering you in to see the Pope. “The senator’s just on his way back from the floor. Did Rob offer you some coffee?” On hearing this, the kid behind thereception desk stood up, disclosing the kind of body you see in half-hour infomercials for exercise machines. Joel thought about dispatching him for coffee, just to humiliate him. But if Joel went into the sanctum with coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other, this would be that rare day when a senator wanted to shake hands.
    It was enough of a putdown just to ignore Rob. He turned to Melanie. “You said he might have some