The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [4]
“So bring me up to speed, Vallence,” Jay said as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses to the bridge of his nose. “Seeing anyone I should know about?”
Martin shook his head. “Nothing serious—work is still too crazy.”
Jay responded with a bark that Martin recognized as a laugh. “Didn’t you say last year that you wanted to—and I quote—get a life?”
Martin smiled and patted his not insubstantial paunch. “I also wanted to lose some of this.” At over six feet tall, with an often goateed, bearded, or at least five-o’clock-shadowed face and barely an inch of skin not covered in fur—and as much as he liked to avoid labels and the illusory “communities” so often associated with them—there was no getting around the fact that he was a “bear,” and possibly even a “daddy bear” now that he was safely into his forties. “I’ll get there,” he promised, “but there’s a ton of work at the firm right now—Internet stuff—‘start-ups,’ ” he said, making the quotation marks sign with his fingers.
“Even after the vaunted ‘crash’?” said Jay—returning the quotations sign. He could afford to be glib, given that his grandfather had left him enough to make finances a negligible concern. Martin nodded as Jay continued. “So job aside—what else? How’s the rest of your year been?”
“I can’t complain.” Martin shrugged.
Jay laughed. “You can to me!”
Martin reconsidered the question. “Okay, how about a few nagging problems on the health front I could live without?”
Jay grimaced. “Hello, life after forty.”
“Indeed,” Martin acknowledged before outlining a list of symptoms with which he had been bothered in the past year, including episodes of numbness in his hands and feet, maddeningly itchy armpits, an arthritic knee, and problems sleeping as a result of an unrelenting need to piss on some nights, particularly—and here he paused to signal the bartender for a second round—after drinking. “Sorry if that’s too much information before dinner.”
Jay brushed off the apology. “Christ, Vallence, we’re forty-one, not fourteen! Physical decline should be expected and embraced at our age, except by those of your jockish ilk, who try to perpetuate youth with tricks and mirrors.”
This was not exactly fair. Though Martin had started all four years in goal as a hockey player at Cornell—and had long enjoyed his athleticism and accompanying good health, a few extra pounds and his HIV-positive status notwithstanding—it was also true that, in keeping with a tradition of goalies, he had largely avoided the weight room and most forms of cardiovascular exercise, with the possible exception of having sex, which—as much as he tried not to think of it in such clinical terms—was probably the best thing he did for his heart with any regularity. Because Jay was more or less acquainted with all of this—except the more salacious details of his romantic escapades—Martin felt no need to defend himself on such terms.
Jay waited for the bartender to replace his tumbler. “So what does your doctor say?”
Martin shrugged. “No idea about the hands and feet—and as for the other stuff, about the best he could come up with was prostatitis.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Jay said, shaking his head. “Completely vague and incurable.”
“You have it, too?”
“Try not to sound so cheerful,” Jay remarked. “I was born with it—weak bladder, stabbing pains in your balls, insomnia—these things come and go.”
They were led to their table, where they considered the menu for a few minutes before Jay picked up the thread of the conversation.