Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Cheating, I should add, was easy in Madame Hellier’s case, as the room in which our class took place was furnished not with ordinary desks, but rather with round tables at which we sat in groups of four. Also, because she was neither savvy nor dictatorial enough to take precautions, but on the contrary often left the room altogether during tests to smoke a cigarette with Frau Blumenfeld, the German teacher, it was a fairly simple matter not only to make sure I was seated across from a boy named Erik, who was half Swiss and had a flair for languages, but also to glance across the table whenever I came to a question that stumped or worried me—not so much, I told myself at the time, in order to steal his answer as to assure myself that my own was not incorrect. And yet, more often than not, Erik would turn out to have eluded some snare into which I had fallen blindly, or to have remembered a subtle kink of grammar that I had failed to pick up on; and once alerted to my own error, how, after all, could I leave the wrong answer on the page?

  No one noticed, either, or at least no one said anything, although once, handing back the corrected tests (I had gotten an A), Madame Hellier did remark casually, “I can’t help but notice that you and Erik gave all the same answers—even the wrong ones.”

  Cheating, of course, leads to lying: opening my mouth, I affected an expression of indignation that must have been highly convincing, for Madame Hellier immediately retracted her innuendo, apologized, and continued passing out the corrected tests.

  After that my cheating became both flagrant and chronic. Always I gave myself pardon, afterward, by reminding myself that my motive was not to pillage the labor of others so much as to obtain a degree of relief for myself. After all, for me the sense of escalating panic that marked the days leading up to a test was nothing compared to the apprehension I felt once the test (if I had not cheated on it) was finished, the sleepless nights during which I would try to recollect every question, to reassess my strategies, to determine, as best I could, how I had done; indeed, I remember waking, too many times, at four in the morning from a dream in which I’d suddenly recognized the wrong turn I’d made in some calculus equation, getting up and going to the kitchen table, where, on one of my mother’s notepads, I’d try to reconstruct both the problem and my solution in the hope (ever waning) that I might turn out, in the end, to have solved it correctly. So lost would I become in this futile, obsessive procedure that often at daybreak, when my father came in for his toast and coffee, I would still be sitting there in my pajamas, surrounded by scraps of paper, under a light as oppressive as the ones used by the police during interrogations.

  Now I wonder whether cheating is like taking drugs or gambling; that is to say, whether, as taking a puff from a joint is supposed to lead inexorably to shooting heroin, or putting a quarter in a slot machine to staking your life savings at a roulette table, looking over your shoulder at a friend’s French exam will necessarily lead to one’s graduation into what might be called the major modes of cheating, such as buying answers, or breaking into a professor’s office to steal copies of an exam, or writing crib notes on the inside of your wrist. Which is to say nothing of posteducational cheating: price gouging, insider trading, adultery. In my case, at least in a literal sense, the answer is no; I was neither bold nor clever enough to take such risks. Still, what I lacked in daring I made up for in persistence. Indeed, if I were to add them up, I’d have to say that in addition to the standardized tests that I took, I probably cheated on as many as a hundred exams. And as a result, I got what I wanted. I did well on my SATs. I earned straight As and was admitted to the university from which I was so slavishly determined to graduate. Now, as I finished high school, the future that lay before me was one in the potentialities of which I could revel, for it was a blank page, as yet unsullied by the smudges and erasures, the tom edges and ink blotches, of its own experiencing. And in this future, I told myself, I would never cheat. What would be the need? Cheating had been merely the means by which to attain this much-deserved end, this guarantee of inclusion in a world where cheating would no longer be necessary.

  Alas, it was not to be. Indeed, today I’m fairly certain that it was my career as a cheat itself which sowed in me, as its dark legacy, the drive to succeed, the “readiness to pounce on a sure thing” that would despoil the writer’s life of which it had been my hope, through cheating, to assure myself. Yes, if I had it to do over again, I’d do it differently. I’d take German and Physics and Philosophy. I’d study to learn, and I’d learn with joy.

  I am often startled by the extent to which the public and the private, the life of our times and the life of our days, reflect each other. As an adolescent, I used to like to think of myself as being out of sync with the age in which I was growing up; I saw myself as an iconoclast, at once too urbane and too tender to thrive in the world into which I’d been born, when the truth was that my zeal for success, not to mention my neurotic obsession with tests, made me the perfect citizen (despite my protests to the contrary) of that epoch in which SAT Review was offered as an alternative to Shakespeare; in which the so-called “Back to Basics” movement campaigned for the return both of prayer and corporal punishment to the classroom; in which the parents of a schoolmate of mine promised him a BMW upon graduation, but only if he got into Harvard. (He didn’t.)

  This is the public side, the “sociological” side, if you will, of the story; there is a private side too. Today I cannot help but deplore my habit, from very early on, of endowing teachers and institutions with the capacity to validate not only my intelligence, but my right to exist. Why, I ask myself now, did I crave so urgently these tokens of approval? In part, I suspect, because I wanted, by means of them, to distract attention from what I perceived to be the single great blemish on my curriculum vitae—my homosexuality. This was especially true where my parents were concerned. By preceding the inevitable revelation with a catalogue of my successes, I hoped that I might elide their inevitable disapproval and grief. Thus even before I had admitted my homosexuality to myself, I was already gathering my trophies together, building a sort of arsenal against future encroachments.

  When I was in college, I used to tell people that given the choice, I’d always take fame over money. (Now, of course, I’ve learned that money is the more valuable of the two commodities, because it can buy you the one thing that fame steals: privacy.) In making such a lofty and ludicrous pronouncement, I thought I was affirming my opposition to the politics of greed that characterized those years, the Reagan years. Yet the assertion reflected equally my faith in fame itself as a real-world equivalent of straight As, less the natural consummation of God-given talent than an advantage obtained through connections and luck. And this was why, though I grew to admire, even to love Stanley Flint during the semester I spent under his tutelage, I also continued to view him not only as a literary genius, but as the holder of some golden key by means of which I might at last gain entry to that magical city from which he arrived by bus every Wednesday, and in the stratosphere of which I too longed to shine. Without admitting it to myself, I nurtured the hope that I might be the next student for whom, on the basis of a single sentence, he obtained a publishing contract, as no doubt did most of my classmates. For though I was now riding on the glass-bottomed boat, of course there are always other glass-bottomed boats, ones with more limpid floors, that drift on richer seas.

  At that time my university was going through a brief and peculiar period (one, no doubt, never to be mentioned in its official histories) during which it had a reputation as a “gay school.” This reputation was not merely a matter of undergraduate gossip. On the contrary, it was so widespread as to prompt an article in the New York Times, the author of which titillated her readers with such details as the distinction, in campus lingo, between “lipstick lesbians” and “crunchies”: the former glamour girls who smoked and painted their nails, the latter more likely to wear flannel than Ferragamo, and fond of granola (hence the epithet). And though, in the final analysis, the article was somewhat exaggera
ted—for instance, it gave the impression that the campus was literally overrun by queers, that boys went to class in drag, that girls sucked marijuana smoke out of each other’s mouths in the library—it was also something of a milestone, in that it represented the first public acknowledgment of open homosexual life at a university where for decades gay men and lesbians had felt obliged to efface themselves. (Later, a simple advertisement in the alumni magazine announcing the formation of a new gay and lesbian alumni group would expose the latent strain of barbarity in the school’s history by provoking an avalanche of outraged letters from graduates threatening to cancel their subscriptions, withdraw their financial contributions, even pull their children out of the school should the offending advertisement not be immediately revoked, denounced, obliterated.)

  One result of this new “gay visibility” was that, though I was still deeply closeted at the time I took Stanley Flint’s seminar, nonetheless I’d already met several “out” homosexuals, most notably a group of boys I’d sometimes encounter in the common room outside the dining hall, sitting at the piano and singing a parodic version of the theme from The Patty Duke Show that began: “They’re cousins, they’re lesbian cousins ..." Though they couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, these boys seemed to me incredibly sophisticated, and not entirely as a consequence of the skewed perspective of my own youth, which made a twenty-one-year-old appear to be an “older man.” It was also because they broadcast—intentionally, I suspect—an affect of debauched weariness and ennui the likes of which I’d never previously encountered. For instance, all of them chain-smoked, and dressed in black or gray flannel. Most of the time they wore ties; one, I suspected, wore lipstick. His name was Philip Crenshaw, and he had the caved-in cheeks and kohl-ringed eyes of a vampire. He was very gaunt, with long, spidery fingers, and he talked a bit like Stanley Flint—that is to say, in a deliberately affectless, aristocratic accent that gave away little of his origins, in monologues punctuated with linguistic archaisms, the subject of which was usually the homosexual underworld of New York, to which he and his friends repaired on weekends. “Girls, I was visiting the Mineshaft last Saturday,” he might say, “when I had the most frightful misadventure. I’d just walked away from the glory holes—having discovered, to my horror, that the delectable member I’d only seconds before taken into my mouth had on its underside this alarming little wart—when, strolling by the piss tubs, who should I see receiving the sacrament of fifty streams but my shrink! There he lay, naked as the day he was born, and positively glistening. And the worst part was, our eyes met. Well! You can imagine my anxiety when I arrived the next day for my appointment. ‘And what did you think when you saw me in the piss tub?’ he asked. ‘Did you want to piss on me?”’

  Philip’s best friend was a robust, sallow boy of Irish descent called Gerald Wexler. Short and hefty, he had the unlikely combination of blue eyes and black hair (“Black Irish,” he used to say by way of selfpraise), and compensated for his lack of physical stature by projecting himself violently onto every scene in which he was a character. Though his physiognomy was less than appealing (at least to me), he managed, by boasting about the enormity of his penis, to persuade a lot of men (including, much later, myself) to go to bed with him. Even at that early age he was already cultivating the air of jaded, bon vivant languor that in subsequent years, when he lived in Amsterdam, would mature into a veneer of Proustian dissipation, as if at twenty-five he were a retiree from some long career of wantonness and carousal. I remember thinking him spiteful, and rather jealous; for instance, at a party once, long before I admitted my homosexuality, he sidled up to me, and said, “So, Martin, have you come out yet?”

  I was so shocked that I didn’t even think to lie. “No,” I replied miserably.

  “I thought not,” he answered, and wandered off again to join his friends.

  More sympathetic by far than Gerald, Philip, and their cohorts were the lesbians with whom I studied, most evenings, in the rear smoking section of the library. Most of these girls—Gretchen and Schuyler, for example—were, to borrow the blunt terminology of the New York Times, “lipstick lesbians,” or a subvariety thereof; that is to say, they adhered to the chicly austere aesthetic of Manhattan’s East Village, which in those years required of its disciples conformity to a code of strict minimalism. When they spoke—which was rarely—it was with an affectation of listlessness, as if to suggest the attrition of the spirit itself, a sort of psychic anemia. Thus Gretchen, puffing on a cigarette during a break from her interminable thesis, might observe to Schuyler in regard to one of their professors, “He’s really such a low-brow, sweetheart”—stretching out the syllables to the very limits of their capacity for attenuation, as if on the lexical equivalent of a torture rack. All of this convinced me that they were worldly, these girls who had spent semesters in Paris, who smoked Gauloises and carried in their Prada bags little tins filled with lavender-flavored pastilles.

  The member of this community with whom I felt the strongest rapport, however, was probably the one who took its tenets of fashion least seriously. This was a prelaw student, a few years older than myself, named Barb Mendenhall. With her spiky blond hair, the pectoral muscles into which her breasts (thanks to a stem program of weightlifting) were gradually disappearing, her unwavering wardrobe of plaid shirts and hiking boots, Barb would have seemed the epitome of the fifties diesel-dyke had it not been for the ironic current of delicacy that blunted her masculine affect, and of which the pair of pearl earrings she wore was only the most explicit emblem. For instance, late one night she arrived in our midst bearing as always her tidy stack of utilitarian economics and political science textbooks (in sharp contrast to the slim volumes of theory, the brutalized yellow Gallimard paperbacks with which Gretchen and Schuyler and their ilk littered the tables). Having first arranged her notebooks and highlighters across from my own mess of story, she sauntered over to the comer and, with a thunderous grunt, hawked a wad of phlegm into the garbage can. “Oh, Jesus, Barb,” Gretchen muttered.

  “Thanks for sharing that with us, Barb,” Schuyler added, stubbing out her cigarette in a plastic coffee cup, while Barb herself swaggered back to the table, her thighs as thick as a cowboy’s, a bemused smile playing upon her lips.

  Unlike Gretchen and Schuyler, Barb was not a regular fixture in the library. On the contrary, she graced us with her presence only on those occasions when she could find a few hours to spare from her strict regimen of studying, computer work, and the sports to which she was so assiduously devoted: fencing, basketball (she was on the varsity team), even, toward the end of her senior year, boxing. I remember encountering her there one sunny spring morning, at an hour when the rear smoking section was empty except for me, because most of the lesbians were still asleep. Taking the seat across from mine, she pulled from her backpack her stack of morning mail, including a large envelope out of which she proceeded to tear, with great impatience, the latest issue of a magazine called Woman Athlete. “Oh, man,” she said, rolling her eyes and licking her lips in what might have been a parody of masculine slavering, and showed me a photograph in which a sleek German pole-vaulter stood poised to leap. “Hubba-hubba.” She laughed. Yet I was sure I could detect alongside her evident lust a quality of wistfulness in her voice, an intimation of what I might have called, had I read Proust (which I hadn’t), the “tristesse d’Olimpio” of sapphism.

  Barb was very beautiful. I remember seeing her from behind one afternoon. Her lustrous blond hair, newly buzz-cut, might have been that of a Roman soldier’s. When she turned around, her eyes—mournful, lucid, deliquescent, cold, and gray (the gray of certain rare mushrooms)—suggested depths of yearning at which her outward air of pragmatism barely hinted. In those eyes one could read not only a childhood marked by unintelligible longings, but the adolescence into which that childhood had segued, and during which those longings had coalesced, as it were, into the idealized image of the woman she desired both to possess and to be. (The confla
tion of the desire to have and the desire to be—which can lead you to feel simultaneous jealousy and envy toward a cheating lover whose paramour you also find attractive—is probably the aspect of homosexuality with which heterosexuals have the most trouble empathizing.) Their exotic melancholy not only undercut Barb’s macho posturings, it lent to her stony countenance an unexpected shadowing of vulnerability.

  The extent of that vulnerability, however, became evident only during the spring of my senior year, after I had finally come out and was helping to organize the university’s annual “Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days,” or GLAD. This was essentially a weeklong series of dances, lectures, panels, and “gay-straight raps,” culminating in an enormous rally during which thousands of balloons emblazoned with pretty pink triangles would be released into the sky.

  An aside, now, about that pink triangle: although I was fully aware, then, of its evil origin—that in German concentration camps homosexuals had been forced to wear these pink triangles in the same way that Jews were forced to wear yellow stars—nevertheless its omnipresence, during GLAD week, did not have the intended effect (at least I think it was the intended effect) of making me contemplate the horrors of Nazism. On the contrary, whenever I carried my pink triangle balloon or brandished my pink triangle button, it was my own boldness in making such a display that intoxicated me, so much so that I barely registered the triangle’s implications, which were of course the implications of evil itself. In this way, for my generation, the pink triangle became gradually dislocated from history. The minute it was turned upside down by its designers to signal its new function as an emblem of power and pride, there began a process of degeneration that would eventually reduce it into what it is today, a sort of politically correct fashion accessory, streamlined and natty, like the ubiquitous red AIDS ribbon that in a decade or so would be sprouting on every Hollywood breast, in some cases picked out in rubies.