Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  As a child I loved books as things, as well as things to read, and was inclined to endow them with sentience, the capacity to experience pain, to love, or to be lonely. Thus when I accompanied my mother to the library, and waited while she studied the newly arrived novels in the “7-Day” section, what captured my imagination more viscerally than any promise the books themselves might hold was a drama of my own invention in which the new books—which still wore their dust jackets—snubbed and sneered at the old books, which for reasons I did not understand had been denuded, stripped of their one garment, forced to sit naked and chilly in the bleak stacks, as neglected as the elderly men and women who lived in the nursing home to which my grandmother had been consigned in the last days of her senescence. In the library maltreatment and delinquency were common. Malicious youths manhandled or defaced the old books, some of which hadn’t been checked out for decades. No doubt they envied their more popular and youthful brethren, the 7-Day books, for which women like my mother waited impatiently, and sometimes had to sign up weeks in advance.

  She was the great reader of the family. In addition to novels, she read histories, particularly those of a domestic nature, the sort that catalogue, in lieu of battles fought and governments toppled, what people ate and drank and how they washed themselves in distant centuries. My sister read only three books, over and over again: The Diary of Anne Frank, The Bell Jar, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, all bath-bloated. My father alternated technical treatises with what he called “airplane novels,” paperbacks of a suspenseful nature, usually with partially naked women on the cover.

  Of all the members of the family, only my brother showed the instincts of a connoisseur. In a little room off the living room that we called “the Hole” (and that would later, to his lasting regret, be annexed to my parents’ bathroom to make space for a hydromassage tub), he kept his collection of science fiction and fantasy novels, their covers agleam with stars and starships and gaseous orbs circling triple suns. Not surprisingly, the Hole owed its name to the fact that it was both dark and cramped, no more than a closet, really, with one tiny window against which my brother had pushed his desk. To add to the effect of Hole-ishness, he had stained the plywood walls and bookshelves the color of coffee.

  After he went off to college, I used to sit sometimes by myself in the Hole, working on model cars and pausing occasionally to stare at the cover or read a few pages of one of the sci-fi novels. My favorite was called One-Eyed Runts of Gamma Epsilon Five, and told the story of a spacecraft that has had the misfortune to crash on a planet overrun with bald, single-eyed dwarves, all of them female and sex-starved. These dwarves, with their puckered pink lips and three-fingered hands, featured prominently on the cover, where they were depicted groping for a protagonist just outside the frame. That they had no visible genitals only added to my burgeoning confusion as to the construction of the female anatomy, a confusion about which I was too shy to inquire of my father and too shrewd to ask my brother, who in any case would have used the occasion only to make something up.

  I give the wrong impression, however, if I suggest that One-Eyed Runts of Gamma Epsilon Five was in any way typical of my brother’s collection, the vast bulk of which consisted of high-minded novels by authors for whom the ether represented less an end in itself than a framework within which to pose existential questions. Nor did all of these books look up to the stars; some looked downward, to a region of caverns and castle keeps and cobwebbed passages, books like The Lord of the Rings and The Gormenghast Trilogy, the musty covers of which seemed themselves to emanate the odors of a medieval dungeon. Holed up in the Hole during those lonely afternoons after both he and my sister had moved out of the house, I’d often thumb through the volumes of The Gormenghast Trilogy, absorbing without ever reading them that aura of gothic mystery of which the Hole itself seemed portion, as if it were a service entrance to some realm of Merovingian darkness.

  Much of my early education about sex took place—ironically—in the Hole. For instance, on a low shelf, my brother kept a small assortment of Zap Comix, in the pages of which leering cartoon foxes, their fangs dripping with lust, pried apart the legs of buxom pig-women, while mares in high heels paraded down Haight Street, their human breasts spilling over the bodices of their tiny dresses, cinched at the diaphragm like the ones my sister made for herself on her Singer sewing machine. The world of the Zap Comix was infused with a marijuana haze, and could not have been more different from that of the novels my mother brought home from the library, in which sex figured more as an occasion for anger than burlesque. One, for instance, ended with its heroine buying pornographic pictures in Mexico—for some reason I remember vividly the sentence, “An immense brown penis pushes against a pink breast”—while another described in visceral detail (and more radically still, in the present tense) the changing of a tampon. With their clipped, even clinical tone, their matter-of-fact use of dirty words (“prick” and “piss” in particular), and, most tellingly, their atmosphere of ennui and short-temperedness, these novels gave voice to the same half-articulated feminist rage that must have underscored my mother’s habit of snapping the spines of books (even “7-Day” books), or in the evenings cleaning the copper bottoms of her Revere Ware pots with such ferocity they seemed literally to glower.

  My brother and sister are much older than I am. Both of them had graduated from college well before I entered high school. They attended, one year apart, the university off the grounds of which we lived, and near which my father worked. Yet whereas my sister stayed on campus all four years, my brother, during his senior year, moved out of his dorm and rented a studio in an old Victorian house that had been divided up into apartments. I liked to visit him sometimes in this room to which he was gradually removing all his books, now that the Hole was in the process of being transformed into a hydromassage tub. There were always amusing things to look at there, such as a postcard on which one mouse says to another, “Why do mice have such small balls?” and the other answers, “Because very few mice know how to dance.” (I didn’t get the joke; nor did my brother—probably because my begging amused him—ever enlighten me as to its hidden meaning.)

  It was also in the house where my brother lived that I met my first novelist. I can’t remember his name. He was an old man (at least from my perspective), oleaginous in aspect, with a large mole on his cheek. One afternoon when I was visiting he knocked on the door and presented my brother with a copy of his latest book, a paperback called The House. I remember he called me “son” and patted my head. I suppose my brother didn’t read The House immediately, however, because it wasn’t until Thanksgiving that I heard it referred to again, this time as the subject of some inside joke between him and my sister: indeed, the mere mention of its title drove them both into fits of laughter. For as I soon learned, the house in The House was the very one in which my brother and the old novelist rented apartments. Nor were their fellow tenants at all happy about the rather pornographic use to which the novelist had put them. “You’re too young to understand,” my brother said, but loaned me The House anyway, which I read in a single night. The plot, of which I recall only the basic outlines, was episodic and multiform, as is often the case in books that take place in apartment houses, or hotels, or on cruise ships. I remember that in the first chapter one of the occupants of the house murders her husband, then chops up his body and feeds it to the garbage disposal. Another is an Indian who teaches his neighbors’ neglected wives the pleasures of the Kama Sutra. Another—perhaps the novelist himself, in a rather idealized self-portrait—is a handsome, virile homosexual given to cruising the parks and alleyways of an unnamed city.

  This was not the first time I had encountered homosexuality in a novel: I had read Myra Breckinridge, which was one of my father’s airplane books, as well as most of Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won't Mind, when no one was looking, at the local bookstore. The House, however, more than either of these books, I savored, in particular one scene in which t
he gay hero, cruising a park, encounters another man dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket who stands before him, gyrates his hips suggestively, and rubs his erection through his pants. Slowly the outline of the “hardened member” is revealed, slowly the man unzips his pants, exposing black pubic hair—at which point a dog scares him away. (As for the author, a few months after the book was published he started receiving anonymous threats, presumably from his neighbors, and was compelled to move.)

  Aside from novels and domestic histories, my mother’s chief source of literary enlightenment in those years was a weekly magazine of immense prestige, so famous that it was known in our house simply as “the magazine.” No doubt, if you are American, you have already guessed the name of the magazine; nor do I neglect to give it here out of coyness, but rather in deference to the sense of awe that name inspired in me, back in the days when the magazine enjoyed an almost sacred literary status, one that provoked both veneration and fear, as in those religious sects that perceive God’s name as too holy to bear utterance. For in our kitchen, where brightly colored piles of the magazine’s back issues lay everywhere, it really was a sort of cult, one into which my mother, from when I was very young, inducted me. And as a consequence, I viewed the magazine not, like other magazines, as being the product of discrete human labor in some New York office, but rather as a sort of immaculate conception that occurred weekly in our mailbox—an impression that its unusual policy of not printing the names of its editors, nor those of the authors who composed the brief unsigned articles with which each issue commenced, and which were written, as it were, by vapor, only served to intensify. In this magazine there were no biographical notes, no photographs of writers; instead their names—some famous, some obscure—appeared modestly, in tiny type, at the end of every article.

  Today I cannot underestimate the importance of this magazine, which in those years really defined American literature, and not only positively, by what it published, but negatively, by what it did not. So vast was its influence that just as writers whose fiction appeared regularly in its pages became identified as-authors (a Faustian bargain, because it required them to trade, in exchange for this huge advantage, some of their independence), those whose work never appeared in the magazine were forced to define themselves in opposition to it, because it went without saying that every story the magazine did not publish it had necessarily rejected.

  After my mother died my father told me something that surprised me. He told me that in the years just after my birth she had entertained, for a time, literary aspirations of her own; had even written half a novel, the manuscript of which he had discovered, one afternoon, in a kitchen drawer, and started to read, at which point she had snatched it out of his hands and eventually burned it. To me, she never mentioned any desire to write, though I do remember a peculiar incident that occurred when I was thirteen, and that in retrospect suggests the possibility of a latent and unfulfilled ambition on her part. At that time the New York Times Magazine—the famous Sunday crossword puzzle of which she filled in so religiously—was sponsoring a competition to finish a short story, the first half of which had been written by a writer famously associated with that other magazine, the one to which we were so in thrall. After reading the half story, I decided to enter the contest. I don’t remember what I wrote, only that I took great pride in my pages, and showed them to my mother on the assumption that she would give my venture her seal of approval. To my bewilderment, however, she did not smile as she put the pages down, only pursed her lips and crinkled her nose, as if the dog had just farted. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, “but this really is very immature. If you sent it into the contest, you’d only embarrass yourself.”

  I was stunned. Nonetheless I obeyed my mother, who was the only authority on literary matters I knew, and consigned my pages—as she had those of her unfinished novel—to the back of a drawer. A few months later, when the winners of the contest were announced, I was dismayed to discover among the names of the runners-up that of a twelve-year-old boy from Michigan.

  A long while later, when I was in college, my mother telephoned me one afternoon. “You’ll never guess who I met in the waiting room at the radiation therapy center,” she said. “The nicest woman, from Tacoma. Her name is Leonie Kaufman. And her daughter—you’ll never believe it—works for the magazine.”

  I was sitting at my desk in the cold Northeast, before the IBM Selectric typewriter I had saved up for months to buy, and that seemed to me so “state of the art.” “Really?” I said, slightly amazed to learn that anyone actually worked for the magazine—and more particularly, anyone with a connection to my mother.

  This was the year after I took Stanley Flint’s seminar. At the time I was taking yet another writing course, less demanding than Flint’s, and taught by a novelist rumored to be a female-to-male transsexual. Until I heard this rumor, nothing in the novelist’s appearance had led me to suspect him of having once been a woman, though on scrutinizing his physiognomy more carefully I did notice that his hands were smallish, his face unusually soft and round, his voice a bit high for a man’s: evidence, perhaps, of the rumor’s truth, or else of the degree to which I was susceptible to the power of suggestion.

  In any event, my teacher’s original gender mattered less to me than the fact that unlike Flint, he was encouraging me mightily in my pursuit of a story on which I was at work, a story based on events that had taken place at our university during the first semester of my freshman year. Back then I lived across the hall from a boy called Matthew Spalding—a very clever boy, a talented actor, good at doing imitations of movie stars and opera singers. Though I liked Matthew, I didn’t think much about him—that is, until the afternoon a few weeks into the term when he walked into the men’s room on the seventh floor of the main library, closed himself into a stall, and with a carving knife he had hidden in his backpack stabbed himself in the stomach, slashed his wrists, and slit his throat.

  It is a commonplace that many would-be suicides, when they try to kill themselves, are less interested in dying than in making a “cry for help.” Thus they climb to the tops of buildings where they know the police will try to talk them down, they swallow a bottle of pills and immediately announce the fact to their loved ones, they slash their wrists, but only at an hour when they can be certain that someone will come home and find them. And at first, because he had been rescued, we all assumed that Matthew had attempted a suicide of this sort; yet if this was the case, he’d calculated very badly, for almost no one used the seventh floor of the library. Indeed, Matthew would probably be dead today, were it not for a fact of which I doubt he could have been apprised: namely, that this particular men’s room, not only by virtue of its remote location, but because its door could actually be locked, was known among campus homosexuals as a good place to meet for sex. And as a result, only a minute or so after he went into this bathroom, someone else went in after him, someone who, upon seeing the blood pouring out from under the stall’s partition, immediately summoned the police; the upshot of which was, miraculously, that Matthew was saved, and within a few days receiving visitors in the psychiatric ward of the university hospital. Most of these visitors were girls who had had crushes on him even before his suicide attempt. Now, one after another, they made the pilgrimage (I did too, once) to the hospital psych ward, with its double-locked double doors, only to return a few hours later, eyes lucid as those of witnesses to saintly miracles, and tell their friends, “He’s not the one who’s sick. We are.”

  This is not, though, the end of the story. A few days after Matthew’s hospitalization a pretty girl named Pasha, more in love with him even than the others, tried also to kill herself so that she too could be admitted to the psych ward and be near him. Astoundingly, she was placed in the same therapy group with Matthew, who with his intelligence and wit had already taken a sort of leadership position in the odd little community of the ward. Later, Pasha went back to Oregon, while Matthew was transferred to a private
sanitarium on the edge of the city, a place to which the girls in our dormitory continued to make their pilgrimages for a while, though fewer and fewer every week.

  This, then—the story of Matthew, and Pasha, and the seventh-floor men’s room—was the story I was writing that semester. Indeed, it was usually the thing over which I was laboring during the evenings I spent in the rear smoking section of the library, a locale that, as the months went by, was to become as popular as certain bars, despite the carpets into which cigarette butts had been ground, and the laminated tables yellowed by tar, and the brightly hued, vinyl-covered armchairs, pocked with bum marks, that lined the back wall. Sometimes it was so crowded there you couldn’t get a seat and had no choice but to migrate across the way to the luminously clean nonsmoking section, where no one interesting sat, yet where—as in those regions of chic New York restaurants to which the unknown are relegated, and which are deemed “Siberia”—you could always be sure of finding a place.

  One evening, while I was working on my story, the TV star strolled in and took the seat across from mine. I glanced up surreptitiously from my notebook. She was less pretty than I remembered from the situation comedies in which she had appeared. Her famous black hair, which had appeared so lustrous on screen, was tied in a limp braid. She had slung an L. L. Bean jacket over the back of the chair, was smoking a Camel, and writing (to judge from her books) a paper on Faulkner. Her gaze never met mine, though a few nights later, at one of those edgy off-campus parties the lesbians were always throwing, we bumped into each other, literally, on the dance floor, after which, having first dusted herself off, she gave me a smile of recognition. Although she was a fixture at these parties, I still wasn’t certain whether she was a lesbian herself, given that she never attended the monthly gay and lesbian dances, or the meetings of the various gay and lesbian alliances, or any of the events attendant upon GLAD week. And yet a few weeks earlier my friend Eve Schlossberg, a photographer who liked to roam around the parties in order to capture the pictures of ecstatic dancers that would later make her famous, claimed to have had an altercation with the TV star, who had stormed up to her in a fury and demanded her film: “As if I were some common paparazzo!” Eve added imperiously. Needless to say she refused to surrender her negatives, though she did promise not to print any shots in which the TV star appeared.