Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  That fall I had a new roommate, Donald Schindler. A complex saga of love and disillusionment underlay this seemingly trivial change of circumstances. As I mentioned earlier, the previous year I had roomed with Jim Sterling, with whom I often spent weekends on Central Park West. Although Jim was the product of a genteel New York upbringing—as a teenager he had attended an exclusive East Side prep school, accompanied the daughters of the rich to cotillions, ridden taxis back and forth from violin lessons with a member of the New York Philharmonic—his coarse, reddish hair and thick fingers betrayed the fact that like me, he was a child of immigrants, Hester Street peasants who had risen in one generation from peddlers to captains of industry. Not that any self-consciousness about his origins ever marred his happy relations with the debutantes and bluebloods with whom he’d gone to school; on the contrary, he got along with them all famously. He got along with everyone famously. It was the only thing about him that I distrusted.

  Jim was a major force in my life during those years. Avidly social, he stood at the center of a little circle that gathered most evenings around eleven in our room to eat chocolate chip cookies, or traveled en masse for pizza and hot tuna grinders at a local Greek diner. The members of this group, the founding of which dated back to the earliest days of our freshman year, had little in common save contiguity, the fact that we had all been assigned, that distant first semester, to the same dorm. Under normal circumstances such indiscriminate alliances—of which only the very young are capable—dissolve over time; and yet in our case, against the odds and thanks in great part to the vigorous energy with which Jim strove to hold us together, the little group had managed to maintain not only its integrity but its habits.

  Nostalgia had a good deal to do with it. A burnished glow of childhood—nourished by Jim—irradiated most of our evenings together, and seemed to protect us. It didn’t matter that during most of the hours of the day we were all off pursuing knowledge and sex and praise, itching to grow up; those evenings in our room, we drank hot chocolate instead of the gin that Gretchen and Schuyler served at their parties. No one smoked cigarettes, much less pot, for Jim had a puritanical aversion to all drugs. Indeed, he had not only vowed but kept his vow never to speak again to a former member of the group, a sly New York girl who had once fed him a pot brownie without telling him what it was.

  But to get back to the saga of our breakup: the year before, we had made a new friend, a transfer student from the University of North Carolina called Ashley, or Ash, Barker, whom Jim had subsequently initiated into the little group. On the surface at least, Ash’s most striking characteristic was his almost seraphic beauty. With his olive skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, he might have been an angel in a Botticelli portrait. His charm was androgynous and, for me at least, curiously without erotic power. Yet even though (in my view) he didn’t hold a candle, say, to certain handsome and virile stars of the lacrosse team, he stood out in a way that these athletes never would, thanks to the very quality of inviolability that he projected, as if he really were an angel: a possibility to which the fact that he shaved but once a week lent credence, and as a consequence of which he always had dozens of suitors, most of them unappealing—homely Jane Eyres in search of their own personal Rochesters, or big-breasted seductresses who wanted to mother him, or more disturbingly (at least to Jim and me) boys, most notably a jaded member of the Philip Crenshaw circle who lived upstairs from us, in one of the rooms designated as “psycho singles” because they were reserved for students with whom no one else was willing to live. This boy was forever showing up uninvited in Ash’s room, where he would lie on the couch and stare at Ash while he studied. His method was relentlessness; it was as if he hoped by sheer force of will to breach the battlements of Ash’s resplendent virginity. For Ash, by virtue of his good nature as much as his good looks, was serious business, worthy of labor, and yet at the same rime naive, unsuspecting, always willing to take at his word, say, the physics grad student who offered to give him clown lessons, then in the course of one of the lessons tried to kiss him. Also, his character was such that he could not bear to disappoint, and therefore accepted invitations on which he would otherwise have preferred to pass. One afternoon, for instance (and this sort of episode was typical), he received a letter from a girl he didn’t know, in which she explained that her roommate, who was in his Shakespeare class, had become so besotted with him that the writer feared she might do herself in if Ash didn’t ask her on a date. Upon receiving this bizarre communication his immediate and panicked response was to pick up the phone and prepare to do as bidden, for there was more than a trace of chivalry in his nature; but Jim, to whom he had read the letter aloud, wouldn’t hear of it. Instead he picked up the phone, dialed the number of the student psychiatric service, and gave to the psychiatrist who answered the names both of the girl and her roommate. Relieved to have the matter thus taken out of his hands, Ash could not express fervently enough his gratitude to Jim—a gratitude from which Jim, in turn, walked away with pride, glib in the assurance that because he at least would never be mistaken for a predator, he now possessed what all the predators wanted: Ash’s trust.

  The crisis, if that is not too strong a word, came during the spring. Because I was taking Stanley Flint’s seminar that term, I was spending less time with Ash and Jim. Instead I was hanging out in the rear smoking section of the library, in the company of lesbians and cocaine snorters and other depraved sorts of whom Jim obviously (though silently) disapproved. More and more that semester, Stanley Flint and the lesbians had begun to captivate my attention, diverting it from Jim’s little group. For instance, instead of eating in the dining hall with Ash and Jim, I would go on occasion to little off-campus dinner parties. Instead of having pizza with them after the library closed, I would sit with the lesbians in their dark apartments, watching them smoke joints. I suppose I should have taken it as a sign when one weekend Jim invited Ash—and not me—to travel with him to New York. And yet it is perhaps in the nature of friendship, as opposed to love, that we think of it as a constancy that requires no nurturing, and from which we can withdraw when we choose, certain that, like the affection of our mothers, it will be there to welcome us back whenever we return.

  Alas, this is not how it is with friendship, which in the end is more like love than most people admit: a truth I learned late that semester, when one night Jim came up to my table at dinner (I was eating alone) and asked if he could sit down with me. Of course, I said.

  Visibly nervous, he pulled out a chair. In a few weeks, he reminded me, the room draw was coming up. We would have to choose our roommates for the following year.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Well,” Jim went on, “I’ve been talking it over with Ash, and we’ve decided that we’d like to room together.”

  I blinked. “Oh,” I said, “you mean the two of you,” for the dormitory included a few triples.

  Jim looked away. “Yes,” he said. “The two of us.”

  I pretended not to care; in truth, however, I was both shocked and hurt. After all, I’d introduced Jim to Ash. That they should now have established, between themselves, an intimacy from which I was to be barred seemed both unjust and fated. Nor did I give much thought to my own negligence in the matter, the degree to which I had ignored, in recent weeks, Jim’s friendship. For it seemed to me in those days that I was forever introducing people, boys and boys or boys and girls, only to see them form impregnable couples, to which I would become at best a sort of annex, a substitute child, wanted because the couple in question needed an audience before whom they might perform their little dramas. And though, in the case of Jim and Ash, the coupling was not erotic, nonetheless the result was the same: not only was I alone, I feared that solitude was to be my lot in life. More practically, I had only a few weeks in which to find someone else to room with, or face exile in a psycho single. Unfortunately, nearly all the boys in my dormitory had already made their arrangements, with the result that only “the scrapin
gs,” as my mother might have put it, were left to choose among.

  That was how I ended up with Donald Schindler. Not that there was anything wrong with him—that is to say, he didn’t smell bad or have terrible acne, he wasn’t a member of the National Rifle Association, or the Dungeons and Dragons Club, or the Fundamentalist Christian Alliance. Instead he was simply a midsized Jewish boy from Long Island who at least on the surface conformed to every stereotype of the midsized Jewish boy from Long Island. Indeed, that was the trouble. With his freckled skin and chestnut-colored hair he was a walking cliché, robust and dull and responsible, the classic mensch of whom mothers dream when they plan their daughters’ weddings. And for this reason no one liked him.

  I have always thought it must be a terrible thing to be the living epitome of a type. This was particularly the case with Donald, who had been for many years denied the opportunity to reveal the breadth and dimension of his character, shunned often by peers who, presuming him to be only what he appeared, had never taken the trouble to get to know him, that in the end he had had no choice but to close himself off, grow solitary and self-supportive, in an effort to protect himself from what he perceived to be the certainty of social failure. And this was, ironically, the other reason why no one wanted to live with him: he radiated a hostility of which he himself was unconscious, and would have accepted exile in a psycho single without protest had I not come up to him one morning to inquire whether he might want to consider rooming with me. His answer, to my mild surprise, was an instantaneous and smiling yes.

  Having hesitantly decided to pair up—relieved, as well, no longer to be among those poor dregs of humanity still without roommates at this late date—we made a plan to have dinner together that night. An Economics major, he told me that he intended to go to law school when he graduated, not because he loved the law, but because he felt it incumbent upon himself to maintain that level of family affluence for the sake of which his grandparents—like mine, poor immigrants, children of pogroms and shtetls—had endured so many years of hardship. A while later, when I met Eli Aronson, I would witness an even more intense variation on this theme: the theme of the immigrant family which, having struggled to attain prosperity, guards that prosperity almost jealously. Such families (Donald’s was exemplary) often lead a sort of split existence, in which the desire to assimilate does battle with a heritage they are determined, after so many years of diaspora, to entrench. Thus Donald’s parents, who belonged to an exclusive synagogue, who had sent him every week for Hebrew lessons when he was a child, and who would have been scandalized had he dated a gentile girl, also lived in a white Georgian house, resplendently colonnaded, and situated on a verdant lane dotted with maple trees and yew hedges called Maidstone Court. His father was Seymour, just as mine was Herbert. Seymour, Sydney, Herbert, Bernard: growing up, I’d always assumed these to be ordinary Jewish first names, when in fact they were stolid British last names, selected by our grandparents—all those Shmuels and Yettas, Shlomos and Saras—to ease their sons’ social acclimation. Nor would it have ever occurred to them to think how swiftly their new homeland would slot these names right back where they belonged in its assumptions, leaving in their wake Uncle Bernie, Uncle Sy, Uncle Herb, those consummate Yids.

  The self-awareness that Donald displayed during that dinner surprised and impressed me. Somehow I had never expected him to be so consciously sardonic about his own status as an avatar, a status the very fact of which effaced, at least in other people’s eyes, the possibility of his even having a personality. And yet his private self, which he revealed shyly but without reluctance over the course of the next semester, proved to be much more complex than this outward aspect had led me to believe. For instance, as the term progressed, and as I began to receive more and more phone messages from smoky-voiced lesbians, an unsuspected strain of bohemianism began to expose itself in him. He was full of curiosity about my disreputable friends, their habits and hangouts. Once, after Schuyler had called to invite me for drinks at a seedy bar that she and her clan had recently colonized, he even asked me whether I made it my habit to frequent such louche environs: not disapprovingly, but in a tone of genuine curiosity, behind which there resonated a shy desire—not hope, he had been excluded too long for that—to be invited along.

  I asked him what he had planned for that evening. He shrugged. “Nothing. Maybe the tailgate party,” he said, referring to one of those large, dull gatherings the dormitories threw on weekends, the sort of dreary fetes to which boys like Donald paid admission, only to stand together loutishly on the periphery, talking about football.

  A sudden surge of generosity claimed me, and I asked him if he wanted to join me. He looked astonished; clearly he was so used to being left out of things that actually being invited along had never occurred to him.

  In a state of high excitement, he hurried into the bathroom, from which he emerged a few moments later emanating the bitter odor of Listerine, the cloying perfume of Arrid Extra Dry rolled on too lavishly. For a moment I regretted my impulsive kindness; what, after all, would the lesbians, with their Samsara and patchouli oil, make of this boring boy, this boy whose very smell, so antiseptic and oppressive, suggested suburban drugstores? I feared lest Donald, in his plainness, should stand out in their atmosphere of opium-den lassitude as rudely as Gretchen, with her pearls and nose ring, would have stood out at the Schindlers’ synagogue. Yet as it turned out I had nothing to worry about—or rather, as is so often the case, I was worrying about the wrong thing.

  In due course we arrived at the bar. Its low-voltage green glow'revealed, at a front booth upholstered in red vinyl, the faces, both dissipated and exotic, of the lesbians drinking and smoking with a claque of gay boys. No one was talking; they wore on their faces expressions of boredom that seemed well suited to the dilapidated condition of the bar, so unlike that of certain spiffy establishments closer to campus, where well-heeled undergraduates gathered to guzzle Pimm’s Cup and sing old college songs. This bar, on the other hand, had never been a student hangout; indeed, until the lesbians had taken it over, it had remained the exclusive and dreary domain of ill-tempered old men, professional drunks who lived in the single-room-occupancy hotels that punctuated the outskirts of the campus, some of whom now sat near the television, staring glumly over their beers at the peculiar and noisy party that had intruded upon what had been up until then their private sanctum.

  Slumming, usually looked down upon, must be thanked at least for this, that it pumps economic nutrition into dead locales. It didn’t matter that the wallpaper was smoke-stained and peeling, or that the television had bad reception, or that the vinyl booths were splitting in places, exposing their yellowed foam rubber innards: what was important was that suddenly, because of the lesbians, the bar was happening. Thus Dolly, the waitress, had a fresh dye job, and knew each of her new clients not only by name, but by drink. “Stoly and tonic, right, Laur?” she asked in her husky voice, while Mel, her stoic partner and possible husband, mixed daiquiris. Meanwhile Donald, approaching the crowded booth, smiled like someone who has finally, after years of searching, found his element.

  Amazingly enough, he hit it off with everyone. Nor did the fact that some of the girls were making out with each other faze him in the least; instead he seemed not only to accept this homosexual ambiance, but to delight in it—which did not, I think, mean that he himself was gay; on the contrary, I suspect that it was more the bohemian character of the situation that appealed to him, at least to judge from the exuberant way he was looking at everyone, especially Lauren, the girl to whom the TV star was purportedly linked at the time, and Eve Schlossberg, who was not herself a lesbian (yet) and seemed perfectly willing to return his attentions. She had brought a friend with her, a boy named Lars whom I thought very handsome and arrogant, with his sleek nose, his lean legs, and pouty eyes. This Lars made me nervous for the precise reason that unlike Philip and Gerald and their crowd, nothing in his appearance, his voice or clothes or countenance,
gave away the fact that he was gay. Homosexuality as a self-declaring state made more sense to me, for though I was spending most of my free time, that semester, with a gay crowd, among young men and women who, I supposed, took it for granted that I too was gay, nonetheless even at this late date I clung to the belief that so long as I neither spoke of nor acted on my sexual impulses, they would fail to implicate me. Which, as it turned out, was not the case at all, as I learned the evening I came back to my room from the library only to find that someone had written on the door “Martin Bauman is gay”—words I wiped away furiously, in the middle of the night, fearful lest someone should happen upon me in the throes of erasure.

  Given the situation I was in, you’d think I would have admired Lars, who in his “normal guy” masculinity provided such a contrast to Gerald and Philip’s self-mocking and repellent faggotry; and indeed, if Lars had cultivated me, if he had even so much as acknowledged my existence, I might have done just that; my entire life might have gone differently. Instead, from the moment we were introduced (by Eve, with a knowing wink), Lars refused to give me the time of day. Not only did he seem not to like me, he seemed actively to dislike me, so much so that soon I began to perceive his virile athleticism less as an ideal to be emulated than a challenge to which I—not a queen like Philip Crenshaw, but at the same time incapable of serving a volleyball—could never possibly live up. Worse, his rebuff implied that the campus was full of boys who were neither scrawny and intellectual like me, nor lisping and faggotty like Philip, into whose fraternity of masculine pleasure I could never hope to gain admission. Yet if they existed, these boys, who were they? Why had I never met them? Where were they hidden?