Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Lars’s refusal that night even to acknowledge my presence did not surprise me. What did surprise me was that even as he ignored me, he paid enormous attention to Donald; flirted with him outrageously; even, as the night drew to a close, put his arms around him and whispered something in his ear that made Donald wriggle with laughter.

  Afterward, on the way back to our room, slightly envious that my charitable gesture had led to such a huge success, I asked Donald what it was that Lars had said to him. “That he has a crush on me,” Donald answered, his lips turning upward in a smile. Once again an act of kindness, an act of introduction, had ended, perversely enough, in my own exclusion.

  From that night on, Donaldss became an integral member of Gretchen and Schuyler’s circle. The degree to which they embraced him stunned and slightly offended me. Now it was Donald who Lauren called to invite to parties; Donald who offered to take me along; Donald who sat alone with Lars at a banquette at dinner, engaged in a laughing tête-à-tête. Dressed in his usual uniform of white T-shirt, jeans, and outmoded tennis shoes, smelling always of Listerine, he went to every party, accepted every invitation, laughed at the irony that after so many years as a wallflower, he had finally found social success—but in a circle where every girl was gay! Well, not every girl, I said, and reminded him of Eve Schlossberg, always skulking through those parties with her opportunistic camera. He yawned. Yes, he said, it was true, there was Eve Schlossberg; and yet that hair of hers!... His blasé attitude puzzled me, even made me wonder if Donald might be gay after all, until it occurred to me that Eve was quite possibly the first girl who had ever expressed a genuine interest in him, in which case it might be more exciting to rebuff her advances than to respond to them.

  Meanwhile his friendship with Lars deepened. At parties they made a habit of dancing together, for Donald had no qualms about dancing with other boys. Once Lars even asked him to slow dance, an invitation to which Donald responded first by balking, then, after a pause, by boldly stepping into Lars’s arms—a gesture of bravura on his part that made me queasy with envy. The late arrival of this chance to reveal the hidden wildness in his personality appeared to delight Donald, especially at party’s end, when the breaking dawn found him ensconced in Lars’s lap, smiling broadly, as if he were simultaneously answering a challenge and issuing one, proving his openness and flouting the narrow mores of his mother, who, if she’d seen him in such a posture, would have burst into tears.

  And yet I doubt Donald ever accepted Lars’s more intimate invitations, the ones I myself had hoped to receive. If he did, he certainly never told me. Not that this dissuaded Lars from continuing to make them; on the contrary, Donald’s rebuffs appeared only to fuel Lars’s determination to win him over. And this I found confusing. For by courting Donald so unabashedly, Lars had called into question what I took to be some of the fundamental rules of sex: namely, that very good-looking people naturally gravitate only toward other very good-looking people; that if Lars showed no interest in me, it wasn’t because of who I was, but because I simply wasn’t of his echelon; finally, that to fall in love with very beautiful people (as, for instance, so many disgraced girls and boys had fallen in love with Ash) was necessarily to invite humiliation and embarrassment. Better, much better, to focus one’s attention on those whose attractiveness was more or less on a par with one’s own—or so I told myself, until the day that Lars, whom I grouped with Ash in the very highest echelon, fell in love with Donald, plain Donald, who washed his hair with Tegrin and had a greasy forehead. In so doing, he shot my theories to hell.

  A question remains: if what made Donald so attractive to Lars and the lesbians was the disparity between the image he projected and the interior self to which it provided such a contrast, then what made the lesbians attractive to him? The answer, I think, was their very inaccessibility, the fact that unlike the women with whom he’d grown up, they were so utterly self-sufficient: rich, capable, smart, and, more significantly, oblivious to, unneeding of, men. Not that they disliked men; they simply didn’t require them. My presence, or Donald’s, or Lars’s, either in the rear smoking section of the library or at Dolly’s bar, was fine, was amusing and delightful. It just wasn’t necessary. I suspect Donald appreciated that, and respected them for it. I suspect he also found it sexy.

  As for Lars, months passed and he still didn’t give up on his efforts to seduce Donald, even though, quite naturally, the unglamorous reality of their friendship had by now eclipsed, even defused, the erotic frisson of their flirtation, in the process infusing their banter with a joking quality, as if it were all simply a game (albeit a game to which the unlikely but never relinquished possibility of sexual consummation lent an edge of tension). For Donald, it was becoming clear, no matter how flattering he might find Lars’s invitations, was in the end no more likely to accept them than Eve Schlossberg’s. Nor was Lars singleminded in his pursuits, as I learned when, during a break in our Milton seminar one afternoon, Eve announced to me (with the smug pride and fake offhandedness of the confidante), “By the way, have you met Lars’s new boyfriend?”

  “I didn’t know he had one,” I answered.

  Eve nodded. “A graduate student in History. They haven’t had sex yet,” she added intimately, “they’ve only cuddled.”

  My response to this news (a response of which I felt ashamed) was again envy. In contrast to Lars, for whom it was no doubt ordinary, the prospect of cuddling as a prelude to sex (not to mention sex) made my mouth water. For whereas he, at nineteen, was already a sexual sophisticate, who had had, or so Eve told me, countless lovers, including his high school music teacher, I was at nineteen a virgin in every sense: a truth I had so far admitted only to Donald, who had confessed in kind that he had done it just once, with a “slow” girl in his high school. In such worldly, even world-weary circles we wandered like neophytes, admiring and awestruck, yet finally lost in the wilderness.

  I realize now that I have not yet said anything about music, which played such an important role in our lives back then. These were the years—those immediately following the advent of punk rock—when the antisocial shrieking of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols was in the process of giving way to that more palatable, less threatening version of itself that was known as “new wave.” Essentially, new wave assimilated the violent ravings of punk into the fold of a more melodic affability, neutralizing both its originality and its power to disturb. And it was to this rather ambiguous music—songs by bands like the Human League, the Thompson Twins, Culture Club—that Donald and I danced so gleefully, both at the parties we went to and on certain wild evenings at Dolly’s bar. Remote were the high school gyms where girls had stood anxiously in clusters waiting for boys to ask them to dance, and in which only discrete pairs, captivated by the push and pull of their private orbits, circled that glowing orb, the rented disco ball, as it tossed over the floor, the walls, even our hands and faces, bits of confetti made from light and color that we would chase as aimlessly as a dog chasing a sunbeam. Here, on the other hand, pairdom was not a requirement of dancing. You could dance alone, or in a group, and when you danced in a pair, such was the promiscuous fluidity of the crowd that it might hurl a stranger into your arms, or pull your partner from you. Thus in those warrenish apartments where Donald and I danced together, those apartments where all around us girl couples smoked joints and made out on Salvation Army couches, it meant nothing that suddenly he might part from me and yank an annoyed Eve Schlossberg, who was in the middle of snapping a picture, into a jitterbug; or that Lars, appearing out of nowhere, should suddenly run up to him and lift him into the air; or that even the TV star herself, perhaps as a consequence of too violent a shove, should come flying toward me at such speed that the two of us would end up literally on the floor, laughing and only slightly wounded.

  Sometimes when we were alone in our room, or in the common room late in the evening, making tapes for a party, Donald and I would “slam-dance”: hurl our bodies against eac
h other with such insolent energy, such youthful and ecstatic recklessness, that in the morning, when I got up to shower, my arms and hips would be covered with bruises.

  Then, only a few months into the term, and despite all our fondness for each other, we had a terrible falling out. The source of this breach, surprisingly, was politics, a subject of which I have heretofore made little mention not because it was irrelevant to our lives, but because the degree of its relevance was something of which most of us had remained unconscious, until that fateful November evening in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. His victory was an outcome that neither my mother nor I, in our wildest dreams, would have ever predicted, having as West Coasters witnessed too many years of gubernatorial ineptitude, too many failures on his part to win the Republican nomination, even to be able to imagine the idea of “President Reagan.”

  Of course we were wrong; and not only wrong, but hugely wrong. For Reagan not only whipped Carter that fall, he whipped him so thoroughly as to leave us numb, horrified to discover the extent to which, in our little liberal enclave, we had been living in a dream, remote from a national disgruntlement that in the form of votes now threatened to undo, as one of my mother’s friends put it, “everything we achieved in the sixties.” Now I laugh at the hysteria to which Reagan’s election drove some of my mother’s friends, one of whom went so far as to buy an open ticket to France, in the event that a sudden wave of fascism should sweep the nation. In 1980, however, my ideas were more simplistic. I took it as a given that if on a personal or social level two people found sufficient common ground to enjoy each other’s company and become friends, then by necessity they must also share the same political perspective. Yet this was not the case at all, as I learned a few weeks before the election, when in reply to some remark I’d made about “those assholes who’d actually vote for Reagan,” Donald looked me square in the eye and said that if I thought everyone who planned to vote for Reagan was an asshole, then I’d better revise my opinion of him, because he had every intention of voting for Reagan himself.

  I was shocked. “But you’re a Democrat,” I said.

  “Why should that matter?”

  “Well, look at the people you hang out with! Do you think any of our friends are voting for Reagan?”

  “Lars is voting for Reagan.”

  This was too much. “But Lars is gay!” I protested.

  “So?”

  “But if Reagan had his way he’d put every homosexual on the planet in a concentration camp!”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Donald said blithely. “Anyway, there are plenty of gay Republicans. There’s even an organization of gay Republicans in Washington.”

  This I refused to believe. To my view, if homosexuality had a genetic origin, the gay gene had by necessity to be linked to the leftist gene. “I don’t see how you can sit there and say all this so casually,” I said. “You and Lars. I mean, look at Reagan’s social policies—”

  “Look at his economic policies. America can’t afford four more years of President Peanut. We’ll be bankrupt. We’ll be at Russia’s mercy.”

  Yanking my chair away from the table where we were eating, I fled. Tears filled my eyes. I wondered how I could even endure another night in the same room with Donald, and wanted to call my mother for comfort; to call the dean and ask that Donald be assigned immediately to a psycho single; to call Eve and ask if it was true—if it was even possible—that Lars was a Republican.

  In the end, however, I did none of these things. Instead I coldshouldered Donald, even as we remained roommates. Short of agreeing to change his vote, he did everything he could to remedy the wound. I was the one who refused to budge. For suddenly I found myself disillusioned not only with Donald himself, but with that entire crowd that studied in the rear smoking section of the library, the political viewpoint of which, I was quickly discovering, was essentially one of apathy. Gretchen, for instance, said she had no intention even of registering to vote. “I’m apolitical,” she told me drowsily. Eve insisted she was a libertarian, while Lauren refused to discuss the subject at all. Their lack of engagement in the electoral process, though not out of keeping with the generally lethargic affect they cultivated, saddened me, and cast in a new light those very aspects of the circle that had attracted me in the first place. No longer did blasé smoking call up, for me, Paris cafés on rainy afternoons: instead it made me cough. Likewise at the parties—so crowded and fume-riddled—where once I had danced in a rapture, I found myself growing claustrophobic and bored. Even Dolly’s I didn’t enjoy anymore, so edged with contempt did the rapport between owner and clients suddenly appear to me: evidence not of freedom or imagination, but of that Weltschmerz in which only those who have both time and money can afford to indulge.

  If I owed my rather rigid ideas about politics to anyone, it was my mother, an entrenched enemy of the status quo, who had voted several presidential elections in a row for an obscure independent candidate, a black lady with a lisp called Shirley Chisholm. I’m still not entirely certain what prompted, in the early seventies, my mother’s transformation (at least in my eyes) from docile housewife to troublemaker; I suspect it was some confluence of feminist dogma and dissatisfaction with her lot in life. All that is sure is that at a certain moment she started infuriating my father with her habit, at dinner parties, of refusing to stay silent when some of his more right-wing colleagues made remarks along the lines of, “If you ask me, the simplest solution is just to drop a bomb on Moscow.”

  “I understand that you had to think it,” my father would remark afterward, crabbily undoing his tie, still reeling from my mother’s outraged and withering reply, “but did you have to say it?”

  The fact was, unlike my father, who counseled in almost every circumstance the avoidance of conflict, my mother believed with equal avidity in speaking her mind. Sometimes I thought this tendency innate to her character; on other occasions I suspected that she was fomenting discord for the express purpose of vexing her husband. In any case his anxiety lest she say something explosive to someone, coupled with her resentment of his desire, in her words, to “shut her up about politics,” lent to all social occasions they attended together (and especially to the parties they threw at home) an aroma of panic and hostility that infiltrated the house for days before and afterward. For instance, I remember a costume party they gave one year at Mardi Gras, to which my father had invited, among others, a particularly reactionary colleague, and my mother a friend of hers from the hairdresser’s, a woman with peroxide blond hair like Dolly’s, whose husband showed up wearing a Nixon mask. My father’s colleague, offended, left in a huff. “It’s disgraceful,” he said, “mocking the president of the United States like that”—a remark to which my father responded by paling, my mother by smiling, ever so slightly.

  Though my mother had hated Nixon vehemently, cursed him through the Watergate years, vowed that as soon as her cancer was diagnosed as terminal she would “take him out,” she looked upon Reagan less as a villain than as a buffoon. Indeed, when he won the Republican nomination that year, her initial response was to breathe a sigh of relief, since in her view the choice of such a cretin as the Republican candidate simply ensured Jimmy Carter’s reelection. Not that she liked Carter, either, having taken his decision to reinstate draft registration as a personal betrayal. For the Vietnam War was not, then, so far off that she didn’t still have nightmares in which she went to visit me in boot camp and found me with my head shaved, being subjected to humiliations that were to me (I must admit) exciting to contemplate, because I could not do even a single push-up. Also, my poor brother, toward the end of the war, had had the misfortune of drawing the number 4 in the draft lottery, which meant almost certain conscription. In a panic he had bought a ticket to Canada, though in the end the combination of a heart murmur and a college deferment (one of the last given out before the war ended) saved him from being shipped off.

  As my eighteenth birthday approached, the decision as to
whether I myself should register for the draft became a source of contention between my parents. Curiously enough my father, who took the matter far less seriously than my mother, advised me simply to ignore the call to register. My mother, on the other hand—imagining, I suppose, a scene in which the police dragged me handcuffed from my dorm room, and furthermore having discussed the matter at great length with the other women in her local chapter of Mothers Against the Draft—believed that I should register, but only after sending a letter to our senator asserting my moral opposition to all war. In addition, I was supposed to cover the draft registration card, which I had to fill out at the post office, with stickers expressing my intense resentment at being legally compelled to sign up for a military with which I was not in sympathy: stickers graciously printed up, and paid for, by Mothers Against the Draft.

  In the end, more timid than my father (or perhaps he simply feared the ramifications of my mother’s strategy) I took the latter course. Meanwhile my mother, since Reagan had won the Republican nomination, found herself in the uncomfortable position not only of having to vote, but to campaign for a candidate by whom she felt personally betrayed.

  If she derived comfort from anything at this time, it was the assurance that Carter’s reelection was a fait accompli. Yet as the summer progressed—exposing, in its merciless heat, the irritable mood of the country—even that assurance became more and more tenuous. I think we were both holding out for some last-minute resurgence of sanity that would prove all the pollsters wrong, as had occurred when Truman beat Dewey. Instead the wave crashed over us. Reagan won by a landslide. That night at my university, huge, impromptu parties sprouted up everywhere, at which friends of mine whom I would never have dreamed capable of such perfidy opened bottles of champagne and smugly toasted not only the election of “President Reagan” (how hard it was for me to get my mouth around those words!), but the age of illusory prosperity, of cocaine and wild parties and rampant greed, of which—graced with that peculiar sagacity of which only the young are capable—they were taking with each glass of champagne a first, bloody gulp.