Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  We walked by countless cubicles, in which a number of people—men and women, middle-aged and old—were sitting before antiquated typewriters, writing or talking on the phone. Some of them smoked. Next to one woman’s desk stood a plastic garbage can piled high with crushed Diet Coke cans. It suddenly occurred to me that these people were probably writers, and that these cubicles were the offices that the magazine gave to those among its contributors whom its legendary editor prized the most. (Such lore I had learned from my mother.) Unfortunately Edith—my Edith, the Mrs. Risko Edith having been all but destroyed—led me along at too fast a clip to gawk. “Did you have a good trip?” she was asking. “I assume you took the train—or was it the bus? Do you have a car?”

  “I took the bus. I don’t have a car.”

  “My son wants a car in college. He’s very insistent about it, but his father and I don’t think it’s a good idea. Here, come in.” We stepped into her office, which was narrow and wedge-shaped, with only a sliver of a window. “I mean, what’s the point of a car, when you’re living on campus? Sit down.”

  I did. On her desk, next to a pile of manuscripts, sat yet another elderly typewriter—the one with the jumping “a” and “m,” no doubt. Above it, several pieces of magazine stationery thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board announced titles not to be read beyond (“The First Time”), sentences not to be read beyond (“Morning call came early at Auschwitz, but Baruch didn’t care; he was a morning person”), words not to be read beyond (“myriad”).

  We talked for a while. She inquired after the president of my university, whom it turned out she had once dated—“Eons ago.” She had three sons, she said, the youngest of whom (the one who wanted the car?) was currently applying to college. And where had I gotten those handsome corduroy pants? I told her I didn’t know, that my mother had bought them for me, at which point she had me stand up so that she could pull out the waistband in order to read the inside label.

  After that we went to lunch at a hotel long associated with the magazine’s staff, one that in the thirties had been a famous gathering place for literary intellectuals but that in the intervening years had fallen on hard times, eventually escaping the wrecking ball only thanks to a bailout on the part of a Japanese conglomerate. Now, where once writers had exchanged witticisms, tourists photographed their food.

  Although in subsequent years I would meet many people who came from Edith’s milieu—the milieu of the original bluebloods, old Protestant money, a direct chain of descent leading back to the Mayflower—at the time she represented something relatively new to me. Not that I hadn’t previously met adults who were rich—I had—and yet these adults had tended to be Jews, avatars of upward mobility like Jim Sterling’s father, whose own father had been an immigrant from Lithuania. (Shulevitz, his original name, he had changed at Ellis Island in homage to British currency.) Inherited wealth, of course, is something entirely different. For instance, as I learned over lunch, Edith’s family had had an association with the magazine from its birth: indeed, her grandfather had been one of its first backers. She divided her time between an apartment on East End Avenue (“we bought it thirty years ago, when real estate was cheap”) and a “drafty old summer house” in Maine, part of a compound of houses that had been in her husband’s family since the First World War. Her husband, whose name was Beavis, was a lawyer. The oldest of her sons was also a lawyer. The middle one was an artist. The youngest, the one who was applying to college, and for whom she had coveted my green corduroy pants, hadn’t decided yet. All of them went by nicknames: Whiff, Lanny, J.A.

  Our main courses arrived. Over the years, I’d come to associate the term WASP with poached salmon, dessert forks, prudish portions; indeed, so concerned was I lest I should make a gluttonous impression on my new editor that I’d ordered more modestly than I might have in other company—an entirely unnecessary measure, as it turned out, for Edith tucked into her own ample lunch with gusto. She picked up her lamb chops by their bony handles and chewed on them. She ordered an ice cream sundae for dessert. Such casual hedonism made me think wistfully of my mother and her friends with their bowls of sugarless Jell-O, their draconian diets and rigorous exercise routines. None of them was as thin as Edith, however, who clearly had no peasant blood in her, who radiated the hale health, the natural grace, of the aristocrat. She had garden dirt under her nails. In lieu of a purse she carried a canvas bag, battered and patched, from L. L. Bean.

  After she had paid the bill—“We’ll let the fellow with the top hat pick up this one,” she said—we went back to her office to talk about the story. “Homosexuality is such a hard subject to handle!” she told me, taking the manuscript from the pile on her desk. “And yet you manage it so effortlessly. That’s what I like. I’ve read plenty of homosexual stories, and the trouble is, they all seem sociological. They all say, ‘Look, I’m about homosexuality as a category,’ instead of just being about people, which is what yours is. And the mother’s a great character. Incidentally, Mr. ———” (she named the magazine’s famous editor) “is particularly keen to be publishing it. He wants to run it as soon as possible, which is high praise given that a lot of stories sit around here for a year or more before they make it into print. Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. How could I explain that if I looked stunned, it was less because Edith’s remarks had included an element of praise than because up until that moment I hadn’t realized I’d written a “homosexual story”? This was a troubling matter. Before I had a chance to brood on it, however, Edith had pulled some galleys out of a manila folder and handed them to me: my story, already typeset in the magazine’s unmistakable face, with suggestions penciled in the margins. “The ones in red are mine,” she said. “The ones in green are Mr. ———’s. You’ll notice he’s constantly putting in commas. He has a thing about commas. He thinks people don’t use them enough anymore. The third set—the ones in blue—are Anka’s. I’ll be taking you in a minute to meet Anka.”

  I stared open-mouthed at my story’s title, at the distinctive typography, at my name at the end.

  “Oh, one thing before I forget,” Edith went on. “In the story we’ve got three ‘fuck’s and a ‘piss.’ Now Mr.———’s willing to forgo the ‘piss’—he says there’s no way around it—but he draws the line at ‘fuck,’ so we’ll have to find an alternative to that. I’m afraid we’re a bit fuddy-duddy around here,” she added, winking. “As for the contract, it should be ready in a few days. Do you have an agent yet?”

  “No,” I answered, my eyes still fixed on the galleys.

  “You’ll probably start getting inquiries once the story’s published. Or I could make a few recommendations. Not that you’ll need an agent with us—more for book contracts. Oh, and you’ll be receiving a check within a couple of weeks. You’re probably wondering how we pay. Most authors do. The system’s not really all that complicated. Basically, everyone around here reads the story and gives it a grade, like in school, A to D. Then the grades are averaged together—naturally Mr.———’s counts more than the rest—and based on that we work out a price per word. Fairly straightforward, in the end.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I love the bit about the woman whose hair is like a brioche. That’s a great bit. Plus the scene under the mistletoe! Oops, we’d better go see Anka before she leaves for her shrink appointment.”

  Standing briskly, she walked out of the office. I followed her down yet another long corridor—clearly the domain of the lower orders, for the offices were both darker and smaller than the ones I’d passed earlier, some with frosted windows, some with no windows at all.

  At one of the doors, which was open just a crack, she knocked.

  “Who is it?”

  “Edith!”

  We entered. A plump woman in her early thirties, with a hooked nose, flushed cheeks, and long blond, gray-streaked hair rose from her cluttered desk.

  “Anka, this is Martin,” Edith said.

  “
A pleasure to meet you,” said Anka, holding out her hand. “Sit, if you can find a chair.”

  Her office was a chaos. I had to take a coat, a purse, and a string bag of onions off the extra chair before I could sit down. Edith, having pooh-poohed my insistence that she sit and I stand, disappeared briefly, returning a few seconds later with a folding chair of the sort my parents kept in their basement next to the card table.

  “I really love your stories,” Anka was telling me. “I don’t know if Edith told you, but I was the first one around here to discover you. That story about your mother and the radiation therapy center. At least I presume it’s your mother.”

  “Yes,” I said, rather amazed, yet at the same time refreshed, by the boldness of her inferences.

  “It may be personal,” Anka continued. “You see, we have a lot in common. I’m from Washington, too. And my mother also goes every week to a radiation therapy center.”

  A dim idea seized me. “Which hospital?” I asked.

  She named our town.

  “But that’s where my mother goes!”

  “You’re kidding. What’s her name?”

  “Carolyn.”

  “Your mother’s Carolyn? But that’s amazing! My mother adores Carolyn! She talks all the time about Carolyn!”

  “What’s your mother’s name?”

  “Leonie. Leonie Kaufman.”

  “From Tacoma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it a small world?” Edith threw in, perhaps not realizing that what was amazing wasn’t so much the smallness of one world as the fact that two I had always thought irretrievably distant—my mother’s and the magazine’s, the one in which I lived and the one for which I longed—had just collided.

  Before I left to catch my bus, Anka gave me a sheaf of her own stories, seven of them, all photocopied from small literary quarterlies. “Every one of these was rejected by the magazine,” she said, “in case you were wondering if I get preferential treatment because I work here.”

  “Thanks. I can’t wait to read them.”

  “Call me the next time you’re in New York,” she added. “I’ll have you over for dinner.”

  I explained that I intended to be in New York two weekends hence, as the guest of my friend Jim Sterling. “Great,” Anka said. “Maybe we can arrange something for Saturday. Only remember—when you call, let the phone ring once, then hang up. Then call back and let it ring twice. Otherwise I don’t pick up.”

  I promised to follow these instructions, after which I bid Anka and Edith good-bye and headed to the Port Authority. On the bus I studied the tricolored suggestions in the margins of the galleys. Generally speaking Mr.———, as Edith had alerted me, confined himself to inserting commas, while Edith offered what she called “judicious cuts,” most of which, when I made them, led instantly to the elimination of those very awkwardnesses over which I had sweated while writing on the story. Indeed, so self-evident did I find her solutions that I wanted to hit myself on the head for not having seen them myself—much the same sensation as when, in high school, our math teacher would map out on the blackboard the elegant answer to some thorny algebra problem on which, after hours of struggle, I had finally given up.

  Anka’s suggestions, the ones in blue, were murkier. For instance: “I feel the need for some meanness here,” she wrote at one point in the margin. And: “Are you sure this is the right metaphor?” And: “Why editorialize? The facts speak for themselves.” Such criticisms, I found, were harder to respond to than Edith’s, for the simple reason that they came in the form of questions rather than answers. As for Anka’s own stories—which I devoured—they described the ups and downs of a young woman’s complicated relationship with her equally young husband, whom she has married straight out of high school. In the last of the stories, the young woman has an affair and leaves the husband. In order to avoid his perpetual, pleading calls, however, she must instruct her friends and colleagues in an elaborate telephone code...

  As I soon learned, Anka’s relationship with the telephone, in life as well as in fiction, bordered on the paranoid. For instance, even though she had given me along with her stories a sheet of magazine stationery on which she had scribbled her home address and phone number, whenever I tried to reach her at her apartment I got an answering machine—something of an innovation in those days. Later, she explained to me that she never answered the phone when she was at home, preferring instead to “screen” calls and pick up only for those friends with whom she felt up to speaking. For Anka had a lot of people she wanted to steer clear of: not only, presumably, her ex-husband, but the agents of a credit card company with which she was having a dispute, several lawyers, her landlord, even, depending on the state of their relationship, her mother. Needless to say, the last thing I wanted was to be added to her “don’t answer” list, which I imagined as being akin to the list of titles not to be read beyond that I had seen posted above Edith’s desk. And yet I had a favor to ask. Ever since I had discovered that her mother was the famous Leonie with whom my own mother cracked jokes at the radiation therapy center, I’d been worrying lest Leonie—having learned from Anka of my story’s acceptance—should congratulate my mother, with whom I hadn’t yet shared the news. Accordingly, a few days after our meeting I called Anka at her office, following the elaborate instructions she had dictated. The second time she picked up. “Hello, Anka,” I said.

  “Martin, how are you?”

  “Fine. Good.” I paused. “And you?”

  She made a noise that does not translate easily into print: a sort of digestive whinny, signifying disgust or frustration or both. “So what’s up?”

  “I’m afraid I need to ask you a favor.”

  On the other end of the line I heard palpable, even eager silence: Anka was listening. Yet once I had explained the situation, she neither interrogated my motives, nor sputtered that it was too late, that she had already told Leonie, that Leonie was at that very instant on the way to the radiation therapy center to chat with Carolyn. Instead she said simply, “Don’t worry, I haven’t breathed a word to Mom.”

  I was relieved. “Thank you,” I said.

  “At the same time, I wouldn’t advise your putting it off for long,” Anka continued. “I mean, eventually your mother’s going to read the story. It can’t be avoided. I know. I’ve been through the same thing.”

  I figured that she was referring to the affair she had had—or rather, to the affair I presumed her to have had, judging from her stories, which I had taken to be autobiographical. Yet what surprised me even more than Anka’s frankness in alluding to her own “personal life” was the ease with which she drew conclusions about mine. For if I interpreted her correctly, then she not only took it for granted that I had read her stories as autobiographical, she also took it for granted that she could read mine the same way; in other words, she had deduced, from the story, that I was gay, and to this deduction, because it was accented neither with hostility nor self-righteousness, I hardly knew how to respond. After all, since my childhood bus stop, only two people had ever confronted me publicly about my homosexuality: Gerald Wexler, and the author of the anonymous graffito on my door. In both cases the motivation had been malice. Anka, on the other hand, seemed to be acting only from friendly concern. I cannot overstate how much I liked her. Today I have no idea where she is; a dozen years ago she quit the magazine, gave up her apartment, and disappeared off the face of the earth. The last time I spoke to Edith even she hadn’t a clue what had become of her. When I was young, however, she changed my life. More important by far than the first person to whom one comes out is the first person to whom one does not need to come out. Her support precluded confessions. For that, Anka, wherever you are, I thank you.

  The following week I met with Edith a second time, to go over the galleys. At lunch she asked me which writers I admired. I mentioned Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, whose work at that point had not yet been published in the magazine. As it happened I’d met Carve
r a few years earlier, at the same community college writing workshop where I’d encountered the poet of the yellow river. I explained that I had told him my idea (still vestigial then) for a story about Bo and Peep, then confided that at seventeen I doubted whether I knew enough to communicate the sort of despair that would lead someone to abandon her life and go off to meet a spaceship. To which he replied, “Once you’ve known one despair you’ve known every despair”: an observation with which Edith, by nodding, indicated her quiet accord.

  “And what are you reading at school?” she asked.

  “Howards End,” I said. “For my class on the Edwardian novel.”

  “Lionel Trilling thought it was his best book—though personally I’d plump for A Room with a View. As for Morgan, he told me he preferred The Longest Journey. Isn’t that odd? It just goes to show you that writers can be the worst judges of their own work.”

  “You mean you knew him?”

  “Not well, but yes. He was friends with Mr.———back when I worked as his secretary.”

  “Wow,” I said. It was hard for me to conceive of someone actually having known Forster. “What was he like?”

  “Extremely kind. And honest. In fact sometimes he could be so honest that people would get offended. Not the sort who suffers fools gladly.”

  “How did you meet him? Excuse me, I hope I don’t sound like I’m interrogating you.”

  “You don’t. It was at a luncheon party that Mr.———and his wife gave one weekend at their place on Long Island. I remember I was incredibly nervous—meeting the great man and all. But then Morgan put me at my ease almost at once. He was good at that. You see, there were all these writers there, all hell-bent on making a positive impression, and they were talking so much he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. So he just sat there, and I just sat there, because I was too shy to say anything, and then he winked at me, I suppose because we were the only two people at the table who weren’t flapping our gums.” I laughed. “Anyway, at some point the conversation turned to why people write, and someone there suggested that maybe fiction writing was only a matter of wish fulfillment, like dreams—we were all armchair Freudians in those days—and suddenly Morgan sort of raised an eyebrow at me. Back then I assumed the look meant that he thought Freud was a lot of hooey and didn’t I agree, only I’ve been thinking about it recently, and now I wonder whether it was because when he did all his best writing, he was so young. After all, he was only in his twenties when he wrote A Room with a View, he hadn’t experienced anything, really. He’d always been trapped with that mother of his, in addition to which there was his homosexuality—homosexuality you just couldn’t do much about in those days. And so in a certain way his early novels were pure wish fulfillment. Anka thinks that George is the most cardboard character in the book, but I think that’s because George was Morgan’s beau ideal, the love he was always looking for but gave Lucy instead. What he couldn’t five, he wrote.”