Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  These remarks filled me with vague alarm. In speaking this way of Forster’s youth, I wondered, was Edith offering me a warning? After all, I too was young; I too wrote of experiences I had never had, while having experiences of which I never wrote—in particular, the experience of living always on the margins of other people’s dramas, as chronic sidekick, go-between, or counselor.

  That evening I arrived back at school determined (a) to lose my virginity and (b) to come out, both before the term ended. In essence, I had simply reached the point where I could no longer bear the weighty life of pretense to which I had previously consigned myself. For such a costume, paradoxically, is not only cumbersome but flimsy. It seems always to be coming unpinned. I wanted to be off with it, and therefore vowed that by the time my story appeared in print, I would have, as it were, caught up with myself, become the sort of person who could have written such a story from experience.

  It was now April; this meant that only a week remained before the GLAD festivities began. Accordingly I decided to make the closing ceremony my deadline, and with the same industry that had marked my preparations for the PSAT, devoted my energy to the task of convincing someone to seduce me, which is in and of itself a form of seduction.

  But who? Lars, obviously, was out of the question. So were Gerald, Philip, and their crowd, though in retrospect, I realize that I probably could have gotten any of them to do me the favor just by asking. Nor would I consider even for a minute visiting the gay bar that operated a few blocks from campus, a squalid and cheerful little hole in which the owner’s mother was rumored to wash the glasses, for I was puritanical, and therefore determined to find another “nice boy,” someone who, like me, would never set foot in a gay bar—a fact of which, in future years, when we were a couple, we could boast.

  I had now narrowed my criteria. The next step was to investigate the most likely source for the sort of boy I was seeking: namely, the membership (thirty in all) of an elite all-male choir at my university, one that was famous all over the world, and which year to year, though its members changed, remained ineluctably itself, bringing to the ears of nostalgic alumni its familiar repertoire of madrigals and fight songs, always in the same delicate a cappella arrangements, always performed by lovely, clean-cut, eager-eyed boys in white tie and tails. Of the group’s members that year, six, so far as I knew, were gay. I decided that before GLAD week ended, I was going to have slept with one of them.

  It is a testament to the awe Edith Atkinson inspired in me that even now, nearly twenty years after our first meeting, I still cannot bring myself to use the word “myriad.” Likewise the presence of “The First Time” on Edith’s list of “Titles Not to Be Read Beyond” forbids me from going into detail about the process by which I ended up sleeping, the Tuesday of GLAD week, with Theodoric Vere Swanson III—the member of the chorus on whom I had decided to set my sights not because I found him the most attractive (on the contrary, of the six candidates he was the least my “type”), but because I judged him, on the basis of his looks, to be “on my level,” and therefore less likely than the others to humiliate me with rejection. Here, of course, is the beginning of a significant drama: the scissoring of the erotic from the romantic, and my consequent evolution into a much worse kind of cheat than I had been in high school. This story, however, remains to be told in future chapters. For the moment my goal was simpler, and I achieved it: over the course of a single night’s sexual gamboling in which pleasure, at least on my side, played little if any role; a night marked by embarrassing stabs, on both our parts, at the sort of “sophisticated” erotic dialogue we had read in books (for instance: “tastes good, huh?” Theodoric Vere Swanson III said as he guided his penis into my mouth, his lovely tenor voice as unsuited to these words as mine had been when, at the age of thirteen, my own voice not yet cracked, I had played the psychiatrist in a junior high school production of Equus); over the course of this night I managed at last to cross a border I immediately recognized to have existed only in my own mind. Now, at last, I could come out, which I did the following day, investing my solemn confessions with a hit of pride that mimicked the official tone of GLAD week. One after the other, over pious cups of tea, I exposed myself to Donald, to Jim Sterling, to Ash and Julia, none of whom seemed the least bit ruffled by my news, because in fact I was merely confirming a truth of which they themselves had been conscious for years.

  The next weekend Jim and I went into New York. As requested, a few days before our departure I called Anka, who invited me to dinner that Saturday at her apartment. It turned out that she lived not far from Jim’s parents, in a rambling old flat just off Columbus Avenue, a neighborhood that is now glamorous, but that was in those days in the throes of transformation: no longer the exclusive domain of poor yet industrious Jews, butcher shops with glatt kosher stickers in their windows, piano and violin teachers; no longer, even, the realm of immigrant squalor that had in the sixties begun to encroach upon all this middle-class Jewish orderliness, replete with smelly bodegas that sold sugarcane juice, tropical fruits over the hairy rinds of which flies crawled, questionable-looking meats; and yet not yet the crowded corridor of sushi bars and shoe stores it would become a decade later, Columbus Avenue in those years was simply a street trying to maintain a breakfront of brave resistance against incoming tides of change; and that breakfront, by 1982, was beginning to buckle.

  In a sense, as Anka told me later, it was all her fault—or rather, the fault of all those artistic young men and women who in the mid-seventies, wanting a lot of space but having little money, had begun quietly emigrating uptown, moving into huge, vacant apartments for which the rent was still astonishingly low. Soon the neighborhood had a reputation as cutting edge, which meant that with the economic boom of the Reagan years people with a lot of money, attracted by the heady smell of the creative, began to follow the pioneers across the park, upping the rents and effectively putting an end to the old orders, to the delis and butcher shops and bodegas. Buildings went co-op, and Anka, who had lived in her six-room apartment for nine years and paid a rent of three hundred and seventeen dollars a month, found herself sharing the morning elevator ride with investment bankers, Broadway directors, and rock stars, all of whom had purchased their apartments for prices in the six figures. Like many rent-controlled tenants, she was, not surprisingly, the bane of her landlord’s existence, especially since, in sharp contrast to those of her neighbors who were already in their eighties and nineties, she was neither likely to die nor move any time soon. And as a result, she said, the landlord was out to get her. “He wants to get rid of me because he knows that once I’m gone, the others will go,” she told me that evening as she led me through the big, drafty apartment, along hallways with creaking parquet floors, past bathrooms in which huge tubs with feet squatted next to cracked ceramic basins. Because the immense rooms had hardly any furniture in them (or perhaps because I was used to the highly specific room distinctions that characterized the middle-class milieu of my childhood), I found it hard to tell one from another; we ended up in what might have been the living room, but could also have been the study, or the dining room. Here what I would later learn to recognize as four original Arne Jacobsen kitchen chairs surrounded a Formica table with a typewriter on it. Against the wall was an old sofa over which Anka had thrown a beige sheet.

  She walked me to the window, the pane of which was broken, sealed with cardboard and tape. “See this?” she said. “My landlord did this. Or one of his goons. Threw a rock.”

  “Are you sure?”

  A cat came into the room, sinuous and fat, with an immense, raccoonish tail. “There’s no evidence,” Anka went on, picking up the cat and holding it protectively. “Still, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. I mean, think about it. I’m a complainer. I’ve taken him to court twice already. He knows he can’t throw me out, so he’s always looking for creative ways to get back at me. For instance, there’s been a leak in the bathroom ceiling for m
onths. I call and call, but he won’t have it fixed. Also, there’s a law that says he has to turn on the heat by November first. Well, remember how cold it got last October? He wouldn’t switch it on, at least not in my apartment. And now he’s trying to evict me over the cat. He says the cat attacked a neighbor, when the poor old thing can’t even use his claws anymore. Would you like anything to drink?”

  I asked for water. While Anka fetched it from the kitchen the cat, with a forthrightness I had never before witnessed in a feline, climbed onto my stomach, put his forepaws on my shoulders, and with a loud purr began rubbing his whiskered cheeks against my own.

  The doorbell rang. “I’ve invited some friends to join us,” Anka said, handing me my glass of water, then pushed the admission buzzer. Brushing off the cat (its claws pulled my sweater), I stood politely to greet the new arrivals, who turned out to be a pair of young women, one tall and slightly paunchy, with blond hair, the other dressed in jeans and an oversized lumberjack shirt. She had an oddly asymmetrical face that reminded me of Liza Perlman. In fact, she was Liza Perlman.

  “This is Janet Klass,” Anka said, and kissed the cheek of the blond girl. “Janet’s doing her dissertation in Cognitive Psychology at Columbia. It’s a statistical study of the work habits of writers, which means that every month those of us poor slobs who were dumb enough to agree to take part have to fill out these tedious questionnaires that delve into the most intimate aspects of our lives.”

  “Oh, please, Anka,” said Janet. “A pleasure to meet you, Martin.

  ” “And this is Liza Perlman. She’s in the study too.”

  “It’s a thrill to meet you,” Liza said, offering me her hand, which was both moist and limp. “Anka gave me a copy of your story—I hope you don’t mind. It’s really great.”

  “I loved it too,” Janet added.

  “She’s probably going to try to rope you into the study now,” said Liza.

  “Hey! Don’t spoil my game plan!”

  It took me mildly aback that Anka had been sharing my story with so many people; and yet, when I thought about it, I could see no reason to be offended, given that within a matter of months the story would be in print. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all,” I said to Janet. “Only I’m hardly a writer. I mean, I’ve only written a few stories—”

  “Oh, you’re a writer all right,” Anka said, patting me on the back.

  “You’re what I’d call a natural writer,” Liza concurred.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” asked Anka.

  “You know—someone to whom it just comes, like breathing.”

  We sat down at the table with the Arne Jacobsen chairs. A warm flush of satisfaction was running through me, its center point the spot on the small of my back where Anka had touched me.

  “Liza, I’d be disingenuous—” I said. “Or would I be ingenuous?”

  “Ingenuous,” Anka interrupted, “if you’re going to say what I think you’re going to say.”

  “Okay. I’d be ingenuous if I didn’t tell you that I read your novel last year. I really loved it.”

  “Sorry. In that case you’d be ¿¿ingenuous. I thought you were going to say something else.”

  Anka was right. I was disingenuous—and more than she realized, since in truth I’d read only the dust jacket of Liza’s novel, from which I’d learned that it concerned the relationship between a bulimic girl and her fat mother; even then I was becoming an adept at the New York art of flattery.

  Liza pulled at her earlobe—a tic to which, over the years, I would grow accustomed. Praise, as I soon learned, delighted her, yet she was never quite sure how to muster the blend of gratitude, pride, and humility that is the proper response to it. Instead her cheeks flushed when people said nice things to her. “Oh, thanks,” she said—a little pompously, I thought, as I gave her the once-over. In fact she was much prettier (and smaller) than her jacket picture would have led one to assume. Also, since the picture had been taken she’d cut her red hair short, which suited her. Even under her shapeless clothes, I could see that she had a slender, girlish, graceful body, one that seemed curiously disconnected from her freckled, oblong face with its frame of red hair (“Jewish red,” Eli later specified) as in a book I’d had as a child in which the heads, bodies, and nether regions of various animals could be combined in any number of hilarious ways.

  Anka removed her typewriter from the table and disappeared into the kitchen. “Even though we never met, we went to school together,” Janet was saying to me.

  “Really? When did you graduate?”

  “Last year. Do you know Gerald Wexler, by the way?”

  I said that I knew him vaguely.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” Liza asked. “I’ve met him a few times through my friend Eli. Eli used to go out with his twin brother. Do you like him? Is he smart?”

  “I don’t know him well enough to judge,” I admitted, then added boldly, “though I do have to confess, I find him kind of obnoxious.” “I’m so relieved to hear you say that! We do too!” Laughing, Liza clapped her hands together. And who were we? I wondered. Liza and Janet? Liza and Eli, who had gone out with Gerald’s twin brother—which meant, presumably, that Gerald’s twin brother was also gay? (Gay brothers was a possibility I had not previously contemplated.)

  Anka returned. In her arms she carried two large bottles, one containing Diet Coke and the other white wine, which she deposited onto the table. Then she spread out a fan of take-out menus: pizza, Chinese food, falafel, hamburgers. “I’m afraid I don’t cook,” she said, “so order what you want.”

  An uncertain smile claimed Janet’s lips. “Oh, what a cool idea,” Liza said. No doubt she found Anka’s rather novel way of throwing a dinner party, to say the least, amusing, the stuff of later tales to be shared over other dinners, more proper dinners, cooked by their hosts or by caterers. And yet to me the stack of take-out menus was pure delight; the only dilemma was what to choose amid such bounty.

  In the end I settled on Chinese food: cold sesame noodles and “pot sticker” dumplings. (How daring, I thought, to order only appetizers!) Anka and Janet elected to split a large mushroom pizza, while Liza, who suffered from various food allergies, said she would just have a Greek salad.

  Once Anka had phoned in our orders, she returned to join us at the table. Liza wanted to know what I thought of Edith. “I’ve heard she’s really lovely,” she said, pulling once again at her earlobe.

  “I’ve only met her twice. She’s been wonderfully encouraging.”

  “Edith is a saint,” Anka said. “She’s a substitute mother for me.”

  “You know, everyone’s saying yours is going to be the first gay story the magazine’s ever published,” Liza continued. “How do you feel about that?”

  I barely had time to register the implications of this question—not to mention of the phrase (which I would hear a thousand times in the coming years) “gay story”—when the doorbell rang. The first of several delivery boys, this one bearing Liza’s Greek salad, stood sheepishly on the threshold. Two others followed in close succession. By now, to my relief, the topic of conversation had shifted from Liza’s difficult question (attention spans are short in New York) to Janet’s study, the methodology of which Anka was playfully challenging. “I mean, how can statistics harness something so ineffable as the creative mind?” she asked, slicing up their pizza.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Liza interrupted, “but before I forget, I’ve just heard some amazing gossip!” Eager silence. “Yesterday my mother was having lunch with an editor at Holt, and he told her that-just bought Sam Stallings’s first novel for two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Two hundred thousand!”

  “She couldn’t believe it. We both hate his work!”

  “I must have rejected fifty of his stories at the magazine,” Anka said. “The worst sort of I’m-a-macho-guy-and-I’m-gonna-prove-it-by-going-out-to-shoot-rabbits crap.”

  “Do you think he might want to take part
in my study?” Janet asked.

  Both of them stared at her. She blushed.

  “Did I tell you I met him last year at Club Bread?” Liza resumed. “At first I tried to be friendly, but he came off as such a phony! For instance, he does this whole ‘I’m just a regular, working-class guy’ shtick—you know, acting as if he finds literary life disgusting and snobbish and all that—and yet at the same time he’s the ultimate operator! I mean, he was always repairing his truck. Every time you saw him his legs were sticking out from under his truck. He never came to any of our readings, but then when Galway Kinnell visited, he showed up in a tie and blazer.”

  “How pompous.”

  “And that’s not all! I’ve got a friend, Ellen Garber—have you read her novel, Anka? You should, it’s really wonderful—anyway, she was at school with him. One day they had a lunch date. Well, as it happened, that same week Stanley Flint was visiting. Flint was sitting alone, eating a sandwich, at the table behind Ellen’s. So up walks Sam with his lunch tray, smiling at Ellen, who stands up to greet him, when suddenly he notices Flint, by himself. And you know what he does? He pretends not to even know her. He walks right past her, straight up to Flint, and says, ‘Excuse me, sir, mind if I join you?”’