Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  It was through Sara that I was introduced into a substratum of Manhattan society of which I might otherwise never have learned anything. This was the culture of middle-class Orthodox Jews, the tendrils of which, though firmly rooted in the Lower East Side, also reached into the most remote neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan. These Jews had their own restaurants, at which Sara and I often ate: in addition to the French-kosher La Difference, there was the Chinesekosher Moishe Peking, and the Japanesekosher Shalom Japan, the owner of which sang karaoke on Thursday nights.

  It was here that I told her, one Thursday night, that I was gay. She remained nonplused.

  “And yet I’ll bet there aren’t any gay Orthodox Jews, are there?” I challenged.

  “Sure there are.”

  “So how do they reconcile their sex lives with their religion?”

  “Well,” Sara said, “the ones I know—because biblical law says you can’t lie with another man, they do it standing up.”

  The ingenuity she described—an ingenuity that was at once Jewish and gay—made me laugh. In this way our friendship was secured.

  After that we had lunch together most days, either at the office, or at one of the kosher restaurants, or on Tuesdays at a cheap Chinese place nearby, with all the other editorial assistants. Because Sara could not eat the food served here, she always brought along a bottle of fruit juice and an apple that she would peel primly, while the rest of us spun the lazy Susan in the center of the table, piled our bowls with greasy noodles and kung pao chicken, guzzled Tsingtao beers. Conversation at these lunches tended to devolve quickly into complaint: the dissipation of literary values was lamented, as were our pitiful incomes. (Average starting pay in those days was just under twelve thousand dollars a year.) Or we would tell rude stories about our bosses, one of whom—a new recruit from Random House—did not know the difference between Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe. This horrified his assistant, Jane, an earnest Vassar graduate of twenty-two. “I mean, can you imagine?” she’d say. “An editor at one of the most illustrious publishing houses in New York, and he doesn’t know who Thomas Wolfe is.”

  “My boss can’t spell ‘separate,’” a colleague chimed in.

  It is worth pointing out here that like the new arrival from Random House, the editor who couldn’t spell “separate” was one of the ones Marge had hired upon her arrival, and as such to be distinguished from the few remaining old editors, the ones who had been with Hudson twenty years or more, and not only knew the difference between Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe, but had edited both of them. These editors had lunch at their desks, in contrast to the new kids, who ate out every day with agents at fancy restaurants—meals from which they returned moaning that the food had been too rich. “These days when I go to the Four Seasons I just order a green salad with lemon juice,” Marge herself was wont to say, to the horror of Sara, whom she had never once invited out for a meal, kosher or otherwise.

  All struggles, I’m convinced, come down in the end to food. My colleagues, I saw, were in the process of becoming Marxists; they were experiencing alienated labor; they were smarting at the unequal distribution of wealth. And yet a vestige of their old literary idealism must still have survived in them, for toward the ends of our Thursday lunches, a little drunk from too much Tsingtao beer, we would always end up vowing that someday, together, we would quit Hudson and form a new publishing company, one that cared about literature, and that would be called (after the Chinese restaurant) Round Table Books. And at this new company the old values would be resurrected. Young authors would be taken on with an eye toward the future—tiny Hemingways, miniature Whartons, junior Faulkners! A backlist would be built to rival that of Scribner’s or Knopf—exactly the sort of backlist that these days Hudson seemed to care less and less about replenishing; yes, for a moment, hope would brighten our young faces, until it was time to pay the bill (so poor were we that we divvied it up to the penny), after which, slightly urpy, we would return to our cubicles and wait for the editors, who had big offices with windows, to come back from their equally big lunches.

  As for Marge Preston, her insistence that she ordered only a green salad when she went to the Four Seasons must have been spurious. Either that, or she simply did not possess the aristocratic genes of lamb-chop-loving Edith Atkinson, in comparison to whom she appeared bookish, lumbering, and coarse, all at once: a peculiar mélange of Marianne Moore and Estée Lauder. Though she was not yet forty, it was to her that the powers that be not only at Terrier, but at the conglomerate that owned Terrier (of whom the most daunting was no doubt her own immediate superior, the elegant Mrs. Fairfax, whose soft-spoken manner and impeccably tailored suits belied a certain professional implacability) had entrusted the perilous job of dragging fuddy-duddy old Hudson House into the twentieth century; nor, I think, could they have found a better person to take on this onerous task, for though Marge was an instinctive and somewhat ruthless businesswoman, she was also the author of a biography of I. Compton-Burnett, which meant that the more literary members of the Hudson staff could not help but respect her erudition. I remember her as a mass of flying yellow hair, cigarette smoke, and L’Air du Temps, always in a rush, always late for something, yet never too busy, even in the midst of giving orders to two or three people at once, to offer some nugget of witty and allusive commentary. “This manuscript,” she might say, “makes me remember what Dr. Johnson said about the dancing dog: the thing is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.”

  The same might have been said of Marge herself. Though a shrewd editor, capable of inspiring awe in Nobel laureates, several of whom had dedicated books to her, she was also hopelessly disorganized, forever losing crucial documents and missing deadlines and failing to return phone calls. In this regard she posed a startling contrast to the sleek and efficient Mrs. Fairfax, whose presence of mind always seemed to put Marge to shame. Worst of all, she often broke down at critical moments, at which point the responsibility for running the editorial department would fall—unbeknownst to anyone—onto Sara’s capable shoulders. Without Sara, Marge might have been fired by Mrs. Fairfax months earlier. Yet rather than acknowledge this debt to her assistant, or express to her any form of gratitude, time and again she passed Sara over for promotions. Her excuse was that Sara did not possess the “intellectual qualifications” necessary to become an editor, which meant in essence that she had graduated not from Radcliffe or Smith, but from the City University of New York. Instead, she disparaged and abused her assistant, much as in old novels the “distressed gentlewoman” will often heap opprobrium upon the paid companion without whose assistance she cannot so much as get out of bed in the morning.

  As I mentioned earlier, Marge’s mandate from Terrier had been to transform Hudson from a sleepy and genteel backwater into a “major player,” and toward this end she had not only gotten rid of all the “dead wood” (people like Mrs. Brillo), but made it clear to her underlings that their future at the company depended on their capacity to generate profit. It was a decree at the very mention of which the oldtimers cringed, for by and large they were mild, unambitious men and women who lived in rent-controlled apartments, and were content to publish every year a familiar assortment of first novels, French cookbooks, and detailed guides to birdwatching. None of these books sold very well (or cost very much), yet in the old days this hadn’t mattered much, since as everyone knew Harry Hudson III had such deep pockets that he never looked at the balance sheets; the whole company was for him merely a tax write-off; in short, he preferred that Hudson lose money. To the old-timers, the bestseller was a distasteful, even lurid animal, one to which, when on rare occasions they did produce a specimen (always by accident) they referred with wistful regret, as if success were an unfortunate and rare mutation in the literary gene.

  Of course they were wrong—and not merely in their estimation of Harry Hudson El’s attitude. For as it turned out his pockets weren’t nearly so deep as everyone had thought, which was why he’d had to sell t
he company. And now the powers that be had given Marge deadlines and numbers to match. Rumor even had it (though this Sara refused to corroborate) that at the end of the coming year she was supposed to fire all the editors whose books had failed to make a profit—in which case, as Carey Finch noted ruefully, she’d have to fire every editor in the house. This she didn’t do. And yet it was true that recently a few editors—including Carey’s boss—had rather abruptly decided to take early retirement. In their place terrifying “hot shots,” such as Jane’s recruit from Random House, were hired. This was particularly troublesome to Carey, who had liked his boss, a fiery leftist whose list consisted mostly of statistic-driven studies by political scientists who wrote earnest analyses of urban decline, environmental decline, social decline—in short, books that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our culture was in decline. But now this affable and somewhat tipsy gentleman had suddenly (and under duress) “left,” and though Marge assured Carey that he himself would be kept on, she gave no indication as to who it was he would be working for: someone flashy and vulgar, no doubt, who would laugh at his idealistic advocacy of the timeless.

  Carey was an angular young man of twenty-one, graceful less in the manner of a bird than of a squirrel; and indeed, it was of a squirrel that I usually thought when I ran into him in the corridor where he went to smoke, lifting the cigarette to his lips with that same blend of appetite and precision that marks the aforementioned rodent’s demeanor when eating acorns. Everything about him, now that I think of it, was squirrely: his fine-boned hands, his silky fawn hair, even his eyes, which were the size and color of hazelnuts. I thought him very handsome. Whenever he strode down the hall past my desk, his gaze intently focused, his body spry in its never-changing uniform of jeans, tweed jacket, and Oxford shirt, my response was invariably one of attraction mixed with envy. For I recognized that despite whatever comparisons one might draw between him and backyard animals, Carey possessed, and would always possess, the very thing I lacked: namely, that cohesive admixture of self-knowledge and taste to which we refer when we say that someone has a “look.” I knew. I didn’t have a look. Instead, with my wrinkled shirts, ill-fitting glasses, and shaggy hair that when uncut (which was most of the time) lifted off my head in rolling waves, I must have given an impression as ill-defined as that of Marge Preston, when she hurtled by in one of her weirdly conceived and oddly touching outfits: a pink Chanel suit, say, with Birkenstock sandals.

  What made Carey’s look work, on the other hand—what made his perfect manners and faultless fingernails signify so much more than merely a dull adherence to convention—was the current of short-temperedness, even violence, that underscored his idealism, and that revealed itself whenever, at Round Table lunches, the topic of literature came up. Then he would become both testy and argumentative, especially if a writer he considered to be overrated (for example, Forster, my own favorite, whom he thought a sentimentalist) received what was, in his opinion, undue praise. For unlike the terrible Terriers, he really loved literature, and not as a writer manque, but as a reader. He read with epicurean gusto. He read the way a gastronome eats.

  Carey lived not far from me, in a studio apartment on West 110th Street, which meant that sometimes we rode the subway home together after work. Because we never talked about anything except books, I had no idea that he was gay until one Saturday evening when, quite by accident, I ran into him with some of his friends at the monthly Columbia gay dance. The occasion, which might have been awkward, turned out to be utterly cordial; indeed, not only was Carey not flummoxed by my presence, he appeared genuinely pleased to see me, and immediately invited me to join the little group of boys with whom he was sitting at one of the tables on the periphery of the dance floor. These turned out to be mostly old pals from college: one was a graduate student in Biology, another worked as a legal clerk, a third managed a gourmet food shop. None of them seemed to be remotely on the make, which rather surprised me. Instead they spent the duration of the festivity happily planted at their little table, never dancing (it was hard to imagine Carey dancing), just chatting, mostly about some mutual friends, a couple named Richard and Susan, whose doings they seemed to find endlessly fascinating. And how safe, even cozy, I felt in the little nest that Carey’s friends formed, especially when, from a distance, a man I had noticed at another Columbia dance started staring at me. The trouble was, there was something slightly mad about the way this man stared; it gave me an instant erection. He was probably thirty—years younger than I am now. He had thick hair, broad shoulders, just the tiniest bit of a beer belly. From where he stood leaning against the wall, his hips slightly bucked, drinking a Corona into the neck of which a lemon wedge had been shoved, he cast me a look so frankly lewd and assessing I almost giggled. No one had ever looked at me that way before. And yet such brazenness only left me shy and at a loss for words. So I stayed where I was, safe behind that social border across which, I knew, decorum would forbid this man from dragging me by the hair, no matter how much I might want him to. Even when he went to the toilet, casting a glance over his shoulder as he walked, I didn’t follow.

  When the dance ended, we all went out for hamburgers at Tom’s Diner (later to be made famous by Suzanne Vega), where I saw a lot of people I knew: Philip Crenshaw, as gaunt as ever with his kohl-ringed eyes, and Lars with Eve Schlossberg, who was studying photography at the New School, and my roommate Will with one of his boyish amours. The man who had been staring at me I did not see: he had gone home, apparently, or moved on to some other venue. I remember feeling relieved, and at the same time disappointed. Secretly I hoped that when I left the diner to go back to my apartment, I’d find him waiting around the comer, at which point I would have no choice but to submit to his bold gaze. But I didn’t. Instead I walked home alone, looking back now and then to see if by any chance he might be lingering on a stoop.

  That night it was too hot to sleep. Naked and unsheeted in my bed, I tried to imagine what the stranger with the questioning eyes might have done with me, or to me, had I gone with him. Part of me lamented not having approached him—the part of me that was tired of crossing only when the crossing guard told him to. And yet that spare, brutal room to which, in my imagination, the stranger led me was a place I feared as much as I desired. There, I knew, I would be stripped not only of my clothes, but of my very self; the crossing guard would fall to the pavement, and in his place would rise up a creature of pure, pleading appetite.

  We were having a terrible heat wave in New York. Though the sky was always gray and heavy, no rain fell on the dirty sidewalks for weeks at a time. Each workday, on my way to and from the subway, I’d find myself pushing through an end-of-the-world heat, a death-of-the-rain-forests heat that might have been a rain forest. And yet even on Sundays, when the streets were empty, and everyone sensible had gone to the beach, I stayed behind, too grateful at last to be a leaseholding resident of Manhattan even to want to contemplate stepping off the island of my dreams. Anyway, I reasoned, why fight the crowds at the beach, why endure sunburn and sand flies and pebbles in my shoes, when I could just as easily spend the day at Jim Sterling’s parents’ cool apartment, reading, or watching television, or playing Monopoly? This was my preferred method of repose. Quintessential city people, the Sterlings owned no “little place on the shore,” no country house. Instead Mrs. Sterling joked that they had invested their money in first-class air-conditioning. “Our unit’s a Cadillac,” she told me. Nor had she any truck with the claim that too much conditioned air was bad for the lungs. On the contrary! She kept their apartment so cold we had to wear sweaters.

  Hot Sunday mornings, then, while all our friends were lugging beach umbrellas, ice chests, and suntan lotion to Penn Station, Jim and I would meet at the comer of 86th and Broadway (he too was renting a cramped apartment), then walk together to his parents’ building on Central Park West. Up we’d ride in the elevator, noting carefully, whenever it made stops to pick other people up or let them off, the styles in w
hich the various foyers were decorated. One, I remember, brought to mind old ocean liners; another, all chintz and bullion fringe, resembled a Victorian powder room; a third had gleaming white walls and a chrome-edged table I recognized from the Museum of Modern Art’s furniture collection.

  Soon we’d arrive at the twentieth floor, which belonged in its entirety to the Sterlings, and where the walls of the foyer were painted a crisp butterscotch yellow. The floor was marble, as was that of the dining room, which was unquestionably the most impressive room in the apartment, with walls covered in Zuber paper, hand-blocked and painted, and in this case depicting a vaguely Eastern river landscape, replete with rose-colored peacocks and ginkgo trees. At the mahogany table an individual saltcellar with its own tiny spoon sat behind each place setting. Until I’d met the Sterlings I hadn’t known what a saltcellar was. Now I dismissed the salt-and-pepper sets of my childhood as yet further evidence of its cultural poverty, and vowed never to “shake” salt again so long as I lived.