Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Of course, if the Sterlings themselves had been as stuffily formal as their dining room—if, for instance, Mrs. Sterling had set her table with four forks and three spoons, or kept a little bell by her plate to ring for the maid (indeed, if she’d had a maid, as opposed to Gussie, who came in three times a week to fry chicken and wore an old pair of Jim’s underpants on her head)—then probably I wouldn’t have liked them nearly as much as I did. And yet this Jewish couple who had grown up in Yonkers were amazingly (considering the elegance of their apartment) blasé. Except on those nights when Gussie fried them chickens, they ate only take-out, most of it from Zabar’s, that West Side emporium to which, in the spring and fall, Mrs. Sterling liked to go herself to do the shopping. (In summer and winter she had everything delivered.) Sundays in particular were days of ritualistic excess, the table littered with little plastic Zabar’s tubs containing lox and flavored cream cheeses, platters of rye bread, bagels, and bialys, sheets of wax paper layered with lacy slivers of pastrami, half cakes in half-cake-shaped plastic receptacles. Jim and I would eat—brunch, not lunch—then afterward retreat to his room, where we might amuse ourselves by playing old board games, or watching reruns of 1950s science fiction movies. When you are twenty, childhood has yet to season into memory; beneath the bark the wood is still green. Hence we could happily waste the whole day in an inertia of television. Or he might read, while I reverted to my adolescent habit of drawing maps for nonexistent subway systems. Or we’d take on projects in Mrs. Sterling’s kitchen, preparing from a cookbook called Cocktail Food (it was the only one she owned) such dainties as “cucumber flowers filled with caviar,” “lemon swans,” “pink-salmon-souffle-stuffed zucchini boats.” Now I see that if we threw ourselves into these activities with such fervor, it was only because we knew they were the last little gasps of a dying thing, as in the final weeks of August children will often seem to play with greater intensity, as if to protest the leaves that are already starting to change, the “Back to School” ads in the newspapers. For soon we would reach a point where we could no longer muster the enthusiasm needed for such play; we would jump full-force into adult habits and tastes: strip poker instead of Monopoly, coffee instead of Diet Coke. Ours was the zeal that precedes nostalgia, which was why, when we shook hands at the comer of Broadway and 86th Street at day’s end, a blush of shame would sometimes creep over our faces—evidence that the pleasures in which we had been indulging were at once too ludicrous and too intimate to bear articulation.

  Probably the sense that has eroded most steadily in me, as I’ve grown older, is that of certainty. When I was young, I felt certain that I would live the entirety of my life in New York City; I felt certain that I would never own a house, only an apartment; I felt certain that the city was—no, not my choice—my fate. Instead of which, almost two decades later, I live as far from New York as you can get, amid patient cultivations, on an unpaved road where the only traffic is caused by passing flocks of sheep. These days it’s hard for me to believe that I could have endured summers in New York—yet I not only endured them, I thrived on them. After all, there was so much to do! Shakespeare in the park (hours waiting in line), Ethiopian restaurants where one ate mysterious pulses with one’s fingers (risk of salmonella). Everything was always open. You could get cold sesame noodles at two in the morning if you wanted to. (Cold sesame noodles—a dish I had never tasted outside Manhattan—were my chief gastronomic passion; for two weeks straight that summer I ate nothing else, only slurped, every night, those delicious chilly threads and their peanut butter dressing from the aluminum tins in which the local Chinese restaurant packed them.) Or you could go to any number of clubs, or travel from party to party, or stay home and watch reruns of I Love Lucy until dawn.

  City life became, for me, the source of mad daydreams. For example, it thrilled me to contemplate the fact that just a few inches away from where I sat, say, reading in the Sterlings’ living room, someone else, a stranger, was very likely also sitting. And who might this stranger be? A movie star? A man who forced his wife to dress in a rabbit suit? A girl who drew pentangles on her bedroom floor? That I didn’t know enraptured me, and made me regret those expanses of lawn and tree that in my parents’ neighborhood separated one family from the next. Here, on the other hand, variety was layered, as in a club sandwich. People lived atop one another, and beside one another, and all around one another, in a series of boxes inside other boxes. It made me feel ensconced, protected, saved.

  That summer, with the exception of Jim, I was spending less and less time with my old friends and more with Carey’s—a coterie of intelligent, well-educated young men who wore tweed jackets, had their hair cut at old-fashioned barbershops, and spoke incessantly, whenever they were together, of this couple, this Richard and Susan, with whom they were collectively obsessed, and about whom they were always saying vague and tantalizing things along the lines of: “The thing about Susan is that she’s just so ... but what can you say about Susan?”

  Apparently you could say that she loved sex; that once she had told Carey she pitied men, because they could never experience the bliss of being fucked simultaneously from front and back; that a parfumeur in Paris had been so taken with her, he had mixed a special perfume in her honor.

  As for Richard, he was a great fellow. Everyone loved Richard. At NYU Law School normal straight guys scrambled to be his friend. (Later I asked my roommate Will if he knew Richard. “That guy?” Will said. “He never talks. I hardly notice him.”) Richard was sometimes the subject of salacious speculation among the group, chiefly regarding the size of his penis. (Whenever this matter came up, I noticed, Carey would grow gloomy, silent, and the subject would change.)

  He had other reasons to be gloomy. At Hudson, Marge was taking her time replacing the editor he had worked for, which meant that he found himself in what was for him the unenviable position of not having enough to do. Carey was one of those people who is only happy when he has tasks to which he must attend (a convenient excuse, I have found, for the avoidance of self-examination). Accordingly, in the days following his editor’s “retirement,” he would often wander over to my desk and linger there idly, in much the same way that I had often lingered at Mrs. Brillo’s desk, hoping she might offer me a second doughnut. One day he even asked if he could help out with the slush pile. Sara was so shocked that Carey would actually volunteer to take on this onerous task that she asked Marge to give him a project to keep him busy until she hired the new editor, at which point Marge saddled him with a 750-page fishing encyclopedia to edit.

  Secretly I was disappointed. While they’d lasted, I’d enjoyed Carey’s visits, the frustrated energy he radiated when idle. The truth was, I had become a bit smitten with him—or to put it more accurately, I had decided to become a bit smitten with him, not because he attracted me physically (in his agile wiriness, he could not have differed more from the dark stranger at the dance), but because he seemed to me the sort of person with whom I ought to fall in love: one whose evident respectability, when the time came to enact that visit home with a boyfriend that was my story in the magazine, would distract my mother’s attention from the fact that he was male. Obviously this was neither the first nor the last time I would fall in love in such a calculated way, for in those days, as I have said, I could divorce the erotic from the romantic as neatly as my sister separated the yolk from the white of an egg. Lust, I believed, could also be an offshoot of love, one that evolved slowly, over years. It was the same trick I’d played in high school, when I’d convinced myself that I had “crushes” on certain girls, only this time the object of my artificial affection was not a girl, but a boy whose very decorousness obviated the necessity of thinking about desire.

  On the subway, meanwhile, brutish men, versions of that leering beau ideal at the dance, would sometimes look my way. Because they recalled the stare of the stranger at the dance, their glances, even when casual, excited me. Around them I built erotic scenarios as elaborate as the imaginary
subway systems I still invented at Jim Sterling’s on Sunday afternoons. In the fantasies I spun around Carey, on the other hand, the two of us never took off our clothes. Instead, wearing cashmere sweaters and ascots, we would sit side by side in leather armchairs, in the living room of the village brownstone we owned together. A fox terrier (homage to Terrier Books, of which Carey was now editor in chief) lounged between our feet. What I was enjoying, in these fantasies, was what Mrs. Patrick Campbell called “the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue”—yet I had never known the hurly-burly of the chaise longue. I had skipped a crucial step. And meanwhile Carey and I remained only friends. I was far too timid to make advances. Also, we were never alone together. Instead, whenever we went out it was in the company of other people—Carey’s college buddies, or the Round Table crew, or Eve Schlossberg, with whom he’d turned out to have gone to high school.

  Was it because of shyness that he was trying to avoid being alone with me? I wondered sometimes, but could not say for sure. The nervousness he radiated blocked out all signals, collected around him like a woolly darkness. In his company motives were obscure, distances distorted, perspectives blurred.

  At work, meanwhile, the period of limbo continued. Candidate after candidate for the open slot Marge interviewed and rejected. Nor was she quick in the process. Lackadaisical in the least pressured of situations, she grew panicked under the gun, and ground to a halt. Without Sara’s aid I don’t know what she (or Carey) would have done; she simply could not make up her mind. And then one Friday, in response, perhaps, to some unspoken signal of helplessness, Sara stepped in and took over. She was really extraordinarily efficient. By the end of the morning she had every one of Marge’s meals booked for the following week: breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with prospective editors, some of whom Marge herself had approached, some of whom Sara had chased down on her own.

  Monday the rush began. Not that we had any idea who the candidates in question were. Sara was nothing if not discreet. Only she knew to what restaurant Marge went hurrying off at the end of every morning, invariably twenty minutes late, and invariably not in possession of some crucial item or document: her wallet, or a catalogue, or an umbrella, with which Sara would have to run after her, calling “Wait!” as the elevator doors shut on Marge’s face.

  The strategy worked, however. By the end of the week Marge had gained five pounds from all the meals, but was also down to three finalists. Or so Sara confided in us without divulging a single name. After all, it is by only sharing just enough information to keep others hungry that you can secure for yourself a small power base.

  That Friday, meetings were scheduled with all three candidates. Because at least two of them already had other jobs, these meetings had to be conducted in secret, not at the office, but in Marge’s living room. Even though Friday was usually one of my days off, I came in after lunch, if for no other reason than to give Carey moral support. Especially for him, a palpable halo of worry surrounded Marge’s empty office as the afternoon waned, and no call came. By the end of the day, we realized, a decision would most likely have been made. But what decision? Who? Only Sara might know, and Sara wasn’t talking.

  Dusk fell. “Has she called?” we asked Sara, who was putting on her raincoat, readying herself for the hurried trip home before the sun set. But she only shook her head. “Sorry, lads,” she said, and went. Carey packed up his fishing encyclopedia. I asked if he wanted to have dinner with me, and though the invitation seemed genuinely to please him, nonetheless he asked if he could take a rain check: his mother was in town, and he was going with her to her favorite sushi bar.

  Monday I arrived at the office before nine. Sara and Carey were already there, which didn’t surprise me. What did was that Marge was in her office with the door closed.

  “According to the janitor they’ve been locked up together since six-thirty,” Carey said.

  “Who are they?”

  “Marge, Mrs. Fairfax, and Mr. X,” said Sara.

  “Or Ms. X,” Carey added. “We won’t know until they come out whether it’s Mr. or Ms.”

  For a moment the three of us simply stared at the closed door. Then Sara said, “Well, no point in standing around, let’s get to work.” And she sat down at her desk. Reluctantly, Carey slunk off to his fishing encyclopedia. Getting ice for my Diet Coke, I passed Marge’s office a second time. The door was still shut.

  Eventually I too sat down, and was just reading the first page of a “young adult” novel called Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Retarded when a spasm of adolescent hunger seized me, and I decided to go and get something from the candy machine—checking on the way, of course, to see if Marge’s door was open; it wasn’t. I ate the Hershey’s bar I’d bought, then retraced the path to my cubicle, which took me yet again past Marge’s door, still closed. Then I went to the men’s room, where I was just unzipping my fly when someone walked in and stood at the urinal next to mine. I turned to see who it was, and found myself eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Flint.

  “Bauman,” he said casually. “What are you doing here? They’re not publishing you, are they?”

  “No, I work here,” I answered.

  “Really? What a coincidence,” Flint said. “Because as of today, so do I.”

  6. LAW OF THE JUNGLE

  ALTHOUGH I SAW very little of Liza Perlman that fall—for the duration of her stint at Babcock College in Minnesota she had sublet her New York apartment, and flew back only on holidays—nonetheless we talked all the time by phone. This was not merely due to distance; as I quickly discovered, Liza’s preferred mode of communication was the telephone. When she woke up in the mornings, even before she got out of bed, she always called one of her friends—usually the famous Eli, or else a boy called Ethan with whom (strange as it may sound) she watched Jeopardy! over the phone. Sometimes she even slept with the phone cradled in her arms, the way that a puppy will sleep nestled against an alarm clock wrapped in a blanket.

  Our conversations were usually about books. “Any news?” Liza would ask me, meaning news about publishing. (She took it for granted that my job at Hudson gave me access to all manner of inside information.) Yet usually in Babcock, Minnesota, she knew more than I did in New York She knew, for instance, at what salary Stanley Flint had been hired, having learned this “extraordinary” scoop from her mother: eighty thousand a year “plus stock options,” which seemed a staggering figure. For Flint, as it turned out, was one of Sada Perlman’s clients, as were Leonard Trask, Nancy Coleridge, and most of the other writers he admired. “You could say he made my mother’s career,” Liza explained. “I mean, before that she was just a housewife in New Jersey. Then she left my father, and with one client—this black woman from Cincinnati no one had ever heard of, but whom Stanley admired—she decided to become an agent. One client! If nothing else, you can say this about my mother: she has a good nose.”

  If there was no news, we talked about Liza’s teaching. She was miserable in Babcock, she said, where no one had ever heard of a bagel. To a one, her students were “imbeciles.” She longed for home—for Chinese food, and movies, and all-night grocery stores. In Babcock, everything closed at five. People actually went to church on Sundays; even her colleagues in the English department went to church. To make matters worse, because she did not drive, she had to depend on her few on-campus friends to get anywhere—chiefly Lucy Ellington, a poet, and head of the Babcock Creative Writing department. “Do you know her work?” Liza asked, and sighed before I could answer. “It’s wonderful. I don’t know what I’d do without Lucy. We play Scrabble together every weeknight.”

  Toward the end of our conversations Liza sometimes made a perfunctory inquiry as to how my “personal” life was going. Was I finding my way? Had I “met” anyone?

  Reluctantly I told her about Carey, with whom I seemed incapable of getting anywhere beyond infatuation. “I really ought to introduce you to my friend Eli,” she responded absently. “I’ve t
old you about him, haven’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Next time I’m in New York...” But not surprisingly, the next time she was in New York, she was so busy we had time only for coffee, and the promised meeting with Eli never materialized. In truth, I hardly noticed. A few days earlier, a huge distraction had walked into my life: my roommate Dennis’s mother, Faye, had showed up at the end of August for a two-week visit and never left. A tiny woman—shorter even than Will—she dressed in espadrilles and washed-out sundresses that gave her a curiously tragic aspect, as if she were the doomed heroine of a Tennessee Williams play. She had shoulder-length streaked hair, gravel-colored eyes that seemed always to be on the verge of filling with tears, a weak chin that quavered when she laughed.

  From the evening of her arrival she insisted that we call her Faye and not Mrs. Latham. “I can’t stand Mrs. Latham,” she said. “It makes me feel so old.” She also insisted that we “pretend she wasn’t even there,” a rather disingenuous command, it seemed to me, since despite her diminutiveness she took up enormous amounts of space: both in the cramped bathroom, every surface of which she had soon covered with her eye creams, face creams, leg creams, lipsticks, pills, soaps, and scrubs, and in the living room, where she slept on the foldout sofa and hung her dresses from a piece of tricolor laundry cord purchased at Duane Reade. Also, she smoked, which none of us did, leaning her head out the window into the vestibule, from the depths of which the super’s pit bulls growled up at her.