Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  “What they have in common,” Susan repeated. And paused. “Richard, darling,” she said after a moment, “I find every one of them enchanting, but I can’t for the life of me guess what they have in common.”

  “Here’s a clue,” Carey said. “It’s today.”

  “Today—but what is today?”

  We all laughed. Finally Richard gave in and told her. Bursting into a smile, she kissed him, kissed all of us. For such attentions as these—perhaps even more luxurious than the gifts—Susan, I saw, could afford to take for granted. I wondered what it would feel like to be so affluent—and not merely in terms of money, but of love.

  When dinner ended, having bid farewell to Ingo and Amos, the four of us climbed into an old-fashioned Checker Cab and headed to the West Side. This yellow behemoth, the manatee of the automotive world, was one of the last of its breed, with jump seats, on which Carey and I sat. First we stopped on 87th Street, where Richard and Susan got out. “No, no, you two ride on,” Susan scolded, when Carey tried to get out too.

  “But I thought you might want to play a game of Risk,” he pleaded.

  “Not tonight. I have to give Richard a thank-you blowjob.” Again, she winked. “Now, you two behave yourselves. Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do.”

  “Good night, Susan,” Carey said, and withdrew into the taxi. “103rd Street,” he told the driver as Richard slammed the door.

  “Let’s get off at 110th, and I’ll walk back,” I suggested.

  “No, I’ll walk up. No need for you to walk.”

  “Okay, if you want.”

  I got up from the jump seat. The slapping noise it made as it hit the partition startled me, bringing to mind as it did a trip I’d taken to London with my parents when I was a boy, when I had loved sitting on the jump seats of black cabs. Now, however, it made no sense to remain on that childish little platform and, taking Susan’s place on the more comfortable bench, I looked at Carey expectantly. He stayed where he was.

  I opened the window a crack. It was one of the only times I could remember that the two of us had actually been alone together. Yet we did not talk. Back rigid, Carey stared at the Broadway traffic, the slurred reflection of car lights and streetlamps sweeping across the plane of his glasses.

  “The dinner was fun, wasn’t it?” I said.

  He nodded, mumbled words I didn’t catch. Recalling Susan’s wink, I asked myself whether his silence might not be a sign that he was hoping I might make some first move that he himself was too timid to attempt ... and yet, if this was the case, he gave no clue as to his wishes. Indeed, he gave no clue as to anything. So I stayed where I was, my face palsied in a clown smile, breathing in the cigarette and cinnamon smell of his jacket, until the taxi arrived at 103rd Street. He paid and got out. On the street we stood together, hands in our pockets, like duelists waiting for a signal.

  Then I was brave. “Listen,” I said, “if you’re not—”

  “I suppose Susan’s been bugging you about it too,” Carey interrupted.

  “About what?”

  “This crazy idea she has, that you and I...”

  I was silent.

  “Fixing us up,” he went on. “And it’s so ridiculous! Not that she doesn’t mean well—it’s just that, have you noticed the way straight people will sometimes assume that just because two people are gay, automatically they’re meant to be a couple?”

  “Oh, I have,” I lied.

  “And then this making sure we sat together, and leaving us alone in the taxi. She can really be so coarse.”

  “Coarse, yes,” I repeated. Yet my voice, despite the immense effort I was making to be jaunty, remained hollow, and my eyes were as wet as Faye’s. I could not hide the disappointment I was suffering, not even from Carey, who stepped a little closer.

  “There’s something I need to show you,” he said.

  Taking off his jacket, he rolled up the cuff of his shirt, held out his forearm. “Look.” From where his fingers spread out, each with a dusting of hair above the knuckle, veins fanned the length of the hand up to the narrow wrist, around which rope bums coiled like ribbons. I blinked.

  “This is what I like,” Carey said, flexing the muscles of his arm. “Do you understand?”

  “I think so. I think.”

  He unrolled his cuff and covered up, once again, his wrists; once again he put on his jacket. “There’s only one thing I need to ask you,” he said, “and that’s not to say anything to Susan and Richard.”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “It’s not that I make a secret of what I do. It’s just—with some people it’s easier not to talk about it. You know what I mean?”

  “Of course I know what you mean.”

  “Good. I’m glad. Well, good night, Martin.” He held out his hand. “See you at the office tomorrow. I hope you—understand.”

  “Good night. I do,” I said. And shaking hands, we parted. Oblivious to traffic, I lunged out onto Broadway, not noticing that the light was red; a car swerved to avoid hitting me; from the screeching of horns, the ranting of the driver who had stepped out of the car and was shaking his fist, I fled into an all-night grocery store, where a Korean girl stood moistening lettuce heads with a spray bottle. In the cool silence, waxy red and yellow peppers glistened amid coriander beds. There were packages of Chinese noodles of the sort my mother had made me for lunch when I was a child, stirring a raw egg into the soup; bars of the expensive Swiss chocolate that Will and Vincent liked to share; boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies, before a display of which I now paused, caught my breath, waited for my heartbeat to steady. Well, I thought, at least it’s not that he doesn’t like me, and picking up a box of cookies, went to pay. Wraithlike, the girl with the spray bottle floated across the store, took her place behind the cash register, studied, as if they were some sort of riddle, the cookies I had selected.

  By now someone else had come in—a stocky man dressed in loose jeans and an open shirt. His hair was cut short, as short as his day’s growth of beard. When I looked at him, he looked back. It took me a moment to recognize him; after all, at the Columbia dances, the light had never been this bright, nor his hair this closely cropped.

  I gave the girl money. From where he stood by the beer cooler, the stranger stroked his chin, grabbed, as if unconsciously, the crotch of his jeans, smiled at me. His smile burned. Astonished, aroused almost to the point of hurt, I took my change and hurried out of the store. Yet I did not go home. Instead I loitered on the comer, pretending to examine my receipt. Inside my head a voice of prudence—that crossing guard whose commands I had always heeded—was urging me to hurry back to my apartment, to flee this temptation as fast as possible. Resistant, I stalled, until the stranger emerged. He was carrying a pack of cigarettes. Striding to the comer, he stood next to me, close enough so that I could feel the heat of his biceps.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I answered.

  He stretched his arms over his head. “So who are you?”

  “Martin Bauman.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Martin Bauman,” he said. “I’m Joey.” He held out his hand. His teeth, I noticed, were crooked and smoke-stained, yet this flaw—which under other circumstances would have troubled me—I found easy to edit out, so captivating was the scratching sound his fingers made as he stroked his chin.

  Then the light changed. We crossed. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he said.

  “Yes. At the Columbia dances.”

  “Oh sure, that’s where it was. I missed last month.”

  “It was good, it was a good one.”

  “I try to get to them whenever I can, which isn’t that often.” He rubbed his hands together. “So what are you up to tonight, Martin Bauman? Got anything up?”

  “On my way back from a party. An anniversary party.”

  “Yeah? Whose?”

  “Some friends of mine. Richard and Susan. Actually, it was their half anniversary. Richard threw it, an
d we all got Susan half presents.”

  “Cool.”

  Silence, for a moment. “And what are you up to?”

  “Oh, nothing much.” He stopped walking. “To tell the truth, I was feeling kind of homy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Feeling in the mood to fuck.” And he looked at me hard, in the eye. “Are you into that? I mean—getting fucked.”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Where do you live? Could we go to your place?”

  “I’ve got roommates ”

  “That’s okay. We can go to my place. That is, if you don’t mind the dirty underwear on the floor.” He winked.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Just a few blocks from here. Come on.” And turning around, he walked back the way we’d come, toward the grocery store. I followed. “Smoke?” he asked, offering me a cigarette.

  “No thanks. But I don’t mind if you do.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He put the cigarettes away.

  After that we stopped talking. At the end of a dark block, he led me to a building the door to which had apparently been broken open by vandals. Graffiti covered both the stoop and the walls. Hurry, I wanted to say as we stepped into the vestibule, for just as in a long car trip the last few minutes are the most difficult to endure, so now, after years of patience, I was finding even the prospect of waiting for an elevator almost unbearable; what I wanted was to watch him put his key into the door, hear the deadbolt unlatching, feel, finally, the pressure of his big fingers unbuttoning, without restraint or ceremony, the flowered shirt that Faye had helped me pick out—when was it?—hours, days ago?

  At last the doors creaked open. We stepped inside. In the brief privacy of the elevator, Joey leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. The sweetness of the kiss made me smile. Very delicately, he lifted my glasses off my face, held them over his head, and waved them. “Give me the fucking money,” a voice shouted suddenly, to which another voice—my own—shouted back, “All right, only please don’t hurt my glasses.”

  “Give me the fucking money!”

  I handed him my wallet. The doors slid open. On the landing, he pulled out the cash, tossed the wallet into the elevator, threw my glasses to the floor, and crushed them with his foot. Then he was gone, leaping down the stairs in a riot of footfalls that bred echoes of footfalls, until in my ears I could hear the cicadas screaming in my parents’ garden.

  A door slammed. I picked up my wallet and stepped into the hallway, where I retrieved what was left of my glasses. The lenses were in pieces, which was inconvenient, because without them I could hardly see at all. Even so, I didn’t want to get back into that elevator. Instead, gripping the handrail, I began to make my way down the stairs.

  Curious: for some reason, in that percussive moment, what I was remembering was an afternoon in seventh grade when during science class (we were doing dissections) a tough boy named Dwight Rohmer had dropped my three-ring binder into a vat of cow eyeballs. “Fuck off.” I’d shouted as I fished the slimy notebook from the formaldehyde, at which point Dwight’s friends had let out a collective groan, a sort of “Ooob, ooob!” under their breaths, as if I were a girl they had happened upon peeing under a tree. Only Dwight did not say, uOoooh, oooh.” Instead, when class ended, he grabbed me by the arm, dragged me into the boy’s room, and, pushing my face into the piss-smelling cement, kicked me hard, over and over. His kicks were bracing. They knocked the fear out of me. “No one tells me to fuck off!” he cried, while behind him that Greek chorus, his friends, smoked and observed the proceedings pitilessly. “Law of the jungle, man,” one of them murmured, as Dwight lifted me to my feet and hurled me, hard, against the wall; after which I ran bawling from the bathroom, through the cafeteria, and into the office of my guidance counselor, whom I told, in tears, what had happened. This guidance counselor, a young man who cultivated a goatee in the days when such things were not fashionable, gave me a glass of water, which I drank, and summoned Dwight. To my surprise, he sat us down next to each other. Dwight wore an expression of implacability, as if brutal experience had hardened him beyond fear. “Did you hit Martin?” asked the counselor.

  He shrugged.

  “Why?”

  “He told me to fuck off.”

  “And he threw my notebook into a vat of eyeballs,” I added in fury.

  The counselor now announced that he had some photocopying to do, and left. We were alone. Through tears I looked at Dwight, who indicated, with a subtle gesture of his forehead, the door, through a crack in which the counselor’s eye could be plainly made out, as huge and stupid as that of any cow.

  By now I had reached the bottom of the staircase. Stepping outside, onto the stoop, I saw people whose faces were only brushstrokes. Suddenly it occurred to me that I no longer had my cookies. What had happened to the cookies? Their loss, for some reason, aggrieved me much more than that of the glasses, the money. And meanwhile those strangers were looking at me. I could feel them looking at me. Did they guess, from my appearance, that in an instant I had been robbed and blinded?

  Still, it could have been worse, I reminded myself. I could have been dead.

  Slowly I made my way down the street. Without my glasses the city was lovelier than ever. Streams of yellow light arced and spluttered against the backdrop of the sky. Above my head streetlamps were puddles of lime blurring into cherry, around which swift little banners swam, schools of them, like illuminated fish. Even the darkness itself seemed palpable, an element through which I had to dig my way, hands thrust in front of me, scooping up fistfuls of the cool, charcoal-colored air.

  And then I was crossing Broadway again, stumbling down 103 rd Street, where the lights of a hundred apartments winked at me. Fitting my key into the door to my own building, I noticed that my hands were shaking. Why were they shaking? My mind felt calm, and in any case I was home now, safe, stepping into my apartment with its familiar smells of grease and perfume. I hadn’t had, and therefore hadn’t lost, much money. I hadn’t lost ... The hall light was off. “Who’s there?” a frail voice called.

  “It’s me. Martin.”

  “Oh, Martin, honey!” Faye stepped out of the living room. She was in her dressing gown, her pink backless slippers. “But you’re ashen. What happened?”

  “I was mugged.”

  “Oh my Lord, are you all right? Do you need a doctor?”

  “No, I’m fine. Is Will here?”

  “He’s out. Dennis is working. Come on, come with me.”

  Putting an arm around my shoulders, she led me into the kitchen, where she poured me a glass of water. I drank it greedily, in a single gulp. “Sit down. You look all right,” she said.

  “I’m fine. I just lost my glasses.”

  “Oh my poor darling, do you have an extra pair?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, don’t you worry, yesterday I passed a shop that does them in an hour. We’ll go over there first thing in the morning and get you shipshape. Now what would you like? A shot of whiskey, maybe?”

  “Just some more water, thanks.”

  She poured out another glass, sat down across the table. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  I told her that walking home from the Korean grocery store, I’d been knocked to the ground by two figures whose faces I could not make out. “Give me the fucking money,” one of them had shouted, after which I had handed him my wallet, from which, to my relief, he had taken only the cash; in the course of the fracas, however, my glasses had been knocked onto the street, where a car had run them over.

  “Well, bless your heart,” Faye said. “How much did you lose?”

  “Fifty dollars.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “There’s no point. There’s nothing I can tell them. I didn’t see their faces.”

  Pleading fatigue, I got up and went into my room, where I undressed. My flowered shirt, I noticed, had a tear in one elbow. I threw it into the trash. Pulling off my
pants, I observed dispassionately the drying streaks on the front of my underwear, which I took off as well, before lying down on the bed and closing my eyes. Somehow I did not want to switch off the light.

  Soon I heard a knock on the door. “Who is it?” I asked softly.

  “Faye. I noticed your light was still on. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine. You can go to bed.”

  “Okay, just wanted to check.” A pause. “Well, good night, honey.”

  “Good night.”

  “Listen, if you need anything, even if it’s the middle of the night, just holler. Don’t worry about waking me.”

  “I won’t,” I said, and, switching off my own light, listened to the quiet swish of Faye’s slippers as she padded down the hall. The next morning Faye took me, as promised, to the optician’s shop she had passed, the one that produced new glasses in an hour. It was unseasonably warm out. Holding my arm firmly, she led me through mazes of daytime traffic, down into the subway and back up again. Then in the shop, because I couldn’t see well enough to make a selection on my own, she picked out a pair of frames for me. “And you know what?” she said, sitting down next to me. “These ones are nicer than the ones you lost—so maybe this cloud has a silver lining after all.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Silver lining! How funny, since they’re silver glasses! By the way, there’s a coffee shop next door. Can I get you anything? A Coke?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “To tell the truth, I’m not really thirsty either.”

  From a little table next to my chair she picked up a copy of the magazine. Without my glasses, everything looked cottony, even Faye’s arm, the slender trunk of which obtruded into my peripheral vision every time she turned a page. And yet, like the truly blind, I could hear more clearly than ever: the voices of a woman and her daughter trying on sunglasses, someone doing scales on a piano, the quiet hum of traffic. Also Faye’s voice: “It’s time for me to go, I think...”

  I turned. “What?” I said.

  “You’re sweet to pretend,” she went on, “but I know you can’t wait to get rid of me. I’m not dumb. I realize when I’ve overstayed my welcome.”