Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  “Oh, Bauman. Come in.” I did. Atop his desk my manuscript sat, pristine, looking as if it had never been touched. Perhaps he hasn’t read it yet, I thought with relief, which would at least mean that he didn’t hate it (hate me).

  “What can I do for you today?”

  What can I do for you today! The question hardly seemed apposite, given the circumstances. “I wondered if you’d had a chance to look at the pages I gave you,” I said.

  “Pages?”

  “The novel.”

  Flint appeared confused. “What novel? You didn’t give me a novel.”

  “But I—”

  “Oh, you mean this?” He pointed to my manuscript. “But this isn’t a novel,” he said, laughing gently, as if at a display of idiocy. “This is just paper with little black marks on it! A novel,” he went on, lips closing over teeth, “is an act of chemical bonding. A novel sparks. Atoms in orbit, sending off electrical charges that yank them into structure. Whereas this”—again, he indicated the manuscript—“this is just letters combined into words, words into sentences, one sentence after another, blah-blah-blah. Too much plot, too much subject matter, too much jerking off, in both senses of the phrase.” He pushed the manuscript toward me. “I know you can do better than this, Bauman. You did better than this once. As you may recall I wrote you a letter several years back indicating that you needed my guidance, and that it would be in your best interest to persuade that august institution from which you recently graduated to invite me back for a semester—and to this letter, I don’t need to remind you, you elected never to reply. Well, some time has passed since then, and now, it seems, you’re able to admit that you need me. Which is fine. I’m not a vindictive man.” He stood. “As you may know, I’m teaching a private seminar these days, twice a week Not under the aegis of a university—that’s far too restrictive. What I’d suggest is that you apply for the winter term—not that I can guarantee you admission, that will depend on the quality of the other submissions, since of course, the seminar is strictly limited to eighteen participants. Baylor will be attending—she won’t pay, she’ll be a sort of auditor. Well, think about it. As I said, you have little choice.” He handed me my eighty pages of little black marks. “I know you’re disappointed. I know you were hoping for an offer of publication. Unfortunately, you’re nowhere near that stage yet, as far as I’m concerned, nor is there any guarantee that you ever will be. Well, good-bye, Bauman.”

  “Good-bye. Thank you,” I said. And snatching the manuscript back, I hurried to the men’s room, to one of the stalls, where I sat down. The fact was, it had taken me a few moments to grasp the full import of Flint’s monologue. And how amazing, I thought (with that detached tranquillity of mind that so often immediately follows a shock) that I had actually reached a point with him where I would have been glad to hear one of those familiar epithets, “baby talk” or “unmitigated shit”: anything but this relegation to successively lower echelons of attention (and yet how the purity of his standards still thrilled me, awed me!), this demotion from favorite to merely another undistinguished voice in the roaring mob!

  I left the men’s room; I hobbled back to my perch. Before my eyes the slush grew blurry, turned literally to slush. It occurred to me, rather dimly, that I would now very likely have to quit my job. For how could I continue to work at Hudson, when Flint occupied an office only a few feet away from where I sat, and through the door to which I could always catch, if I craned my neck, a glimpse of his cruel, unforgiving, beloved face? Nor did it help much that pride was already rushing in to ameliorate the damage, that around the wound the helper cells of pride were erecting a scab of pep talk and testimonials, reminders that despite whatever Flint had said there still sat in my desk drawer half a dozen letters from agents all eager to represent me, all admiring of my story in the magazine. (And had Baylor ever published anything in the magazine?) For the injury, despite all pride’s efforts to subdue it, still gaped. Flint refused to budge from the throne upon which I had placed him. His praise remained the only reward that mattered to me, which meant that so long as he reigned, every blessing he bestowed upon other people would be a knife between my ribs.

  And then, almost before I had made the decision to stand, I was on my feet again. I wasn’t sure where they were taking me, only that when I found myself outside Marge Preston’s office, my being there seemed somehow inevitable. Sara was away from her desk. “Excuse me, Marge?” I called through the open door.

  Raising her eyes from her own desk, the surface of which was a chaos of letters and spreadsheets, she glanced up at me, took off her half glasses. “Hello, Martin,” she said, pleasantly if a bit impatiently. “What’s up?”

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about.” I had my hands twisted one around the other. “May I?” I indicated the door with my head.

  Marge straightened her back. “Of course,” she said, stood, and shut the door behind me. “Is something wrong? You don’t look well.”

  I had never before noticed how short she was; she came up only to my shoulder. “It’s just...”

  Putting her arm around me, she led me to a conference table, where she sat me down.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” I said. “Something happened recently that I’ve been worrying about, that I feel I need to tell you about—and yet...”

  Her lips were grim. “Go ahead,” she instructed. “And don’t worry, this will stay between us.”

  “But that’s just it, I’m not sure if ... You see, it’s about Stanley Flint.”

  She rubbed her temples. “Oh dear. Go on.”

  Then I told her about the woman who had appeared at the front desk and asked to see “the editor.” I told her about Flint’s unexpected entrance, and their subsequent disappearance together into his office. I assured her that of course I had no reason, no reason at all, to assume that by inviting the woman in Flint was doing anything other than offering encouragement to a fledgling writer ... yet there were rumors. Even back when I’d studied with him, there had been rumors.

  To all this she listened quietly, without expression, chewing on the left temple of her glasses.

  “I thought you should know,” I concluded.

  Marge got up. She strolled over to a bookcase, from which she extracted a volume of poetry by Wallace Stevens. “Martin, as I’m sure you’re aware,” she said, flipping through the poems, “I’ve worked in book publishing for a number of years. Fifteen years.”

  “Yes.”

  “More importantly, I’ve worked as a woman in book publishing for fifteen years. I know the kinds of things that go on. I have to. If I didn’t I’d never have gotten as far as I have.” She shut the book. “Part of my job is keeping my ears open. You’ll have to trust me on this, but there’s very little that happens at this company of which I’m not aware. All of which is a way of saying that what you’ve told me today—it’s nothing that comes as a surprise. Nothing. No, all that’s a surprise to me is that Martin Bauman should turn out to be the kind of person who’d use information like this to try to get back at someone.”

  “But I’m not trying to get back at anyone!” I countered, stunned not by the falsehood of her accusation, but its truthfulness. “Anyway, why should I want to get back at Flint?” (This in a quieter voice.)

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Still, it must have hurt when he bought Julia Baylor’s novel. And yet you’ve got to realize, Martin, that just because Julia’s reached, shall we say, a certain level of maturity, that doesn’t give you the right to try to spoil her chances, or ruin Stanley’s career.”

  “But I’m not jealous! Baylor and I are friends. We had lunch together.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “From a sense of duty.”

  Marge smiled benevolently. “I think, Martin,” she said, sitting across the table from me, “that maybe now is the time for you to consider whether it’s in your best interest to keep working at H
udson. After all, you’re a writer. Publishing’s no career for you. As I’ve often said, when writers get too involved in publishing, they’re ruined by it. You ought to be off on an island, where there’s nothing to distract you but the sound of the surf against the rocks—not here, in this dreary office, with all these tiresome people. And publishing’s not what it used to be. Nor, I fear”—she sighed dramatically—“will it ever be again.”

  “But plenty of writers have worked as editors. Doctorow was an editor. Toni Morrison—”

  “If you need a job, go work on an oil rig, or at a zoo. Something that feeds your creativity. Anything but some miserable old publishing house full of backstabbing and gossip and details you’d probably be better off not knowing.”

  “But I like working here...” My voice trailed off, for I was close to tears. “Excuse me if I’m dense,” I said, “but am I being fired?”

  Smiling sweetly, Marge nodded.

  I said nothing, only breathed deeply, to contain the sob I felt rising in my throat like a hiccup. Then I stood.

  “Are you all right?” Marge asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “In fact—it may sound strange, but I want to thank you. I can tell you’re doing this for my own good. I feel humbled. I hope you won’t continue to think badly of me ... And of course I won’t say anything to anyone else about what happened.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Please don’t think I’ve ignored these problems. Believe me, I’m dealing with them in my own way. But sometimes effectiveness requires, shall we say, a certain degree of discretion.”

  I nodded. She stood and opened the door for me. We shook hands.

  In the interval Sara had returned. “What’s wrong?” she asked under her breath. “Why were you and Marge locked up in there?”

  I told her I had just been fired. “Oh dear,” she said, in a voice that betrayed neither surprise nor any great displeasure. “I’m sorry, Martin.”

  “I am too," I said meekly. Then I returned to my desk, where I gathered together the few possessions I kept there—a box of Kleenex, a comb, the mug from which I drank my Diet Coke—and left Hudson - Terrier forever. I went home. The apartment seemed oddly empty without Faye, who was just about the only person to whom I could have confessed, at that moment, what I’d been through. I even considered, briefly, phoning her in Atlanta, but checked myself in case she should interpret my distress call as a plea for help and catch the next flight up to New York.

  I spent the rest of the day watching television: a flurry of soap operas and game shows, talk shows and grainy cartoons whose characters I remembered from my childhood, the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny and Pepe Le Pew, out of whose amorous arms a black cat painted with a white stripe had continually to wrest herself. No one came home. For dinner I ate delivered Chinese food, as at Anka’s so many months ago, then went to bed, eyes red and limbs heavy, successfully anesthetized by so much TV. I hoped I would sleep without dreaming, for hours, for days, only some time during the middle of the night the sound of keys in the lock startled me; I woke, and to my surprise found myself privy to one of those moments of self-understanding that come upon us so rarely when we are young (and only with slightly greater frequency when we grow older). For just as, in the aftermath of that seduction that had turned into a robbery, the loss of my glasses had brought the familiar Manhattan landscape, as it were, into a fresh and unexpected focus, so now—bereft of those dependable correctives, optimism, and self-confidence—I saw my own motives ... not more clearly, just differently. And what I saw upset me more than anything Stanley Flint or Marge Preston had said. I saw a boy so desperate for approval that, having failed to win it from one source, he had ricocheted immediately to another, which had also denied him. Worse, in the second go-round, he had been perfectly willing to try to ruin someone with the suggestion of indiscretions no worse, in the end, than any of his own, in order to attain, almost as a by-product of his reassurance, a dose of vengeance. Yet the worst part was that when, in return for this effort, he had suffered humiliation, he had actually offered thanks for that humiliation, strained to recalibrate it so that in his own mind, at least, it would signify approval. Indeed, so base (and so self-abasing) did the behavior of this boy seem to me that I wanted to lack him hard, as once Dwight Rohmer had kicked me.

  I got out of bed. Just as I no longer felt sorry for myself, I no longer felt grateful to Marge, whose disparagement of the publishing industry I now recognized for that insider’s cynicism, both fatuous and arrogant, by means of which the more entrenched try to convince the less entrenched that their exclusion from the corridors of power is a blessing. After all, if things were so bad, why wasn’t Marge trying to change them? This was, I knew, a grim diagnosis, yet curiously it did not move me to despair. Instead, as dawn broke, a mysterious energy coursed through me. To my surprise, I discovered that my ambitions, though somewhat bloodied, had survived the night intact; indeed, they were crying out for me to do some things I’d been putting off for months, and that morning, in keeping with their demands, I made an appointment to meet with the one agent who had not told me I had to write a novel; I arranged a lunch with Edith; I even sat down in a coffee shop and read over those pages of mine that had received, at Flint’s hand, such a drubbing, and found that I was as eager to return to work on them as I was pleased by what I’d already done.

  The following week I got a new job, not on an oil rig, but at a snooty bookshop on the Upper East Side, the ill-tempered owner of which prided himself on the influence he wielded over his clients, most of them New York society ladies, who depended upon him to sell them exactly those books the presence of which on their ebonized Sheraton consoles would be sure to convince any party guest that he or she had walked into a truly intellectual home. Because the taste of the owner was both eclectic and obscure, he was also much beloved by certain authors whose novels, had it not been for the energy with which he promoted them (though he could be equally capricious in withdrawing his favor), would have sold only a few hundred copies: writers like Georges Perec (crafter of the famous e-less novel), W. M. Spackman, George Steiner, Kennedy Fraser, Gilbert Adair. For taste trickles down, and the party guests who took note of which books were sitting on those Chippendale étagères and in those Biedermeier cabinets always made a point not only of buying them and pretending to read them, but of recommending them vehemently to their sisters-in-law, interior designers, and psychiatrists, all of whom then felt themselves duty-bound to follow suit. In this way a few people who might not have otherwise done so discovered literature, so the owner of the bookstore can be credited with actually having done some good.

  In any case, of my tenure at this bookstore (which was even briefer than my tenure at Hudson-Terrier) everything I need to say can be summed up in a single anecdote: as a sop to those of his employees who were, like me, far too educated to take any pleasure in the operation of a cash register, the bookstore owner had set aside a shelf for the display of those volumes that we designated “staff recommendations.” This shelf was near the table on which he exhibited, in gleaming stacks, his own favorites. Best-selling pieces of trash (excuse me, commercial novels) were relegated to a remote comer, as at small-town newsstands the pornography is always hidden far in the back, next to the gun magazines.

  One afternoon during my first week at the bookstore a woman in her early sixties, expensively though inelegantly dressed, came up to the front desk and asked for the owner, who was at lunch. “Can I help you?” I offered, at which point, rather hesitantly, she inquired whether I might be able to recommend a novel to her.

  As it happened, that very morning I had made my first contribution to the employee recommendation shelf: Sybille Bedford’s A Favourite of the Gods, which Obelisk (now defunct) had just brought back into print. “It’s really wonderful,” I said, handing her the book, which she regarded dubiously. “It’s about a young girl growing up between the wars, with this awful mother. Most of it takes place on the French Riviera.”

  “O
h, the Riviera,” the woman said, lifting her eyebrows. “All right, I’ll give it a try.” And she took the novel away with her.

  The next morning she was back. Again she asked for the owner. “He’s in the back,” I said. “Would you like—”

  “No, no, that’s all right,” she answered hurriedly, and removed A Favourite of the Gods from her purse. “I’m afraid this just isn’t working for me. Could I exchange it?”

  “Of course.”

  Very cautiously, then—looking first over her shoulder toward the door of the office, from which the owner had not emerged—she moved to the back of the shop, where she picked a book off the trash shelf. “I’ll take this,” she said, scurrying up to the desk and handing me Judith Krantz’s Mistral’s Daughter.

  At that instant the owner stepped out of his office. “Hi, Fritzi,” he said.

  “Good morning, George,” Fritzi answered, and looked at me helplessly. But to her relief, I had already slipped the book into its plain brown wrapper.

  I am now going to break one of Stanley Flint’s cardinal rules. I am going to write a scene set at a cocktail party.

  If it is any justification, Flint himself was a guest at that party; indeed, he was one of the principal guests, having once taught the author in whose honor it was being thrown. But to tell the story correctly requires some backtracking. Near the middle of December—I had been working at the bookstore about a month then—I received a call from Liza Perlman, who had just gotten back to New York for her Christmas break. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked. “Because my mother’s gotten me an invitation to this huge publishing party. It’s for this really hot young writer, Sam Stallings. Do you know him?”

  “Isn’t he the one you were talking about at Anka’s?” I asked. “The one you thought was so arrogant?”

  Liza hedged. “Oh, I’m not saying I like him personally. Personally I think he’s a jerk. Still, the party should be great. Have you read his book, by the way?”