Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  “Not yet,” I admitted, carefully eliding the fact that though, indeed, I had not read Rodeo Nights, I had thumbed through it a dozen times at the store, in that way of literary New Yorkers who, before even turning to a novel’s opening page, will first examine the author’s photograph, check the back cover to see which other writers have given him blurbs, look at the dedication, scan the acknowledgments (to see who the author’s friends are, as well as by which institutions he has been awarded grants, residencies, and “financial assistance”), and finally skim the small print on the copyright page, whereon are listed the names of those magazines in which a portion of the book in question (usually “in somewhat different form”) has previously been published.

  “I have to confess, I haven’t either,” Liza said. “I mean, it all sounds so macho, you know, one of those books in which guys are always calling each other by their last names. Not my cup of meat, as my friend Eli says of Arnold Schwarzenegger ... Still, it’s going to be the party, my mother says. It’s at———'s.” (She named the editor of a well- known literary magazine, a rich man who lived in a townhouse overlooking the East River.) “Everyone’s going to be there. My mother, by the way, was the one who suggested I invite another writer along, so I thought I’d ask you—that is, if you’re not busy.”

  As it happened I wasn’t busy; nor could I deny the curiosity—far more intense than my irritation at Liza’s pretentiousness—that those dangerous words everyone's going to be there had aroused in me.

  We agreed to meet at seven on a specified comer of Sutton Place, after which I got dressed and hailed a taxi: a rare indulgence, but then again, this was a rare occasion. Liza was already waiting when I arrived. Dressed in a jeans jacket, black silk pants, and a pale cashmere sweater—an outfit that, I would later learn, like so much else in her life, represented a concession to her mother, who could not abide what she called “dyke clothes”—she was leaning against a lamppost, a shapeless purse slung over one shoulder. Her red hair, I noticed, she had grown a bit longer since we’d last seen each other; tufts of it dipped shaggily into her eyes.

  Having said hello and kissed each other on the cheek, we walked toward the little cul-de-sac at the end of which the editor lived. I asked Liza how her semester at Babcock had gone. “Yuck,” she said. “I think I’d go crazy if it weren’t for Lucy. Only next term she’s on leave, so I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  We reached the editor’s house. By the open door a crowd was gathering; just inside, an efficient-looking young woman was checking the names of the guests off a list attached to a clipboard, while behind her a liveried servant took their coats.

  Liza stopped speaking. She seemed distracted, as if she were looking for someone who might recognize her. No one seemed to, however, and when we reached the head of the line and the efficient young woman said, “May I have your name, please?” her answer sounded more like a question—“Liza Perlman?”—as if she wasn’t entirely sure who she was.

  The young woman scanned her clipboard. “How do you spell that?”

  “P-E-R-L, no A.”

  “Ah, yes.” With a yellow highlighter she sliced Liza off the list. “And you?”

  I stammered.

  “He’s my guest,” said Liza.

  The young woman nodded. We passed. The servant took my coat (Liza kept her jacket), after which we walked up a flight of stairs the treads of which were painted pale pink, to match the pink-striped paper on the walls. “Wow,” I said. “Imagine owning a whole house in New York City.”

  “Haven’t you ever been in a townhouse before?”

  I shook my head. She smiled, as if my innocence (which was in fact largely manufactured) had touched her. By now we were at the top of the stairs; in front of us an immense living room spread out, its parquet floor covered with an equally immense (and genuine) Aubusson carpet.

  “Do you know most of these people?” I asked Liza, gazing out at the little islets of furniture that punctuated this seascape, and upon which the party guests, like exotic marine specimens, were writhing and feeding, as in those rock pools that the ebbing of the tide brings into view.

  “Some,” Liza said. “That’s Nadine Gordimer. She’s doing a reading at the 92nd Street Y tomorrow. And over there’s John Irving.”

  I peered. “He’s shorter than I thought he’d be.”

  A waiter approached us, bearing a tray on which filled roundels of puff pastry had been arranged. “Brie and ham tartlet?”

  “Thank you.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Champagne? Sparkling water? Ginger ale?”

  We each took a glass of ginger ale. “Say, isn’t that Stanley Flint?” Liza asked, pointing across the room.

  I followed her finger. To my horror, I saw that she was right: near the back of the room, where a pair of damask curtains, heavily fringed and pelmeted, framed a view of the East River, Flint was drinking and laughing with Marge Preston and two women I didn’t recognize.

  My first impulse was to flee, or short of that disguise myself—as I might have done as a child—within the copious folds of the curtains. Because I knew that to behave in this way would be to lay bare certain emotions of which I preferred that Liza remain ignorant, however, I held my ground.

  “By the way, how’s your friend Eli?” I asked.

  “Don’t you want to say hello to him? He was your teacher, wasn’t he?”

  “Later, if you don’t mind.”

  “I wonder where my mother is,” said Liza, whose concentrated perusal of the crowd appeared to have eclipsed her focus on Flint.

  “Why didn’t he come tonight?”

  “Who?”

  “Eli.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t like parties. Do you want to walk over to the bar?”

  “Stuffed mushroom caps? Buffalo wings?” a waiter called—this latter item, I suspected, a nod to the setting of Sam Stallings’s novel. I took a sample of each, then followed Liza to the bar, next to which more hors d’oeuvres were displayed on a long table, all elegantly overwrought, and a far cry from the “cocktail food” Jim Sterling and I had prepared in his mother’s kitchen. It was here that we stationed ourselves, for the table, we soon discovered, provided the ideal post from which to observe the party’s many tropical atolls, not to mention those inviting currents into which others, braver than we, were now diving headlong, while we stayed rooted to the shore.

  Or at least this was how I felt. Liza—less innocent than I, though more timid—appeared merely to be searching for a face in the crowd at once familiar and friendly, the face of someone who might offer a hand to ease her in. And soon enough this face appeared. “Oh look, there’s Janet!” she cried, and began waving frantically. “Janet! Over here!”

  From the throng Janet Klass extricated herself. “Hi, Liza,” she said. “Hi, Martin.” She picked up a leaf of endive stuffed with crab. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys! I don’t know anybody at this party.”

  “Neither do we!” Liza cried gleefully.

  “Sam only invited me because he’s in my study. What are you drinking, by the way?”

  “Ginger ale. You know what this reminds me of, the three of us here? It reminds me of the neighborhood parties my parents used to take me to, when all the kids would have to sit at the children’s table.” And indeed, to the insiders working the crowd, those seasoned veterans of a thousand New York parties, what children we must have seemed, with our soft drinks and giggling intimacies! A year or so later all this would change, there would be born that cult of youth (a by-product of the Reagan years) of which the high priests were those Wall Street whiz kids who seemed always to be earning their first million before turning twenty-two (their number included both Barb Mendenhall and my old roommate Donald), and to whom Liza and I, as well as Sam Stallings, would come to serve as a sort of low-rent analogue, a “literary brat pack,” to borrow the language of the press, the members of which, it was said, shared a fondness for nightclubs, a link to Stanley Flint, and a penchant
for the so-called “minimalist” style. Straight out of graduate writing programs, already armed with lucrative contracts, the members of the brat pack would soon be taking over parties like this one, as well as magazines, publishing houses, PEN committees ... and yet for the moment all this was still far away, and it was just Liza, Janet, and I standing at the fringe of the hors d’oeuvres table, gazing out at a scene that seemed to have been going on for a hundred years, like one of those soirées that Proust takes so many pages (and so much pleasure) in describing.

  But I have digressed. It so happened that while we were waiting there, staring meekly (if this is possible) at the roaming crowd, a pair of eyes had picked us out for special scrutiny. These eyes belonged to a tall woman of middle age, cleanly suburban in her tartan skirt and ruffled white blouse, and now bearing down on us, speaking even as she walked, though I couldn’t make out her exact words. As she approached—back straight and bosom high—the expression of questioning anxiety that had marked Liza’s face since our arrival suddenly gave way to a grimace in which relief and worry were admixed. “Liza,” the woman said, shaking her head disapprovingly.

  “Hi, Mom,” Liza said.

  Then Sada Perlman, having first kissed her daughter on the cheek, stepped back, put her hand on her heart, and sighed.

  “Mom, please—”

  “At least you could have done the buttons right. And that jacket! What’s the point of wearing nice clothes if you’re going to cover them up—”

  “It doesn’t matter! You remember Janet, don’t you?”

  “Of course. Hello, Janet. My, that’s a lovely skirt. A pity my daughter doesn’t take tips on how to dress from you. And how’s your study going?”

  “Very well, thank you, Mrs. Perlman. I’m hoping to finish collecting my data by spring, at which point I can start the computer analysis—”

  “And this is Martin Bauman, the young writer I was telling you about. Martin, I’d like you to meet my mother, Sada Perlman.”

  “Hello, Martin.”

  “How do you do,” I said.

  “How do you do,” she answered. “I’ll tell you straight off, I read that story of yours in the magazine, and I thought it was terrific.”

  “You did? I’m glad.”

  “It must have been upsetting for your mother, though. I know it would have been for me.” She stared rebukingly at Liza, who turned away. “So tell me, are you kids having fun? I noticed that Stanley’s here. Liza, have you said hello to him yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And what about Sam? He certainly is the toast of the town. Ellie Dickman just told me his book’s entering the bestseller list next week at number nine, isn’t that fabulous?”

  “Really? Number nine?”

  “Listen, honey,” Sada continued, taking her daughter by the hand, “Nora’s over there—you know she can’t walk very well these days—and I promised I’d take you by to say hello—”

  “Oh, Mom...”

  “Come on, darling, she’s an old lady. You know she’s always asking after you. It would break her heart if you didn’t at least talk to her.” “But she always gets me trapped in conversations that last for hours!”

  “I promise to rescue you. Now be a good girl and go.” With which words Sada pushed Liza out into the crowd. Timorously Janet and I followed. From one of a pair of armchairs dressed in chintz slipcovers an old woman with bright white hair and a faint mustache smiled up at us. “Liza,” she said warmly, trying to stand, an effort in which her legs, though braced by support hose and tennis shoes, refused to comply.

  “Don’t get up. Hello, Nora.”

  “Sweetheart, let me look at you. You look wonderful.” Nora reached her arms toward Liza, who bent down obediently to be kissed. “And how long has it been? So much time. People live too long.”

  “Nora, may I introduce my friends? Martin Bauman and Janet Klass. Martin and Janet, Nora Foy.”

  I gasped a little. From Sada’s conversation I had assumed that this Nora would turn out to be some tiresome relative she had dragged along to the party, to whom filial duty required Liza to make nice; instead of which here was Nora Foy, the poet and memoirist every one of whose books my mother had read faithfully, though never without the complaint that they were too “whiny.”

  The fact that the Nora of whom Sada spoke so familiarly was not merely any Nora, but a famous Nora, only fortified the perception—already burgeoning in me—that Liza had an impeccable literary pedigree; and yet it also had the effect, curiously enough, of highlighting the degree to which this party, for all its metropolitan glamour, was in the end not very different from the neighborhood Christmas parties to which I’d gone every year since I could remember, and at which my mother always accompanied the carolers on the piano. “Sit down and tell me what you’ve been writing,” Nora said, patting the armchair opposite hers, while Liza, a ferocious smile planted on her face, stared after her mother, who had drifted away and fallen into conversation with a short young man in a purple jacket. Despite her promise, it seemed, Sada was not going to rescue her after all, and with a resigned sigh Liza acceded to her fate.

  As for Janet and me, we found ourselves abandoned to the mercy of the crowd, the members of which seemed to be dancing all around us. And indeed, as previously I had looked upon the party as an exotic marine habitat, it was now as a dance that I conceived it, one in which strangers were constantly “breaking in” and separating partners from each other, as Nora Foy had separated Liza from me. Faces were everywhere—faces, and smells, a skirmish of perfumes the likes of which I hadn’t encountered since the days when Faye had filled our corridor with her samples from Bloomingdale’s. There was John Irving, and Jay McInerney, and a woman I thought might have been Renata Adler ... and Stanley Flint, again, at the sight of whom my heart started racing. As at the premiere of the play in which the TV star had acted, destiny had placed him directly in my line of vision. Our eyes met; confidently he strode up to where I was standing with Janet. “Bauman,” he said warmly, and shook my hand.

  Janet—the very idea of Stanley Flint, she later told me, intimidated her too much to bear even the prospect of being introduced to him—had fled. Flint and I were alone. He looked good—certainly better than in the Hudson offices, the fluorescent ceiling lights of which tended to lend to his harrowed complexion (well, to everyone’s harrowed complexion) a pale, blotchy cast. Now, in the warm luminescence of the cocktail party, his beard hearty and weathered, he squeezed my hand, looked me intently in the eye.

  “Hello,” I said, still not sure what to call him.

  “A delight to see you, young man,” he said, “a real delight”—which was a relief to me, because it meant at least that Marge hadn’t told him about my attempt to get him fired. “I must tell you, the offices of old Mr. Hudson are a sadder place without your eager young face peering around every comer. We all talk about it. Rosenzweig and Finch and I. How else to put it? You brightened things up with your clumsy eagerness, your exuberant awkwardness.”

  “Thank you. Work’s going well, I trust?”

  He shrugged. “As a job, it’s an ordeal to me. I see my function as essentially thankless—to be a midwife to literature. And every day the fight gets tougher, the fight to convince the money machines that greatness matters. You see, they have no vision beyond their balance sheets. To them the only books that matter are the account books ... but that’s neither here nor there. You’re well rid of us. A publishing house is no place for a writer.”

  I smiled; so at least he still considered me a writer.

  “As for the new slush reader,” he continued, “a tiresome girl, very literal-minded. No equal to you.”

  “And Carey?”

  “Wonderful. A godsend. I don’t know how I’d live without him. But the truth”—here he stepped closer to me—“and this, I trust, will remain between us, is that I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying on at Hudson. Certainly long enough to see the books I cherish through to publication—my b
eloved Baylor, for instance. Only I’ve been writing myself quite a bit lately ... a novel ... Your friend Liza’s mother’s just sold it to Knopf, on the basis of half the manuscript.”

  “Really,” I said, recalling with amazement the constipated stories I’d read in the university library. “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

  “Well, I suppose. But you see, I’m not sure how I’m to manage it, the triple duty I now face, teaching my beloved ones, and my work at Hudson, and writing. Of course there are more hours in the day than one thinks at first. Still, at a certain point a man must choose his weapons. Two out of the three, perhaps ... and speaking of teaching, I trust I’ll be receiving a submission sometime soon from you for my seminar?”

  “Yes,” I said, though privately I wondered whether taking Flint’s seminar—that is, should I even be admitted to it—would really do me much good. For what I craved at that moment, more than anything, was freedom from all those judges in whom I had invested the power to bestow upon me a tide I could really only bestow upon myself. Just as a few months earlier I’d grown weary of the magazine with its sometimes old-maidish likes and dislikes, now the idea of once again having to submit to Flint’s tirades and blandishments, no matter how justified, wearied me, as it were, in advance.

  “When’s the deadline for submission?”

  “January fifteenth—which gives you a little time. But please”—he lifted his hands into the air—“nothing from that unspeakable manuscript you showed me on your last day at Hudson, which I trust you’ve disposed of! Something fresh, something worthy of your talent, my boy!” And he patted me on the back, hard. “Well, I must go. Work—writing—awaits. I should never have let Marge convince me to come to this horrible party, such activities are a waste of time. You shouldn’t be here either. Be well. Stay in touch.”

  Waving grandly, he turned away from me. The crowd swallowed him up.

  Suddenly Janet was at my side again. “Stanley Flint,” she said. “Wow. The very name makes my hands shake.”

  “I didn’t realize that old lady was Nora Foy.”