“By the way,” I said to Liza during one of our telephone conversations, “you never explained to me why it was that talking to Nora Foy upset you so much at the party.”
“Oh, it’s not Nora herself,” Liza said. “Nora’s all right. It’s just that my mother’s always pushing her at me because she wants to rub in my face what it’s like growing up to be an old lesbian.”
“I didn’t know Nora Foy was a lesbian.”
“Of course. And my mother says that if I don’t mend my ways, I’ll end up just like her—miserable and alone and living in squalor with forty-seven cats.”
“But, Liza,” the gay-straight rap leader in me said, “there are also thousands of lesbians who’ve made happy and successful lives for themselves, with other women.”
“I know. Eli tells me the same thing.”
“As well as thousands of women who fought their natural impulses and ended up in loveless marriages.”
“Eli says that too. You’re a lot alike, you and Eli. I should introduce you. But for the moment it’s a moot point, because as it stands starting in January I’m trapped again in Babcock, where there isn’t a lesbian for miles around, and Jessica”—this was the woman, a ceramist, whom Liza was currently dating—“she’s here in New York. Confidentially, though, I’ve started seeing a man at school. On the side. Nothing serious, it’s just to amuse myself. His name’s Arthur—Art—and he teaches history. He has a really big penis. Do you like that? I find it hurts.”
“Well—”
“I do like men, you know. I’m not some man-hating bull dyke. I enjoy sex with them. And anyway, even if my going out with Art does please my mother, that’s hardly relevant, because as it stands she couldn’t be more unhappy with me on account of Jessica. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she concluded. “I hardly know you. Yet somehow I feel as if we’ve been friends our whole lives. Isn’t it funny the way that happens?”
I had to agree that it was funny, especially because I felt the same way—this despite those bursts of hysteria and hypocrisy that so infuriated me in Liza. For it was true that even after just a few days, our bond already seemed better established, more vesseled with intimacy, than many others I had shared for a much longer duration, so much so that sometimes it was hard to believe we hadn’t actually sat together at that children’s table of our childhood. There is no quicker shortcut to intimacy than the discovery of common ground, of which Liza and I had acres; what we didn’t realize—what we wouldn’t realize until we were older—was that it is upon the method by which that ground is cultivated, not the soil itself, that intimacy in the long run depends.
In any case, it became quickly evident that among the many things Liza and I shared was a whole vocabulary of nostalgia, the common grammar of the suburbs—in particular the television programs we’d watched—having made it possible for this New Jersey girl and this Seattle boy, without ever meeting, to have what was in essence the same childhood. Eli was different. Though he’d also grown up in the suburbs, he’d disdained them in a way we hadn’t, devoting his attentions not to TV, but to the reading of Shakespeare and violin lessons. Every Sunday he’d ridden the train into the city, where he’d wandered the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, searching for his soul mate. The fin de siècle was his ideal, the world into which he bemoaned not having been born, with the result that even as Liza and I, at the age of twelve, were both preparing “cut-glass dessert,” following the recipe from the Joys of Jell-O cookbook, Eli, in his own mother’s kitchen, was making boeuf en gelée, having read somewhere that it was a favorite dish of Oscar Wilde’s. Eli, in other words, was an intellectual snob, whereas Liza and I were snobs of a different and perhaps more insidious order, the sort who grow defensive in the company of those for whom the love of serious art has rendered the unrefined flavors of popular culture unpalatable. Yet this is a natural process, in much the same way that it is natural to discover that the SpaghettiOs with sliced franks you loved as a child no longer seem quite so delicious after you have grown up and gone to eat trenette al pesto in a harborfront Ligurian trattoria.
In the end, I suppose you could say that Liza and I were voluptuaries of the SpaghettiO, epicures of Room 222, connoisseurs of Airport 1975, the entire cast of which—Karen Black, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Sid Caesar, Gloria Swanson (playing herself), and so on—both of us could recite from memory. Thus at dinner with Liza and Janet Klass, I could mention apropos of nothing a band I remembered having seen once on The Gong Show, four geeky youths dressed in white gowns and pulling around IV poles while they sang, “Hospital, hospital, like it, like it.”
“But wait, wait! I remember that too!” Liza had shouted, thrusting her hand into the air like a child overeager to answer a teacher’s question. “They were a sort of precursor of Devo. And Jaye P. Morgan gonged them!”
Television—a dubious heritage, to say the least—was the lodestar of our friendship. Our knowledge of its arcana amazed Janet, who had grown up in a more rarefied atmosphere, where TV was strictly banned. “You guys are incredible,” she’d tell us. “I never saw any of those programs, I was too busy reading Little House on the Prairie. ” And yet the surprise, in my case as well as Liza’s, was that we had read too: we had read while watching television.
The other topic of which Liza spoke obsessively was AIDS, over which, in those years, we both suffered even though we knew very little about it. AIDS had first come into my life several summers earlier, when, driving with my mother in her green MGB sports car (my mother disdained station wagons) to the inauguration of some enormous new supermarket, I’d heard a voice on the radio speaking about “gay cancer.” “Purple lesions, previously seen only in elderly men of Mediterranean extraction,” the voice had said. “Hopefully the disease has not spread outside the homosexual community.” My mother had chewed gum, kept driving. “What’s the world coming to,” she’d asked, “when even on the radio people misuse ‘hopefully’”—my mother, ever the crossing guard of grammar, the layer-down of the “lay” and “lie” law, the wager of the one-woman war on the split infinitive.
This was in 1980, when no one knew anything about AIDS. By the end of 1982, when I met and befriended Liza, little had changed, except that the disease—no longer called GRID—was spreading fast. Our worry was blanketed in ignorance, fringed with denial. Nor, I suspect, would I have believed it if some prophet had told us that twenty years hence AIDS would still be with us, and that only the naive and demented would talk of a cure.
As for Liza, her distress was both exaggerated and to a certain degree touristic. It did not matter how many times I reminded her that so far at least, there existed only one proven case of female-to-female AIDS transmission. “I know, I know,” she’d say, “and yet what if—this is purely hypothetical—you have, say, a tiny cut on your finger, microscopic, and then you insert it, you know, into somebody? Couldn’t you get it that way?”
“Theoretically, though the probability is almost nil.”
“A few weeks ago Eli told me that soon there’s going to be a test available. He says that when it comes on the market we should all band together and refuse to take it, because if the government gets ahold of information like that, they’ll start quarantining people, and from then on it’ll only be a matter of time before we end up in concentration camps.” She frowned. “I’m not sure, though. I mean, if there was a test, I think I’d take it, just to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t see why you’re so worked up,” I answered (carefully dodging the tricky question of my own attitude toward tests), “since from what you’ve told me you don’t have anything to worry about. And even if you did, would it really help to know you were positive for the virus, when clearly there’s nothing anyone can do and you’ll die anyway?”
“Oh, I’m so tired of this! Do we always have to talk about AIDS? Let’s talk about something else,” Liza said, for she had the bad habit of forgetting, whenever a subject made her uncomfor
table, that it was she who had brought it up.
“Okay. How’s the famous Eli? Have you heard from him lately?”
“I got a postcard from Aix.” She sounded bored.
“He’s a writer too, isn’t he?”
“Well, yes. That is to say, he writes. He’s never published a book.” “And is he good?”
“Oh, not bad—but at the same time not what I’d call a natural writer, the way you and I are natural writers. For Eli it’s more like he chose it instead of it choosing him, you know what I mean?”
I did. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Liza wanted to keep Eli from becoming a “natural writer,” in which capacity he might have threatened her supremacy.
“Eli’s an amazing person,” she continued, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she had just insulted him. “The thing about him is that he’s got this almost magical ability to make you feel cozy and safe in his company. He’s a wonderful masseur. There’s something very feminine about him. He’s a sort of man-woman, really. You know when we lived together in college, we always slept in the same bed.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And it wasn’t anything like sleeping with Arthur, who snores and flails. Instead Eli just sort of—shapes his body around yours. Also he’s got this beautiful beard, but it’s the sort of beard a woman would have, if women had beards. You could comb it with a Barbie comb.”
“You told me that the first time I met you.”
“Oh, did I?” Liza asked disingenuously, for as I soon learned, this was one of her favorite mots concerning Eli, whom it was in her interest to emasculate. Her mother, needless to say, hated him; to Sada he was a demonic figure, forever beckoning her daughter with luscious apples to which she—merely the mother—could offer no alternative save the homey flavors, more wholesome if less delectable, of the domestic kitchen. For Liza was impressionable, and Eli, when he spoke of his own homosexuality, did so with the fervor of a rabbi and the charm of a mountebank.
Meanwhile, even as Liza disparaged Eli, she also depended on him. Thus she told me that though both of them had had lovers over the years, their friendship had always taken priority over these mere affairs of the heart. I wondered whether I was supposed to interpret this as a warning, since in my typical way, I was already looking upon my own love affair with Eli—whom I had not even met—as a fait accompli. And yet if this was the case, was Liza’s intention to dissuade me, or simply to make sure I understood the parameters within which I could safely operate? So long as I respected her dominance, I suspected, so long as I gave wide berth to the primacy of her friendship with Eli, then she would be delighted to introduce me to him when she got back to New York in the spring. Yet if, on the other hand, what I sought was a relationship with Eli that might eclipse their own, I should look elsewhere, for it would never happen; not in a million years.
8. THE DEVILED-EGG PLATE
THAT SPRING I finally met Barclay Eberhart, my new agent, with whom, until that time, I had communicated only by post. At first, based on his old-fashioned letterhead and signature, I’d assumed that Eberhart—whose clients were mostly obscure contributors to the magazine—would turn out to be a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman with fine white hair, in appearance rather resembling the learned professor whose advice Babar the Elephant seeks whenever he finds himself faced with a scientific or technological dilemma. Instead, however—as I discovered when I called him the first time to make a lunch appointment—Barclay, to judge from his (her) voice, was a woman—and not only that, but the same “Billie” with the bleached-blond hair to whom Henry Deane had introduced me, and who had irked me by refusing to meet my eye. “Fooled you,” she said when I went to meet her at her apartment. “Barclay’s a family name. I’ve been called Billie since I was a child. Come in.”
After giving me a brief tour of the flat—she did not yet have an office, having then been in the business only a few years—Billie took me out to lunch at Café des Artistes, which she called her “watering hole.” Here the waiter brought her an ashtray and lighter almost as soon as we sat down. She seemed anxious, which was not surprising, given the slightly hostile caution I was broadcasting, having never forgotten that initial bad impression she had made on me at Sam Stallings’s party; and yet context often influences actions more than we would like to admit, with the result that the person whom we find, in one setting, boorish or ill-tempered, can reveal herself to be both charming and likable in another. Certainly this was the case with Billie, who in her own words “did horribly” at parties, yet was utterly winning one on one. Nor could I deny the degree (of which I became conscious only as the lunch progressed) to which I had made certain assumptions about her character and intelligence based only on her hair color, having inherited from my mother a set of narrow prejudices, one of which held that a woman with “loud hair” was necessarily “L.C.” (low-class), whereas Billie was not only decidedly “H.C.” but the author herself of several novels published in the late sixties and early seventies, all of which, it turned out, my mother had checked out from the library and read. “They weren’t very good, though,” Billie told me, “which is why I became an agent. Because I loved good writing, and if I couldn’t produce it myself, I decided, the next best thing I could do would be to sell it, make writers I liked some decent money for a change.”
I was glad to hear it, just as I was glad to hear her dismiss as “idiotic bullshit” certain “instant bestsellers” and “review-proof books” for which Hudson-Terrier and other publishers had been recently paying vast sums of money. “I mean, think about it,” she said. “You go to a bank, and say, ‘I represent the estate of Grace Metalious—”
“Who?” I interrupted.
“That’s my point. She wrote Peyton Place. You go to the bank and say, ‘I represent the estate of Grace Metalious, and I want to borrow fifty thousand dollars,’ and the bank will laugh in your face. But if you say, ‘I represent the estate of Samuel Beckett, and I want to borrow fifty thousand dollars,’ the bank will say, ‘Write your own check.’” She smiled aggressively. “The problem with the direction publishing’s going in is that publishers are always looking for the Grace Metaliouses, not the Samuel Becketts. And I’m changing that.”
Billie’s integrity impressed me mostly because it was not merely anecdotal. For example, she told me she had recently sold to Simon and Schuster a work about the philosophical implications of animal training, written by a lady in her early eighties who had been on the staff of the magazine since the beginning of the Second World War, for the princely sum of seventy-five thousand dollars. On the other hand, just this morning she had refused to represent the author of what she called “junky” historical novels that earned millions of dollars annually, because she could not abide his politics.
She was a peculiar admixture of enterprise, shyness, and principled gestures that sometimes worked against her own best interests. Sleek and muscular, with a supple complexion that seemed to belie her fifty-three years on this planet, and that was the envy of those among her colleagues who had endured all manner of plastic surgery in order to achieve a less convincing version of what for Billie was both natural and free, she came from a long line of New England bluebloods, a family the complex ramifications of which enwebbed several presidents and the author of Gone With the Wind, as well as Edith Atkinson, who was either Billie’s third cousin or her cousin thrice-removed (she wasn’t sure which). A protected girlhood distinguished only by an affair with a male teacher at boarding school had concluded, unsurprisingly, at Smith College, which she attended for two years before absconding to New York, where she joined Andy Warhol’s circle and shared an apartment with Ultra Violet. It was during these years that she became, as she dispassionately put it, the “junkie and drunk” she still was, though she had neither touched a glass of wine nor smoked a joint for almost ten years now. Finally, near the end of the sixties, she’d landed in a mental hospital, only to emerge from its protective barbarity a few years later
, personality intact, at which point she married, had a girl child, now twelve, divorced, married again, and divorced again. All of which, she said, had worn her out so thoroughly that these days she preferred to lead a quieter life, devoting her energies exclusively to work and to the raising of the daughter—rarely to men, and never to drinking.
After lunch we went back to her apartment, where we sipped chamomile tea and got down to business. Having read my eight stories and the 150-odd pages I had written so far of The Terrorist, Billie told me, she felt fairly convinced that my work was ready to be sent out. Her game plan (if I approved it) was to seek for me a two-book contract, from a publisher on whom I could rely “to keep your books in print for the rest of your life, and after.” She then handed me a list she had drawn up of houses and editors to whom she wanted to submit: Putnam, I read, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Random House, Hudson-Terrier; at this last house, Billie added, she was thinking of showing the manuscript to Stanley Flint, whom she was sure was going to love it.
“Actually, I’d rather if you didn’t give it to Stanley Flint,” I said, putting down the sheet.
Billie looked puzzled. “Fine, if that’s what you want,” she said. “Only may I ask why?”
Because I didn’t feel like telling her everything right then, I explained merely that Stanley Flint had once been my teacher, and that until recently I had worked at Hudson-Terrier as the slush reader. “Enough said,” she replied, and crossed Flint’s name off her list. “Anyway, there’s every possibility that Stanley won’t be at Hudson for very much longer. You know Sada Perlman’s just sold his first novel to Knopf for four hundred thousand dollars.”
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