“Four hundred thousand dollars!”
She nodded. “I haven’t read it yet. I’m told it’s pretty dense. I think what they’re banking on is his celebrity, his name. But who knows? Stanley’s a genius, so the novel might be a masterpiece.”
By now it was May. Though a variety of activities had kept me busy since Christmas—most notably, my search for a new apartment, Dennis and Will having informed me on the same afternoon that they each intended to move out at the end of the summer—I still hadn’t fallen in love. Moreover, with every week that passed in which I didn’t fall in love, I found myself looking forward that much more eagerly to the day when Liza would come back and finally introduce me to Eli Aronson, on whom I had for rash and illogical reasons pinned my hopes.
Alas, this did not come to pass. Near the end of the month Liza, who had been offered last-minute residencies at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, called to tell me that she had decided not to return to New York at all that summer, and instead to extend the sublet of her apartment until the beginning of September. (The fact that Jessica, the ceramist, was also going to be at Yaddo had no doubt influenced her decision.) This meant that if I wanted to meet Eli, I would either have to call him up myself—a frightening prospect—or wait until Liza reentrenched herself in the autumn.
I chose to take the latter course—a decision made easier by the fact that as summer began, and with it that annual exodus to the beach, I suddenly found myself the object of not one, but two amorous campaigns. First Kendall Philips, the editor at House and Garden who had introduced himself to me at Sam Stallings’s party, started calling me on a regular basis and inviting me out on what appeared to be, from the way he conducted himself, “dates.” This was bewildering only in that I wasn’t really attracted to Kendall: I preferred his friend Roy, who, alas, showed not the slightest interest in me, being at the moment, at least according to Kendall, too furiously in love with a futures analyst on Wall Street even to notice anyone else. (“Roy’s what we call a yarmulke queen,” Kendall explained. “One of those guys who only likes arrogant Jewish boys.”) Our three dates were uncomfortable occasions, mostly as a consequence of Kendall’s refusal to take the hints I was always dropping that I didn’t want to go to bed with him. His obduracy was all the more difficult to tolerate, in that it recalled my own behavior back when I was infatuated with Carey, and had ignored his signals of disinterest so willfully. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak, I suddenly understood what a difficult position I’d put Carey in, and vowed to find some means of apologizing to him for what I now saw to have been a substantial error of taste as well as judgment.
In any case, this episode blew over—or perhaps I should say (more truthfully if less prettily) I stopped returning Kendall’s phone calls—when one chilly evening at a Columbia dance a boy named Enrique Antonio Miguel Fernando Jimenez came up to me out of the blue and asked me to dance. This boy, as I learned, was twenty-four years old, lived with his parents in the Bronx, and was working at a branch of the Athlete’s Foot in order to pay his way through City College, where he was studying drama. Ricky (or Tony, or Mike, or Nando; he moved among his many names as casually as certain people change their hair color) took such an instant liking to me that at first I found myself mistrusting his affection, which I assumed to have an ulterior motive; after all, in my experience so far, whenever people had claimed to want to kiss me or go to bed with me it had either been because they intended to steal my money (as had been the case with Joey) or because some demented fondness for my writing made them want to be able to say they’d slept with (even more than they wanted actually to sleep with) “Martin Bauman, the author of such and such a story.” Yet it was, in fact, simply Martin Bauman whom Ricky really had asked to dance that night. Because he never read the magazine, he had no idea that I’d published a story there. Nor did he care much when I told him. Drama, he said, was his thing: Ibsen, Sondheim, Woody Allen (an odd trio, I thought). He looked at the magazine only for the cartoons.
I found him very attractive. Like Joey (whom I never again saw at one of those Columbia dances) he was both broad-shouldered and dark; like Roy he was bulky, even a little fat, with the sort of musculature that one acquires only through a lifetime of physical exertion, as opposed to that synthetic brawn—somehow too glossy and plasticized—that one piles on by means of weightlifting regimens and steroids (and that in so many cases seemed intended to provide an armature against AIDS); finally, like Stanley Flint, he had heavy hair and penetrating black eyes. I cannot tell you what a contrast he presented to the fixtures at that Columbia dance—for example, to Kendall himself, who had exercised the muscles in his upper body so much, and those in his lower body so little, that in the end, to borrow a memorable Henry Deaneism, he was “all man from the waist up, all woman from the waist down.” Genetics, on the other hand, had given Ricky a long torso, fleshy lips, and limbs strong enough to crush as well as to embrace. Like his manners, which were gentlemanly in the extreme, his face seemed to belong to a distant era, at once harsher and more courtly than ours, so that when he kissed me that night at the end of the slow dance—bright eyes shining, mint-smelling voice unctuous as he whispered, “I could really go for you, Martin”—what I recalled were those brooding portraits of young noblemen, always in mail and codpiece, that Bronzino painted for the Medici court.
Afterward, at my apartment, we slept together. Unlike Will, who had made such a drama out of postponing the consummation of his love affair with Vincent, Ricky had no qualms about going to bed with someone on first meeting. Indeed, when (lying together on that couch that Faye had made into her bed) I stopped his hand on my fly, and asked, “Don’t you think it’s too soon?” his answer was a simple and persuasive no. “Why wait?” he reasoned. “After all, if we don’t do it tonight, we’ll do it tomorrow night.”
He was right: we did it both nights. The second time he brought me flowers, and a little ring, made of colored glass, which I still have, and treasure more than either of the rings—one of jade, which providentially broke in half a year after we met, the other of silver—that Eli and I would exchange later on.
I have long believed that one can deduce more about a man’s character from the attitude he brings to sex than any other mode of interaction. In my case, sex has always been a cerebral business, in which fetishistic props—those elements that lend to the act a quality, so to speak, of atmosphere—play at least as important a role as the person (or persons) I am with. Ricky, on the contrary, perceived sex as a purely physical—and purely communicative—pleasure. This meant, among other things, that he had no interest in pornography, which I hoarded. “To me, making love just isn’t a spectator sport,” he liked to say whenever I brought the subject up, thus employing one of those stock phrases with which—ashamed of his upbringing in a poor Hispanic neighborhood, by immigrant parents who barely spoke English—he was always peppering his conversation. Likewise he never wore underwear. “What’s the point?” he said. “They only get in the way.” For he had no idea—and why should he have?—that probably as a consequence of some episode lost in the fog of memory (or the steam of a shower room) I attached great erotic importance to the pulling off of a man’s underwear: a case, perhaps, of the wrapping paper mattering more than the gift. Now I suspect that if only I’d been brave enough to voice this desire, Ricky would have gladly acceded to it, for he was not prudish, and would have gone far to make me happy; and yet in those days fear of rebuke inhibited me far too often from speaking up. Instead, when I was with him as when I was alone, I resorted, in my mind, to highly specific fantasies by means of which I could be certain of arousing myself. Thus I would pretend that I was an athlete getting a massage from his coach, or that I was a grunt being punished by his sergeant at boot camp, assuming all the time that in doing so I was fooling Ricky, when in fact my closed eyes betrayed my absence, with the result that he got sad, for he knew that the pleasure I was experiencing was a private one.
But I have digressed, I see now, from the subject of love to that of sex, which is only a department of love. Ricky’s conception of love was both simpler and more admirable than mine. That little ring—spontaneously offered, and none too costly—was its emblem. I think he never questioned love, which he perceived as an element both copious and free, upon which circumstance sometimes acts as a pollutant or irritant. To me, on the other hand, love was the precious wand of sunlight that on rare days pierces the cloud cover of discord and strife under which all human dramas play out, and to which as a child I had learned early to acclimate myself. In other words, I was (perhaps because of my upbringing) a congenital pessimist, whereas Ricky, for no good reason (and this made it all the more charming), had managed to retain not only his childish idealism, but the old-fashioned belief—no doubt Latin in nature—that loyalty is a virtue. Once he decided that he loved someone, he never strayed. Nor would he ever have tolerated my cheating on him, for jealousy is the one volatility a heart like his will allow itself. All that he asked in return for his malleability—his readiness, at any moment, to returne his needs in order to accommodate mine—was fidelity, which he saw as an easy enough thing to give. After all, sexual variety can have little allure (much less meaning) to one for whom pleasure comes as easily as breathing.
In retrospect, I wonder if I should have clung to him; and yet, if I am to be truthful, I must confess that his adoration—not to mention his tendency toward chivalrous self-sacrifice—annoyed me as much as it flattered me. This was in part because the very straightforwardness of Ricky’s nature—which in the abstract I esteemed—also caused him to scorn the sort of tortured and analytical “dissections” in which Liza and I took such satisfaction, and which were to him merely a waste of time. Because he felt no need for talk, he teased me about the hours I spent on the phone: the point of life was pleasure, he said, which he defined purely in terms of its own experiencing. Indeed, his only neurotic trait, no doubt derived from that perpetual wish to convince me that he was worldly, was his habit of filling his conversation with the stock phrases of which I have already given one example. Thus, if I were to mention my despair at knowing so few people with whom I could really talk about writing, he would reply, “What am I, chopped liver?”: an expression I found particularly galling not merely because it was so hackneyed, but because it called attention to my Jewishness, with which Ricky claimed to feel a great affinity on account of his fondness for Woody Allen, whom I loathed, yet at whose altar he presumed that I, being a Jew, must also worship. Here, as in so many volleys, he missed the target, and instead of persuading me that we were of the same milieu, only made me feel more acutely the distance that separated that apartment in the Bronx, full of incense smells and plaster saints, from that book-littered room of mine wherein, amid copies of the magazine and posters of the London Underground and the Paris Metro, his discarded pants, always carrying a faint whiff of Obsession for Men, appeared so out of place.
Yet there was a darker reason for my feeling that I could never make a life with Ricky, one that in those days I would scarcely have had the courage to articulate. It was this: he was the first man I had ever met who managed to embody both the dominant father figure by whom I longed to be ravaged, and the sweater-clad coeval by whose side I dreamed of reading Middlemarch on long winter nights. Such a fusion of traits, you might think, would have been the ideal after which I chased. Instead it frightened me. I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps I imagined that if I gave myself up to pleasure, as Ricky did, then my selfhood would slip away, as once a diamond of my mother’s had slipped down the bathroom drain. Thus whenever he visited my apartment I always opened the windows after he left, in order to dissipate that odor of cologne and sweat—to me the very redolence of submission—in the wake of which I could not write.
That summer we “saw” each other two or three times a week—I put quotation marks around the word “saw” because my affair with Ricky constituted the only relationship I have ever had that I can fit under the traditional rubric of “seeing someone” or “dating.” Subse-quently—and not only with Eli—my impatient need for instantaneous and total union led me to skip all intermediate stages and jump directly from first meeting to “the deep, deep peace of the double bed”; only with Ricky did I experience that style of courtship—“going steady”—toward which young people are supposed to lean. This was mostly his doing. Though he had no qualms about sleeping with me on the first date, in the long run, he said, he believed in “taking things slowly,” not so much from a sense of caution as to maximize the pleasure he derived from process. It was the same with eating; while a desire for satiation compelled me to wolf down my dinners, Ricky savored each bite.
Also, because some scruple obliged him to wake every morning in his bed in the Bronx, even if it meant crossing Manhattan in the rain at four in the morning to catch a bus, he never spent the night with me. Probably some vestige of his Catholic education, with its emphasis on filial duty, underlay the obstinacy with which he enforced this rule, no matter how often I reminded him (nor could he deny it) that after all he was a grown man, whose parents had long since stopped believing he was in bed every night by eleven. After all, unreason can have its own peculiar logic. Thus each night, in spite of my vague pleas that he stay, Ricky would climb noiselessly out of my bed, dress in the dark, fumble for his watch and wallet. “Don’t go,” I’d call halfheartedly, at which point he would kiss me, whisper, “Good night, baby,” tiptoe down the corridor (yet his tennis shoes, of which, thanks to his job, he had a dozen pairs, made the floor squeak), open and shut the door with great delicacy, so that it should not slam. There would be a sound of creaking that would resolve itself into the familiar click of the deadbolt, which meant that I was alone. I could get up, wash, brush my teeth. For despite protests to the contrary, I was always relieved when Ricky left, since in fact I had never once in my life spent a whole night in the same bed with someone else. Snobbery made me dread lest he should embarrass me in front of my roommates, while habit made me worry that if he did stay I would never get to sleep.
The truth was, despite my proclaimed longing for a great love, I had over the years grown rather inured to solitude, from which I even derived a certain consolation. Now I can trace the beginning of this process back to the Friday night during my sophomore year in high school when a girl named Kim Finnegan, a friend of all of my friends, gave a party and in a fit of teenage caprice made a drama of not sending me an invitation (because, of course, she had to have someone not to invite). My father was away; my mother, I seem to recall, was waiting for the result of some dire test. Lying in my sister’s bed (for I liked to sleep, on weekends, in rooms other than my own), I listened to the thrum of the rain, and found in its very constancy a rhythm by which to construct my own solace; the knowledge that not far away my friends were enjoying themselves, perhaps at my expense, became itself a warmth against which I could nestle. Meanwhile I watched the little bar of light under the doorframe that meant my mother had not yet gone to bed. For hours it remained steady, as clear-edged as a gold ingot; then around two I heard her slippered feet in the corridor, the definitive flip of the switch, after which this bar of light—my touchstone, through that rainy night—disappeared and left me swimming in darkness.
I have mentioned that during that summer I was looking for an apartment: in late August, just before Dennis was scheduled to begin graduate school, and Will to move into the Lower East Side railroad flat he was to share with Vincent, I finally found one. This was, at last, the cabin in the sky of which I had so long dreamed, a studio nineteen stories up, with a view of both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, and boasting a panoply of complicated gadgets installed by its former tenant, a gay electrician. Most prominent among these were an electrified Murphy bed that operated by remote control, and a Venetian blind one could lower and raise using a garage door opener motor hidden beneath the window. Needless to say the presence of such low-tech gewgaws only added to th
e delight I took in my new home—the first in which I had ever lived alone—and to which, with Ricky’s help, I moved, one humid afternoon, my few items of furniture (most of them made of unpainted plywood, purchased at a store in my neighborhood the sign for which—NUDE FURNITURE—; made me think of strip joints) and many books. This turned out to be a fairly time-consuming procedure, since the new apartment was located far downtown from the tenement flat that Janet had passed on to me, in a building with a checkerboard and oak-paneled lobby, and that was named, as are so many in Greenwich Village, after one of the old Dutch masters.
At this point I became so involved in decorating the new apartment that in my frenzy to paint walls and purchase sheets, hang pictures and alphabetize novels, I almost forgot the fact that certain strange editors were at present reading my book of stories, which Billie had started, in her words, to “shop around.” Or perhaps I should not say “forgot,” since even in my delirium I called her twice a week. “No news yet,” she always said. Even so I remained optimistic, for I liked my collection, at least one-eighth of which bore the magazine’s seal of approval. In the end I had titled it The Deviled-Egg Plate, after a story about which I was shortly to have a fracas with my mother much greater in scope and longer-lasting than any my story in the magazine might have provoked. The problem was not that the story exposed a secret of mine, but one of hers: specifically, her early marriage, long before she had even met my father, to a handsome sailor who had subsequently abandoned her, and from which she had retained, for reasons never clearly articulated, all the original gifts, including the crystal plate for holding deviled eggs referred to in my tide. What intrigued me was that my mother refused categorically ever to use this deviled-egg plate, which, at the same time, she would neither give away nor sell. Rather than ask her why this was, I decided to invent the reason for myself, and wrote the story—which probably made her at least as angry (the reason I invented bearing a startling similarity to the truth) as the fact that in doing so I was exposing to public scrutiny a matter that was “none of my business.”
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