In any case, I did not have to wait long to get the news for which I was hoping. Indeed, only a few weeks after she’d sent the collection out, Billie, sounding surprised, called to tell me that an editor at———had made a “low offer” for my two books. I asked her what low meant; she told me, and I whooped with joy, for I lived very cheaply in those days, and what she considered “not nearly enough” was to me a windfall, in that it allowed me to quit my job at the bookstore.
After that I wasted no time in sharing my good fortune—rather boastfully, I am afraid—with those among my friends whom I thought it would either please or distress: to wit, Liza (whom I knew would tell Eli); Carey (whom I knew would tell Flint); Sara (whom I knew would tell Marge); and finally Anka, through whom I hoped the news would be quickly spread not only to Edith, but to those amorphous others whose views she represented, and who had rejected all but one of the stories in the collection. My hope was that, upon discovering that a major publisher had disagreed with their assessment of my stories (not to mention the half-finished novel), Flint and these others would be compelled to wonder whether they had made a mistake in dismissing me. And yet behind that hope there also sounded a vague echo of selfrecrimination, the voice of Flint repeating the words “ready to pounce on a sure thing,” as well as the nagging suspicion that in the end his opinion counted more than that of a publisher whose interests were essentially commercial.
The other person I told was Ricky, who alone among these acquaintances greeted the news with unalloyed delight, and even insisted on taking me out to dinner to celebrate. I balked—after all, I was the one who had just made some money, whereas he had only his income from the shoe store with which to support himself, help out (I suspected) his family, and pay his tuition. Nonetheless he was adamant. He would take me to Windows on the World, he said, on top of the World Trade Center.
The next night, more than a hundred stories up, Ricky ordered a bottle of champagne. To mark the occasion, he had put on a special outfit: a rayon jacket that shimmered from green to brown, depending on the light, and a melon-colored shirt, open at the throat to show off the gold chain that seemed to draw luminescence from his chest as pearls are said to derive their glow from the heat of a woman’s skin. He had bought me another present—a silver-plated bookmark, from Tiffany’s, inscribed to “M.B. from E.A.M.F.J.”—and though I thanked him profusely, and even felt myself on the verge of tears, my embarrassment must have shown through: I, who was so unused to receiving presents, had so far bought him nothing.
The champagne arrived. “To you,” he toasted, lifting his glass. “And to me. I’ve got good news too.”
“Really? What?”
“I didn’t want to say anything until it was official, but I’ve been cast as Mitch in Streetcar. Not an official drama department production or anything—just something some lads are doing on their own. We’ve got to keep it under wraps because we can’t afford to pay the rights. Still, I’m happy.”
“Congratulations, Rick,” I said, simultaneously marveling at this innocence that allowed him to equate our successes, and feeling my vanity wounded that he did not acknowledge the superiority of mine. (For this latter reaction—so unworthy of you, Ricky—I now apologize with all my heart.) Meanwhile he was studying the menu with an enthusiasm that touched me even as it irked me; for like his correlation of our victories, like his clothes, like the cologne in which he doused himself, his appetite for the sort of overwrought dishes in which the restaurant specialized simply proved the width of the gulf that separated us. I really was more cultured than he was, I saw, which was why his pretensions annoyed me. And yet if this was true (and I couldn’t pretend otherwise) it was only because one more generation separated me from my immigrant grandfather’s shtetl than separated Ricky from the island life, at once pastoral and primitive, into which his own parents, five decades earlier, had been born.
The dinner progressed slowly. Because Ricky could sense my anxiety, which made me grasp for topics, he didn’t talk much. He ordered a second bottle of champagne. You drink too much, I found myself thinking, not so much because his drinking in and of itself distressed me, or even came as a surprise to me, but because already I was looking for excuses to end our affair. For just as in college I had imagined that the person with whom I was destined to spend my life, when I met him, would instantly set off the Geiger counter in my heart, so now I subscribed to the even more bankrupt (yet convenient) theory that compatibility is merely a matter of shared predilections, and that only with someone who matches seven out of ten requirements on a checklist could one make a happy life. “Nondrinker,” as it happened, was one of my ten requirements, as was “good taste in clothes, food, etc.” Ricky did not make the grade on either count, and that evening I resolved, despite his kindness, to break with him.
It was shortly after this dinner that Liza, having finished up her residency at Yaddo, at last returned to New York, where she reclaimed her old apartment after a two-year sublet. This basement studio—a cave—was located three blocks away from Eli’s sixth-floor walk-up, an aerie. Indeed, Liza told me, Eli’s apartment got so bright in the mornings that he kept sunglasses by the side of the bed; hers, on the other hand, was so dark that she had to have the lights on even on the sunniest of afternoons.
Almost as soon as she had settled in she told me that she wanted to fix me up on the long-promised (and long-postponed) blind date with Eli, her own romance with Jessica, with whom she had just spent a “blissful” month at Yaddo, having reached a sufficient pitch of intensity (or so I surmised) to cause her to reconsider the pledge that she and Eli, though never in so many words, had implicitly made to each other, and according to which neither would ever allow a love affair to take precedence over their own, less definable bond. This meant that for the moment at least, it was in her interest for Eli to fall in love, since such a turn of events would both preclude any possibility of jealousy on his part, and allow the four of us (for some reason this prospect delighted her) to double-date.
But I, like Liza, am jumping ahead of things. At the moment I still haven’t met Eli, though I have spoken to him—once—on the phone. Having been given his number by Liza, who assured me that he had seen my picture, thought me “cute,” and was definitely “looking,” I called him up one afternoon to make a date. To my surprise a woman answered. “May I speak to Eli?” I asked.
“This is he,” the woman said, her voice suddenly going gruff—for Eli, it turned out, though a baritone, had a voice like Lotte Lenya’s over the phone, which meant that whenever he received a call from someone selling newspaper subscriptions or trying to convince him to vote for a particular candidate for the city council, it was always as “Mrs. Aronson” (or later “Mrs. Bauman”) that he was greeted.
Not wanting to embarrass him, I glossed over my mistake, which in any case I had no reason to think he’d noticed. “This is Martin Bauman,” I said. “Liza’s friend.”
“Oh, Martin Bauman. I’ve been wondering when you’d call.”
We talked for a few minutes. Eli told me that he lived on Elizabeth Street, near Little Italy, only a few minutes from my apartment by taxi. Accordingly I suggested we have dinner together some evening. “Great,” he said, “why not tonight?”—which surprised me only in that I had expected him to say (as New Yorkers so often do) “Let me check my book ... Yes, I’m free a week from Wednesday.” This urban habit of planning everything ahead, I have always believed, endures chiefly because it provides such an easy means of proving to other people how much busier and fuller one’s life is than theirs. Liza indulged in it all the time, as did I, sometimes even going so far as to pretend to have dates on nights when none existed simply in order not to be thought “out of the swim.” Eli’s impulsiveness, on the contrary, suggested either that, like Ricky, he was unequal to tactics, or that in his eagerness to meet me he was perfectly willing to cancel another date. Either likelihood pleased me, and having nothing to do myself that night, I accepted his proposal
in the spirit of spontaneity with which it had been made.
A few hours later, just as I was about to walk out the door, the telephone rang. Thinking it might be Eli, I hurried to pick it up.
It was Ricky. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Because I’m standing at a pay phone on your comer, feeling lustful.”
I lied. I told him an old friend of mine was back in town, and that I had to have dinner with her.
“Hey, no problem,” Ricky said. “Tell you what, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” I added, and in trying to embellish my he, no doubt only succeeded in calling attention to it. “It’s just that this friend of mine, I haven’t seen her in months, and she’s one of the only people I can really talk to, you know what I mean?”
“What am I, chopped liver?” asked Ricky. “Just kidding. Toodles. Big kiss.”
He hung up. Having taken stock of my appearance, I rode the elevator down to the lobby. Through the doors I checked to make sure Ricky wasn’t still standing on the comer. Fortunately he was gone, probably to the subway. The thought of him alone in those dreary catacombs made me wistful for a moment, even made me wonder if, in betraying him, I was making a great mistake. And yet at this point I was well beyond imagining a life with Ricky. So I strolled southeast, toward Little Italy. At the address Eli had given me a modest stone building rose up, its fire escapes festooned with climbing roses, ivy, wisteria: lower Manhattan’s answer to the hanging gardens of Babylon. I rang. “Yes?” Eli’s voice intoned through the intercom.
“It’s Martin.”
He let me in. Well, here goes, I remember thinking, my life, for even then, somehow, I knew that Eli and I would go far together. Finally on the sixth floor, winded from the climb, I knocked on his door. “Hello,” he said, opening it, “I’m Eli.”
Hello, I’m Eli. How strange—especially from the perspective of so much time wasted and distance traversed—to contemplate the innocuous, even tedious words with which most marriages, by necessity, must begin! Accepting his proffered hand, I stepped into the apartment. He did not look anything like what I’d expected. In fact he never looked the same from one minute to the next. He was shape-shifting, mercurial. If you’d shown a stranger six photographs of him, taken on different days, probably the stranger would have sworn they were of six different people. A few years later, crossing back to West Berlin from East Berlin (the wall had not yet fallen), Eli was nearly arrested because he looked so unlike his passport picture. Nor did his tendency to worry his appearance—for example, to regrow his beard one month, then shave it off the next—do much to lend to his countenance that quality of permanence, of singularity, in which it was so lacking. Indeed, all I could have said about him—this man whom I even doubted I would recognize were I to see him on the street the following morning—was that he was about six feet tall, that he had a full head of thick, Semitic hair, and that he wore glasses. (Even here, however, there was variation, since he had several pairs among which he moved as casually as Ricky among his names.) Like Barb Mendenhall, his eyes were deep and liquid, though of indefinite coloration: green-gold one day, blue, or even pale gray, the next. Finally, because he was wearing only running shorts and a T-shirt—a common enough outfit for him, and also one by means of which, I suspected, he hoped to make a good impression on me, for he was as proud of his body as he was ashamed of his face, which he thought ugly—I could tell that he had a well-formed, hairless (or did he shave?) weightlifter’s chest.
We sat together on his futon sofa bed, behind which a massive wall of books spread out—comfortingly disordered, and featuring amid the masses of Wildeiana a small press paperback titled Anal Pleasure and Health, prominently displayed, for there was a touch of the provocateur in Eli. All told, his one room—a literal garret, with a high ceiling on which brown water stains bloomed, and a row of clattery windows that looked onto the street—had an aspect at once more intelligible and coherent than his own. A worn Oriental carpet covered the floor, which was of battered wood, splintering in places. Against the far wall, next to the surprisingly tiny desk at which, presumably, he wrote his novels that were not “natural,” there stood an immense loft bed, installed to take advantage of the apartment’s height. The walls were decorated with framed posters depicting Fra Angelico frescoes.
I relaxed instantly, and only in part thanks to the glass of white wine Eli had poured for me (and which, for once, I actually drank). There was something so comfortingly bohemian about that room, something so ordinary—my ordinary—about sitting there, talking lazily, as on so many nights I’d talked lazily with my friends in the room Jim Sterling and I had shared at the university, that in its beneficent atmosphere everything I’d found foreign and unfamiliar in Ricky slowly separated itself from him and stood out in relief. These were his attributes, which he might have offered as marks of identity, had he been the Renaissance nobleman in the Bronzino portrait to whom I had likened him. As for Eli, in his company a voice, perhaps his own, seemed to whisper, “You are home”: home in this room as musty as the used bookstores I’d once scoured with my brother in Seattle, home amid these smells of wood and glue and paper, and of the lavender spilling its buds through an open window onto the comer of the futon, and the traffic that made the windows shiver, and the fresh rain. For Eli’s apartment was, if not that very brownstone in which I’d dreamed of reposing side by side with Carey Finch in leather chairs, at least a place in which I could read. “I’m a little drunk,” I said, as, leaning back against the bookshelf, I let my head droop against his shoulder.
“That’s okay,” he answered. Nor did he flinch. I think he felt at home with me too.
That night we ate dinner at a restaurant the mad owner of which made only soup (but fifty-six varieties), before returning to his apartment, where he showed me pictures of himself as a little boy, and of his family. In one he was an eight-year-old in a football uniform. He did not have to tell me he hated football. I knew. I’d hated it too. Now I see that more than Eli himself, it was our common heritage—the fact that I did not have to explain to him who Denton Welch was, just as he did not have to explain to me what a kreplach was—by which, that evening, I felt myself so seduced. And yet at the time I could not have made such subtle distinctions. I put too much trust in my emotions, which told me that I was happy, to bother parsing their grammar. More like Ricky than I realized, I simply felt.
Not that Eli and I came from exactly the same world; on the contrary, he had grown up in the realm of high finance. His father (whose name, like mine, was Martin, or Marty) worked in Great Neck, where his own father had founded a small brokerage firm; his mother, Harriet, was a housewife. Marty, Harriet, I repeated to myself, knowing that I would need to memorize these names, for they belonged to people who were going to be my in-laws; and then there were Nadine and Sandra, the sisters; Nadine’s husband, Brian, a thug and (worse still) a “goy”; and their children, Abigail and Jonah, over whose religious upbringing Harriet was currently engaged in warfare with her in-laws. At present, Eli told me, she was incensed because “that woman,” after making promises to the contrary, had snuck Jonah off one Sunday morning and had him baptized. At Harriet’s insistence, however, the boy had also been circumcised. There had been a bris—another word the meaning of which I would have had to explain to Ricky, who for all his chopped liver really knew nothing about Jewish life.
After a while Eli and I stopped talking. Switching off the lamp, he lit some candles, then removed my glasses (thinking of Joey, I couldn’t help but flinch a little when he did it), and kissed me. His lips tasted like lip balm. In the absence of corrective lenses the candle flames seemed to multiply, until they were a choir of dancing genii from the Arabian nights, or the edging, at once hallucinatory and precise, of some Persian carpet. Yet this time the unexpected scream, that voice from nowhere that shouted “Give me the fucking money!”—I could not hear it.
We undressed each other—to my relief, I found, he wore underwear—then climbed
up into his loft bed, which was unmade, draped randomly with blankets from his childhood, old quilts he’d picked up at rummage sales, a down comforter through the seams of which tiny feathers now and then wafted. Climbing on top of him, I dug my fingers (on one of which, I realized distantly, I still wore Ricky’s ring) into his chest. His penis was sleek, cigarillo-sized, with a scrotum that receded as tidily as a Murphy bed when he became aroused. At the tip the skin tautened where during his own bris an overeager rabbi, handling the knife for the first time, had cut too close. Mine, by comparison, was avid and clumsy: a slobbering dog.
For about an hour we had sex of a sort, albeit not very successfully; and yet this did not trouble me at the time, for my old fantasies of submission at the hands of a stem uncle were remote from Eli’s loft. Anyway, the thing I wanted here was not sex at all, so much as that intimate cuddling that precedes or follows sex, and of which I recalled hearing jealously that Lars had partaken with his graduate student. Nor was there any question (as there had been with Ricky) of where I would spend the night: it went without saying.
As we lay there together, Eli’s phone rang twice. First, through the answering machine, his mother spoke—something about a bar mitzvah gift she was going to buy on his behalf—then Liza, laughingly asking, “Where are you? Call me as soon as you can! I can’t wait to hear all about your hot date”: words which, because they were not meant for my ears, made me laugh, and sent a subversive thrill down my spine.
Then Eli blew out the candle he’d carried up to the loft with him, put his arms around me, and whispered, “Good night, Martin Bauman.” His body, as Liza had promised, curled around mine. He slept quietly, easily, his breath sweet in my ear, while I listened to the clattering of the old windows, the loud, almost gooselike shrieks of the street cleaners. And to my surprise—for I knew I was supposed to be happy—I found myself missing my own empty bed, as well as all those beds in which every night of my life I’d gone to sleep alone, and in the mornings woken up alone: a nostalgia that seemed to evaporate even as I breathed it in, like that early-winter snow that melts to raindrops the instant it touches the earth.
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