Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  The next morning we got up early and strolled together to a coffee shop on Sheridan Square. It was unseasonably warm out; shirtless, dressed in running shorts and a black leather jacket that showed off to advantage the chest that was his best feature, Eli might have been a Village clone from the seventies, had the glasses he’d chosen, battered gold-rims with tape on the hinges, not paid such homage to his nineties fetish: John Addington Symonds, then, from the neck up, Tom of Finland from the neck down. He held my hand as we walked. Blushing, I kept looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was staring at us. No one was. In that part of New York two men holding hands was normal. Then at the coffee shop the sight of some uniformed policemen smoking and eating omelettes puzzled me—“I thought policemen weren’t supposed to go to restaurants on duty,” I said to Eli—until I saw that their badges read lapd, not nypd, and that both of them had tiny gold earrings in their right ears. Eli laughed, pressed his knee into my crotch. We ate eggs and toast without bacon—Eli was a vegetarian, while I feared offending the Jew in him with my gluttony for pork—and had the first of a thousand conversations about Liza. To my surprise, he spoke of his great friend both with malice and a formidable lack of discretion. For instance, when I asked him to describe the famous Jessica, whom I had never met, he told me that she was in her late thirties, an avid runner, and had been living for the last twenty years with Peggy, to whom she was, for all intents and purposes, married. “Which means Liza’s the other woman,” he concluded. “And she can’t stand it.”

  “Liza didn’t tell me that.”

  “Of course not. She’s ashamed of it.”

  And did Liza love Jessica? I asked next. Was she, in his view, really a lesbian?

  “To answer that question, all you have to do is take a walk with her. A handsome man and a beautiful woman walk by. Quick: which one does Liza stare at?”

  I inquired how he and Liza had met. He told me that in college, in a seminar on Colonial American Literature, they had become friends because they felt so isolated from the other students, all preppy types in monogrammed sweaters. At that time both of them had roommates they loathed, so the next semester they moved off campus together into a tiny apartment. There was only one bed. Though they never had sex, they “experimented” sometimes—not a problem for Eli, who according to the Kinsey scale was probably twenty percent heterosexual anyway. (“We were stoned at the time,” he added. “We were usually stoned at the time.”) During those years he also nursed Liza through any number of emotional crises, most of them revolving around her sexual indecision, as a consequence of which she was forever volleying between men and women. “She’s terribly selfish that way,” he explained. “When she has a problem, she expects everyone else to drop whatever they’re doing and run to help her. But when someone else has a problem, she just sort of yawns or turns on the television.”

  Eli’s other grievance against Liza had to do with her “arrogance,” as a consequence of which she had no qualms about mentioning herself and Oscar Wilde in the same breath. This had became especially problematic during their senior year in college, when Eli was still struggling to get his stories into undergraduate literary magazines, and Liza had just sold her first novel. “Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t jealous,” he said. “I loved her novel. Only she had this way of forgetting that I was a writer too. For instance, whenever she introduced me to anyone—her new editor, say—it was always as ‘my friend Eli,’ never ‘my friend Eli, who also happens to be a talented young writer.’ Even today it rankles me. Like, just before Christmas, there was this big party for Sam Stallings—you know, that guy who wrote Rodeo Nights? Well, Liza’s mother (a nightmare, but that’s another story) invited her to come and told her to bring a writer friend with her. So what does she do? She runs over to my apartment and says, ‘Who should I invite? Who should I invite?’ as if it hadn’t even occurred to her who was sitting there next to her. Your name was on the short list, incidentally.”

  “It was?” I said, pretending surprise, not wanting to admit that in the end it had been I whom Liza had chosen.

  After we finished breakfast, we walked to A Different Light, the gay bookstore, where Eli showed me a story of his in an anthology edited by Henry Deane. The story was called “Ineptitude” and described a clumsy attempt on the part of two teenage boys—cousins—to fuck in a shed in the narrator’s backyard. Eager to read it, I both bought the anthology and made a show, in front of the salesclerk, of asking for Eli’s autograph, then walked him back to his apartment, where at the door, in full view of passersby, he kissed me on the mouth. Embarrassed—especially when an old woman strolled by with her dog—I pulled away. He stared at the ground.

  “Well, it’s been wonderful meeting you, Martin,” he said, and in a gesture of mock machismo, punched my arm.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m a prude, or that I’m ashamed,” I said falteringly. “It’s not that, it’s just—I’ve never been very comfortable with public displays of affection. PDAs, my friend Kendall calls them.” I laughed stupidly.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to think—”

  “I don’t think anything. Good-bye.” He held out his hand.

  “And what are your plans today?” I threw in, for now that he seemed annoyed with me, I could not bear the prospect of being parted from him.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably I’ll write, call Liza back, go to the gym. Then tonight I teach.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you taught. Where do you teach?”

  He named a technical school in Brooklyn, on the urban campus of which, two nights a week, he instructed a group of black and Hispanic secretaries in basic composition. Of this class and its students I would hear much in the coming weeks; for the moment, however, it was merely a source of anguish, a prior obligation by means of which he could achieve the swift breach with me that I felt certain, as a consequence of my rude response to his kiss, he now wanted to make.

  At last it became clear that he was not going to invite me back up, and we said good-bye. Returning to my apartment, I gazed at the pristine bed, which seemed to stare back at me rebukingly, like a mother whose very silence makes it far more obvious that she has been up all night worrying herself to death over her child’s waywardness than could any words. Next I checked my answering machine, on which, unlike Eli’s, I had not a single message. Then I switched on my computer, only to discover that I could hardly muster the concentration to finish a sentence, much less the chapter of The Terrorist on which I was at work. So I read Eli’s story, which I liked, even though the exalted language he used when describing sex left me rather cold. I watched television. I also watched the phone, which did not ring until about five that afternoon.

  “Hey, big guy, what’s going on?” Ricky asked when I picked it up.

  I stiffened. In the wake of my night with Eli, I had almost entirely forgotten about Ricky. Nonetheless a sense of duty to this man who had been so decent now compelled me to suggest that we meet at a coffee bar near my apartment. I had something I wanted to talk to him about, I said.

  “Fine, right,” Ricky answered, “only wouldn’t it be easier for me to come by your place?”

  “No, I’d rather we talk at the coffee bar,” I stammered. Then—fearful that I might be causing him pain (though of course this would be unavoidable once we sat down)—I added, for stupid comfort, “I’ve been cooped up all day. I’d like to stretch my legs.”

  “Hey, no problem. So when do you want to meet?”

  “Is half an hour okay?”

  “Be there or be square,” Ricky said. “Only I may be late. I have to get across town.”

  I said that was fine, that I would wait for him, and after brushing my teeth, left immediately for the coffee bar. He was already there when I walked in, an untouched slice of apple cake crumbling in front of him.

  “I lied,” he said. “I wasn’t across town. I was across the street from your building.”

  I sat down.
During the walk from my apartment I’d been rehearsing what I was going to say, and now I launched into a monologue the very scale of which (not to mention its rhetorical excesses) Ricky must have found, to say the least, bewildering. I told him that the night before I had met the person with whom, I felt certain, I was destined to spend my life; that in light of this wholly unexpected (and unplanned) eventuality, we could obviously not go on “seeing” each other as we had (though of course I hoped we would remain friends, eat lunches and dinners together, etc.); that I would always recall fondly the time we had spent together; that he was a wonderful person and must not think any of this had anything to do with him per se, for it did not; that, finally, I hoped he would forgive me.

  To all of this Ricky listened raptly, his eyes wide, his lips curved into a smile different from the one with which he had greeted me, more like the smile I myself had often affected when, as a child, my mother had shared with me some piece of bad news (the death of a relation, for example), and I had found myself barely able to contain my laughter.

  At length I shut up. He was quiet.

  “Well?” I asked—as if he owed me a response.

  He put his hands together and rested his chin on them. “Actually, I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “from your tone of voice on the phone, I was expecting something like this.”

  “Really?”

  “So I guess last night you weren’t having dinner with an old friend after all, were you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so—not even last night.”

  Then he sighed once—loudly—and with that disarming naturalness that had marked, when we were together, his experience of pleasure, began to weep, noisily, indiscreetly, tears reddening his eyes and making tracks on his cheeks, for he was as artless in sorrow as in joy. I gave him my napkin. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, noticing that the waitress and some of the other customers were staring at us, “I’m just—it’s just very emotional for me, that’s all. I mean, I’m happy for you. I really hope you’ve found what you’re looking for. And I’ll always treasure these months we’ve had together, I’ll always treasure these memories. I mean that.”

  “Thank you. Do you want some water?”

  He shook his head. He had stopped crying. “I’m ready to talk now,” he said, and then for about twenty minutes, as if I owed it to him to listen (which I suppose I did), he spoke of what he called his “happiest moments” with me—the greatest of these, according to him (and this surprised me) being our dinner at Windows on the World, the mere recollection of which, he said, would be enough, even forty years from now, to bring a smile to his face. Flustered by his outpourings of affection, I played, under the table, with the glass ring he had given me, and which the night before, with Eli, I had neglected to take off. Yet Ricky did not ask for it back, nor did I feel prepared to return it to him.

  At last the bill arrived—Ricky would not be dissuaded from paying it—and we headed out together onto Greenwich Avenue. During our talk the sun had gone down. Standing between a pair of tailored yews, their needles bedecked with tiny lights that seemed to lend to our farewell a holiday atmosphere of nostalgia, regret, and glamour, we spoke of the weather, the imminence of winter, the inescapability of age. It was windy out. I pulled my collar tighter around my throat. “I hope you don’t mind if we don’t prolong this,” Ricky said, affecting an actorish voice I had never heard him use before.

  “No, of course not,” I answered.

  “Okay, good. Well, good-bye.”

  Turning away from me, he left. For a few moments I watched him moving into the dark, a lonely figure, head bent and shoulders clenched against the wind. I saw him only once more, a few years later, when on an equally windy night we quite literally bumped into each other on East End Avenue. Still handsome if a bit heavier (but weren’t we all?) he told me that he had given up acting and was now a computer programmer; that he lived in a small apartment on 94th Street; that he had a boyfriend, Liam, who sang in the Met choir.

  “And you?” he asked, as people always will on such occasions, before adding, a little sardonically, I thought, “Still living with that great love of your life?”

  I said that I was. I did not tell him that I was also more unhappy than I’d ever thought it possible to be. Checking his watch, he made a show of being surprised by the hour, explained apologetically that he had not realized what time it was; he was late to meet Liam for a movie; he hoped we’d run into each other again. Then he waved and was gone. In such ways, even at great distances from the wounding moment, revenge can be exacted. Nor did I bother wondering, as I might have once, whether with this man with whom I shared nothing I might have made less of a botch of things than I had with Eli, with whom I shared everything. For Eli was waiting for me, and I had to go; in an Indian restaurant eighty blocks downtown from this comer onto which I had just emerged after having hurried sex with a man named Lewis, a man who had picked me up an hour earlier at a porno bookstore, Eli, who hated to be kept waiting, was waiting, no doubt drumming his fingers against the table. I hailed a taxi, and tried to think up a convincing lie.

  That night, when I got back to my apartment, I found a message on my answering machine. “I’m just back from class,” Eli said, “and I’ve been thinking about you. All day, as a matter of fact. Call me. Bye.”

  I sat down at my desk. The message, which might have surprised me a few hours earlier (when I assumed Eli must hate me), did not now; indeed, at that instant it seemed natural that he should feel fondness toward me, because Ricky did, and who was to say that affection, like a sort of pollen, can’t be carried on the breeze along sidewalks, even all the way to Elizabeth Street, where it might blow through Eli’s open window and onto his futon?

  I phoned him back. “Are you coming over?” he asked, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. And I said that I was, that I would be there in twenty minutes. Before I left, though, I took the cassette out of the answering machine and stored it away in my desk drawer, as if it were a love letter I should someday nostalgically savor; and then, into the same desk drawer, because I didn’t want to wear it anymore, but like my mother’s deviled-egg plate I also couldn’t bring myself to part with it, I put Ricky’s ring.

  9. TRIAL MARRIAGE

  THERE IS A JOKE—not a very good one—that I remember hearing a lot in those years, the mid-eighties. “So this lesbian is having a drink with her straight friend,” the joke goes, “and she says that the next day she and her lover are celebrating their fifth anniversary. ‘Well, I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ the friend says, ‘when you people talk about your anniversary, do you mean the anniversary of the day you met? Of the first time you slept together? Of the day you moved in together?’ And the lesbian says, ‘Yes.’”

  Much can be deduced, from this joke, about the speed with which Eli and I, in the weeks following our long-postponed meeting, moved from blind date to what he was calling, even on the second night, “trial marriage.” Honorary lesbians, as Liza put it, beginning on the evening that we had dinner at the restaurant with fifty-six lands of soup, neither of us slept alone for a year. Instead we spent every night together, usually at his apartment. This was my choice. Unlike me, Eli knew how to make a place feel like a home. Nor were we apart much during the day; only when he went to the gym, or his yoga class, or choir practice—activities to which I would have also gladly accompanied him had not some scruple about making a nuisance of myself checked my enthusiasm.

  Some afternoons I brought my computer over to his garret, where I set it up on the dining table and wrote while he wrote, deriving comfort from the parallel clatter of his own computer even as (though he told me this only much later, and in anger) the comparative speed and recklessness with which I worked affronted that part of him that valued caution, steadiness, what he saw as a nineteenth-century literary prudence. On the evenings when he taught I went with him to his school (which, occupying three floors of a tired office building in downtown Broo
klyn, hardly conformed to any previous notion I held of a school), then waited in the cafeteria until he’d finished. Yet even this was not enough for me. Indeed, in my need to gorge myself on intimacy with Eli, I would have been happy never to let him go, to hold onto him even while he was lecturing his students, even while he was sitting on the toilet. Now it was I who, when we were out together, grabbed his hand tightly, or slid my arm protectively around his shoulder, no matter who was looking.

  To justify our impulsiveness in leaping so recklessly from first date into a condition closely resembling if not strictly adhering to the definition of matrimony, we often pretended to have known each other much longer than we had. For example, to my father’s query “When did you meet this guy?” (asked when I called to tell him I’d fallen in love and hoped to bring my new boyfriend home for Christmas), I answered, “Six months ago.” In fact, it had been six days, yet so gravid with possibility had those six days seemed to me that I did not feel I was lying, only translating a rare experience into the language of ordinary human intercourse—just as, when considering the life of a dog, we must remember that one of his years equals seven of ours.

  As for Liza, she greeted the news that Eli and I were “together” with unqualified delight. Only a few days earlier Jessica had at last secured from her lover, Peggy, permission to move out of the apartment they shared and sublet a studio, which meant that now, in New York as at Yaddo, Liza could sleep with Jessica whenever she wanted. This unexpected change in circumstances unleashed a new intrepidity in her. Abandoning, for the moment, her waffling ways, she gave herself over fully to lesbianism, of which she spoke, for the first time in her life, without grief or worry. She even went so far as to throw out her skirts and to start wearing only a single earring in her left ear, though both of her ears were pierced; gestures which, though today they may not sound terribly subversive, counted for Liza—in whose war with her mother clothes were the primary ammunition—as the gravest insurgencies.