Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Our days took on a comfortable quality of routine, which was surprising only in that Eli and I had known each other, at this point, for all of two weeks. Youth, I now believe, is rather like one of those vacations during which your sense of time itself is foreshortened, so that the couple with whom you’ve started chatting only that morning at breakfast, and in whose company you’ve made an exhaustive survey of the Vatican Museum, eaten lunch, and climbed the Spanish Steps, you feel by evening that you’ve known far too long, since childhood. In the same way, within a matter of days, breakfast at the diner where I’d noticed the policemen in the LAPD uniforms had become, for Liza and me, a “ritual,” for Eli, whose personality was more corrosive, a “habit.” There, over an egg-white omelette, Liza would describe—sparing no detail—the transports and ecstasies to which Jessica had brought her the night before. By contrast, Eli and I would have usually just passed an evening more in keeping with the conventions of retirement than of youth. This was mostly a matter of choice; we shared a deep longing for domestic peace, one which our sexual discordance (which seemed to get worse the more we labored to repair it) only underscored. Or perhaps I should say that for me it was a matter of choice. In hindsight, I suspect that Eli suffered more deeply from this incompatibility, in part because he expected more from sex than I did, in part because fantasy—that reservoir from which I could draw at will—simply did not satisfy him; like Ricky, he preferred “the real thing,” which was why Liza’s accounts of multiple orgasms on Jessica’s futon provoked in him such unexpected irritation and impatience.

  To give but one example—and here the reader who prefers to be spared, as my mother might have put it, “the gory details” is advised to skip to the next paragraph—one night not long after we met, when we were in bed, Eli asked me to insert one of my fingers into his anus. Though I had never before been called upon to perform this particular manoeuvre, I agreed; oiling up my index finger, I thrust it in clumsily. Eli yelped. “Jesus, Martin, do you always have to be such a klutz?” he cried, only to check his vexation upon noticing how crestfallen I looked.

  Then, as a patient mother might explain to her child why he must not poke her in the eye, Eli said, “You just have to learn to be gende, sweetheart. Because when you do that, remember, you’re touching the most intimate part of me”—words which, in their utter unsexiness, brought to mind the man at Boy Bar through whose mouth Mr. Mooney had ventriloquized the terrible phrase “window dresser.” I almost laughed. Yet Eli, I saw, was bristling with an almost rabbinical fervor that would become, over time, the most implacable of the many impediments to our happiness. The trouble was, whereas my own erotic satisfaction required the presence of certain situational props, and Ricky took to lovemaking as naturally as certain prodigies, when first seated at the piano, seek out euphony, Eli considered sex a sublime, even sacred business in which childish delight played little part, and fetishism none. Pleasure, for him, was not even its purpose; its purpose was to redress the many injustices he felt he had suffered, beginning with his father’s remoteness and continuing on to his rejection by Princeton, his inability to publish the three novels he’d already written, the failure of the theatrical production of Daphnis and Chloe (with incidental music by himself) that he had staged in college, etc., etc. To compensate for what he had endured, Eli needed a lover in whose eyes he could see his own face reflected as an object of desire, which made me in certain ways exactly the wrong person for him to have taken up with. And just as my remoteness made Ricky sad, it made Eli angry.

  However, I see that I have once again divagated from the subject at hand, which is the way Liza, Eli, and I passed our days in those days. To wit: having finished our breakfast at the coffee shop (by now it was usually around eleven), we would take a stroll through the neighborhood, perhaps stopping off to browse at one of the local bookstores, of which our favorite was Three Lives. Here Liza would pick up and throw down shiny new novels as casually as Sylvia Fowler samples perfume in The Women. “I heard Avon’s put in a hundred-thousand-dollar paperback floor for this one,” she might say—she had close friends at every publishing house, with whom she consulted daily—“only they really regret it. It’s supposed to be a bomb.” (She was referring, as it happened, to Julia Baylor’s first effort, hot off the press.) Or, “Oh look, here’s another Stanley Flint book. You can tell because the jacket copy’s incomprehensible.”

  I looked—it was the book of stories by the young woman who designed headstones—while Eli, for whom these bookstore visits served chiefly as a reminder of the fact that unlike Liza and me, he himself had been unable to publish any of his novels, turned away and with a gesture of repudiation took up a dog grooming manual. His frustration, however, Liza hardly noticed. At last she put down the story collection, the acknowledgments to which she had been skimming assiduously, and without buying anything—“why buy,” she argued, “when we know people everywhere, we can get everything free?”—led us out of the store. At this point she returned to her apartment to work, while Eli either went to the gym or, if it was Saturday, to his yoga class.

  He and I next met up in his studio after lunch. If I hadn’t brought over my computer, while he toiled away on his novel I would examine his books. Only Anal Pleasure and Health proved to be a disappointment, with its pruriently sincere illustrations and advice on how to maintain the proper balance of intestinal fauna through laxatives. Much more interesting to me (and less unctuous) was a battered old volume that he had picked up at a yard sale, containing reproductions of homosexually themed art through the ages, and titled, for reasons at which I could not guess, L'Amour Bleu. By an accident of casual alphabetization it was shelved next to Bloodroot Sisters, an anthology of “dykewomyn poetry” that I remembered my sister having also owned. (Indeed, I see now that if I took pleasure in exploring Eli’s library, it was in part because it reminded me so much of my parents’, an eclectic collection into the equally vague alphabetization of which, as we all went off to college and they reclaimed our rooms for various new uses, my father had gradually incorporated many of our own books, with amusing results: Liberace Cooks rubbed shoulders with C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, The House with Managerial Psychology, Naked Came the Stranger with The Order of Things.)

  About the novel on which Eli was at work I knew very little, except that it included (as Chapter Two) his story “Ineptitude,” which I’d read in Henry Deane’s anthology; perhaps as a consequence of Liza’s habitual laxness in responding to the pages he sometimes showed her, he refused categorically to share it with me, no matter how loudly I pleaded. Nor was writing, I soon learned, the only art in which he dallied: he was also a painter who had on his trip to France completed some bold watercolors, a poet who had once won a prize for a sestina, a baritone, a violinist, and lastly a composer, in which capacity he had been working for the past five years on an unfinished string trio (“basically Mozartian and unfashionable”), which his mother hoped to persuade the Beaux Arts Trio to perform. (She was friendly with a cousin of the cellist.)

  That Eli could spread himself so thin impressed me at first, given that, like Liza, I could do nothing but write; I had no other talents. And yet I am no longer so sure that a multiplicity of gifts is any great advantage to an artist. Certainly in Eli’s case his refusal to settle down and devote himself exclusively to one pursuit—which he manifested, those afternoons, by jumping restlessly from his desk to his violin, and then from his violin to his easel—lent to all his efforts a distinct odor of (what else to call it?) dilettantism. Though Oscar Wilde was his hero, it was to one of those minor figures who lurked on the fringes of the twenties, publishing dozens of forgettable books on all manner of subject (someone like Sacheverell Sitwell), that he bore the closest resemblance. Rarely did he write (or paint, or compose, or play, for that matter) with anything like the concentrated, even agonized vehemence that marked Liza’s own periods of intensest work, those days on which she would sit bent over her typewriter for hours at a time, in a co
ntorted posture from which Eli was always trying to discourage her by buying her special stools or orthopedic back pillows, for he feared (quite rightly) that the upshot of such self-torture would be scoliosis. He, on the other hand, had perfect posture: indeed, it was perhaps this very lack of manic devotion by dint of which his back had been spared to which Liza referred when she said that he wasn’t a “natural” writer.

  Yet there was another reason for Eli’s artistic promiscuity, one which Liza, possibly from a sense of misplaced delicacy, never mentioned. It was this: unlike her, he had wealthy parents who were always happy to write him thousand-dollar checks, which meant that he could afford, as she could not, to put off that inevitable moment when an artist must start thinking of his work as a job. My own situation was more ambiguous, my parents, though by no means poor, lacking altogether that rooting in the financial sector by virtue of which Eli’s mother and father seemed always to have ready cash on hand (not to mention their willingness to dispense it). So far I’d met his mother only once, at the bottom of his stairwell on Elizabeth Street, where she’d stopped to leave him a check (what else?) before rushing off to a New York Philharmonic concert. Our encounter, which lasted all of a minute, had that strangely artificial air that seems always to environ introductions the prearranged nature of which both parties have agreed tacitly to ignore. Thus, though the meeting was supposed to be “accidental,” we had both dressed to make a good impression, she in heavy pearls and a fur coat, I in a Harris tweed jacket and the same wide-wale corduroy pants that Edith had admired. I remember that her skin was flushed from the cold. Shaking my hand, she expressed her hope that I would join the family in a few weeks for its annual Chanukah party. “What I love about the Jewish holidays,” she said, “is that they celebrate freedom.” For Eli had already informed her of my own family’s habit of putting out both a menorah and a Christmas tree in order to profit from two opportunities to receive presents: a practice of which Harriet, as devout as any reform Jew can be, disapproved strenuously. (I think that at this point her eagerness to inculcate in me a new spirit of Jewish pride far outweighed any anxiety she might have felt about my being her son’s homosexual lover, given that her older daughter had married a Catholic and her younger daughter was now threatening to marry a Seventh Day Adventist; though I might be a member of one tribe, I had at least the advantage of also being a member of another.)

  In any event, Eli’s work and my reading usually kept us busy, those afternoons, until five or so, at which point Liza would invariably telephone and ask us what we were doing, in the same tone of voice that a bored child adopts when she has just woken up from a nap and—seeing that the sky is cloudy—calls up some friend to inquire laconically if he or she would like to play. Not that this pose of indolence effaced her more serious purpose: for Liza, in those days, without necessarily even being conscious of the aspiration, was trying to create in her apartment what would have been called, at a different time and in a different city, a “salon.” This was the real reason she never agreed to come over to Eli’s studio, or (heaven forbid) mine. Like Madame Verdurin, she felt safer when the “little clan” of which we were the principal members was safely assembled under her own roof. Nor, in truth, did I mind going over to Liza’s those afternoons, for I loved the walk to her building, which took us along a succession of tree-lined sidewalks on which the streetlamps, when they came on, made the changing leaves look as if they were pressed from gold. Hand in hand, Eli and I would stride down Second Avenue, sometimes stopping at a newsstand, where I’d buy the current issue of the magazine, or a chocolate bar; or Eli, at a health food store he liked, would get for himself and Liza some specimens of what he called “health food junk food”—carob chip cookies, “fruit ‘n’ fiber” muffins sweetened with apple juice, taro chips.

  Then we’d ring her buzzer; she would let us into her dark little cave, the narrow windows of which gave onto the back of an untidy garden with a dogwood tree and a decrepit fountain from which a dolphin dribbled brackish water. In contrast to Eli’s apartment, the decoration of which revealed his instinct for recognizing, in inanimate things, a reflection of himself, Liza’s furniture had a curiously affectless quality. In front of the window a sofa in striped cotton exchanged dumb glances with a wood-veneered coffee table. The desk, of white laminate, came from the Door Store. The loft bed was an exact copy of Eli’s, crafted by the same team of lesbian carpenters. As for the redbrick walls, they were hung with posters of paintings by Monet, Degas, and Frida Kahlo—posters Liza had purchased framed—as well as a portrait of her that Jessica had just completed, and out of which she stared daringly, almost reproachfully, shirt open to reveal breasts so red, they might have been scarred by burning.

  What gave Liza’s apartment its special charm, however—indeed, it was the major reason she had rented it—was the comer fireplace in which Eli, on those cool afternoons, was always trying to fuss up a little blaze, using as kindling some sticks he’d bought from a vendor at the Union Square Market. Mostly these efforts failed, and we would resort to one of the Duraflame logs that Liza was always sending me to the comer supermarket to buy along with chocolate-covered raisins, if she was stoned and had the munchies. Not that I minded. Youngest child that I was, I liked doing errands. On such afternoons we were sometimes alone, though more often Liza also had over one or two of what Eli called her “minions,” those friends in whom her wit inspired adoration, and whose number included Janet Klass, Ethan (the boy with whom she liked to watch Jeopardy! over the telephone), and, especially on weekends, a whole flock of girls who worked in publishing, and on whom Liza relied for gossip and free books. Most of these girls, so far as I could tell, were called Amy.

  Here is a typical day: it is a cold Thursday in November, and Eli and I—intertwined as usual—are lying with Liza on her loft bed. Below, on the sofa, sit Ethan and one of the Amys, an assistant editor at Avon (it was from her that Liza had gotten the intelligence on Julia Baylor) who as a consequence of a similar but far more consequential indiscretion has just been fired. Now, in her distress, she has been spending most of her time trailing after Liza, never talking much, yet at the same time not really getting in the way, in which regard she resembles also in behavior one of those innocuous yet pleasant lapdogs, a toy poodle, or bichon frise, that her physiognomy (she was small, round, with frizzy apricot hair that she tended to wear teased up in a topknot) brings to mind.

  As for Ethan, he is pallid and lean, with the sort of toneless, drooping body that skinny men who spend all of their time at desks seem fated to develop. The year before, he and Eli had had a disastrous affair; how this bad business concluded I have no idea, though I do know that Eli, even though he maintains in Ethan’s presence a posture of unrelenting civility, cannot seem to control, when Ethan isn’t around, his desire to insult him. When Ethan isn’t there Eli refers to him as “the Bellows,” because of the way that his stomach, when he sits down naked, partitions itself into five distinct pleats. He complains about Ethan’s maniacal fastidiousness, as evidenced, among other things, by his socks, which he keeps arranged according to the color spectrum, and the fact that in his apartment he maintains a fish tank in which there are displayed all the typical decorative amenities of fish tanks—plastic diver, buried treasure, anchor, lurid pink gravel—yet no fish; not a single fish. To Eli such an incongruous artifact is the ultimate sign of moral frigidity, of a disdain for life in all its messy glory; and yet in my view (though I would never dare say this to Eli) all that the fish tank implies is the depth of loneliness into which a soul can devolve once the very prospect of human intercourse—from which experience (particularly with Eli) has taught Ethan to expect only grief—has begun to pall. For in fact (though again, I would never admit this to Eli) I quite like Ethan, who never fails to amuse me with his cleverness, and who possesses without question the most blazing intellect of anyone in the room. (He really is, for instance, a brilliant pianist, in comparison with whom Eli, when he takes out his violin, seems
merely an amateur.)

  But to return to the past tense: on the Thursday afternoon of which I am writing, and which I have chosen not only because it was representative, but because it presaged the first real crisis in my relationship with EU, the five of us were, as I said, sitting around Liza’s apartment, and we were stoned—or I should say, everyone but Ethan, who had allergies and never smoked. In my case, even though a scruple from childhood still forbade me from taking so much as a puff from a joint or water pipe, I had managed, by inhaling the fumes that escaped whenever the forbidden object was not in someone else’s mouth, to become intoxicated without actually being implicated. Already, this afternoon, we had eaten the health food snacks Eli had bought, listened to Liza chat on the phone with her mother for twenty minutes, and played a game of her invention in which, having been shown the cover and the title of a book, you had to make up its first sentence. These amusements had been concluded, however, and now, as rain started to beat on the roof, we had fallen into one of those surreal chats that marijuana smoking so often seems to induce. While on Liza’s facesized television, on Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White revealed the next-to-last letter of a word Ethan had already barked out three minutes earher, Liza showed Eli her left foot, the big toenail of which—having become afflicted with a fungus—her doctor had only that morning had to remove.