That she had arrived at the party with Baylor surprised us, since of course Baylor herself—on whom Marge had banked, quite literally, to justify Flint’s hiring—was the major source of this disappointment, her own novel, despite favorable reviews, having sold only a few thousand of the fifty thousand copies printed. To make matters worse, Baylor’s agent had been shrewd enough to secure for her, well before the novel had come out, an advance of five hundred thousand dollars for her second book, which put her in the peculiar position (though in literary New York, where reputation and income rarely correspond, perhaps this position is not all that peculiar) of being substantially richer than most of her better-known and more highly regarded contemporaries.
And yet if either she or Marge was losing sleep over this predicament, their expressions, as they stepped through the door, did not reveal it. On the contrary, both looked flushed and happy. Marge, who had lost weight since I’d last seen her, appeared younger and more robust than when she’d fired me. As for Baylor, sleek and natty in a black jacket and trousers that belied their own expensiveness (“Armani,” whispered Kendall, who had wandered over to join our conversation, “cost at least two thousand bucks”), with her elegantly short hair and pearl earrings she presented an even greater contrast than at our lunch to that studious girl with the braids upon whom I had stumbled in Stanley Flint’s seminar room. Indeed, she wore the relaxed expression of someone for whom such environments are utterly without threat because she has been born into them.
Our little groups, in the way of parties, now collided. Smiling, Marge greeted Billie, to whom certain professional liabilities made her beholden. “And how’s Stanley doing?” Billie asked her.
“Well, as it happens, he’s just signed on this fabulous new novel by a young black writer from Indiana,” Marge said, “only now everyone’s complaining that it’s unethical because the kid was one of his private students. But I don’t think it’s unethical at all! After all, Stanley Flint’s students, generally speaking, make up the body from which all of tomorrow’s great writers, the Hemingways and Woolfs of the future, are going to be drawn, don’t you think? Just look at the examples we have in front of us. Julia Baylor and Martin Bauman, both former students of Stanley Flint, both rising literary stars...”
Baylor turned away. I blushed. Liza coughed.
“I was thrilled to hear about his selling his novel,” she said. “Have you read it yet?”
“Alas no. No one has. He won’t show it to anybody, not even his closest friends, apparently he doesn’t even want galleys sent out. Typical Stanley to be so secretive, he’s even made the people at Knopf swear not to breathe a word about the plot until he’s finished his revisions. Excuse me, story. I know Stanley hates the word ‘plot.’”
“Tell him congratulations from me,” I threw in.
“Of course. And as for you, Martin”—I turned from her gaze as from the stm—“what an honor it is for me to hold the distinction of having once given the sack, given the heave-ho, to a young man whom I guarantee, within a very few months, is going to be a major player, not just Martin Bauman but the Martin Bauman.” She pinched my cheek. “But I’m sure you forgive me, don’t you, dear? You realize it was for your own good. I’ve always had a sixth sense about these things. And who knows? If I hadn’t fired you, today you might still be reading slush at Hudson, instead of standing here, client of Billie and author of Trish.” (Trish was my editor.)
“Well,” I said, uncertain as to how I was supposed to greet this peculiar testimonial.
“By the way, Sara asked me to send you her regards. You know she’s been promoted. She’s an editor now.”
“Oh, I’m delighted.”
“And Carey—it’s tragic, really—you know he’s been out of the office for the last few weeks, he hasn’t been well. Somewhere along the line he managed to pick up a bad case of hepatitis. And then today he called me and said that he’s planning to quit. Apparently he wants to go to graduate school.”
“Who’s Carey?” asked Liza.
“A friend of mine,” I said. “Stanley Flint’s assistant.”
Henry Deane—always a fixture at these parties (but then again, so was I)—now approached us, dragging in his wake an extremely tall, distinguished-looking man in his fifties, with a luxuriant gray beard, stooped shoulders, and bushy eyebrows. “Oh, hello, Michael,” he said to me, for he could never seem to get my name right. “Michael, have you met my friend and former lover, Seamus Holt?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said, “though of course I’ve seen his plays.” (This was a lie.)
“Michael Bauman, Seamus Holt. Oh, and Seamus, you know Billie Eberhart, and Marge, of course—and everyone knows Kendall. And tell me, Michael, who are these charming young ladies?”
Trish, Julia, and Liza were introduced first to Henry, then to Seamus, who, having hurled at them a series of rudimentary hellos, turned to me and glowered. “Young man, I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” he said. “You’ve written such a wonderful collection of stories, which proves you’ve got a real talent, and in the whole book, in all two hundred and sixteen pages, not a single word, not a single fucking word about AIDS. It’s outrageous. Don’t you realize that by shirking your duty, by failing to bring this horrible crime to the attention of our brothers and sisters, you’re collaborating with the enemy? You’re adding to the silence in which we’re all going to die, die, die?”
“Oh, Seamus, please,” said Henry. “I have to apologize for him, Michael,” he added. “You see, he has this insane idea that AIDS is the result of germ warfare by the government or some such thing.”
“Misrepresenting me as usual,” said Seamus. “What I said was—”
“Or that AIDS started because of experiments on monkeys in Africa, I don’t know, he changes his conspiracy theories more often than he changes his socks.”
By now the women, as if instinctively, had crept away from us and into another conversation. “So when’s moving day, Henry?” asked Kendall.
“The fourteenth. You may have heard that I’m moving to Madrid for a year,” Henry said to me. “Certain people”—he indicated Seamus—“insist I’m doing it to run away from AIDS, but I ask you, how can anyone escape AIDS? If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Though I’ve got to admit it’ll be a relief not having to visit any more friends in hospitals. Last week I was at Bellevue every afternoon. I’ve got six friends in the same ward. Six! The nurses all know me by now.”
“Really? Is it really that bad?” asked Kendall.
“Horrible. One ex-lover of mine, he’s been in intensive care a week now. Some weird pneumonia. And when his lover checked him in they wouldn’t let him go into the emergency room because he wasn’t ‘next of kin.’”
“Well, there you have it,” said Seamus, “that’s exactly the sort of thing a young man like you, a young gay writer with potential, owes it to the rest of us to write about. Instead of which—I’m sorry—in your stories, it’s just all this coming-out shit, and what’s my mother going to think, and crap like that.”
“I’m not sure it’s fair to dictate to a writer what he ought or ought not to write,” I said bravely.
“Exactly! Good for you!” Henry patted me on the back. “You see, Seamus, Michael here is obviously a serious artist, not some hack propagandist like you.”
“And have you been writing about AIDS, Seamus?” Kendall asked.
“I’m working on something. That’s only the half of it, though. We’re trying to start an organization to cope with all this—because, you see, it’s much worse than anyone’s letting on. Much, much worse.” He stepped closer. “I mean, look at all these goddamn faggots. Half the men in this room must be faggots, and half of those are probably carrying the virus, and do they care? Are they doing anything about it? Are they using condoms? By the way, I hope all of you, especially you young people, but you too, Henry, are using condoms, because if you’re not you’re signing your own death warrants. And in Henry’s case, I promis
e, he’s signing other people’s death warrants.”
“You know what Gore said to me the other day?” interjected Henry. “He said if AIDS is really spread by butt-fucking, then every woman in Italy would have AIDS. Ha!”
Liza had now rejoined our little circle. “Excuse me for butting in,” she said, “but I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about condoms, and I wanted to ask...”
“Yes, you too, young lady,” said Seamus, “make sure that when your boyfriend fucks you with that huge membrum virile of his, he puts on a sleeve. No glove, no love.”
“No, not that,” Liza persisted. “Actually what I wanted to ask was what your feeling was about dental dams for lesbians.”
“Oh, lesbians. Pooh! Lesbians don’t get AIDS. It’s a waste of breath.”
“But how can you know that, Seamus?” asked Kendall, whose deft faculty for posing questions that were challenging enough to keep the conversation interesting but not so challenging as to generate serious worry had made him in recent years a much sought-after guest at Park Avenue dinner parties. “I mean, given all the surprises we’ve had lately, who’s to say that AIDS won’t turn out to be a scourge for lesbians too?”
“Well, scourge is a strong word,” Liza threw in, blanching a little.
“I’m not saying it’s going to be a scourge,” Kendall continued, “I’m just pointing out that the evidence isn’t in yet.”
“But there’s documentary evidence,” said Henry. “Like I said, I’ve got half a dozen gay male friends in Bellevue with AIDS right now. On the other hand, I don’t know a single lesbian who’s got it.”
“You don’t know a single lesbian,” Seamus said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, penetrative sex, semen up the asshole, mucous membranes, that’s where the danger lies, not in one girl tonguing, excuse me, another one’s clit.”
“God, that Seamus Holt is just horrible!” Liza said a few minutes later, when we were standing in line at the bar. “Really a maniac! That’s why Marge didn’t want to talk to him, you know. Apparently the other night, at a dinner party, he threw a drink in the face of one of the trustees of Mount Sinai, because he said the hospital wasn’t spending enough on AIDS research. Can you believe that? Diet Coke, please. I mean, I don’t want to diminish what he’s saying,” she went on, taking her drink, “but you’ve got to admit, he goes over the top. My mother says he’s always been that way, that AIDS has just given him the soapbox he’s needed. So I guess I shouldn’t be too upset. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” She had pulled me, I noticed, into as remote a comer as the party had to offer. “What I wanted to ask you about—in confidence, of course—is your friend Julia. Please don’t hate me, but I have to know. Is she in any way, at all...”
“A lesbian?”
“Ssh!”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“Because all evening I’ve had this impression, this very strong impression ... you know ... that she’s been, well, looking at me.”
“And what if she has been?”
“I don’t know! I’m so confused! Do you think she’s pretty? I do. Only she smokes so much, it would be like kissing an ashtray ... And anyway, the last thing I need right now is to get involved with another woman. And even if I did, you know, approach her or something, what if it turned out I was misreading her? That would be so humiliating.”
Liza’s monologue—so maddeningly familiar—had already started to vex me. Suddenly impatient, I suppressed the urge to pick her up by the shoulders, to shake her, to throw a drink in her face—anything but be pulled back into that vortex of egoism and uncertainty in which she was always spinning. For Liza’s greatest problem, I now saw clearly, was not her sexuality at all, but rather that stubborn resistance to self-examination—common in writers, who for all the fluency with which they pry into the pathologies of others become like children when any degree of self-analysis is required—that led her to crave so desperately the calming pat on the head by means of which “society” (personified by her mother) indicates its approval of our decision to toe the line and respect convention. I wished that for once she would think deeply about this conflict that rumbled at the core of her being, instead of electing merely to fixate yet again on Nora Foy, whose specter she was now, for the umpteenth time, evoking: “I’m so afraid of ending up like Nora,” she was saying, “old and alone and living with all those cats! And the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls on the bed!” Yet Liza’s view of Nora, I could safely say, had nothing to do with Nora’s view of herself, or even with what might be called the general view of Nora. Instead, her preoccupations, which the willingness of her friends to discuss her problems with her ad nauseam only aggravated, had brought into being a second Nora, a clone or doppelganger, who nonetheless managed to live in harmony, at least in Liza’s mind, with that Nora of whom, at other moments, she spoke in such adulatory terms, either as the mentor who had encouraged her in her writing from an early age, or as the second mother in whose house (a different house, which seemed to have nothing to do with the cat-littered wreck in which the doppelganger ruled) Liza was not only welcome, but had actually lived for long periods, including the summer over the course of which she had finished Midnight Snacks.
By now the party was reaching that climactic moment—so common at gatherings advertised as “Cocktails, 6-8”—when the decision of one guest (in this case Billie) to say good-bye and fetch her coat provokes everyone else, in a sort of frenzy, to follow suit. This meant that over the course of five minutes our host’s living room, with its curtain pelmets of which Kendall had been so critical, had almost totally emptied out, the mass of humanity that defined the party having been convulsed in a sort of unified seizure to the coat check, where in the sudden and enormous queue its members gazed at their watches, as if they had all just remembered dinner parties for which they were late. Fearful of overstaying our welcome, Liza and I left too, though happily the fact that we’d brought no coats allowed us to bypass the nervous queue. Liza was still talking about Nora Foy; in fact, she was talking about Nora Foy so continuously, and with such unceasing agitation, that I couldn’t help but wonder whether she might not be trying—in contrast to her usual routine of simply riding the rat’s wheel of her obsessions until the effort had exhausted her—to wrench the conversation toward this particular topic for some specific reason, with the same clangorous infelicity that marked, in her writing, certain transitions between one paragraph and the next.
Out on the street, she asked if I wanted to have dinner with her. I said yes and suggested we call Eli and invite him to join us.
“Actually, let’s not,” she said. “Instead let’s just go out to dinner the two of us, shall we? After all, it’s been ages since we did that. Not since before you and Eli got together.”
“Well, all right, if you like,” I answered, as crossing the street, we walked into a local Chinese restaurant. “Only if you don’t mind I think I’ll phone him and tell him what we’re doing, so he won’t worry.”
“Fine.” Sitting down, she picked up her menu. I went to the pay phone. As it happened Eli wasn’t home, and I could only leave him a message.
“Did you reach him?” she asked when I got back.
I shook my head.
“Where’s he been today, anyway? When I called him earlier I kept getting his machine.”
“He’s with his mother. This afternoon he had to take her to a doctor’s appointment.”
“Ah, the hideous Harriet.” Liza giggled. “Have you met her yet?”
“Briefly. I didn’t think she was so hideous.”
“I don’t mean physically. I mean ... well, let’s just say I find her a hide hard to take. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my telling you that, especially since Eli makes no bones about hating my mother’s guts.”
“I’d say that’s a bit exaggerated, Liza.”
“Really? I don’t. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t like Harriet—it’s just that I
find the way she treats Eli, the way she’s always treated him, a little sickening. She’s done him a lot of damage, in my opinion.”
“How so?”
“By coddling him too much. By encouraging him in every one of his little artistic pursuits—which is fine, except that she’s completely oblivious to questions of talent. She’s an ignoramus, culturally speaking. All that matters to her is that he’s Eli Aronson, as if that automatically makes him a genius at everything he tries. And the result is that Eli has this really inflated sense of his own abilities, as well as of his mother’s power, all of which makes him in the end miserable and resentful, especially toward me, because I’ve had so much more success than he has. The story of what happened when he didn’t get into Princeton is typical.”
“I haven’t heard that story.”
“You haven’t?” Liza quieted. “That’s funny. Because goodness knows he’s told it to all sorts of other people. It’s not like it’s a secret.” She paused, arranged her hands on her lap. “Shall I tell you?”
Though I had the distinct feeling that I was being led into a trap, that by agreeing to listen to the story I would be tacitly entering into a conspiracy with Liza against Eli, nevertheless I let my curiosity get the best of me. “Go ahead,” I said.
“Well, you do know that all his life Eli’s mother wanted him to go to Princeton, right? And that when he didn’t get in it was, like, a major tragedy in the family.”
As it happened I did not know this, though I recalled an afternoon not long ago when, lying in Eli’s loft, I’d read aloud to him a line from Renata Adler’s Speedboat that I’d thought funny—a reference to a girl “who cried all the time because she hadn’t been accepted at Smith”—only he hadn’t laughed.
“Well, when he didn’t get in, Harriet got this insane idea into her head that it was all because of Zoë.”
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