Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  “Zoë?”

  “His high school girlfriend.”

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  “Because Zoë’s father was the local alumni interviewer for Princeton, which meant naturally that Zoë herself, being a legacy, was going to go to Princeton. Anyway, Harriet decided that if her son, her magnificent Eli, hadn’t gotten into Princeton, there was only one explanation, and that was that Zoë’s mother had put pressure on Zoë’s father to keep him out, probably because she didn’t approve of their relationship. So Harriet called the admissions office and demanded to speak to the director, and when she got him, she put up this huge fuss, she protested his rejection, demanded an investigation of Zoë’s parents, in short, made a complete fool of herself. After that he was so ashamed he wouldn’t even go to his own graduation.”

  “How terrible!”

  “But that’s not the worst of it.” Liza leaned closer. “You know that when we were at school, Eli put on this production of Daphnis and Chloe? Typical Eli, really, staging something like that. Anyway—he doesn’t know this, and you mustn’t ever tell him I told you, you have to promise me—one afternoon just before the first performance, Harriet called me up and told me that she’d just heard from Eli, and that he was all mopey because no one was planning to throw a cast party. And since she knew he was too proud to give the party himself, or accept the money from her to give one, she wanted to give me some money to organize a cast party, only I wasn’t under any circumstances to tell Eli that it came from her. Eli was supposed to think that all the people in the cast, who really couldn’t have cared less, had chipped in.” She sighed, as one might at the pathetic spectacle of an overclipped poodle. “And really, that was just Harriet to a tee, always believing that her little boy was something special and that when the world didn’t do its part to celebrate him, it was her job to step in and rectify things. Only I think in the end it was Eli she hurt, by making him assume that somehow he was entitled to a certain degree of success, to Princeton, to a cast party—the production, needless to say, was the kind that put your teeth on edge—even if he hadn’t earned it. What she ended up doing was teaching him that when he failed, it was only because of other people’s prejudices and ignorance. And that’s what bothers me about his novels, if I’m going to be totally honest—the sense that he hasn’t really given them his all, that he still thinks he ought to get accolades just because he’s his mother’s son. But he’s not seven years old anymore, and what we’re talking about isn’t some synagogue Purim pageant. And then you see, the worst part of it is that if anyone does say anything against his work, he can just apply what his mother taught him and turn on that person. Believe me, I’ve been down that road with him.” She narrowed her eyes. “I suspect you’ve been down it too.”

  In fact I had, though I wasn’t about to admit this, for I felt it was my duty to defend Eli.

  “Actually, no,” I said. “Actually, I’d say I have a different outlook on him from yours.”

  “Oh come on, Martin. I know you love Eli. I love him too. Still, all you have to do is read his writing in order to realize—”

  “But I’ve read his new novel,” I lied, “and I think it’s brilliant.”

  Liza raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, if that’s true, it must mean he’s had a big growth spurt recently,” she said, “because I’ve got to tell you, his first three, they were pretty mediocre.”

  “Not this one. In fact, once he’s finished his revisions, I’m planning to show it to Billie.”

  Now Liza looked not only surprised, but genuinely amazed. “Seriously? You’re going to give your agent Eli’s novel?”

  “Well, why not?”

  “But aren’t you afraid ... I mean, if she doesn’t like it, wouldn’t it put you in an awkward position? Make her think, you know, less of you for having liked it yourself?”

  “Of course not. Anyway, even if Billie doesn’t like it—which I really can’t imagine—it hardly matters. She’s not the only agent in the world.”

  “Oh, I know, it’s just ... you know, I’ve been down this road with Eli too. A couple of years ago I showed his novel to my agent—well, not to my agent himself, but to his assistant, who happened to be a friend of both of ours. And when she said she didn’t think she could sell it, Eli took it really personally. I felt like I had to mediate between them.”

  “I doubt that will happen in this case,” I said, “since Eli’s never met Billie.”

  “No, I guess not.” Our food arrived. “You know, I think that’s really generous of you, Martin,” Liza said, “to help Eli that way. I’m sure he’ll be very grateful. You’ve clearly been good for him, and I’m really glad that the two of you have found such happiness together. I mean that.” And, staring at the food in bewilderment, as if she were as confused by the dishes she had ordered as by her failure to win me over to her viewpoint, she began to eat.

  Afterward, I shared with Eli an edited account of our conversation. “Yet the one thing that puzzles me,” I concluded, “is why she began by talking about Nora Foy in this very determined way, then dropped the subject.”

  “Oh, that must have been because of the trip next weekend,” he answered casually.

  “What trip?”

  “Didn’t she tell you? It figures she didn’t. You see, every year around this time Nora goes away for a weekend to visit some friends in Bucks County, and we have this tradition, Liza and I, of house-sitting for her and taking care of the dogs.”

  “But I thought she had cats.”

  “Nora doesn’t have any cats! She’s got two fox terriers, Charlus and Pimperl—Charlus after Proust, Pimperl after Mozart’s dog. Anyway, we were talking about it yesterday, and Liza asked if I was planning to invite you along. And I said that yes, of course I was. She didn’t answer, but I could tell she was annoyed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when it comes to these rituals, these things that she and I have been doing together for a million years, she’s very ... protective. Even if I couldn’t go with her because of a real emergency, even if my mother were at death’s door, she’d be furious. And what makes it even more tiresome is that when we’re there it’s always the same thing: the first night we eat dinner at the Quiet Clam, where Liza orders the grilled scallops. Then we go home and get stoned and play Scrabble—not that I like Scrabble. I hate Scrabble. And I always lose, because Liza’s so bloodthirsty. Still, it has to be Scrabble. And then the next morning we have breakfast at this little place at the golf course where Liza always has the cheese omelette—and then, and then ... Always the same! She’s trapped by habit. Her whole life, when you think about it, is a repetition compulsion.”

  “So you’re not looking forward to the trip.”

  “Oh no, on the contrary, I can’t wait. I love this trip. That’s why I want you to come along.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. To shake Liza out of her complacency. And also to prove to her that my having fallen in love with you is a good thing, a boon to our friendship. And also”—here he kissed me on the nose—“because I’d be lonesome without you.”

  I frowned. “But if she doesn’t want me to go—”

  “She’s going to have to accept it whether she likes it or not,” Eli said, getting up and walking into the bathroom, “since the only alternative is her going alone.”

  “Yes, but Eli, if Nora’s her friend—”

  “Oh, but she’s my friend too,” Eli interrupted. And from the sink he launched into a complicated story about how on a certain occasion, years earlier, he had gone out to Nora’s house without Liza, to help her repaint her living room, and become intimate, over the course of a weekend, not only with Nora but Hilda, with whom Nora had been living for the last fifty years. Hilda, who had left both her husband and her job as a high school librarian for Nora, had no profession. Instead she devoted herself entirely to the organization and maintenance of the Nora Foy archive, which too
k up the entire attic of their house in East Hampton, and in which every document that could reasonably be considered relevant to Nora’s career—even shopping lists and the little scraps of paper on which Nora jotted down messages to herself—was now, thanks to Hilda’s industry and affection, stored and catalogued.

  “And where’s Hilda now?” I asked, for until today I had heard nothing of her.

  “Oh, she died. She had Alzheimer’s.” By now Eli, his face wet from washing, had emerged from the bathroom. “So you see, Liza’s in no position to tell me what to do where Nora’s concerned.” He patted me on the cheek. Clearly it pleased him as much to have a weapon against Liza as it pleased Liza to have a weapon against him. Yet in all this fractiousness, where did I fit in? No doubt Eli’s wish to bring me along was sincere; still, I couldn’t help but recognize in it a desire to hurt Liza. Nor had she been entirely truthful, I suspected, when she’d insisted that she wished the best for Eli and me, for if she did, then why had she tried so hard at dinner to make him look ridiculous?

  It is always disturbing to recognize the capacity for malice in friends whom we are used to viewing as generous and kind; yet such an acknowledgment is less essential if we wish to cut the friendship off with impunity than if we intend to carry it on. And this was especially true in the case of Liza, whose aggression owed less to retaliatory anger than to that very quality of oblivious self-interest that made her at once such a companionable friend and such an unreliable ally. Thus (to give but one example) it was not until Eli threw it in her face many years later that she even realized how badly she’d hurt him by asking for his advice on whom to take to Sam Stallings’s party. Instead, that salvo, like most of her salvos, was friendly fire; it was a stray bullet slipping through a chink in the battlements, as opposed to one of those hydrogen bombs that Eli sometimes detonated. And though I cannot blame him for feeling the need to defend himself against Liza (and later me), since to stretch the war metaphor a bit further, we were both such loose cannons, neither can I pretend that his inclination toward vengefulness made my sleep easy. True, lack of intention does not excuse the perpetrator of a cruelty any more than a blind comer excuses the driver who hits a child; and yet, if asked with which one you would more likely trust your life, the terrorist or the hit-and-run driver, which would you choose?

  It was all very sad. Indeed, in hindsight I realize that the best thing I could have done that weekend would have been to make myself scarce, to invent some excuse for not coming along, and thereby give Liza the opportunity to end that part of her life with dignity. After all, only a year later I would be jumping at opportunities to spend weekends alone in the city, for by then I would have started having affairs. At the time, though, all I wanted—and at any cost—was to stay with Eli. This was the real reason I accepted his invitation, not, as I told myself, to show spousal loyalty, or to defend him against Liza’s belittlements.

  So we all went together, in Eli's mother’s station wagon, which he had borrowed for the trip. Because Liza and I had neither seen nor spoken to each other since the dinner at the Chinese restaurant, I worried that she might be sullen or short with me. Instead, when we met that morning, she greeted me with a cheerfulness that made me wonder whether Eli might have been exaggerating her disgruntlement. In fact, I would have willingly chucked all my negative expectations for the weekend out the window had Liza not, almost as soon as he got into the driver’s seat, preempted any discussion of which of us would ride in the front by claiming, with a sort of proprietary cheek, the seat next to Eli’s for herself. Annoyed but reluctant to provoke a rupture, I said nothing, only climbed into the back, where I fumed like the child to whose place I’d been relegated. Meanwhile Liza had put on a cassette tape, the cast recording of an early Sondheim musical I did not know, with which she and Eli sang along all the way to Manorville: yet another tradition from which lack of information excluded me. Was this her new strategy? I found myself wondering as we pulled into Grace’s for Cokes. That is, simply to ignore my presence for the duration of the weekend, as if I were a third fox terrier that some neighbor had asked them to care for? If so, it made me no more happy than did Eli’s refusal to heed the loud and simmering silence I’d been trying to radiate all through the drive. Indeed, when Liza went to the bathroom, giving us our first moment alone together, he did not even ask how I was. Instead he just said, “Having fun?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know any of those songs,” I said.

  “Poor Martin. I’m sorry, I forgot you might be feeling left out in the back seat. Tell you what, when we get back in, we’ll teach them to you.”

  I was not, however, about to give up so easily, and taking advantage of Liza’s absence, I hurried to the car and claimed her place in the front. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said when she came out a few minutes later, “you know I’ve got long legs. I was starting to feel cramped back there.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Liza responded listlessly, and got into the back. We resumed the drive. Once again Eli put on the cassette; then, when Liza did not start singing, he took it out again.

  By now we were passing through that long stretch of car dealerships, pool companies, and traders in marble and die that precedes the actual villages of eastern Long Island, and that gives way, soon enough, to the old shingled houses, the dimly lit restaurants in which Nora and her literary cronies were reputed to get drunk together, the hardware stores and thrift shops and “candy kitchens” that distinguished that lovely part of the world, for this was in the days before investment bankers and movie directors had begun colonizing the Hamptons, the days before Pets Painted with Love had become yet another Ralph Lauren Country Store, and the villages still retained a touch of antiquated charm. Because it was late fall, sodden leaves clogged the gutters. In front yards, on green, green lawns, raked-up piles of them waited to be carted off. Then Eli made a left turn, drove down a few narrow streets (on one of them some black children were playing stickball), and stopped the car. We got out. In contrast to most of its neighbors, Nora’s house was an old and sagging harridan, with brown shutters and a weedy front garden. Through the mayhem a few tea roses thrust out their decadent heads. On the stoop, the bricks of which also had weeds growing between them, Eli fit the key into the lock and fiddled for a minute, while behind the door a sound of snuffling and whining started up, those barks and scrapings that signify the almost uncontrollable vehemence of canine ardor.

  Then he shoved the door open, and they were all over us, two terriers who, with their bearded muzzles, their black and white coats spattered with tan, would have resembled exactly the mascot of my former employer had they only been well groomed, instead of, like the garden itself, walking thickets of fur from the depths of which, at any number of points (for they were constantly in morion), here an eye popped out, there a black nose, a pink tongue. They jumped us; they pawed us; they squealed and licked our ears. Never in the world, it seemed, had there been gratitude to equal theirs, never had there lived, anywhere in God’s green kingdom, creatures so ecstatic, so avid with love.

  We stepped inside. “Poor Nora,” Liza said with a loud sigh, and led us through the living room, past a pair of sofas draped in dirty beige sheets, along floorboards scratched by generations of dogs’ nails and never resanded. In the kitchen the faucet dripped, the wooden breakfast table was coated with a layer of grime you could draw pictures in with your finger (and Liza did). How she loved this place! She loved the bedrooms, both the spare one with its framed lace and the other, larger, in which, on a sagging bed with a white spread, the famous Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls—grandmotherly Raggedy Anns—reclined. Here the windows were curtained in a blue Chinese toile de Jouy on which a happy mustachioed fellow in pointy shoes and a jester’s cap swung on a cord suspended between two branches of a tree. On one of the branches, through a trick of perspective, a pair of elaborately plumed birds his own size had built a nest big enough for him to sleep in, along with three tidy eggs. “When I lived here one
winter I used to stare at this fabric for hours,” Liza said. “I used to make up stories set in that little world. You wouldn’t walk here; you’d skip. You’d frolic and sport.”

  “You’d cavort,” Eli said.

  “You’d bobble.”

  “You’d frisk.”

  Then we fed the dogs, and once they were sated, went ourselves to feed at the famous Quiet Clam—Liza, as promised, ordered scallops—where we wondered why Nora had given them such pretentious names. “Frankly, I think it’s show-offy,” she said. “And Nora’s not the only one. For instance, Seymour Kleinberg, did you know that he calls his pugs Isabel and Caspar, after The Portrait of a Lady?”

  “I had a music teacher in high school who named all his cats after opera heroines,” Eli said. “Tosca, Aida, Musetta, Doretta.”

  “My friend Kendall Philips,” I offered, “was in Southampton last summer, on the beach, when he heard a couple chasing after their Dalmatian puppy, and calling ‘Doghampton, Doghampton, bad dog!’”

  I smiled. Liza and Eli smiled back—a bit condescendingly, I thought.

  “And what’s wrong,” Eli asked, “with giving dogs and cats ordinary dog and cat names—you know, like Frisky or Skipper?”

  “Our dog was called Lulu,” Liza said wistfully.

  “We had a cat called Daisy.”

  “And yet by the same token certain names are almost too normal, so much so that they sound ludicrous when applied to a pet. For instance, Susan. Can you imagine meeting a cat called Susan?”

  “How about Margaret?”

  “And yet the funniest name of all for an animal—I’m sorry, but it’s got to be”—Liza covered her mouth with her hands—“is Martin. Martin!” She guffawed. “Can you imagine it, Eli? ‘Martin, here, boy! Good Martin!”’

  “Darn,” Eli said, “Martin peed on the mg!”

  “Ha-ha,” I said neutrally, and made no fuss; after all, the last thing I wanted was to be accused of being a spoilsport. And yet the words rankled. Once again, I was the outsider, the interloper. It seemed to be my fate.