By the time we got back to Nora’s that evening, the dogs had once again entered into a state of ecstatic loneliness. Having first jumped on us and licked our ears, when we bent down, to make sure we were ourselves, they headed out into the backyard to pee and dig and do all the other things that for dogs amount to serious business.
“Have you got the joints?” Liza asked Eli, who nodded.
“Good. I’ll get out the Scrabble set.”
Bending down, she set to digging in her suitcase. Eli yawned theatrically.
“Actually, Liza,” he said, winking at me but for her, “I’m pretty bushed tonight. Couldn’t we save Scrabble for tomorrow?”
She gaped up at him. “You mean you don’t want to play?”
“Not right now.”
“And what about you, Martin?”
I turned to Eli. In fact I would have been happy to play, only his look told me to pretend otherwise.
“I’m pretty tired myself,” I said.
Liza stood up. “Well, I guess that’s that, then,” she remarked, crossing her arms over her chest. “Since I can’t play alone, I suppose there’s no choice but to hit the proverbial hay.”
“The land of dreamy-dreams,” Eli echoed.
“Still, we could at least get stoned—”
“But what’s the point, when we’re going to bed?”
“Oh, I see,” Liza said huffily, and forced a smile. “Okay, if that’s how you want it, that’s how it’ll have to be.”
“Yup.”
“Well, pleasant dreams.”
“Pleasant dreams,” Eli repeated pleasantly. Yet he did not move. None of us moved. Liza, still standing by her suitcase, fingered the bag with the Scrabble letters in it.
The dogs scratched at the door; Eli let them in.
“Well, well, well,” he said once he had both terriers inside.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m afraid that we’re on the horns of a dilemma.”
“Why? Which dilemma?”
“That tired old dilemma,” Eli said, sitting down on a sandy armchair, “of sleeping arrangements.”
“Sleeping arrangements! But why should that be a problem?”
“You tell us, Martin,” Liza said. “Where would you like to sleep tonight? Or perhaps I should ask, with whom would you like to sleep tonight?”
“Well, with Eli, of course ... I mean, doesn’t that make sense?”
“And where?”
“In the room with the double bed. Where else?”
“So in other words, you two’ll take the big bed and the big room, and I’ll sleep in the little bed in the little room. Is that right?”
“Liza, stop this this second,” Eli suddenly barked. “You’re being ridiculous.”
Falling onto the couch, Liza buried her head in her hands and began to weep. Alarmed, the dogs ran to her. They licked her ears. They tried to lick her eyes.
“I don’t understand,” I said—though I did. “Why is this such a big deal?”
“It’s a big deal, Martin, because for the five years that Liza and I have been coming here we’ve always slept together in the big bed. And now she doesn’t want to give that up. She doesn’t want anything to change, ever, if it involves me.”
“But when you’ve come here before, you’ve always been alone, it’s always been just the two of you. Doesn’t that make a difference?”
“Of course it does. It’s a new situation—a permanent one.”
Liza wept more loudly. Standing, Eli took a box of tissues from the mantel, then sat next to her. “Oh, come on,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder, “there’s no reason to blow this all out of proportion. I mean, think of it this way: how’s it any different from when we’re in New York?”
“But we’re not in New York! We’re at Nora’s. And so I don’t see why just because the two of you are fucking, it means I should get left out in the cold—literally.”
“But whether you like it or not, Martin is my lover.”
“And so you have to sleep with him every night of your life?”
“But the thing you never seem to realize, Liza, is that if the tables were turned, if it were you and Jessica instead of me and Martin, you’d take it for granted that you two would sleep together and never even think about what I wanted.”
“But that’s my point! I’d never have invited Jessica! I’d never have been that insensitive. I’m sorry, Martin,” she continued, dabbing at her eyes, “but I’ve got to tell the truth. I’m really angry that you’re here. I’m angry at you for coming, and I’m angry at Eli for asking you, and I’m angry at myself because I see now that introducing you two was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”
“Oh, so my happiness is a mistake? My future is a mistake?”
“For me, yes.”
Eli stood. “You never think of anyone but yourself, do you?” he shouted, loudly enough so that the dogs ceased, for a moment, their endless task of comfort. Alarmed, she looked up, looked into his eyes, before spiraling away from him.
Then there was a silence. Their backs turned to each other, tensely poised in this standoff that neither arbitration nor argument would resolve, Eli and Liza stared at anything: the bookshelves, the dogs, the half-open door to the kitchen. How they loathed each other at that moment! And yet what struck me even more viscerally than the depth of their enmity was the strength of the love from which it had grown, and without which it would have desiccated into indifference. For it was as if Liza’s words had burned away a layer of cant in which their friendship had been swathed, revealing its fundamental, polarized elements, circling each other endlessly: pain and love, love and pain.
No one else was there to help. Even the dogs looked at me pleadingly, as if they recognized the limited potency of their tongues.
And so I got up. Very tentatively, I approached Liza, who was hunched in a comer of the sofa. I put a hand on her warm shoulder. “Look, how about this?” I suggested. “The bed in Nora’s room is pretty big. What if all three of us sleep there ... together?”
She laughed.
“That way we’ll all get what we want. Both of us will get Eli, you won’t have to sleep alone, I won’t have to sleep alone. Plus it’ll be fun in its own right. Like a slumber party. What do you say?”
She rubbed her nose. “I don’t know ... Eli?”
He shrugged.
“And what’s the alternative?”
Again, silence. “I suppose,” Eli said, “the alternative is that we don’t sleep.”
“I see your point,” Liza conceded, laughing a little—which relieved me. “Well, okay ... I guess.”
So we headed upstairs, to Nora’s bathroom, where like children we brushed our teeth together; we took turns peeing. While Liza put on her nightgown, Eli and I gingerly moved the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls onto the dresser, turned down the spread, took off our pants and shirts, and climbed into the bed. “Brr, it’s cold,” I said, switching off the reading lamp and burrowing into his chest.
Liza climbed in last, on his right—it went without saying that he would sleep in the middle—then switched off the other light. “Good night, Eli,” she said.
“Good night, Liza.”
“Good night, Martin.”
“Good night, Eli. Good night, Liza.”
“Good night, John Boy.” She giggled. Another silence fell, which only the mattress, sighing whenever one of us turned over, interrupted. Clinging to my comer of the sheet, I felt the bed curve under me like the earth itself; I felt Eli’s hand take mine. And far away, on the other side of this continent, was he touching Liza too? Was she touching him? For once I didn’t care. What mattered was that I was here, in the moment, in this bed, with these people who loved each other, and whom I loved. These were interesting times for me, they were exciting times—and someday they might even be pleasant times to remember.
11. I’M NOT HERE
OF MY MOTHER’S DEATH, which occurred late
that summer, I shall say little here. I have already made too much of it in fiction, milked it too much for sentiment and dread. Such episodes ought to be recounted only in the spare nudity of their experiencing. Yet how could I have done that when her death broke every rule I’d been taught in writing classes? To wit, it told what it should have showed; the dialogue was hackneyed; the descriptions were banal; none of the principals was likable; its author put himself in a position of moral superiority to his characters...
What I’m trying to say here (but it’s painful) is that for the sake of pats on the head, good reviews, and fan mail (as well as to satisfy a clause in my contract that promised me an extra ten thousand dollars for every week the book I wrote about my mother spent on the Times bestseller list, which it never made), I spruced up her death like a corpse before an open-casket funeral, in the process committing several sins of omission and at least one bold-faced lie: in the book I place my protagonist at his mother’s bedside at the moment of her death. Yet in fact, during those last hours, I was nowhere near her hospital room. Instead I was hiding with Eli at my sister’s house, eating pot brownies and watching a video of Pepe Le Pew cartoons: over and over the cat, on whose back circumstance had painted a slender white stripe, scrambled out of the passionate skunk’s arms; over and over the skunk declared undying amour. What kept me away wasn’t fear so much as a youngest child’s pouty indignation that my brother and sister should have gotten her for ten more years than I had. Well, I would show them, I decided. I would make them all sorry. But I only made myself sorry.
I suppose someday I shall forgive myself for not being with my mother when she died. I suppose I shall even forgive myself for not sticking around long enough to be with my father when he scattered her ashes over the bay. But I shall never forgive myself for the ease with which, in that novel I wrote about her death, I inserted myself into both these solemn scenes—as if my absence were merely the sort of plot inconsistency it is the duty of fiction to correct. (Stanley Flint, of course, would have seen right through such a lie: he could smell the inauthentic a mile away. And yet by that time I had long since stopped showing Flint my work, not, as I told myself, because I didn’t trust him, but because I feared he might catch me out in my mendacity.) Ahem.
That spring my story collection, The Deviled-Egg Plate, had been published to what that tiresome if useful reference work, Contemporary Authors, called “favorable-to-mixed reviews”—a locution more suggestive of weather reports than literary criticism. I quote:
Helen Shipley of the———Gazette lauded Bauman for his “fluency and grace,” while Joann Finkelstein of the Reporter praised the “crystal-clear lucidity” of his prose and the “human warmth emanating from the characters, all of whom really fizzle.”
On the other hand, Seamus Holt complained in Queer Times that Bauman’s “wan, watered-down portrayal of gay life” amounted to “the worst land of assimilationist nonsense,” while J. J. Frakes of the———Tribune-Sentinel objected to Bauman’s “obsession with homosexuality—is nobody straight?!” Of one of the stories he observed: “If this were about Jim and Polly instead of Jim and Paul, who’d give a darn?”
Kendall Philips, who read all reviews of everything, even in the most obscure newspapers, called me to commiserate. “Opinions are like assholes,” he asseverated. “Everybody has one.” Yet despite the cavils of gay activists and right-wing mavens alike, the story collection did well (for a story collection)—that is to say, it made it into paperback, got nominated for a prize, and even landed me a leading role in an article published that summer in Broadway magazine that would prove to be both the making and unmaking of my career. This article, which was titled “Invasion of the Prestige Snatchers: The Nouvelle Vague of Young Writers and Where It Hangs Out,” featured two photographs—one of me, Liza, and Eli playing Scrabble and drinking tea in front of her fireplace (my big head threw Eli’s into shadow), the other of Sam Stallings, Violet Partridge (to whom Liza, you may recall, was cozying up in the last chapter), and someone called Bart Donovan, who wrote mostly about cocaine, shooting pool in a louche Bowery bar. “It’s like they’re our evil twins,” Liza giggled when the early copies arrived, “the bad kids to our good kids.” Yet oddly enough, while the good kids in this little drama were gay Jews, the bad kids (with the possible exception of Bart Donovan) were straight WASPs. They didn’t wear sweaters their mothers had knitted. Instead Sam had ex-wives, while Violet (better known as “Vio”) had once earned her living dancing naked in a vat of Jell-O. In the end it was their vague; they were the ones who surfed it. As for us, we simply clung to the edges of the crest until it broke.
Our position was ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable; in our own minds at least, we were always the scholarship lads, the wallflowers at the tailgate. Thus I remember arriving with Liza at one of those parties that Vanity Fair was forever throwing for itself. Ahead of us in line stood Jay McInerney with his girlfriend of the moment, a model who had become famous after a lunatic had attacked her with a razor. As they neared the gauntlet of paparazzi, a hundred flashes erupted. “How stupid,” I said to Liza, yet was unable to hide my chagrin when upon our own entrance the photographers reloaded their film.
Even more distressing to me were those occasions on which I found myself the object of an attention that seemed to me misplaced, or in some way warped. For example, in Milan once with Eli to promote the Italian translation of my stories, I attended along with Sam Stallings a party honoring “the new generation of American writers,” the host for which was a famous clothes designer. Here, though wearing a pink-and-white-striped jacket purchased for twenty dollars at a Seventh Avenue knockoff shop, I was compelled by the regiment of fashion photographers present to dance before their cameras with a former Itahan starlet of the fifties, now boozy and hoarse-voiced. No doubt the artificial intimacy into which we were thrust embarrassed the actress as much as my jacket did; nonetheless, being a veteran of such publicity stunts, she played along gamely, whispering in my ear what appeared to be endearments but were actually arch instructions not to clutch so tightly at her crimson mile dress. Afterward, at the end of half a dozen interviews with regional papers in which I was asked, “Can you tell us at which clubs you and the other members of the Brat Pack drink together like the Lost Generation in Paris?” a journalist with purple hair stuck a microphone in my face, and said, “What is death to you, in two words?”
“This interview,” I would have answered, had I been clever.
Later that night Eli and I had a fight. We only had one fight in those years, but we had it over and over. It went like this: first some ineptitude or insensitivity on my part would enrage him. In retaliation he would be cruel. In response to his cruelty I would bristle, lash out, then, as my own anger burned off, retreat into a posture of remorse and supplication that was in fact aggressive, because it demanded instant forgiveness as the ransom for leaving him alone. Soon our fight would take on a life of its own, its origins would be forgotten, it would adapt to the same invariable and sorry trajectory, with me banging furiously at a door Eli had locked. And though, every time, he proved himself to be the more skilled and cruel antagonist, keen to my weak points, which he gauged expertly, who’s to say whether in my own frantic flailing I didn’t him: him just as much? Probably I did. Still, anger was a condition of his life in a way that it had never been of mine. For he had a tornado in him. Far from earth, the little house of his soul flew about in churning winds. A few years earlier he’d read Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, and it had set him off for life, authorizing his rage, which was both relentless and lacerating. Now, every time we argued, the drama began again. Outside the window his father, like Miss Gulch, rode by on a broomstick. Liza failed to invite him to a party. Rejection letters flapped in the furious air.
The problem wasn’t anything so simple as jealousy, or that things were going badly for him; on the contrary, despite Liza’s naysaying, Billie Eberhart had just sold his novel to an eminently respect
able publisher. And yet even this good news did not make him happy, because, as he was always reminding me, though-had just bought his novel, my publisher (which he considered more prestigious) had turned it down. “Which, when you think about it, is like getting rejected by Princeton all over again,” he added.
I should have realized, then, that what I was dealing with in Eli was something far less remediable than lack of reputation; he could have won the Nobel Prize in literature, and still found a way to view his victory as somehow trumped up, fallacious, without meaning. Nor were matters made easier when mutual friends, to his face, dismissed his career as merely a subdivision of mine. Not only to newspaper subscription salesmen was he “Mrs. Bauman”; instead at that time it must have seemed that every phone call, every letter, every dinner invitation he received concealed a secret motive. Out of the blue, old friends from whom he hadn’t heard in years would call, apparently just to say hello, really to see if, through him, they could get me to do some favor for them. Fellow homosexuals, whom you would have thought more sensitive, asked him outrageous questions—“So why are you really with Martin, Eli? For your career?” Others praised his “selflessness” in giving up so much “to help Martin write ... how hard it must be for you, Eli!”
No doubt the zenith (or perhaps I should say the nadir) of this period was an Author’s Guild panel tided “What’s the Matter with Kids Today? Young Writers Speak Out” that took place in the auditorium of the same Brooklyn school at which Eli had once taught. The other participants were Julia Baylor, Violet Partridge, and an elegant woman named Lise Schiffrin who had just published an equally elegant collection of short stories, I’m Not Here. Neither Liza nor Eli were in the audience. In Liza’s case, this was because she was out of town, having been invited (it was the sort of invitation only Liza ever seemed to receive) to take part in a “youth think tank” sponsored by a manufacturer of video games; at the moment she was sitting poolside with six other “geniuses” (one of them, Ben Pollack, the man she would eventually marry) at a Ritz-Carlton in southern California. As for Eli, because we had had a fight earlier that day, at the last minute he’d refused to come with me. Instead, he said, he was going to stay home and do some of his own work for a change.
Martin Bauman Page 36
