Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Lise Schiffrin was a startling figure. Her eyes, which were immense and dark, suggested the staring panic of certain marsupials, while her long, magnificently erect torso made me think of those exotic water birds whose feathers turn pink from eating shrimp. All told she provided a welcome contrast to Vio, whom I had come to distrust in recent months, in large part due to her duplicitous habit of simultaneously reviling the literary establishment for its “elitism”—her supposed exclusion from the corridors of power owing, she argued, to her roots in the rural south, where her (very good) novel was set—and exploiting that establishment for all it was worth. Thus every Christmas for the past five years she was rumored to have mailed to about three dozen famous novelists gift-wrapped packages of homemade divinity—a present by means of which she must have hoped to drum into the consciousness of these eminences at least the rhythm of her name, so that when the bound galleys of her novel arrived in their mailboxes, instead of throwing them aside along with all the other bound galleys they received, they would take note of them, recall the association of the name Violet Partridge with the sugared delectability of the divinity (enough to make their mouths, like those of Pavlov’s dogs, water), and read the book. And this strategy, moreover, appeared to have worked, for the back of Vio’s novel boasted no less than fourteen blurbs, penned by (among others) Sam Stallings, Leonard Trask, Nora Foy, Henry Deane, and Stanley Flint.

  Such a tactic put Vio in the opposite camp from Lise, who suffered from that allergy to professionalism that distinguishes a certain kind of very dedicated and very innocent artist. She was, in the most dangerous sense of the word, a purist, which was why, when the panel began, and from each of us the aggressive moderator extracted an opening statement, she could express only her bewilderment at being asked to take part in the first place; after all, she pointed out, even though she had just published her first book, she was not, in any ordinary sense of the word, young—she was forty-four—thereby giving voice to a bafflement similar to the one I had experienced a few years earlier when Jim Sterling had taken me to see a musical review in which all the songs were based on poems written by the elderly; the trouble was, of the dozen cast members, few looked to be more than fifty, with the result that when a vigorous black woman strode onto the stage and belted out the showstopper “I Am Not Old!” we could only agree with her.

  What a welcome presence Lise was on that panel, especially during the question-and-answer session, when Vio—in response to the question, “Do you make a living from your writing?”—first claimed that her work earned her only enough money “to pay the rent” (when everyone knew she had just sold the film rights to her novel for half a million dollars), then went on to excoriate the “meritocracy” by which she felt herself to have been, as a consequence of her origins, excluded (yet at that moment she was weighing teaching offers from no less than three universities)! Lise, on the other hand, when asked what her plans were for the future, simply gazed at the audience with those wide eyes of hers, and said, “What are my plans? Very simple. Write, write, write."

  Afterward we were taken to the cafeteria and sat down at four card tables piled with copies of our books. A long line—at least fifty people—had already gathered in front of Vio’s table, where she was now signing away and chatting with the professional suavity of a talk-show host. Julia’s line was slightly shorter, and consisted mostly of current or former students of Stanley Flint. Mine was limited to about a dozen young queers, some with female accomplices in tow. As for Lise, though she was without question the most gifted writer present that evening, not a single person waited at her table. Instead she sat alone before thirty copies of I'm Not Here, clearly wishing she weren’t, so that I longed to get rid of my own admirers if for no other reason than to claim my rightful place as one of hers.

  “And who is this book for?”

  “Erika, with a K.”

  To Erika. All best wishes, Martin Bauman.

  “Hello. And who is this book for?”

  “Could you make it out to Jamie and Stuart—with a U—on their anniversary?”

  “But what if you split up? Who’ll keep the book?” They didn’t laugh. “Just kidding.” To Jamie and Stuart. Happy Anniversary! Martin Bauman.

  “Hello. And who is this for?”

  “Roy.”

  I looked up. Before me stood Roy Beckett. “Howdy, stranger,” he said.

  “Roy,” I answered. And smiled. Though I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, since that party during which we had flirted and Liza had discussed dental dams with Seamus Holt, in the intervening months his face, I had to admit, had stayed with me, a vision to be called up and mused over not while Eli and I were fighting, but rather in the exhausted aftermath of our fights, when fatigue itself had brokered a kind of peace between us. For with his lustrous, clean-shaven cheeks, Roy was in many ways the very antithesis of Eli, whose face seemed every day to become more rabbinical, more darkly scowling, as if through it the agony of history were revealing itself. Roy, by contrast, was squeaky-clean, smelling of limes. Tonight he wore a gray suit, pressed white shirt, Hermes tie—the usual Manhattan uniform, and a far cry from Eli’s tiny running shorts, his underpants pinkened by contact with something red, the jeans he had owned since high school.

  I told Roy how much I appreciated his coming to hear me—something none of my other friends had done—which made him laugh. “Do you think I’d miss one of your rare public appearances?” he asked. “Not a chance. And now, if you wouldn’t mind...” He pressed a copy of my own book toward me, back cover facing out, so that his hands seemed to be caressing my cheeks. Opening it, I wrote, To Roy Beckett, whose arrivals into my life, though rare, always bring pleasure. Yours, Martin Bauman. Then I handed it back to him. He opened the book. “You should’ve been a doctor,” he said, examining my signature, “I can hardly read your writing. So listen, what are you doing now?”

  I balked. “There’s supposed to be a dinner...”

  “With those women? Forget it. Come have a drink with me instead.”

  “But I—”

  “You’ll have more fun with me, I promise.”

  He winked—which decided me—and after I’d agreed to go, went to wait for me near the back of the room. Finishing up my signatures, I bid Lise good-bye, glancing over my shoulders, as we talked, to make sure that Roy hadn’t left. And what a different place this cafeteria seemed tonight from all those evenings on which I had sat here alone, waiting for Eli to finish up with his class! Back then I could have imagined no greater happiness than to roost amid the smells of hamburger grease and salad dressing, listening through traffic for the sound of Eli’s voice, the moment when the door would open and he and Comma Splice and Evensha Hopkins, in a riot of laughter, would tumble out ... Afterward, on the way back to his apartment, we might stop for dinner at the restaurant that served fifty-six varieties of soup. No more, though. Now rancor had contaminated the waters of our domesticity; the soup, cooked with the bones of contention, was sour.

  Roy, on the other hand, seemed to me the embodiment of freshness that evening, and not only because he cultivated such a straight-from-the-shower affect (and smell); also because, in his urbanity and carriage, the smoothness of his suit and of his words, he was, once again, the very opposite of Eli: a professional, with his own co-op, an MBA from Stanford, furniture he had bought (as opposed to inheriting it from his mother’s basement). Beautiful civilities embraced him, the same ones that Eli, in his irascibility, so consciously and high-handedly flouted. For as I was discovering, the quirky charm of his studio (and Liza’s) could pall quickly. Those little rooms that in winter had seemed so cozy became stale with the arrival of warm weather. My infatuation with Roy (and consequent disillusionment with Eli) initiated a long period during which I was forever shuttling between two worlds, which charmed and repulsed in equal measure: the first, of which Eli was the exemplar, aggressively private, and governed by the creed of personal relations; the second both more cosmopolitan and less c
ommodious, with its grand pooh-bahs and guest lists, that world that the French call—imparting to the word both a lacquer of glamour and the slightest patina of contempt—“society.”

  Roy, of course, never used this word. He had grown up poor, in a Philadelphia ghetto, which might have explained (oddly enough) the ease with which he now made his way in the corridors of blue-chip office buildings and blueblooded apartment buildings. Though Baptist and black, he was nonetheless more of a WASP than any WASP could be, just as T. S. Eliot was the consummate Englishman. Thus he did all his shopping at Paul Stuart (never Brooks Brothers), had his eye on a house in Newport, and kept a copy of Paul Fussell’s Class by his bedside. In subsequent months, when our affair really got going, I would find myself being dragged along by him to any number of AmFAR benefits, evenings that were in their way far more brain-numbing than the intimate, Amy-filled, pot-infused gatherings Liza had once convened, yet at which I might at the very least meet a Rockefeller, or hear anecdotes about the latest White House dinner, or catch the eye of the waiter as he spooned new potatoes onto my heated plate ... But I have jumped ahead, as is my habit, too far, too fast. I have to rein myself in, and bring us back to the evening of the panel, on which Roy took me out not, as I half expected, to one of the trendy restaurants where, after work, he sometimes ate a plate of quail and truffle risotto at the bar (these we would frequent later), but rather to a rooftop cocktail lounge on Second Avenue, very forties, all buttoned red plush and highhipped waitresses. From our table we could see the Roosevelt Island tramway, above the lit cables of which a surprisingly voluptuous moon rose, gray-blue, veined with canals the color of Roy’s eyes.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said, winking at me again so that I blushed.

  “I am too,” I admitted.

  Then we drank Manhattans (what else?), and he told me everything he’d liked about my book. I didn’t listen. Quite inconveniently, I thought, Eli had intruded upon our intimacy: Eli who, despite all the forces conspiring to evict him—alcohol, jazz piano, the soft but insistent pressure of Roy’s voice—was nonetheless superimposing himself upon the scene as indelibly as the reflection of a passing waitress on the view outside the window. Alone in his studio, dressed in one of the peculiar outfits he favored while working—a Tyrolean sweater, say, and no pants—he puttered about, tuned his violin, brewed some herbal tea. And all the while he hadn’t a clue that forty blocks uptown, my knee pressed into Roy’s, I was betraying him. That was the thing that got me—not Eli’s suffering, but his innocence—which was why I resolved to lie when I got home, to tell him I’d gone out with Julia and Lise Schiffrin. This was my first adultery, though it preceded by months the first time I had sex with someone else.

  After a while Roy stopped talking about my book; instead he just gazed at me. Across the narrow table I studied his face. Because I was a little drunk, I said, “It’s not often you meet someone with black hair and blue eyes.”

  “It’s not often you meet someone with black skin and blue eyes. And you, Martin Bauman, you’ve got blue eyes too, though your hair isn’t black. More mouse’s back—Nice Jewish Boy brown.”

  “Oh that’s right, you like—” I quieted, not sure whether it would be kosher for me to mention what Kendall had told me months ago, that Roy was a yarmulke queen. Yet if this was the case, shouldn’t he be warned that he was making a mistake in choosing me, who’d never gone to Hebrew school, much less been bar-mitzvahed? Eli would have been more up his fetishistic alley, I suspected, though somehow I couldn’t quite imagine Roy and Eli getting along.

  That was the closest we came that night to admitting any mutual attraction. Though more banter followed, soon Eli—or more specifically, my worry that Eli would be irritated if I got back late—propelled me to make excuses, tell Roy good-bye, and hurry home. As we parted, he slid his business card into my hand. “Don’t forget to call,” he said, and I told him I wouldn’t. What I didn’t know was that something was about to happen that would lead to the postponement of that call—and everything it implied—for more than a year.

  Eli became a different man during the weeks that led up to my mother’s death, both kinder and less contentious, as if the very gravity of the situation had revived the caregiver in him and sent the combatant into retreat. Gone, suddenly, were the great tempests of resentment to which I had become acclimated; instead, in Seattle, where we were sleeping on my sister’s pullout couch, he took it upon himself to supervise the grocery shopping and the management of the household. He picked up my nephew every afternoon at day care. In the hospital waiting room, where the rest of us were more or less living, he always made sure there was plenty of water and fruit juice around—and not only for us, but for those loved ones of other dying people with whom we were obliged to share that starkly intimate space.

  One morning (I made much of the episode in my novel, which whitewashed our relationship as much as it did my own cowardice) he even excoriated a nurse who, upon noticing us hugging in a comer, had asked us to please “stop making such a spectacle” of ourselves. Eli—employing to someone’s actual benefit, for once, that flair for invective that he had honed over years of insults—had flayed the poor woman so pitilessly that in the end she’d had no choice but to limp back to her station, as voided of spirit as the girl he had called, many years earlier, a flat-chested, dog-faced bitch.

  This attitude of protectiveness (coupled with a rerouting of hostilities in other directions from my own—that of the nurse, for example) only intensified when we got back to New York; here, too, instead of returning to his old habits of bellicosity, he treated me with an almost excessive tenderness, as if I were an injured creature whose very survival depended upon gentle handling. Nor did I fail to take advantage of this change in his demeanor, which was entirely to my benefit. For now, whenever I did something inept or insensitive, Eli, instead of snapping at me, choked back his vexation. He watched I Love Lucy in bed with me every night. He even got me a dog, an eight-week-old fox terrier called Maisie (via Nora Foy), simply because I had mentioned one day, apropos of nothing, that I wanted to have one. And when, in my simple grievousness, I begged him to take me to stay for a few days with his family—after all, though she wasn’t my mother, at least Harriet was a mother; nor was I above, at that moment, accepting a substitute for the irreplaceable thing I had just lost—he always agreed, even if it meant postponing a yoga lesson, or missing out on a choir rehearsal, or having to cancel a long-planned dinner with Liza.

  I remember vividly his parents’ house on Long Island, to which we traveled by train, or if circumstances permitted—if, for instance, Harriet had come into town to take in a concert—by station wagon. It was situated on a wide, sidewalkless thoroughfare that linked the interstate to the village, and that was called, funnily enough, Park Avenue. A vast ornamental lawn, incised in summer with stripes where the power mower had pushed back the grass like the nap of a carpet, separated traffic from the house, which was Colonial, huge and yellow; indeed, somehow it seemed too huge for its inhabitants, who stole about nervously in their own corridors, heated only the principal rooms in winter, and never sat in the living room with its bow windows and silk curtains, its gleaming Steinway, its damask couches. There was a reason for this. Until he was eight, Eli told me, his family had lived in a different house, more modest, and filled with homely, practical furniture from a department store in Westbury. But then his father, deciding that a grander residence was needed to match his grand sense of himself, had moved them out of their comfortingly crowded little neighborhood and into this haughty quasi mansion with its cargo of lowboys and ottomans, flirtatious little footstools and claw-footed coffee tables, which Harriet kept scrupulously clean, yet refused to use. Instead she sat only in the little room off the front hall to which the few items she had been able to salvage from the old house—a consolingly rumpled sofa, two BarcaLoungers, and a battered cherry cabinet—had long since, like poor but dependent cousins, been relegated.

  Sometimes,
at my insistence, we stayed on Park Avenue for days at a time. Because they were not my own, the rooms comforted me. Everywhere there were emblems of grief—for instance, the Stair-a-La-tor that climbed up the staircase to the second floor and that had been installed the year that Eli’s grandmother had come to die in an upstairs bedroom—yet because it was not my grief, I could regard these emblems with indifference, just as I could listen with indifference to the acrimonious arguments Eli sometimes had with his mother, or the music he alone played on the grand piano, or the mutterings of Marty as he tried to fix (and only broke further) the antiquated VCR. (Though one of the first to come on the market, and state-of-the-art at the time of its purchase, it was now a dinosaur.)

  Of my own mother, meanwhile, I tried to think as little as possible. The last time I’d seen her healthy had been that summer in Florida, where she and my father had gone to visit one of his sisters. “If anyone ever tells you growing old is a tragedy,” she’d said to me, “don’t listen to them. Believe me, growing old is wonderful. You know so much.”

  I dreamed about her all the time. In one dream (I had it in the guest room on Park Avenue) I received a notice in the mail that at a certain hour, at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, shadowy authorities would be making her “available” for fifteen minutes. In this dream I rushed to make the appointment, fighting traffic the whole way, then found her waiting near where the old Italians play bocci, dressed in a tartan plaid skirt fastened with a safety pin. All ravages smoothed, gazing out at the fanned red ribs of the Golden Gate Bridge, she put her arm around me and pointed to that monument to inescapability, the island of Alcatraz. “Look, Martin,” she said, as if I were still a child whose attention she had to captivate. “Look, honey. Isn’t the world an interesting place?”