Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Sometimes, during those somber days on Park Avenue, I also thought of Roy. Since returning from Seattle I’d neither called nor heard from him. Even so, his hands caressing the outline of my photograph stayed with me; their imagined touch, which only the book jacket had felt, intimated possibilities of joy, freedom from warfare and sorrow, tranquillity, and at the same moment stimulation, because (of course) such a life was remote from this world; reality had not yet smudged it with dirty fingers. And then Roy, too, would intrude upon my dreams, often in the company of my mother, with whom he walked peacefully on the rocks that front the Pacific near Port Angeles, and where once (it seemed eons ago) I had gone with her to see the sea elephants. Me, I was alone, in the distance, as always, watching.

  I did not go home. This was mostly to avoid my father, who in his perfectly reasonable eagerness to get on with his life was making all sorts of changes to the house of which I disapproved. Gone, for instance, was the hydromassage tub that had previously been the Hole; in its place a new bathroom, all chrome and glass, had risen. Where previously the floors had been covered by shag carpeting, new parquet was being laid. He’d even painted the shingles gray, and gotten rid of the bed in which he and my mother had slept, replacing it with a low mahogany platform, a pallet of foam as minimal and sleek as the life for which, in his sorrow, he was preparing himself: all changes that in my view, at least, amounted to acts of desecration, for it seemed to me then that it was his duty to maintain the house as it had always been, as a sort of shrine to his dead wife’s spirit at which her children and grandchildren, whenever they chose, could pay homage. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is usually the old who want to go forward, while the young cling heedlessly to the past.

  Much of my time I spent with Harriet. A kind and intelligent woman, she had worried eyes and blond hair for which she had once been famous, but which today she kept short and to the point. Like many daughters of the Depression—like my own mother—she was too well trained in the art of self-denial to think much of her own pleasure. Thus when they were alone, she and Marty never drank wine, rarely went to restaurants, ate plenty of healthful unsalted fish. Let one of her children telephone to announce an imminent visit, however, and the spaghetti to be dressed with a jar of tomato sauce warmed in the microwave would give way to briskets of beef, noodle kugel, chocolate chip cookies. The comfort I took in her home, I see now, must have touched her maternal vanity, yet more to the point was the fact that my presence there, though questionable in its outward semblances—what etiquette guide, after all, explains how to introduce your son’s homosexual lover at the synagogue?—had the side benefit of bringing her elusive, much-loved, first-born Elijah back into the fold. Harriet’s gratitude to me meant that there was little she would not have done to ease my sorrow, few whims of mine she would not have indulged, if only to guarantee that I would keep bringing Eli back.

  Yet she drew the line at Christmas. This was a chronic sore spot between us, my fondness for elves and mistletoe and all the other accoutrements of a holiday that for her would forever be summed up by the girls who in her childhood had pushed her off the jungle gym, chanting, “You killed Christ! You killed Christ!” Thus when she saw the little tree that Eli—at my behest—had set up and decorated in his apartment, her response was to weep. “Don’t you know the lights are suppose to represent the drops of Christ’s blood?” she cried. I didn’t know—further evidence of my family’s laxness and ignorance. If she’d had her way, Harriet would have used Christmas as an opportunity to inculcate in me, at last, some knowledge of my own religious heritage. Instead I kept putting in for a tree. I begged for a tree. “You can call it a Chanukah bush if you want,” I reasoned.

  “But it’s not our faith.”

  Finally, as a concession, she agreed to roast a turkey, so long as it could be accompanied by something decidedly un-Christmasy. (We settled on lasagna.) Most of the morning she and Marty devoted to back taxes; then around five we sat down at the kitchen table. Only the four of us were there. While we ate Marty watched C-Span on the little television. Eventually Harriet got up to clean the kitchen, and I went to call my father, who was spending the holiday at the beach house of some friends. “Happy holidays,” I said to him glumly, as in the background music played, ice clinked in glasses.

  “Happy! Ha!” my father answered. “I’m about to cry.”

  On New Year’s Day, Eli and I went back to New York; once reinstalled in his apartment I spent most of my time in the loft bed, watching television, just as at his parents’ I had spent most of my time riding the Stair-a-Lator up and down, up and down. Such behavior, needless to say, worried Eli. Eager to remedy the situation, he made it clear that he would be available at any hour, to satisfy any little desire I might have; indeed, all I had to do was mention, in the most off-the-cuff manner, some casual yen—for an ice cream sundae, say, or the video of a favorite movie—and he would be on the phone or out the door to satisfy it. Still, I got no happier. Because I so rarely left it, the apartment took on a stuffy smell that frustrated the athlete in him; after all, spring was coming; he needed fresh air, grass on which to stretch his limbs. Finally one warm morning he threw open all the windows, admitting a breeze big drafts of which he gulped like water. I stayed in bed. “I’m going to take Maisie to the park,” he announced loudly, perhaps in the hope that I might volunteer to join them. But I didn’t.

  “Too bad we don’t live closer to the park,” I said, “or you wouldn’t have to take the subway.”

  “Would you like that? Would you like to live closer to the park?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  A few days later a dentist’s appointment compelled me, for the first time in weeks, to leave the apartment. When I got back, Eli had vacuumed, taken the sheets to the laundry, even made the bed—no mean feat, when the bed is ten feet off the ground. “I have a surprise for you,” he said and, sitting me down, announced that he had just sublet his studio for a year to an NYU undergraduate, renting in its stead the uptown apartment of a friend of his, a composer called Glenn Schaefer who was about to leave for a sabbatical in Florence. Ostensibly the purpose of this rather troublesome and complex removal was to fulfill my wish that we live closer to Central Park, the healing properties of which Eli advocated mightily, not only for us, but also for Maisie, who could run free there as she never could in the East Village. Also, we would have more space: a one-bedroom instead of two studios. Also, if I followed his lead and sublet my own apartment, we could try out, as we never had before, the experiment of actually living together.

  To work out the details, Eli and I went to have dinner with Glenn at his apartment. Comparatively speaking, he was a new friend of Eli’s; that is to say, they had met only a few months before, during the intermission of a Met performance of Aida, where in the men’s room Glenn had tried to pick him up—unsuccessfully, as it turned out, though they became great pals anyway. More recently, Eli had shared with Glenn the unfinished string trio on which he had been working for so many years, and to which, in the wake of Glenn’s suggestions, he had recently returned with renewed zeal. As a composer, Glenn was notorious for his “Nonet in F-sharp Minor Never to Be Played,” a postmodernist conundrum that had earned him ridicule from the New York Times, as well as veneration from the music students who now flocked to his composition seminar at Rutgers.

  What Eli saw in him I was never able to fathom. In his early forties, troglodytic and muscular, with an unmown blond face and heavy-lidded eyes, he suffered from terrible halitosis, as well as that more typical New York malady, a sort of halitosis of the mind, the victims of which feel compelled to share with you, from the word go, all the most scurrilous details of their lives. Thus at dinner, in response to an innocent inquiry on my part as to why he liked Florence so much, he had led me to a bookshelf filled with thirty years’ worth of sketchpads, pulled out “1984,” and, handing it to me, said, “Turn to page seventeen.” I did. A hirsute youth, wearing only white boxer shorts, sat open-
legged on a Dante chair. “His name’s Pierluigi,” Glenn said rapturously, “and he plays double bass in the Orchestra della Toscana. Straight of course, but I’ve had him. If you go to Florence, you could have him too.”

  He returned to the kitchen, where Eli was supervising the final stages of a chicken tetrazzini—chicken tetrazzini being, as it happened, Glenn’s gastronomic calling card. This left me alone in the sunken living room with his boyfriend of the moment, an underfed Russian émigré called Ivan, in his early twenties, whom Glenn liked to tease by instructing to repeat what he referred to as “that sentence.”

  “But vy?” Ivan would protest. “Vy you vant me to say this stupid thing?”

  “Come on. Please.”

  Ivan would huff. “All right, all right. ‘Ve must get rid of moose and squirrel.’ But vy is this funny? Vy?”

  Poor Ivan, this evening, appeared desolate, no doubt because in a few days his lover of the last several months would be departing for Tuscany, for umbrella pines and ribollita and a hundred Pierluigis. Slumped on a sofa from the brocade covers of which dust rose in mushroom clouds, he gazed out the window at windows. Traffic noise roared up. Me, I was too busy studying the apartment to take much notice of him. It was a very weird place. Table lamps and wall sconces with red shades threw an opium-dennish light against the walls, which were painted black; photographs mottled them, many of famous people, including a Russian actor I recognized, naked against a cream-colored screen. His penis, though flaccid, hung halfway to his knee.

  “Oh, that,” Glenn said when I asked him about it. “A little treasure of mine. Avedon took it—on the condition that it never be shown publicly.”

  “Then how did you get it?”

  “I used to have a friend who worked in his dark room. Sometimes he’d sneak me a print...” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Dead now. My friend, as well as the actor.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Isn’t it?” Glenn leaned closer. “I only wish all Russians...” And indicating poor Ivan, he sighed loudly, so that I caught a whiff of his sour-sweet, mulchy breath.

  After that the famous chicken tetrazzini was served. Because he talked so much, Glenn ended up eating very little, whereas Ivan ate huge quantities of food very slowly, like Klothilde, the poor relation in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Neither he nor I took much of a role in the conversation, which centered on the vilifications a pair of opera singers were reputed to hurl at each other during rehearsals: much more up Eli’s alley than mine, that topic. Also, I was far too busy trying to figure out how on earth I was going to live in such an unlikely place to pay much attention to what was being said. Around the sunken bowl of the living room, a collection of human and animal skulls, memento mori and shrunken heads, was ranged. This wasn’t so bad—such objects could easily be stowed in a closet—and yet could the same be said for the vast decoupage of snapshots with which Glenn had covered one entire wall of the bedroom, a farrago of faces and bodies I didn’t know, arranged with such intricate (and intimate) care that once undone, I suspected, it could never be reconstructed? It was to this mesh of Glenn’s history—what Eli called his “little black wall”—that we would wake every morning during the months we lived there. While we dressed, strangers’ faces scrutinized our nakedness. In the night they infiltrated our dreams.

  The next week I sublet my apartment to Julia Baylor, who had just broken up with her boyfriend. Then, dog and computers in tow, we moved uptown. Earlier, Glenn had encouraged Eli and me to take advantage of his collection of CDs and videos, especially the pornographic ones, which, he’d hinted, were a far cry from the usual West Hollywood fare. Our curiosity piqued, we put one in the VCR the first night. It turned out to be a medley of Glenn’s favorite scenes from various commercial productions, spliced together to provide a sort of route map to his orgasms. Indeed, at the end of the tape a clip for which he must have felt a special fondness, in which a burly man in his forties plunges a dildo into a blond boy’s upturned ass, was repeated over and over, as if a needle had gotten stuck on a record.

  On another tape, the usual porn gave way, after a few minutes, to footage of a naked Ivan sitting cross-legged on Glenn’s bed with another youth. This boy was even skinnier than Ivan was, and had terrible pimples on his back. While off screen Glenn’s voice issued orders, the pair sifted through a cardboard box filled with whips, buttplugs, and vibrators, eventually laying hands on a sort of two-ended dildo which reminded me of the pushmi-pullyu in Doctor Dolittle. “Okay, Ivan,” Glenn’s voice instructed from the distance, “now take the lube and grease up Ignat’s butt.”

  At this point Eli switched off the tape. “Most shocking,” he said. “Maisie is scandalized. I’m putting her to bed.”

  Carrying the dog under his arm like a purse, he disappeared through the bedroom door. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I called after him. Instead of following, however, I turned the video back on. What excited me about it was less the fact of Ivan’s presence—he wasn’t at all my type—as the knowledge that only a few nights before, in this very room, he and I had eaten dinner together, conversed, exchanged bored glances across the table. This was the intoxication of the real, and I was experiencing it for the first time: that moment when the line between what is imagined and what is smelled, touched, tasted, suddenly blurs. Wasn’t the sofa on which he and Ignat were currently engaging in such a fascinatingly rarefied act of fornication the very one on which I, pants around my ankles, now sat? True, it was distasteful to think that from across an ocean—by proxy, as it were—Glenn was seducing me as, despite his bad breath, he had presumably seduced Ivan, Ignat, and the double bassist from Florence. Yet unlike Eli, I submitted willingly to his remote control. I did not go into the bedroom. I stayed, and I watched.

  Living in that apartment, I later told Roy, was a bit like being trapped in one of Glenn’s videos, in the endless loop of his tics and compulsions. From every wall, every cornice and doorknob, he bore down, the whole corrosive mess of him, squeezing the breath out of me as no doubt, heaving over him, he must have squeezed the breath out of poor scrawny Ivan. And though at night, it was true, the living room took on a certain sheen of metropolitan glamour, the lamps with their fringed scarlet shades glowed languidly, the light of passing taxis, bouncing upward, made a pleasing show against the mullioned windows (so that I understood, for a moment, how easy it would be to succumb to Glenn’s strategic caresses), by daybreak his almost fungal presence—immanent in the books on his shelves and the suits in his closet—would have reasserted itself, as heavy as the smell of old beer and cigarettes in a nightclub from which the last partygoer, at five in the morning, has just departed.

  It was during the weeks immediately following our move uptown that I became accident-prone. Walking one afternoon down Broadway, a movie marquee across the way having caught my eye, I tripped over the curb, twisted my ankle, and landed nose down on the pavement. Blood poured out, strangers screamed, though in the end it turned out merely to be a surface wound; no bones broken. Then a few days later, driving Harriet’s station wagon through the Midtown Tunnel, my eyes blackened as if I had been beaten (and one of the ironies of my accidents was that they always left me looking beaten, so that many people began to suspect Eli of assaulting me), I nearly rear-ended a Hampton Jitney on its way to Montauk. Eli cursed my spaciness, almost got angry, then controlled himself. How on earth could I be so careless? he asked. Did I have a death wish? I hotly denied it. Even so, balancing atop a precarious ladder in Glenn’s apartment a week or so later, I stretched too far to adjust a book and crashed to the ground, bruising my hip so that it turned a purplish black. As it happened I was alone at the time, which was fortunate: I couldn’t have borne Eli’s reproachments. Dragging myself to the sofa, my ankle still aching from when I’d hit my nose, I wondered if perhaps he was right, if I had a death wish. And yet I didn’t think I wanted to die. If anything, I had a life wish. I was teasing fate to prove my invincibility.

  The truth was, in
the wake of my mother’s death I was having to confront for the first time the very phenomenon of mortality from which her illness, curiously enough, had always protected me. This, I think, is why I was constantly walking into lampposts or slipping on the ice all that winter: to test my own immunity, to establish that what had happened to her (not to mention what had happened to Philip Crenshaw) would never happen to me. For everywhere I turned, it seemed, someone was dying. Lars, after a swift illness—five days!—was dead. So was Eve Schlossberg’s brother. So, for that matter, was Theodoric Vere Swanson III, the first boy I’d ever slept with. That I knew none of them well, curiously enough, only added to the sense of bewilderment that the news of their deaths called up in me. For it seemed that there should have been everywhere vigorous young men, most of whom one hardly knew, running up and down city streets, chatting and eating and looking for just the right dining table for their apartments; instead of which, mysteriously, there were not.

  These were dark days—literally. A blanketing of gray, the color of the iron curtain, as I envisioned it in childhood, descended over the city and would not lift. It was thick, miasmal. Dusk came at five or so, bringing a bit of relief in that it cloaked, for a time, the straitjacket of the sky. Then in the morning we would look for the tiniest breach in the clouds, and not find it. There was little reason to go out. The air was wet and chilly, and in the neighborhood shops everybody had a cold.

  I was trying to write about Joey, about being robbed, albeit not very successfully. The problem was that in those days I clung to the notion that any misfortune could be redeemed through its own recounting; and while it is true that the cooking down of experience into something at once more beautiful and less inchoate than itself can be a cathartic process, clarifying as well as purgative, such transformative episodes are both rare and costly, requiring a degree of self-knowledge I did not then possess; what was really a subtle and complex negotiation between fate and art I misconstrued as the crudest kind of barter, in some cases a literal barter, as if by earning more money from the story I wrote about Joey than he had stolen from me, I could not only compensate for, but somehow profit from his attack.