Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  “Let’s go,” Eli said.

  Then she led us through spaces we already knew: the living room and the dining room, and the room with the twin beds, and the room with the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls, with its curtains of Chinese toile. Next she showed us her study, where Eli intended to set up his computer, and a little spare room next door, once Hilda’s sewing room, where it was my hope to start work on a novel about my mother’s death. (“Dying mothers and whacking off, whacking off and dying mothers,” Seamus Holt had written of me. “Can this boy speak of nothing else?”)

  Finally we followed Nora up a steep little staircase to the attic, which was kept locked, and into which neither of us had previously stepped. The door required some fiddling before she could get it to budge; when it did, it revealed a long, low mansard, its clean geometries accented by rows of putty-colored metal shelving. Everything here was tidy and sparse: the manuscripts, the notebooks, even the frayed and yellowed letters and lists folded neatly in their dusty plastic sleeves. As for the books—and every book Nora had ever written was here, in every conceivable edition, from Japanese to Finnish to Icelandic—affixed to their spines were little labels bearing call numbers, Dewey decimal, written out in Hilda’s neat librarian’s hand. “She couldn’t stomach the demise of the Dewey decimal system,” Nora said. “Clung to it to the bitter end.” Pulling a small chair out from under a child-sized desk, she sat down. “Oh, I really can’t keep up with all of this since Hilda died! Why, just look over there!” And she pointed to a hasty pile of scraps and books, everything that had come in since Hilda had given up her guardianship, still waiting to be catalogued. “You know I’ve never been a very organized person,” she said to me—which I thought strange given that I hardly knew her. “Left to my own devices I’d live in a chaos. But Hilda—this was her calling. And now I feel I owe it to her to maintain what she began, which is why I’ve finally agreed to accept Yale’s offer and sell them the whole kit and caboodle. Do you think it’s all right, Eli? Do you think she’d mind?”

  “Of course not,” Eli answered soothingly, rubbing his friend’s shoulders.

  She sighed. “Thank you. I don’t get touched much anymore, except by doctors. Anyway, they’ve just upped the offer to fifty thousand. And I could do with the money right now, I must say. The hip replacement—I thought Medicare would pay for everything. But it turns out it only pays for part of everything! Ow!” She grimaced; Eli had pummeled too hard. “I’ll tell you, I expected old age to be a lot of things, I expected it to be boring and painful and frustrating. What I never expected was for it to be so damned expensive. People really live too long,” she concluded, as she had at Sam’s party, then stood again and led us back down the narrow staircase.

  That night Nora slept in her own guest room, giving us the room with the double bed. She was leaving early in the morning, and we made sure to be up in time to see her off. As it turned out, however, not only had she risen before we had, she’d made us breakfast: an old-fashioned American breakfast, eggs and pancakes and sausages. “People live too long,” she repeated from the stove, where she was pouring batter onto a none-too-clean cast-iron griddle. “You remember that nice boy who used to run the bookstore, Eli? I’m sure you met him. Well, he has to give it up. He can’t earn enough off the shop to afford living out here—and his family’s been in East Hampton for two hundred years!” She made a noise of disgust. “And to think that when I bought this place it went for twelve thousand dollars, which at the time seemed like a fortune! But now my friend Pat, who’s in real estate, she says I could sell it in a second for half a million just because it’s south of the highway. And I just might. Who knows? The town’s not what it used to be, what with all those junky stores on Newtown Lane, the T-shirt shops and the Christmas-all-year shops and the Ralph what’s-his-name—isn’t he really Lipschitz? It reminds me of Revere Beach when I was a kid. Like one of those gimcrack little amusement park towns on the Atlantic. You never would have expected that here. Here we had Jackson Pollock.” She poured out the last of the batter. “Still, the last thing I want is to turn into one of those miserable old fools who devote their lives to being bulwarks against change, like Hilda with her Dewey decimal obsession. ‘Bulwarks against change.’ Do you like that, Eli?” He nodded. “Write it down for me, will you?”

  “Sure thing,” Eli said, pulling a pad from his pocket, and leaving me to marvel once again at the strange ways writers adopt in each other’s company.

  Later that morning, after we had safely planted Nora on the Hampton Jitney, we took Maisie for a walk through the town. Newtown Lane was, as Nora had promised, a curious mishmash of rubbish both expensive and cheap. Fly-by-night branches of New York boutiques elbowed the hardware store, while across the street a sentry of overpriced little antiques stores, their windows replete with painted New England dressers and Royal Crown Derby, flanked a pallid pizzeria; with the first fall leaves, we knew, their owners would close up shop, follow the rich and the warmth down south, to Palm Beach, where they maintained their winter headquarters.

  As in New York, over the next few days we fell quickly into familiar habits, which was exactly what we’d hoped to avoid in the country. In the mornings we’d work, then eat lunch at an ersatz tearoom over which portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip presided, before riding down to the gay beach on a pair of rusty bicycles that Eli had dug out of Nora’s garage. I liked the gay beach, where sociable lesbians read mystery novels amid the tanned and oily bodybuilders. Compared to theirs, our towels were threadbare, our umbrella—like the bicycle, dug out of Nora’s garage—ill-tempered and prone to collapse. Still, we had fun. While Eli played with the dog, I took long strolls along the shore on the pretense of wanting to “think something out” and inevitably ended up in a zone of dunes and beach grass, lunar valleys where men lounged naked amid signs warning against Lyme disease. (Everywhere, it seemed, sex and disease were wed.)

  Sometimes, when Eli was in New York for an opera, or to see his mother, I’d go to the beach at night. When I took off my shoes, the sand squished up between my toes, not burning as at noon but cool like the other side of a pillow. Often a fog reduced the other men scattered among the dunes to murky bulbs of shadow from which, as I approached, a figure might disjoin itself, veer toward me, then disappear into the tenebrous distance. I’d move on. And though we might meet again, that stranger and I, though he might even grope my chest and stomach like a blind man before a statue—not for pleasure, but simply to get a rough idea of what I felt like, whether I was muscly or soft, hairy or smooth—only rarely would we graduate to the next step, fingers fumbling with belts, the untangling of a penis already moist with the residue of some earlier encounter. Then the game would begin, that familiar and tiresome game; over and over you would bring each other to the point of orgasm and then back away, like children daring each other to jump into a cold pool—“you first”; “no, you first”—until it became clear that neither was willing to go first, at which point you would bid each other a resigned farewell, zip up your pants, and walk hurriedly away.

  Once, on that beach, on a particularly foggy night, an alluring shadow beckoned me into the dunes, only to reveal itself to belong to Henry Deane. Both of us laughed from embarrassment. “I think it’s probably best if we don’t mention to anyone our running into each other this way,” he said as we made our way back to the parking lot.

  “No, of course not,” I agreed. “And what are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Visiting Seamus. He’s got a place in Springs. He’s been coming out for years.” We had reached the tarmac. A car trained its brights on us, so that we had to squint. Trapped, for a few seconds, in the scrutiny of our nameless assessor, Henry smiled and waved, at which point the driver gunned his engines and fled in a fury.

  “The thing is, Seamus would never approve of my coming to the beach at night,” Henry went on. “He’s very puritanical about such matters. Jesus, staying there’s like
being in a nunnery! Fortunately he’s in New York this evening. And what about your Eli? Also in town?”

  I nodded.

  “Ah well, when the cat’s away the mice will play. And there must be honor among mice.”

  “Of course.”

  “Much more pleasant, this beach, than some bar. The other night, for instance, you’ll never guess who picked me up here—that fellow brat-packer of yours, what’s his name, the one they’re always comparing to Bret Easton Ellis.”

  “Bart Donovan.”

  “Right. I didn’t even know he was gay—he says he isn’t, he dates girls, too—only in his spare time he has a thing for older gentlemen like me. Anyway, he invited me back to his place. At first I was worried, he looked so innocent, with these big eyes like a basset hound’s, but then when we got there he opened up a suitcase and there were all these dildos. But I mean, huge dildos! And he wanted me to fuck them with him—him with them, sorry—from smallest to largest, leading up to the biggest of all, which was this horrifying thing, I don’t even know what to call it, in the shape of an arm and fist. It might have been the scale model for some Trotskyite monument! A real paean in the ass, if you get my drift. Ha!”

  “And did you do it?”

  “Of course! I didn’t want to disappoint the boy.”

  “And?”

  “Well, just as he promised, they all went straight in. No trouble at all! He didn’t even need poppers. So afterward, being naturally curious, I asked him how he managed it, and he just shrugged, and said, ‘Mind over matter, dude.’ Although of course I couldn’t help but wonder, if he needed that at twenty-whatever, what he was going to need when he got to be my age.” Henry touched my shoulder. “Don’t mention any of this to Seamus. If he finds out he’ll probably start calling up Bart and railing at him to come out of the closet, and guess who’ll get blamed? Moi! Oh, and by the way, how’s that nice dyke friend of yours? Lisa?”

  “Liza. Getting married, actually.”

  “Really! I’ve never been to a lesbian wedding, though I’ve heard—”

  “She’s marrying a man.”

  “Oh. And are you going?”

  I shook my head. In fact, the question of whether to attend Liza’s wedding had in recent days become a source of contention between Eli and me, chiefly as a result of her having sent us two separate invitations, which he took as a hostile gesture: “As if a gay couple doesn’t deserve to be treated like any other couple,” he complained. It went without saying that Eli himself was planning to decline. And yet in contrast to earlier days, I thought I could hear beneath his anger a suppressed choke of regret, that for the sake of mere disapproval he was sacrificing the most enduring friendship of his life. Clearly it was pride, or mostly pride, that kept him from surrendering his posture of defiance. As for me, though I felt less strongly about the matter, the last thing I wanted was to provoke him. As it stood we were fighting far too much about things that I wasn’t conscious of doing for me to dare any deliberate provocation.

  So we decided not to go, though at Harriet’s urging we sent a present. At first Eli wanted to send knives. “What’s wrong with knives?” he asked when I objected. “A nice set of knives makes for a good, practical gift.”

  “But she might take it negatively. The sharpness and all.”

  He sighed loudly; scratched his head. “You may be right. Well, to hell with it, then, I’ll call Fortunoff's and have a blender delivered. If you don’t think that’s too aggressive.”

  “No, no.”

  “I think a blender’s the perfect choice,” he continued, picking up the phone. “You know, because it carries no connotation of malice in its own right, and yet it’s so impersonal ... I’m sure she’ll get the message.”

  A week later a thank-you note arrived, addressed, this time, to both of us, and bearing not Liza’s but Ben’s address. “Dear Eli and Martin,” it read:

  Your lovely gift arrived yesterday, and we are thrilled! Already we’ve whipped up a gazpacho and a round of piña coladas. Thank you so much! We will remember you with every pesto!

  Yours,

  Liza and Ben

  “Pina coladas!” Eli cried after he read the letter. “Can you imagine Liza drinking a pińa colada?” He shook his head. “And when I think of the letters she used to write me!” he added, his voice lilting with a pathos from which I failed to derive a single useful clue as to the degree to which sorrow might underlie his anger with me.

  We were not settling in. In Nora’s house, away from newspapers and telephone calls, we had hoped to find a silence in which we could once again hear our own voices; instead New York—and specifically those aspects of New York with which we found it so difficult to cope—appeared, with a sort of canine loyalty, to have followed us out. Thus, not only were we always running into Marge Preston, in shorts and T-shirt, at the grocery store, but we were also always getting invitations—from Billie, from both our editors, even from Sam Stallings, who had rented a place in Amagansett—to cocktail parties. Worse, it seemed we could not leave the house without running into someone one of us knew—for instance, Donald Schindler, whom we encountered one evening in line at the movies, part of a crowd gazing bemusedly at a talking car, its lights flashing. (“Stand back,” it declared. “Do not approach.”) Yet another of those overmonied Wall Street whiz kids whose increasingly loud presence Nora so lamented, he immediately asked us to a barbecue at a place he had taken with “some people from Smith Barney.” The address was in the Northwest Woods, in a zone of cheaply built plywood spec houses the enormous rent for which ten or twelve remote acquaintances would divvy up, and where in a weird recapitulation of college days these men and women who lived normally in expensive if small apartments, and shared their beds only with lovers, would have to “bunk” in the same room with two or three virtual strangers. Eli and I, on the other hand, had the run of Nora’s vast if dilapidated manse, for which we paid nothing, though under normal circumstances it would have commanded a hefty price. In the mornings we lounged plaintively in the weedy back garden; in the evenings (and against our better judgment) we went to parties from which Eli, as a consequence of being written off one too many times as “Mrs. Bauman,” tended to emerge sullen or wrathful.

  One night, at a dinner hosted by Henry’s agent (she turned out to be the fat lady from Sam Stallings’s launch), we ran into Seamus. With his tall, stooped figure, grizzled beard, and bushy eyebrows, he might have been some rabid Puritanical minister, a gay Roger Chillingworth. “Nora Foy!” he cried when we told him where we were staying. “That ridiculous cow, why doesn’t she come out?” (I felt the swoosh of heads turning.) “It infuriates me,” he went on, “when these people everyone knows perfectly well are queer refuse to fess up, especially at a moment of crisis. Why sometimes I’m tempted to drag her out myself, kicking and—”

  “Now, Seamus, temper, temper,” interrupted Henry, who was with him.

  “But isn’t it a question of generations?” Eli put in timidly. “I mean, Nora’s older than we are. Perhaps for her—”

  “Generations, schmenerations, courage is courage and cowardice is cowardice.”

  Kendall—always present at such functions—now changed the subject, as was his role. I worried that from then on Seamus might hate me even more than he hated my books, and was surprised, the next morning, to get a call from him. It seemed that the afternoon before, the Fundamentalist Christian owner of a café on Main Street, Delicious Delights, had fired his lesbian employee, claiming that she had kissed her lover on the lips at work. Now Seamus was putting together a picket in front of the shop of the sort that in New York he had already organized several times with great success, albeit on a larger scale and to protest larger injustices.

  Dutifully, then, Eli and I drove over to Delicious Delights, where along with Henry and about a dozen other embarrassed-looking friends of Seamus’s, including Henry’s agent in dark sunglasses and a straw hat, we marched dolefully back and forth for an hour or so, muttering at
Seamus’s urging, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, homophobia’s got to go,” while the smirking owner of the café videotaped us, and the lesbian whose firing had incited the fracas gave an interview to a youthful reporter from the East Hampton Star. I remember thinking how much less self-conscious I would have felt if I had been (as indeed I would soon be) one of thousands storming city hall in Manhattan, our defiance emboldened by the protective embrace of so many comrades. Instead the fired lesbian sounded demented as she gibbered to the reporter, and when Donald Schindler arrived with some of his Smith Barney pals for a prebeach cappuccino, a gust of shame ran through me. “What’s going on?” he asked. I explained. “Well, then, I guess I won’t go in,” he said, watching regretfully as his Wall Street confreres, slick boys and girls who did not share his historical association with queers, ignored him and me and strode blithely across the picket line.

  Later—thirsty in the heat—I noticed Henry standing a little apart from the rest of the crowd, drinking a Coke. “Where did you get it?” I asked.

  “At Delicious Delights,” he whispered. “Don’t tell Seamus, I snuck in while he was taking a whiz”—which was just like Henry. The fact that he was in many ways much more of a literary man than his friend justified, at least to my mind, his comparative lack of scruples, in which I took a giddy pleasure. For I admired the rebel in him, and recognized even then that Seamus, for all his troublemaking, in the end possessed the less radical soul.

  The European grandeur of Henry’s writing, combined with his penchant for outrageous frankness, meant that he made many of his colleagues jealous, most notably an elderly, irascible author—like Henry, an expatriate—who had until recently enjoyed the distinction of being the only “mainstream” American novelist to live openly as a homosexual. A few weeks earlier, at a dinner party, Kendall had found himself seated next to this gentleman, who had spent the bulk of the meal railing against Henry, his words becoming more vituperative the more he drank, until in his stupor he reached for the wine and picked up a bottle of olive oil by mistake. Stunned and fascinated, Kendall watched the old man fill his glass, take a gulp, and splutter olive oil all over his shirt and tie. “You did that on purpose!” he cried while a servant mopped him. “You didn’t warn me! You all want me to die so you can elect Henry Deane king fag!”