Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

“It’s me,” I said.

  “Oh, hi!” (Was he glad to hear from me? His tone of unyielding cheerfulness made it hard to say.)

  “How are you?”

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, Roy,” I said. “God, I wish you were here in New York tonight, and we were planning to go out to dinner together, and to a movie, and then home—”

  He drew in his breath. “Wait, someone’s at the door.” A hand over the mouthpiece. Then: “Sorry, Martin? I’ve got to dash. Business. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “No problem. Bye.”

  “Bye.” He hung up. And how stupid of me, I thought (putting down Glenn’s black phone), to have used the word “home,” when Roy had made it so vividly clear that I was never, under any circumstances, to think of his apartment as anything more than a place where I was welcome as a guestl Not that he’d ever said as much; he was far too polite to make statements; instead he’d simply never bothered to give me a key, or empty a drawer for me, or clear a few hangers in the closet, though I slept there half the nights of each week. For there were always limits with Roy; his whole life, when you thought about it, was constructed of limits, restraints, shut doors (his parents, whom I was never to meet, his childhood, even his blackness)—so many of them that in his company (dared I admit it) I often found myself missing the impulsiveness, even the recklessness, that had led Eli and me to make our quick leap from blind date to trial marriage. No doubt it had been rash of us—indeed, if we’d been more careful, I knew, I might not have found myself in the dilemma I was in now—yet what fun it had been!

  No, I reflected—moving into the bedroom, preparing to dress for Stanley Flint’s reading—in the end this weird flat with its red-shaded sconces and homemade videos was probably as much a home to me as any of the many rooms I’d slept in over the years: my studio, and Eli’s with its high loft, and Liza’s with its little fireplace, its messy books, its face-sized television. At Eli’s parents’ house, yes, there I’d felt at home; yet now, from Park Avenue, I was banished, as I was effectively banished even from the house where I’d grown up, not because my father had willed it, but because my fear of running into Mrs. Keller made me reluctant to go back. My dorm rooms, the ones I’d shared with Jim Sterling and Donald Schindler, had long since passed into other hands, as had the old apartment on West End Avenue where I’d taken Ricky, and befriended Faye. Which left me—where?—exactly here, among Glenn’s skulls and brocades, his photos, what Eli so cleverly called his “little black wall.”

  And so it was from a place I would never have guessed I’d have ended up living that I set out, that September evening, by myself, to hear Stanley Flint give his reading at the 92nd Street Y. Uptown I walked, through warm winds and that smell of bread rising from subway grates to which I’d once thrilled, past Korean markets where women in business suits and tennis shoes, pumps in their briefcases, were picking out plums, past paid walkers leading tangles of dogs—five or six together—out toward the park. This was New York, the city in which I had always wanted to live, and where today I did live, after a fashion, along with Liza, and Eli, and Stanley Flint, and all its other denizens. And then I was at the Y, outside of which an eager crowd had already gathered, no doubt drawn by Flint’s interview with Bill Moyers (it had aired the night before), or perhaps by Henry Deane’s review, which had just come out in the Times, or perhaps by the fact that The Writing Teacher had recently hit the bestseller list at number seven. “Anybody got a ticket?” I heard a man shout, and pushed past him, just as years before I’d pushed past the journalists trying to get into the TV star’s theatrical premiere, just as before that I’d pushed those students whose names, unlike mine, hadn’t been “on the list” to claim my rightful place in Stanley Flint’s seminar: all rather fatiguing, this constant pushing past. Still, I handed in my ticket, stepped through a pair of wide doors into that inner sanctum, the auditorium itself, where people milled more quietly. Not far off I noticed Julia Baylor, with whom I rarely socialized these days, though she lived in my apartment. Never comfortable alone, she hurried up to me, slipped a bejeweled arm through mine. “We’ll sit together, is that all right?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “A real gathering of the clan tonight,” Baylor went on—and with her elbow, pointed out the boy with the wire-rimmed spectacles. “Silvery’s here too,” she added. “You know she’s a senior editor at Morrow. And look over there!” It was Mittman, shy in a business suit and tennis shoes, probably with her pumps in her briefcase.

  After a few minutes we sat down. Though Baylor was talking, avidly, however, and about any number of things—her new boyfriend, who was French; the allure of Paris; oh, and could I give her any tips on running the dishwasher, because somehow no matter which detergent she used, the glasses always came out spotty?—the crowd funneling into the theater had captivated my attention too thoroughly for me to catch much of what she said. For among the faces flowing past, in addition to our former classmates, I could recognize all sorts of people I knew: several Amys, and Henry Deane’s agent, and Janet Klass, looking sleek and scholarly in a beige linen jacket and matching skirt. No Marge though, and no Carey. And most disappointingly, no Liza, though her mother—dressed as always in a tartan skirt, a ruffled blouse—could be spied holding court near the stage, where all the seats had “Reserved” signs taped to them. And then, to my utter surprise—for she was the last person I would have expected to see here, or for that matter anywhere, ever again—the florid woman who had strode up to me in the Hudson-Terrier lobby and demanded to see the editor, thus precipitating the end of my career as a slush reader, passed through the doors. I smiled. I almost waved. She must not have recognized me, though, for she walked right past us, right down the aisle, and took one of the seats with the “Reserved” signs taped to them.

  Then the lights dimmed, the crowd hushed, Sada and her cronies hurried to their places. A bony little man in a brown suede jacket stepped out onto the stage. “Hello,” he said, his voice a barely audible stutter, “my name is Leonard Trask, and it’s my pleasure, tonight, to introduce my friend and teacher, Stanley Flint...”

  Leonard Trask! I looked at Baylor, whose gaze was fixed on his glasses. But it was impossible! I wanted to shout. How could Leonard Trask—whom Flint, we must remember, had discovered when he was still a mineworker in Montana, and who was by all accounts a ferocious figure, of Hemingwayesque proportion—how could this little man, with his mumbly tonalities and his bald spot, be he? Why, he would have looked as out of place drilling in a mine as he did here, on the stage of the 92nd Street Y in New York City, babbling and spitting and expressing his incoherent gratitude to have been given this honor, this privilege, the opportunity to introduce, tonight, a great writer ... Stanley Flint.

  Applause, then. Cane thrust forward, Flint limped onto the stage. His eyes blazed, his beard, glinting in the footlights, looked as if it were studded with mica. “Good evening,” he said, in his familiar stentorian voice, his classroom voice, and put a copy of The Writing Teacher on the lectern. “Tonight I’m going to read to you—it probably won’t surprise you—from my novel The Writing Teacher. An early chapter, about youth, which is always a dangerous subject. You may have noticed that I walk with a cane ... Many people have asked me, over the years, why this is. What happened to my leg. Well, the chapter I’m going to read tonight amounts to an explanation, albeit not necessarily the true one.” A low murmur of laughter. Flint cleared his throat. “So ... onward. Chapter Three. The Leg.”

  Baylor gasped. “Oh, I love this part,” she whispered, and pulling a copy of the novel—much dog-eared, stuck through with Post-it Notes—out of her purse, opened it to Chapter Three.

  Then Flint began to read, and what he read undid me, not only because it was great, but because it offered a rare glimpse into those muddy depths, the Flintness of Flint, by which as a student I had been so maddened and mystified. In those days, after all, Flint’s limp, like every other facet of his character, h
ad been the subject both of speculation and rumor. It was said that a jealous lover had shot him; that during his rodeo days (also unsubstantiated) a horse had thrown him; that it was Hemingway himself, during a barroom brawl precipitated by the young Flint’s daring to call the great man “a phony,” who had administered the crucial blow. And yet, if the story he read tonight was to be believed, then the explanation for his limp was both less alluring and more terrible than anything his idolatrous students could have invented. Put crudely, it was the story of a gregarious child made outcast by his peers. The harder he struggles to gain their approbation, the more coldly they disdain him, until finally, in a bid to win their attention, he becomes a clown. The other children, glad as always for the cheap spectacle of foolishness, egg him on. He willingly mistakes their mockery for appreciation. Then one day, on a dare, he runs in front of a bus as it turns a comer; the bus mows him down; his left leg is crushed, and must be amputated at the knee. (“Oh, the clownish longing,” he read, “of those who have not been loved for what they are!”)

  This, then, was the unhappy yet eminently commonplace story of Flint’s limp—a story he related, that night, in a voice at once grave and uninflected, and lacking utterly in those oratorical flourishes that had distinguished, say, his readings of Leonard Trask or Nancy Coleridge, back when Baylor and I were his students. For it seemed that he too had reached the conclusion that certain episodes must be told simply or not at all. The pleasure they provide is that of naked empathy. Indeed, it was only as he put his book down that I remembered the question with which he had been rumored to open his seminars in the old days (though in truth I’d never heard him ask it): would you be willing to sacrifice a limb in order to write a sentence as good as the one that opens A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

  After the reading ended, in the lobby, Flint sat at a card table and signed copies of The Writing Teacher. Acolytes and aspirants—dozens of us—we waited patiently as the line snaked forward. And what would I say to him when I reached its head? Something—but how to phrase it?—about the way that art slices right through all that nonsense ... no, to say that would be to add to the nonsense, not to art. Much better to strike just the right balance between judiciousness and praise, to indicate in the space of a few words not merely that his reading had moved me, but that I understood why it had moved me ... And then I was there, hovering over him (so much more demeaning, this posture, than that of the supplicant, who kneels) while he gazed up at me, eyes vague, as if he couldn’t quite connect my face with my name.

  “Martin Bauman,” I said, to help him along.

  He smiled—“Oh, Bauman, of course!”—and shook my hand. “You’ll forgive me, so many of my darlings are here tonight I’m rather overwhelmed. Well, you’re looking fine, I must say. And what are you up to these days? I must tell you, in my last weeks there the offices of Hudson-Terrier seemed a sorrier place without your loud and cheerful presence.”

  I grinned. How I still longed for his approval!

  “Actually, my own novel’s about to come out,” I volunteered.

  “Is it? Congratulations.”

  “To you, too. Not that I’ve read The Writing Teacher■”—where had all my fine speeches gone?—“I’ve only read the part about me, and I just want to say—”

  “About you?”

  “Well, about Simon, as you call him. And I just want to say that if you ever saw me standing across the street from your apartment building, it was because I used to live across the street from your apartment building.”

  “But why is this relevant?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want—”

  “Bauman, you disappoint me. Recall what Beethoven said when the violinist complained that his part in a quartet was too difficult.” “What?”

  “‘Do you really believe I’m worrying about your miserable fiddle when I write?”’

  I laughed, as did several people behind me in the line; as usual Flint’s anecdotes, even when offered at my expense, both charmed and amazed me. Then I backed away, leaving him to less compromised admirers. On and on the line wove, full of men and women in whose faces you could see reflected that rare purity of appreciation that comes when a work of art, entirely on its own terms, changes—no, not the world (Seamus, on this point we will always disagree)—but our souls. As for Flint, he shook hands, he sat and signed, tired and faintly embarrassed, the unwitting crafter of the well-crafted thing. Because of the thing—the book—dignified rooms welcomed him, this outpost of culture and civility welcomed him. Yet not far off those voices—the voices of taunting children—could still be heard, just as what had driven him here, like a missing limb, could still be felt: the longing of those who have been hated for what they are to be loved for what they have made.