Anka laughed.
“What’s Club Bread?” Janet asked.
“You know, Bread Loaf. The writers’ conference.”
“Stanley Flint was my teacher, too,” I said.
“Really? Did you like him? I know him a little through my mother. As a teacher I’ve heard he’s brilliant but mad.”
I've heard. How many thousands of times, over the course of that evening—and a hundred evenings to come—would this seemingly innocuous, ultimately pernicious little phrase be used: “I’ve heard she’s a really bad writer.” “I’ve heard she got a huge advance for her last book, but the publisher was disappointed by the sales.” “I’ve heard he’s always trying to seduce his women students.” Later, I too would become skilled at such subspeech. At the time, however, I still believed that in New York writers got their nourishment from intellectual exchange, when in fact all anyone did was gnaw at the bones of hearsay and hindsight.
When the evening ended (early) Anka saw us to the elevator. Once downstairs, Janet, who was going uptown, got into a taxi. As Liza was planning to take the subway downtown, I offered to escort her to the station. This did not surprise her. She seemed to take it for granted that I would want to stay in her company.
Briskly we headed toward Broadway. Even now the phrase “gay story” was echoing in my head—this despite the fact that Liza’s flip observation was hours old, cold under the weight of all those other manic subjects that had been heaped atop it during the dinner, like coats piled on a bed at a party. Curious: earlier I’d wanted to leave the phrase alone. Now, however, in the silence of our walk together I found myself straining for a way to return to this topic, about which I longed to converse with Liza, with whom even then I felt a mysterious kinship. And why? I hardly knew her. Worse, she had already revealed herself to be a terrible gossip, the sort of person one should never trust with secrets. And yet I see now that I wasn’t looking for someone to keep my secrets. I was looking for someone to free me from my secrets.
We had arrived at the 72 nd Street station. “I hope you’ll stay in touch,” Liza said, once again offering me her limp hand. “Are you planning to move to New York when you graduate?”
I said that I was.
“I could probably get you a job teaching at the New School—if you’re interested. Oh, have you got a book yet?”
“A book!” I shook my head.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure you will soon.” And she handed me her visiting card. “Call me the next time you’re in town. I have a friend I’d like you to meet. My best friend, Eli Aronson. Did I mention him already? He’s got this thick, luxurious blond beard, very soft—the sort of beard a woman would have if women had beards.” And with this quite extraordinary offering she smiled.
Now I wonder: was there something knowing, perhaps even questioning, in that smile? And if so, what was the question? When Liza talked of Eli Aronson, was she speaking in a code of omissions as complex as Anka’s code of telephone rings, offering me a clue—as in the crossword puzzles to which both she and my mother were addicted—by means of which I might fill in the answer that would in turn provide the key to the other answer with which it intersected, the one that addressed the mystery not of Eli’s homosexuality, not even of my homosexuality, but of her own?
Not that this was really such a mystery. Indeed, I think I probably knew from the beginning that Liza was a lesbian, if from nothing else than from the surface details: her loose jeans, her short hair, the fact that she wore only one earring. And yet, as I subsequently discovered, it would have horrified her to find out that anything in her appearance “gave her away.” Even more than for me, the process of coming out was for Liza fraught with torment, mostly because her natural eagerness to share every detail of her life so perpetually militated against her terror, as she put it, of being “pigeonholed,” or mistaken for “some horrible, hideous, fat old dyke.” Now I can’t help but suspect that she was using Eli—the promise of Eli, the threat of Eli—to nudge the nervous revelation into voice.
We had been standing for five minutes on the sidewalk in front of the subway station. Even though it was the time for good-bye, however, we didn’t say good-bye. Instead, as during that moment after a date when one partner waits for the other to ask if he or she “would like to come up for a drink,” we hung fire. Hesitation gaped between us, for we were both shy; yet in the end it was Liza who took the plunge and suggested we go and have a cappuccino at a little café she knew.
Then I puffed out clouds of relief (it was a chilly night) and with gratitude followed her up Amsterdam Avenue to the dark, smoky little café where over cake and steamed milk (I still didn’t drink coffee) I poured out my heart to her, confided to her my worries about my parents, admitted my longing to find, someday, a great love, and by doing so mortared an intimacy the implications of which I am still today excavating, and will probably be excavating until I am old.
In such small, unexpected ways our lives change irrevocably, and I am a fool (but a natural fool) to try to tease out of the past the directions my own might have taken had I had the foreknowledge to let Liza simply disappear down the damp steps of the subway station that night, into the train and out of my life forever.
When the semester ended, as planned, I flew home to visit my parents. My mother was in a good mood because the brutal course of radiation therapy treatments that she was then undergoing appeared to be paying off: that is to say, the small tumors that pocked her body were shrinking, and in one or two cases had disappeared altogether. My father considered this, along with my return from college, cause for celebration, so the night after I got home we went out to dinner at a French restaurant—this despite my mother’s anxiety over her hair, some of which had fallen out, and which she had recently had “recrafted” by a hairdresser who specialized in clients undergoing radiation therapy. “It was that nice Leonie Kaufman who recommended him,” she added. “You know, the one whose daughter works for the magazine.”
I said nothing. I even managed, for the duration of the dinner, to steer the conversation away from such literary subjects. Then we got home, and as was their habit, my parents changed into their robes and lay down on the bed to watch television. I remember I was extremely jittery, almost bursting with the need to get the ordeal over with, to tell them once and for all about my story, at which point, I imagined, I would be free, the last hurdle would have been cleared, my life, from then on, would be a clean, straight path down which I had merely to stroll, enjoying all the sequential pleasures that lined it. And this need to unburden myself must indeed eventually have beaten back fear, for around ten I went into their bedroom, and said, “Mom, Dad, I have something I need to talk to you about,” at which point my father turned to me quizzically and my mother, adjusting her eyeglasses, said, “Can’t it wait until a commercial?” which was just like my mother. So I sat down at the foot of the bed and waited until the commercials came on. My father had a remote control—at that time still something of a novelty—which he aimed at the screen to mute the volume. Inside the television cats pranced silently toward bowls of Little Friskies. I stood.
“You said you wanted to talk to us about something?” my father asked, his face open and relaxed, as was my mother’s. And why shouldn’t they have been relaxed? Neither of them had reason to expect, at that moment, that their youngest child, his chest puffed out like a pigeon’s and his hands plucking at the lint on his sweater, was about to spring on them two intertwined revelations either one of which would have been enough to leave them reeling with astonishment. Yet there it was: into the quiet of their nighttime bedroom, during a commercial break, this child had strode, screwed up his eyes, and uttered a sentence it would take both of them several seconds to unpuzzle. “Mom, Dad”—pausing, he issues a deep and alarming breath that is meant to start the adrenaline pulsing in their veins, to alert them to the fact that this is a serious matter, that at last, before silent cats, their boy is going to unmute himself—“Mom, Dad, guess what
? I’m coming out in the magazine.”
5. DEAR MR. TERRIER
A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, while cleaning out a basement, I happened upon something I had no memory of saving: one of the surveys Janet Klass sent me every month as part of her doctoral research, and that every month I filled out as dutifully as the good student I had recently been. The survey consisted of twenty-four multiple choice questions, the first of which ran as follows:
What is your chief motivation for writing?
(a) Personal satisfaction
(b) Financial reward
(c) Public recognition
(d) Desire to communicate
(e) Other (please amplify below)
How did I answer? I can’t recall. Probably (a), personal satisfaction, the rituals of a child trying to write the Narnia Chronicles. Or perhaps (d) or (c). Not (b). I would never have admitted to (b). Now I can see that within me there coexist two radically different beings, the artist and the fame seeker. Without the artist, the fame seeker would have nothing to peddle. Without the fame seeker, the artist would have no audience, no career, most crucially no money; the fame seeker—from whose embrace of the public the shy artist shrinks—is also his enabler. For just because art is the opposite of commerce doesn’t mean that it lives outside its influence. Indeed, Janet, if I were to fill out your survey today, the only answer I could give to this question would be (e) other. Please amplify below, you say; all right, I will. But I must warn you, it will take more than a paragraph. Indeed, you might say this very novel is my amplification.
Ahem. But where was I? Oh yes.
After I graduated from college I moved to New York, where I went to work for the publishing firm of Hudson House, in whose editorial department I had once been a summer intern. In the interval a paperback company called Terrier Books had acquired Hudson, fusing the two entities into the rather ungainly “Hudson-Terrier.” Hudson had then sold its old offices on Fifth Avenue, with their battered mahogany writing desks and leather armchairs, shipped its staff and files downtown to Terrier’s vast and loftlike “space,” and removed the word “House” from its spines, so that they bore only the name “Hudson.” New joint stationery was printed up, on which the famed wirehaired dog that was the symbol of Terrier appeared to be barking at the oil lamp that had been Hudson’s logo since its inception in 1883.
In my childhood, Terrier books had always been my favorites, if for no other reason than because my family always kept fox terriers, creatures of great tenacity and loyalty, whose obsessive habits in many ways mirrored my own. Thus whenever my brother and sister initiated a round of that game wherein people are likened to foods, machines, flowers, etc., when the category of “animals” came up I was always a terrier. The little black-and-white dog on the spine of the books, so similar in affect and posture to the ones with which I lived, was a mascot: all my earliest literary dreams ended with publication by Terrier, which was probably why I so delighted in the prospect of working there.
My job required me to be at the office three days a week, which I thought ideal, because it left me plenty of time to write. As it happened, the publication of my story the previous spring had caused a small stir in literary circles: that is to say, it had piqued the curiosity of readers, become the subject of speculation among writers (particularly homosexual writers), provoked a barrage of letters to the magazine, most of them negative, etc. And yet, curiously enough, this little storm that the story had generated barely touched me, its author, mostly because the magazine’s policy of not printing the biographies of its contributors meant that none of the speculators knew who I was. Also, at the time of the publication I was out of the country, traveling in Europe and enjoying (if that is the right word) the heady regret of being absent from my own great moment. I remember that the week of July 11, when the issue of the magazine featuring my story hit the stands, I was in Rome, staying in a little hotel near the Spanish Steps—a more expensive place than I could afford, really, except that there happened to be a single single room, without a bath, and about the size of one. And there, on the floor next to the narrow bed, my head on my suitcase (there was no space for a desk, much less a chest of drawers), I would half sit, half he in the afternoons, writing until the sun went down, at which point it would be cool enough that I could go and wander the old city, bored and friendless yet too shy to strike up a conversation with strangers.
What I didn’t know was that across the ocean, my story was taking on its own life. In gay circles, writers who had struggled for years to get their work into the magazine were making aghast and disbelieving telephone calls to one another, asking if anyone knew who “he” was, this Martin Bauman who had stepped out of nowhere to one-up them. No one knew anything, though, except that there was a Martin Bauman listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, a gay Martin Bauman, in fact, who worked as an interior decorator. Many years later, at a party, I met him. Thrown into sudden intimacy by the mysterious bond that is a common name, we retreated together to a comer, where he told me, “You can’t imagine the calls I got. And the invitations I turned down!” No one guessed that the Martin Bauman who had actually written the story had already stepped back into that nowhere from which he had emerged briefly—or more correctly, a new nowhere, that of a tiny, telephoneless room in Rome, the one window of which looked out onto a cramped cortile, and in which, on hot nights, it was impossible to sleep.
And yet, so brief is the American attention span that by the time I got back to school in September the issue of the magazine containing my story had already been buried, in dentists’ waiting rooms and in Upper East Side living rooms (as well as on my mother’s kitchen desk), under stacks of more recent numbers. Even my mother’s friends, from whom she had been having to endure a barrage of undesired commiseration all summer (“Poor Carolyn! Did you know before you read it?”) started leaving her alone, their interest caught by fresher scandals—a child on heroin, a husband surprised in panties and high heels—all of which came as a relief to me. As it stood I had too much to do—my senior thesis, a photography course I was taking, the perpetual possibility of love—to be able to contend with such an ambivalent variety of fame. Instead I became political; I met, and briefly ruined, Barb Mendenhall; I went to bed with a handsome art student, and enjoyed myself a little bit. For a while even New York faded into the background; even Liza Perlman, with whom I was in the incipient phases of becoming intimate, disappeared, subletting her apartment and taking a two-year teaching gig at a tiny college in Minnesota.
From Stanley Flint, on the other hand, I heard nothing, and this surprised me. That he hadn’t read, or at least heard about the story, seemed improbable, for I knew that he subscribed to the magazine, and kept abreast of the fiction it published, seventy-five percent of which he dismissed as “unmitigated shit.” Did his silence mean, then, that my story had not qualified as part of that minority he considered worthy? Or was the letter he never wrote (and I checked my mailbox every day) merely a snub—further evidence that he had not forgiven me for my failure to get him his old job back?
One afternoon during my last semester I ran into Baylor in the rare book room of the library. Though she had graduated a year earlier, she was still living near campus, having taken a job as an editorial assistant at the university press. “Hello, Bauman,” she said when she saw me. “Congratulations on your story.”
“Thanks.”
“I can’t pretend I’m not jealous as hell. I am. In fact, I wish I hadn’t liked it as much as I did.”
“And you—are you writing much these days?”
“All the time. Every spare minute.” She checked her watch. “Oops, I’d better get back to work. Nice seeing you.” And she hurried out the library doors.
It was mid-April when this meeting took place. The forsythias were in bloom; my senior thesis was finished, typed, turned in. With graduation only weeks away, I suddenly realized that I could no longer put off dealing with certain realities I’d been trying to avoid for months
, chief among them the knowledge that at summer’s end I would no longer have a secure little dorm room to return to, no longer a cozy schedule of lectures and seminars to keep me busy and vary my days. Instead I would have to make a life for myself and by myself—a task upon which, with that concentrated and pleasureless determination that had characterized my seduction of Theodoric Vere Swanson, I now focused my energies: I started looking for an apartment, a job, an adulthood. At school most of my friends were in a better situation than I was. Donald Schindler, having deferred Harvard Law School, was going to work on the stock exchange; Jim Sterling had landed a job as an editorial assistant at Time; Ash, who always made odd choices, was planning to enroll in clown school. As for me, my sole ambition was to move to New York and write. And yet despite Baylor’s jealousy, even where writing was concerned, things were not going nearly as well as I had hoped. For though the publication of my story had netted me a few thousand dollars and half a dozen letters of vague inquiry from publishers and agents, it had not, as I had dreamed it might, led to the publication of a second story in the magazine, and then a first-refusal contract, and finally one of those coveted writers’ offices past which Edith had led me before our first lunch. Instead everything I’d sent her since the previous summer—seven stories in all—she had, for a variety of sensible reasons, rejected—which meant that I could no longer count on the magazine to make my career. Nor could I count on it to pay my rent. So I decided to look for a job. Because I knew people at Hudson, Hudson was the first place I called, and Hudson was where I ended up working.
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