Sometimes I wondered why she wasn’t staying at a hotel, as my own mother most certainly would have done under the circumstances. Lack of money seemed an unlikely reason, as Faye had a walletful of gold credit cards. Loneliness for her son, then? Yet Dennis’s work schedule meant that he was away most evenings, and he spent his afternoons locked in his room, sleeping or reading. Nor did his remoteness appear to strike his mother as anything out of the ordinary. Indeed, from her behavior you would have thought she was in New York only to see New York Most mornings she rose early and went to museums, or on “looking” expeditions at Saks and Bergdorfs from which she returned laden with perfume samples the odors of which mingled humidly in our unventilated corridor.
At first I couldn’t quite tell what she made of our squalid little nest—such a far cry from her ranch house in suburban Atlanta, with its swimming pool, its central air-conditioning, its wall outlets (of which she spoke rapturously) into which a vacuum cleaner tube could be plugged directly. (“It makes cleanup so easy!”) Yet if our yellowing linoleum and dirty walls disturbed her, she never let on. Instead, while Dermis sold tickets at the Thalia, she cleaned. In the bathroom she scrubbed the mildewed grouting with Tilex. In the kitchen she put on heavy gloves and removed forty years of encrustation from the old stove. “If there’s one thing you boys need it’s good old-fashioned mothering,” she told Will once, before presenting him with one of the elaborate meals she was wont to prepare, meals consisting mostly of homely American dishes, for which she thought we might be nostalgic: cracker salad (iceberg lettuce, saltines, tuna, and mayonnaise); chicken and dumplings; casseroles into which she mixed ground beef, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese mix, and canned cream of mushroom soup. Such dinners, from which Dennis was generally absent, at first delighted Will and me; after all, we were still boys, with huge appetites. But then on the second Friday of her visit, when we had both come home early with the intention of taking showers before going off to dinners with friends, she announced that she had been laboring all day to make us spaghetti with her “special” sauce. The combination of her wet eyes, quivering chin, and tomato-stained sundress proved too much to resist: dutifully we sat down and ate her spaghetti, neither of us mentioning the other dinners with which we would have to follow this one. Faye herself did not eat, only watched. “Is it good?” she asked. “Is the pasta overcooked? I try to make it al dente, which is how Dennis likes it. His father likes his mushy. That man has no culture.”
No, we reassured her, the spaghetti was perfect; the sauce was not too dry; she had not added too much oregano. With our own mothers, of course, we would never have been so polite, just as Dennis, arriving home in the middle of the meal, was not polite, snarling “I’m not hungry!” before slamming into his room, leaving his mother with welling eyes and garlic on her fingers.
All told, such a vital female presence in our midst both awed and fatigued us, so much so that as the date of her planned departure neared, we found ourselves looking eagerly forward to the resumption of our ordinary rhythms. But then the Saturday morning when she was supposed to leave came, and passed, and Faye was still there. Nor did she offer any explanation for her continued residency; instead, as usual, she was cooking. (“Oyster stew,” she announced when I walked in the door.)
Dennis, taciturn at the best of moments, was reading in his room. His silence hinted at grim possibilities, and when the discovery that we had no onions sent Faye running out to the comer grocery, we confronted him where he sat behind a volume of Derrida. Point-blank, Will asked him how long his mother intended to stay.
Dennis ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “All she says is for a while.”
“But doesn’t she miss her vacuum cleaner outlets? Doesn’t she miss your father?”
“The one thing I’m sure of is that she doesn’t miss my father.”
“But it’s already been such a long visit...” Will could not have hinted more loudly that he wanted Dennis to ask his mother to leave ... Then keys sounded in the lock. “I’m back!” we heard Faye calling in her singsong voice.
“We’re in here!” Dennis yelled.
Her little face appeared through the crack in the door. “Having a powwow?” she asked cheerfully. “Mind if I join in—or is this one for boys only?”
It was now September. Although the first day of fall was fast approaching, the heat wave that had shrouded Manhattan for most of the summer hung on. Even so, Faye cooked furiously, which did nothing to cool our already stuffy apartment. Sundays I fled to the Sterlings’ icy perch with more than usual enthusiasm, only to return at twilight to a corridor in which the smells of frying meat and perfume commingled stiflingly. I went early to work and left late, while Will stayed most evenings at the NYU library until it closed. As for Faye, whereas previously she had spent much of her time window-shopping and going to museums, now she almost never left the apartment, only sat in the kitchen, smoking and reading suspense novels of great length and gruesomeness, most of which centered around the kidnapping, torture, and murder of small children. It was now becoming rapidly clear to us that she had left her husband, a fact to which only her husband—a man whose phone manner was so mild it bordered on the sinister—appeared not to have caught on. Because we both knew that we could not have thrown out our own mothers under such circumstances, however, Will and I gave Dennis no ultimatums. Instead we tried to make the best of the situation. We were kind to Faye. We pretended not to hear the screams that emanated from the television set, on which she was always watching made-for-television movies about the kidnapping, torture, and murder of small children.
At last autumn came, with a sudden gust of brown leaves and chilly weather. Because, in previous years, this would have been the season for returning to school I found myself dreaming most nights that I still had tests to take, papers to finish. During the day an acute nostalgia claimed me. I missed the old ritual of choosing courses, missed my dorm room, in which some stranger was now sleeping, missed Gretchen and Schuyler, Barb Mendenhall, Eve Schlossberg. They should have been sitting, once again, at that yellowed Formica table in the rear smoking section of the library. Instead Gretchen and Schuyler were in Paris and Berlin, respectively; Barb was in law school at Stanford; Eve, who was trying to make a go of it as a photographer, was sharing a tenement flat with Lars on the Lower East Side. People whose faces I wouldn’t have recognized now occupied those chairs that for me would forever carry the imprint of my friends’ behinds, and this knowledge made the one visit I paid to my old stomping grounds that September almost as difficult to endure as the longing it was meant to assuage.
To compensate—and to keep myself away from Faye’s burdensome presence—I threw myself with more alacrity than ever into the slush pile; yet even the offices of Hudson-Terrier, thanks to the unexpected arrival of Stanley Flint, were no longer the haven they had once been. Not that Flint was unpleasant; on the contrary, he could not have been more cordial. Whenever he passed my desk he patted me on the back. He called me “young man” or, as in the old days, “Bauman.” No, the problem was that he refused categorically to acknowledge my existence as a writer. Not once did he ask me how my real work was going. Not once did he congratulate me on the story I had published, or make reference to our past student-mentor relationship. In his spare time, I knew, he continued to teach two nights a week. Sometimes his students would come by to visit him in his office, which he kept dark even on the brightest of afternoons, the shades drawn, his desk awash in lamp glow.
His arrival at Hudson had not been without its attendant fanfare. Indeed, so newsworthy had the New York Times considered his hiring that it had run his picture on the front page of the arts section, alongside an article in which Marge had expressed her delight that “this genius of American letters” was “joining the Hudson team.” Such press gushing had been enough to ensure Flint’s popularity with the terrible Terriers, for whom what was impressive was not that he was great but that he was “hot.” At the sa
me time, his long-standing affiliation with good writers made him popular with my Hudson colleagues, who were at the very least relieved to be working with someone connected to literature. Even Carey got along with Flint, of whose tastes he approved, and when Flint made his first acquisition—just a week after our meeting in the men’s room—Carey made a point of smuggling me a photocopy of the manuscript. The book in question, a collection of stories by a Park Avenue divorcee who had once been one of Flint’s students, intimidated me not only because of its wit, but its concision: here was the vaunted “minimalist” style that he championed, and that in the coming years would be first revered, then vilified. My writing, on the other hand, was neither clever nor succinct; indeed, as Flint had indicated in his offending letter, its main virtue was warmth, which did best when given room to breathe. I wished I could have been wittier, a Fran Lebowitz whose mailbox would always be crammed with party invitations. (Everything comes down to food: according to Liza, you could eat so well at publishing parties that once you got on the A-list you’d never have to buy groceries again.)
Flint worked like a demon. In his interview with the Times he’d vowed never to take more than a week to respond to a manuscript, and he kept that vow. Not once did I arrive at the office when he wasn’t already there, nor did he once leave before me, which made his coldshouldering (either intentional or—even worse—the result of his simply having forgotten who I was) all the more difficult to bear. For the truth was, as in college, I craved his attention, only now I was competing for it not with Acosta or Mittman, but with writers who taught at my university, or were members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. So far as reading manuscripts went, Flint’s policy was to cast a wide net, then throw back almost everything he caught—which meant that almost from the moment of his arrival, publication by him was looked upon as a prize of great worth. More manuscripts now landed on his desk than on that of any other editor, some of them by novelists whose agents would have laughed, just a few months earlier, had a colleague suggested they submit to a backwater like Hudson. Even more shockingly, Flint was turning down books by authors who were much more famous than he was. At editorial meetings battles erupted over his rejections: not only was he saying no to Pulitzer Prize winners, he was dismissing their work as “baby talk” or “unmitigated shit.”
His decisions occasionally raised the hackles of management, whom Marge was always having to placate. “I trust his instincts,” she declared, when on the same afternoon he turned down a new book of stories by a writer with an office at the magazine, and bought a first novel by a woman no one had ever heard of. “Bauman, it’s great,” he told me. “I’m flabbergasted. This girl—she’s from Mississippi, and she works, believe it or not, carving headstones. Her husband’s family runs a headstone business. I don’t know where she learned to do it, but she writes like an avenging angel. Extraordinary stuff: long, long sentences, but so gorgeously crafted it’s as if they’re made from gossamer. She tells the most gruesome stories and makes them beautiful, as opposed to all those tedious people who tell beautiful stories and make them gruesome.”
The news of this acquisition was followed by another announcement: he had bought the rights to a first novel that Marge hoped would become “a major bestseller.” The author was one Julia Baylor.
She came in the next day, looking both thinner and more elegant than at school, and very pleased with herself. As it happened I was sitting at the front desk at the time, filling in for the receptionist, Dorell, who was out to lunch. “Martin,” she said, “what on earth art you doing here?”
“I work here,” I answered meekly.
“How wonderful,” she said. “Then it’ll be just like the old days.”
It was not. In the old days, I was the favorite. Now I was a menial, manning the reception desk, while Baylor and Flint chatted in his office.
A few minutes later they reemerged, laughing to show their teeth. “Take my calls, will you, Bauman?” Flint said. “I shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours.” And they sauntered off toward the elevator.
That afternoon I went home in a state of despondency. Old feelings of inferiority were creeping over me: why Baylor and not me? I found myself asking. Was it because of the letter I had failed to answer? Because Flint hated homosexuals? Because he and Baylor had had an affair? Or was the truth quite simply that Flint had lost interest in my writing, concluded that whatever potential he’d once seen in me had, as it were, evaporated? Such, I had to admit, was the most likely, if least palatable, explanation for his behavior—or more accurately, his lack of behavior, given that his comportment with me was never, for all its neglectfulness, anything less than courteous.
As it happened, my own work was not going very well right then. The trouble was that I kept getting stuck, sometimes for weeks, on a single sentence, like one of those wind-up toy robots that walks into a wall and keeps walking. Faye provided the ideal excuse for this inertia, since in the past, on the days when I hadn’t gone to Hudson, I’d almost always had the apartment to myself. Now, however, Faye not only never went out, she made such a show of not disturbing me that in the end her attempts at silence served only to wreck my concentration, until finally I decided that I would do better if I took my typewriter down to Hudson and set it up in the empty office of one of the fired editors. At least there I could write undisturbed, and even better, glance up, whenever I wanted to, and see Carey at his desk, a pencil in his mouth, his pressed shirt folding in on itself in such a way that the contours of his chest were obscured. For my crush on Carey—which in recent months I had allowed to lapse—had of late resurfaced, not as a result of any change in his attitude toward me, but because my roommate Will had just fallen in love and was forever describing to me the dreamy evening walks that he and his paramour, an NYU freshman named Vincent, took through Riverside Park, where under the stars they kissed for the first time. Vincent and Will shared chocolate bars in our kitchen and, most romantically of all, had for almost a month been putting off the actual act of sex, in order to make the event, when it happened, that much more exalted. The only problem was that Vincent lived in a dormitory, while we had Faye. How would she react, Will wondered, were she to bump into a half-naked stranger in the bathroom? Did she even realize that we were gay? (Knowing Dennis, it seemed unlikely that he would have told her.)
Eager to be of service (as well as to gain a vicarious experience of Will’s love affair by functioning as its facilitator), I offered to talk to Dennis on his behalf—an offer Will accepted at once, perhaps in the hope that threat of embarrassment to his mother might motivate Dennis, at last, to ask her to leave. As it happened Dennis was working that evening at the Thalia, which meant that there was no chance of Faye interrupting our conversation.
Accordingly, after having dinner (cooked by Faye, of course), I strode down to the theater, which was on 95th Street, and rapped on the box office window. Behind bulletproof glass Dennis was reading Beyond Good and Evil, which seemed oddly apposite. “Hey,” he said, smiling vaguely as he got up to let me in.
“Hi, Dennis,” I said, stepping inside the ticket booth.
“What’s up? Want some popcorn?”
“No thanks. I need to talk to you about something.”
“Oh?” He sat down on his stool.
“You know that guy Vincent that Will’s been seeing?”
An elderly woman now approached the booth and asked for a ticket.
“Sorry, go on.”
“Well, Will’s invited him to sleep over tomorrow night.”
No response. Dennis was making change.
“Is that okay with you?”
“Why wouldn’t it be okay with me?”
“Because—with your mother here ... we thought that maybe—”
“I told her from the beginning, as long as she insists on staying with us, she’s going to have to accept our living our lives the way we always do.”
“But does she even know that Will’s gay? That I’m gay?
”
“Is it any of her business?” Dennis handed the old woman her ticket. “Tell Will to have anyone over that he wants,” he added, when it became clear that I wasn’t leaving. Yet Wendy Stone, I noticed, hadn’t been down for several weeks now. Was this because of Faye? (No, as it turned out: she had met someone else, the man she was going to marry, which further explained Dennis’s bad mood.)
The next night I had dinner with Anka Kaufman, after which I arrived home to find the apartment quiet. From the living room the light of the television flickered: Faye, I saw, had fallen asleep while watching a video of Brief Encounter.
I went to bed, only to be roused an hour later by the sound of the deadbolt turning; then, around dawn, by the familiar gurgle of a flushing toilet, a shower switching on. When I woke, around nine, it was to the smell of maple syrup. In the kitchen, a rather stunned-looking youth wearing only a pair of white Calvin Klein underpants sat at the Formica table; Faye, flipping pancakes, was chatting with him amiably about Princess Diana; Dennis, in his ratty bathrobe, was staring grimly into Nietzsche. We had been foiled again.
In October, amid wind and unexpected frigidities (yet our landlord, like Anka’s, refused to switch on the heat), Carey finally introduced me to Richard Powell and Susan Bloom, the couple of whom he and his friends made such a cult. Though both were scions of wealthy Upper East Side households—habituated, from early in their childhoods, to shopping at Barney’s and Christmas vacations in Gstaad—they now lived in a squalid railroad flat on West 87th Street with several deaf white cats. Their furniture, most of which they had dragged in off the street and draped with Indian bedspreads, brought to mind opium dens, as did the smell of incense, cigarettes, and curry that infused the crumbling foam rubber of the sofa. Later I would come to recognize this particular variety of dereliction as merely another version of that “slumming” instinct that had driven my college friends to Dolly’s bar; at the time, however, I thought it wonderfully bohemian, this atmosphere that was to me as cozy and smelly as that of the box in which a litter of kittens has just been born.
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