“Of course. She’s been a client of Sada’s forever. Oh, look, Liza’s free again.” Janet pointed across the room to where Liza, pulling at her earlobe, was walking toward us.
“Sorry about that,” Liza said. “I can’t bear the way my mother’s always forcing Nora down my throat. I had to pretend I was sick in order to get away.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Long story. By the way, Janet, Nora says she’s very interested to hear about your study. Why don’t you go and talk to her?” And she pushed Janet in Nora’s direction. “Janet’s sweet,” she added to me, having first verified that the missile had hit the desired target, “but she can be so boring. Oh look, there’s Sam Stallings. Wouldn’t you like to meet him?”
Without waiting for a reply she pulled me away, toward the edge of the room, where a short young man in a sleek khaki suit and black T-shirt was standing at the center of a crowd. He wore on his face an expression of glib self-satisfaction that on reflection I realized I might too have worn, had a novel for which I had been paid two hundred thousand dollars just entered the bestseller list at number nine. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t recognize him, for I had studied his picture carefully at the bookstore, and though the reddish pockmarks that blemished his face—residue, no doubt, of teenage acne—had not been visible in it, at the same time it had not, as pictures so often do, falsified his good looks. (A few years later I would learn this lesson myself, when during my own brief moment of fame a young movie producer who had summoned me to his office to “take a meeting” looked at me quizzically upon my arrival. “But in your picture you look like the young Rupert Brooke,” he complained. “You don’t look anything like Rupert Brooke.”)
To be fair, Sam Stallings, whose photo had made me think of Emilio Estevez, didn’t look anything like that beau ideal either, though I wasn’t about to write him off as a consequence. He had his own distinct appeal. By his side a thin girl in a satin sheath—a model, I would later learn—smoked a Virginia Slim and stared with ennui at the crowd, which, not being her own, offered her nothing. Later that evening I would learn from a profile of Sam in New York magazine that though he was only thirty, he already had two ex-wives. When asked what he wanted to do next, he’d answered, “I’d like to direct.”
Liza introduced us. “Oh, Bauman,” Sam said, shaking my hand so firmly I almost yelped. “Yeah, I read that story of yours in the magazine. It was good. Really interesting.”
The subtle implications of the adjective “interesting”—chosen on this occasion, I suspected, in order to make it clear that to Sam the very idea of homosexuality was as alien, say, as the Hindu practice of drinking cow urine—did not fail to have the desired effect on me. I grinned at him dumbly. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read your book yet, though I’m eager to.”
“Sam,” the model whispered, interposing herself.
“Oh, Liza, this is Amber. Amber, Liza. And Martin.”
Amber blew out smoke. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry, my boyfriend’s really rude. He never introduces me to anybody.”
“I like your suit, Sam.”
“Oh, thanks. There’s an interesting story behind this suit. It was a gift, if you can believe it or not, from Gianni Versace.”
“Versace loved his book, isn’t that cool?” said Amber. “You know it was published in Italy even before it came out here. We went over, and Sam was really the toast of Milan. They even lent him a Ferrari.”
“Really.”
“And then one day, I’m sitting in my suite, exhausted after, like, thirty interviews, opening a bottle of Brunello with Amber, when there’s a knock on the door, and the bellhop brings in this box containing five Versace suits!”
“Who’s your Italian publisher?” Liza asked enviously.
“Oh shit, there’s my agent,” said Sam, who, though a Mississippian by birth (I had learned this from his book jacket), had long since mastered the New York art of getting swiftly out of a conversation. For there were hundreds of people at the party, and he wanted to preen before every last one of them. “I’d better run,” he told Liza. “Good seeing you. And Martin”—to my surprise, he winked—“a true pleasure, buddy. Let’s do lunch sometime. Come on, sweetheart.”
“Bye,” Amber said, grinding her cigarette butt into the Aubusson.
They strode away. “You know who Amber reminds me of?” I said, turning to Liza, only to discover that she was gone. In her place an immensely fat and overrouged woman, eating a piece of cake, was grinning at me.
“No, who?” asked this woman, who must have thought herself very witty.
“Oops, sorry, I thought you were someone else,” I said—and hurried off in search of Liza. It turned out that one of those mysterious undertows that flow through parties had simply carried her off while I was gazing after Sam Stallings, so that now she stood near the periphery, in huddled conversation with a woman whose bleached-blond hair reminded me of Rocky’s in The Rocky Horror Picture Shaw. I looked for Janet, but she was still embroiled with Nora Foy. (“People live too long,” Nora was saying in her loud voice.) Which meant that I was not only alone, but, I feared, conspicuous in my solitude, and on the theory that at least if I held a drink in my hand I’d look as if I had a reason to be at the party, I walked to the bar and got in line.
I had been waiting only a few seconds when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. The young man in the purple jacket, the one for whom Sada had forsaken her daughter, now glared at me. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing someone call you Martin Bauman. Are you the Martin Bauman?”
This locution rather stunned me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Which one is the Martin Bauman?”
“Well, naturally, the one who wrote that great story in the magazine.”
“Oh, that one. Yes, I guess so.”
The young man clapped his hands together with childish delight. “Oh, I can’t believe it!” he cried. “You don’t know how incredible this is. That story—it was the story of my life. Roy!”—at the sound of which name, a handsome young black man disengaged himself from one of the atolls and approached. “You’re not going to believe it. This is Martin Bauman.”
“Really!” Roy held out his hand demurely. “Congratulations! That was some story.”
“Thanks.”
“Forgive me if I sound like a raving fan,” his purple-clad friend continued. “It’s just—you don’t know the lengths I went to, when the story was published, trying to find out who you were. And now you’re here. So let me ask: who are you?”
I stammered. “I’m not sure—”
“That’s a very rude question, Kendall,” said Roy, clearly the more even-keeled of the two. “Didn’t your mother teach you manners? You’re supposed to introduce yourself and offer the girl a drink before you pounce on her.”
“Oops, sorry. I’m Kendall Philips. I work at House and Garden. And this is my friend Roy Beckett, from the Times—publishing division.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Roy Beckett said. “The fact is, if we both sound surprised, it’s because we figured you’d be older. How young are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two,” Kendall repeated, shaking his head as if in disbelief. “Oh, baby. Look, there’s Henry. Henry!” He waved his arms as if signaling a car to stop.
A stalklike man in his late forties approached. “Henry, you’re going to die,” Kendall said. “This is—ta-da—Martin Bauman.”
“Oh, what a delight!” said Henry. “You know we’ve all been crazy with curiosity to meet you. All us gay writers, I mean. I’m Henry Deane.”
I shook his hand. Here was another name I’d heard, another writer whose books I should have read but hadn’t.
The woman with the bleached-blond hair, to whom Liza had been talking, was the next to near. “Hello, Henry,” she said. “Isn’t it marvelous about Sam’s book making the bestseller list?”
I have never warmed to being told what
to think is marvelous; neither, apparently, did Henry, who, ignoring this nonquestion, said, “Oh hi, darling. Billie, you’ll never believe it, I didn’t believe he really existed, to tell the truth, but this is Martin Bauman.”
“Oh, the famous Martin Bauman,” Billie said, fixing her gaze not on my face but the staircase, up which, for all we knew, someone really important might at that very moment come reeling.
“I didn’t know I was famous,” I said, when what I should have said—more honestly if less modestly—was “I didn’t know I was famous until tonight.”
I date from that party the beginning of an intimacy the sediment of which, despite its comparatively short duration—it lasted only a few years, until Liza’s marriage to Ben Pollack estranged her from Eli, from whom I was soon after to be estranged myself—I can taste on my lips even today, years later; it is the flavor of the sugary batter left over in the bowl after a cake has been mixed—and that is exactly the sort of metaphor at which Liza excelled. For in memory taste, like sound, lasts longer than sight, which is why Liza’s voice—charming, querulous, a chalky blue color (if voices have colors)—can be dictating these words to me today, even though I haven’t heard it for more than a decade. As for her face, it is more or less lost to me: not surprising, given that since her wedding I’ve seen her only once, from a distance. She was standing on the corner of East 64th Street and Second Avenue, the same shapeless purse slung over her shoulder that she’d been carrying the night of Sam Stallings’s party, and dressed, despite the upheavals that had marked the intervening years—her marriage, my breakup with Eli, the birth of her child and deaths of our mothers—in exactly the same sort of vaguely masculine outfit about which Sada had always remonstrated. Then I wondered at the passage of time, which wears away the outer layers of experience while leaving the essential self intact. I didn’t say hello, though. There was too much to explain, and as it stood, I was already late for an appointment.
It had been over the course of the week immediately following Sam Stallings’s party—a week during which we talked or saw each other almost every day, until I had to fly back to Washington for the Christmas holidays—that my friendship with Liza, as well as my knowledge of her, really cemented. Most of our conversations took place over the telephone. Liza, who had a terror of solitude, more or less lived on the phone. Whether in New York or Minnesota, alone or with a lover, she never began her mornings without first making a call from bed—as I mentioned earlier, either to Eli, or a boy called Ethan, or in the absence of these two reliable confreres, as was the case that Christmas break, when Eli was bicycling in the south of France with his parents and sisters, and Ethan had gone off to visit a White Russian princess in Venice, someone else, some new discovery, in this instance myself.
The first call came the morning after the party, when in the stillness of my apartment—Will having already gone to the gym, and Dennis being asleep—Liza’s voice provided a welcome interruption. “Did I wake you?” she asked—which she had. Nonetheless I pretended to have been up for hours.
“Me, I’m still in bed,” Liza said. “You can probably hear it in my voice, I’m still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Incidentally, isn’t that a funny euphemism, calling the stuff that forms in the corners of your eyes ‘sleep’? I wonder where it comes from?”
I agreed that it was funny—such seemingly random asides, I would soon learn, were typical of Liza—then asked her if she’d enjoyed the party.
“Enough,” she said, “but you know how it is with parties, there are so many people, and you run around so frantically trying to say hello to all of them, and in the end you come away hyperventilating and feeling as if you haven’t talked to anyone at all.”
“That’s true.”
“You were certainly a hit, though. Especially with Henry Deane. I’ll bet you weren’t expecting to get so much attention,” she added—a little jealously, I thought.
“Not really.”
“Well, if you want my opinion, you ought to strike while the iron’s hot, put out a collection—oh, and of course follow it immediately with a novel. You are working on a novel, aren’t you?”
I said that I was.
“Great. What’s it called?”
“The Terrorist."
“Nice title. What’s it about?”
I explained to her. She listened carefully, though also with a slight edge of impatience—a lot of uh-huhs, and mmms—as if trying to hurry me along to the point at which politeness would require me to turn the question around and ask it of her.
“And what are you working on? Also a novel?”
“Mmm. I’ve never been much interested in short stories. For the moment—this is tentative, a working title—I’m calling it The Island of Misfit Toys.”
“You mean as in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?”
“Yes, yes!” Liza cried gleefully. “I’m so happy you recognize the allusion! Of course,” she added, her voice taking on an unexpected gravity, “a lot of people think it’s outrageous to call a novel The Island of Misfit Toys. Radical. But I think it’s brave when serious literature takes on popular culture, don’t you? Also, I love the Island of Misfit Toys. Remember the choochoo train with the square wheels?”
“And that doll. I never could figure out what the doll was doing there. She didn’t have anything wrong with her.”
“Yes, yes! That’s the point—the idea of feeling there’s something wrong with you, when at least outwardly there isn’t.”
“Is that what your novel’s about?”
“Sort of. It’s about a girl who suddenly develops a lesbian crush on her friend.”
Her voice grew a little pinched as she said this, as if she’d been worrying how I might react.
“That’s a great idea. Very dramatic.”
“I only wish my mother felt the same way. But what she says is that if I publish this book, it’ll ruin my career.”
“Why?” .
“Because when people read the novel, they’ll assume I’m a lesbian and pigeonhole me as a lesbian writer. And I just don’t see why that should be the case, do you? I mean, if you were to read a book about a woman who falls in love with another woman, would you assume the writer was a lesbian?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”
Liza squealed, sort of. “But why?” she cried. “I mean, couldn’t the writer just be writing the book because she thought the subject was interesting?”
“Possibly, but that’s not what you were asking me,” I said. “You were asking me if people would assume, from reading the book, that the writer was a lesbian, and what I’m saying is that given the way the world is, people probably will.”
“But that’s so stupid! And anyway, the book’s in the third person. Originally it was in the first person. Then I changed it to third person. Now a lot of it’s from the point of view of the heroine’s boyfriend. Don’t you think that should make a difference?”
“I don’t see why it matters,” I said boldly, “if people think you’re a lesbian.”
“I know, I know. Eli says the same thing.”
“I mean, everyone at that party—Sam Stallings, for instance—took it as a given that / was gay. And my feeling is, so what? I am.”
“But that’s the problem!” Liza said, her voice tinny with exasperation. “I’m not—or rather, I’m not only. Oh, this kind of thing must really be so much easier for men! I mean, if you’re a man, from what I gather, it’s just a matter of, you either like to whack off looking at pictures of naked girls, which means you’re straight, or you like to whack off looking at pictures of naked boys, which means you’re gay. But with women it’s never so simple. In my case, for instance, I’ve dated both men and women. As a matter of fact I’m dating a woman right now. But that doesn’t mean I’m making a lifetime commitment to being a lesbian.” I heard her frown. “What I don’t understand is why people have to give everything a label. Because once you’re labeled a lesbian, it’s like, that’s the end of
it, you can never get married and have children, which I fully intend to do.”
“But lesbians do have children. Lesbians do get married.”
“Oh, please! Have you ever been to a lesbian wedding? Eli and I went to one last year, it was horrible. Both the ‘brides’ wore tuxedos. Also, even though they registered, none of their relatives bothered to buy them any decent presents. Excuse me, I’m walking to the kitchen right now ... I have a cordless phone ... I’m getting a Diet Coke.” Suddenly her voice lowered. “Hold on a sec. Hi, Mom.” There was a noise of muffling. “Sorry about that,” she went on a moment later. “I’m back in my room now.”
“You’re staying with your mother?”
“My apartment’s sublet until the spring, so I don’t have any choice. It’s horrible. There.” She pulled—I could hear it—the pop-top off the Diet Coke. “Anyway, as I suppose you’ve figured out, I’m pretty unresolved about this lesbian thing. All my friends tease me about it, this whole drama of, is Liza a lesbian this week, or isn’t she? ‘The great debate,’ Eli calls it.”
I was already beginning to suspect that if Liza spent as much time discussing her sexual indecision with her friends as she had with me, whom she hardly knew, it was at least in part to ensure the centrality of “the great debate” in their (our) conversations. Not that her suffering wasn’t real: on the contrary, as I learned over the course of the next several days, ever since she had made the mistake, in high school, of confessing to Sada her love for her best friend, Kelly, her mother had been waging a vigorous campaign to stop her from making what she insisted would be the biggest mistake of her life. For Sada, despite the dismal state into which her own marriage had declined (she and her husband had not lived together for almost twenty years), remained for murky reasons the staunchest advocate of heterosexual monogamy on the planet; indeed, her enthusiasm for the ideal of coupledom seemed to have increased exponentially as the condition of her own union had degenerated, which meant that despite her professed feminism, she often found herself at odds with certain literary friends from whom her “conservative” positions alienated her. In this way she prefigured some other feminists who in subsequent years would enter into a marriage of convenience with the Christian right, with which they shared nothing save the common goal of wanting to criminalize pornography.
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