Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Impatience, needless to say, won out; picking up the phone, I dialed Liza’s number. To my surprise she picked up after only one ring. “It’s Martin,” I said.

  “Oh, hi, Martin,” she answered, her voice surprisingly cheerful.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I suppose so, considering. Did Eli tell you what happened?”

  “Only a little.”

  “It was horrible. This evening I went over to Jessica’s assuming, you know, that we were going to spend the night together just like any other. And I had no reason to expect otherwise. I mean, we’d talked on the phone this morning, and she’d said that she was going to make this wonderful salmon teriyaki that I love for dinner. Do you eat Japanese food, by the way? I’ve just found the most fantastic sushi place on Greenwich Avenue, we’ve got to try it. Anyway, when I got there, she had her fists clenched and tears in her eyes, and before I even had the chance to say hello, she said to me, ‘I’m going back to Peggy.’”

  “But why?”

  “Who knows? She wouldn’t even tell me. And now the thing is, I’m just in shock, which is probably why I’m babbling about Japanese restaurants. I mean, I trusted her, Martin. I really put my faith in Jessica. Not that I assumed our relationship was going to last forever—I didn’t—and yet at the same time I always took it for granted that at least, if it ended, it would end gracefully, and we’d part as friends. Instead of which this sudden about-face. And on top of that her refusal even to explain. She just wanted me out of there. I was back on the street five minutes after I arrived.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks. Eli’s here now. He’s trying to put me back together, like Humpty-Dumpty. Do you want to talk to him?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “One second.” And putting her hand over the receiver, she muttered something to Eli, who laughed.

  “Hello, love of my life and fire of my loins,” he said, taking the receiver from her. (As I imagined it, they were lying in her loft bed, naked for all I knew.)

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. What are you up to?”

  “Not much.” I drew in my breath. “I was just wondering when you were planning to come home.”

  “Oh, but ... hold on. What?” Again, the sound of laughter. “Sorry, sorry. Actually, I thought I’d spend the night here with Liza, if you don’t mind. She’d rather not be alone.”

  “Are you stoned?”

  “A little.”

  “But I do mind.”

  Eli breathed heavily. “Oh, honey, don’t worry. Tell you what, why don’t you stay at my apartment, how does that sound? And then at dawn I’ll wake you with a kiss.”

  “But why should you stay there? I mean, it’s not like she’d do the same for you.”

  “Martin—”

  “Just today you were complaining about her, about how she takes so much more than she gives, about how as soon as there’s pussy—”

  “But that’s not the point.”

  “It is. I give you so much more, and you’re perfectly willing to shaft me—

  “I’m not shafting you.”

  “You know as well as I do we’ve never spent a night apart.”

  “Yes, but this is hardly an ordinary situation. Liza needs me.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “Martin, for God’s sake, it’s one night!”

  I let out a loud groan. “Eli?” I heard Liza call questioningly.

  “If you don’t come back,” I said, appalled and thrilled by my own brazenness, “it’s over between us.”

  “Oh, Jesus—”

  “I mean it.”

  Eli emitted a strangled noise. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked. Then, when I didn’t answer: “We’ll talk about it when I get back.”

  With a violence that made me jump, he hung up.

  Pushing the tiny buttons on top of the phone, I called him back. The line was busy.

  I sat down at his desk. What I was feeling, at that moment, was a paradoxical blend of exultation and cowardice—just as, many years later, having smashed a bottle of expensive wine against a tiled floor, I would stare down at the shards of glass, the hurried rivulets of wine, and find myself at once emboldened (by the discovery in myself of a genuine capacity for action) and horrified (by the realization that one action can lead, on the part of another person, to a reaction). For though I understood, in the wake of my conversation with Eli, that on one level I had succeeded—I had browbeaten him into coming home—I also saw that by so doing I might have incurred a wrath of which the frigid, even ominous tone of his voice when he had uttered those last words—“We’ll talk about it when I get back”—was only the faintest echo; and to this presumed threat I reacted as a dog does when, having gone one step too far in testing his owner’s patience, he suddenly abandons aggression and rolls over onto his back, as if to say, I acknowledge your superiority; I acquiesce to punishment; and yet at the same time, by exhibiting such remorsefulness, I hope that I can also dim your wrath.

  Taking off my clothes, I climbed up into Eli’s loft. Never before had I been alone in this bed, and remembering the many nights I had spent here with Eli—nights during which I had derived, from his proximity, not only bodily warmth but a sensation of security and well-being—I found myself craving more viscerally than ever that presence the permanent forfeiture of which, because I had protested its cessation for a single night, I might now have guaranteed for the rest of my life. For I feared that by challenging Eli in this way I had startled a swarm of furies in their hive, from whence they would fly at me, recriminations and counterrecriminations, as pernicious as the colony of red ants that once, when I was very small, I had made the mistake of disturbing, and which had attacked me. Screaming, I’d run to my mother and sister, who had tom off my clothes, thrown me into a tub filled with cold water. Only now neither my mother nor my sister, even if they’d been here, could have helped me. Only Eli could help me. And given the circumstances, what right did I have to ask him for help?

  I decided then that when he got back and ordered me out (as I was sure he would), I would simply refuse to leave; I would cling tight to the sheets of his bed; even if he tried to drag me down the ladder, force my clothes onto my body, pull me toward the door, I would hold on to him, as I’d learned once to do in a lifesaving class, not letting go until we reached shallow water.

  It was now nearly midnight. Exhausted, I felt myself, despite my valiant efforts to remain awake, lapsing into an uneasy sleep, in the course of which old memories assailed me. I thought of the bus stop at which I had been taunted to the point of tears, of the science class during which Dwight Rohmer had dropped my notebook into a vat of cow eyeballs. And though I could not deny that in these remote and scarring episodes there lay the origins of certain bad adult habits—for example, in my fight with Dwight Rohmer the habit (demonstrated only this evening) of exploding when angry, then withdrawing as soon as my explosion had provoked a response, or in my running away from the taunting boys the habit of assuming that any challenge I made to another person’s authority, no matter how legitimate, would be met not merely with resistance, but banishment—neither could I pretend that my woefulness made these episodes in any way interesting. For the sources of our pain are often appallingly banal, which is why their recitation can elicit irritation in a listener, rather than the sympathy we hoped to find. So your father was cold, the world says, so the other boys teased you ... so what? It doesn’t make you special. It only makes you ordinary. Yet it is the knowledge of our ordinariness that, once acquired, proves to be the most painful, and the most instructive, of all.

  Thus it was from tiresome and repetitive musings, a vicious circle of recollection and self-pity, that Eli’s keys in the lock, an hour later, pulled me awake. “I’m sorry,” I called out automatically upon hearing them, and in so doing set the tone for the rest of our relationship. For though I didn’t know it, Eli had taken my threats seriously, and come home pre
pared to submit to them. That “I’m sorry,” issued with such bathos, clued him in to the truth, which was that my conduct over the phone, far from instinct with potency, had been merely histrionics. My fear, in other words, was a self-fulfilling prophecy, alerting Eli as to exactly which weak spots he might exploit.

  I sat up in bed. “Eli, I’m sorry,” I repeated. He did not answer. In the quiet I heard his keys crashing against the top of the desk, the unbuckling of his belt.

  “I made a terrible mistake. I tried to call you back, but the line was busy. I wanted to tell you—”

  “Well, here I am. Are you satisfied? You’ve got me right where you want me, back in your clutches.”

  “But that’s what I wanted to tell you. I was wrong to ask you to come back. I wanted to tell you to stay at Liza’s after all. In fact, why don’t you go back there now?”

  “It’s too late.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Of course it is, after I left her there crying—”

  “Eli—”

  “Weeping, begging me to stay.”

  “Oh God, I feel so guilty! It’s all my fault.”

  He went into the bathroom. From the loft I listened to him peeing, brushing his teeth, spitting toothpaste foam into the water. Then the door opened; the ladder rungs sighed as he climbed up into the loft. Well, at least he’s not sleeping on the sofa, I observed privately, as I felt his body, with a gratifying thunk, fall next to mine.

  I reached for him.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said.

  “But, Eli—”

  “Don’t you dare touch me. You’ve got what you asked for. I’m here. Now don’t you dare ask for one more thing.”

  “But you’re not being fair!”

  “And you were?”

  “Listen! It wasn’t just that I wanted you here. It was for your own good. Because it makes me furious the way Liza treats you, the way she acts like you ought to be available whenever she wants you, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what else you might be doing—”

  “That’s my business.”

  “All she has to do is say jump, and you—”

  “Will you shut up? Will you please just shut up and let me get some sleep?”

  I shut up. He breathed.

  “Jump,” I added after a few seconds.

  “You always have to have the last word, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. But I could never get to sleep if I thought you thought I was trying to drag you back here only because I—”

  “Look, what do you want? Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then be quiet.” He rolled away from me.

  “I’ll never get to sleep,” I said.

  “Is that my fault?”

  “I wish we could solve this before—”

  “It’s going to take a lot longer than that.”

  Reaching under the mattress, then, he took two foam rubber plugs from a box he kept there and stuffed them into his ears. Within a few minutes he was snoring.

  I had lied. I would fall asleep—I knew I would—both because I was exhausted and because, despite my protestations, the mere presence of Eli’s body next to mine was a consolation. For once he fell asleep, I knew, I could touch him without his even realizing it, I could flout his orders, I could pretend that it was an ordinary night. Nor had the militant voice, despite the mortifications it had witnessed, been completely silenced in me; on the contrary, it was relishing its victory, if not over Eli, then over Liza, whose hand, by dragging him back, I had at least forced. No one else had ever done that. To Liza, I knew, I had proven myself once and for all an adversary not to be taken lightly. Yet even as I cherished this victory, I also recognized that it counted for little, because it proved only that I could be a bigger bully than she was. What remained to be seen (but to this question my dubiousness, auguring a future of struggle, served almost as the answer) was whether I could also be a bigger bully than Eli.

  10. SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS

  NOT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, the three of us were friends again (youth is like that), eating dinner together at the Japanese restaurant on Greenwich Avenue of which Liza had spoken over the phone. This time there was no question as to where Eli would spend the night, Liza having realized, to her sorrow and annoyance, that I had no intention of ceding him willingly to her; nor could much advantage be gained from starting a war with me that she would very likely lose. Much wiser, she must have reasoned, to lie low, at least for the time being. After all it was hardly in her interest to lose both of us. Though she loved Eli, it must not be forgotten that she also liked me. Nor was she above professional considerations, and what was the point of risking a friendship that in the future might be helpful to her in her career?

  Nevertheless, after we’d finished our sushi and were standing on the comer of Greenwich and Seventh avenues, preparing to say our goodbyes, almost in spite of herself Liza let a look of indignity cloud her eyes, as if my impudence in staking such a claim on attentions to which heretofore she had held an exclusive deed was simply intolerable. Just as quickly the look dissipated—Liza was more self-controlled than she let on—and, bidding us farewell, she headed bravely back toward that tiny apartment (the very nexus of her abandonment) in which she would sleep, no doubt, with the telephone cradled in her arms.

  As for Eli, as soon as she was gone he slipped his hand through my arm and squeezed it. His rage of the night before had passed entirely, leaving in its wake a greater tenderness, as if the storm clouds of our fight had irrigated the landscape they had also battered, making it more verdant if less tidy. Now I suspect that he was actually rather grateful to me for standing up to Liza. After all, to be the object of a rivalry cannot—especially for one who craves attention as much as Eli did—be entirely displeasing. Nor can I help but wonder to what degree he himself might have fostered those feelings of antagonism that ended up so thoroughly corroding my friendship with Liza—feelings by which he claimed to be repulsed, but which, when you thought about it, belonged more to his combative nature than to either of ours. For Eli, though he advertised himself as a paragon of gentleness, a sort of emotional Pillsbury Doughboy, could also be a dragon. When driving, for example, he had no qualms—if, say, another driver pulled out ahead of him in traffic—about opening his window and letting fly a torrent of abuse so scathing that nine times out of ten the offending idiot would race away in terror, fearful lest Eli should in his “road rage” pull out a shotgun and blow his head off. His sisters were the same way. Their amazing streams of invective—“part and parcel of growing up on Long Island,” Eli said—bore little semblance to human speech. Instead they were inarticulate spewings of fury, punctuated by incessant, even Tourretic repetitions of the word “fuck.”

  More than once I saw him reduce unlikely enemies, who had made the mistake of picking fights with him, to tears or silence, for if my way of coping with childhood cruelties was to flee, his response to a history of similar persecutions was to retaliate, as it were, retroactively, by enacting upon unwitting strangers the vengeance he wished he could have taken on the bullies of his adolescence. There was a story Eli liked to tell about a girl in his neighborhood who had teased him at the bus stop, making fun of his hair, his clothes, even his name; one afternoon, taking as a cue a phrase he’d heard an older cousin use, he had preempted her harassment by shouting, “Shut up, you flat-chested, dog-faced bitch”—an epithet in response to which the girl, utterly stunned, had burst into a fit of weeping and run off.

  Such a rejoinder, alas, was typical of Eli, whose reprisals were often out of proportion to the injury that had provoked them. Indeed, even the very generosity and sweetness that marked his general behavior could become an occasion for rancor, as on the evening when, in the midst of giving Liza a back rub, he had suddenly removed his oiled hands, stood up, and started complaining about the fact that in six years she’d never once given him a back rub, that all she did was take, that all anyone did wa
s take, and that he was sick of being a servant to other people’s pleasures—a diatribe to which Liza, still semiconscious in the wake of one of his superb and anesthetizing massages, hardly knew how to respond. For it was never his way to protest each grievance as it occurred, and thereby dilute his anger in the ordinary tides of human intercourse; instead he would compile, over the years, a list of these grievances, never mentioning them, yet mulling them over in secret, masking them with an almost wincingly immoderate courtesy, until the moment came when he would unleash upon his tormentor a deluge of righteous indignation so immense and so indisputable that in its drenching aftermath the victim would be unable even to muster words. Dumbfounded, he or she would limp away, and never attempt communication with Eli again. And because he was too proud ever to make a first step toward reconciliation, he would never attempt communication, either. Thus within only a few years of our meeting, he had severed all relations with his father, he had severed all relations with Liza, and eventually, he would sever all relations with me.

  The truth was, in those earliest months of our acquaintance Eli and I were like one of those antique couples forced by their families into arranged marriages, and therefore compelled to learn about each other only within the claustrophobic parameters of conjugal intimacy, from which there is little opportunity of escape—the only difference in our case being that we ourselves had done the arranging, instinctively, as soon as we had recognized in each other a shared longing for the domestic stability of which the television shows of our childhood had been a parody, instilling in us a paradoxical blend of appetite and distrust. This dream of cozy coupledom besotted me to such a degree that soon I began to view every sign Eli gave of his individuality, his peculiarity, in essence, his humanity, as an intrusion upon the stage set I had constructed around him, and to which he himself, though essential as a prop, was irrelevant as a person. For I was as consumed by the wish to live out my fantasy as those ersatz officers we’d seen at the coffee shop on Sheridan Square had been driven by the need to act out theirs. Thus (to return to the evening after our fight), upon getting back from dinner with Liza, and seeing that it was almost eleven, I had insisted that we immediately climb together into Eli’s loft bed, snuggle up among the blankets, and watch the double bill of I Love Lucy reruns that always came on at that hour: a ritual I had, for some reason, often dreamed of sharing with a lover, and in which Eli, so far, had been happy to indulge me. And yet tonight he kept interrupting the sublime sensations of warmth and security that this program—the very nexus of childhood comfort—called up in me, with unwelcome brushings and rubbings, or worse, pullings and grabbings, most often of my hand, which he was always putting on his penis, as if he wanted me to avert my attention from Lucy and do something to it. Finally, irritated by his refusal to take a hint (after all, I was not without my own streak of belligerence) I turned to him and said, “Will you quit it? I’m trying to watch.”