Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  In the wake of my accident, I left the apartment less and less frequently. Most of the time I stayed in Glenn’s bedroom, trying to write or—no, not reading—re-reading those books that I could trust to provide a sedative effect, a sort of literary Valium: Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, the more cheerful of Barbara Pym’s tales of provincial English life, the Mapp and Lucia series by E. F. Benson, the filmed version of which my mother, by dying, had just missed. Or I watched television, old Warner Brothers cartoons I’d already seen a hundred times and that I hope will continue to be repeated, every afternoon, for eternity. The frenetic interactions of Tweety and Sylvester, Tom and Jerry—from which a scrim of glass protected me—lent to those days the same hushed air of convalescence that had marked the afternoons when I’d been kept home from school with a cold, and over which, in recollection at least, a subtle rain is always falling. For memory has its own weather; even today, in my mind, a cloud cover hangs over our months in Glenn’s apartment, making it difficult to distinguish, in all that cold, wet, concentrated gray, the real source of my unhappiness, with which a hundred mirages furiously competed. No matter that I told myself and others I was fine, “resting,” recuperating; the truth is, I had entered into what clinicians term an “acute vegetative depression,” albeit one that refused to recognize its own face in the mirror. And such a state, like a warm bath in a cold room, is easier to drop into than to climb out of. Left to my own devices, I got fat; my breath became sour. Eli was horrified, but checked himself from saying anything, lest my lethargy should be some necessary step in the grieving process that it would be lethal for him to interrupt.

  As is often the case, my sorrow coincided, for him, with a period of great happiness and productivity. If Glenn’s apartment brought out the worst in me, coaxed into bloom some germ of sordidness I carried within myself, it had the opposite effect on him. Most afternoons he disappeared for hours, with Maisie, into the park; they ran and played fetch, and fell in with a neighborhood clique, incipient militants whose shared resentment of the leash laws had inspired them to revolutionary tactics. These new friends of his were always engaging in little acts of civil disobedience, such as letting their dogs off the leash all at once in the presence of a patrolman, who would then be hard-pressed to issue summonses. Afterward, Eli would burst back into the apartment, sweaty and exuberant from his exploits, which he would share with me even as he shimmied out of his clothes, switched on the shower. Laconic on the bed, I would pretend to listen; aim the remote control toward the television; watch passively as game shows, talk shows, soap operas sped by illegibly, stations seen from a moving train. What we were engaging in was an unspoken battle of wills, his enthusiasm versus my lassitude, which always won out. Finally, discouraged by my silence, he too would lapse into silence, lie down next to me, and start reading, or else go out again, as if to protest my dissolution, the irritating and obvious fact that the things he had hoped would make me happy, and for the sake of which he had moved us uptown, were making me miserable.

  He had a point. I was not cooperating with his efforts to rouse me. For instance, whenever he invited me to go with him to the opera, or to a concert at Carnegie Hall, I always said no, claiming that classical music bored me. (Yet later, with someone else, such music would become a mainstay of my life.) Whenever he entreated me to accompany him and Maisie on one of their park frolics, I begged off. (Yet later, with another dog, I would spend whole days there.) What rankled him even more than my refusals, moreover, was probably the suspicion that they owed less to any real difference in our temperaments than to an unwillingness on my part to join in, and thus enhance, his pleasure, as he had enhanced mine, say, every time he’d sat through an episode of I Love Lucy with me. For it was obvious that I was blaming on circumstance a disaffection to which, from blindness or selfishness, I would nonetheless not fess up. What was less obvious was the source of this disaffection. Clearly it was nothing so simple as a conflict in tastes—his for Joan Sutherland versus mine for Joni Mitchell—because such decorative kinks affection, in the long run, always smooths out. Nor was it the erotic threat of another, of Roy, for instance, against whose clean-cut positivity, even if he’d been around at that dark moment, I would have had to shield my eyes. Nor was it resentment at any mistreatment I believed myself to have suffered at Eli’s hands, for by then I had come to accept my own partial responsibility for our warfare. No, what I was feeling was something far more unreasoned than that, something more akin to the base antipathy that provokes one dog, without explanation, to growl at another. There is no pretty way to say this. I wanted to love Eli, I tried valiantly to love him, indeed, on some primitive level I probably did love him; but I didn’t like him.

  There, I’ve said it. I didn’t like him. Very likely he didn’t like me, either. That he loved me I am fairly certain, in that heedless, indiscriminate way of siblings whom history has bound together, yet who within an hour of reuniting are at each other’s throats. And yet—the vast history of family life to the contrary—this is never a very good basis for conjugal union. You have to like each other as well as love each other, else the thousand irritating little details that make up the human spirit will drive you to rage—as, for instance, Eli’s habit of shucking off his clothes like a snake shedding his skin, which in someone else I might have found charming, drove me to grind my teeth, ball my hands into fists. Why? Because it was Eli. Nor was he indifferent to my aversion, which no doubt bruised his ego. And how unjust it must have seemed to him—yet another example of his fatedness—that at the very moment of his own fledgling happiness, I should be militating against our marital happiness! Still, there it was. He held back from expressing his frustration, while I remained immovably perched atop the slide of my destiny, too frightened to go down yet too proud to admit defeat.

  My social life dwindled to nearly nothing. A few weeks earlier, a critic had published a diatribe against what he called the “scourge” of minimalism, thus initiating a media backlash against the “brat pack.” Around the same time Sam Stallings’s second novel came out to what could only be called barbarous reviews, at which point the party invitations dried up. This was just as well: I was hardly in the mood to see people. Instead, when I got bored or lonely, I talked over the phone with Liza, from whom the combination of our move uptown and her new infatuation with Ben Pollack had distanced Eli of late. No longer did she convene her old “afternoons” with Ethan, Janet, and the Amys; instead, she told me, she preferred to spend her time alone with Ben, with whom she insisted that she had fallen irretrievably in love—a declaration that Eli and I, quite naturally, took with a grain of salt; after all, throughout their long history, hadn’t she claimed on other occasions to have fallen hopelessly in love with men, only to give them up as soon as some pretty girl caught her attention? In our experience, Liza’s lesbianism was such an endemic fact of her character, even of her physiology, as to render moot any debate over sexual confusion. Yet now she was insisting not only that she loved Ben, but that she loved him in spite of a conscious decision she had made to commit herself unwaveringly to lesbianism—a decision, moreover, of which he was fully aware, and on which she had no intention of reneging.

  “But, Liza,” I said in frustration, “isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant?” In response to which she shot back that in her view to reject someone you loved just because he was a man was as dishonest as to reject someone you loved just because she was a woman. Prejudice went both ways, she insisted; existed on both sides of the erotic divide.

  Eli, for selfish reasons, would not be persuaded. Since the weekend at Nora Foy’s, he had been enjoying a rare equilibrium in his relationship with Liza, who appeared finally to have realized that she could no longer take their friendship for granted. For a long while she had been at his beck and call, free when he wanted her and undemanding when he didn’t; but then Ben had come along and, as is so often the case when someone has a new lover, suddenly she didn’t seem to need Eli anymore. Nor
did his insistence that this didn’t bother him, that on the contrary, her sudden lack of availability came as a relief, sparing him from having to take part in the “cult of her crises,” keep him from needing to express, whenever her name came up, his disappointment at her “cowardice,” not to mention his conviction that by choosing Ben, she was merely buckling under to convention and trying to get back at Eli for what she saw as the shoddy way he had sometimes treated her. Meeting Ben might have made things easier for Eli, by giving a human face to her treachery; only Eli didn’t want to meet Ben. To him Ben wasn’t a person so much as a figurehead, allegorical snout thrust forward from the prow of that vast and totemic cruiser, heterosexuality. He and Liza talked for hours on the phone, they argued and hung up on each other and called each other back again, she tried ceaselessly to persuade him of her sincerity while he tried ceaselessly to dissuade her from her “betrayal.” Neither succeeded in convincing the other of anything. They had reached an impasse—not so much between conflicting ideologies, as between his old-fashioned belief that sexual identity was a fixed boundary, the violation of which amounted to a kind of treason, and her contrary pleas for a more supple definition of the erotic self.

  Things only got worse after that. At the dinner that Eli and I, after much nagging from Liza, finally agreed to go to with her and Ben, Eli hardly spoke at all. Ben seemed a likable enough fellow—handsome in his way, and obviously intelligent, though timid, which was hardly surprising, given the slight, almost lewd, almost flirtatious, and in any case inquisitional smile that Eli, in his silence, kept casting toward him. To compensate for Eli’s refusal to open his mouth, I talked as much as I could, too much, in the end: I became, once again, the babbling youngest child who had so bored my brother and sister. Liza joined in: we filled the air with banter. Yet the dinner, despite our valiant efforts to salvage it, was a failure. Indeed, as Eli and I walked home afterward, he could only shake his head, interspersing sighs of disbelief with the occasional remark about how Liza had been dressed. “Did you notice she’s growing her hair long again?” “Did you notice she’s wearing two earrings again?” “Did you see she’s carrying a purse?”

  “But, Eli, she’s always carried a purse.”

  “Yes, but not like that. This time, walking away with him, that purse swinging from her arm, she might have been Sada.”

  “She wasn’t wearing a skirt.”

  “She will be next time.”

  Alas, there was no next time. That evening, closing himself up with Maisie in Glenn’s bedroom, Eli called Liza on the telephone for the last time. For almost four hours they yelled at each other. Because I had the television in the living room switched on, I heard almost nothing of their fight. Nor, in truth, did I want to: I could guess in advance its import. Whenever Eli’s voice grew loud enough to penetrate the closed door, I turned the volume up higher. I remember that I was watching the porno channel on New York cable, the Voyeur Vision lady, whom men called for five dollars a minute to witness her live responses to their live lust.

  “Voyeur Vision lady, I want to be your slave!”

  “Yeah? You want to be my slave? Then get down on your knees and lick the television!”

  After a while I must have fallen asleep, for when I opened my eyes again, instead of the Voyeur Vision lady, I found myself looking at Eli. He was smiling in that curiously lurid way he had smiled at Ben.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said, and stretched. “What time is it?”

  “Three.”

  “Have you been on the phone all this time?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s over.” He repeated his smile. “Liza and me.”

  I sat up. “Oh, Eli...”

  “But it’s okay, Martin! In fact I’m glad. Because it’s been on the way for months, hasn’t it, when you think about it? And some relationships—this is what I told Liza—you just outgrow. They’re too fixed in their own time, they won’t mature, which means that to sustain them you also have to sustain the conditions that nurture them—and that would really be impossible, wouldn’t it, because Liza and I, we’re not college kids anymore, and if we pretended we were until we were old and gray—well, that wouldn’t be very attractive, would it?”

  “Still, she’s your best friend.”

  “Correction. You’re my best friend.” He kissed me. “And now, just think” (sitting next to me on the brocade sofa, he put his arm around my shoulder) “we’re finally free in a way we never have been. I mean, we don’t have to worry about Liza being competitive, or making demands, or insisting we all sleep in the same bed. Or her phone calls. Or all those tired rituals, that weekend at Nora’s, the afternoons.” He glanced at me guardedly, a little sadly. “Not that I’m suggesting that you should feel under any pressure to change your relationship with her—I mean, after all, your friendship with her is completely independent of mine. For instance, she’d love for you to come to the wedding—”

  “What wedding?”

  “But didn’t I tell you? That’s what started the fight in the first place. She and Ben are getting married.”

  “But they’ve just met!”

  “I know, I know. Needless to say I won’t be going. I can’t give this sort of thing my seal of approval. You’re another matter, though. You could go.”

  “Are you kidding? Without you? Not a chance.” I rubbed my tired temples. “Oh, it seems so sad, Liza actually carrying through on all those old threats. I wonder if she’ll regret it, if someday she’ll wake up and think, What the hell have I done?”

  “But she insists she’s still a lesbian. That’s what’s so strange. She says she’ll even keep writing about it—only she won’t act on it.” Eli sighed. “Well, I’d better take Maisie out. She’s about to burst.”

  “Want me to come?”

  He looked surprised. “That’s nice of you, Martin, only ... no thanks. I need to think. Anyway, it’s late.”

  “Okay.”

  He left then. Stepping into the bathroom, looking at myself in the big mirror, I tried to reconcile my reaction to the news of this rupture—a genuine feeling of remorse, not only for myself, but for Liza and Eli too—with what I knew would be the more fitting response of a loyal lover (not to mention the response most likely to gratify Eli), a combination of shock and relief. For as I tried to remind myself, only a year ago, in the days when Liza had seemed such a threat to me, it was exactly this sort of rift that I had hoped for. Only now, in the mirror, I was no longer the boy whom Roy Beckett had taken out for a postpanel Manhattan; instead, with my puffy eyes and unkempt hair, I looked more like Glenn than myself, as if his spirit, the spirit of his apartment, were possessing me.

  Bankruptcy! Only now does it strike me that this chapter, the hardest in the book to write and the longest in gestation, is Chapter Eleven. Oh, why did I refuse so adamantly (when it would have helped) to name what was rising in my bones that night, and had been rising steadily since the hour of my mother’s death—as cold as the ache of a twisted ankle, an echo of which you know (and isn’t this the first sign that youth is over?) you’ll be feeling for the rest of your life: the penetrating chill of loss?

  A few weeks after that, on the spur of the moment, Eli and I cashed in our frequent-flyer miles and went to Italy. What inspired us to make this trip, I think, was the delusion—so common to couples in trouble—that a change of scenery will automatically revive the inner scenery, freshening a tired love; and yet to believe this is to ignore the hermetic nature of marriage, which little outside itself can touch. At first, it was true, the shock of new sights and sounds perked us up a bit. Indeed, in Venice we were almost happy, tripping along the elevated boards that crisscross San Marco during acqua alta, when floodwaters turn the piazza into a wading pool. Yet it did not last. Instead this sensation of new possibilities, not only in the world but in ourselves, dissipated as we made our way down the peninsula. By Bologna I was depressed again, Eli frustrated, as alw
ays, at his inability to make me feel better. Then we tried the next desperate measure couples take under such circumstances: we invited someone else in to liven things up, in this case Glenn, whom Eli called from the train station in Florence. Yet as it turned out, Glenn was leaving that night for Paris. We had time only to drink a coffee with him, after which he graciously offered us his apartment on Via dei Neri to sleep in before departing himself for a new romance and some concerts of the Ensemble Intercomperain.

  That afternoon, walking with Eli through the Piazza della Signoria, amid the spring traffic of tourists and pigeons I noticed a tall, hunched, familiar-looking woman posed earnestly before the statue of Perseus. “My God,” I said, “I think that’s Lise Schiffrin.” And stepping nearer to where this woman, Blue Guide in hand, was peering at the streaked bronze musculature of the sculpture, I saw that I was right: she was, unmistakably, Lise Schiffrin. “Hello,” I said, and she turned. It took her a second to register who I was, but once she did she smiled winningly, so that I could see the flecks of lipstick on her teeth. She was wearing a soft black leather coat, very expensive, and a lot of jewelry.

  “Martin,” she said, offering me one of her long hands to shake, at which point I introduced her to Eli. “Oh, what a pleasure to meet you,” she told him, then turned to me and asked, “By the way, how’s that very good-looking friend of yours—you know, the one you stood us up for after the panel?”