Eli blinked. “Oh, Roy,” I said. “He’s fine, thanks. Listen, would you like to have a coffee? If you’re free, that is—we don’t want to interrupt your day. It’s just such a surprise and a pleasure, running into you—”
“No, I’d love to,” Lise said. “We’ll go to Rivoire.” And, taking Eli’s arm, she led us across the piazza to a big cafe from the tables of which, in nice weather, you could admire the fake David and the Palazzo Vecchio.
“Clearly you know Florence better than we do,” Eli said, sitting down.
“Oh, I try to come a couple of times a year. I’ve got a friend here, perhaps you know her...” (She named a hugely famous shoe designer.)
“Well, of course, by reputation,” I said.
“Oh, you should really meet her. She’s quite wonderful. Well!” And, smiling, she opened her enormous eyes to the fullest possible extent. “So how long has it been since that historic panel? More than a year! Is it possible?”
“I’m afraid it wasn’t the most stimulating evening.”
“Decidedly not. In fact, if it hadn’t been for you, Martin, it would have been a complete washout. He really saved the day,” she added for the benefit of Eli, who was busy trying to signal a waiter. “Poor Julia and I hardly knew what to say, while that awful what’s-her-name—Violet Hummingbird or whatever—”
“Wasn’t she terrible?”
“I’ll tell you, in all my years in New York—and though I haven’t been a writer for very long, I’ve traveled in other fairly, shall we say, or at least I used to think so, cosmopolitan circles—I’ve never met such an operator.”
Eli was now lifting his arm into the air, snapping his fingers at the waiter, who elected to ignore him. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “Such rudeness. And only because we’re foreigners.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” Lise assured him. “The waiters here are always rude. It’s their mandate. You shouldn’t take it personally. So that friend of yours, the good-looking one,” she continued to me, “what’s he—”
Eli was on his feet. “Signore,” he shouted in his opera Italian, “per favore, siamo aspettando. ”
“One moment, please,” the waiter shouted back, “stay calm, please.”
“No, I won’t stay calm. You’ve served four groups that arrived after we did, and—”
The waiter made a gesture, at which point Eli let fly an English obscenity that silenced Lise, and that the waiter must have understood, for suddenly he abandoned the old woman he was serving and marched over to our table in high dudgeon. Cheeks bulging, he and Eli stood eye to eye, nose to nose, and screamed.
“This is absurd. Just because we are Americans—”
“Ma non, it is not that you are American, it is that you are vulgar and ugly. You do not behave this way in my cafe—”
“And you do not behave this way to a paying customer who has come in good faith and expects to be—”
“Eli, please,” I interjected. “It’s not worth—”
“Shut up.”
“Please leave,” the waiter ordered.
“Perhaps we’d better go,” said Lise, standing.
“Eli,” I repeated, “I really don’t think this is worth—”
“Oh, this is wonderful,” Eli said, “thank you very much, Martin, for being such a support to me when I’m trying to defend myself. Excuse me, Lise, there’s no need for you to leave, you haven’t been asked to. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, but I can’t bear this anymore. I can’t bear any of it anymore.”
Then he yanked his jacket off the back of his chair and went. I stood. “Eli,” I called, as he ran toward Via Calzaiuoli, turned a comer onto one of the little side streets, and was lost.
I sat down again. People were looking. Lise, her purse on the table, was busily redoing her eye makeup.
“I’m sorry,” I said, laughing slightly. “I’m afraid that sometimes Eli gets a little—hot under the collar, shall we say.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she answered placidly; then, arching her face toward mine, she added, “Listen, if you want to go after him—”
“No, no. What’s the point? I wouldn’t find him. And anyway, I hardly want to seem to be giving the green light to this kind of behavior. Or to miss an opportunity to spend some time with you ...”
“That’s so sweet of you,” she said, trying to suppress—or so it seemed to me—the look of bottomless pity filling her eyes. “It must be ... difficult for you.”
“Yes,” I affirmed, in the tone of someone making a long-withheld confession. “Yes, it is.” At which point the waiter, at long last, came to take our orders.
An hour or so later, a little drunk from too many Campari and sodas, I returned to Glenn’s apartment on Via dei Neri. Eli wasn’t back yet, which was a relief: I didn’t feel up to talking to him. Instead I opened a program from a concert given the week before by the Orchestra della Toscana that I had noticed loitering on top of the piano. Looking in the back, I scanned the names of the double bassists until I came to “Pierluigi Pellegrini.” A phone book in the kitchen provided his address—Via Ghibellina, just around the comer—and telephone number, which I dialed.
“Pronto?” a youthful voice answered after one ring.
Then I explained that I was a friend of Glenn’s from New York, that I was staying at his apartment while he was in Paris, and that he had suggested I give him a call. To my surprise Pierluigi immediately invited me to tea at his apartment. “But when? Now?” I asked.
“Why not?”
Why not indeed? “Great,” I said. “I’ll be over in a few minutes.” And, hurrying out of the apartment—making sure, first, that Eli wasn’t approaching from either direction on Via dei Neri—I walked briskly through the oncoming twilight to Via Ghibellina, where Pierluigi greeted me at the door to his flat, offered me Fanta because he had no tea, sat me down on his sofa, asked me if I did not agree that Glenn was the best and most loyal of friends, not to mention a genius, and pointed out a pair of Dante chairs he had inherited from his grandmother. “Why, I recognize that chair,” I said. “It’s in Glenn’s drawing of you...”
“You mean the drawing where I’m only wearing my boxer?”
I nodded. “I hope you don’t mind that he showed it to me.”
“Oh, no. I’m proud of my body.” He sat next to me. “I am so grateful to Glenn that he sent you to me,” he went on, putting his big, warm hands on my cheeks and pulling my face toward his crotch; nor did I object to the celerity, the lack of ceremony, with which he performed this maneuver. For it was what I had come for, I knew, so I did exactly what was expected of me, and not only by Pierluigi, but by Glenn, by Eli, most crucially, by myself. Letting go of all prudishness, I stripped him to his shorts. I posed him in the Dante chair. And then, for twenty minutes or so on a cold spring Florentine afternoon, I “had” him.
12. KING FAG
I BECAME A SLUT. It was the natural next step, this fall into the slipstream, this immersion in tongues and sensation where once there had been only ideas and screens. Now, instead of asking Eli to take me along when he went to visit his parents on weekends, I’d beg off his invitations, so that I could stay in New York and devote myself to sex. Nor was it difficult, even when he was with me, to deceive him, for we hardly spent any time together anymore. If I’d found out he’d been having an affair I would have been glad, for the simple reason that an adultery on his part would have lifted the onus from mine. (To such a low point had our great, our exemplary love sunk that I no longer thought in terms of ideals. I thought in terms of what I could get away with.)
Otherwise, when questioned, I lied. I said I had a date to eat kosher Chinese food with Sara Rosenzweig, or to see a movie with Kendall, when really I was planning to go to a safe sex club an advertisement for which I’d read in the back of the New York Native, a place where the customers were one another’s pornography, and “lifeguards” wearing pink armbands patrolled the premises to make sure no penis ever entered illegally i
nto a mouth or anus. We were at a transitional moment in the scurrilous history of the AIDS epidemic. Activism—the glory years of ACT UP—remained for the future. At the same time those early days of panic and uncertainty, when total abstinence was urged as the only surefire method for avoiding infection—these, at least, were well behind us. No longer did fear of disease corrode every act of intimacy. Instead it was generally accepted that so long as one adhered rigorously to the rules of “safe sex,” HIV transmission could be dodged. Yet what were those rules? There lay the problem. For on procedural matters—which were, finally, the heart of the matter—none of the experts seemed to be in agreement; thus in Germany posters in gay bars advised oral sex as a safe alternative to fucking, even as in New York similar posters were asserting that oral sex could be just as risky as anal sex, even if the person whose penis you had taken in your mouth (I thought anxiously of Pierluigi) did not ejaculate. (Did this mean that what was dangerous in New York was safe in Düsseldorf?) Likewise, while the authorities were united, at least, on the point that condoms provided an effective means of blocking the virus, how many of us knew, back then, that the ones made out of lambskin (which later, naively, Roy and I used twice) gave no protection whatsoever? How many of us knew, for that matter, that Vaseline could cause a latex condom to erode? Confronted with such ambiguities, some people—most of them older than I—elected to give up sex altogether, on the theory that once you’d become inured to the licentious abandon of the “old days,” such a cramped approximation as safe sex, which was to sucking and fucking what a dietetic hard candy is to chocolate mousse, was simply beside the point.
More optimistic souls took on the role of cheerleaders for masturbation, of which a Gay Men’s Health Crisis brochure declared: “Not only is jerking off with a buddy risk-free and fun, it’s hot? Music to my ears! For though such a promotion might represent to the new celibates merely a futile and annoying attempt to make the unpalatable palatable—“It’ll never work,” Gerald Wexler argued, “people would always rather have real sex”—to me the prohibition had the odd effect of giving the green light to the acts I liked best. (Everything was ideological in those days; masturbation, according to post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS thinking, was not only childish but oppressive, a reminder of the closet and its privations.) In retrospect, I don’t know whether the patronage of safe sex that marked those years brought to the fore in me a strain of adolescent eroticism that social pressures had heretofore suppressed, or whether, in a subconscious response to the newfound intertwining of eros with disease, I had constructed a desire to suit the limitations with which I was faced. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. What is important is that those of us who had hang-ups stayed alive. (We were not the majority, though. Indeed, even at the safe sex club I couldn’t help but notice the rapacity with which, when the “lifeguard” was looking the other way, certain of my fellows would bolt down for a quick suck, as if what really excited them was not sex itself but the contravention of authority.)
Much later, I had a funny conversation about those clubs with the husband of a friend of mine, a man who could not fathom why I should find it arousing to be in a room where seventy-five men were masturbating all at once. “Well,” I countered, “wouldn’t you find it arousing to be in a room where seventy-five women were masturbating all at once?”—a scenario the appeal of which, he had to confess, made more sense to him, albeit purely on the level of fantasy: “Women wouldn’t put up with it,” he insisted, which was probably true. Yet with women or men, he went on, wouldn’t the room get boring after a while? I had to admit that it did; indeed, by my third or fourth visit to the safe sex club its allure had already begun to pall, much as tea grows weaker with every soak of the bag. I hated it when someone I knew waved or smiled at me, or a foolish voice called out of the mists, “Excuse me, but aren’t you Martin Bauman? I loved your stories”—words I shooed away like flies. For at that moment Martin Bauman was the last person I wanted to be; indeed, I wanted to forget him, the baggage—of which there was more every year—that he lugged around with him, and that made the footloose shamblings of his early youth seem so improbable.
Homosexual men are adepts at the banalization of the subversive. And this is in large part, I think, because we are men—no, worse than that, men besotted by masculinity, whose libidos no woman’s touch will ever temper. Proust may have been right when he implied that the “invert” is at heart a woman. Nonetheless there is much in him that is essentially and fatally male: habits of competition, relentlessness, denial, dissimulation. In fact it may be that when heterosexual men (including the friend mentioned earlier) balk not only at the effeminacy of queens, but at their lack of self-discipline, what they are really protesting is the degree to which we hold up a mirror to their own appetite, which perhaps only the influence of women keeps in check. (By the same token, if critics responded with ire to a theorist’s recent suggestion that male masturbation is in essence a homosexual act, it may have been less because the idea itself was outrageous than because in every man’s masculine self-regard the seed of homosexuality lies dormant.)
Around this time—summer returned, bringing with it a vague melancholic longing for sand and heat (and in my case, for that peculiar alternative to sand and heat, the arctic chill of the Sterlings’ apartment)—I received the following fan letter, sent care of my publisher. “Dear Martin Bauman,” it read:
Though I’m not in the habit of writing to authors, your book of stories, The Deviled-Egg Plate, moved and delighted me so much that I felt I had to acknowledge the pleasure. Thank you! I look forward to reading the novel promised on the dust jacket.
I am a member of a twelve-step group for sexually compulsive men that meets every Monday evening in Room 407 of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, which is located on West 13 th Street. I have the feeling that you would benefit from joining us. Remember, sexual compulsiveness is an illness, and one that can be treated with therapy. Help is nigh!
Yours sincerely,
Norman J. Parenti
My first reaction to this letter was to wonder whether, or when, I’d slept with its author—was he hot? Would I want to do it again? For so swifüy had I moved from a point where I could count the men I’d had sex with on one hand, to one in which it was impossible to keep track of their number, much less their names, that the possibility of my having done something with “Norman J. Parenti” I took not only as a given, but despite the distinct thrust of his communication, as an opportunity.
My second reaction—to which the first contributed as much as the letter itself—was indignation. How dare this stranger write me such a letter, I found myself thinking, a letter as unwelcome as it was impudent, and nervy enough to hint that just because I had a healthy attitude toward things libidinous, there was somehow something wrong with me? There was nothing wrong with me! On the contrary, if anyone had anything wrong with him, it was “Norman J. Parenti” with his faddish faith in twelve-step groups. (Here intellectual snobbery provided the perfect excuse not only for unreasoned disdain, but for closing the door on the question of why, if the letter was so silly, it had so upset me.) For in urging me to join his little group, what was Norman J. Parenti doing but dressing in the simpering language of self-help the very equation of pleasure with evil against which the men and women who had founded the Gay and Lesbian Community Center had struggled? Now I no longer see myself as being “above” the language of psychotherapy; I’m willing to admit my own sexual compulsiveness. Back then, however, to take such a letter seriously would have been to sanction a process of self-examination the stresses of which I refused, because they would have required me to do violence to my own illusions.
In July, advance reviews began to appear both for The Terrorist and for Eli’s first novel, History Lessons, which were scheduled to come out within a few weeks of each other. They were not good; indeed, in the case of The Terrorist, the review in Publishers Weekly was so bad as to merit mention at the front of the magazine, where, amid other bu
lleted news items (including the announcement of Stanley Flint’s imminent resignation from Hudson-Terrier), I read the following: “Coming on the heels of his promising story collection, The Deviled-Egg Plate, Martin Bauman’s first novel, The Terrorist, is a major disappointment.” Thank you, PW! To make matters worse, though the reviews for History Lessons were marginally more positive, Eli concluded from the rather nasty fuss that PW had kicked up that as in the past I had eclipsed him with the spectacle of my success, I was now going to eclipse him with the spectacle of my failure. “I mean, with all that, who’s even going to notice my book?” he complained. “It’s Mrs. Bauman all over again.” His projected bitterness started us fighting, only more nastily than before, since beneath the surface of our discord lay the unspoken fact of my chronic infidelity.
What boded worse for either of us than each other, however, was a third publication set to coincide with ours: that of Stanley Flint’s eight-hundred-page opus, The Writing Teacher. According to the buzz, this novel was going to be “the publishing event of the season”: “100,000-copy first printing,” I read at the bottom of the PW review (which was boxed and starred), “ 16-city author tour, major ad/promo.” And all this for Stanley Flint, who despite his demonstrable genius as a teacher and editor was as a writer, at least to judge from those few stories I’d read in college (as well as in his own estimation), utterly forgettable! Why him? I found myself asking. Had greatness touched him at midlife, as it had Proust? Perhaps. For if PW was to be believed, then The Writing Teacher was not merely “the literary tour de force of the decade,” not merely “a powerfully moving meditation on art, commerce, and sin,” not merely “a fascinating postmodernist conundrum, an interrogation of the self and of the border territory between fact and fiction,” but “one of those rare and original works of art that announces, almost from the outset, its destiny: this one will last.” Well! At the very least, I hoped, Flint’s projected success might give Eli and me reason to band together in the irony of our comparative puniness. Yet when I shared the review with him, and laughed over the fact that in the case of my own novel only fifteen thousand copies were being printed, and a book tour planned to encompass a mere eight cities, he reminded me tartly that he wasn’t being sent on any book tour at all.
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