ONE WINTER MORNING during my junior year I found a letter from the magazine in my mailbox. At first I assumed it would turn out to be one of those cut-rate subscription offers that as a student I was always receiving, until I noticed that my name and address had been typed using an old-fashioned typewriter on which both the “a” and the “m” jumped up. Inside, typed in the same manner, and corrected in one spot with Liquid Paper, was the following note:
Dear Mr. Bauman,
This is a fan letter. I have just read your story “Weight” in Watermark [a student magazine], and it is terrific. You have a great ear for dialogue and an eye for detail. Also, you’ve pulled off something difficult: putting yourself not only in a woman’s shoes, but in an older woman’s shoes, with utter conviction. Others around here have read the story too and are equally impressed, and if you write any more, we hope you’ll let us see them.
Sincerely,
Edith Atkinson
Rereading this letter nearly twenty years later (in the interval the magazine has undergone upheavals and reincarnations that in those days would have been unthinkable; Edith is long retired; of those “others” to whom she refers so coyly, none remains), I see in it all the hallmarks of the magazine’s old sense of itself as an institution too firmly rooted in the soil of American culture, too canonical, if you will, ever to fall prey to commercial realities. This confidence is evident, for example, in the seemingly effortless transition from “I” to “we” that Edith makes in the last sentence, a transition intended, I now know, to underscore the fact—made manifest also in her decision not to indicate her tide nor to say how she came to read a story published in an undergraduate magazine in the first place—that the letter, though signed by one “Edith Atkinson,” has in fact been drafted by the hovering spirit of that self-incarnating entity, the magazine itself.
Another aspect of this letter that today takes me by surprise: even in 1981, when such usages were already out of fashion, the telephone number is given according to the old formula OXFORD 3-1414: a testament (along with Edith’s stubborn refusal to exchange her old Remington for one of the new IBM Selectrics then coming onto the market, and that would soon themselves be rendered obsolete by the earliest versions of the personal computer) to the magazine’s view of itself as exempt from, perhaps even beyond the reach of, technology, time, history.
The first thing I did after I received the letter was to run over to Jim and Ash’s room and read it to them. Then I telephoned my mother. Then I typed out a polite note to Edith Atkinson, indicating that I would like to send her more stories.
Her reply arrived the following week. Yes, she said, she would be delighted to read more of my work. Hastily I pulled together my oeuvre, which at that point consisted of four stories, the latest of these, “String,” being the saga of Matthew Spalding’s suicide attempt. (I had a fondness for one-word titles in those days.) It was a story of which, despite Stanley Flint’s blandishments, I felt especially proud.
Ten days later they all came back. “Dear Mr. Bauman,” Edith wrote:
We’ve read these with interest. They’re good, but there are several problems. First, the stories are too memory-oriented, and we are off recollection these days. Second, in all four your tone is sometimes condescending. Also, there aren’t any likable characters, by which I mean characters with whom we can sympathize, whose points of view we want to share.
In the end it seems to me that you’re writing in a voice that’s too cold for you, and while objectivity is fine, that first story of yours suggests to me that your natural tendency is toward a more intimate tone.
I’m sorry not to have better news. Do keep sending me your work!
Yours,
Edith Atkinson
The letter did not distress me particularly, for the simple reason that over the last several weeks I had been coming around myself to much the same opinion that Edith expressed here, and that Stanley Flint had expressed about the last of the stories in his letter. Not that I felt inclined to write a belated note of thanks or apology to Flint, with whom I was still a little angry. Probably I should have, and yet the truth was, I no longer felt that I needed anything from him, since now it was upon Edith Atkinson alone—a woman who existed for me purely as a prose style, who had no face, voice, or age—upon whom I was pinning my hopes; she, and not Flint, would become my mentor, my sage, my guide to that mysterious and enviable universe, New York.
Accordingly, I decided to write a new story, keeping Edith in mind as an ideal reader: someone remote, intelligent, and finicky, whose enthusiasm would matter.
As had become my habit, I didn’t go home for spring break that year. Instead I stayed at school, where I spent every afternoon in the rear smoking section of the library, quiet and empty during this period when everyone else was off on vacation. The new story was oracular in nature, in that it described a scene I had not yet enacted, much less come to recognize as the essential prerequisite to my adulthood it was destined to be: namely the scene, now almost iconic, in which the young homosexual comes out to his parents.
Some further information is necessary here. Although, by this point, I was spending much of my time with Lars and Gretchen and their crowd, I still did not conceive of myself, at least consciously, as homosexual. This is a difficult state to explain to anyone who has not lived in it. Suffice it to say that instinct makes itself felt less strongly when it is indulged than when it is betrayed. For years I had tried to convince myself that the starstruck reverence I cultivated for certain girls and women really amounted to erotic love—a sleight of hand I could sustain only so long as the girls and women in question refused to take my passions seriously, as had been the case until the spring semester of my freshman year, when one evening I found myself sitting alone in the residential common room with flame-haired Nina Reilly, whose affections I had been cultivating, the lights switched off and her locks pressed into my nostrils. Even though we said nothing, even though we did not so much as look at each other, still, I could feel forming over our heads, like a cartoon speech bubble, the prelude to a kiss.
Pleading a paper to finish, I fled—the reality of what was expected of me overwhelmed me—after which I stopped pretending to have fallen in love with girls. Instead I adopted a pose of sexual nullity: so long as I didn’t declare myself, I reasoned, I would remain at least in principle heterosexual, this condition being the default program in the same way that “female” is the default program for the human embryo when the hormonal influence of the Y chromosome is suppressed. And yet on some level I must have wanted to be found out, for in a course I took on the sociology of Japan, I wrote my term paper on Yukio Mishima—but purely, I told myself, out of intellectual curiosity. Visiting my parents one Christmas, I checked out John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw and H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Other Love on my mother’s library card—but only because I was open-minded and wanted to learn.
With the story it was the same ruse: what I told myself was that I was writing about a young man who flies home to tell his parents that he is gay not because I was gay, not because I knew that soon I would have to fly home and make the same declaration to my own parents, but because I found the situation “interesting.” It was interesting to contemplate the dramatic consequences of such a revelation. It was interesting to piece together, with that same detached empathy that had guided me in writing about Aunt Lily, or Matthew Spalding, or my mother, those ordered emotions it takes but a single truthful utterance to scatter.
What I did not admit was that in telling such a story I was also engaging in one of those acts of literary palmistry by means of which writers so often predict or rehearse their own futures. Thus, even though half a year would pass before I would bring about the scene of revelation that lay at the story’s heart (and for which—irony of ironies—the story itself would serve as the springboard), even though half a decade would pass before I would bring Eli Aronson home for one of the ersatz Jewish Christmases in which my family specialized and we would scandalize my father by kissing under the mistletoe, nonetheless I was able to write these very scenes, in large part thanks, I see now, to the solitude of that spring break, that ugly, empty library, which, in its tranquil amplitude, provided for my imagination a model of spaciousness it had not known since childhood: a blank page. There I felt myself freed, for the first time, from the fear lest some suspicious figure—my mother, Donald, myself—should peer over my shoulder and deduce, from a few scrawled sentences, what it was that the story and I shared. Or is this disingenuous of me to say, when I was writing the story for Edith Atkinson, for the one magazine on which every literate American (and in particular my mother) depended as a source for fiction? I’m still not sure. What is certain is that I could never have written the story had that library not swathed me in its cool, protective, and effacing cloak.
Not that I wrote with ease; on the contrary, the construction of the story (if it could even be called that) was slow and ornery, consisting chiefly in a nervous sequence of steps backwards and forward, false starts, interruptive bouts of panic and despair. “Flow,” when it happened, never happened for long. By the end, my notebook was a mass of illegible marginalia, fierce erasures that made holes in the paper, all in sharp contrast to the tidy legal pads that Barb Mendenhall, my only companion, arranged each morning across the table from me, the textbooks over which, with methodical industry, she dragged her yellow, pink, and blue highlighters.
I finished the story just as the break ended. By then I felt as bruised as the pages themselves, for even though I had typed out a fresh copy, I still winced whenever I looked at the lumpy sentences, the infelicitous turns of phrase. Indeed, even in those instances where I had attempted literary first aid and covered over the offending passage with a bandage of rhetoric, I grimaced, for now I recognized the “repairs” to be about as seamless as the grafts that Dr. Frankenstein affixed to his monster’s face. To each repair I would then make further repairs, which would necessitate, in those years before the personal computer, typing out yet another fresh copy. Bandages piled on top of bandages until I could no longer distinguish the wound from the cure, until I was as bleary-eyed as a surgeon, emerging only half-satisfied from the operating theater, his gloves stained with the patient’s blood.
The season of midterms took me out of myself for a time. After a week I reread the story and, to my surprise, found it not nearly so bad as I had feared. Accordingly, and with a bravado I could never have mustered had I not shut down the part of my brain that worried over consequences, I sent it off to Edith Atkinson. Several weeks passed without a reply. Each morning, when I went to check my mail, I fully expected to find in my box the requisite thick envelope of rejection. Instead I found nothing, or even worse, one evil morning, a thin envelope printed with the name and address of the magazine, which I tore open in a riot of hope, only to discover inside the cut-rate subscription offer with which I had confused Edith’s original letter in the first place.
It was now the end of March. Nearly a month had passed since I’d sent the story. Was no news good news? Did the fact that Edith was taking so much longer to respond than she had on previous occasions mean that the story’s merits were being debated? That it had gotten lost in the mail? That she was on vacation? Or was the delay simply an indication (this seemed the most likely scenario) that it was being circulated among those “others” for whose collective opinion Edith served as mouthpiece? Indeed, perhaps Edith didn’t even exist; perhaps hers was simply the name the “others” used when they wanted to make cautious inquiries without jeopardizing their precious anonymity. (As I later learned, such a scenario wasn’t far off the mark.)
Then one Monday afternoon, while I was studying in my room, the phone rang, and Donald (with whom, despite our political differences, I was still living) picked it up. “It’s for you,” he said, handing me the receiver.
“Martin Bauman? Edith Atkinson.”
“Oh, hello!” I said.
“Your story’s terrific. We’d like to publish it.”
I looked at Donald. He was cleaning his ears with a Bic pen.
“There is some work I’d like to do on the story, though—if you’re amenable. Tell me, do you ever come to New York?”
“Sure. I mean, I could.”
“Why don’t you come next week and I’ll take you to lunch? We can talk.” '
“Great.”
“Is Thursday okay? I wouldn’t want to take you away from your classes.”
“No, Thursday’s fine. I don’t have class on Thursday.”
“Come by the office. Ask for me at fifteenth-floor reception. Oh—is one o’clock all right?”
“Fine.”
“By the way, you should be very proud. It’s a wonderful story, a very important story. We’re thrilled to be doing it.”
She hung up. The entire conversation—which changed my life irrevocably (and not only for the better)—had taken all of a minute. And now it was over, and I was still sitting on our familiar sofa with its shot springs; across the room Donald was sniffing the clot of ear wax impaled on the end of his pen.
“What’s up?” he asked.
I told him that the magazine had bought my story. He snorted. “I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said. And why should I have? Probably when I arrived next Thursday at the offices of the magazine, it would be to be told by the fifteenth-floor receptionist (no doubt a pitiless harridan, deaf, after decades, to the pleas of a thousand, a million, young aspirants) that some mistake had been made, that Edith Atkinson had made no appointment with me, that Edith Atkinson was on extended leave, that there was no Edith Atkinson.
“So what’s the story about?” Donald asked next.
I opened my mouth. I thought.
“It’s about family,” I said after a moment.
“Good subject, good subject.”
I worried that Donald might press for specifics, but he didn’t. Instead my vague answer seemed to satisfy him, just as it satisfied all the other people with whom, over the next few days, I shared my news, including my writing teacher of the previous year. “Do you want to read it?” I hazarded, not really certain what I’d do if he said yes.
“No, no,” he answered. “I’d rather wait and see it in the pages of the magazine.”
If there had been any chance my mother might have said the same thing, very likely I would have told her too. And yet I knew my mother: such an imprecise answer as “it’s about family” would never satisfy her. She would nag at me until I gave her details. So I decided not to tell her, or at least to wait until I went home at the end of the term to tell her, ostensibly because such news was far too monumental to deliver over the phone, in fact because I was trying to postpone as long as possible the moment when I would have to reveal to her and my father what the story was about—which would be tantamount, I knew, to coming out to them. For my mother was at once too clever and too suspicious to be taken in by those feints of purely “intellectual” interest by means of which, while writing the story, I had managed to delude myself.
Still, I started preparing. In my mind I rehearsed over and over the scene of inquisition, imagining any number of possible responses on the part of my parents, and for each one readying a strategy of self-defense.
If, for instance, my father said to me, “I’m so disappointed in you,” I decided that I would respond by listing all my successes: a catalogue of prizes and encomia so impressive that in its wake he could not possibly remain disappointed, especially when reminded of that catalogue’s crowning glory, the acceptance of my story by the magazine.
If he said to me, “Are you sure this isn’t just a phase you’re going through?” I would first tell him about Nina Reilly, then by way of chastising him for his narrow-mindedness read aloud some heart-stopping words on the subject (from the story, of course) that would put an end to this line of questioning altogether.
If my mother burst into tears, and said, “It’s all our fault”—but here I faltered. What could I say if my mother burst into tears? The very idea made me angry. “How dare you not admire me, how dare you cry?” I decided I would shout, thereby shaming her into a more dignified posture.
And finally, if my parents persisted in wailing and shaking their heads, if they refused obstinately to accept the news of their son’s homosexuality except in terms of tragedy, then, and only then, I would use my secret weapon: the boyfriend I was determined to have found by then, a boyfriend so handsome, well-spoken, and respectable that they would have no choice but to smile, wipe the tears from their eyes, and acknowledge that even my sister could not have done better. Yet this boyfriend—so far—had failed to materialize, no matter how diligently I crisscrossed the campus in search of him, my heart held out as if it were a Geiger counter that would beat more loudly, and with greater frequency, the closer I came.
The Thursday on which I was to have lunch with Edith Atkinson neared. The evening before, not sure what to wear, I summoned Donald, who advised a flannel jacket and a pair of green corduroy pants that my mother had given me on my last visit home. He had worn a similar outfit, he told me, to a summer job interview, and it had done the trick perfectly.
That night he headed off, as usual, to Dolly’s bar, leaving me to try to get some sleep. But I couldn’t, and at six the next morning, already showered, shaved, and dressed, I took an early bus into New York. For several hours I wandered through midtown, stopping occasionally to stare up at the many-eyed red brick edifice in which the magazine maintained its offices, not really very distinguishable, I saw now, from all the other many-eyed red brick edifices crowded together on that street, nor even the exclusive domain of the magazine at all, which I had always assumed would own its own building. Instead, if the directory posted on the lobby wall was to be believed, the magazine occupied only three of the twenty-five floors. On the others, real estate agents, advertising copywriters, accountants and dentists and the consulates of African nations went about their business, presumably unconscious of, or perhaps in some way spurred to great thoughts by, their proximity to a myth, an icon, to what was in short the quivering spirit of American literature itself.
In any case, that morning I ate too many doughnuts, drank too much Coca-Cola, browsed at Coliseum Books until I had a headache. Finally at ten to one I returned to the building, entered the great rectangular lobby, got into the elevator, and rode to the fifteenth floor. Here the doors opened onto a cramped waiting room with no windows. The walls were putty-colored. Next to a reinforced door—electrified, like the ones at the psychiatric ward to which Matthew Spalding had been banished after his suicide attempt—a young girl wearing wire-rimmed glasses, vaguely pretty and bearing not the slightest resemblance to the heartless crone I had envisioned, sat behind a bulletproof glass partition, busily depositing pills into a seven-sectioned box labeled with the days of the week.
It seemed to take her a moment to register my presence.
“Can I help you?” she asked, after I had cleared my throat.
“Hello,” I answered, eager to assure her that I was not merely some hopeful with a manuscript to deposit. “I have an appointment with Edith Atkinson.”
“Your name?”
“Martin Bauman.”
She picked up the phone. I waited. “Edith? A Martin Bauman to see you ... Okay. Edith will be out in a second,” she told me as she hung up.
I sat down on one of the hard little chairs that were lined up against the wall, as at a police station, or outside a school principal’s office. Across from me posters in brass frames depicted covers of the magazine dating back to its inception in the last century. And how long would Edith keep me waiting? What would she look like? Because one naturally creates a face to match every voice, when I’d talked to her I’d imagined a woman with disorderly hair, her glasses hanging from a cord around her neck. A smoker, I assumed. And indeed, as I thought about it, I realized that this image was not invented at all, but excavated from memory, the image of my mother’s piano teacher, Helen Risko, of whose no-nonsense voice—“owe-two-three, one-two-three,” while my mother clunked out a Chopin waltz—Edith’s own voice, over the telephone, had reminded me.
Then the door buzzed open and someone walked in. “Martin?” the familiar voice asked.
I looked up. The woman who was apparently Edith Atkinson had white hair, silky and fine, pinned behind her head with a barrette. She wore pearl earrings, a beige tailored suit, sleek pumps. She was tall and svelte.
I stood. “I’m Edith,” Edith said, holding out a hand without rings, without nail polish, soft from moisturizer. From between thin, coral-colored lips smallish teeth gleamed. Her age I had trouble deducing: somewhere between fifty and seventy, I guessed. I thought her beautiful.
“Let’s go to my office,” she continued, and led me through the forbidding electrified door. Here a yellow corridor divided into further yellow corridors. The paint on the walls was thickly slavered, full gloss, as in hospitals. On a bulletin board next to a coffee machine someone had posted an advertisement for free kittens.
We walked by countless cubicles, in which a number of people—men and women, middle-aged and old—were sitting before antiquated typewriters, writing or talking on the phone. Some of them smoked. Next to one woman’s desk stood a plastic garbage can piled high with crushed Diet Coke cans. It suddenly occurred to me that these people were probably writers, and that these cubicles were the offices that the magazine gave to those among its contributors whom its legendary editor prized the most. (Such lore I had learned from my mother.) Unfortunately Edith—my Edith, the Mrs. Risko Edith having been all but destroyed—led me along at too fast a clip to gawk. “Did you have a good trip?” she was asking. “I assume you took the train—or was it the bus? Do you have a car?”
“I took the bus. I don’t have a car.”
“My son wants a car in college. He’s very insistent about it, but his father and I don’t think it’s a good idea. Here, come in.” We stepped into her office, which was narrow and wedge-shaped, with only a sliver of a window. “I mean, what’s the point of a car, when you’re living on campus? Sit down.”
I did. On her desk, next to a pile of manuscripts, sat yet another elderly typewriter—the one with the jumping “a” and “m,” no doubt. Above it, several pieces of magazine stationery thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board announced titles not to be read beyond (“The First Time”), sentences not to be read beyond (“Morning call came early at Auschwitz, but Baruch didn’t care; he was a morning person”), words not to be read beyond (“myriad”).
We talked for a while. She inquired after the president of my university, whom it turned out she had once dated—“Eons ago.” She had three sons, she said, the youngest of whom (the one who wanted the car?) was currently applying to college. And where had I gotten those handsome corduroy pants? I told her I didn’t know, that my mother had bought them for me, at which point she had me stand up so that she could pull out the waistband in order to read the inside label.
After that we went to lunch at a hotel long associated with the magazine’s staff, one that in the thirties had been a famous gathering place for literary intellectuals but that in the intervening years had fallen on hard times, eventually escaping the wrecking ball only thanks to a bailout on the part of a Japanese conglomerate. Now, where once writers had exchanged witticisms, tourists photographed their food.
Although in subsequent years I would meet many people who came from Edith’s milieu—the milieu of the original bluebloods, old Protestant money, a direct chain of descent leading back to the Mayflower—at the time she represented something relatively new to me. Not that I hadn’t previously met adults who were rich—I had—and yet these adults had tended to be Jews, avatars of upward mobility like Jim Sterling’s father, whose own father had been an immigrant from Lithuania. (Shulevitz, his original name, he had changed at Ellis Island in homage to British currency.) Inherited wealth, of course, is something entirely different. For instance, as I learned over lunch, Edith’s family had had an association with the magazine from its birth: indeed, her grandfather had been one of its first backers. She divided her time between an apartment on East End Avenue (“we bought it thirty years ago, when real estate was cheap”) and a “drafty old summer house” in Maine, part of a compound of houses that had been in her husband’s family since the First World War. Her husband, whose name was Beavis, was a lawyer. The oldest of her sons was also a lawyer. The middle one was an artist. The youngest, the one who was applying to college, and for whom she had coveted my green corduroy pants, hadn’t decided yet. All of them went by nicknames: Whiff, Lanny, J.A.
Our main courses arrived. Over the years, I’d come to associate the term WASP with poached salmon, dessert forks, prudish portions; indeed, so concerned was I lest I should make a gluttonous impression on my new editor that I’d ordered more modestly than I might have in other company—an entirely unnecessary measure, as it turned out, for Edith tucked into her own ample lunch with gusto. She picked up her lamb chops by their bony handles and chewed on them. She ordered an ice cream sundae for dessert. Such casual hedonism made me think wistfully of my mother and her friends with their bowls of sugarless Jell-O, their draconian diets and rigorous exercise routines. None of them was as thin as Edith, however, who clearly had no peasant blood in her, who radiated the hale health, the natural grace, of the aristocrat. She had garden dirt under her nails. In lieu of a purse she carried a canvas bag, battered and patched, from L. L. Bean.
After she had paid the bill—“We’ll let the fellow with the top hat pick up this one,” she said—we went back to her office to talk about the story. “Homosexuality is such a hard subject to handle!” she told me, taking the manuscript from the pile on her desk. “And yet you manage it so effortlessly. That’s what I like. I’ve read plenty of homosexual stories, and the trouble is, they all seem sociological. They all say, ‘Look, I’m about homosexuality as a category,’ instead of just being about people, which is what yours is. And the mother’s a great character. Incidentally, Mr. ———” (she named the magazine’s famous editor) “is particularly keen to be publishing it. He wants to run it as soon as possible, which is high praise given that a lot of stories sit around here for a year or more before they make it into print. Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said. How could I explain that if I looked stunned, it was less because Edith’s remarks had included an element of praise than because up until that moment I hadn’t realized I’d written a “homosexual story”? This was a troubling matter. Before I had a chance to brood on it, however, Edith had pulled some galleys out of a manila folder and handed them to me: my story, already typeset in the magazine’s unmistakable face, with suggestions penciled in the margins. “The ones in red are mine,” she said. “The ones in green are Mr. ———’s. You’ll notice he’s constantly putting in commas. He has a thing about commas. He thinks people don’t use them enough anymore. The third set—the ones in blue—are Anka’s. I’ll be taking you in a minute to meet Anka.”
I stared open-mouthed at my story’s title, at the distinctive typography, at my name at the end.
“Oh, one thing before I forget,” Edith went on. “In the story we’ve got three ‘fuck’s and a ‘piss.’ Now Mr.———’s willing to forgo the ‘piss’—he says there’s no way around it—but he draws the line at ‘fuck,’ so we’ll have to find an alternative to that. I’m afraid we’re a bit fuddy-duddy around here,” she added, winking. “As for the contract, it should be ready in a few days. Do you have an agent yet?”
“No,” I answered, my eyes still fixed on the galleys.
“You’ll probably start getting inquiries once the story’s published. Or I could make a few recommendations. Not that you’ll need an agent with us—more for book contracts. Oh, and you’ll be receiving a check within a couple of weeks. You’re probably wondering how we pay. Most authors do. The system’s not really all that complicated. Basically, everyone around here reads the story and gives it a grade, like in school, A to D. Then the grades are averaged together—naturally Mr.———’s counts more than the rest—and based on that we work out a price per word. Fairly straightforward, in the end.”
“Fine.”
“And I love the bit about the woman whose hair is like a brioche. That’s a great bit. Plus the scene under the mistletoe! Oops, we’d better go see Anka before she leaves for her shrink appointment.”
Standing briskly, she walked out of the office. I followed her down yet another long corridor—clearly the domain of the lower orders, for the offices were both darker and smaller than the ones I’d passed earlier, some with frosted windows, some with no windows at all.
At one of the doors, which was open just a crack, she knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Edith!”
We entered. A plump woman in her early thirties, with a hooked nose, flushed cheeks, and long blond, gray-streaked hair rose from her cluttered desk.
“Anka, this is Martin,” Edith said.
“A pleasure to meet you,” said Anka, holding out her hand. “Sit, if you can find a chair.”
Her office was a chaos. I had to take a coat, a purse, and a string bag of onions off the extra chair before I could sit down. Edith, having pooh-poohed my insistence that she sit and I stand, disappeared briefly, returning a few seconds later with a folding chair of the sort my parents kept in their basement next to the card table.
“I really love your stories,” Anka was telling me. “I don’t know if Edith told you, but I was the first one around here to discover you. That story about your mother and the radiation therapy center. At least I presume it’s your mother.”
“Yes,” I said, rather amazed, yet at the same time refreshed, by the boldness of her inferences.
“It may be personal,” Anka continued. “You see, we have a lot in common. I’m from Washington, too. And my mother also goes every week to a radiation therapy center.”
A dim idea seized me. “Which hospital?” I asked.
She named our town.
“But that’s where my mother goes!”
“You’re kidding. What’s her name?”
“Carolyn.”
“Your mother’s Carolyn? But that’s amazing! My mother adores Carolyn! She talks all the time about Carolyn!”
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Leonie. Leonie Kaufman.”
“From Tacoma?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it a small world?” Edith threw in, perhaps not realizing that what was amazing wasn’t so much the smallness of one world as the fact that two I had always thought irretrievably distant—my mother’s and the magazine’s, the one in which I lived and the one for which I longed—had just collided.
Before I left to catch my bus, Anka gave me a sheaf of her own stories, seven of them, all photocopied from small literary quarterlies. “Every one of these was rejected by the magazine,” she said, “in case you were wondering if I get preferential treatment because I work here.”
“Thanks. I can’t wait to read them.”
“Call me the next time you’re in New York,” she added. “I’ll have you over for dinner.”
I explained that I intended to be in New York two weekends hence, as the guest of my friend Jim Sterling. “Great,” Anka said. “Maybe we can arrange something for Saturday. Only remember—when you call, let the phone ring once, then hang up. Then call back and let it ring twice. Otherwise I don’t pick up.”
I promised to follow these instructions, after which I bid Anka and Edith good-bye and headed to the Port Authority. On the bus I studied the tricolored suggestions in the margins of the galleys. Generally speaking Mr.———, as Edith had alerted me, confined himself to inserting commas, while Edith offered what she called “judicious cuts,” most of which, when I made them, led instantly to the elimination of those very awkwardnesses over which I had sweated while writing on the story. Indeed, so self-evident did I find her solutions that I wanted to hit myself on the head for not having seen them myself—much the same sensation as when, in high school, our math teacher would map out on the blackboard the elegant answer to some thorny algebra problem on which, after hours of struggle, I had finally given up.
Anka’s suggestions, the ones in blue, were murkier. For instance: “I feel the need for some meanness here,” she wrote at one point in the margin. And: “Are you sure this is the right metaphor?” And: “Why editorialize? The facts speak for themselves.” Such criticisms, I found, were harder to respond to than Edith’s, for the simple reason that they came in the form of questions rather than answers. As for Anka’s own stories—which I devoured—they described the ups and downs of a young woman’s complicated relationship with her equally young husband, whom she has married straight out of high school. In the last of the stories, the young woman has an affair and leaves the husband. In order to avoid his perpetual, pleading calls, however, she must instruct her friends and colleagues in an elaborate telephone code...
As I soon learned, Anka’s relationship with the telephone, in life as well as in fiction, bordered on the paranoid. For instance, even though she had given me along with her stories a sheet of magazine stationery on which she had scribbled her home address and phone number, whenever I tried to reach her at her apartment I got an answering machine—something of an innovation in those days. Later, she explained to me that she never answered the phone when she was at home, preferring instead to “screen” calls and pick up only for those friends with whom she felt up to speaking. For Anka had a lot of people she wanted to steer clear of: not only, presumably, her ex-husband, but the agents of a credit card company with which she was having a dispute, several lawyers, her landlord, even, depending on the state of their relationship, her mother. Needless to say, the last thing I wanted was to be added to her “don’t answer” list, which I imagined as being akin to the list of titles not to be read beyond that I had seen posted above Edith’s desk. And yet I had a favor to ask. Ever since I had discovered that her mother was the famous Leonie with whom my own mother cracked jokes at the radiation therapy center, I’d been worrying lest Leonie—having learned from Anka of my story’s acceptance—should congratulate my mother, with whom I hadn’t yet shared the news. Accordingly, a few days after our meeting I called Anka at her office, following the elaborate instructions she had dictated. The second time she picked up. “Hello, Anka,” I said.
“Fine. Good.” I paused. “And you?”
She made a noise that does not translate easily into print: a sort of digestive whinny, signifying disgust or frustration or both. “So what’s up?”
“I’m afraid I need to ask you a favor.”
On the other end of the line I heard palpable, even eager silence: Anka was listening. Yet once I had explained the situation, she neither interrogated my motives, nor sputtered that it was too late, that she had already told Leonie, that Leonie was at that very instant on the way to the radiation therapy center to chat with Carolyn. Instead she said simply, “Don’t worry, I haven’t breathed a word to Mom.”
I was relieved. “Thank you,” I said.
“At the same time, I wouldn’t advise your putting it off for long,” Anka continued. “I mean, eventually your mother’s going to read the story. It can’t be avoided. I know. I’ve been through the same thing.”
I figured that she was referring to the affair she had had—or rather, to the affair I presumed her to have had, judging from her stories, which I had taken to be autobiographical. Yet what surprised me even more than Anka’s frankness in alluding to her own “personal life” was the ease with which she drew conclusions about mine. For if I interpreted her correctly, then she not only took it for granted that I had read her stories as autobiographical, she also took it for granted that she could read mine the same way; in other words, she had deduced, from the story, that I was gay, and to this deduction, because it was accented neither with hostility nor self-righteousness, I hardly knew how to respond. After all, since my childhood bus stop, only two people had ever confronted me publicly about my homosexuality: Gerald Wexler, and the author of the anonymous graffito on my door. In both cases the motivation had been malice. Anka, on the other hand, seemed to be acting only from friendly concern. I cannot overstate how much I liked her. Today I have no idea where she is; a dozen years ago she quit the magazine, gave up her apartment, and disappeared off the face of the earth. The last time I spoke to Edith even she hadn’t a clue what had become of her. When I was young, however, she changed my life. More important by far than the first person to whom one comes out is the first person to whom one does not need to come out. Her support precluded confessions. For that, Anka, wherever you are, I thank you.
The following week I met with Edith a second time, to go over the galleys. At lunch she asked me which writers I admired. I mentioned Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, whose work at that point had not yet been published in the magazine. As it happened I’d met Carver a few years earlier, at the same community college writing workshop where I’d encountered the poet of the yellow river. I explained that I had told him my idea (still vestigial then) for a story about Bo and Peep, then confided that at seventeen I doubted whether I knew enough to communicate the sort of despair that would lead someone to abandon her life and go off to meet a spaceship. To which he replied, “Once you’ve known one despair you’ve known every despair”: an observation with which Edith, by nodding, indicated her quiet accord.
“And what are you reading at school?” she asked.
“Howards End,” I said. “For my class on the Edwardian novel.”
“Lionel Trilling thought it was his best book—though personally I’d plump for A Room with a View. As for Morgan, he told me he preferred The Longest Journey. Isn’t that odd? It just goes to show you that writers can be the worst judges of their own work.”
“Not well, but yes. He was friends with Mr.———back when I worked as his secretary.”
“Wow,” I said. It was hard for me to conceive of someone actually having known Forster. “What was he like?”
“Extremely kind. And honest. In fact sometimes he could be so honest that people would get offended. Not the sort who suffers fools gladly.”
“How did you meet him? Excuse me, I hope I don’t sound like I’m interrogating you.”
“You don’t. It was at a luncheon party that Mr.———and his wife gave one weekend at their place on Long Island. I remember I was incredibly nervous—meeting the great man and all. But then Morgan put me at my ease almost at once. He was good at that. You see, there were all these writers there, all hell-bent on making a positive impression, and they were talking so much he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. So he just sat there, and I just sat there, because I was too shy to say anything, and then he winked at me, I suppose because we were the only two people at the table who weren’t flapping our gums.” I laughed. “Anyway, at some point the conversation turned to why people write, and someone there suggested that maybe fiction writing was only a matter of wish fulfillment, like dreams—we were all armchair Freudians in those days—and suddenly Morgan sort of raised an eyebrow at me. Back then I assumed the look meant that he thought Freud was a lot of hooey and didn’t I agree, only I’ve been thinking about it recently, and now I wonder whether it was because when he did all his best writing, he was so young. After all, he was only in his twenties when he wrote A Room with a View, he hadn’t experienced anything, really. He’d always been trapped with that mother of his, in addition to which there was his homosexuality—homosexuality you just couldn’t do much about in those days. And so in a certain way his early novels were pure wish fulfillment. Anka thinks that George is the most cardboard character in the book, but I think that’s because George was Morgan’s beau ideal, the love he was always looking for but gave Lucy instead. What he couldn’t five, he wrote.”
These remarks filled me with vague alarm. In speaking this way of Forster’s youth, I wondered, was Edith offering me a warning? After all, I too was young; I too wrote of experiences I had never had, while having experiences of which I never wrote—in particular, the experience of living always on the margins of other people’s dramas, as chronic sidekick, go-between, or counselor.
That evening I arrived back at school determined (a) to lose my virginity and (b) to come out, both before the term ended. In essence, I had simply reached the point where I could no longer bear the weighty life of pretense to which I had previously consigned myself. For such a costume, paradoxically, is not only cumbersome but flimsy. It seems always to be coming unpinned. I wanted to be off with it, and therefore vowed that by the time my story appeared in print, I would have, as it were, caught up with myself, become the sort of person who could have written such a story from experience.
It was now April; this meant that only a week remained before the GLAD festivities began. Accordingly I decided to make the closing ceremony my deadline, and with the same industry that had marked my preparations for the PSAT, devoted my energy to the task of convincing someone to seduce me, which is in and of itself a form of seduction.
But who? Lars, obviously, was out of the question. So were Gerald, Philip, and their crowd, though in retrospect, I realize that I probably could have gotten any of them to do me the favor just by asking. Nor would I consider even for a minute visiting the gay bar that operated a few blocks from campus, a squalid and cheerful little hole in which the owner’s mother was rumored to wash the glasses, for I was puritanical, and therefore determined to find another “nice boy,” someone who, like me, would never set foot in a gay bar—a fact of which, in future years, when we were a couple, we could boast.
I had now narrowed my criteria. The next step was to investigate the most likely source for the sort of boy I was seeking: namely, the membership (thirty in all) of an elite all-male choir at my university, one that was famous all over the world, and which year to year, though its members changed, remained ineluctably itself, bringing to the ears of nostalgic alumni its familiar repertoire of madrigals and fight songs, always in the same delicate a cappella arrangements, always performed by lovely, clean-cut, eager-eyed boys in white tie and tails. Of the group’s members that year, six, so far as I knew, were gay. I decided that before GLAD week ended, I was going to have slept with one of them.
It is a testament to the awe Edith Atkinson inspired in me that even now, nearly twenty years after our first meeting, I still cannot bring myself to use the word “myriad.” Likewise the presence of “The First Time” on Edith’s list of “Titles Not to Be Read Beyond” forbids me from going into detail about the process by which I ended up sleeping, the Tuesday of GLAD week, with Theodoric Vere Swanson III—the member of the chorus on whom I had decided to set my sights not because I found him the most attractive (on the contrary, of the six candidates he was the least my “type”), but because I judged him, on the basis of his looks, to be “on my level,” and therefore less likely than the others to humiliate me with rejection. Here, of course, is the beginning of a significant drama: the scissoring of the erotic from the romantic, and my consequent evolution into a much worse kind of cheat than I had been in high school. This story, however, remains to be told in future chapters. For the moment my goal was simpler, and I achieved it: over the course of a single night’s sexual gamboling in which pleasure, at least on my side, played little if any role; a night marked by embarrassing stabs, on both our parts, at the sort of “sophisticated” erotic dialogue we had read in books (for instance: “tastes good, huh?” Theodoric Vere Swanson III said as he guided his penis into my mouth, his lovely tenor voice as unsuited to these words as mine had been when, at the age of thirteen, my own voice not yet cracked, I had played the psychiatrist in a junior high school production of Equus); over the course of this night I managed at last to cross a border I immediately recognized to have existed only in my own mind. Now, at last, I could come out, which I did the following day, investing my solemn confessions with a hit of pride that mimicked the official tone of GLAD week. One after the other, over pious cups of tea, I exposed myself to Donald, to Jim Sterling, to Ash and Julia, none of whom seemed the least bit ruffled by my news, because in fact I was merely confirming a truth of which they themselves had been conscious for years.
The next weekend Jim and I went into New York. As requested, a few days before our departure I called Anka, who invited me to dinner that Saturday at her apartment. It turned out that she lived not far from Jim’s parents, in a rambling old flat just off Columbus Avenue, a neighborhood that is now glamorous, but that was in those days in the throes of transformation: no longer the exclusive domain of poor yet industrious Jews, butcher shops with glatt kosher stickers in their windows, piano and violin teachers; no longer, even, the realm of immigrant squalor that had in the sixties begun to encroach upon all this middle-class Jewish orderliness, replete with smelly bodegas that sold sugarcane juice, tropical fruits over the hairy rinds of which flies crawled, questionable-looking meats; and yet not yet the crowded corridor of sushi bars and shoe stores it would become a decade later, Columbus Avenue in those years was simply a street trying to maintain a breakfront of brave resistance against incoming tides of change; and that breakfront, by 1982, was beginning to buckle.
In a sense, as Anka told me later, it was all her fault—or rather, the fault of all those artistic young men and women who in the mid-seventies, wanting a lot of space but having little money, had begun quietly emigrating uptown, moving into huge, vacant apartments for which the rent was still astonishingly low. Soon the neighborhood had a reputation as cutting edge, which meant that with the economic boom of the Reagan years people with a lot of money, attracted by the heady smell of the creative, began to follow the pioneers across the park, upping the rents and effectively putting an end to the old orders, to the delis and butcher shops and bodegas. Buildings went co-op, and Anka, who had lived in her six-room apartment for nine years and paid a rent of three hundred and seventeen dollars a month, found herself sharing the morning elevator ride with investment bankers, Broadway directors, and rock stars, all of whom had purchased their apartments for prices in the six figures. Like many rent-controlled tenants, she was, not surprisingly, the bane of her landlord’s existence, especially since, in sharp contrast to those of her neighbors who were already in their eighties and nineties, she was neither likely to die nor move any time soon. And as a result, she said, the landlord was out to get her. “He wants to get rid of me because he knows that once I’m gone, the others will go,” she told me that evening as she led me through the big, drafty apartment, along hallways with creaking parquet floors, past bathrooms in which huge tubs with feet squatted next to cracked ceramic basins. Because the immense rooms had hardly any furniture in them (or perhaps because I was used to the highly specific room distinctions that characterized the middle-class milieu of my childhood), I found it hard to tell one from another; we ended up in what might have been the living room, but could also have been the study, or the dining room. Here what I would later learn to recognize as four original Arne Jacobsen kitchen chairs surrounded a Formica table with a typewriter on it. Against the wall was an old sofa over which Anka had thrown a beige sheet.
She walked me to the window, the pane of which was broken, sealed with cardboard and tape. “See this?” she said. “My landlord did this. Or one of his goons. Threw a rock.”
“Are you sure?”
A cat came into the room, sinuous and fat, with an immense, raccoonish tail. “There’s no evidence,” Anka went on, picking up the cat and holding it protectively. “Still, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. I mean, think about it. I’m a complainer. I’ve taken him to court twice already. He knows he can’t throw me out, so he’s always looking for creative ways to get back at me. For instance, there’s been a leak in the bathroom ceiling for months. I call and call, but he won’t have it fixed. Also, there’s a law that says he has to turn on the heat by November first. Well, remember how cold it got last October? He wouldn’t switch it on, at least not in my apartment. And now he’s trying to evict me over the cat. He says the cat attacked a neighbor, when the poor old thing can’t even use his claws anymore. Would you like anything to drink?”
I asked for water. While Anka fetched it from the kitchen the cat, with a forthrightness I had never before witnessed in a feline, climbed onto my stomach, put his forepaws on my shoulders, and with a loud purr began rubbing his whiskered cheeks against my own.
The doorbell rang. “I’ve invited some friends to join us,” Anka said, handing me my glass of water, then pushed the admission buzzer. Brushing off the cat (its claws pulled my sweater), I stood politely to greet the new arrivals, who turned out to be a pair of young women, one tall and slightly paunchy, with blond hair, the other dressed in jeans and an oversized lumberjack shirt. She had an oddly asymmetrical face that reminded me of Liza Perlman. In fact, she was Liza Perlman.
“This is Janet Klass,” Anka said, and kissed the cheek of the blond girl. “Janet’s doing her dissertation in Cognitive Psychology at Columbia. It’s a statistical study of the work habits of writers, which means that every month those of us poor slobs who were dumb enough to agree to take part have to fill out these tedious questionnaires that delve into the most intimate aspects of our lives.”
“Oh, please, Anka,” said Janet. “A pleasure to meet you, Martin.
” “And this is Liza Perlman. She’s in the study too.”
“It’s a thrill to meet you,” Liza said, offering me her hand, which was both moist and limp. “Anka gave me a copy of your story—I hope you don’t mind. It’s really great.”
“I loved it too,” Janet added.
“She’s probably going to try to rope you into the study now,” said Liza.
“Hey! Don’t spoil my game plan!”
It took me mildly aback that Anka had been sharing my story with so many people; and yet, when I thought about it, I could see no reason to be offended, given that within a matter of months the story would be in print. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all,” I said to Janet. “Only I’m hardly a writer. I mean, I’ve only written a few stories—”
“Oh, you’re a writer all right,” Anka said, patting me on the back.
“You’re what I’d call a natural writer,” Liza concurred.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” asked Anka.
“You know—someone to whom it just comes, like breathing.”
We sat down at the table with the Arne Jacobsen chairs. A warm flush of satisfaction was running through me, its center point the spot on the small of my back where Anka had touched me.
“Liza, I’d be disingenuous—” I said. “Or would I be ingenuous?”
“Ingenuous,” Anka interrupted, “if you’re going to say what I think you’re going to say.”
“Okay. I’d be ingenuous if I didn’t tell you that I read your novel last year. I really loved it.”
“Sorry. In that case you’d be ¿¿ingenuous. I thought you were going to say something else.”
Anka was right. I was disingenuous—and more than she realized, since in truth I’d read only the dust jacket of Liza’s novel, from which I’d learned that it concerned the relationship between a bulimic girl and her fat mother; even then I was becoming an adept at the New York art of flattery.
Liza pulled at her earlobe—a tic to which, over the years, I would grow accustomed. Praise, as I soon learned, delighted her, yet she was never quite sure how to muster the blend of gratitude, pride, and humility that is the proper response to it. Instead her cheeks flushed when people said nice things to her. “Oh, thanks,” she said—a little pompously, I thought, as I gave her the once-over. In fact she was much prettier (and smaller) than her jacket picture would have led one to assume. Also, since the picture had been taken she’d cut her red hair short, which suited her. Even under her shapeless clothes, I could see that she had a slender, girlish, graceful body, one that seemed curiously disconnected from her freckled, oblong face with its frame of red hair (“Jewish red,” Eli later specified) as in a book I’d had as a child in which the heads, bodies, and nether regions of various animals could be combined in any number of hilarious ways.
Anka removed her typewriter from the table and disappeared into the kitchen. “Even though we never met, we went to school together,” Janet was saying to me.
“Really? When did you graduate?”
“Last year. Do you know Gerald Wexler, by the way?”
I said that I knew him vaguely.
“Is he a friend of yours?” Liza asked. “I’ve met him a few times through my friend Eli. Eli used to go out with his twin brother. Do you like him? Is he smart?”
“I don’t know him well enough to judge,” I admitted, then added boldly, “though I do have to confess, I find him kind of obnoxious.” “I’m so relieved to hear you say that! We do too!” Laughing, Liza clapped her hands together. And who were we? I wondered. Liza and Janet? Liza and Eli, who had gone out with Gerald’s twin brother—which meant, presumably, that Gerald’s twin brother was also gay? (Gay brothers was a possibility I had not previously contemplated.)
Anka returned. In her arms she carried two large bottles, one containing Diet Coke and the other white wine, which she deposited onto the table. Then she spread out a fan of take-out menus: pizza, Chinese food, falafel, hamburgers. “I’m afraid I don’t cook,” she said, “so order what you want.”
An uncertain smile claimed Janet’s lips. “Oh, what a cool idea,” Liza said. No doubt she found Anka’s rather novel way of throwing a dinner party, to say the least, amusing, the stuff of later tales to be shared over other dinners, more proper dinners, cooked by their hosts or by caterers. And yet to me the stack of take-out menus was pure delight; the only dilemma was what to choose amid such bounty.
In the end I settled on Chinese food: cold sesame noodles and “pot sticker” dumplings. (How daring, I thought, to order only appetizers!) Anka and Janet elected to split a large mushroom pizza, while Liza, who suffered from various food allergies, said she would just have a Greek salad.
Once Anka had phoned in our orders, she returned to join us at the table. Liza wanted to know what I thought of Edith. “I’ve heard she’s really lovely,” she said, pulling once again at her earlobe.
“I’ve only met her twice. She’s been wonderfully encouraging.”
“Edith is a saint,” Anka said. “She’s a substitute mother for me.”
“You know, everyone’s saying yours is going to be the first gay story the magazine’s ever published,” Liza continued. “How do you feel about that?”
I barely had time to register the implications of this question—not to mention of the phrase (which I would hear a thousand times in the coming years) “gay story”—when the doorbell rang. The first of several delivery boys, this one bearing Liza’s Greek salad, stood sheepishly on the threshold. Two others followed in close succession. By now, to my relief, the topic of conversation had shifted from Liza’s difficult question (attention spans are short in New York) to Janet’s study, the methodology of which Anka was playfully challenging. “I mean, how can statistics harness something so ineffable as the creative mind?” she asked, slicing up their pizza.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Liza interrupted, “but before I forget, I’ve just heard some amazing gossip!” Eager silence. “Yesterday my mother was having lunch with an editor at Holt, and he told her that-just bought Sam Stallings’s first novel for two hundred thousand dollars.”
“She couldn’t believe it. We both hate his work!”
“I must have rejected fifty of his stories at the magazine,” Anka said. “The worst sort of I’m-a-macho-guy-and-I’m-gonna-prove-it-by-going-out-to-shoot-rabbits crap.”
“Do you think he might want to take part in my study?” Janet asked.
Both of them stared at her. She blushed.
“Did I tell you I met him last year at Club Bread?” Liza resumed. “At first I tried to be friendly, but he came off as such a phony! For instance, he does this whole ‘I’m just a regular, working-class guy’ shtick—you know, acting as if he finds literary life disgusting and snobbish and all that—and yet at the same time he’s the ultimate operator! I mean, he was always repairing his truck. Every time you saw him his legs were sticking out from under his truck. He never came to any of our readings, but then when Galway Kinnell visited, he showed up in a tie and blazer.”
“How pompous.”
“And that’s not all! I’ve got a friend, Ellen Garber—have you read her novel, Anka? You should, it’s really wonderful—anyway, she was at school with him. One day they had a lunch date. Well, as it happened, that same week Stanley Flint was visiting. Flint was sitting alone, eating a sandwich, at the table behind Ellen’s. So up walks Sam with his lunch tray, smiling at Ellen, who stands up to greet him, when suddenly he notices Flint, by himself. And you know what he does? He pretends not to even know her. He walks right past her, straight up to Flint, and says, ‘Excuse me, sir, mind if I join you?”’
Anka laughed.
“What’s Club Bread?” Janet asked.
“You know, Bread Loaf. The writers’ conference.”
“Stanley Flint was my teacher, too,” I said.
“Really? Did you like him? I know him a little through my mother. As a teacher I’ve heard he’s brilliant but mad.”
I've heard. How many thousands of times, over the course of that evening—and a hundred evenings to come—would this seemingly innocuous, ultimately pernicious little phrase be used: “I’ve heard she’s a really bad writer.” “I’ve heard she got a huge advance for her last book, but the publisher was disappointed by the sales.” “I’ve heard he’s always trying to seduce his women students.” Later, I too would become skilled at such subspeech. At the time, however, I still believed that in New York writers got their nourishment from intellectual exchange, when in fact all anyone did was gnaw at the bones of hearsay and hindsight.
When the evening ended (early) Anka saw us to the elevator. Once downstairs, Janet, who was going uptown, got into a taxi. As Liza was planning to take the subway downtown, I offered to escort her to the station. This did not surprise her. She seemed to take it for granted that I would want to stay in her company.
Briskly we headed toward Broadway. Even now the phrase “gay story” was echoing in my head—this despite the fact that Liza’s flip observation was hours old, cold under the weight of all those other manic subjects that had been heaped atop it during the dinner, like coats piled on a bed at a party. Curious: earlier I’d wanted to leave the phrase alone. Now, however, in the silence of our walk together I found myself straining for a way to return to this topic, about which I longed to converse with Liza, with whom even then I felt a mysterious kinship. And why? I hardly knew her. Worse, she had already revealed herself to be a terrible gossip, the sort of person one should never trust with secrets. And yet I see now that I wasn’t looking for someone to keep my secrets. I was looking for someone to free me from my secrets.
We had arrived at the 72 nd Street station. “I hope you’ll stay in touch,” Liza said, once again offering me her limp hand. “Are you planning to move to New York when you graduate?”
I said that I was.
“I could probably get you a job teaching at the New School—if you’re interested. Oh, have you got a book yet?”
“A book!” I shook my head.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure you will soon.” And she handed me her visiting card. “Call me the next time you’re in town. I have a friend I’d like you to meet. My best friend, Eli Aronson. Did I mention him already? He’s got this thick, luxurious blond beard, very soft—the sort of beard a woman would have if women had beards.” And with this quite extraordinary offering she smiled.
Now I wonder: was there something knowing, perhaps even questioning, in that smile? And if so, what was the question? When Liza talked of Eli Aronson, was she speaking in a code of omissions as complex as Anka’s code of telephone rings, offering me a clue—as in the crossword puzzles to which both she and my mother were addicted—by means of which I might fill in the answer that would in turn provide the key to the other answer with which it intersected, the one that addressed the mystery not of Eli’s homosexuality, not even of my homosexuality, but of her own?
Not that this was really such a mystery. Indeed, I think I probably knew from the beginning that Liza was a lesbian, if from nothing else than from the surface details: her loose jeans, her short hair, the fact that she wore only one earring. And yet, as I subsequently discovered, it would have horrified her to find out that anything in her appearance “gave her away.” Even more than for me, the process of coming out was for Liza fraught with torment, mostly because her natural eagerness to share every detail of her life so perpetually militated against her terror, as she put it, of being “pigeonholed,” or mistaken for “some horrible, hideous, fat old dyke.” Now I can’t help but suspect that she was using Eli—the promise of Eli, the threat of Eli—to nudge the nervous revelation into voice.
We had been standing for five minutes on the sidewalk in front of the subway station. Even though it was the time for good-bye, however, we didn’t say good-bye. Instead, as during that moment after a date when one partner waits for the other to ask if he or she “would like to come up for a drink,” we hung fire. Hesitation gaped between us, for we were both shy; yet in the end it was Liza who took the plunge and suggested we go and have a cappuccino at a little café she knew.
Then I puffed out clouds of relief (it was a chilly night) and with gratitude followed her up Amsterdam Avenue to the dark, smoky little café where over cake and steamed milk (I still didn’t drink coffee) I poured out my heart to her, confided to her my worries about my parents, admitted my longing to find, someday, a great love, and by doing so mortared an intimacy the implications of which I am still today excavating, and will probably be excavating until I am old.
In such small, unexpected ways our lives change irrevocably, and I am a fool (but a natural fool) to try to tease out of the past the directions my own might have taken had I had the foreknowledge to let Liza simply disappear down the damp steps of the subway station that night, into the train and out of my life forever.
When the semester ended, as planned, I flew home to visit my parents. My mother was in a good mood because the brutal course of radiation therapy treatments that she was then undergoing appeared to be paying off: that is to say, the small tumors that pocked her body were shrinking, and in one or two cases had disappeared altogether. My father considered this, along with my return from college, cause for celebration, so the night after I got home we went out to dinner at a French restaurant—this despite my mother’s anxiety over her hair, some of which had fallen out, and which she had recently had “recrafted” by a hairdresser who specialized in clients undergoing radiation therapy. “It was that nice Leonie Kaufman who recommended him,” she added. “You know, the one whose daughter works for the magazine.”
I said nothing. I even managed, for the duration of the dinner, to steer the conversation away from such literary subjects. Then we got home, and as was their habit, my parents changed into their robes and lay down on the bed to watch television. I remember I was extremely jittery, almost bursting with the need to get the ordeal over with, to tell them once and for all about my story, at which point, I imagined, I would be free, the last hurdle would have been cleared, my life, from then on, would be a clean, straight path down which I had merely to stroll, enjoying all the sequential pleasures that lined it. And this need to unburden myself must indeed eventually have beaten back fear, for around ten I went into their bedroom, and said, “Mom, Dad, I have something I need to talk to you about,” at which point my father turned to me quizzically and my mother, adjusting her eyeglasses, said, “Can’t it wait until a commercial?” which was just like my mother. So I sat down at the foot of the bed and waited until the commercials came on. My father had a remote control—at that time still something of a novelty—which he aimed at the screen to mute the volume. Inside the television cats pranced silently toward bowls of Little Friskies. I stood.
“You said you wanted to talk to us about something?” my father asked, his face open and relaxed, as was my mother’s. And why shouldn’t they have been relaxed? Neither of them had reason to expect, at that moment, that their youngest child, his chest puffed out like a pigeon’s and his hands plucking at the lint on his sweater, was about to spring on them two intertwined revelations either one of which would have been enough to leave them reeling with astonishment. Yet there it was: into the quiet of their nighttime bedroom, during a commercial break, this child had strode, screwed up his eyes, and uttered a sentence it would take both of them several seconds to unpuzzle. “Mom, Dad”—pausing, he issues a deep and alarming breath that is meant to start the adrenaline pulsing in their veins, to alert them to the fact that this is a serious matter, that at last, before silent cats, their boy is going to unmute himself—“Mom, Dad, guess what? I’m coming out in the magazine.”