7. AT THE CHILDREN’S TABLE

AROUND THIS TIME I started writing a novel. This was not entirely an artistic choice: of the half dozen agents from whom I had received letters of inquiry after the publication of my story, all but one had told me that it would be impossible to launch my career with a story collection. Stories, the agents explained, simply didn’t sell, the only editors who were interested in them being those at the magazine, which of course did not need to concern itself with such trivial matters as profit—and yet from the magazine I was finding myself, with every rejection letter I received (there had now been twelve), feeling increasingly estranged. Even Anka sounded different to me on the phone, as if my calls wearied her, as if it would be only a matter of time before she changed her hang-up code and added my name to the list of people with whom she preferred not to speak. For like any great aristocrat, the magazine was both ill-tempered and eccentric, with many curious little likes and dislikes (no dream sequences, no phonetic renderings of demotic speech, exclamation points only when absolutely necessary), and now, despite my zealous adherence to her unwritten codes, the old dame had apparently decided not to be “at home” to me anymore. A novel, I saw, would at least bring me into a literary arena in which the magazine, by virtue of its very devotion to the story form, held less sway; and this realization, combined with the discovery that Stanley Flint was going to publish Julia Baylor, had the effect of jump-starting my literary ambitions. After months of lassitude I itched, once again, to write. I would call my novel The Terrorist, I decided; essendally, it would conflate the history of my own family with that of the Kellers, some neighbors of ours, a well-intentioned if weakly idealistic couple whose daughter had tried one afternoon to blow up the state capitol.

My hope was that the story of this family would provide the novel not only with dramatic backbone, but with a vehicle into which I could deposit all the lore of my sixties childhood; yet as I wrote on (and I wrote with remarkable fluidity) every day found me divagating further from my original conception. The great difficulty of constructing a novel is that one has to maintain, at the same moment, two radically different perspectives: the first that of the entirety, the book as it will be remembered by a reader who has long since finished it (and what a difficult point of view this is to adjudge, requiring an act of projection not only across space, but time), and the second, that of the thousand minutiae—details of place, expression, smell, nuance—which proliferate in this ocean of story, yet seem always to be swimming off in the wrong direction, leading you toward dead regions, or even worse, regions that prove to be far more lively than those to the exploration of which you have committed yourself. Process, in other words, begets unexpected (and not always pleasant) discoveries, and the “theme” turns out to be not the thing with which you began, but the thing with which you end.

One afternoon Baylor called me at work and invited me to have lunch with her. At her suggestion we met at one of the expensive restaurants where I often made reservations for editors. No longer the owlish girl I’d met the first night of Stanley Flint’s seminar, she had her long blond hair pulled back into a chignon, wore a natty navy blue jacket and an Hermes scarf, and most dramatically, appeared to have lost, somewhere along the way, the big glasses through which she had once scowled at her German worksheets. Now her blue eyes, which I had never really seen, accented the sculptural beauty of her cheekbones, so much so that I wondered which was the mask, this Manhattan chic or the schoolgirlishness of university days.

Almost immediately we fell into a conversation about Flint. “The thing is, when we were in school everyone used to make such a cult of him,” she said. “His origins, his family, everything. Remember the stories in class?” She laughed. “And of course the truth is always so much more banal—which, when you think about it, is one of the basic tenets of Flintism, isn’t it?”

“So what is his history?” I asked, trying not to sound too curious.

She shrugged. “Southern. He comes from the Carolinas, I think. The limp’s from some accident he had as a child. For a long time he worked on newspapers.”

“And has he been much married, like what’s-her-name—you know, ‘silvery’—said?”

“Well, twice, which isn’t that much, comparatively speaking. With his first wife he only had sons. With Ursula—she’s a psychiatrist—he has a little girl. Naomi. She’s ten.”

“Have you met them?”

Baylor shook her head. “Flint still maintains a very strict separation between church and state. But he talks about them. From what I gather, the healthiness of the whole arrangement embarrasses him, because he’s afraid it’ll take away from his reputation as an outlaw.”

“Where do they five?”

“Upper West Side. West End and ... 104th, I think.”

I gawped. “But I five at West End and 103rd!”

“Do you now.”

“But that can’t be! I’ve never seen him once on the street.”

“Why should that be so surprising?” Baylor asked. “New York’s an enormous city”—which was true. Yet if Flint lived not, as I had always assumed, in some remote and glittering comer of the East Side from which all but the wealthy and famous were barred; if, rather, he lived within spitting distance of my own daily life, in that same neighborhood where every afternoon, unconscious of his proximity, I ordered take-out Chinese food, and did my laundry, and bought groceries, then the cosmopolitan world with which I’d always associated him was both more navigable and less distant than I’d thought. And this discovery, while dulling the luster of his aura, also gave it a patina of identity to which the connoisseur in me responded with zeal.

That evening I did not go home after work. Instead, climbing out from the subway, I walked a block north of my own apartment, then stood for a few minutes on the comer of West End and 104th, gazing at the buildings that defined the intersection: four staunch brick edifices, impenetrable and murky, cozy only to their occupants, for whom they were the trees in which nests awaited. Out of one of the doors a little girl carrying a tennis racket now hurried: Naomi Flint? If so, she looked nothing like her father. And yet why should she have been Naomi Flint? Each of these buildings had a population the size of a small town's. It was as unlikely that tonight I should see Naomi Flint, I realized, as that I should ever, in all my months on West End Avenue, have run into Stanley Flint.

Even so, in the foyer of one of the buildings (the only one without a doorman) a brass plaque proclaimed the presence within of

 

URSULA FLINT, MD
PSYCHIATRY
PLEASE RING 6-A

 

which meant that Baylor was right; Flint did live here. Standing in the foyer, fearful lest someone walking in might accuse me of loitering, I studied rows of tiny buttons on the intercom. 6-A: FLINT, I read. And across the way, beneath one of the mailboxes: FLINT, S. & U.

So this is it, then, I remember thinking: the glass door with its security bolts through which he walks each morning and each evening; the lobby, with its Naugahyde benches and sand-filled ashtray, where he gathers his mail; the old-fashioned elevator in which every day he rides up to that apartment wherein, presumably, he had read my first story, and Baylor’s novel, and the stories by the girl who designed headstones. That I could get no closer appalled and excited me, and fearful lest he should stumble upon me gaping at his name, I fled, retreating to my own humble digs. Later, though, stepping outside for some air, I couldn’t help but linger on Flint’s sidewalk for a while, staring at the illuminated sixth floor of his building; and likewise the next morning, at five, ostensibly because I wasn’t sleepy, I went out and stood on the comer of 104th Street until, just as dawn broke, he emerged, as shocking in his reality as one of those monuments, the leaning tower of Pisa or the Eiffel Tower, the impact of which a history of postcard views and miniature statues blunts so much less than we think it will; indeed, in the nakedness of selfhood, these spires startle all the more for their many cheap approximations. Unaware that his every move was being witnessed, relieved (albeit briefly) of the burden of a public image, Flint was at that moment both more himself—and less. He scratched his head, bent to tie a shoelace. Then he turned the comer. I followed him. Because he did not see me he was not, at the moment, Stanley Flint at all: instead he was simply the “I” to which all of us are reduced at those instances when we have no need to exist for other people.

Leaning on his cane, he headed for Broadway, where at a kiosk he bought a New York Times. He went into a coffee shop (I watched through the window) and sat at the counter. I thought briefly of following him in, taking the seat next to his as casually as if it really were by accident—and yet to do so, I knew, would be to spoil that brief caesura, that nameless solitude in which he was tarrying. So I waited patiently on the comer, and when he stepped out of the coffee shop and hailed a passing taxi, from behind the display of porn magazines festooning the news kiosk I watched until his cab was gone from view.

Not long after this something occurred that was destined to have far-reaching effects on my relationship with Flint. One morning I was filling in, as usual, for the receptionist at the Hudson-Terrier front desk, feeling rather bored and wondering when she would get back from her break, when the elevator doors opened and a florid woman in her mid-forties walked out. A mass of pale curls framed this woman’s face, which was overly made-up and somewhat damp. Although she was fat, her weight sat well on her, in contrast, say, to that of Marge Preston, which tended to settle in her behind and thighs. This woman, on the other hand, had the sort of firmly overstuffed body to which we allude when we describe someone as “zaftig” or “Rubenesque.” Under her green parka she wore a pink satin cocktail dress. Her lips, which were painted coral, she pursed confidently as she stepped up to me, head erect, bosom thrust forward in the manner of a Miss America striding down the runway. “Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” I answered. “May I help you?”

“Yes you may. I’d like to speak to the editor.”

I drew my back up. So here it was at last, I thought—human slush, slush in the flesh—and was preparing to show the woman the door when another door—the one to Hudson Editorial—clicked open, and Flint walked out. “Bauman,” he said, “I was wondering...” And he stopped in his tracks. “Hello,” he said to the woman. “May I help you?”

“Good morning,” she repeated. “As I was just telling this young gentleman, I’m here to speak to the editor. About a book I’ve written.”

“I’m the editor,” Flint answered. “Won’t you step this way, Madame?”

Then, casting a conspiratorial glance in my direction, Flint led her toward his office, from which they reemerged about twenty minutes later. “Thank you very much,” the woman said breathily, shaking his hand.

“You’re very welcome, my dear,” he answered, and pushed the elevator button for her. She stepped inside. Patting me on the shoulder, he winked at me, then returned to his office.

The door clicked closed. I flinched. Well, what was that about? I remember asking myself. Had I just witnessed Flint the womanizer in action? Or was it, on the contrary, Flint the editor who had come to the fore that afternoon, somehow recognizing in the very carriage of this overdressed woman the faint resplendence of unrefined genius?

That morning I gave in, once again, to love. Nothing would do, I decided, but Flint’s praise, and with my heart in my throat, I resolved to ask him to read the eighty pages I had so far written of The Terrorist. And yet how to approach such a daunting figure? Here lay the trouble. At first, from shyness, I tried writing him a letter, then tore it up; after all, wouldn’t a letter seem oddly impersonal given that three days a week we worked thirty feet from each other? A phone call, then—but that would be cowardly. Or perhaps I might ask Carey to talk to him on my behalf, as previously I had asked Susan to talk to Carey ... only in that case the results had been disastrous. No, I decided, the only thing to do was to confront him directly, and accordingly, at the end of a long day about a week after the episode of the woman in the parka, I knocked at his door, which was as usual half-open. (Or should I say half-shut? Dimly I recollect intelligence tests from my childhood.)

“Come in!” he called.

I peered inside. “Hello,” I said sheepishly. (I still didn’t know what to call him. Stanley? Flint? Mr. Flint?) “I wondered if I might—”

“Oh, Bauman.” Pushing aside a manuscript he was in the throes of red-penciling, he motioned me in. “And what can I do for you this fine day? Don’t just stand there, come in.”

I did as bidden. “Thank you,” I said, clearing my throat. “Actually, I wanted to ask you a favor. You see, for the last couple of months I’ve been working on a novel, my first novel. I’ve got about eighty pages now. And given the fact that at school you were pretty enthusiastic about that story I wrote, I was wondering whether you’d mind—”

“You mean you want me to read it?” He grinned. “But I’d be delighted to. And what are you doing in the doorway like that? Sit down, sit down.” He pointed to a chair in the comer. “Is that what you’re holding in your hands? Your manuscript? Bring it here.”

Approaching him, I gave him the story. He scanned the first pages. “Nice title,” he said. Then he skipped to the last page; looked at the final line; said nothing.

“I must confess, Bauman,” he continued, vaguely flipping through my pages, “that I did read that story of yours in the magazine. And I hope you won’t be offended”—he glanced up at me suddenly, guardedly—“if I tell you I wasn’t much impressed.”

“I’m not offended.”

“The trouble was, it read like a public service announcement. Also, you write as if homosexuality itself was interesting. It’s not interesting. All that’s interesting is individual experience.” He scooped my pages back into a pile. “I didn’t say anything earlier because in our capacity as coworkers, I felt it wasn’t my place. You understand, don’t you? As for this novel, The Terrorist—really a nice title—of course I’ll be more than happy to give it a look-through tonight—”

“Tonight!”

“Why waste time? Then we can talk tomorrow, how does that sound?”

“Fine.” I hesitated. “Oh, and by the way, please don’t feel you have to be gende just because—”

“Have I ever been gende? You sound like a girl about to be fucked for the first time.”

“Oh, well...” I laughed, embarrassed. He waved. I backed out of the office. Gathering up my coat, I left. What was surging through me was the same sensation of dread that in high school had always preceded the mornings when I would get the results of a test; I hardly slept that night, and when dawn broke, hurried to work, where I hoped that Flint, encountering me as he arrived, might take me into the office and get the business over and done with. Yet as luck would have it, though I got in at half past seven, he had beaten me to the punch and was already holed up in his office. As usual his door was ajar. Dare I knock on it? I asked myself, then decided not to: after all, if he had come in so early, it was probably to get some reading done without being disturbed. So I drank my Diet Coke, settled down at my desk, tried to concentrate on The Horror of Hilton High ... only my eye kept wandering to the clock. Eight approached. Once again, as if casually, I swung by Flint’s office, the door to which remained ajar. Still I didn’t knock. For he had merely said that he would talk to me “tomorrow,” and there was still the whole of the day left. No doubt the best course of action would be simply to wait until he summoned me. Only he didn’t summon me. The morning waned. Passing by his desk around eleven, I asked Carey if he was in a meeting. “No, he’s alone,” Carey said. “Do you need to see him?”

I shook my head, checked my watch. Panicked now, I waited ten more minutes, then puffed up my chest and knocked on the fatal door.

“Yes?” Flint called.

“Hello,” I said, peeping my head through the crack.

“Oh, Bauman. Come in.” I did. Atop his desk my manuscript sat, pristine, looking as if it had never been touched. Perhaps he hasn’t read it yet, I thought with relief, which would at least mean that he didn’t hate it (hate me).

“What can I do for you today?”

What can I do for you today! The question hardly seemed apposite, given the circumstances. “I wondered if you’d had a chance to look at the pages I gave you,” I said.

“Pages?”

“The novel.”

Flint appeared confused. “What novel? You didn’t give me a novel.”

“But I—”

“Oh, you mean this?” He pointed to my manuscript. “But this isn’t a novel,” he said, laughing gently, as if at a display of idiocy. “This is just paper with little black marks on it! A novel,” he went on, lips closing over teeth, “is an act of chemical bonding. A novel sparks. Atoms in orbit, sending off electrical charges that yank them into structure. Whereas this”—again, he indicated the manuscript—“this is just letters combined into words, words into sentences, one sentence after another, blah-blah-blah. Too much plot, too much subject matter, too much jerking off, in both senses of the phrase.” He pushed the manuscript toward me. “I know you can do better than this, Bauman. You did better than this once. As you may recall I wrote you a letter several years back indicating that you needed my guidance, and that it would be in your best interest to persuade that august institution from which you recently graduated to invite me back for a semester—and to this letter, I don’t need to remind you, you elected never to reply. Well, some time has passed since then, and now, it seems, you’re able to admit that you need me. Which is fine. I’m not a vindictive man.” He stood. “As you may know, I’m teaching a private seminar these days, twice a week Not under the aegis of a university—that’s far too restrictive. What I’d suggest is that you apply for the winter term—not that I can guarantee you admission, that will depend on the quality of the other submissions, since of course, the seminar is strictly limited to eighteen participants. Baylor will be attending—she won’t pay, she’ll be a sort of auditor. Well, think about it. As I said, you have little choice.” He handed me my eighty pages of little black marks. “I know you’re disappointed. I know you were hoping for an offer of publication. Unfortunately, you’re nowhere near that stage yet, as far as I’m concerned, nor is there any guarantee that you ever will be. Well, good-bye, Bauman.”

“Good-bye. Thank you,” I said. And snatching the manuscript back, I hurried to the men’s room, to one of the stalls, where I sat down. The fact was, it had taken me a few moments to grasp the full import of Flint’s monologue. And how amazing, I thought (with that detached tranquillity of mind that so often immediately follows a shock) that I had actually reached a point with him where I would have been glad to hear one of those familiar epithets, “baby talk” or “unmitigated shit”: anything but this relegation to successively lower echelons of attention (and yet how the purity of his standards still thrilled me, awed me!), this demotion from favorite to merely another undistinguished voice in the roaring mob!

I left the men’s room; I hobbled back to my perch. Before my eyes the slush grew blurry, turned literally to slush. It occurred to me, rather dimly, that I would now very likely have to quit my job. For how could I continue to work at Hudson, when Flint occupied an office only a few feet away from where I sat, and through the door to which I could always catch, if I craned my neck, a glimpse of his cruel, unforgiving, beloved face? Nor did it help much that pride was already rushing in to ameliorate the damage, that around the wound the helper cells of pride were erecting a scab of pep talk and testimonials, reminders that despite whatever Flint had said there still sat in my desk drawer half a dozen letters from agents all eager to represent me, all admiring of my story in the magazine. (And had Baylor ever published anything in the magazine?) For the injury, despite all pride’s efforts to subdue it, still gaped. Flint refused to budge from the throne upon which I had placed him. His praise remained the only reward that mattered to me, which meant that so long as he reigned, every blessing he bestowed upon other people would be a knife between my ribs.

And then, almost before I had made the decision to stand, I was on my feet again. I wasn’t sure where they were taking me, only that when I found myself outside Marge Preston’s office, my being there seemed somehow inevitable. Sara was away from her desk. “Excuse me, Marge?” I called through the open door.

Raising her eyes from her own desk, the surface of which was a chaos of letters and spreadsheets, she glanced up at me, took off her half glasses. “Hello, Martin,” she said, pleasantly if a bit impatiently. “What’s up?”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about.” I had my hands twisted one around the other. “May I?” I indicated the door with my head.

Marge straightened her back. “Of course,” she said, stood, and shut the door behind me. “Is something wrong? You don’t look well.”

I had never before noticed how short she was; she came up only to my shoulder. “It’s just...”

Putting her arm around me, she led me to a conference table, where she sat me down.

“I don’t know where to begin,” I said. “Something happened recently that I’ve been worrying about, that I feel I need to tell you about—and yet...”

Her lips were grim. “Go ahead,” she instructed. “And don’t worry, this will stay between us.”

“But that’s just it, I’m not sure if ... You see, it’s about Stanley Flint.”

She rubbed her temples. “Oh dear. Go on.”

Then I told her about the woman who had appeared at the front desk and asked to see “the editor.” I told her about Flint’s unexpected entrance, and their subsequent disappearance together into his office. I assured her that of course I had no reason, no reason at all, to assume that by inviting the woman in Flint was doing anything other than offering encouragement to a fledgling writer ... yet there were rumors. Even back when I’d studied with him, there had been rumors.

To all this she listened quietly, without expression, chewing on the left temple of her glasses.

“I thought you should know,” I concluded.

Marge got up. She strolled over to a bookcase, from which she extracted a volume of poetry by Wallace Stevens. “Martin, as I’m sure you’re aware,” she said, flipping through the poems, “I’ve worked in book publishing for a number of years. Fifteen years.”

“Yes.”

“More importantly, I’ve worked as a woman in book publishing for fifteen years. I know the kinds of things that go on. I have to. If I didn’t I’d never have gotten as far as I have.” She shut the book. “Part of my job is keeping my ears open. You’ll have to trust me on this, but there’s very little that happens at this company of which I’m not aware. All of which is a way of saying that what you’ve told me today—it’s nothing that comes as a surprise. Nothing. No, all that’s a surprise to me is that Martin Bauman should turn out to be the kind of person who’d use information like this to try to get back at someone.”

“But I’m not trying to get back at anyone!” I countered, stunned not by the falsehood of her accusation, but its truthfulness. “Anyway, why should I want to get back at Flint?” (This in a quieter voice.)

“You tell me.”

“I don’t.”

“Still, it must have hurt when he bought Julia Baylor’s novel. And yet you’ve got to realize, Martin, that just because Julia’s reached, shall we say, a certain level of maturity, that doesn’t give you the right to try to spoil her chances, or ruin Stanley’s career.”

“But I’m not jealous! Baylor and I are friends. We had lunch together.”

“Then why are you here?”

“From a sense of duty.”

Marge smiled benevolently. “I think, Martin,” she said, sitting across the table from me, “that maybe now is the time for you to consider whether it’s in your best interest to keep working at Hudson. After all, you’re a writer. Publishing’s no career for you. As I’ve often said, when writers get too involved in publishing, they’re ruined by it. You ought to be off on an island, where there’s nothing to distract you but the sound of the surf against the rocks—not here, in this dreary office, with all these tiresome people. And publishing’s not what it used to be. Nor, I fear”—she sighed dramatically—“will it ever be again.”

“But plenty of writers have worked as editors. Doctorow was an editor. Toni Morrison—”

“If you need a job, go work on an oil rig, or at a zoo. Something that feeds your creativity. Anything but some miserable old publishing house full of backstabbing and gossip and details you’d probably be better off not knowing.”

“But I like working here...” My voice trailed off, for I was close to tears. “Excuse me if I’m dense,” I said, “but am I being fired?”

Smiling sweetly, Marge nodded.

I said nothing, only breathed deeply, to contain the sob I felt rising in my throat like a hiccup. Then I stood.

“Are you all right?” Marge asked.

“Yes,” I said. “In fact—it may sound strange, but I want to thank you. I can tell you’re doing this for my own good. I feel humbled. I hope you won’t continue to think badly of me ... And of course I won’t say anything to anyone else about what happened.”

“I’d appreciate that. Please don’t think I’ve ignored these problems. Believe me, I’m dealing with them in my own way. But sometimes effectiveness requires, shall we say, a certain degree of discretion.”

I nodded. She stood and opened the door for me. We shook hands.

In the interval Sara had returned. “What’s wrong?” she asked under her breath. “Why were you and Marge locked up in there?”

I told her I had just been fired. “Oh dear,” she said, in a voice that betrayed neither surprise nor any great displeasure. “I’m sorry, Martin.”

“I am too," I said meekly. Then I returned to my desk, where I gathered together the few possessions I kept there—a box of Kleenex, a comb, the mug from which I drank my Diet Coke—and left Hudson - Terrier forever. I went home. The apartment seemed oddly empty without Faye, who was just about the only person to whom I could have confessed, at that moment, what I’d been through. I even considered, briefly, phoning her in Atlanta, but checked myself in case she should interpret my distress call as a plea for help and catch the next flight up to New York.

I spent the rest of the day watching television: a flurry of soap operas and game shows, talk shows and grainy cartoons whose characters I remembered from my childhood, the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny and Pepe Le Pew, out of whose amorous arms a black cat painted with a white stripe had continually to wrest herself. No one came home. For dinner I ate delivered Chinese food, as at Anka’s so many months ago, then went to bed, eyes red and limbs heavy, successfully anesthetized by so much TV. I hoped I would sleep without dreaming, for hours, for days, only some time during the middle of the night the sound of keys in the lock startled me; I woke, and to my surprise found myself privy to one of those moments of self-understanding that come upon us so rarely when we are young (and only with slightly greater frequency when we grow older). For just as, in the aftermath of that seduction that had turned into a robbery, the loss of my glasses had brought the familiar Manhattan landscape, as it were, into a fresh and unexpected focus, so now—bereft of those dependable correctives, optimism, and self-confidence—I saw my own motives ... not more clearly, just differently. And what I saw upset me more than anything Stanley Flint or Marge Preston had said. I saw a boy so desperate for approval that, having failed to win it from one source, he had ricocheted immediately to another, which had also denied him. Worse, in the second go-round, he had been perfectly willing to try to ruin someone with the suggestion of indiscretions no worse, in the end, than any of his own, in order to attain, almost as a by-product of his reassurance, a dose of vengeance. Yet the worst part was that when, in return for this effort, he had suffered humiliation, he had actually offered thanks for that humiliation, strained to recalibrate it so that in his own mind, at least, it would signify approval. Indeed, so base (and so self-abasing) did the behavior of this boy seem to me that I wanted to lack him hard, as once Dwight Rohmer had kicked me.

I got out of bed. Just as I no longer felt sorry for myself, I no longer felt grateful to Marge, whose disparagement of the publishing industry I now recognized for that insider’s cynicism, both fatuous and arrogant, by means of which the more entrenched try to convince the less entrenched that their exclusion from the corridors of power is a blessing. After all, if things were so bad, why wasn’t Marge trying to change them? This was, I knew, a grim diagnosis, yet curiously it did not move me to despair. Instead, as dawn broke, a mysterious energy coursed through me. To my surprise, I discovered that my ambitions, though somewhat bloodied, had survived the night intact; indeed, they were crying out for me to do some things I’d been putting off for months, and that morning, in keeping with their demands, I made an appointment to meet with the one agent who had not told me I had to write a novel; I arranged a lunch with Edith; I even sat down in a coffee shop and read over those pages of mine that had received, at Flint’s hand, such a drubbing, and found that I was as eager to return to work on them as I was pleased by what I’d already done.

The following week I got a new job, not on an oil rig, but at a snooty bookshop on the Upper East Side, the ill-tempered owner of which prided himself on the influence he wielded over his clients, most of them New York society ladies, who depended upon him to sell them exactly those books the presence of which on their ebonized Sheraton consoles would be sure to convince any party guest that he or she had walked into a truly intellectual home. Because the taste of the owner was both eclectic and obscure, he was also much beloved by certain authors whose novels, had it not been for the energy with which he promoted them (though he could be equally capricious in withdrawing his favor), would have sold only a few hundred copies: writers like Georges Perec (crafter of the famous e-less novel), W. M. Spackman, George Steiner, Kennedy Fraser, Gilbert Adair. For taste trickles down, and the party guests who took note of which books were sitting on those Chippendale étagères and in those Biedermeier cabinets always made a point not only of buying them and pretending to read them, but of recommending them vehemently to their sisters-in-law, interior designers, and psychiatrists, all of whom then felt themselves duty-bound to follow suit. In this way a few people who might not have otherwise done so discovered literature, so the owner of the bookstore can be credited with actually having done some good.

In any case, of my tenure at this bookstore (which was even briefer than my tenure at Hudson-Terrier) everything I need to say can be summed up in a single anecdote: as a sop to those of his employees who were, like me, far too educated to take any pleasure in the operation of a cash register, the bookstore owner had set aside a shelf for the display of those volumes that we designated “staff recommendations.” This shelf was near the table on which he exhibited, in gleaming stacks, his own favorites. Best-selling pieces of trash (excuse me, commercial novels) were relegated to a remote comer, as at small-town newsstands the pornography is always hidden far in the back, next to the gun magazines.

One afternoon during my first week at the bookstore a woman in her early sixties, expensively though inelegantly dressed, came up to the front desk and asked for the owner, who was at lunch. “Can I help you?” I offered, at which point, rather hesitantly, she inquired whether I might be able to recommend a novel to her.

As it happened, that very morning I had made my first contribution to the employee recommendation shelf: Sybille Bedford’s A Favourite of the Gods, which Obelisk (now defunct) had just brought back into print. “It’s really wonderful,” I said, handing her the book, which she regarded dubiously. “It’s about a young girl growing up between the wars, with this awful mother. Most of it takes place on the French Riviera.”

“Oh, the Riviera,” the woman said, lifting her eyebrows. “All right, I’ll give it a try.” And she took the novel away with her.

The next morning she was back. Again she asked for the owner. “He’s in the back,” I said. “Would you like—”

“No, no, that’s all right,” she answered hurriedly, and removed A Favourite of the Gods from her purse. “I’m afraid this just isn’t working for me. Could I exchange it?”

“Of course.”

Very cautiously, then—looking first over her shoulder toward the door of the office, from which the owner had not emerged—she moved to the back of the shop, where she picked a book off the trash shelf. “I’ll take this,” she said, scurrying up to the desk and handing me Judith Krantz’s Mistral’s Daughter.

At that instant the owner stepped out of his office. “Hi, Fritzi,” he said.

“Good morning, George,” Fritzi answered, and looked at me helplessly. But to her relief, I had already slipped the book into its plain brown wrapper.

 

I am now going to break one of Stanley Flint’s cardinal rules. I am going to write a scene set at a cocktail party.

If it is any justification, Flint himself was a guest at that party; indeed, he was one of the principal guests, having once taught the author in whose honor it was being thrown. But to tell the story correctly requires some backtracking. Near the middle of December—I had been working at the bookstore about a month then—I received a call from Liza Perlman, who had just gotten back to New York for her Christmas break. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked. “Because my mother’s gotten me an invitation to this huge publishing party. It’s for this really hot young writer, Sam Stallings. Do you know him?”

“Isn’t he the one you were talking about at Anka’s?” I asked. “The one you thought was so arrogant?”

Liza hedged. “Oh, I’m not saying I like him personally. Personally I think he’s a jerk. Still, the party should be great. Have you read his book, by the way?”

“Not yet,” I admitted, carefully eliding the fact that though, indeed, I had not read Rodeo Nights, I had thumbed through it a dozen times at the store, in that way of literary New Yorkers who, before even turning to a novel’s opening page, will first examine the author’s photograph, check the back cover to see which other writers have given him blurbs, look at the dedication, scan the acknowledgments (to see who the author’s friends are, as well as by which institutions he has been awarded grants, residencies, and “financial assistance”), and finally skim the small print on the copyright page, whereon are listed the names of those magazines in which a portion of the book in question (usually “in somewhat different form”) has previously been published.

“I have to confess, I haven’t either,” Liza said. “I mean, it all sounds so macho, you know, one of those books in which guys are always calling each other by their last names. Not my cup of meat, as my friend Eli says of Arnold Schwarzenegger ... Still, it’s going to be the party, my mother says. It’s at———'s.” (She named the editor of a well- known literary magazine, a rich man who lived in a townhouse overlooking the East River.) “Everyone’s going to be there. My mother, by the way, was the one who suggested I invite another writer along, so I thought I’d ask you—that is, if you’re not busy.”

As it happened I wasn’t busy; nor could I deny the curiosity—far more intense than my irritation at Liza’s pretentiousness—that those dangerous words everyone's going to be there had aroused in me.

We agreed to meet at seven on a specified comer of Sutton Place, after which I got dressed and hailed a taxi: a rare indulgence, but then again, this was a rare occasion. Liza was already waiting when I arrived. Dressed in a jeans jacket, black silk pants, and a pale cashmere sweater—an outfit that, I would later learn, like so much else in her life, represented a concession to her mother, who could not abide what she called “dyke clothes”—she was leaning against a lamppost, a shapeless purse slung over one shoulder. Her red hair, I noticed, she had grown a bit longer since we’d last seen each other; tufts of it dipped shaggily into her eyes.

Having said hello and kissed each other on the cheek, we walked toward the little cul-de-sac at the end of which the editor lived. I asked Liza how her semester at Babcock had gone. “Yuck,” she said. “I think I’d go crazy if it weren’t for Lucy. Only next term she’s on leave, so I don’t know what I’ll do.”

We reached the editor’s house. By the open door a crowd was gathering; just inside, an efficient-looking young woman was checking the names of the guests off a list attached to a clipboard, while behind her a liveried servant took their coats.

Liza stopped speaking. She seemed distracted, as if she were looking for someone who might recognize her. No one seemed to, however, and when we reached the head of the line and the efficient young woman said, “May I have your name, please?” her answer sounded more like a question—“Liza Perlman?”—as if she wasn’t entirely sure who she was.

The young woman scanned her clipboard. “How do you spell that?”

“P-E-R-L, no A.”

“Ah, yes.” With a yellow highlighter she sliced Liza off the list. “And you?”

I stammered.

“He’s my guest,” said Liza.

The young woman nodded. We passed. The servant took my coat (Liza kept her jacket), after which we walked up a flight of stairs the treads of which were painted pale pink, to match the pink-striped paper on the walls. “Wow,” I said. “Imagine owning a whole house in New York City.”

“Haven’t you ever been in a townhouse before?”

I shook my head. She smiled, as if my innocence (which was in fact largely manufactured) had touched her. By now we were at the top of the stairs; in front of us an immense living room spread out, its parquet floor covered with an equally immense (and genuine) Aubusson carpet.

“Do you know most of these people?” I asked Liza, gazing out at the little islets of furniture that punctuated this seascape, and upon which the party guests, like exotic marine specimens, were writhing and feeding, as in those rock pools that the ebbing of the tide brings into view.

“Some,” Liza said. “That’s Nadine Gordimer. She’s doing a reading at the 92nd Street Y tomorrow. And over there’s John Irving.”

I peered. “He’s shorter than I thought he’d be.”

A waiter approached us, bearing a tray on which filled roundels of puff pastry had been arranged. “Brie and ham tartlet?”

“Thank you.”

“No thank you.”

“Champagne? Sparkling water? Ginger ale?”

We each took a glass of ginger ale. “Say, isn’t that Stanley Flint?” Liza asked, pointing across the room.

I followed her finger. To my horror, I saw that she was right: near the back of the room, where a pair of damask curtains, heavily fringed and pelmeted, framed a view of the East River, Flint was drinking and laughing with Marge Preston and two women I didn’t recognize.

My first impulse was to flee, or short of that disguise myself—as I might have done as a child—within the copious folds of the curtains. Because I knew that to behave in this way would be to lay bare certain emotions of which I preferred that Liza remain ignorant, however, I held my ground.

“By the way, how’s your friend Eli?” I asked.

“Don’t you want to say hello to him? He was your teacher, wasn’t he?”

“Later, if you don’t mind.”

“I wonder where my mother is,” said Liza, whose concentrated perusal of the crowd appeared to have eclipsed her focus on Flint.

“Why didn’t he come tonight?”

“Who?”

“Eli.”

“Oh, he doesn’t like parties. Do you want to walk over to the bar?”

“Stuffed mushroom caps? Buffalo wings?” a waiter called—this latter item, I suspected, a nod to the setting of Sam Stallings’s novel. I took a sample of each, then followed Liza to the bar, next to which more hors d’oeuvres were displayed on a long table, all elegantly overwrought, and a far cry from the “cocktail food” Jim Sterling and I had prepared in his mother’s kitchen. It was here that we stationed ourselves, for the table, we soon discovered, provided the ideal post from which to observe the party’s many tropical atolls, not to mention those inviting currents into which others, braver than we, were now diving headlong, while we stayed rooted to the shore.

Or at least this was how I felt. Liza—less innocent than I, though more timid—appeared merely to be searching for a face in the crowd at once familiar and friendly, the face of someone who might offer a hand to ease her in. And soon enough this face appeared. “Oh look, there’s Janet!” she cried, and began waving frantically. “Janet! Over here!”

From the throng Janet Klass extricated herself. “Hi, Liza,” she said. “Hi, Martin.” She picked up a leaf of endive stuffed with crab. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys! I don’t know anybody at this party.”

“Neither do we!” Liza cried gleefully.

“Sam only invited me because he’s in my study. What are you drinking, by the way?”

“Ginger ale. You know what this reminds me of, the three of us here? It reminds me of the neighborhood parties my parents used to take me to, when all the kids would have to sit at the children’s table.” And indeed, to the insiders working the crowd, those seasoned veterans of a thousand New York parties, what children we must have seemed, with our soft drinks and giggling intimacies! A year or so later all this would change, there would be born that cult of youth (a by-product of the Reagan years) of which the high priests were those Wall Street whiz kids who seemed always to be earning their first million before turning twenty-two (their number included both Barb Mendenhall and my old roommate Donald), and to whom Liza and I, as well as Sam Stallings, would come to serve as a sort of low-rent analogue, a “literary brat pack,” to borrow the language of the press, the members of which, it was said, shared a fondness for nightclubs, a link to Stanley Flint, and a penchant for the so-called “minimalist” style. Straight out of graduate writing programs, already armed with lucrative contracts, the members of the brat pack would soon be taking over parties like this one, as well as magazines, publishing houses, PEN committees ... and yet for the moment all this was still far away, and it was just Liza, Janet, and I standing at the fringe of the hors d’oeuvres table, gazing out at a scene that seemed to have been going on for a hundred years, like one of those soirées that Proust takes so many pages (and so much pleasure) in describing.

But I have digressed. It so happened that while we were waiting there, staring meekly (if this is possible) at the roaming crowd, a pair of eyes had picked us out for special scrutiny. These eyes belonged to a tall woman of middle age, cleanly suburban in her tartan skirt and ruffled white blouse, and now bearing down on us, speaking even as she walked, though I couldn’t make out her exact words. As she approached—back straight and bosom high—the expression of questioning anxiety that had marked Liza’s face since our arrival suddenly gave way to a grimace in which relief and worry were admixed. “Liza,” the woman said, shaking her head disapprovingly.

“Hi, Mom,” Liza said.

Then Sada Perlman, having first kissed her daughter on the cheek, stepped back, put her hand on her heart, and sighed.

“Mom, please—”

“At least you could have done the buttons right. And that jacket! What’s the point of wearing nice clothes if you’re going to cover them up—”

“It doesn’t matter! You remember Janet, don’t you?”

“Of course. Hello, Janet. My, that’s a lovely skirt. A pity my daughter doesn’t take tips on how to dress from you. And how’s your study going?”

“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Perlman. I’m hoping to finish collecting my data by spring, at which point I can start the computer analysis—”

“And this is Martin Bauman, the young writer I was telling you about. Martin, I’d like you to meet my mother, Sada Perlman.”

“Hello, Martin.”

“How do you do,” I said.

“How do you do,” she answered. “I’ll tell you straight off, I read that story of yours in the magazine, and I thought it was terrific.”

“You did? I’m glad.”

“It must have been upsetting for your mother, though. I know it would have been for me.” She stared rebukingly at Liza, who turned away. “So tell me, are you kids having fun? I noticed that Stanley’s here. Liza, have you said hello to him yet?”

“Not yet.”

“And what about Sam? He certainly is the toast of the town. Ellie Dickman just told me his book’s entering the bestseller list next week at number nine, isn’t that fabulous?”

“Really? Number nine?”

“Listen, honey,” Sada continued, taking her daughter by the hand, “Nora’s over there—you know she can’t walk very well these days—and I promised I’d take you by to say hello—”

“Oh, Mom...”

“Come on, darling, she’s an old lady. You know she’s always asking after you. It would break her heart if you didn’t at least talk to her.” “But she always gets me trapped in conversations that last for hours!”

“I promise to rescue you. Now be a good girl and go.” With which words Sada pushed Liza out into the crowd. Timorously Janet and I followed. From one of a pair of armchairs dressed in chintz slipcovers an old woman with bright white hair and a faint mustache smiled up at us. “Liza,” she said warmly, trying to stand, an effort in which her legs, though braced by support hose and tennis shoes, refused to comply.

“Don’t get up. Hello, Nora.”

“Sweetheart, let me look at you. You look wonderful.” Nora reached her arms toward Liza, who bent down obediently to be kissed. “And how long has it been? So much time. People live too long.”

“Nora, may I introduce my friends? Martin Bauman and Janet Klass. Martin and Janet, Nora Foy.”

I gasped a little. From Sada’s conversation I had assumed that this Nora would turn out to be some tiresome relative she had dragged along to the party, to whom filial duty required Liza to make nice; instead of which here was Nora Foy, the poet and memoirist every one of whose books my mother had read faithfully, though never without the complaint that they were too “whiny.”

The fact that the Nora of whom Sada spoke so familiarly was not merely any Nora, but a famous Nora, only fortified the perception—already burgeoning in me—that Liza had an impeccable literary pedigree; and yet it also had the effect, curiously enough, of highlighting the degree to which this party, for all its metropolitan glamour, was in the end not very different from the neighborhood Christmas parties to which I’d gone every year since I could remember, and at which my mother always accompanied the carolers on the piano. “Sit down and tell me what you’ve been writing,” Nora said, patting the armchair opposite hers, while Liza, a ferocious smile planted on her face, stared after her mother, who had drifted away and fallen into conversation with a short young man in a purple jacket. Despite her promise, it seemed, Sada was not going to rescue her after all, and with a resigned sigh Liza acceded to her fate.

As for Janet and me, we found ourselves abandoned to the mercy of the crowd, the members of which seemed to be dancing all around us. And indeed, as previously I had looked upon the party as an exotic marine habitat, it was now as a dance that I conceived it, one in which strangers were constantly “breaking in” and separating partners from each other, as Nora Foy had separated Liza from me. Faces were everywhere—faces, and smells, a skirmish of perfumes the likes of which I hadn’t encountered since the days when Faye had filled our corridor with her samples from Bloomingdale’s. There was John Irving, and Jay McInerney, and a woman I thought might have been Renata Adler ... and Stanley Flint, again, at the sight of whom my heart started racing. As at the premiere of the play in which the TV star had acted, destiny had placed him directly in my line of vision. Our eyes met; confidently he strode up to where I was standing with Janet. “Bauman,” he said warmly, and shook my hand.

Janet—the very idea of Stanley Flint, she later told me, intimidated her too much to bear even the prospect of being introduced to him—had fled. Flint and I were alone. He looked good—certainly better than in the Hudson offices, the fluorescent ceiling lights of which tended to lend to his harrowed complexion (well, to everyone’s harrowed complexion) a pale, blotchy cast. Now, in the warm luminescence of the cocktail party, his beard hearty and weathered, he squeezed my hand, looked me intently in the eye.

“Hello,” I said, still not sure what to call him.

“A delight to see you, young man,” he said, “a real delight”—which was a relief to me, because it meant at least that Marge hadn’t told him about my attempt to get him fired. “I must tell you, the offices of old Mr. Hudson are a sadder place without your eager young face peering around every comer. We all talk about it. Rosenzweig and Finch and I. How else to put it? You brightened things up with your clumsy eagerness, your exuberant awkwardness.”

“Thank you. Work’s going well, I trust?”

He shrugged. “As a job, it’s an ordeal to me. I see my function as essentially thankless—to be a midwife to literature. And every day the fight gets tougher, the fight to convince the money machines that greatness matters. You see, they have no vision beyond their balance sheets. To them the only books that matter are the account books ... but that’s neither here nor there. You’re well rid of us. A publishing house is no place for a writer.”

I smiled; so at least he still considered me a writer.

“As for the new slush reader,” he continued, “a tiresome girl, very literal-minded. No equal to you.”

“And Carey?”

“Wonderful. A godsend. I don’t know how I’d live without him. But the truth”—here he stepped closer to me—“and this, I trust, will remain between us, is that I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying on at Hudson. Certainly long enough to see the books I cherish through to publication—my beloved Baylor, for instance. Only I’ve been writing myself quite a bit lately ... a novel ... Your friend Liza’s mother’s just sold it to Knopf, on the basis of half the manuscript.”

“Really,” I said, recalling with amazement the constipated stories I’d read in the university library. “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

“Well, I suppose. But you see, I’m not sure how I’m to manage it, the triple duty I now face, teaching my beloved ones, and my work at Hudson, and writing. Of course there are more hours in the day than one thinks at first. Still, at a certain point a man must choose his weapons. Two out of the three, perhaps ... and speaking of teaching, I trust I’ll be receiving a submission sometime soon from you for my seminar?”

“Yes,” I said, though privately I wondered whether taking Flint’s seminar—that is, should I even be admitted to it—would really do me much good. For what I craved at that moment, more than anything, was freedom from all those judges in whom I had invested the power to bestow upon me a tide I could really only bestow upon myself. Just as a few months earlier I’d grown weary of the magazine with its sometimes old-maidish likes and dislikes, now the idea of once again having to submit to Flint’s tirades and blandishments, no matter how justified, wearied me, as it were, in advance.

“When’s the deadline for submission?”

“January fifteenth—which gives you a little time. But please”—he lifted his hands into the air—“nothing from that unspeakable manuscript you showed me on your last day at Hudson, which I trust you’ve disposed of! Something fresh, something worthy of your talent, my boy!” And he patted me on the back, hard. “Well, I must go. Work—writing—awaits. I should never have let Marge convince me to come to this horrible party, such activities are a waste of time. You shouldn’t be here either. Be well. Stay in touch.”

Waving grandly, he turned away from me. The crowd swallowed him up.

Suddenly Janet was at my side again. “Stanley Flint,” she said. “Wow. The very name makes my hands shake.”

“I didn’t realize that old lady was Nora Foy.”

“Of course. She’s been a client of Sada’s forever. Oh, look, Liza’s free again.” Janet pointed across the room to where Liza, pulling at her earlobe, was walking toward us.

“Sorry about that,” Liza said. “I can’t bear the way my mother’s always forcing Nora down my throat. I had to pretend I was sick in order to get away.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Long story. By the way, Janet, Nora says she’s very interested to hear about your study. Why don’t you go and talk to her?” And she pushed Janet in Nora’s direction. “Janet’s sweet,” she added to me, having first verified that the missile had hit the desired target, “but she can be so boring. Oh look, there’s Sam Stallings. Wouldn’t you like to meet him?”

Without waiting for a reply she pulled me away, toward the edge of the room, where a short young man in a sleek khaki suit and black T-shirt was standing at the center of a crowd. He wore on his face an expression of glib self-satisfaction that on reflection I realized I might too have worn, had a novel for which I had been paid two hundred thousand dollars just entered the bestseller list at number nine. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t recognize him, for I had studied his picture carefully at the bookstore, and though the reddish pockmarks that blemished his face—residue, no doubt, of teenage acne—had not been visible in it, at the same time it had not, as pictures so often do, falsified his good looks. (A few years later I would learn this lesson myself, when during my own brief moment of fame a young movie producer who had summoned me to his office to “take a meeting” looked at me quizzically upon my arrival. “But in your picture you look like the young Rupert Brooke,” he complained. “You don’t look anything like Rupert Brooke.”)

To be fair, Sam Stallings, whose photo had made me think of Emilio Estevez, didn’t look anything like that beau ideal either, though I wasn’t about to write him off as a consequence. He had his own distinct appeal. By his side a thin girl in a satin sheath—a model, I would later learn—smoked a Virginia Slim and stared with ennui at the crowd, which, not being her own, offered her nothing. Later that evening I would learn from a profile of Sam in New York magazine that though he was only thirty, he already had two ex-wives. When asked what he wanted to do next, he’d answered, “I’d like to direct.”

Liza introduced us. “Oh, Bauman,” Sam said, shaking my hand so firmly I almost yelped. “Yeah, I read that story of yours in the magazine. It was good. Really interesting.”

The subtle implications of the adjective “interesting”—chosen on this occasion, I suspected, in order to make it clear that to Sam the very idea of homosexuality was as alien, say, as the Hindu practice of drinking cow urine—did not fail to have the desired effect on me. I grinned at him dumbly. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read your book yet, though I’m eager to.”

“Sam,” the model whispered, interposing herself.

“Oh, Liza, this is Amber. Amber, Liza. And Martin.”

Amber blew out smoke. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry, my boyfriend’s really rude. He never introduces me to anybody.”

“I like your suit, Sam.”

“Oh, thanks. There’s an interesting story behind this suit. It was a gift, if you can believe it or not, from Gianni Versace.”

“Versace loved his book, isn’t that cool?” said Amber. “You know it was published in Italy even before it came out here. We went over, and Sam was really the toast of Milan. They even lent him a Ferrari.”

“Really.”

“And then one day, I’m sitting in my suite, exhausted after, like, thirty interviews, opening a bottle of Brunello with Amber, when there’s a knock on the door, and the bellhop brings in this box containing five Versace suits!”

“Who’s your Italian publisher?” Liza asked enviously.

“Oh shit, there’s my agent,” said Sam, who, though a Mississippian by birth (I had learned this from his book jacket), had long since mastered the New York art of getting swiftly out of a conversation. For there were hundreds of people at the party, and he wanted to preen before every last one of them. “I’d better run,” he told Liza. “Good seeing you. And Martin”—to my surprise, he winked—“a true pleasure, buddy. Let’s do lunch sometime. Come on, sweetheart.”

“Bye,” Amber said, grinding her cigarette butt into the Aubusson.

They strode away. “You know who Amber reminds me of?” I said, turning to Liza, only to discover that she was gone. In her place an immensely fat and overrouged woman, eating a piece of cake, was grinning at me.

“No, who?” asked this woman, who must have thought herself very witty.

“Oops, sorry, I thought you were someone else,” I said—and hurried off in search of Liza. It turned out that one of those mysterious undertows that flow through parties had simply carried her off while I was gazing after Sam Stallings, so that now she stood near the periphery, in huddled conversation with a woman whose bleached-blond hair reminded me of Rocky’s in The Rocky Horror Picture Shaw. I looked for Janet, but she was still embroiled with Nora Foy. (“People live too long,” Nora was saying in her loud voice.) Which meant that I was not only alone, but, I feared, conspicuous in my solitude, and on the theory that at least if I held a drink in my hand I’d look as if I had a reason to be at the party, I walked to the bar and got in line.

I had been waiting only a few seconds when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. The young man in the purple jacket, the one for whom Sada had forsaken her daughter, now glared at me. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing someone call you Martin Bauman. Are you the Martin Bauman?”

This locution rather stunned me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Which one is the Martin Bauman?”

“Well, naturally, the one who wrote that great story in the magazine.”

“Oh, that one. Yes, I guess so.”

The young man clapped his hands together with childish delight. “Oh, I can’t believe it!” he cried. “You don’t know how incredible this is. That story—it was the story of my life. Roy!”—at the sound of which name, a handsome young black man disengaged himself from one of the atolls and approached. “You’re not going to believe it. This is Martin Bauman.”

“Really!” Roy held out his hand demurely. “Congratulations! That was some story.”

“Thanks.”

“Forgive me if I sound like a raving fan,” his purple-clad friend continued. “It’s just—you don’t know the lengths I went to, when the story was published, trying to find out who you were. And now you’re here. So let me ask: who are you?”

I stammered. “I’m not sure—”

“That’s a very rude question, Kendall,” said Roy, clearly the more even-keeled of the two. “Didn’t your mother teach you manners? You’re supposed to introduce yourself and offer the girl a drink before you pounce on her.”

“Oops, sorry. I’m Kendall Philips. I work at House and Garden. And this is my friend Roy Beckett, from the Times—publishing division.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Roy Beckett said. “The fact is, if we both sound surprised, it’s because we figured you’d be older. How young are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two,” Kendall repeated, shaking his head as if in disbelief. “Oh, baby. Look, there’s Henry. Henry!” He waved his arms as if signaling a car to stop.

A stalklike man in his late forties approached. “Henry, you’re going to die,” Kendall said. “This is—ta-da—Martin Bauman.”

“Oh, what a delight!” said Henry. “You know we’ve all been crazy with curiosity to meet you. All us gay writers, I mean. I’m Henry Deane.”

I shook his hand. Here was another name I’d heard, another writer whose books I should have read but hadn’t.

The woman with the bleached-blond hair, to whom Liza had been talking, was the next to near. “Hello, Henry,” she said. “Isn’t it marvelous about Sam’s book making the bestseller list?”

I have never warmed to being told what to think is marvelous; neither, apparently, did Henry, who, ignoring this nonquestion, said, “Oh hi, darling. Billie, you’ll never believe it, I didn’t believe he really existed, to tell the truth, but this is Martin Bauman.”

“Oh, the famous Martin Bauman,” Billie said, fixing her gaze not on my face but the staircase, up which, for all we knew, someone really important might at that very moment come reeling.

“I didn’t know I was famous,” I said, when what I should have said—more honestly if less modestly—was “I didn’t know I was famous until tonight.”

 

I date from that party the beginning of an intimacy the sediment of which, despite its comparatively short duration—it lasted only a few years, until Liza’s marriage to Ben Pollack estranged her from Eli, from whom I was soon after to be estranged myself—I can taste on my lips even today, years later; it is the flavor of the sugary batter left over in the bowl after a cake has been mixed—and that is exactly the sort of metaphor at which Liza excelled. For in memory taste, like sound, lasts longer than sight, which is why Liza’s voice—charming, querulous, a chalky blue color (if voices have colors)—can be dictating these words to me today, even though I haven’t heard it for more than a decade. As for her face, it is more or less lost to me: not surprising, given that since her wedding I’ve seen her only once, from a distance. She was standing on the corner of East 64th Street and Second Avenue, the same shapeless purse slung over her shoulder that she’d been carrying the night of Sam Stallings’s party, and dressed, despite the upheavals that had marked the intervening years—her marriage, my breakup with Eli, the birth of her child and deaths of our mothers—in exactly the same sort of vaguely masculine outfit about which Sada had always remonstrated. Then I wondered at the passage of time, which wears away the outer layers of experience while leaving the essential self intact. I didn’t say hello, though. There was too much to explain, and as it stood, I was already late for an appointment.

It had been over the course of the week immediately following Sam Stallings’s party—a week during which we talked or saw each other almost every day, until I had to fly back to Washington for the Christmas holidays—that my friendship with Liza, as well as my knowledge of her, really cemented. Most of our conversations took place over the telephone. Liza, who had a terror of solitude, more or less lived on the phone. Whether in New York or Minnesota, alone or with a lover, she never began her mornings without first making a call from bed—as I mentioned earlier, either to Eli, or a boy called Ethan, or in the absence of these two reliable confreres, as was the case that Christmas break, when Eli was bicycling in the south of France with his parents and sisters, and Ethan had gone off to visit a White Russian princess in Venice, someone else, some new discovery, in this instance myself.

The first call came the morning after the party, when in the stillness of my apartment—Will having already gone to the gym, and Dennis being asleep—Liza’s voice provided a welcome interruption. “Did I wake you?” she asked—which she had. Nonetheless I pretended to have been up for hours.

“Me, I’m still in bed,” Liza said. “You can probably hear it in my voice, I’m still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Incidentally, isn’t that a funny euphemism, calling the stuff that forms in the corners of your eyes ‘sleep’? I wonder where it comes from?”

I agreed that it was funny—such seemingly random asides, I would soon learn, were typical of Liza—then asked her if she’d enjoyed the party.

“Enough,” she said, “but you know how it is with parties, there are so many people, and you run around so frantically trying to say hello to all of them, and in the end you come away hyperventilating and feeling as if you haven’t talked to anyone at all.”

“That’s true.”

“You were certainly a hit, though. Especially with Henry Deane. I’ll bet you weren’t expecting to get so much attention,” she added—a little jealously, I thought.

“Not really.”

“Well, if you want my opinion, you ought to strike while the iron’s hot, put out a collection—oh, and of course follow it immediately with a novel. You are working on a novel, aren’t you?”

I said that I was.

“Great. What’s it called?”

“The Terrorist."

“Nice title. What’s it about?”

I explained to her. She listened carefully, though also with a slight edge of impatience—a lot of uh-huhs, and mmms—as if trying to hurry me along to the point at which politeness would require me to turn the question around and ask it of her.

“And what are you working on? Also a novel?”

“Mmm. I’ve never been much interested in short stories. For the moment—this is tentative, a working title—I’m calling it The Island of Misfit Toys.”

“You mean as in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?”

“Yes, yes!” Liza cried gleefully. “I’m so happy you recognize the allusion! Of course,” she added, her voice taking on an unexpected gravity, “a lot of people think it’s outrageous to call a novel The Island of Misfit Toys. Radical. But I think it’s brave when serious literature takes on popular culture, don’t you? Also, I love the Island of Misfit Toys. Remember the choochoo train with the square wheels?”

“And that doll. I never could figure out what the doll was doing there. She didn’t have anything wrong with her.”

“Yes, yes! That’s the point—the idea of feeling there’s something wrong with you, when at least outwardly there isn’t.”

“Is that what your novel’s about?”

“Sort of. It’s about a girl who suddenly develops a lesbian crush on her friend.”

Her voice grew a little pinched as she said this, as if she’d been worrying how I might react.

“That’s a great idea. Very dramatic.”

“I only wish my mother felt the same way. But what she says is that if I publish this book, it’ll ruin my career.”

“Why?”    .

“Because when people read the novel, they’ll assume I’m a lesbian and pigeonhole me as a lesbian writer. And I just don’t see why that should be the case, do you? I mean, if you were to read a book about a woman who falls in love with another woman, would you assume the writer was a lesbian?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”

Liza squealed, sort of. “But why?” she cried. “I mean, couldn’t the writer just be writing the book because she thought the subject was interesting?”

“Possibly, but that’s not what you were asking me,” I said. “You were asking me if people would assume, from reading the book, that the writer was a lesbian, and what I’m saying is that given the way the world is, people probably will.”

“But that’s so stupid! And anyway, the book’s in the third person. Originally it was in the first person. Then I changed it to third person. Now a lot of it’s from the point of view of the heroine’s boyfriend. Don’t you think that should make a difference?”

“I don’t see why it matters,” I said boldly, “if people think you’re a lesbian.”

“I know, I know. Eli says the same thing.”

“I mean, everyone at that party—Sam Stallings, for instance—took it as a given that / was gay. And my feeling is, so what? I am.”

“But that’s the problem!” Liza said, her voice tinny with exasperation. “I’m not—or rather, I’m not only. Oh, this kind of thing must really be so much easier for men! I mean, if you’re a man, from what I gather, it’s just a matter of, you either like to whack off looking at pictures of naked girls, which means you’re straight, or you like to whack off looking at pictures of naked boys, which means you’re gay. But with women it’s never so simple. In my case, for instance, I’ve dated both men and women. As a matter of fact I’m dating a woman right now. But that doesn’t mean I’m making a lifetime commitment to being a lesbian.” I heard her frown. “What I don’t understand is why people have to give everything a label. Because once you’re labeled a lesbian, it’s like, that’s the end of it, you can never get married and have children, which I fully intend to do.”

“But lesbians do have children. Lesbians do get married.”

“Oh, please! Have you ever been to a lesbian wedding? Eli and I went to one last year, it was horrible. Both the ‘brides’ wore tuxedos. Also, even though they registered, none of their relatives bothered to buy them any decent presents. Excuse me, I’m walking to the kitchen right now ... I have a cordless phone ... I’m getting a Diet Coke.” Suddenly her voice lowered. “Hold on a sec. Hi, Mom.” There was a noise of muffling. “Sorry about that,” she went on a moment later. “I’m back in my room now.”

“You’re staying with your mother?”

“My apartment’s sublet until the spring, so I don’t have any choice. It’s horrible. There.” She pulled—I could hear it—the pop-top off the Diet Coke. “Anyway, as I suppose you’ve figured out, I’m pretty unresolved about this lesbian thing. All my friends tease me about it, this whole drama of, is Liza a lesbian this week, or isn’t she? ‘The great debate,’ Eli calls it.”

I was already beginning to suspect that if Liza spent as much time discussing her sexual indecision with her friends as she had with me, whom she hardly knew, it was at least in part to ensure the centrality of “the great debate” in their (our) conversations. Not that her suffering wasn’t real: on the contrary, as I learned over the course of the next several days, ever since she had made the mistake, in high school, of confessing to Sada her love for her best friend, Kelly, her mother had been waging a vigorous campaign to stop her from making what she insisted would be the biggest mistake of her life. For Sada, despite the dismal state into which her own marriage had declined (she and her husband had not lived together for almost twenty years), remained for murky reasons the staunchest advocate of heterosexual monogamy on the planet; indeed, her enthusiasm for the ideal of coupledom seemed to have increased exponentially as the condition of her own union had degenerated, which meant that despite her professed feminism, she often found herself at odds with certain literary friends from whom her “conservative” positions alienated her. In this way she prefigured some other feminists who in subsequent years would enter into a marriage of convenience with the Christian right, with which they shared nothing save the common goal of wanting to criminalize pornography.

“By the way,” I said to Liza during one of our telephone conversations, “you never explained to me why it was that talking to Nora Foy upset you so much at the party.”

“Oh, it’s not Nora herself,” Liza said. “Nora’s all right. It’s just that my mother’s always pushing her at me because she wants to rub in my face what it’s like growing up to be an old lesbian.”

“I didn’t know Nora Foy was a lesbian.”

“Of course. And my mother says that if I don’t mend my ways, I’ll end up just like her—miserable and alone and living in squalor with forty-seven cats.”

“But, Liza,” the gay-straight rap leader in me said, “there are also thousands of lesbians who’ve made happy and successful lives for themselves, with other women.”

“I know. Eli tells me the same thing.”

“As well as thousands of women who fought their natural impulses and ended up in loveless marriages.”

“Eli says that too. You’re a lot alike, you and Eli. I should introduce you. But for the moment it’s a moot point, because as it stands starting in January I’m trapped again in Babcock, where there isn’t a lesbian for miles around, and Jessica”—this was the woman, a ceramist, whom Liza was currently dating—“she’s here in New York. Confidentially, though, I’ve started seeing a man at school. On the side. Nothing serious, it’s just to amuse myself. His name’s Arthur—Art—and he teaches history. He has a really big penis. Do you like that? I find it hurts.”

“Well—”

“I do like men, you know. I’m not some man-hating bull dyke. I enjoy sex with them. And anyway, even if my going out with Art does please my mother, that’s hardly relevant, because as it stands she couldn’t be more unhappy with me on account of Jessica. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she concluded. “I hardly know you. Yet somehow I feel as if we’ve been friends our whole lives. Isn’t it funny the way that happens?”

I had to agree that it was funny, especially because I felt the same way—this despite those bursts of hysteria and hypocrisy that so infuriated me in Liza. For it was true that even after just a few days, our bond already seemed better established, more vesseled with intimacy, than many others I had shared for a much longer duration, so much so that sometimes it was hard to believe we hadn’t actually sat together at that children’s table of our childhood. There is no quicker shortcut to intimacy than the discovery of common ground, of which Liza and I had acres; what we didn’t realize—what we wouldn’t realize until we were older—was that it is upon the method by which that ground is cultivated, not the soil itself, that intimacy in the long run depends.

In any case, it became quickly evident that among the many things Liza and I shared was a whole vocabulary of nostalgia, the common grammar of the suburbs—in particular the television programs we’d watched—having made it possible for this New Jersey girl and this Seattle boy, without ever meeting, to have what was in essence the same childhood. Eli was different. Though he’d also grown up in the suburbs, he’d disdained them in a way we hadn’t, devoting his attentions not to TV, but to the reading of Shakespeare and violin lessons. Every Sunday he’d ridden the train into the city, where he’d wandered the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, searching for his soul mate. The fin de siècle was his ideal, the world into which he bemoaned not having been born, with the result that even as Liza and I, at the age of twelve, were both preparing “cut-glass dessert,” following the recipe from the Joys of Jell-O cookbook, Eli, in his own mother’s kitchen, was making boeuf en gelée, having read somewhere that it was a favorite dish of Oscar Wilde’s. Eli, in other words, was an intellectual snob, whereas Liza and I were snobs of a different and perhaps more insidious order, the sort who grow defensive in the company of those for whom the love of serious art has rendered the unrefined flavors of popular culture unpalatable. Yet this is a natural process, in much the same way that it is natural to discover that the SpaghettiOs with sliced franks you loved as a child no longer seem quite so delicious after you have grown up and gone to eat trenette al pesto in a harborfront Ligurian trattoria.

In the end, I suppose you could say that Liza and I were voluptuaries of the SpaghettiO, epicures of Room 222, connoisseurs of Airport 1975, the entire cast of which—Karen Black, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Sid Caesar, Gloria Swanson (playing herself), and so on—both of us could recite from memory. Thus at dinner with Liza and Janet Klass, I could mention apropos of nothing a band I remembered having seen once on The Gong Show, four geeky youths dressed in white gowns and pulling around IV poles while they sang, “Hospital, hospital, like it, like it.”

“But wait, wait! I remember that too!” Liza had shouted, thrusting her hand into the air like a child overeager to answer a teacher’s question. “They were a sort of precursor of Devo. And Jaye P. Morgan gonged them!”

Television—a dubious heritage, to say the least—was the lodestar of our friendship. Our knowledge of its arcana amazed Janet, who had grown up in a more rarefied atmosphere, where TV was strictly banned. “You guys are incredible,” she’d tell us. “I never saw any of those programs, I was too busy reading Little House on the Prairie. ” And yet the surprise, in my case as well as Liza’s, was that we had read too: we had read while watching television.

The other topic of which Liza spoke obsessively was AIDS, over which, in those years, we both suffered even though we knew very little about it. AIDS had first come into my life several summers earlier, when, driving with my mother in her green MGB sports car (my mother disdained station wagons) to the inauguration of some enormous new supermarket, I’d heard a voice on the radio speaking about “gay cancer.” “Purple lesions, previously seen only in elderly men of Mediterranean extraction,” the voice had said. “Hopefully the disease has not spread outside the homosexual community.” My mother had chewed gum, kept driving. “What’s the world coming to,” she’d asked, “when even on the radio people misuse ‘hopefully’”—my mother, ever the crossing guard of grammar, the layer-down of the “lay” and “lie” law, the wager of the one-woman war on the split infinitive.

This was in 1980, when no one knew anything about AIDS. By the end of 1982, when I met and befriended Liza, little had changed, except that the disease—no longer called GRID—was spreading fast. Our worry was blanketed in ignorance, fringed with denial. Nor, I suspect, would I have believed it if some prophet had told us that twenty years hence AIDS would still be with us, and that only the naive and demented would talk of a cure.

As for Liza, her distress was both exaggerated and to a certain degree touristic. It did not matter how many times I reminded her that so far at least, there existed only one proven case of female-to-female AIDS transmission. “I know, I know,” she’d say, “and yet what if—this is purely hypothetical—you have, say, a tiny cut on your finger, microscopic, and then you insert it, you know, into somebody? Couldn’t you get it that way?”

“Theoretically, though the probability is almost nil.”

“A few weeks ago Eli told me that soon there’s going to be a test available. He says that when it comes on the market we should all band together and refuse to take it, because if the government gets ahold of information like that, they’ll start quarantining people, and from then on it’ll only be a matter of time before we end up in concentration camps.” She frowned. “I’m not sure, though. I mean, if there was a test, I think I’d take it, just to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t see why you’re so worked up,” I answered (carefully dodging the tricky question of my own attitude toward tests), “since from what you’ve told me you don’t have anything to worry about. And even if you did, would it really help to know you were positive for the virus, when clearly there’s nothing anyone can do and you’ll die anyway?”

“Oh, I’m so tired of this! Do we always have to talk about AIDS? Let’s talk about something else,” Liza said, for she had the bad habit of forgetting, whenever a subject made her uncomfortable, that it was she who had brought it up.

“Okay. How’s the famous Eli? Have you heard from him lately?”

“I got a postcard from Aix.” She sounded bored.

“He’s a writer too, isn’t he?”

“Well, yes. That is to say, he writes. He’s never published a book.” “And is he good?”

“Oh, not bad—but at the same time not what I’d call a natural writer, the way you and I are natural writers. For Eli it’s more like he chose it instead of it choosing him, you know what I mean?”

I did. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Liza wanted to keep Eli from becoming a “natural writer,” in which capacity he might have threatened her supremacy.

“Eli’s an amazing person,” she continued, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she had just insulted him. “The thing about him is that he’s got this almost magical ability to make you feel cozy and safe in his company. He’s a wonderful masseur. There’s something very feminine about him. He’s a sort of man-woman, really. You know when we lived together in college, we always slept in the same bed.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And it wasn’t anything like sleeping with Arthur, who snores and flails. Instead Eli just sort of—shapes his body around yours. Also he’s got this beautiful beard, but it’s the sort of beard a woman would have, if women had beards. You could comb it with a Barbie comb.”

“You told me that the first time I met you.”

“Oh, did I?” Liza asked disingenuously, for as I soon learned, this was one of her favorite mots concerning Eli, whom it was in her interest to emasculate. Her mother, needless to say, hated him; to Sada he was a demonic figure, forever beckoning her daughter with luscious apples to which she—merely the mother—could offer no alternative save the homey flavors, more wholesome if less delectable, of the domestic kitchen. For Liza was impressionable, and Eli, when he spoke of his own homosexuality, did so with the fervor of a rabbi and the charm of a mountebank.

Meanwhile, even as Liza disparaged Eli, she also depended on him. Thus she told me that though both of them had had lovers over the years, their friendship had always taken priority over these mere affairs of the heart. I wondered whether I was supposed to interpret this as a warning, since in my typical way, I was already looking upon my own love affair with Eli—whom I had not even met—as a fait accompli. And yet if this was the case, was Liza’s intention to dissuade me, or simply to make sure I understood the parameters within which I could safely operate? So long as I respected her dominance, I suspected, so long as I gave wide berth to the primacy of her friendship with Eli, then she would be delighted to introduce me to him when she got back to New York in the spring. Yet if, on the other hand, what I sought was a relationship with Eli that might eclipse their own, I should look elsewhere, for it would never happen; not in a million years.