THAT SPRING I finally met Barclay Eberhart, my new agent, with whom, until that time, I had communicated only by post. At first, based on his old-fashioned letterhead and signature, I’d assumed that Eberhart—whose clients were mostly obscure contributors to the magazine—would turn out to be a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman with fine white hair, in appearance rather resembling the learned professor whose advice Babar the Elephant seeks whenever he finds himself faced with a scientific or technological dilemma. Instead, however—as I discovered when I called him the first time to make a lunch appointment—Barclay, to judge from his (her) voice, was a woman—and not only that, but the same “Billie” with the bleached-blond hair to whom Henry Deane had introduced me, and who had irked me by refusing to meet my eye. “Fooled you,” she said when I went to meet her at her apartment. “Barclay’s a family name. I’ve been called Billie since I was a child. Come in.”
After giving me a brief tour of the flat—she did not yet have an office, having then been in the business only a few years—Billie took me out to lunch at Café des Artistes, which she called her “watering hole.” Here the waiter brought her an ashtray and lighter almost as soon as we sat down. She seemed anxious, which was not surprising, given the slightly hostile caution I was broadcasting, having never forgotten that initial bad impression she had made on me at Sam Stallings’s party; and yet context often influences actions more than we would like to admit, with the result that the person whom we find, in one setting, boorish or ill-tempered, can reveal herself to be both charming and likable in another. Certainly this was the case with Billie, who in her own words “did horribly” at parties, yet was utterly winning one on one. Nor could I deny the degree (of which I became conscious only as the lunch progressed) to which I had made certain assumptions about her character and intelligence based only on her hair color, having inherited from my mother a set of narrow prejudices, one of which held that a woman with “loud hair” was necessarily “L.C.” (low-class), whereas Billie was not only decidedly “H.C.” but the author herself of several novels published in the late sixties and early seventies, all of which, it turned out, my mother had checked out from the library and read. “They weren’t very good, though,” Billie told me, “which is why I became an agent. Because I loved good writing, and if I couldn’t produce it myself, I decided, the next best thing I could do would be to sell it, make writers I liked some decent money for a change.”
I was glad to hear it, just as I was glad to hear her dismiss as “idiotic bullshit” certain “instant bestsellers” and “review-proof books” for which Hudson-Terrier and other publishers had been recently paying vast sums of money. “I mean, think about it,” she said. “You go to a bank, and say, ‘I represent the estate of Grace Metalious—”
“Who?” I interrupted.
“That’s my point. She wrote Peyton Place. You go to the bank and say, ‘I represent the estate of Grace Metalious, and I want to borrow fifty thousand dollars,’ and the bank will laugh in your face. But if you say, ‘I represent the estate of Samuel Beckett, and I want to borrow fifty thousand dollars,’ the bank will say, ‘Write your own check.’” She smiled aggressively. “The problem with the direction publishing’s going in is that publishers are always looking for the Grace Metaliouses, not the Samuel Becketts. And I’m changing that.”
Billie’s integrity impressed me mostly because it was not merely anecdotal. For example, she told me she had recently sold to Simon and Schuster a work about the philosophical implications of animal training, written by a lady in her early eighties who had been on the staff of the magazine since the beginning of the Second World War, for the princely sum of seventy-five thousand dollars. On the other hand, just this morning she had refused to represent the author of what she called “junky” historical novels that earned millions of dollars annually, because she could not abide his politics.
She was a peculiar admixture of enterprise, shyness, and principled gestures that sometimes worked against her own best interests. Sleek and muscular, with a supple complexion that seemed to belie her fifty-three years on this planet, and that was the envy of those among her colleagues who had endured all manner of plastic surgery in order to achieve a less convincing version of what for Billie was both natural and free, she came from a long line of New England bluebloods, a family the complex ramifications of which enwebbed several presidents and the author of Gone With the Wind, as well as Edith Atkinson, who was either Billie’s third cousin or her cousin thrice-removed (she wasn’t sure which). A protected girlhood distinguished only by an affair with a male teacher at boarding school had concluded, unsurprisingly, at Smith College, which she attended for two years before absconding to New York, where she joined Andy Warhol’s circle and shared an apartment with Ultra Violet. It was during these years that she became, as she dispassionately put it, the “junkie and drunk” she still was, though she had neither touched a glass of wine nor smoked a joint for almost ten years now. Finally, near the end of the sixties, she’d landed in a mental hospital, only to emerge from its protective barbarity a few years later, personality intact, at which point she married, had a girl child, now twelve, divorced, married again, and divorced again. All of which, she said, had worn her out so thoroughly that these days she preferred to lead a quieter life, devoting her energies exclusively to work and to the raising of the daughter—rarely to men, and never to drinking.
After lunch we went back to her apartment, where we sipped chamomile tea and got down to business. Having read my eight stories and the 150-odd pages I had written so far of The Terrorist, Billie told me, she felt fairly convinced that my work was ready to be sent out. Her game plan (if I approved it) was to seek for me a two-book contract, from a publisher on whom I could rely “to keep your books in print for the rest of your life, and after.” She then handed me a list she had drawn up of houses and editors to whom she wanted to submit: Putnam, I read, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Random House, Hudson-Terrier; at this last house, Billie added, she was thinking of showing the manuscript to Stanley Flint, whom she was sure was going to love it.
“Actually, I’d rather if you didn’t give it to Stanley Flint,” I said, putting down the sheet.
Billie looked puzzled. “Fine, if that’s what you want,” she said. “Only may I ask why?”
Because I didn’t feel like telling her everything right then, I explained merely that Stanley Flint had once been my teacher, and that until recently I had worked at Hudson-Terrier as the slush reader. “Enough said,” she replied, and crossed Flint’s name off her list. “Anyway, there’s every possibility that Stanley won’t be at Hudson for very much longer. You know Sada Perlman’s just sold his first novel to Knopf for four hundred thousand dollars.”
“Four hundred thousand dollars!”
She nodded. “I haven’t read it yet. I’m told it’s pretty dense. I think what they’re banking on is his celebrity, his name. But who knows? Stanley’s a genius, so the novel might be a masterpiece.”
By now it was May. Though a variety of activities had kept me busy since Christmas—most notably, my search for a new apartment, Dennis and Will having informed me on the same afternoon that they each intended to move out at the end of the summer—I still hadn’t fallen in love. Moreover, with every week that passed in which I didn’t fall in love, I found myself looking forward that much more eagerly to the day when Liza would come back and finally introduce me to Eli Aronson, on whom I had for rash and illogical reasons pinned my hopes.
Alas, this did not come to pass. Near the end of the month Liza, who had been offered last-minute residencies at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, called to tell me that she had decided not to return to New York at all that summer, and instead to extend the sublet of her apartment until the beginning of September. (The fact that Jessica, the ceramist, was also going to be at Yaddo had no doubt influenced her decision.) This meant that if I wanted to meet Eli, I would either have to call him up myself—a frightening prospect—or wait until Liza reentrenched herself in the autumn.
I chose to take the latter course—a decision made easier by the fact that as summer began, and with it that annual exodus to the beach, I suddenly found myself the object of not one, but two amorous campaigns. First Kendall Philips, the editor at House and Garden who had introduced himself to me at Sam Stallings’s party, started calling me on a regular basis and inviting me out on what appeared to be, from the way he conducted himself, “dates.” This was bewildering only in that I wasn’t really attracted to Kendall: I preferred his friend Roy, who, alas, showed not the slightest interest in me, being at the moment, at least according to Kendall, too furiously in love with a futures analyst on Wall Street even to notice anyone else. (“Roy’s what we call a yarmulke queen,” Kendall explained. “One of those guys who only likes arrogant Jewish boys.”) Our three dates were uncomfortable occasions, mostly as a consequence of Kendall’s refusal to take the hints I was always dropping that I didn’t want to go to bed with him. His obduracy was all the more difficult to tolerate, in that it recalled my own behavior back when I was infatuated with Carey, and had ignored his signals of disinterest so willfully. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak, I suddenly understood what a difficult position I’d put Carey in, and vowed to find some means of apologizing to him for what I now saw to have been a substantial error of taste as well as judgment.
In any case, this episode blew over—or perhaps I should say (more truthfully if less prettily) I stopped returning Kendall’s phone calls—when one chilly evening at a Columbia dance a boy named Enrique Antonio Miguel Fernando Jimenez came up to me out of the blue and asked me to dance. This boy, as I learned, was twenty-four years old, lived with his parents in the Bronx, and was working at a branch of the Athlete’s Foot in order to pay his way through City College, where he was studying drama. Ricky (or Tony, or Mike, or Nando; he moved among his many names as casually as certain people change their hair color) took such an instant liking to me that at first I found myself mistrusting his affection, which I assumed to have an ulterior motive; after all, in my experience so far, whenever people had claimed to want to kiss me or go to bed with me it had either been because they intended to steal my money (as had been the case with Joey) or because some demented fondness for my writing made them want to be able to say they’d slept with (even more than they wanted actually to sleep with) “Martin Bauman, the author of such and such a story.” Yet it was, in fact, simply Martin Bauman whom Ricky really had asked to dance that night. Because he never read the magazine, he had no idea that I’d published a story there. Nor did he care much when I told him. Drama, he said, was his thing: Ibsen, Sondheim, Woody Allen (an odd trio, I thought). He looked at the magazine only for the cartoons.
I found him very attractive. Like Joey (whom I never again saw at one of those Columbia dances) he was both broad-shouldered and dark; like Roy he was bulky, even a little fat, with the sort of musculature that one acquires only through a lifetime of physical exertion, as opposed to that synthetic brawn—somehow too glossy and plasticized—that one piles on by means of weightlifting regimens and steroids (and that in so many cases seemed intended to provide an armature against AIDS); finally, like Stanley Flint, he had heavy hair and penetrating black eyes. I cannot tell you what a contrast he presented to the fixtures at that Columbia dance—for example, to Kendall himself, who had exercised the muscles in his upper body so much, and those in his lower body so little, that in the end, to borrow a memorable Henry Deaneism, he was “all man from the waist up, all woman from the waist down.” Genetics, on the other hand, had given Ricky a long torso, fleshy lips, and limbs strong enough to crush as well as to embrace. Like his manners, which were gentlemanly in the extreme, his face seemed to belong to a distant era, at once harsher and more courtly than ours, so that when he kissed me that night at the end of the slow dance—bright eyes shining, mint-smelling voice unctuous as he whispered, “I could really go for you, Martin”—what I recalled were those brooding portraits of young noblemen, always in mail and codpiece, that Bronzino painted for the Medici court.
Afterward, at my apartment, we slept together. Unlike Will, who had made such a drama out of postponing the consummation of his love affair with Vincent, Ricky had no qualms about going to bed with someone on first meeting. Indeed, when (lying together on that couch that Faye had made into her bed) I stopped his hand on my fly, and asked, “Don’t you think it’s too soon?” his answer was a simple and persuasive no. “Why wait?” he reasoned. “After all, if we don’t do it tonight, we’ll do it tomorrow night.”
He was right: we did it both nights. The second time he brought me flowers, and a little ring, made of colored glass, which I still have, and treasure more than either of the rings—one of jade, which providentially broke in half a year after we met, the other of silver—that Eli and I would exchange later on.
I have long believed that one can deduce more about a man’s character from the attitude he brings to sex than any other mode of interaction. In my case, sex has always been a cerebral business, in which fetishistic props—those elements that lend to the act a quality, so to speak, of atmosphere—play at least as important a role as the person (or persons) I am with. Ricky, on the contrary, perceived sex as a purely physical—and purely communicative—pleasure. This meant, among other things, that he had no interest in pornography, which I hoarded. “To me, making love just isn’t a spectator sport,” he liked to say whenever I brought the subject up, thus employing one of those stock phrases with which—ashamed of his upbringing in a poor Hispanic neighborhood, by immigrant parents who barely spoke English—he was always peppering his conversation. Likewise he never wore underwear. “What’s the point?” he said. “They only get in the way.” For he had no idea—and why should he have?—that probably as a consequence of some episode lost in the fog of memory (or the steam of a shower room) I attached great erotic importance to the pulling off of a man’s underwear: a case, perhaps, of the wrapping paper mattering more than the gift. Now I suspect that if only I’d been brave enough to voice this desire, Ricky would have gladly acceded to it, for he was not prudish, and would have gone far to make me happy; and yet in those days fear of rebuke inhibited me far too often from speaking up. Instead, when I was with him as when I was alone, I resorted, in my mind, to highly specific fantasies by means of which I could be certain of arousing myself. Thus I would pretend that I was an athlete getting a massage from his coach, or that I was a grunt being punished by his sergeant at boot camp, assuming all the time that in doing so I was fooling Ricky, when in fact my closed eyes betrayed my absence, with the result that he got sad, for he knew that the pleasure I was experiencing was a private one.
But I have digressed, I see now, from the subject of love to that of sex, which is only a department of love. Ricky’s conception of love was both simpler and more admirable than mine. That little ring—spontaneously offered, and none too costly—was its emblem. I think he never questioned love, which he perceived as an element both copious and free, upon which circumstance sometimes acts as a pollutant or irritant. To me, on the other hand, love was the precious wand of sunlight that on rare days pierces the cloud cover of discord and strife under which all human dramas play out, and to which as a child I had learned early to acclimate myself. In other words, I was (perhaps because of my upbringing) a congenital pessimist, whereas Ricky, for no good reason (and this made it all the more charming), had managed to retain not only his childish idealism, but the old-fashioned belief—no doubt Latin in nature—that loyalty is a virtue. Once he decided that he loved someone, he never strayed. Nor would he ever have tolerated my cheating on him, for jealousy is the one volatility a heart like his will allow itself. All that he asked in return for his malleability—his readiness, at any moment, to returne his needs in order to accommodate mine—was fidelity, which he saw as an easy enough thing to give. After all, sexual variety can have little allure (much less meaning) to one for whom pleasure comes as easily as breathing.
In retrospect, I wonder if I should have clung to him; and yet, if I am to be truthful, I must confess that his adoration—not to mention his tendency toward chivalrous self-sacrifice—annoyed me as much as it flattered me. This was in part because the very straightforwardness of Ricky’s nature—which in the abstract I esteemed—also caused him to scorn the sort of tortured and analytical “dissections” in which Liza and I took such satisfaction, and which were to him merely a waste of time. Because he felt no need for talk, he teased me about the hours I spent on the phone: the point of life was pleasure, he said, which he defined purely in terms of its own experiencing. Indeed, his only neurotic trait, no doubt derived from that perpetual wish to convince me that he was worldly, was his habit of filling his conversation with the stock phrases of which I have already given one example. Thus, if I were to mention my despair at knowing so few people with whom I could really talk about writing, he would reply, “What am I, chopped liver?”: an expression I found particularly galling not merely because it was so hackneyed, but because it called attention to my Jewishness, with which Ricky claimed to feel a great affinity on account of his fondness for Woody Allen, whom I loathed, yet at whose altar he presumed that I, being a Jew, must also worship. Here, as in so many volleys, he missed the target, and instead of persuading me that we were of the same milieu, only made me feel more acutely the distance that separated that apartment in the Bronx, full of incense smells and plaster saints, from that book-littered room of mine wherein, amid copies of the magazine and posters of the London Underground and the Paris Metro, his discarded pants, always carrying a faint whiff of Obsession for Men, appeared so out of place.
Yet there was a darker reason for my feeling that I could never make a life with Ricky, one that in those days I would scarcely have had the courage to articulate. It was this: he was the first man I had ever met who managed to embody both the dominant father figure by whom I longed to be ravaged, and the sweater-clad coeval by whose side I dreamed of reading Middlemarch on long winter nights. Such a fusion of traits, you might think, would have been the ideal after which I chased. Instead it frightened me. I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps I imagined that if I gave myself up to pleasure, as Ricky did, then my selfhood would slip away, as once a diamond of my mother’s had slipped down the bathroom drain. Thus whenever he visited my apartment I always opened the windows after he left, in order to dissipate that odor of cologne and sweat—to me the very redolence of submission—in the wake of which I could not write.
That summer we “saw” each other two or three times a week—I put quotation marks around the word “saw” because my affair with Ricky constituted the only relationship I have ever had that I can fit under the traditional rubric of “seeing someone” or “dating.” Subse-quently—and not only with Eli—my impatient need for instantaneous and total union led me to skip all intermediate stages and jump directly from first meeting to “the deep, deep peace of the double bed”; only with Ricky did I experience that style of courtship—“going steady”—toward which young people are supposed to lean. This was mostly his doing. Though he had no qualms about sleeping with me on the first date, in the long run, he said, he believed in “taking things slowly,” not so much from a sense of caution as to maximize the pleasure he derived from process. It was the same with eating; while a desire for satiation compelled me to wolf down my dinners, Ricky savored each bite.
Also, because some scruple obliged him to wake every morning in his bed in the Bronx, even if it meant crossing Manhattan in the rain at four in the morning to catch a bus, he never spent the night with me. Probably some vestige of his Catholic education, with its emphasis on filial duty, underlay the obstinacy with which he enforced this rule, no matter how often I reminded him (nor could he deny it) that after all he was a grown man, whose parents had long since stopped believing he was in bed every night by eleven. After all, unreason can have its own peculiar logic. Thus each night, in spite of my vague pleas that he stay, Ricky would climb noiselessly out of my bed, dress in the dark, fumble for his watch and wallet. “Don’t go,” I’d call halfheartedly, at which point he would kiss me, whisper, “Good night, baby,” tiptoe down the corridor (yet his tennis shoes, of which, thanks to his job, he had a dozen pairs, made the floor squeak), open and shut the door with great delicacy, so that it should not slam. There would be a sound of creaking that would resolve itself into the familiar click of the deadbolt, which meant that I was alone. I could get up, wash, brush my teeth. For despite protests to the contrary, I was always relieved when Ricky left, since in fact I had never once in my life spent a whole night in the same bed with someone else. Snobbery made me dread lest he should embarrass me in front of my roommates, while habit made me worry that if he did stay I would never get to sleep.
The truth was, despite my proclaimed longing for a great love, I had over the years grown rather inured to solitude, from which I even derived a certain consolation. Now I can trace the beginning of this process back to the Friday night during my sophomore year in high school when a girl named Kim Finnegan, a friend of all of my friends, gave a party and in a fit of teenage caprice made a drama of not sending me an invitation (because, of course, she had to have someone not to invite). My father was away; my mother, I seem to recall, was waiting for the result of some dire test. Lying in my sister’s bed (for I liked to sleep, on weekends, in rooms other than my own), I listened to the thrum of the rain, and found in its very constancy a rhythm by which to construct my own solace; the knowledge that not far away my friends were enjoying themselves, perhaps at my expense, became itself a warmth against which I could nestle. Meanwhile I watched the little bar of light under the doorframe that meant my mother had not yet gone to bed. For hours it remained steady, as clear-edged as a gold ingot; then around two I heard her slippered feet in the corridor, the definitive flip of the switch, after which this bar of light—my touchstone, through that rainy night—disappeared and left me swimming in darkness.
I have mentioned that during that summer I was looking for an apartment: in late August, just before Dennis was scheduled to begin graduate school, and Will to move into the Lower East Side railroad flat he was to share with Vincent, I finally found one. This was, at last, the cabin in the sky of which I had so long dreamed, a studio nineteen stories up, with a view of both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, and boasting a panoply of complicated gadgets installed by its former tenant, a gay electrician. Most prominent among these were an electrified Murphy bed that operated by remote control, and a Venetian blind one could lower and raise using a garage door opener motor hidden beneath the window. Needless to say the presence of such low-tech gewgaws only added to the delight I took in my new home—the first in which I had ever lived alone—and to which, with Ricky’s help, I moved, one humid afternoon, my few items of furniture (most of them made of unpainted plywood, purchased at a store in my neighborhood the sign for which—NUDE FURNITURE—; made me think of strip joints) and many books. This turned out to be a fairly time-consuming procedure, since the new apartment was located far downtown from the tenement flat that Janet had passed on to me, in a building with a checkerboard and oak-paneled lobby, and that was named, as are so many in Greenwich Village, after one of the old Dutch masters.
At this point I became so involved in decorating the new apartment that in my frenzy to paint walls and purchase sheets, hang pictures and alphabetize novels, I almost forgot the fact that certain strange editors were at present reading my book of stories, which Billie had started, in her words, to “shop around.” Or perhaps I should not say “forgot,” since even in my delirium I called her twice a week. “No news yet,” she always said. Even so I remained optimistic, for I liked my collection, at least one-eighth of which bore the magazine’s seal of approval. In the end I had titled it The Deviled-Egg Plate, after a story about which I was shortly to have a fracas with my mother much greater in scope and longer-lasting than any my story in the magazine might have provoked. The problem was not that the story exposed a secret of mine, but one of hers: specifically, her early marriage, long before she had even met my father, to a handsome sailor who had subsequently abandoned her, and from which she had retained, for reasons never clearly articulated, all the original gifts, including the crystal plate for holding deviled eggs referred to in my tide. What intrigued me was that my mother refused categorically ever to use this deviled-egg plate, which, at the same time, she would neither give away nor sell. Rather than ask her why this was, I decided to invent the reason for myself, and wrote the story—which probably made her at least as angry (the reason I invented bearing a startling similarity to the truth) as the fact that in doing so I was exposing to public scrutiny a matter that was “none of my business.”
In any case, I did not have to wait long to get the news for which I was hoping. Indeed, only a few weeks after she’d sent the collection out, Billie, sounding surprised, called to tell me that an editor at———had made a “low offer” for my two books. I asked her what low meant; she told me, and I whooped with joy, for I lived very cheaply in those days, and what she considered “not nearly enough” was to me a windfall, in that it allowed me to quit my job at the bookstore.
After that I wasted no time in sharing my good fortune—rather boastfully, I am afraid—with those among my friends whom I thought it would either please or distress: to wit, Liza (whom I knew would tell Eli); Carey (whom I knew would tell Flint); Sara (whom I knew would tell Marge); and finally Anka, through whom I hoped the news would be quickly spread not only to Edith, but to those amorphous others whose views she represented, and who had rejected all but one of the stories in the collection. My hope was that, upon discovering that a major publisher had disagreed with their assessment of my stories (not to mention the half-finished novel), Flint and these others would be compelled to wonder whether they had made a mistake in dismissing me. And yet behind that hope there also sounded a vague echo of selfrecrimination, the voice of Flint repeating the words “ready to pounce on a sure thing,” as well as the nagging suspicion that in the end his opinion counted more than that of a publisher whose interests were essentially commercial.
The other person I told was Ricky, who alone among these acquaintances greeted the news with unalloyed delight, and even insisted on taking me out to dinner to celebrate. I balked—after all, I was the one who had just made some money, whereas he had only his income from the shoe store with which to support himself, help out (I suspected) his family, and pay his tuition. Nonetheless he was adamant. He would take me to Windows on the World, he said, on top of the World Trade Center.
The next night, more than a hundred stories up, Ricky ordered a bottle of champagne. To mark the occasion, he had put on a special outfit: a rayon jacket that shimmered from green to brown, depending on the light, and a melon-colored shirt, open at the throat to show off the gold chain that seemed to draw luminescence from his chest as pearls are said to derive their glow from the heat of a woman’s skin. He had bought me another present—a silver-plated bookmark, from Tiffany’s, inscribed to “M.B. from E.A.M.F.J.”—and though I thanked him profusely, and even felt myself on the verge of tears, my embarrassment must have shown through: I, who was so unused to receiving presents, had so far bought him nothing.
The champagne arrived. “To you,” he toasted, lifting his glass. “And to me. I’ve got good news too.”
“Really? What?”
“I didn’t want to say anything until it was official, but I’ve been cast as Mitch in Streetcar. Not an official drama department production or anything—just something some lads are doing on their own. We’ve got to keep it under wraps because we can’t afford to pay the rights. Still, I’m happy.”
“Congratulations, Rick,” I said, simultaneously marveling at this innocence that allowed him to equate our successes, and feeling my vanity wounded that he did not acknowledge the superiority of mine. (For this latter reaction—so unworthy of you, Ricky—I now apologize with all my heart.) Meanwhile he was studying the menu with an enthusiasm that touched me even as it irked me; for like his correlation of our victories, like his clothes, like the cologne in which he doused himself, his appetite for the sort of overwrought dishes in which the restaurant specialized simply proved the width of the gulf that separated us. I really was more cultured than he was, I saw, which was why his pretensions annoyed me. And yet if this was true (and I couldn’t pretend otherwise) it was only because one more generation separated me from my immigrant grandfather’s shtetl than separated Ricky from the island life, at once pastoral and primitive, into which his own parents, five decades earlier, had been born.
The dinner progressed slowly. Because Ricky could sense my anxiety, which made me grasp for topics, he didn’t talk much. He ordered a second bottle of champagne. You drink too much, I found myself thinking, not so much because his drinking in and of itself distressed me, or even came as a surprise to me, but because already I was looking for excuses to end our affair. For just as in college I had imagined that the person with whom I was destined to spend my life, when I met him, would instantly set off the Geiger counter in my heart, so now I subscribed to the even more bankrupt (yet convenient) theory that compatibility is merely a matter of shared predilections, and that only with someone who matches seven out of ten requirements on a checklist could one make a happy life. “Nondrinker,” as it happened, was one of my ten requirements, as was “good taste in clothes, food, etc.” Ricky did not make the grade on either count, and that evening I resolved, despite his kindness, to break with him.
It was shortly after this dinner that Liza, having finished up her residency at Yaddo, at last returned to New York, where she reclaimed her old apartment after a two-year sublet. This basement studio—a cave—was located three blocks away from Eli’s sixth-floor walk-up, an aerie. Indeed, Liza told me, Eli’s apartment got so bright in the mornings that he kept sunglasses by the side of the bed; hers, on the other hand, was so dark that she had to have the lights on even on the sunniest of afternoons.
Almost as soon as she had settled in she told me that she wanted to fix me up on the long-promised (and long-postponed) blind date with Eli, her own romance with Jessica, with whom she had just spent a “blissful” month at Yaddo, having reached a sufficient pitch of intensity (or so I surmised) to cause her to reconsider the pledge that she and Eli, though never in so many words, had implicitly made to each other, and according to which neither would ever allow a love affair to take precedence over their own, less definable bond. This meant that for the moment at least, it was in her interest for Eli to fall in love, since such a turn of events would both preclude any possibility of jealousy on his part, and allow the four of us (for some reason this prospect delighted her) to double-date.
But I, like Liza, am jumping ahead of things. At the moment I still haven’t met Eli, though I have spoken to him—once—on the phone. Having been given his number by Liza, who assured me that he had seen my picture, thought me “cute,” and was definitely “looking,” I called him up one afternoon to make a date. To my surprise a woman answered. “May I speak to Eli?” I asked.
“This is he,” the woman said, her voice suddenly going gruff—for Eli, it turned out, though a baritone, had a voice like Lotte Lenya’s over the phone, which meant that whenever he received a call from someone selling newspaper subscriptions or trying to convince him to vote for a particular candidate for the city council, it was always as “Mrs. Aronson” (or later “Mrs. Bauman”) that he was greeted.
Not wanting to embarrass him, I glossed over my mistake, which in any case I had no reason to think he’d noticed. “This is Martin Bauman,” I said. “Liza’s friend.”
“Oh, Martin Bauman. I’ve been wondering when you’d call.”
We talked for a few minutes. Eli told me that he lived on Elizabeth Street, near Little Italy, only a few minutes from my apartment by taxi. Accordingly I suggested we have dinner together some evening. “Great,” he said, “why not tonight?”—which surprised me only in that I had expected him to say (as New Yorkers so often do) “Let me check my book ... Yes, I’m free a week from Wednesday.” This urban habit of planning everything ahead, I have always believed, endures chiefly because it provides such an easy means of proving to other people how much busier and fuller one’s life is than theirs. Liza indulged in it all the time, as did I, sometimes even going so far as to pretend to have dates on nights when none existed simply in order not to be thought “out of the swim.” Eli’s impulsiveness, on the contrary, suggested either that, like Ricky, he was unequal to tactics, or that in his eagerness to meet me he was perfectly willing to cancel another date. Either likelihood pleased me, and having nothing to do myself that night, I accepted his proposal in the spirit of spontaneity with which it had been made.
A few hours later, just as I was about to walk out the door, the telephone rang. Thinking it might be Eli, I hurried to pick it up.
It was Ricky. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Because I’m standing at a pay phone on your comer, feeling lustful.”
I lied. I told him an old friend of mine was back in town, and that I had to have dinner with her.
“Hey, no problem,” Ricky said. “Tell you what, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” I added, and in trying to embellish my he, no doubt only succeeded in calling attention to it. “It’s just that this friend of mine, I haven’t seen her in months, and she’s one of the only people I can really talk to, you know what I mean?”
“What am I, chopped liver?” asked Ricky. “Just kidding. Toodles. Big kiss.”
He hung up. Having taken stock of my appearance, I rode the elevator down to the lobby. Through the doors I checked to make sure Ricky wasn’t still standing on the comer. Fortunately he was gone, probably to the subway. The thought of him alone in those dreary catacombs made me wistful for a moment, even made me wonder if, in betraying him, I was making a great mistake. And yet at this point I was well beyond imagining a life with Ricky. So I strolled southeast, toward Little Italy. At the address Eli had given me a modest stone building rose up, its fire escapes festooned with climbing roses, ivy, wisteria: lower Manhattan’s answer to the hanging gardens of Babylon. I rang. “Yes?” Eli’s voice intoned through the intercom.
“It’s Martin.”
He let me in. Well, here goes, I remember thinking, my life, for even then, somehow, I knew that Eli and I would go far together. Finally on the sixth floor, winded from the climb, I knocked on his door. “Hello,” he said, opening it, “I’m Eli.”
Hello, I’m Eli. How strange—especially from the perspective of so much time wasted and distance traversed—to contemplate the innocuous, even tedious words with which most marriages, by necessity, must begin! Accepting his proffered hand, I stepped into the apartment. He did not look anything like what I’d expected. In fact he never looked the same from one minute to the next. He was shape-shifting, mercurial. If you’d shown a stranger six photographs of him, taken on different days, probably the stranger would have sworn they were of six different people. A few years later, crossing back to West Berlin from East Berlin (the wall had not yet fallen), Eli was nearly arrested because he looked so unlike his passport picture. Nor did his tendency to worry his appearance—for example, to regrow his beard one month, then shave it off the next—do much to lend to his countenance that quality of permanence, of singularity, in which it was so lacking. Indeed, all I could have said about him—this man whom I even doubted I would recognize were I to see him on the street the following morning—was that he was about six feet tall, that he had a full head of thick, Semitic hair, and that he wore glasses. (Even here, however, there was variation, since he had several pairs among which he moved as casually as Ricky among his names.) Like Barb Mendenhall, his eyes were deep and liquid, though of indefinite coloration: green-gold one day, blue, or even pale gray, the next. Finally, because he was wearing only running shorts and a T-shirt—a common enough outfit for him, and also one by means of which, I suspected, he hoped to make a good impression on me, for he was as proud of his body as he was ashamed of his face, which he thought ugly—I could tell that he had a well-formed, hairless (or did he shave?) weightlifter’s chest.
We sat together on his futon sofa bed, behind which a massive wall of books spread out—comfortingly disordered, and featuring amid the masses of Wildeiana a small press paperback titled Anal Pleasure and Health, prominently displayed, for there was a touch of the provocateur in Eli. All told, his one room—a literal garret, with a high ceiling on which brown water stains bloomed, and a row of clattery windows that looked onto the street—had an aspect at once more intelligible and coherent than his own. A worn Oriental carpet covered the floor, which was of battered wood, splintering in places. Against the far wall, next to the surprisingly tiny desk at which, presumably, he wrote his novels that were not “natural,” there stood an immense loft bed, installed to take advantage of the apartment’s height. The walls were decorated with framed posters depicting Fra Angelico frescoes.
I relaxed instantly, and only in part thanks to the glass of white wine Eli had poured for me (and which, for once, I actually drank). There was something so comfortingly bohemian about that room, something so ordinary—my ordinary—about sitting there, talking lazily, as on so many nights I’d talked lazily with my friends in the room Jim Sterling and I had shared at the university, that in its beneficent atmosphere everything I’d found foreign and unfamiliar in Ricky slowly separated itself from him and stood out in relief. These were his attributes, which he might have offered as marks of identity, had he been the Renaissance nobleman in the Bronzino portrait to whom I had likened him. As for Eli, in his company a voice, perhaps his own, seemed to whisper, “You are home”: home in this room as musty as the used bookstores I’d once scoured with my brother in Seattle, home amid these smells of wood and glue and paper, and of the lavender spilling its buds through an open window onto the comer of the futon, and the traffic that made the windows shiver, and the fresh rain. For Eli’s apartment was, if not that very brownstone in which I’d dreamed of reposing side by side with Carey Finch in leather chairs, at least a place in which I could read. “I’m a little drunk,” I said, as, leaning back against the bookshelf, I let my head droop against his shoulder.
“That’s okay,” he answered. Nor did he flinch. I think he felt at home with me too.
That night we ate dinner at a restaurant the mad owner of which made only soup (but fifty-six varieties), before returning to his apartment, where he showed me pictures of himself as a little boy, and of his family. In one he was an eight-year-old in a football uniform. He did not have to tell me he hated football. I knew. I’d hated it too. Now I see that more than Eli himself, it was our common heritage—the fact that I did not have to explain to him who Denton Welch was, just as he did not have to explain to me what a kreplach was—by which, that evening, I felt myself so seduced. And yet at the time I could not have made such subtle distinctions. I put too much trust in my emotions, which told me that I was happy, to bother parsing their grammar. More like Ricky than I realized, I simply felt.
Not that Eli and I came from exactly the same world; on the contrary, he had grown up in the realm of high finance. His father (whose name, like mine, was Martin, or Marty) worked in Great Neck, where his own father had founded a small brokerage firm; his mother, Harriet, was a housewife. Marty, Harriet, I repeated to myself, knowing that I would need to memorize these names, for they belonged to people who were going to be my in-laws; and then there were Nadine and Sandra, the sisters; Nadine’s husband, Brian, a thug and (worse still) a “goy”; and their children, Abigail and Jonah, over whose religious upbringing Harriet was currently engaged in warfare with her in-laws. At present, Eli told me, she was incensed because “that woman,” after making promises to the contrary, had snuck Jonah off one Sunday morning and had him baptized. At Harriet’s insistence, however, the boy had also been circumcised. There had been a bris—another word the meaning of which I would have had to explain to Ricky, who for all his chopped liver really knew nothing about Jewish life.
After a while Eli and I stopped talking. Switching off the lamp, he lit some candles, then removed my glasses (thinking of Joey, I couldn’t help but flinch a little when he did it), and kissed me. His lips tasted like lip balm. In the absence of corrective lenses the candle flames seemed to multiply, until they were a choir of dancing genii from the Arabian nights, or the edging, at once hallucinatory and precise, of some Persian carpet. Yet this time the unexpected scream, that voice from nowhere that shouted “Give me the fucking money!”—I could not hear it.
We undressed each other—to my relief, I found, he wore underwear—then climbed up into his loft bed, which was unmade, draped randomly with blankets from his childhood, old quilts he’d picked up at rummage sales, a down comforter through the seams of which tiny feathers now and then wafted. Climbing on top of him, I dug my fingers (on one of which, I realized distantly, I still wore Ricky’s ring) into his chest. His penis was sleek, cigarillo-sized, with a scrotum that receded as tidily as a Murphy bed when he became aroused. At the tip the skin tautened where during his own bris an overeager rabbi, handling the knife for the first time, had cut too close. Mine, by comparison, was avid and clumsy: a slobbering dog.
For about an hour we had sex of a sort, albeit not very successfully; and yet this did not trouble me at the time, for my old fantasies of submission at the hands of a stem uncle were remote from Eli’s loft. Anyway, the thing I wanted here was not sex at all, so much as that intimate cuddling that precedes or follows sex, and of which I recalled hearing jealously that Lars had partaken with his graduate student. Nor was there any question (as there had been with Ricky) of where I would spend the night: it went without saying.
As we lay there together, Eli’s phone rang twice. First, through the answering machine, his mother spoke—something about a bar mitzvah gift she was going to buy on his behalf—then Liza, laughingly asking, “Where are you? Call me as soon as you can! I can’t wait to hear all about your hot date”: words which, because they were not meant for my ears, made me laugh, and sent a subversive thrill down my spine.
Then Eli blew out the candle he’d carried up to the loft with him, put his arms around me, and whispered, “Good night, Martin Bauman.” His body, as Liza had promised, curled around mine. He slept quietly, easily, his breath sweet in my ear, while I listened to the clattering of the old windows, the loud, almost gooselike shrieks of the street cleaners. And to my surprise—for I knew I was supposed to be happy—I found myself missing my own empty bed, as well as all those beds in which every night of my life I’d gone to sleep alone, and in the mornings woken up alone: a nostalgia that seemed to evaporate even as I breathed it in, like that early-winter snow that melts to raindrops the instant it touches the earth.
The next morning we got up early and strolled together to a coffee shop on Sheridan Square. It was unseasonably warm out; shirtless, dressed in running shorts and a black leather jacket that showed off to advantage the chest that was his best feature, Eli might have been a Village clone from the seventies, had the glasses he’d chosen, battered gold-rims with tape on the hinges, not paid such homage to his nineties fetish: John Addington Symonds, then, from the neck up, Tom of Finland from the neck down. He held my hand as we walked. Blushing, I kept looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was staring at us. No one was. In that part of New York two men holding hands was normal. Then at the coffee shop the sight of some uniformed policemen smoking and eating omelettes puzzled me—“I thought policemen weren’t supposed to go to restaurants on duty,” I said to Eli—until I saw that their badges read lapd, not nypd, and that both of them had tiny gold earrings in their right ears. Eli laughed, pressed his knee into my crotch. We ate eggs and toast without bacon—Eli was a vegetarian, while I feared offending the Jew in him with my gluttony for pork—and had the first of a thousand conversations about Liza. To my surprise, he spoke of his great friend both with malice and a formidable lack of discretion. For instance, when I asked him to describe the famous Jessica, whom I had never met, he told me that she was in her late thirties, an avid runner, and had been living for the last twenty years with Peggy, to whom she was, for all intents and purposes, married. “Which means Liza’s the other woman,” he concluded. “And she can’t stand it.”
“Of course not. She’s ashamed of it.”
And did Liza love Jessica? I asked next. Was she, in his view, really a lesbian?
“To answer that question, all you have to do is take a walk with her. A handsome man and a beautiful woman walk by. Quick: which one does Liza stare at?”
I inquired how he and Liza had met. He told me that in college, in a seminar on Colonial American Literature, they had become friends because they felt so isolated from the other students, all preppy types in monogrammed sweaters. At that time both of them had roommates they loathed, so the next semester they moved off campus together into a tiny apartment. There was only one bed. Though they never had sex, they “experimented” sometimes—not a problem for Eli, who according to the Kinsey scale was probably twenty percent heterosexual anyway. (“We were stoned at the time,” he added. “We were usually stoned at the time.”) During those years he also nursed Liza through any number of emotional crises, most of them revolving around her sexual indecision, as a consequence of which she was forever volleying between men and women. “She’s terribly selfish that way,” he explained. “When she has a problem, she expects everyone else to drop whatever they’re doing and run to help her. But when someone else has a problem, she just sort of yawns or turns on the television.”
Eli’s other grievance against Liza had to do with her “arrogance,” as a consequence of which she had no qualms about mentioning herself and Oscar Wilde in the same breath. This had became especially problematic during their senior year in college, when Eli was still struggling to get his stories into undergraduate literary magazines, and Liza had just sold her first novel. “Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t jealous,” he said. “I loved her novel. Only she had this way of forgetting that I was a writer too. For instance, whenever she introduced me to anyone—her new editor, say—it was always as ‘my friend Eli,’ never ‘my friend Eli, who also happens to be a talented young writer.’ Even today it rankles me. Like, just before Christmas, there was this big party for Sam Stallings—you know, that guy who wrote Rodeo Nights? Well, Liza’s mother (a nightmare, but that’s another story) invited her to come and told her to bring a writer friend with her. So what does she do? She runs over to my apartment and says, ‘Who should I invite? Who should I invite?’ as if it hadn’t even occurred to her who was sitting there next to her. Your name was on the short list, incidentally.”
“It was?” I said, pretending surprise, not wanting to admit that in the end it had been I whom Liza had chosen.
After we finished breakfast, we walked to A Different Light, the gay bookstore, where Eli showed me a story of his in an anthology edited by Henry Deane. The story was called “Ineptitude” and described a clumsy attempt on the part of two teenage boys—cousins—to fuck in a shed in the narrator’s backyard. Eager to read it, I both bought the anthology and made a show, in front of the salesclerk, of asking for Eli’s autograph, then walked him back to his apartment, where at the door, in full view of passersby, he kissed me on the mouth. Embarrassed—especially when an old woman strolled by with her dog—I pulled away. He stared at the ground.
“Well, it’s been wonderful meeting you, Martin,” he said, and in a gesture of mock machismo, punched my arm.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a prude, or that I’m ashamed,” I said falteringly. “It’s not that, it’s just—I’ve never been very comfortable with public displays of affection. PDAs, my friend Kendall calls them.” I laughed stupidly.
“Don’t worry.”
“I wouldn’t want you to think—”
“I don’t think anything. Good-bye.” He held out his hand.
“And what are your plans today?” I threw in, for now that he seemed annoyed with me, I could not bear the prospect of being parted from him.
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably I’ll write, call Liza back, go to the gym. Then tonight I teach.”
“Really? I didn’t know you taught. Where do you teach?”
He named a technical school in Brooklyn, on the urban campus of which, two nights a week, he instructed a group of black and Hispanic secretaries in basic composition. Of this class and its students I would hear much in the coming weeks; for the moment, however, it was merely a source of anguish, a prior obligation by means of which he could achieve the swift breach with me that I felt certain, as a consequence of my rude response to his kiss, he now wanted to make.
At last it became clear that he was not going to invite me back up, and we said good-bye. Returning to my apartment, I gazed at the pristine bed, which seemed to stare back at me rebukingly, like a mother whose very silence makes it far more obvious that she has been up all night worrying herself to death over her child’s waywardness than could any words. Next I checked my answering machine, on which, unlike Eli’s, I had not a single message. Then I switched on my computer, only to discover that I could hardly muster the concentration to finish a sentence, much less the chapter of The Terrorist on which I was at work. So I read Eli’s story, which I liked, even though the exalted language he used when describing sex left me rather cold. I watched television. I also watched the phone, which did not ring until about five that afternoon.
“Hey, big guy, what’s going on?” Ricky asked when I picked it up.
I stiffened. In the wake of my night with Eli, I had almost entirely forgotten about Ricky. Nonetheless a sense of duty to this man who had been so decent now compelled me to suggest that we meet at a coffee bar near my apartment. I had something I wanted to talk to him about, I said.
“Fine, right,” Ricky answered, “only wouldn’t it be easier for me to come by your place?”
“No, I’d rather we talk at the coffee bar,” I stammered. Then—fearful that I might be causing him pain (though of course this would be unavoidable once we sat down)—I added, for stupid comfort, “I’ve been cooped up all day. I’d like to stretch my legs.”
“Hey, no problem. So when do you want to meet?”
“Is half an hour okay?”
“Be there or be square,” Ricky said. “Only I may be late. I have to get across town.”
I said that was fine, that I would wait for him, and after brushing my teeth, left immediately for the coffee bar. He was already there when I walked in, an untouched slice of apple cake crumbling in front of him.
“I lied,” he said. “I wasn’t across town. I was across the street from your building.”
I sat down. During the walk from my apartment I’d been rehearsing what I was going to say, and now I launched into a monologue the very scale of which (not to mention its rhetorical excesses) Ricky must have found, to say the least, bewildering. I told him that the night before I had met the person with whom, I felt certain, I was destined to spend my life; that in light of this wholly unexpected (and unplanned) eventuality, we could obviously not go on “seeing” each other as we had (though of course I hoped we would remain friends, eat lunches and dinners together, etc.); that I would always recall fondly the time we had spent together; that he was a wonderful person and must not think any of this had anything to do with him per se, for it did not; that, finally, I hoped he would forgive me.
To all of this Ricky listened raptly, his eyes wide, his lips curved into a smile different from the one with which he had greeted me, more like the smile I myself had often affected when, as a child, my mother had shared with me some piece of bad news (the death of a relation, for example), and I had found myself barely able to contain my laughter.
At length I shut up. He was quiet.
“Well?” I asked—as if he owed me a response.
He put his hands together and rested his chin on them. “Actually, I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “from your tone of voice on the phone, I was expecting something like this.”
“Really?”
“So I guess last night you weren’t having dinner with an old friend after all, were you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so—not even last night.”
Then he sighed once—loudly—and with that disarming naturalness that had marked, when we were together, his experience of pleasure, began to weep, noisily, indiscreetly, tears reddening his eyes and making tracks on his cheeks, for he was as artless in sorrow as in joy. I gave him my napkin. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, noticing that the waitress and some of the other customers were staring at us, “I’m just—it’s just very emotional for me, that’s all. I mean, I’m happy for you. I really hope you’ve found what you’re looking for. And I’ll always treasure these months we’ve had together, I’ll always treasure these memories. I mean that.”
“Thank you. Do you want some water?”
He shook his head. He had stopped crying. “I’m ready to talk now,” he said, and then for about twenty minutes, as if I owed it to him to listen (which I suppose I did), he spoke of what he called his “happiest moments” with me—the greatest of these, according to him (and this surprised me) being our dinner at Windows on the World, the mere recollection of which, he said, would be enough, even forty years from now, to bring a smile to his face. Flustered by his outpourings of affection, I played, under the table, with the glass ring he had given me, and which the night before, with Eli, I had neglected to take off. Yet Ricky did not ask for it back, nor did I feel prepared to return it to him.
At last the bill arrived—Ricky would not be dissuaded from paying it—and we headed out together onto Greenwich Avenue. During our talk the sun had gone down. Standing between a pair of tailored yews, their needles bedecked with tiny lights that seemed to lend to our farewell a holiday atmosphere of nostalgia, regret, and glamour, we spoke of the weather, the imminence of winter, the inescapability of age. It was windy out. I pulled my collar tighter around my throat. “I hope you don’t mind if we don’t prolong this,” Ricky said, affecting an actorish voice I had never heard him use before.
“No, of course not,” I answered.
“Okay, good. Well, good-bye.”
Turning away from me, he left. For a few moments I watched him moving into the dark, a lonely figure, head bent and shoulders clenched against the wind. I saw him only once more, a few years later, when on an equally windy night we quite literally bumped into each other on East End Avenue. Still handsome if a bit heavier (but weren’t we all?) he told me that he had given up acting and was now a computer programmer; that he lived in a small apartment on 94th Street; that he had a boyfriend, Liam, who sang in the Met choir.
“And you?” he asked, as people always will on such occasions, before adding, a little sardonically, I thought, “Still living with that great love of your life?”
I said that I was. I did not tell him that I was also more unhappy than I’d ever thought it possible to be. Checking his watch, he made a show of being surprised by the hour, explained apologetically that he had not realized what time it was; he was late to meet Liam for a movie; he hoped we’d run into each other again. Then he waved and was gone. In such ways, even at great distances from the wounding moment, revenge can be exacted. Nor did I bother wondering, as I might have once, whether with this man with whom I shared nothing I might have made less of a botch of things than I had with Eli, with whom I shared everything. For Eli was waiting for me, and I had to go; in an Indian restaurant eighty blocks downtown from this comer onto which I had just emerged after having hurried sex with a man named Lewis, a man who had picked me up an hour earlier at a porno bookstore, Eli, who hated to be kept waiting, was waiting, no doubt drumming his fingers against the table. I hailed a taxi, and tried to think up a convincing lie.
That night, when I got back to my apartment, I found a message on my answering machine. “I’m just back from class,” Eli said, “and I’ve been thinking about you. All day, as a matter of fact. Call me. Bye.”
I sat down at my desk. The message, which might have surprised me a few hours earlier (when I assumed Eli must hate me), did not now; indeed, at that instant it seemed natural that he should feel fondness toward me, because Ricky did, and who was to say that affection, like a sort of pollen, can’t be carried on the breeze along sidewalks, even all the way to Elizabeth Street, where it might blow through Eli’s open window and onto his futon?
I phoned him back. “Are you coming over?” he asked, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. And I said that I was, that I would be there in twenty minutes. Before I left, though, I took the cassette out of the answering machine and stored it away in my desk drawer, as if it were a love letter I should someday nostalgically savor; and then, into the same desk drawer, because I didn’t want to wear it anymore, but like my mother’s deviled-egg plate I also couldn’t bring myself to part with it, I put Ricky’s ring.