10. SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS

NOT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, the three of us were friends again (youth is like that), eating dinner together at the Japanese restaurant on Greenwich Avenue of which Liza had spoken over the phone. This time there was no question as to where Eli would spend the night, Liza having realized, to her sorrow and annoyance, that I had no intention of ceding him willingly to her; nor could much advantage be gained from starting a war with me that she would very likely lose. Much wiser, she must have reasoned, to lie low, at least for the time being. After all it was hardly in her interest to lose both of us. Though she loved Eli, it must not be forgotten that she also liked me. Nor was she above professional considerations, and what was the point of risking a friendship that in the future might be helpful to her in her career?

Nevertheless, after we’d finished our sushi and were standing on the comer of Greenwich and Seventh avenues, preparing to say our goodbyes, almost in spite of herself Liza let a look of indignity cloud her eyes, as if my impudence in staking such a claim on attentions to which heretofore she had held an exclusive deed was simply intolerable. Just as quickly the look dissipated—Liza was more self-controlled than she let on—and, bidding us farewell, she headed bravely back toward that tiny apartment (the very nexus of her abandonment) in which she would sleep, no doubt, with the telephone cradled in her arms.

As for Eli, as soon as she was gone he slipped his hand through my arm and squeezed it. His rage of the night before had passed entirely, leaving in its wake a greater tenderness, as if the storm clouds of our fight had irrigated the landscape they had also battered, making it more verdant if less tidy. Now I suspect that he was actually rather grateful to me for standing up to Liza. After all, to be the object of a rivalry cannot—especially for one who craves attention as much as Eli did—be entirely displeasing. Nor can I help but wonder to what degree he himself might have fostered those feelings of antagonism that ended up so thoroughly corroding my friendship with Liza—feelings by which he claimed to be repulsed, but which, when you thought about it, belonged more to his combative nature than to either of ours. For Eli, though he advertised himself as a paragon of gentleness, a sort of emotional Pillsbury Doughboy, could also be a dragon. When driving, for example, he had no qualms—if, say, another driver pulled out ahead of him in traffic—about opening his window and letting fly a torrent of abuse so scathing that nine times out of ten the offending idiot would race away in terror, fearful lest Eli should in his “road rage” pull out a shotgun and blow his head off. His sisters were the same way. Their amazing streams of invective—“part and parcel of growing up on Long Island,” Eli said—bore little semblance to human speech. Instead they were inarticulate spewings of fury, punctuated by incessant, even Tourretic repetitions of the word “fuck.”

More than once I saw him reduce unlikely enemies, who had made the mistake of picking fights with him, to tears or silence, for if my way of coping with childhood cruelties was to flee, his response to a history of similar persecutions was to retaliate, as it were, retroactively, by enacting upon unwitting strangers the vengeance he wished he could have taken on the bullies of his adolescence. There was a story Eli liked to tell about a girl in his neighborhood who had teased him at the bus stop, making fun of his hair, his clothes, even his name; one afternoon, taking as a cue a phrase he’d heard an older cousin use, he had preempted her harassment by shouting, “Shut up, you flat-chested, dog-faced bitch”—an epithet in response to which the girl, utterly stunned, had burst into a fit of weeping and run off.

Such a rejoinder, alas, was typical of Eli, whose reprisals were often out of proportion to the injury that had provoked them. Indeed, even the very generosity and sweetness that marked his general behavior could become an occasion for rancor, as on the evening when, in the midst of giving Liza a back rub, he had suddenly removed his oiled hands, stood up, and started complaining about the fact that in six years she’d never once given him a back rub, that all she did was take, that all anyone did was take, and that he was sick of being a servant to other people’s pleasures—a diatribe to which Liza, still semiconscious in the wake of one of his superb and anesthetizing massages, hardly knew how to respond. For it was never his way to protest each grievance as it occurred, and thereby dilute his anger in the ordinary tides of human intercourse; instead he would compile, over the years, a list of these grievances, never mentioning them, yet mulling them over in secret, masking them with an almost wincingly immoderate courtesy, until the moment came when he would unleash upon his tormentor a deluge of righteous indignation so immense and so indisputable that in its drenching aftermath the victim would be unable even to muster words. Dumbfounded, he or she would limp away, and never attempt communication with Eli again. And because he was too proud ever to make a first step toward reconciliation, he would never attempt communication, either. Thus within only a few years of our meeting, he had severed all relations with his father, he had severed all relations with Liza, and eventually, he would sever all relations with me.

The truth was, in those earliest months of our acquaintance Eli and I were like one of those antique couples forced by their families into arranged marriages, and therefore compelled to learn about each other only within the claustrophobic parameters of conjugal intimacy, from which there is little opportunity of escape—the only difference in our case being that we ourselves had done the arranging, instinctively, as soon as we had recognized in each other a shared longing for the domestic stability of which the television shows of our childhood had been a parody, instilling in us a paradoxical blend of appetite and distrust. This dream of cozy coupledom besotted me to such a degree that soon I began to view every sign Eli gave of his individuality, his peculiarity, in essence, his humanity, as an intrusion upon the stage set I had constructed around him, and to which he himself, though essential as a prop, was irrelevant as a person. For I was as consumed by the wish to live out my fantasy as those ersatz officers we’d seen at the coffee shop on Sheridan Square had been driven by the need to act out theirs. Thus (to return to the evening after our fight), upon getting back from dinner with Liza, and seeing that it was almost eleven, I had insisted that we immediately climb together into Eli’s loft bed, snuggle up among the blankets, and watch the double bill of I Love Lucy reruns that always came on at that hour: a ritual I had, for some reason, often dreamed of sharing with a lover, and in which Eli, so far, had been happy to indulge me. And yet tonight he kept interrupting the sublime sensations of warmth and security that this program—the very nexus of childhood comfort—called up in me, with unwelcome brushings and rubbings, or worse, pullings and grabbings, most often of my hand, which he was always putting on his penis, as if he wanted me to avert my attention from Lucy and do something to it. Finally, irritated by his refusal to take a hint (after all, I was not without my own streak of belligerence) I turned to him and said, “Will you quit it? I’m trying to watch.”

“Sorry,” Eli said hotly. And letting go of my hand, he climbed down from the loft, switched on his computer.

“What are you doing?”

“Working.”

“But what about I Love Lucy?”

“I don’t even like Lucy,” clever Eli answered. “You’re the one who’s crazy about Lucy. You watch.”

“But you have to watch! It’s not the same alone.”

“For Christ’s sake, Martin, will you give me a break? I don’t interrupt you when you’re doing your work. Is mine less valid?”

“You’ve spoiled everything.”

“I’ve spoiled everything!”

Such rapprochements, alas, were typical of our intercourse. Eli’s attempts to excite me I rebuffed because they embarrassed me and seemed ill-timed, yet what must have hurt him even more than my mania for ritual was the obliviousness, even the callousness, with which I greeted what were to him gestures of the gravest sincerity. Indeed, so consumed was I by my own perspective that even my worry lest Eli should leave me amounted merely to the projection of selfinvolvement onto a larger canvas, neatly sidestepping as it did the more delicate question of what he himself might be needing (and not getting).

My erotic history, as it happened, had in no way prepared me for someone like him, just as his had in no way prepared him for someone like me. His (compared to mine) was both intricate and thorny, and included among its major players Ethan, Gerald Wexler’s twin brother, a yoga teacher who ate raw onions for a snack, a girl named Zoë whom he had dated in high school, and a British medical student (also a girl) with whom Liza had also had a long affair. Men and women both, in roughly equal numbers, for on a purely physical level Eli claimed actually to prefer sex with women—an avowal that puzzled me less because it seemed incompatible with his calling himself “gay” than because for me the very idea of sex on a “purely physical level” seemed so incomprehensible. It was in this regard, as he later reminded me rather cruelly, that I differed from everyone else with whom he had ever been involved.

Curiously enough, however, the natural hostility that sex tended to stir up in both of us did not stop us, at least at first, from having it all the time: much more, probably, than we would have if we’d been less ill-matched. The reasons for this were twofold. First, we felt it incumbent upon ourselves to endow the “great love” we were always parading in front of other people with the weight, the experiential ballast, of which sexual passion is supposed to be the measure. Second, from ideological motives, we were determined to prove—if not to these others than at least to ourselves—that contrary to popular opinion gay men could enjoy guilt-free sex in the context of a “healthy” relationship, as opposed to only cheap and impersonal sex in a bathhouse or in one of the dreaded “back rooms,” which I envisioned always as entryways to hell. Such practices as these appalled us. With a sort of automatic contempt we mocked (and rigorously defied) that shopworn convention according to which homosexual men must be either “tops” or “bottoms,” just as we looked down our noses at the “clones” in their lumberjack shirts and mustaches whom we sometimes passed on the street in Eli’s neighborhood, and who were to us less human beings than emblems of a degraded era, one that it was the duty of our own generation to surpass.

Young people, in their arrogance, are thus able to diminish the experience of their elders without even attempting to grasp its complexity. Yet what made this snobbery even more pernicious was the fact that despite my many avowals to the contrary, I was secretly attracted to this antiquated social order of tops and bottoms, just as I often found myself secretly drawn to the clones Eli and I would run into when, say, we had gotten up early in the morning and were taking a walk along the river, and they were stumbling home from the piers whereon they had just enjoyed a night of licentious abandon that had left their hair mussed, their skin pallid, their clothes smelling of amyl nitrate and cigarettes. After the clones I stared with an envy that I draped in the vestments of disgust, a sleight of hand that Eli must have seen right through, just as he must have seen through the excuses I made whenever he asked me to fuck him. For he knew as well as I did that despite the tedious lectures I was always giving on “internalized homophobia”—as a consequence of which, I argued, homosexuals felt obliged to take on the roles of “male” and “female,” rather than formulate their own democracy—I myself was (as Roy Beckett would later put it) a natural-born piece of ass. Or perhaps I should say a “natural-born piece of ass” of the mind, attracted more to the idea of being fucked than the reality, which frightened me.

What was this thing about fucking? I often wondered. Was it because of its procreative function that for homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, penetration was so often viewed as the ne plus ultra of intimacy, in comparison with which what might be called the ancillary sex acts—masturbation, frottage, sucking and licking—were merely nostalgic adolescent diversions? Certainly this was Eli’s view. If he took pleasure in those varieties of sex that come under the heading of “foreplay,” it was in the same way that I took pleasure in I Love Lucy reruns. Fucking, on the other hand, was to him an adult taste, like the taste for raw oysters and strong cheeses—it was, as the Italians say, “important”—which was probably why I shied from it, confirming Eli’s suspicion that I lived in a state of arrested development, a chronic adolescent whose weirdly goofy demeanor would seem less and less becoming the older I grew.

I must also add here (though with no great pride) that throughout this period of frequent, ill-timed, and unsatisfying sex—and despite the mounting evidence that anal intercourse provided the most efficient avenue for HIV infection—Eli and I never once used condoms. I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps we were simply unwilling, in the face of grim statistics, to suspend, as it were, our belief, and accept the disease as an actuality in response to which we would have to disown many of our most basic tenets. Or perhaps, given our youth, we could not yet fathom the possibility (the truth) that an illness so far associated almost exclusively with “them,” the older generation, might also be a threat to us. Or perhaps we had simply not yet grasped the full horror of mortality, of which neither of us had had much experience. Indeed, I remember—and today the memory makes my blood run cold—lying in Eli’s loft bed one rainy afternoon, reading a newspaper article that speculated on “routes of AIDS transmission,” and thinking, well, if we both get it, if he gives it to me, or I give it to him, it won’t be so bad: we can just lie here in the loft together like sick children, watching cartoons. The appalling facts were still so remote from me that I could actually romanticize them that way. Nor did the arguments on which the gay left was then wasting its breath—arguments that in essence attempted to justify sexual consumerism by recasting AIDS in the terminology of a class struggle, in which “they” were using the disease to try to suppress “our” hard-won freedom—do anything to dispel this voluntary blindness, which only an instinctive skepticism could have cured. For instance, I remember once receiving a phone call from Liza, who was in a panic because she had just read an article advising all lesbians to use “dental dams” when engaging in cunnilingus. “But Jessica and I never used dental dams!” she told me. “Do you think I should have? I’m so worried! Because once—I’m embarrassed to say it—she was menstruating, only we didn’t realize it until after I’d started to...”

To allay her anxieties, I reminded her that at the moment there were only five (but previously there had been one) documented cases of female-to-female AIDS transmission—which did not stop her, for months, from feeling her glands ritualistically, neurotically, and at the most unlikely moments: in restaurants, say, or at literary parties, where in the midst of a conversation with Billie Eberhart and Sam Stallings about Penguin’s purchase of Dutton, her fingers, as if of their own volition, would suddenly fly to her neck. Eli was the same. We all were. “Swollen glands” became for us a sort of shorthand for AIDS, about which, in truth, we knew next to nothing, except that swollen glands were supposed to augur its onset. For about two years we palpated our glands obsessively, worrying over every unusual bulge or distention we might encounter, the subsequent abatement of which would seem to us cause for celebration, because it meant that we were not, after all, dying.

It was around this time as well—though curiously this development did nothing either to dispel or accentuate my AIDS anxieties—that I came down with a case of venereal warts: clusters of them, like tiny heads of that wonderful Roman broccoli, sprouting inside and around the opening of the anus, as well as in that nether region just south of the anus that Kendall Philips (always a wit) referred to as the “taint”—“because it ain’t this and it ain’t that,” he said. At another moment in my life such an event (probably a legacy of my affair with Ricky) would have anguished and humiliated me. Now, however, I was able to view it less as a grim portent for the future than as the residue—mercifully insignificant when compared to other possibilities—of a period in my life that had come to a decisive end.

Accordingly, and with Eli’s forbearance, I made an appointment to see a dermatologist in whom I felt fairly certain I could confide my embarrassing condition, because he advertised in the New York Native, a gay paper. This dermatologist, Dr. Spengler, was not, as it turned out, gay himself. On the contrary, he was married with three children, a handsome Jew from New Jersey a decade older than I, and possessed of that amazingly supple, flat, characterless skin—unblemished by so much as a freckle—that seems to be the hallmark of his profession. I don’t think he had any particular opinion, positive or negative, on the question of homosexuality; what had motivated him, rather, to advertise in the New York Native was simply that mercantile instinct by means of which his grandfather (like Eli’s) had managed to rise from the poverty of Hester Street to the affluence of Saddle River. (By a similar stroke of intuition, numerous West Village Indian and Pakistani newsstand owners were at that time starting not only to sell, but to specialize in the sale of, gay pornographic videos, with which they soon filled their windows, and in the selection of which a complete lack of personal interest did not forestall them from offering unsolicited and cheerful advice: “Oh yes, sir, I’d recommend The Bigger the Better, very popular this week, I’ve sold twenty copies!”)

As I recall, the treatment of the warts required six or seven successive visits to Dr. Spengler, visits during which, while I lay on his examining table in my jacket, sweater, shirt, and T-shirt (elegant clothes seemed necessary as a way of asserting my personal dignity), my lower half denuded, my legs in the air, holding my balls in my right hand so that they might not interfere with his rumble laborings, he would discourse enthusiastically about the bluegrass camp in the Adirondacks at which he sojourned annually, and where he would play the banjo “morning, noon, and night,” while at the same time probing what Eli would have called “the most intimate part of me” with an alarming instrument at which I preferred not to look. The treatment involved liquid nitrogen and when it was over, when at last I was liberated of the tiny heads of broccoli, he sent me off with a smile and a pat on the back, as if I were a pupil who had just passed a final exam and to whom his professor feels obliged to offer words of advice: “Remember, they can recur, but if they do, don’t worry. That’s what a dermatologist is for.”

As for Liza, her fear of AIDS was taking a different form, becoming entangled with that old uncertainty about her lesbianism to which, in the wake of Jessica’s flight, she had instantly rebounded, just as she had rebounded to her old dependency on Eli. Such a reversal disheartened him, for he had supposed himself, through Jessica, to have won a decisive victory in the battle he was forever waging against her mother. Now, however, she was reverting to old habits. Once more, she wore two earrings. She even spoke about rewriting her novel yet again, reinstating the third person.

Worse, to her many arguments against lesbianism she now added the risk of AIDS—perversely, we thought, given that (as I constantly reminded her) the risk was extremely low for lesbians. At this point she would always revert to dental dams. Dental dams—and her failure to employ them—became her bailiwick. At a drugstore she bought some, and the three of us tried to figure out how they worked—a comical effort, for she could not get one over her tongue without gagging. Yet when I reminded her that by having unprotected sex with men she was taking a far greater risk than she ever could have with Jessica, she brushed me off, now that she was looking for reasons to be straight rather than vice versa.

From Janet Klass, meanwhile, we learned that Philip Crenshaw—dark-eyed, spidery Philip Crenshaw, whose tales of the Mineshaft had been the peephole (or should I say the glory hole?) through which I had caught my first horrified glimpse of gay New York—had AIDS, and was dying, the first person I actually knew to be taken ill. This news sent a shudder of terror not only through me, but through Liza and Eli. Suddenly our hysterical worry over swollen glands revealed itself for the gratuitous pantomime that it was. Then dread, which is stultifying, stopped us cold. Liza even forgot about dental dams—but only briefly. For just as the trespass of an alien presence into the bloodstream is enough to trigger the immune system (at least when one does not have AIDS), so after the initial period of numbness that comes in the wake of terrible news, the mechanism by which we are able to rationalize, to distort, to edit painful truths and make them bearable, switches on. We reminded ourselves that Philip had been—how else to put it?—a whore. He had not lived, as Eli and I did, in monogamous “bliss.” Instead he was—and for using this word, several years later, I would be chided by my fellows in ACT UP, who considered it overly judgmental—promiscuous; from the clones, only a distance in years, not attitudes, separated him. Yet even as we tried, by such justifications, to sequester not only Philip’s illness, but his death (which came a few months later), the news had shaken us to the marrow. We wanted to make sense of it. We tried to make sense of it. The trouble was, it made no sense at all.

The clones—those men whose postures and costumes I disdained without ever bothering to interrogate them—became our scapegoat, the convenient target at which we could volley all the unintelligible terror that AIDS started up in us. It shames me, today, to recall how casually I badmouthed them. Even my tendency to refer to them as “clones” (as if they were less than human) was, I see now, part of a failed effort to smother the desire they sparked in me. For in those days the Village was still full of them, AIDS having only just begun its bloody pogrom. If I’d ever bothered to get to know any of the clones, then perhaps my manufactured disillusion would have given way to a more real (and thus humane) disillusion; I would have discovered that in sharp contrast to the image I sustained of them (and that they themselves promulgated) as sexual rebels, radicals, outlaws, they were by and large rather middle-class white individuals, accountants and shopkeepers, who would have had more in common with Eli’s parents than with Eli. What they constituted was a gay bourgeoisie, the members of which, in addition to being aficionados of ball stretchers, handkerchief codes, and the like, were also expert cooks, serious collectors of antiques, authorities on home decoration, as well as—though this was less known—baseball fans, devotees of fly-fishing, and observers of the stock market. In short, they differed from their suburban cousins only in the outer emblems that marked their trust in conventions: instead of station wagons, motorcycles; instead of tea parties, tearooms; instead of the synagogue, the country club, and the “no-tel motel,” the cowboy bar, the back room, and the bathhouse.

It was around this time as well that Stanley Flint came gamboling back into my life. Previously, when I’d lived across the street from him, I’d hardly ever seen him except in the Hudson-Terrier offices. Now, however, we seemed to run into each other all the time: at parties, on the subway, once, even, in Dr. Spengler’s waiting room. (Flint, it turned out, was seeing him for the treatment of a skin cancer.) “Young man, you never applied to my class!” he scolded when I walked in. “I’m offended!” Then he broke into a smile I found far more off-putting than any expression of offense. “Sit down, sit down.” He patted the vinyl sofa. “How much more pleasant to have a chat with you than gaze wearily at a year-old issue of People!”

As at his office so many months ago, I sat. “You’re right, I didn’t apply,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. I suppose I was just so tired of being a writing student.”

“But you’ll always be a writing student! Indeed, the minute you stop thinking of yourself as a writing student, you might as well stop thinking of yourself as a writer. And accolades provide no immunization against failure.” He placed a fatherly hand on my knee. “Take my word for it, Bauman, every time you pick up a pen, you court disaster. Even the great Leonard Trask can fuck up. The pages he sent me last week—vile! I told him so. Let’s hope he listens to reason and doesn’t let his reputation go to his head.”

“And how’s your novel proceeding?” I asked, to yank the conversation away from teaching.

He shrugged. “Not as well as before I sold it. Selling it—that was the mistake. Because now there’s a deadline, and little threatening notes, and phone calls I have to return. In effect, I’ve been seduced into the position of a dependent, which is something that a writer must never become. What we really need”—he leaned closer—“is the establishment of a system whereby writers are paid an annual salary and given the freedom to do whatever they want. Imagine that, a paycheck every two weeks, health benefits, the whole package—just what they get to publish, only we’d get it to write! But of course (and I speak from experience) it would be impossible. How would you implement it? Also, they like having us in their clutches. They want us hungry, sniffing at the haunches of the marketplace, because that way they can turn a quicker profit.”

I thought of mentioning the fact that in his dual role as editor and writer, Flint stood on both sides of this divide, then decided against it. “Ah, it was better back in the age of disinterested patronage!” he went on. “Unfortunately, we’re living in an age of institutional patronage, and the problem with institutions is that in the end they’re always going to try to get you to do what’s best for them.”

“Yes, but if you have to work at a job all day to make money,” I averred, “how are you ever going to find the time to write?”

“Ah, now that is the sticking point, isn’t it? Literature—I’m sorry to say it—belongs to a far less democratic age than ours, when there were servants and the lower orders and only people of means even had time to think about writing. Today, it’s true, some of us can make a living at it. But look what you give up in exchange! You become a slave to a publishing house or a university, and once they know you’ve got mortgage payments to make, Bauman, you might as well hand over your balls on a plate right then and there.” He put an arm around my shoulder. “If you want to know what I think, the only people who really ought to be writing these days are these rich Park Avenue ladies with stockbroker husbands, not because they’re necessarily any more talented than the rest of us, but because they’re the only ones who can afford to take the time. For we’re long past the years when Leonard Woolf did the typesetting at the Hogarth Press. There are no more Hudsons at Hudson. Instead, I fear, we’ve entered into the corporate dark ages, with the conglomerate taking the role of the church. And frankly, I fear that literature might just not survive.”

“But it always has! Even during the Dark Ages!”

“Ah, so you think that art is immortal! It isn’t. Books, pianos, paintings—all can be burned. The spirit can be starved, yes, all the way to death. Nothing endures without some degree of sustenance. And what’s worse, once the state’s wiped out art, there are plenty around who will be perfectly willing to collaborate in the dissemination of that sort of substitute, fake art that to be perfectly frank most people prefer to the real thing ... I know, I know, you think I sound like an old man. And yet with the fatal sun, and poison in the air, and skin cancer”—he pointed to the small bandage on his cheek—“how can I keep saying that what one writes matters? That’s my dilemma. Even if they earn money, books won’t save my daughter from radiation.”

At this point the receptionist called his name. Flint stood. “Well, must run,” he said, smiling as casually as if we had just concluded a thirty-second discussion of the weather. “Be well, Bauman.”

“You too,” I echoed, my voice trailing off (I still didn’t know what to call him) as, picking up his cane, he made his way toward Dr. Spengler’s door.

This encounter, not surprisingly, had a profounder effect on me than Flint probably intended it to. Indeed, riding the subway back to Eli’s that morning, I couldn’t help but replay his pronouncements in my head. The death of literature, he’d said ... such a far cry, this doomsday paean, from my own modest experience of publishing, which so far had been both gentle and pleasant. For instance, I had in my shoulder bag (I had just that morning received them in the mail) the bound galleys of The Deviled-Egg Plate. Thumbing through the pages in the subway, I was stunned by how much more authority my words radiated, now that they were printed in beautiful Bodoni Book (a helpful note at the end of the galleys gave the typeface’s history) instead of the familiar Helvetica of my computer. Or was my enjoyment of this private pleasure, as Flint had suggested, merely evidence of the degree to which I had effectively renounced my integrity? I couldn’t be sure. Nor could I be sure whether to take at face value his outlandish assertion that only those who had independent means should become writers. After all, Eli had means, and rather than reveling in the freedom that his parents’ money had bought him, he lived in a chronic squall of anxiety, irritation, and impatience. To Eli exterior validation—not cash—was the longed-for thing, which meant that when, in my thoughtless excitement, I interrupted his writing to show him my bound galleys that afternoon, his insistent enthusiasm could not disguise the crisis of doubt into which I had just thrust him: no matter how loudly he kvelled, there was heartbreak and hopelessness in his voice.

Much better, I decided after that, to confine my excitement to my own apartment, to make from there the long phone calls to Liza during which she filled me in on all the latest publishing gossip, to field from there the many party invitations I was receiving. For somehow my name was now on what Manhattanites call the A-list, and I was getting invitations all the time. Usually my date was Liza, who was looking for a boyfriend, and hoped to find one at one of these parties. She didn’t, of course; under such circumstances you never do. Instead it is usually only when you have just happily settled into matrimony that someone alarmingly attractive suddenly takes an interest in you—as happened in my case when at one party Roy Beckett, who had previously refused to give me so much as the time of day, suddenly started flirting with me. Liza, on the other hand, could not seem to attract a man to save her life—a failure that, because she had always enjoyed such a superabundance of suitors, both depressed and appalled her. “You’ll never go wanting,” Eli had told her once, which was true. The dry spell through which I was escorting her was exceptional, and would last only until spring—none of which stopped her (self-confidence being that fragile) from dissolving into a heap of self-loathing and bewilderment at the end of each party, broken pieces out of which, in Eli’s absence (for the same reasons that he hated bookstores, he refused ever to go to publishing parties) I would attempt to reconstruct the old Liza, usually by suggesting that if she wasn’t succeeding with men, it might be because, in her heart of hearts, she didn’t want to. Liza, however, disagreed. She was no longer interested in being a lesbian, she said. She was over lesbianism.

Sometimes, in her company, I wondered what it was, this category, this idea of the lesbian, that Liza alternately fled and embraced with such avidity. In college the answer, like most answers, had seemed clearer: lesbians, I’d thought then, were either girls like Tammy Lake who lusted viscerally after other girls, or girls like Erica for whom lesbianism was mostly an offshoot of feminism, or fashionable girls like Schuyler who disdained heterosexuality as being simply too boring and conventional for them to bother with. Liza, on the other hand, had only the vaguest conception of feminism, while her attraction to men—though by no means commensurate with what she felt for girls—was nonetheless potent enough to keep the ball of her destiny suspended, as it were, in midair. Even the word “lesbian”—the utterance of which, at certain moments, sent a frisson of excitement down her spine—could at times make her bristle. And why this word? I would ask myself, so quaintly antiquated, with its musty smell of Victorian England, of Sappho, of Amazonian brutalities as imagined in the fusty depths of a Maida Vale bed-sit? Why not instead tribade, popular in continental Europe during the nineteenth century and derived from tribology, “the science of the mechanisms of friction, lubrication, and wear of interacting surfaces that are in relative motion”? Thus in Proust, Dr. Cottard warns the narrator not to tolerate Albertine’s habit of dancing with her friend Andrée, because, as he observes with medical authority, “It’s not sufficiently known that women derive most excitement through their breasts. And theirs, as you see, are touching completely.” Certainly Liza spoke on occasion about the beauty of women’s breasts, especially Jessica’s. Yet she had also said to me once, at the height of her affair with Jessica, “I must say, I do miss the thrust,” in that glib tone of someone who is perfectly content to have made a superfluous sacrifice.

Perhaps it really was simpler for men, I sometimes reflected; a matter, as Liza had once joked, of which pictures one liked to jerk off to—except that neither Eli nor Ricky liked to jerk off to pictures at all, while Eli claimed to enjoy sex with women more. (This didn’t stop him from declaring himself, with genuine militancy, to be “gay,” and later “queer.”) No, in the end all I could conclude was that the fault lay with categorization itself, that crude and elementary tool the inadequacy of which becomes more evident the deeper one probes. For homosexuality is a discipline the advanced study of which necessitates, as it were, its own transcendence, which is why all its serious students finally dispense with terminology altogether, and focus their attentions solely on the particulars of human lives.

But to return to Liza: just as, in Eli's view, my own reluctance to engage in penetrative sex signaled a larger reluctance—a refusal to go gently into adulthood—so Liza, whose retreat from lesbianism, in the wake of Jessica’s departure, had been both panicked and swift, clearly placed this grown-up pleasure at a great remove from that cult of childhood she had taken such pains, both in her writing and her life, to foster. Only Jessica, it seemed, had ever been able to lure her away from Jeopardy! Eli, for all his disparagement, was a willing member of her cult, as was I. Those afternoons at Liza’s studio were for me a logical extension of the summer Sundays I had spent with Jim Sterling in his parents’ apartment. Nor did our habit of reverencing the gratifications of our youth prove an exception to the rule that all private indulgences have their equivalent in public life. For instance, at the literary parties to which Liza and I went together, we were able to discern that our habit of standing awkwardly by the hors d’oeuvres table, instead of drawing bemused and piteous glances as it once had, was now winning us admirers. Seasoned veterans like Billie and Henry Deane seemed to view our lack of refinement as a refreshing indication of vigor. Behaving almost like a couple, like a pair of adorable and clever child geniuses, we charmed them all, Liza with her wit, I with my fecklessness: even when we showed up in jeans and T-shirts at parties where everyone else was in black tie, no one seemed to mind, just as the cousin of Jacqueline Onassis next to whom I found myself seated, one evening, at a benefit dinner at the New York Public Library, did not seem to mind when—bereft of any education in table manners—I drank out of her water glass.

No doubt her tolerance, which hinted at larger movements in the fashion world, was part of the glorification of youthful achievement taking hold at the time, chiefly as a result of the fact that so many young people—to quote Kendall, who, we must remember, worked for House and Garden—were earning “scads of yummy Wall Street money to spend on upholstery fabrics.” My own gains, by comparison, were, like Liza’s, chiefly in prestige. All at once, for instance, we were being sought after as book reviewers, in which capacity we were asked to review not only first novels by our peers, but “big books” by writers whose very presence at a party, only a year earlier, would have been enough to start my heart racing. Even film people started taking an interest in us: that year Liza sold the rights to Midnight Snacks, while I found myself fielding, through Billie, a score of inquiries from producers, most of whom, she assured me, had not even read my stories (which had in any case not yet been published), only the early reviews that had appeared in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. That some of these producers had managed as well to get hold of the just-completed (and not yet edited) manuscript of The Terrorist at first stunned me, until Billie explained that it was a common practice for editorial assistants—in exchange for much-needed cash—to supply Hollywood agents with photocopies of unfinished novels on the sly. No doubt while I’d been working at Hudson, Carey had been doing it; Sara had been doing it; they had all been doing it.

At the time, it rather went to my head. No city in the world is more provincial than New York, nor is any realm of the arts more provincial than that of literature, nor is any community more provincial than the one composed of writers who hobnob with editors, and are to some degree homosexual. And yet these were the only milieus in which anyone knew who I was. To the establishment, literary people and homosexuals are equally suspect if not interchangeable populations, to be regarded with ambivalence at best, contempt at worst. Yet from the parties to which we went the establishment could not have seemed more distant, just as to Kendall the housewife in Smyrna, Georgia, who buys a copy of House and Garden at the grocery store because she’s thinking of redoing her dining room, and upon whose dissatisfaction with her chairs a magazine like House and Garden depends in order to keep up its circulation—to Kendall she did not exist. Instead what existed, all that existed, was New York: decorators and fabric houses and the competition, above all, the competition, Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, Elle Decor. For New York has always been the “secondary city” of which George Steiner writes, in which puff pieces, analyses, interviews proliferate, nearly suffocating those primary works from which they leech sustenance. And not only secondary but tertiary: there were magazines (I read all of them) that existed solely to review books that existed themselves solely to critique other books; there was even a journal devoted exclusively to the review of reviews, so New York was in its way also a quaternary city. Nor were those of us who aspired to the writing of fiction unimplicated in this frenzy, for we all wrote reviews in addition to reading them (which would be a little like, in the music world, Martha Argerich reviewing a recital by Alfred Brendel), and were forever reporting to each other the “buzz,” or, as they called it in Hollywood, the “coverage” on new novels (especially those by our contemporaries), gossip picked up from the Amys about authors we’d never met and books we’d never read, though we'received free copies of them. In high school and college I’d dreamed of a day when I could afford to buy any hardback book I chose; now I got sent hardbacks by the dozen, and didn’t pay a dime. And though I professed—we all did—to write only for the sake of art, the truth is that like Billie at Sam Stallings’s party, I had my ear cocked to the Zeitgeist, inventing even as I sat at my computer the interviews and the reviews and the Publishers Weekly articles that I hoped my book of stories would occasion, as if these counterfeit documents might serve as a guide by which my imagination could find its way.

None of this was particularly fun: obsessions rarely are. Instead, standing together at those parties, Liza and Amy and I would profess how much we “absolutely hated” this sort of thing—a declaration to which any stranger would have sensibly responded, “Well, why did you come?” And our answer to this question, if only we’d had the wherewithal to formulate it, would have been that this squabbly, small-town society which for all its aspirations to worldliness finally resembled, more than anything else, one of those cottagy Devon villages of which E. F. Benson wrote, had taken us in. It had become home for us, a place we felt we belonged.

I remember standing alone at one of those parties—or perhaps I was not alone, perhaps I was flirting with Roy (and wondering if I’d made a mistake to fall in love with Eli), or listening to Kendall hold forth on the vulgarity of the host’s curtain pelmets, or chatting about his impending move to Madrid with Henry Deane, with whom I had become friendly ... in any case, I was standing at one of these parties when I noticed Liza, only a few feet away, huddled in anxious conference with a new friend of hers, the tulip-shaped, peroxide-blond Violet Partridge, several of whose stories Edith Atkinson had bought for the magazine. And though I could pick up only fragments of their dialogue—“hundred-thousand-dollar advance,” I heard, and “front-page review,” and “Shirley MacLaine wants to play the mother”—their very posture (hunched and scoliotic), Liza’s ear tugging, the anguished way she was pulling a tissue through her fist, like a rabbit out of a hat, were enough to tell me that the conversation had nothing to do with pleasure, and everything to do with that need to stay informed that compelled us both, every week, to hurry out and buy the New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Review of Books (not to mention the magazine) the minute these publications hit the stands, not so much to read them as to winnow from them (an operation we could perform in record time) those bits of innuendo by means of which we were able to sustain the illusion of being up to date. For hindsight was to us less frightening than foresight, and therefore we both breathed more easily when, as Liza put it, we felt that we were “on top of things”—a revealing phrase, suggestive of waves, the scrambling of the drowned, the terror of going under.

It may have been at this party too (tellingly, I cannot remember in whose honor it was being thrown) that, while talking with Liza, Billie, and my new editor, three women who seemed to gather around me a veritable cloak of maternal protection, I noticed Marge Preston, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, ascending the stairs with Baylor. According to Liza, Marge was in serious trouble at the moment, her efforts to revive Hudson’s fading glory (of which Stanley Flint’s hiring had been the most vivid example) having so far come to naught, at least from a financial perspective. Indeed, according to the sibilations of the buzz, the powers that be at Terrier and its amorphous parent company were now pressuring Marge to fire Flint or risk being fired herself; for though he had brought the company a certain prestige, he had also failed to generate the bestsellers she had promised.

That she had arrived at the party with Baylor surprised us, since of course Baylor herself—on whom Marge had banked, quite literally, to justify Flint’s hiring—was the major source of this disappointment, her own novel, despite favorable reviews, having sold only a few thousand of the fifty thousand copies printed. To make matters worse, Baylor’s agent had been shrewd enough to secure for her, well before the novel had come out, an advance of five hundred thousand dollars for her second book, which put her in the peculiar position (though in literary New York, where reputation and income rarely correspond, perhaps this position is not all that peculiar) of being substantially richer than most of her better-known and more highly regarded contemporaries.

And yet if either she or Marge was losing sleep over this predicament, their expressions, as they stepped through the door, did not reveal it. On the contrary, both looked flushed and happy. Marge, who had lost weight since I’d last seen her, appeared younger and more robust than when she’d fired me. As for Baylor, sleek and natty in a black jacket and trousers that belied their own expensiveness (“Armani,” whispered Kendall, who had wandered over to join our conversation, “cost at least two thousand bucks”), with her elegantly short hair and pearl earrings she presented an even greater contrast than at our lunch to that studious girl with the braids upon whom I had stumbled in Stanley Flint’s seminar room. Indeed, she wore the relaxed expression of someone for whom such environments are utterly without threat because she has been born into them.

Our little groups, in the way of parties, now collided. Smiling, Marge greeted Billie, to whom certain professional liabilities made her beholden. “And how’s Stanley doing?” Billie asked her.

“Well, as it happens, he’s just signed on this fabulous new novel by a young black writer from Indiana,” Marge said, “only now everyone’s complaining that it’s unethical because the kid was one of his private students. But I don’t think it’s unethical at all! After all, Stanley Flint’s students, generally speaking, make up the body from which all of tomorrow’s great writers, the Hemingways and Woolfs of the future, are going to be drawn, don’t you think? Just look at the examples we have in front of us. Julia Baylor and Martin Bauman, both former students of Stanley Flint, both rising literary stars...”

Baylor turned away. I blushed. Liza coughed.

“I was thrilled to hear about his selling his novel,” she said. “Have you read it yet?”

“Alas no. No one has. He won’t show it to anybody, not even his closest friends, apparently he doesn’t even want galleys sent out. Typical Stanley to be so secretive, he’s even made the people at Knopf swear not to breathe a word about the plot until he’s finished his revisions. Excuse me, story. I know Stanley hates the word ‘plot.’”

“Tell him congratulations from me,” I threw in.

“Of course. And as for you, Martin”—I turned from her gaze as from the stm—“what an honor it is for me to hold the distinction of having once given the sack, given the heave-ho, to a young man whom I guarantee, within a very few months, is going to be a major player, not just Martin Bauman but the Martin Bauman.” She pinched my cheek. “But I’m sure you forgive me, don’t you, dear? You realize it was for your own good. I’ve always had a sixth sense about these things. And who knows? If I hadn’t fired you, today you might still be reading slush at Hudson, instead of standing here, client of Billie and author of Trish.” (Trish was my editor.)

“Well,” I said, uncertain as to how I was supposed to greet this peculiar testimonial.

“By the way, Sara asked me to send you her regards. You know she’s been promoted. She’s an editor now.”

“Oh, I’m delighted.”

“And Carey—it’s tragic, really—you know he’s been out of the office for the last few weeks, he hasn’t been well. Somewhere along the line he managed to pick up a bad case of hepatitis. And then today he called me and said that he’s planning to quit. Apparently he wants to go to graduate school.”

“Who’s Carey?” asked Liza.

“A friend of mine,” I said. “Stanley Flint’s assistant.”

Henry Deane—always a fixture at these parties (but then again, so was I)—now approached us, dragging in his wake an extremely tall, distinguished-looking man in his fifties, with a luxuriant gray beard, stooped shoulders, and bushy eyebrows. “Oh, hello, Michael,” he said to me, for he could never seem to get my name right. “Michael, have you met my friend and former lover, Seamus Holt?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said, “though of course I’ve seen his plays.” (This was a lie.)

“Michael Bauman, Seamus Holt. Oh, and Seamus, you know Billie Eberhart, and Marge, of course—and everyone knows Kendall. And tell me, Michael, who are these charming young ladies?”

Trish, Julia, and Liza were introduced first to Henry, then to Seamus, who, having hurled at them a series of rudimentary hellos, turned to me and glowered. “Young man, I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” he said. “You’ve written such a wonderful collection of stories, which proves you’ve got a real talent, and in the whole book, in all two hundred and sixteen pages, not a single word, not a single fucking word about AIDS. It’s outrageous. Don’t you realize that by shirking your duty, by failing to bring this horrible crime to the attention of our brothers and sisters, you’re collaborating with the enemy? You’re adding to the silence in which we’re all going to die, die, die?”

“Oh, Seamus, please,” said Henry. “I have to apologize for him, Michael,” he added. “You see, he has this insane idea that AIDS is the result of germ warfare by the government or some such thing.”

“Misrepresenting me as usual,” said Seamus. “What I said was—”

“Or that AIDS started because of experiments on monkeys in Africa, I don’t know, he changes his conspiracy theories more often than he changes his socks.”

By now the women, as if instinctively, had crept away from us and into another conversation. “So when’s moving day, Henry?” asked Kendall.

“The fourteenth. You may have heard that I’m moving to Madrid for a year,” Henry said to me. “Certain people”—he indicated Seamus—“insist I’m doing it to run away from AIDS, but I ask you, how can anyone escape AIDS? If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Though I’ve got to admit it’ll be a relief not having to visit any more friends in hospitals. Last week I was at Bellevue every afternoon. I’ve got six friends in the same ward. Six! The nurses all know me by now.”

“Really? Is it really that bad?” asked Kendall.

“Horrible. One ex-lover of mine, he’s been in intensive care a week now. Some weird pneumonia. And when his lover checked him in they wouldn’t let him go into the emergency room because he wasn’t ‘next of kin.’”

“Well, there you have it,” said Seamus, “that’s exactly the sort of thing a young man like you, a young gay writer with potential, owes it to the rest of us to write about. Instead of which—I’m sorry—in your stories, it’s just all this coming-out shit, and what’s my mother going to think, and crap like that.”

“I’m not sure it’s fair to dictate to a writer what he ought or ought not to write,” I said bravely.

“Exactly! Good for you!” Henry patted me on the back. “You see, Seamus, Michael here is obviously a serious artist, not some hack propagandist like you.”

“And have you been writing about AIDS, Seamus?” Kendall asked.

“I’m working on something. That’s only the half of it, though. We’re trying to start an organization to cope with all this—because, you see, it’s much worse than anyone’s letting on. Much, much worse.” He stepped closer. “I mean, look at all these goddamn faggots. Half the men in this room must be faggots, and half of those are probably carrying the virus, and do they care? Are they doing anything about it? Are they using condoms? By the way, I hope all of you, especially you young people, but you too, Henry, are using condoms, because if you’re not you’re signing your own death warrants. And in Henry’s case, I promise, he’s signing other people’s death warrants.”

“You know what Gore said to me the other day?” interjected Henry. “He said if AIDS is really spread by butt-fucking, then every woman in Italy would have AIDS. Ha!”

Liza had now rejoined our little circle. “Excuse me for butting in,” she said, “but I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about condoms, and I wanted to ask...”

“Yes, you too, young lady,” said Seamus, “make sure that when your boyfriend fucks you with that huge membrum virile of his, he puts on a sleeve. No glove, no love.”

“No, not that,” Liza persisted. “Actually what I wanted to ask was what your feeling was about dental dams for lesbians.”

“Oh, lesbians. Pooh! Lesbians don’t get AIDS. It’s a waste of breath.”

“But how can you know that, Seamus?” asked Kendall, whose deft faculty for posing questions that were challenging enough to keep the conversation interesting but not so challenging as to generate serious worry had made him in recent years a much sought-after guest at Park Avenue dinner parties. “I mean, given all the surprises we’ve had lately, who’s to say that AIDS won’t turn out to be a scourge for lesbians too?”

“Well, scourge is a strong word,” Liza threw in, blanching a little.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be a scourge,” Kendall continued, “I’m just pointing out that the evidence isn’t in yet.”

“But there’s documentary evidence,” said Henry. “Like I said, I’ve got half a dozen gay male friends in Bellevue with AIDS right now. On the other hand, I don’t know a single lesbian who’s got it.”

“You don’t know a single lesbian,” Seamus said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, penetrative sex, semen up the asshole, mucous membranes, that’s where the danger lies, not in one girl tonguing, excuse me, another one’s clit.”

“God, that Seamus Holt is just horrible!” Liza said a few minutes later, when we were standing in line at the bar. “Really a maniac! That’s why Marge didn’t want to talk to him, you know. Apparently the other night, at a dinner party, he threw a drink in the face of one of the trustees of Mount Sinai, because he said the hospital wasn’t spending enough on AIDS research. Can you believe that? Diet Coke, please. I mean, I don’t want to diminish what he’s saying,” she went on, taking her drink, “but you’ve got to admit, he goes over the top. My mother says he’s always been that way, that AIDS has just given him the soapbox he’s needed. So I guess I shouldn’t be too upset. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” She had pulled me, I noticed, into as remote a comer as the party had to offer. “What I wanted to ask you about—in confidence, of course—is your friend Julia. Please don’t hate me, but I have to know. Is she in any way, at all...”

“A lesbian?”

“Ssh!”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Because all evening I’ve had this impression, this very strong impression ... you know ... that she’s been, well, looking at me.”

“And what if she has been?”

“I don’t know! I’m so confused! Do you think she’s pretty? I do. Only she smokes so much, it would be like kissing an ashtray ... And anyway, the last thing I need right now is to get involved with another woman. And even if I did, you know, approach her or something, what if it turned out I was misreading her? That would be so humiliating.”

Liza’s monologue—so maddeningly familiar—had already started to vex me. Suddenly impatient, I suppressed the urge to pick her up by the shoulders, to shake her, to throw a drink in her face—anything but be pulled back into that vortex of egoism and uncertainty in which she was always spinning. For Liza’s greatest problem, I now saw clearly, was not her sexuality at all, but rather that stubborn resistance to self-examination—common in writers, who for all the fluency with which they pry into the pathologies of others become like children when any degree of self-analysis is required—that led her to crave so desperately the calming pat on the head by means of which “society” (personified by her mother) indicates its approval of our decision to toe the line and respect convention. I wished that for once she would think deeply about this conflict that rumbled at the core of her being, instead of electing merely to fixate yet again on Nora Foy, whose specter she was now, for the umpteenth time, evoking: “I’m so afraid of ending up like Nora,” she was saying, “old and alone and living with all those cats! And the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls on the bed!” Yet Liza’s view of Nora, I could safely say, had nothing to do with Nora’s view of herself, or even with what might be called the general view of Nora. Instead, her preoccupations, which the willingness of her friends to discuss her problems with her ad nauseam only aggravated, had brought into being a second Nora, a clone or doppelganger, who nonetheless managed to live in harmony, at least in Liza’s mind, with that Nora of whom, at other moments, she spoke in such adulatory terms, either as the mentor who had encouraged her in her writing from an early age, or as the second mother in whose house (a different house, which seemed to have nothing to do with the cat-littered wreck in which the doppelganger ruled) Liza was not only welcome, but had actually lived for long periods, including the summer over the course of which she had finished Midnight Snacks.

By now the party was reaching that climactic moment—so common at gatherings advertised as “Cocktails, 6-8”—when the decision of one guest (in this case Billie) to say good-bye and fetch her coat provokes everyone else, in a sort of frenzy, to follow suit. This meant that over the course of five minutes our host’s living room, with its curtain pelmets of which Kendall had been so critical, had almost totally emptied out, the mass of humanity that defined the party having been convulsed in a sort of unified seizure to the coat check, where in the sudden and enormous queue its members gazed at their watches, as if they had all just remembered dinner parties for which they were late. Fearful of overstaying our welcome, Liza and I left too, though happily the fact that we’d brought no coats allowed us to bypass the nervous queue. Liza was still talking about Nora Foy; in fact, she was talking about Nora Foy so continuously, and with such unceasing agitation, that I couldn’t help but wonder whether she might not be trying—in contrast to her usual routine of simply riding the rat’s wheel of her obsessions until the effort had exhausted her—to wrench the conversation toward this particular topic for some specific reason, with the same clangorous infelicity that marked, in her writing, certain transitions between one paragraph and the next.

Out on the street, she asked if I wanted to have dinner with her. I said yes and suggested we call Eli and invite him to join us.

“Actually, let’s not,” she said. “Instead let’s just go out to dinner the two of us, shall we? After all, it’s been ages since we did that. Not since before you and Eli got together.”

“Well, all right, if you like,” I answered, as crossing the street, we walked into a local Chinese restaurant. “Only if you don’t mind I think I’ll phone him and tell him what we’re doing, so he won’t worry.”

“Fine.” Sitting down, she picked up her menu. I went to the pay phone. As it happened Eli wasn’t home, and I could only leave him a message.

“Did you reach him?” she asked when I got back.

I shook my head.

“Where’s he been today, anyway? When I called him earlier I kept getting his machine.”

“He’s with his mother. This afternoon he had to take her to a doctor’s appointment.”

“Ah, the hideous Harriet.” Liza giggled. “Have you met her yet?”

“Briefly. I didn’t think she was so hideous.”

“I don’t mean physically. I mean ... well, let’s just say I find her a hide hard to take. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my telling you that, especially since Eli makes no bones about hating my mother’s guts.”

“I’d say that’s a bit exaggerated, Liza.”

“Really? I don’t. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t like Harriet—it’s just that I find the way she treats Eli, the way she’s always treated him, a little sickening. She’s done him a lot of damage, in my opinion.”

“How so?”

“By coddling him too much. By encouraging him in every one of his little artistic pursuits—which is fine, except that she’s completely oblivious to questions of talent. She’s an ignoramus, culturally speaking. All that matters to her is that he’s Eli Aronson, as if that automatically makes him a genius at everything he tries. And the result is that Eli has this really inflated sense of his own abilities, as well as of his mother’s power, all of which makes him in the end miserable and resentful, especially toward me, because I’ve had so much more success than he has. The story of what happened when he didn’t get into Princeton is typical.”

“I haven’t heard that story.”

“You haven’t?” Liza quieted. “That’s funny. Because goodness knows he’s told it to all sorts of other people. It’s not like it’s a secret.” She paused, arranged her hands on her lap. “Shall I tell you?”

Though I had the distinct feeling that I was being led into a trap, that by agreeing to listen to the story I would be tacitly entering into a conspiracy with Liza against Eli, nevertheless I let my curiosity get the best of me. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Well, you do know that all his life Eli’s mother wanted him to go to Princeton, right? And that when he didn’t get in it was, like, a major tragedy in the family.”

As it happened I did not know this, though I recalled an afternoon not long ago when, lying in Eli’s loft, I’d read aloud to him a line from Renata Adler’s Speedboat that I’d thought funny—a reference to a girl “who cried all the time because she hadn’t been accepted at Smith”—only he hadn’t laughed.

“Well, when he didn’t get in, Harriet got this insane idea into her head that it was all because of Zoë.”

“Zoë?”

“His high school girlfriend.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

“Because Zoë’s father was the local alumni interviewer for Princeton, which meant naturally that Zoë herself, being a legacy, was going to go to Princeton. Anyway, Harriet decided that if her son, her magnificent Eli, hadn’t gotten into Princeton, there was only one explanation, and that was that Zoë’s mother had put pressure on Zoë’s father to keep him out, probably because she didn’t approve of their relationship. So Harriet called the admissions office and demanded to speak to the director, and when she got him, she put up this huge fuss, she protested his rejection, demanded an investigation of Zoë’s parents, in short, made a complete fool of herself. After that he was so ashamed he wouldn’t even go to his own graduation.”

“How terrible!”

“But that’s not the worst of it.” Liza leaned closer. “You know that when we were at school, Eli put on this production of Daphnis and Chloe? Typical Eli, really, staging something like that. Anyway—he doesn’t know this, and you mustn’t ever tell him I told you, you have to promise me—one afternoon just before the first performance, Harriet called me up and told me that she’d just heard from Eli, and that he was all mopey because no one was planning to throw a cast party. And since she knew he was too proud to give the party himself, or accept the money from her to give one, she wanted to give me some money to organize a cast party, only I wasn’t under any circumstances to tell Eli that it came from her. Eli was supposed to think that all the people in the cast, who really couldn’t have cared less, had chipped in.” She sighed, as one might at the pathetic spectacle of an overclipped poodle. “And really, that was just Harriet to a tee, always believing that her little boy was something special and that when the world didn’t do its part to celebrate him, it was her job to step in and rectify things. Only I think in the end it was Eli she hurt, by making him assume that somehow he was entitled to a certain degree of success, to Princeton, to a cast party—the production, needless to say, was the kind that put your teeth on edge—even if he hadn’t earned it. What she ended up doing was teaching him that when he failed, it was only because of other people’s prejudices and ignorance. And that’s what bothers me about his novels, if I’m going to be totally honest—the sense that he hasn’t really given them his all, that he still thinks he ought to get accolades just because he’s his mother’s son. But he’s not seven years old anymore, and what we’re talking about isn’t some synagogue Purim pageant. And then you see, the worst part of it is that if anyone does say anything against his work, he can just apply what his mother taught him and turn on that person. Believe me, I’ve been down that road with him.” She narrowed her eyes. “I suspect you’ve been down it too.”

In fact I had, though I wasn’t about to admit this, for I felt it was my duty to defend Eli.

“Actually, no,” I said. “Actually, I’d say I have a different outlook on him from yours.”

“Oh come on, Martin. I know you love Eli. I love him too. Still, all you have to do is read his writing in order to realize—”

“But I’ve read his new novel,” I lied, “and I think it’s brilliant.”

Liza raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

“Of course.”

“Well, if that’s true, it must mean he’s had a big growth spurt recently,” she said, “because I’ve got to tell you, his first three, they were pretty mediocre.”

“Not this one. In fact, once he’s finished his revisions, I’m planning to show it to Billie.”

Now Liza looked not only surprised, but genuinely amazed. “Seriously? You’re going to give your agent Eli’s novel?”

“Well, why not?”

“But aren’t you afraid ... I mean, if she doesn’t like it, wouldn’t it put you in an awkward position? Make her think, you know, less of you for having liked it yourself?”

“Of course not. Anyway, even if Billie doesn’t like it—which I really can’t imagine—it hardly matters. She’s not the only agent in the world.”

“Oh, I know, it’s just ... you know, I’ve been down this road with Eli too. A couple of years ago I showed his novel to my agent—well, not to my agent himself, but to his assistant, who happened to be a friend of both of ours. And when she said she didn’t think she could sell it, Eli took it really personally. I felt like I had to mediate between them.”

“I doubt that will happen in this case,” I said, “since Eli’s never met Billie.”

“No, I guess not.” Our food arrived. “You know, I think that’s really generous of you, Martin,” Liza said, “to help Eli that way. I’m sure he’ll be very grateful. You’ve clearly been good for him, and I’m really glad that the two of you have found such happiness together. I mean that.” And, staring at the food in bewilderment, as if she were as confused by the dishes she had ordered as by her failure to win me over to her viewpoint, she began to eat.

Afterward, I shared with Eli an edited account of our conversation. “Yet the one thing that puzzles me,” I concluded, “is why she began by talking about Nora Foy in this very determined way, then dropped the subject.”

“Oh, that must have been because of the trip next weekend,” he answered casually.

“What trip?”

“Didn’t she tell you? It figures she didn’t. You see, every year around this time Nora goes away for a weekend to visit some friends in Bucks County, and we have this tradition, Liza and I, of house-sitting for her and taking care of the dogs.”

“But I thought she had cats.”

“Nora doesn’t have any cats! She’s got two fox terriers, Charlus and Pimperl—Charlus after Proust, Pimperl after Mozart’s dog. Anyway, we were talking about it yesterday, and Liza asked if I was planning to invite you along. And I said that yes, of course I was. She didn’t answer, but I could tell she was annoyed.”

“Why?”

“Because when it comes to these rituals, these things that she and I have been doing together for a million years, she’s very ... protective. Even if I couldn’t go with her because of a real emergency, even if my mother were at death’s door, she’d be furious. And what makes it even more tiresome is that when we’re there it’s always the same thing: the first night we eat dinner at the Quiet Clam, where Liza orders the grilled scallops. Then we go home and get stoned and play Scrabble—not that I like Scrabble. I hate Scrabble. And I always lose, because Liza’s so bloodthirsty. Still, it has to be Scrabble. And then the next morning we have breakfast at this little place at the golf course where Liza always has the cheese omelette—and then, and then ... Always the same! She’s trapped by habit. Her whole life, when you think about it, is a repetition compulsion.”

“So you’re not looking forward to the trip.”

“Oh no, on the contrary, I can’t wait. I love this trip. That’s why I want you to come along.”

“Me?”

“Yes. To shake Liza out of her complacency. And also to prove to her that my having fallen in love with you is a good thing, a boon to our friendship. And also”—here he kissed me on the nose—“because I’d be lonesome without you.”

I frowned. “But if she doesn’t want me to go—”

“She’s going to have to accept it whether she likes it or not,” Eli said, getting up and walking into the bathroom, “since the only alternative is her going alone.”

“Yes, but Eli, if Nora’s her friend—”

“Oh, but she’s my friend too,” Eli interrupted. And from the sink he launched into a complicated story about how on a certain occasion, years earlier, he had gone out to Nora’s house without Liza, to help her repaint her living room, and become intimate, over the course of a weekend, not only with Nora but Hilda, with whom Nora had been living for the last fifty years. Hilda, who had left both her husband and her job as a high school librarian for Nora, had no profession. Instead she devoted herself entirely to the organization and maintenance of the Nora Foy archive, which took up the entire attic of their house in East Hampton, and in which every document that could reasonably be considered relevant to Nora’s career—even shopping lists and the little scraps of paper on which Nora jotted down messages to herself—was now, thanks to Hilda’s industry and affection, stored and catalogued.

“And where’s Hilda now?” I asked, for until today I had heard nothing of her.

“Oh, she died. She had Alzheimer’s.” By now Eli, his face wet from washing, had emerged from the bathroom. “So you see, Liza’s in no position to tell me what to do where Nora’s concerned.” He patted me on the cheek. Clearly it pleased him as much to have a weapon against Liza as it pleased Liza to have a weapon against him. Yet in all this fractiousness, where did I fit in? No doubt Eli’s wish to bring me along was sincere; still, I couldn’t help but recognize in it a desire to hurt Liza. Nor had she been entirely truthful, I suspected, when she’d insisted that she wished the best for Eli and me, for if she did, then why had she tried so hard at dinner to make him look ridiculous?

It is always disturbing to recognize the capacity for malice in friends whom we are used to viewing as generous and kind; yet such an acknowledgment is less essential if we wish to cut the friendship off with impunity than if we intend to carry it on. And this was especially true in the case of Liza, whose aggression owed less to retaliatory anger than to that very quality of oblivious self-interest that made her at once such a companionable friend and such an unreliable ally. Thus (to give but one example) it was not until Eli threw it in her face many years later that she even realized how badly she’d hurt him by asking for his advice on whom to take to Sam Stallings’s party. Instead, that salvo, like most of her salvos, was friendly fire; it was a stray bullet slipping through a chink in the battlements, as opposed to one of those hydrogen bombs that Eli sometimes detonated. And though I cannot blame him for feeling the need to defend himself against Liza (and later me), since to stretch the war metaphor a bit further, we were both such loose cannons, neither can I pretend that his inclination toward vengefulness made my sleep easy. True, lack of intention does not excuse the perpetrator of a cruelty any more than a blind comer excuses the driver who hits a child; and yet, if asked with which one you would more likely trust your life, the terrorist or the hit-and-run driver, which would you choose?

It was all very sad. Indeed, in hindsight I realize that the best thing I could have done that weekend would have been to make myself scarce, to invent some excuse for not coming along, and thereby give Liza the opportunity to end that part of her life with dignity. After all, only a year later I would be jumping at opportunities to spend weekends alone in the city, for by then I would have started having affairs. At the time, though, all I wanted—and at any cost—was to stay with Eli. This was the real reason I accepted his invitation, not, as I told myself, to show spousal loyalty, or to defend him against Liza’s belittlements.

So we all went together, in Eli's mother’s station wagon, which he had borrowed for the trip. Because Liza and I had neither seen nor spoken to each other since the dinner at the Chinese restaurant, I worried that she might be sullen or short with me. Instead, when we met that morning, she greeted me with a cheerfulness that made me wonder whether Eli might have been exaggerating her disgruntlement. In fact, I would have willingly chucked all my negative expectations for the weekend out the window had Liza not, almost as soon as he got into the driver’s seat, preempted any discussion of which of us would ride in the front by claiming, with a sort of proprietary cheek, the seat next to Eli’s for herself. Annoyed but reluctant to provoke a rupture, I said nothing, only climbed into the back, where I fumed like the child to whose place I’d been relegated. Meanwhile Liza had put on a cassette tape, the cast recording of an early Sondheim musical I did not know, with which she and Eli sang along all the way to Manorville: yet another tradition from which lack of information excluded me. Was this her new strategy? I found myself wondering as we pulled into Grace’s for Cokes. That is, simply to ignore my presence for the duration of the weekend, as if I were a third fox terrier that some neighbor had asked them to care for? If so, it made me no more happy than did Eli’s refusal to heed the loud and simmering silence I’d been trying to radiate all through the drive. Indeed, when Liza went to the bathroom, giving us our first moment alone together, he did not even ask how I was. Instead he just said, “Having fun?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know any of those songs,” I said.

“Poor Martin. I’m sorry, I forgot you might be feeling left out in the back seat. Tell you what, when we get back in, we’ll teach them to you.”

I was not, however, about to give up so easily, and taking advantage of Liza’s absence, I hurried to the car and claimed her place in the front. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said when she came out a few minutes later, “you know I’ve got long legs. I was starting to feel cramped back there.”

“No, it’s fine,” Liza responded listlessly, and got into the back. We resumed the drive. Once again Eli put on the cassette; then, when Liza did not start singing, he took it out again.

By now we were passing through that long stretch of car dealerships, pool companies, and traders in marble and die that precedes the actual villages of eastern Long Island, and that gives way, soon enough, to the old shingled houses, the dimly lit restaurants in which Nora and her literary cronies were reputed to get drunk together, the hardware stores and thrift shops and “candy kitchens” that distinguished that lovely part of the world, for this was in the days before investment bankers and movie directors had begun colonizing the Hamptons, the days before Pets Painted with Love had become yet another Ralph Lauren Country Store, and the villages still retained a touch of antiquated charm. Because it was late fall, sodden leaves clogged the gutters. In front yards, on green, green lawns, raked-up piles of them waited to be carted off. Then Eli made a left turn, drove down a few narrow streets (on one of them some black children were playing stickball), and stopped the car. We got out. In contrast to most of its neighbors, Nora’s house was an old and sagging harridan, with brown shutters and a weedy front garden. Through the mayhem a few tea roses thrust out their decadent heads. On the stoop, the bricks of which also had weeds growing between them, Eli fit the key into the lock and fiddled for a minute, while behind the door a sound of snuffling and whining started up, those barks and scrapings that signify the almost uncontrollable vehemence of canine ardor.

Then he shoved the door open, and they were all over us, two terriers who, with their bearded muzzles, their black and white coats spattered with tan, would have resembled exactly the mascot of my former employer had they only been well groomed, instead of, like the garden itself, walking thickets of fur from the depths of which, at any number of points (for they were constantly in morion), here an eye popped out, there a black nose, a pink tongue. They jumped us; they pawed us; they squealed and licked our ears. Never in the world, it seemed, had there been gratitude to equal theirs, never had there lived, anywhere in God’s green kingdom, creatures so ecstatic, so avid with love.

We stepped inside. “Poor Nora,” Liza said with a loud sigh, and led us through the living room, past a pair of sofas draped in dirty beige sheets, along floorboards scratched by generations of dogs’ nails and never resanded. In the kitchen the faucet dripped, the wooden breakfast table was coated with a layer of grime you could draw pictures in with your finger (and Liza did). How she loved this place! She loved the bedrooms, both the spare one with its framed lace and the other, larger, in which, on a sagging bed with a white spread, the famous Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls—grandmotherly Raggedy Anns—reclined. Here the windows were curtained in a blue Chinese toile de Jouy on which a happy mustachioed fellow in pointy shoes and a jester’s cap swung on a cord suspended between two branches of a tree. On one of the branches, through a trick of perspective, a pair of elaborately plumed birds his own size had built a nest big enough for him to sleep in, along with three tidy eggs. “When I lived here one winter I used to stare at this fabric for hours,” Liza said. “I used to make up stories set in that little world. You wouldn’t walk here; you’d skip. You’d frolic and sport.”

“You’d cavort,” Eli said.

“You’d bobble.”

“You’d frisk.”

Then we fed the dogs, and once they were sated, went ourselves to feed at the famous Quiet Clam—Liza, as promised, ordered scallops—where we wondered why Nora had given them such pretentious names. “Frankly, I think it’s show-offy,” she said. “And Nora’s not the only one. For instance, Seymour Kleinberg, did you know that he calls his pugs Isabel and Caspar, after The Portrait of a Lady?”

“I had a music teacher in high school who named all his cats after opera heroines,” Eli said. “Tosca, Aida, Musetta, Doretta.”

“My friend Kendall Philips,” I offered, “was in Southampton last summer, on the beach, when he heard a couple chasing after their Dalmatian puppy, and calling ‘Doghampton, Doghampton, bad dog!’”

I smiled. Liza and Eli smiled back—a bit condescendingly, I thought.

“And what’s wrong,” Eli asked, “with giving dogs and cats ordinary dog and cat names—you know, like Frisky or Skipper?”

“Our dog was called Lulu,” Liza said wistfully.

“We had a cat called Daisy.”

“And yet by the same token certain names are almost too normal, so much so that they sound ludicrous when applied to a pet. For instance, Susan. Can you imagine meeting a cat called Susan?”

“How about Margaret?”

“And yet the funniest name of all for an animal—I’m sorry, but it’s got to be”—Liza covered her mouth with her hands—“is Martin. Martin!” She guffawed. “Can you imagine it, Eli? ‘Martin, here, boy! Good Martin!”’

“Darn,” Eli said, “Martin peed on the mg!”

“Ha-ha,” I said neutrally, and made no fuss; after all, the last thing I wanted was to be accused of being a spoilsport. And yet the words rankled. Once again, I was the outsider, the interloper. It seemed to be my fate.

By the time we got back to Nora’s that evening, the dogs had once again entered into a state of ecstatic loneliness. Having first jumped on us and licked our ears, when we bent down, to make sure we were ourselves, they headed out into the backyard to pee and dig and do all the other things that for dogs amount to serious business.

“Have you got the joints?” Liza asked Eli, who nodded.

“Good. I’ll get out the Scrabble set.”

Bending down, she set to digging in her suitcase. Eli yawned theatrically.

“Actually, Liza,” he said, winking at me but for her, “I’m pretty bushed tonight. Couldn’t we save Scrabble for tomorrow?”

She gaped up at him. “You mean you don’t want to play?”

“Not right now.”

“And what about you, Martin?”

I turned to Eli. In fact I would have been happy to play, only his look told me to pretend otherwise.

“I’m pretty tired myself,” I said.

Liza stood up. “Well, I guess that’s that, then,” she remarked, crossing her arms over her chest. “Since I can’t play alone, I suppose there’s no choice but to hit the proverbial hay.”

“The land of dreamy-dreams,” Eli echoed.

“Still, we could at least get stoned—”

“But what’s the point, when we’re going to bed?”

“Oh, I see,” Liza said huffily, and forced a smile. “Okay, if that’s how you want it, that’s how it’ll have to be.”

“Yup.”

“Well, pleasant dreams.”

“Pleasant dreams,” Eli repeated pleasantly. Yet he did not move. None of us moved. Liza, still standing by her suitcase, fingered the bag with the Scrabble letters in it.

The dogs scratched at the door; Eli let them in.

“Well, well, well,” he said once he had both terriers inside.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m afraid that we’re on the horns of a dilemma.”

“Why? Which dilemma?”

“That tired old dilemma,” Eli said, sitting down on a sandy armchair, “of sleeping arrangements.”

“Sleeping arrangements! But why should that be a problem?”

“You tell us, Martin,” Liza said. “Where would you like to sleep tonight? Or perhaps I should ask, with whom would you like to sleep tonight?”

“Well, with Eli, of course ... I mean, doesn’t that make sense?”

“And where?”

“In the room with the double bed. Where else?”

“So in other words, you two’ll take the big bed and the big room, and I’ll sleep in the little bed in the little room. Is that right?”

“Liza, stop this this second,” Eli suddenly barked. “You’re being ridiculous.”

Falling onto the couch, Liza buried her head in her hands and began to weep. Alarmed, the dogs ran to her. They licked her ears. They tried to lick her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” I said—though I did. “Why is this such a big deal?”

“It’s a big deal, Martin, because for the five years that Liza and I have been coming here we’ve always slept together in the big bed. And now she doesn’t want to give that up. She doesn’t want anything to change, ever, if it involves me.”

“But when you’ve come here before, you’ve always been alone, it’s always been just the two of you. Doesn’t that make a difference?”

“Of course it does. It’s a new situation—a permanent one.”

Liza wept more loudly. Standing, Eli took a box of tissues from the mantel, then sat next to her. “Oh, come on,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder, “there’s no reason to blow this all out of proportion. I mean, think of it this way: how’s it any different from when we’re in New York?”

“But we’re not in New York! We’re at Nora’s. And so I don’t see why just because the two of you are fucking, it means I should get left out in the cold—literally.”

“But whether you like it or not, Martin is my lover.”

“And so you have to sleep with him every night of your life?”

“But the thing you never seem to realize, Liza, is that if the tables were turned, if it were you and Jessica instead of me and Martin, you’d take it for granted that you two would sleep together and never even think about what I wanted.”

“But that’s my point! I’d never have invited Jessica! I’d never have been that insensitive. I’m sorry, Martin,” she continued, dabbing at her eyes, “but I’ve got to tell the truth. I’m really angry that you’re here. I’m angry at you for coming, and I’m angry at Eli for asking you, and I’m angry at myself because I see now that introducing you two was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

“Oh, so my happiness is a mistake? My future is a mistake?”

“For me, yes.”

Eli stood. “You never think of anyone but yourself, do you?” he shouted, loudly enough so that the dogs ceased, for a moment, their endless task of comfort. Alarmed, she looked up, looked into his eyes, before spiraling away from him.

Then there was a silence. Their backs turned to each other, tensely poised in this standoff that neither arbitration nor argument would resolve, Eli and Liza stared at anything: the bookshelves, the dogs, the half-open door to the kitchen. How they loathed each other at that moment! And yet what struck me even more viscerally than the depth of their enmity was the strength of the love from which it had grown, and without which it would have desiccated into indifference. For it was as if Liza’s words had burned away a layer of cant in which their friendship had been swathed, revealing its fundamental, polarized elements, circling each other endlessly: pain and love, love and pain.

No one else was there to help. Even the dogs looked at me pleadingly, as if they recognized the limited potency of their tongues.

And so I got up. Very tentatively, I approached Liza, who was hunched in a comer of the sofa. I put a hand on her warm shoulder. “Look, how about this?” I suggested. “The bed in Nora’s room is pretty big. What if all three of us sleep there ... together?”

She laughed.

“That way we’ll all get what we want. Both of us will get Eli, you won’t have to sleep alone, I won’t have to sleep alone. Plus it’ll be fun in its own right. Like a slumber party. What do you say?”

She rubbed her nose. “I don’t know ... Eli?”

He shrugged.

“And what’s the alternative?”

Again, silence. “I suppose,” Eli said, “the alternative is that we don’t sleep.”

“I see your point,” Liza conceded, laughing a little—which relieved me. “Well, okay ... I guess.”

So we headed upstairs, to Nora’s bathroom, where like children we brushed our teeth together; we took turns peeing. While Liza put on her nightgown, Eli and I gingerly moved the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls onto the dresser, turned down the spread, took off our pants and shirts, and climbed into the bed. “Brr, it’s cold,” I said, switching off the reading lamp and burrowing into his chest.

Liza climbed in last, on his right—it went without saying that he would sleep in the middle—then switched off the other light. “Good night, Eli,” she said.

“Good night, Liza.”

“Good night, Martin.”

“Good night, Eli. Good night, Liza.”

“Good night, John Boy.” She giggled. Another silence fell, which only the mattress, sighing whenever one of us turned over, interrupted. Clinging to my comer of the sheet, I felt the bed curve under me like the earth itself; I felt Eli’s hand take mine. And far away, on the other side of this continent, was he touching Liza too? Was she touching him? For once I didn’t care. What mattered was that I was here, in the moment, in this bed, with these people who loved each other, and whom I loved. These were interesting times for me, they were exciting times—and someday they might even be pleasant times to remember.