OF MY MOTHER’S DEATH, which occurred late that summer, I shall say little here. I have already made too much of it in fiction, milked it too much for sentiment and dread. Such episodes ought to be recounted only in the spare nudity of their experiencing. Yet how could I have done that when her death broke every rule I’d been taught in writing classes? To wit, it told what it should have showed; the dialogue was hackneyed; the descriptions were banal; none of the principals was likable; its author put himself in a position of moral superiority to his characters...
What I’m trying to say here (but it’s painful) is that for the sake of pats on the head, good reviews, and fan mail (as well as to satisfy a clause in my contract that promised me an extra ten thousand dollars for every week the book I wrote about my mother spent on the Times bestseller list, which it never made), I spruced up her death like a corpse before an open-casket funeral, in the process committing several sins of omission and at least one bold-faced lie: in the book I place my protagonist at his mother’s bedside at the moment of her death. Yet in fact, during those last hours, I was nowhere near her hospital room. Instead I was hiding with Eli at my sister’s house, eating pot brownies and watching a video of Pepe Le Pew cartoons: over and over the cat, on whose back circumstance had painted a slender white stripe, scrambled out of the passionate skunk’s arms; over and over the skunk declared undying amour. What kept me away wasn’t fear so much as a youngest child’s pouty indignation that my brother and sister should have gotten her for ten more years than I had. Well, I would show them, I decided. I would make them all sorry. But I only made myself sorry.
I suppose someday I shall forgive myself for not being with my mother when she died. I suppose I shall even forgive myself for not sticking around long enough to be with my father when he scattered her ashes over the bay. But I shall never forgive myself for the ease with which, in that novel I wrote about her death, I inserted myself into both these solemn scenes—as if my absence were merely the sort of plot inconsistency it is the duty of fiction to correct. (Stanley Flint, of course, would have seen right through such a lie: he could smell the inauthentic a mile away. And yet by that time I had long since stopped showing Flint my work, not, as I told myself, because I didn’t trust him, but because I feared he might catch me out in my mendacity.) Ahem.
That spring my story collection, The Deviled-Egg Plate, had been published to what that tiresome if useful reference work, Contemporary Authors, called “favorable-to-mixed reviews”—a locution more suggestive of weather reports than literary criticism. I quote:
Helen Shipley of the———Gazette lauded Bauman for his “fluency and grace,” while Joann Finkelstein of the Reporter praised the “crystal-clear lucidity” of his prose and the “human warmth emanating from the characters, all of whom really fizzle.”
On the other hand, Seamus Holt complained in Queer Times that Bauman’s “wan, watered-down portrayal of gay life” amounted to “the worst land of assimilationist nonsense,” while J. J. Frakes of the———Tribune-Sentinel objected to Bauman’s “obsession with homosexuality—is nobody straight?!” Of one of the stories he observed: “If this were about Jim and Polly instead of Jim and Paul, who’d give a darn?”
Kendall Philips, who read all reviews of everything, even in the most obscure newspapers, called me to commiserate. “Opinions are like assholes,” he asseverated. “Everybody has one.” Yet despite the cavils of gay activists and right-wing mavens alike, the story collection did well (for a story collection)—that is to say, it made it into paperback, got nominated for a prize, and even landed me a leading role in an article published that summer in Broadway magazine that would prove to be both the making and unmaking of my career. This article, which was titled “Invasion of the Prestige Snatchers: The Nouvelle Vague of Young Writers and Where It Hangs Out,” featured two photographs—one of me, Liza, and Eli playing Scrabble and drinking tea in front of her fireplace (my big head threw Eli’s into shadow), the other of Sam Stallings, Violet Partridge (to whom Liza, you may recall, was cozying up in the last chapter), and someone called Bart Donovan, who wrote mostly about cocaine, shooting pool in a louche Bowery bar. “It’s like they’re our evil twins,” Liza giggled when the early copies arrived, “the bad kids to our good kids.” Yet oddly enough, while the good kids in this little drama were gay Jews, the bad kids (with the possible exception of Bart Donovan) were straight WASPs. They didn’t wear sweaters their mothers had knitted. Instead Sam had ex-wives, while Violet (better known as “Vio”) had once earned her living dancing naked in a vat of Jell-O. In the end it was their vague; they were the ones who surfed it. As for us, we simply clung to the edges of the crest until it broke.
Our position was ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable; in our own minds at least, we were always the scholarship lads, the wallflowers at the tailgate. Thus I remember arriving with Liza at one of those parties that Vanity Fair was forever throwing for itself. Ahead of us in line stood Jay McInerney with his girlfriend of the moment, a model who had become famous after a lunatic had attacked her with a razor. As they neared the gauntlet of paparazzi, a hundred flashes erupted. “How stupid,” I said to Liza, yet was unable to hide my chagrin when upon our own entrance the photographers reloaded their film.
Even more distressing to me were those occasions on which I found myself the object of an attention that seemed to me misplaced, or in some way warped. For example, in Milan once with Eli to promote the Italian translation of my stories, I attended along with Sam Stallings a party honoring “the new generation of American writers,” the host for which was a famous clothes designer. Here, though wearing a pink-and-white-striped jacket purchased for twenty dollars at a Seventh Avenue knockoff shop, I was compelled by the regiment of fashion photographers present to dance before their cameras with a former Itahan starlet of the fifties, now boozy and hoarse-voiced. No doubt the artificial intimacy into which we were thrust embarrassed the actress as much as my jacket did; nonetheless, being a veteran of such publicity stunts, she played along gamely, whispering in my ear what appeared to be endearments but were actually arch instructions not to clutch so tightly at her crimson mile dress. Afterward, at the end of half a dozen interviews with regional papers in which I was asked, “Can you tell us at which clubs you and the other members of the Brat Pack drink together like the Lost Generation in Paris?” a journalist with purple hair stuck a microphone in my face, and said, “What is death to you, in two words?”
“This interview,” I would have answered, had I been clever.
Later that night Eli and I had a fight. We only had one fight in those years, but we had it over and over. It went like this: first some ineptitude or insensitivity on my part would enrage him. In retaliation he would be cruel. In response to his cruelty I would bristle, lash out, then, as my own anger burned off, retreat into a posture of remorse and supplication that was in fact aggressive, because it demanded instant forgiveness as the ransom for leaving him alone. Soon our fight would take on a life of its own, its origins would be forgotten, it would adapt to the same invariable and sorry trajectory, with me banging furiously at a door Eli had locked. And though, every time, he proved himself to be the more skilled and cruel antagonist, keen to my weak points, which he gauged expertly, who’s to say whether in my own frantic flailing I didn’t him: him just as much? Probably I did. Still, anger was a condition of his life in a way that it had never been of mine. For he had a tornado in him. Far from earth, the little house of his soul flew about in churning winds. A few years earlier he’d read Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, and it had set him off for life, authorizing his rage, which was both relentless and lacerating. Now, every time we argued, the drama began again. Outside the window his father, like Miss Gulch, rode by on a broomstick. Liza failed to invite him to a party. Rejection letters flapped in the furious air.
The problem wasn’t anything so simple as jealousy, or that things were going badly for him; on the contrary, despite Liza’s naysaying, Billie Eberhart had just sold his novel to an eminently respectable publisher. And yet even this good news did not make him happy, because, as he was always reminding me, though-had just bought his novel, my publisher (which he considered more prestigious) had turned it down. “Which, when you think about it, is like getting rejected by Princeton all over again,” he added.
I should have realized, then, that what I was dealing with in Eli was something far less remediable than lack of reputation; he could have won the Nobel Prize in literature, and still found a way to view his victory as somehow trumped up, fallacious, without meaning. Nor were matters made easier when mutual friends, to his face, dismissed his career as merely a subdivision of mine. Not only to newspaper subscription salesmen was he “Mrs. Bauman”; instead at that time it must have seemed that every phone call, every letter, every dinner invitation he received concealed a secret motive. Out of the blue, old friends from whom he hadn’t heard in years would call, apparently just to say hello, really to see if, through him, they could get me to do some favor for them. Fellow homosexuals, whom you would have thought more sensitive, asked him outrageous questions—“So why are you really with Martin, Eli? For your career?” Others praised his “selflessness” in giving up so much “to help Martin write ... how hard it must be for you, Eli!”
No doubt the zenith (or perhaps I should say the nadir) of this period was an Author’s Guild panel tided “What’s the Matter with Kids Today? Young Writers Speak Out” that took place in the auditorium of the same Brooklyn school at which Eli had once taught. The other participants were Julia Baylor, Violet Partridge, and an elegant woman named Lise Schiffrin who had just published an equally elegant collection of short stories, I’m Not Here. Neither Liza nor Eli were in the audience. In Liza’s case, this was because she was out of town, having been invited (it was the sort of invitation only Liza ever seemed to receive) to take part in a “youth think tank” sponsored by a manufacturer of video games; at the moment she was sitting poolside with six other “geniuses” (one of them, Ben Pollack, the man she would eventually marry) at a Ritz-Carlton in southern California. As for Eli, because we had had a fight earlier that day, at the last minute he’d refused to come with me. Instead, he said, he was going to stay home and do some of his own work for a change.
Lise Schiffrin was a startling figure. Her eyes, which were immense and dark, suggested the staring panic of certain marsupials, while her long, magnificently erect torso made me think of those exotic water birds whose feathers turn pink from eating shrimp. All told she provided a welcome contrast to Vio, whom I had come to distrust in recent months, in large part due to her duplicitous habit of simultaneously reviling the literary establishment for its “elitism”—her supposed exclusion from the corridors of power owing, she argued, to her roots in the rural south, where her (very good) novel was set—and exploiting that establishment for all it was worth. Thus every Christmas for the past five years she was rumored to have mailed to about three dozen famous novelists gift-wrapped packages of homemade divinity—a present by means of which she must have hoped to drum into the consciousness of these eminences at least the rhythm of her name, so that when the bound galleys of her novel arrived in their mailboxes, instead of throwing them aside along with all the other bound galleys they received, they would take note of them, recall the association of the name Violet Partridge with the sugared delectability of the divinity (enough to make their mouths, like those of Pavlov’s dogs, water), and read the book. And this strategy, moreover, appeared to have worked, for the back of Vio’s novel boasted no less than fourteen blurbs, penned by (among others) Sam Stallings, Leonard Trask, Nora Foy, Henry Deane, and Stanley Flint.
Such a tactic put Vio in the opposite camp from Lise, who suffered from that allergy to professionalism that distinguishes a certain kind of very dedicated and very innocent artist. She was, in the most dangerous sense of the word, a purist, which was why, when the panel began, and from each of us the aggressive moderator extracted an opening statement, she could express only her bewilderment at being asked to take part in the first place; after all, she pointed out, even though she had just published her first book, she was not, in any ordinary sense of the word, young—she was forty-four—thereby giving voice to a bafflement similar to the one I had experienced a few years earlier when Jim Sterling had taken me to see a musical review in which all the songs were based on poems written by the elderly; the trouble was, of the dozen cast members, few looked to be more than fifty, with the result that when a vigorous black woman strode onto the stage and belted out the showstopper “I Am Not Old!” we could only agree with her.
What a welcome presence Lise was on that panel, especially during the question-and-answer session, when Vio—in response to the question, “Do you make a living from your writing?”—first claimed that her work earned her only enough money “to pay the rent” (when everyone knew she had just sold the film rights to her novel for half a million dollars), then went on to excoriate the “meritocracy” by which she felt herself to have been, as a consequence of her origins, excluded (yet at that moment she was weighing teaching offers from no less than three universities)! Lise, on the other hand, when asked what her plans were for the future, simply gazed at the audience with those wide eyes of hers, and said, “What are my plans? Very simple. Write, write, write."
Afterward we were taken to the cafeteria and sat down at four card tables piled with copies of our books. A long line—at least fifty people—had already gathered in front of Vio’s table, where she was now signing away and chatting with the professional suavity of a talk-show host. Julia’s line was slightly shorter, and consisted mostly of current or former students of Stanley Flint. Mine was limited to about a dozen young queers, some with female accomplices in tow. As for Lise, though she was without question the most gifted writer present that evening, not a single person waited at her table. Instead she sat alone before thirty copies of I'm Not Here, clearly wishing she weren’t, so that I longed to get rid of my own admirers if for no other reason than to claim my rightful place as one of hers.
“And who is this book for?”
“Erika, with a K.”
To Erika. All best wishes, Martin Bauman.
“Hello. And who is this book for?”
“Could you make it out to Jamie and Stuart—with a U—on their anniversary?”
“But what if you split up? Who’ll keep the book?” They didn’t laugh. “Just kidding.” To Jamie and Stuart. Happy Anniversary! Martin Bauman.
“Hello. And who is this for?”
I looked up. Before me stood Roy Beckett. “Howdy, stranger,” he said.
“Roy,” I answered. And smiled. Though I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, since that party during which we had flirted and Liza had discussed dental dams with Seamus Holt, in the intervening months his face, I had to admit, had stayed with me, a vision to be called up and mused over not while Eli and I were fighting, but rather in the exhausted aftermath of our fights, when fatigue itself had brokered a kind of peace between us. For with his lustrous, clean-shaven cheeks, Roy was in many ways the very antithesis of Eli, whose face seemed every day to become more rabbinical, more darkly scowling, as if through it the agony of history were revealing itself. Roy, by contrast, was squeaky-clean, smelling of limes. Tonight he wore a gray suit, pressed white shirt, Hermes tie—the usual Manhattan uniform, and a far cry from Eli’s tiny running shorts, his underpants pinkened by contact with something red, the jeans he had owned since high school.
I told Roy how much I appreciated his coming to hear me—something none of my other friends had done—which made him laugh. “Do you think I’d miss one of your rare public appearances?” he asked. “Not a chance. And now, if you wouldn’t mind...” He pressed a copy of my own book toward me, back cover facing out, so that his hands seemed to be caressing my cheeks. Opening it, I wrote, To Roy Beckett, whose arrivals into my life, though rare, always bring pleasure. Yours, Martin Bauman. Then I handed it back to him. He opened the book. “You should’ve been a doctor,” he said, examining my signature, “I can hardly read your writing. So listen, what are you doing now?”
I balked. “There’s supposed to be a dinner...”
“With those women? Forget it. Come have a drink with me instead.”
“But I—”
“You’ll have more fun with me, I promise.”
He winked—which decided me—and after I’d agreed to go, went to wait for me near the back of the room. Finishing up my signatures, I bid Lise good-bye, glancing over my shoulders, as we talked, to make sure that Roy hadn’t left. And what a different place this cafeteria seemed tonight from all those evenings on which I had sat here alone, waiting for Eli to finish up with his class! Back then I could have imagined no greater happiness than to roost amid the smells of hamburger grease and salad dressing, listening through traffic for the sound of Eli’s voice, the moment when the door would open and he and Comma Splice and Evensha Hopkins, in a riot of laughter, would tumble out ... Afterward, on the way back to his apartment, we might stop for dinner at the restaurant that served fifty-six varieties of soup. No more, though. Now rancor had contaminated the waters of our domesticity; the soup, cooked with the bones of contention, was sour.
Roy, on the other hand, seemed to me the embodiment of freshness that evening, and not only because he cultivated such a straight-from-the-shower affect (and smell); also because, in his urbanity and carriage, the smoothness of his suit and of his words, he was, once again, the very opposite of Eli: a professional, with his own co-op, an MBA from Stanford, furniture he had bought (as opposed to inheriting it from his mother’s basement). Beautiful civilities embraced him, the same ones that Eli, in his irascibility, so consciously and high-handedly flouted. For as I was discovering, the quirky charm of his studio (and Liza’s) could pall quickly. Those little rooms that in winter had seemed so cozy became stale with the arrival of warm weather. My infatuation with Roy (and consequent disillusionment with Eli) initiated a long period during which I was forever shuttling between two worlds, which charmed and repulsed in equal measure: the first, of which Eli was the exemplar, aggressively private, and governed by the creed of personal relations; the second both more cosmopolitan and less commodious, with its grand pooh-bahs and guest lists, that world that the French call—imparting to the word both a lacquer of glamour and the slightest patina of contempt—“society.”
Roy, of course, never used this word. He had grown up poor, in a Philadelphia ghetto, which might have explained (oddly enough) the ease with which he now made his way in the corridors of blue-chip office buildings and blueblooded apartment buildings. Though Baptist and black, he was nonetheless more of a WASP than any WASP could be, just as T. S. Eliot was the consummate Englishman. Thus he did all his shopping at Paul Stuart (never Brooks Brothers), had his eye on a house in Newport, and kept a copy of Paul Fussell’s Class by his bedside. In subsequent months, when our affair really got going, I would find myself being dragged along by him to any number of AmFAR benefits, evenings that were in their way far more brain-numbing than the intimate, Amy-filled, pot-infused gatherings Liza had once convened, yet at which I might at the very least meet a Rockefeller, or hear anecdotes about the latest White House dinner, or catch the eye of the waiter as he spooned new potatoes onto my heated plate ... But I have jumped ahead, as is my habit, too far, too fast. I have to rein myself in, and bring us back to the evening of the panel, on which Roy took me out not, as I half expected, to one of the trendy restaurants where, after work, he sometimes ate a plate of quail and truffle risotto at the bar (these we would frequent later), but rather to a rooftop cocktail lounge on Second Avenue, very forties, all buttoned red plush and highhipped waitresses. From our table we could see the Roosevelt Island tramway, above the lit cables of which a surprisingly voluptuous moon rose, gray-blue, veined with canals the color of Roy’s eyes.
“I’m glad you came,” he said, winking at me again so that I blushed.
“I am too,” I admitted.
Then we drank Manhattans (what else?), and he told me everything he’d liked about my book. I didn’t listen. Quite inconveniently, I thought, Eli had intruded upon our intimacy: Eli who, despite all the forces conspiring to evict him—alcohol, jazz piano, the soft but insistent pressure of Roy’s voice—was nonetheless superimposing himself upon the scene as indelibly as the reflection of a passing waitress on the view outside the window. Alone in his studio, dressed in one of the peculiar outfits he favored while working—a Tyrolean sweater, say, and no pants—he puttered about, tuned his violin, brewed some herbal tea. And all the while he hadn’t a clue that forty blocks uptown, my knee pressed into Roy’s, I was betraying him. That was the thing that got me—not Eli’s suffering, but his innocence—which was why I resolved to lie when I got home, to tell him I’d gone out with Julia and Lise Schiffrin. This was my first adultery, though it preceded by months the first time I had sex with someone else.
After a while Roy stopped talking about my book; instead he just gazed at me. Across the narrow table I studied his face. Because I was a little drunk, I said, “It’s not often you meet someone with black hair and blue eyes.”
“It’s not often you meet someone with black skin and blue eyes. And you, Martin Bauman, you’ve got blue eyes too, though your hair isn’t black. More mouse’s back—Nice Jewish Boy brown.”
“Oh that’s right, you like—” I quieted, not sure whether it would be kosher for me to mention what Kendall had told me months ago, that Roy was a yarmulke queen. Yet if this was the case, shouldn’t he be warned that he was making a mistake in choosing me, who’d never gone to Hebrew school, much less been bar-mitzvahed? Eli would have been more up his fetishistic alley, I suspected, though somehow I couldn’t quite imagine Roy and Eli getting along.
That was the closest we came that night to admitting any mutual attraction. Though more banter followed, soon Eli—or more specifically, my worry that Eli would be irritated if I got back late—propelled me to make excuses, tell Roy good-bye, and hurry home. As we parted, he slid his business card into my hand. “Don’t forget to call,” he said, and I told him I wouldn’t. What I didn’t know was that something was about to happen that would lead to the postponement of that call—and everything it implied—for more than a year.
Eli became a different man during the weeks that led up to my mother’s death, both kinder and less contentious, as if the very gravity of the situation had revived the caregiver in him and sent the combatant into retreat. Gone, suddenly, were the great tempests of resentment to which I had become acclimated; instead, in Seattle, where we were sleeping on my sister’s pullout couch, he took it upon himself to supervise the grocery shopping and the management of the household. He picked up my nephew every afternoon at day care. In the hospital waiting room, where the rest of us were more or less living, he always made sure there was plenty of water and fruit juice around—and not only for us, but for those loved ones of other dying people with whom we were obliged to share that starkly intimate space.
One morning (I made much of the episode in my novel, which whitewashed our relationship as much as it did my own cowardice) he even excoriated a nurse who, upon noticing us hugging in a comer, had asked us to please “stop making such a spectacle” of ourselves. Eli—employing to someone’s actual benefit, for once, that flair for invective that he had honed over years of insults—had flayed the poor woman so pitilessly that in the end she’d had no choice but to limp back to her station, as voided of spirit as the girl he had called, many years earlier, a flat-chested, dog-faced bitch.
This attitude of protectiveness (coupled with a rerouting of hostilities in other directions from my own—that of the nurse, for example) only intensified when we got back to New York; here, too, instead of returning to his old habits of bellicosity, he treated me with an almost excessive tenderness, as if I were an injured creature whose very survival depended upon gentle handling. Nor did I fail to take advantage of this change in his demeanor, which was entirely to my benefit. For now, whenever I did something inept or insensitive, Eli, instead of snapping at me, choked back his vexation. He watched I Love Lucy in bed with me every night. He even got me a dog, an eight-week-old fox terrier called Maisie (via Nora Foy), simply because I had mentioned one day, apropos of nothing, that I wanted to have one. And when, in my simple grievousness, I begged him to take me to stay for a few days with his family—after all, though she wasn’t my mother, at least Harriet was a mother; nor was I above, at that moment, accepting a substitute for the irreplaceable thing I had just lost—he always agreed, even if it meant postponing a yoga lesson, or missing out on a choir rehearsal, or having to cancel a long-planned dinner with Liza.
I remember vividly his parents’ house on Long Island, to which we traveled by train, or if circumstances permitted—if, for instance, Harriet had come into town to take in a concert—by station wagon. It was situated on a wide, sidewalkless thoroughfare that linked the interstate to the village, and that was called, funnily enough, Park Avenue. A vast ornamental lawn, incised in summer with stripes where the power mower had pushed back the grass like the nap of a carpet, separated traffic from the house, which was Colonial, huge and yellow; indeed, somehow it seemed too huge for its inhabitants, who stole about nervously in their own corridors, heated only the principal rooms in winter, and never sat in the living room with its bow windows and silk curtains, its gleaming Steinway, its damask couches. There was a reason for this. Until he was eight, Eli told me, his family had lived in a different house, more modest, and filled with homely, practical furniture from a department store in Westbury. But then his father, deciding that a grander residence was needed to match his grand sense of himself, had moved them out of their comfortingly crowded little neighborhood and into this haughty quasi mansion with its cargo of lowboys and ottomans, flirtatious little footstools and claw-footed coffee tables, which Harriet kept scrupulously clean, yet refused to use. Instead she sat only in the little room off the front hall to which the few items she had been able to salvage from the old house—a consolingly rumpled sofa, two BarcaLoungers, and a battered cherry cabinet—had long since, like poor but dependent cousins, been relegated.
Sometimes, at my insistence, we stayed on Park Avenue for days at a time. Because they were not my own, the rooms comforted me. Everywhere there were emblems of grief—for instance, the Stair-a-La-tor that climbed up the staircase to the second floor and that had been installed the year that Eli’s grandmother had come to die in an upstairs bedroom—yet because it was not my grief, I could regard these emblems with indifference, just as I could listen with indifference to the acrimonious arguments Eli sometimes had with his mother, or the music he alone played on the grand piano, or the mutterings of Marty as he tried to fix (and only broke further) the antiquated VCR. (Though one of the first to come on the market, and state-of-the-art at the time of its purchase, it was now a dinosaur.)
Of my own mother, meanwhile, I tried to think as little as possible. The last time I’d seen her healthy had been that summer in Florida, where she and my father had gone to visit one of his sisters. “If anyone ever tells you growing old is a tragedy,” she’d said to me, “don’t listen to them. Believe me, growing old is wonderful. You know so much.”
I dreamed about her all the time. In one dream (I had it in the guest room on Park Avenue) I received a notice in the mail that at a certain hour, at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, shadowy authorities would be making her “available” for fifteen minutes. In this dream I rushed to make the appointment, fighting traffic the whole way, then found her waiting near where the old Italians play bocci, dressed in a tartan plaid skirt fastened with a safety pin. All ravages smoothed, gazing out at the fanned red ribs of the Golden Gate Bridge, she put her arm around me and pointed to that monument to inescapability, the island of Alcatraz. “Look, Martin,” she said, as if I were still a child whose attention she had to captivate. “Look, honey. Isn’t the world an interesting place?”
Sometimes, during those somber days on Park Avenue, I also thought of Roy. Since returning from Seattle I’d neither called nor heard from him. Even so, his hands caressing the outline of my photograph stayed with me; their imagined touch, which only the book jacket had felt, intimated possibilities of joy, freedom from warfare and sorrow, tranquillity, and at the same moment stimulation, because (of course) such a life was remote from this world; reality had not yet smudged it with dirty fingers. And then Roy, too, would intrude upon my dreams, often in the company of my mother, with whom he walked peacefully on the rocks that front the Pacific near Port Angeles, and where once (it seemed eons ago) I had gone with her to see the sea elephants. Me, I was alone, in the distance, as always, watching.
I did not go home. This was mostly to avoid my father, who in his perfectly reasonable eagerness to get on with his life was making all sorts of changes to the house of which I disapproved. Gone, for instance, was the hydromassage tub that had previously been the Hole; in its place a new bathroom, all chrome and glass, had risen. Where previously the floors had been covered by shag carpeting, new parquet was being laid. He’d even painted the shingles gray, and gotten rid of the bed in which he and my mother had slept, replacing it with a low mahogany platform, a pallet of foam as minimal and sleek as the life for which, in his sorrow, he was preparing himself: all changes that in my view, at least, amounted to acts of desecration, for it seemed to me then that it was his duty to maintain the house as it had always been, as a sort of shrine to his dead wife’s spirit at which her children and grandchildren, whenever they chose, could pay homage. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is usually the old who want to go forward, while the young cling heedlessly to the past.
Much of my time I spent with Harriet. A kind and intelligent woman, she had worried eyes and blond hair for which she had once been famous, but which today she kept short and to the point. Like many daughters of the Depression—like my own mother—she was too well trained in the art of self-denial to think much of her own pleasure. Thus when they were alone, she and Marty never drank wine, rarely went to restaurants, ate plenty of healthful unsalted fish. Let one of her children telephone to announce an imminent visit, however, and the spaghetti to be dressed with a jar of tomato sauce warmed in the microwave would give way to briskets of beef, noodle kugel, chocolate chip cookies. The comfort I took in her home, I see now, must have touched her maternal vanity, yet more to the point was the fact that my presence there, though questionable in its outward semblances—what etiquette guide, after all, explains how to introduce your son’s homosexual lover at the synagogue?—had the side benefit of bringing her elusive, much-loved, first-born Elijah back into the fold. Harriet’s gratitude to me meant that there was little she would not have done to ease my sorrow, few whims of mine she would not have indulged, if only to guarantee that I would keep bringing Eli back.
Yet she drew the line at Christmas. This was a chronic sore spot between us, my fondness for elves and mistletoe and all the other accoutrements of a holiday that for her would forever be summed up by the girls who in her childhood had pushed her off the jungle gym, chanting, “You killed Christ! You killed Christ!” Thus when she saw the little tree that Eli—at my behest—had set up and decorated in his apartment, her response was to weep. “Don’t you know the lights are suppose to represent the drops of Christ’s blood?” she cried. I didn’t know—further evidence of my family’s laxness and ignorance. If she’d had her way, Harriet would have used Christmas as an opportunity to inculcate in me, at last, some knowledge of my own religious heritage. Instead I kept putting in for a tree. I begged for a tree. “You can call it a Chanukah bush if you want,” I reasoned.
“But it’s not our faith.”
Finally, as a concession, she agreed to roast a turkey, so long as it could be accompanied by something decidedly un-Christmasy. (We settled on lasagna.) Most of the morning she and Marty devoted to back taxes; then around five we sat down at the kitchen table. Only the four of us were there. While we ate Marty watched C-Span on the little television. Eventually Harriet got up to clean the kitchen, and I went to call my father, who was spending the holiday at the beach house of some friends. “Happy holidays,” I said to him glumly, as in the background music played, ice clinked in glasses.
“Happy! Ha!” my father answered. “I’m about to cry.”
On New Year’s Day, Eli and I went back to New York; once reinstalled in his apartment I spent most of my time in the loft bed, watching television, just as at his parents’ I had spent most of my time riding the Stair-a-Lator up and down, up and down. Such behavior, needless to say, worried Eli. Eager to remedy the situation, he made it clear that he would be available at any hour, to satisfy any little desire I might have; indeed, all I had to do was mention, in the most off-the-cuff manner, some casual yen—for an ice cream sundae, say, or the video of a favorite movie—and he would be on the phone or out the door to satisfy it. Still, I got no happier. Because I so rarely left it, the apartment took on a stuffy smell that frustrated the athlete in him; after all, spring was coming; he needed fresh air, grass on which to stretch his limbs. Finally one warm morning he threw open all the windows, admitting a breeze big drafts of which he gulped like water. I stayed in bed. “I’m going to take Maisie to the park,” he announced loudly, perhaps in the hope that I might volunteer to join them. But I didn’t.
“Too bad we don’t live closer to the park,” I said, “or you wouldn’t have to take the subway.”
“Would you like that? Would you like to live closer to the park?”
“Sure, I guess.”
A few days later a dentist’s appointment compelled me, for the first time in weeks, to leave the apartment. When I got back, Eli had vacuumed, taken the sheets to the laundry, even made the bed—no mean feat, when the bed is ten feet off the ground. “I have a surprise for you,” he said and, sitting me down, announced that he had just sublet his studio for a year to an NYU undergraduate, renting in its stead the uptown apartment of a friend of his, a composer called Glenn Schaefer who was about to leave for a sabbatical in Florence. Ostensibly the purpose of this rather troublesome and complex removal was to fulfill my wish that we live closer to Central Park, the healing properties of which Eli advocated mightily, not only for us, but also for Maisie, who could run free there as she never could in the East Village. Also, we would have more space: a one-bedroom instead of two studios. Also, if I followed his lead and sublet my own apartment, we could try out, as we never had before, the experiment of actually living together.
To work out the details, Eli and I went to have dinner with Glenn at his apartment. Comparatively speaking, he was a new friend of Eli’s; that is to say, they had met only a few months before, during the intermission of a Met performance of Aida, where in the men’s room Glenn had tried to pick him up—unsuccessfully, as it turned out, though they became great pals anyway. More recently, Eli had shared with Glenn the unfinished string trio on which he had been working for so many years, and to which, in the wake of Glenn’s suggestions, he had recently returned with renewed zeal. As a composer, Glenn was notorious for his “Nonet in F-sharp Minor Never to Be Played,” a postmodernist conundrum that had earned him ridicule from the New York Times, as well as veneration from the music students who now flocked to his composition seminar at Rutgers.
What Eli saw in him I was never able to fathom. In his early forties, troglodytic and muscular, with an unmown blond face and heavy-lidded eyes, he suffered from terrible halitosis, as well as that more typical New York malady, a sort of halitosis of the mind, the victims of which feel compelled to share with you, from the word go, all the most scurrilous details of their lives. Thus at dinner, in response to an innocent inquiry on my part as to why he liked Florence so much, he had led me to a bookshelf filled with thirty years’ worth of sketchpads, pulled out “1984,” and, handing it to me, said, “Turn to page seventeen.” I did. A hirsute youth, wearing only white boxer shorts, sat open-legged on a Dante chair. “His name’s Pierluigi,” Glenn said rapturously, “and he plays double bass in the Orchestra della Toscana. Straight of course, but I’ve had him. If you go to Florence, you could have him too.”
He returned to the kitchen, where Eli was supervising the final stages of a chicken tetrazzini—chicken tetrazzini being, as it happened, Glenn’s gastronomic calling card. This left me alone in the sunken living room with his boyfriend of the moment, an underfed Russian émigré called Ivan, in his early twenties, whom Glenn liked to tease by instructing to repeat what he referred to as “that sentence.”
“But vy?” Ivan would protest. “Vy you vant me to say this stupid thing?”
“Come on. Please.”
Ivan would huff. “All right, all right. ‘Ve must get rid of moose and squirrel.’ But vy is this funny? Vy?”
Poor Ivan, this evening, appeared desolate, no doubt because in a few days his lover of the last several months would be departing for Tuscany, for umbrella pines and ribollita and a hundred Pierluigis. Slumped on a sofa from the brocade covers of which dust rose in mushroom clouds, he gazed out the window at windows. Traffic noise roared up. Me, I was too busy studying the apartment to take much notice of him. It was a very weird place. Table lamps and wall sconces with red shades threw an opium-dennish light against the walls, which were painted black; photographs mottled them, many of famous people, including a Russian actor I recognized, naked against a cream-colored screen. His penis, though flaccid, hung halfway to his knee.
“Oh, that,” Glenn said when I asked him about it. “A little treasure of mine. Avedon took it—on the condition that it never be shown publicly.”
“Then how did you get it?”
“I used to have a friend who worked in his dark room. Sometimes he’d sneak me a print...” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Dead now. My friend, as well as the actor.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Isn’t it?” Glenn leaned closer. “I only wish all Russians...” And indicating poor Ivan, he sighed loudly, so that I caught a whiff of his sour-sweet, mulchy breath.
After that the famous chicken tetrazzini was served. Because he talked so much, Glenn ended up eating very little, whereas Ivan ate huge quantities of food very slowly, like Klothilde, the poor relation in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Neither he nor I took much of a role in the conversation, which centered on the vilifications a pair of opera singers were reputed to hurl at each other during rehearsals: much more up Eli’s alley than mine, that topic. Also, I was far too busy trying to figure out how on earth I was going to live in such an unlikely place to pay much attention to what was being said. Around the sunken bowl of the living room, a collection of human and animal skulls, memento mori and shrunken heads, was ranged. This wasn’t so bad—such objects could easily be stowed in a closet—and yet could the same be said for the vast decoupage of snapshots with which Glenn had covered one entire wall of the bedroom, a farrago of faces and bodies I didn’t know, arranged with such intricate (and intimate) care that once undone, I suspected, it could never be reconstructed? It was to this mesh of Glenn’s history—what Eli called his “little black wall”—that we would wake every morning during the months we lived there. While we dressed, strangers’ faces scrutinized our nakedness. In the night they infiltrated our dreams.
The next week I sublet my apartment to Julia Baylor, who had just broken up with her boyfriend. Then, dog and computers in tow, we moved uptown. Earlier, Glenn had encouraged Eli and me to take advantage of his collection of CDs and videos, especially the pornographic ones, which, he’d hinted, were a far cry from the usual West Hollywood fare. Our curiosity piqued, we put one in the VCR the first night. It turned out to be a medley of Glenn’s favorite scenes from various commercial productions, spliced together to provide a sort of route map to his orgasms. Indeed, at the end of the tape a clip for which he must have felt a special fondness, in which a burly man in his forties plunges a dildo into a blond boy’s upturned ass, was repeated over and over, as if a needle had gotten stuck on a record.
On another tape, the usual porn gave way, after a few minutes, to footage of a naked Ivan sitting cross-legged on Glenn’s bed with another youth. This boy was even skinnier than Ivan was, and had terrible pimples on his back. While off screen Glenn’s voice issued orders, the pair sifted through a cardboard box filled with whips, buttplugs, and vibrators, eventually laying hands on a sort of two-ended dildo which reminded me of the pushmi-pullyu in Doctor Dolittle. “Okay, Ivan,” Glenn’s voice instructed from the distance, “now take the lube and grease up Ignat’s butt.”
At this point Eli switched off the tape. “Most shocking,” he said. “Maisie is scandalized. I’m putting her to bed.”
Carrying the dog under his arm like a purse, he disappeared through the bedroom door. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I called after him. Instead of following, however, I turned the video back on. What excited me about it was less the fact of Ivan’s presence—he wasn’t at all my type—as the knowledge that only a few nights before, in this very room, he and I had eaten dinner together, conversed, exchanged bored glances across the table. This was the intoxication of the real, and I was experiencing it for the first time: that moment when the line between what is imagined and what is smelled, touched, tasted, suddenly blurs. Wasn’t the sofa on which he and Ignat were currently engaging in such a fascinatingly rarefied act of fornication the very one on which I, pants around my ankles, now sat? True, it was distasteful to think that from across an ocean—by proxy, as it were—Glenn was seducing me as, despite his bad breath, he had presumably seduced Ivan, Ignat, and the double bassist from Florence. Yet unlike Eli, I submitted willingly to his remote control. I did not go into the bedroom. I stayed, and I watched.
Living in that apartment, I later told Roy, was a bit like being trapped in one of Glenn’s videos, in the endless loop of his tics and compulsions. From every wall, every cornice and doorknob, he bore down, the whole corrosive mess of him, squeezing the breath out of me as no doubt, heaving over him, he must have squeezed the breath out of poor scrawny Ivan. And though at night, it was true, the living room took on a certain sheen of metropolitan glamour, the lamps with their fringed scarlet shades glowed languidly, the light of passing taxis, bouncing upward, made a pleasing show against the mullioned windows (so that I understood, for a moment, how easy it would be to succumb to Glenn’s strategic caresses), by daybreak his almost fungal presence—immanent in the books on his shelves and the suits in his closet—would have reasserted itself, as heavy as the smell of old beer and cigarettes in a nightclub from which the last partygoer, at five in the morning, has just departed.
It was during the weeks immediately following our move uptown that I became accident-prone. Walking one afternoon down Broadway, a movie marquee across the way having caught my eye, I tripped over the curb, twisted my ankle, and landed nose down on the pavement. Blood poured out, strangers screamed, though in the end it turned out merely to be a surface wound; no bones broken. Then a few days later, driving Harriet’s station wagon through the Midtown Tunnel, my eyes blackened as if I had been beaten (and one of the ironies of my accidents was that they always left me looking beaten, so that many people began to suspect Eli of assaulting me), I nearly rear-ended a Hampton Jitney on its way to Montauk. Eli cursed my spaciness, almost got angry, then controlled himself. How on earth could I be so careless? he asked. Did I have a death wish? I hotly denied it. Even so, balancing atop a precarious ladder in Glenn’s apartment a week or so later, I stretched too far to adjust a book and crashed to the ground, bruising my hip so that it turned a purplish black. As it happened I was alone at the time, which was fortunate: I couldn’t have borne Eli’s reproachments. Dragging myself to the sofa, my ankle still aching from when I’d hit my nose, I wondered if perhaps he was right, if I had a death wish. And yet I didn’t think I wanted to die. If anything, I had a life wish. I was teasing fate to prove my invincibility.
The truth was, in the wake of my mother’s death I was having to confront for the first time the very phenomenon of mortality from which her illness, curiously enough, had always protected me. This, I think, is why I was constantly walking into lampposts or slipping on the ice all that winter: to test my own immunity, to establish that what had happened to her (not to mention what had happened to Philip Crenshaw) would never happen to me. For everywhere I turned, it seemed, someone was dying. Lars, after a swift illness—five days!—was dead. So was Eve Schlossberg’s brother. So, for that matter, was Theodoric Vere Swanson III, the first boy I’d ever slept with. That I knew none of them well, curiously enough, only added to the sense of bewilderment that the news of their deaths called up in me. For it seemed that there should have been everywhere vigorous young men, most of whom one hardly knew, running up and down city streets, chatting and eating and looking for just the right dining table for their apartments; instead of which, mysteriously, there were not.
These were dark days—literally. A blanketing of gray, the color of the iron curtain, as I envisioned it in childhood, descended over the city and would not lift. It was thick, miasmal. Dusk came at five or so, bringing a bit of relief in that it cloaked, for a time, the straitjacket of the sky. Then in the morning we would look for the tiniest breach in the clouds, and not find it. There was little reason to go out. The air was wet and chilly, and in the neighborhood shops everybody had a cold.
I was trying to write about Joey, about being robbed, albeit not very successfully. The problem was that in those days I clung to the notion that any misfortune could be redeemed through its own recounting; and while it is true that the cooking down of experience into something at once more beautiful and less inchoate than itself can be a cathartic process, clarifying as well as purgative, such transformative episodes are both rare and costly, requiring a degree of self-knowledge I did not then possess; what was really a subtle and complex negotiation between fate and art I misconstrued as the crudest kind of barter, in some cases a literal barter, as if by earning more money from the story I wrote about Joey than he had stolen from me, I could not only compensate for, but somehow profit from his attack.
In the wake of my accident, I left the apartment less and less frequently. Most of the time I stayed in Glenn’s bedroom, trying to write or—no, not reading—re-reading those books that I could trust to provide a sedative effect, a sort of literary Valium: Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, the more cheerful of Barbara Pym’s tales of provincial English life, the Mapp and Lucia series by E. F. Benson, the filmed version of which my mother, by dying, had just missed. Or I watched television, old Warner Brothers cartoons I’d already seen a hundred times and that I hope will continue to be repeated, every afternoon, for eternity. The frenetic interactions of Tweety and Sylvester, Tom and Jerry—from which a scrim of glass protected me—lent to those days the same hushed air of convalescence that had marked the afternoons when I’d been kept home from school with a cold, and over which, in recollection at least, a subtle rain is always falling. For memory has its own weather; even today, in my mind, a cloud cover hangs over our months in Glenn’s apartment, making it difficult to distinguish, in all that cold, wet, concentrated gray, the real source of my unhappiness, with which a hundred mirages furiously competed. No matter that I told myself and others I was fine, “resting,” recuperating; the truth is, I had entered into what clinicians term an “acute vegetative depression,” albeit one that refused to recognize its own face in the mirror. And such a state, like a warm bath in a cold room, is easier to drop into than to climb out of. Left to my own devices, I got fat; my breath became sour. Eli was horrified, but checked himself from saying anything, lest my lethargy should be some necessary step in the grieving process that it would be lethal for him to interrupt.
As is often the case, my sorrow coincided, for him, with a period of great happiness and productivity. If Glenn’s apartment brought out the worst in me, coaxed into bloom some germ of sordidness I carried within myself, it had the opposite effect on him. Most afternoons he disappeared for hours, with Maisie, into the park; they ran and played fetch, and fell in with a neighborhood clique, incipient militants whose shared resentment of the leash laws had inspired them to revolutionary tactics. These new friends of his were always engaging in little acts of civil disobedience, such as letting their dogs off the leash all at once in the presence of a patrolman, who would then be hard-pressed to issue summonses. Afterward, Eli would burst back into the apartment, sweaty and exuberant from his exploits, which he would share with me even as he shimmied out of his clothes, switched on the shower. Laconic on the bed, I would pretend to listen; aim the remote control toward the television; watch passively as game shows, talk shows, soap operas sped by illegibly, stations seen from a moving train. What we were engaging in was an unspoken battle of wills, his enthusiasm versus my lassitude, which always won out. Finally, discouraged by my silence, he too would lapse into silence, lie down next to me, and start reading, or else go out again, as if to protest my dissolution, the irritating and obvious fact that the things he had hoped would make me happy, and for the sake of which he had moved us uptown, were making me miserable.
He had a point. I was not cooperating with his efforts to rouse me. For instance, whenever he invited me to go with him to the opera, or to a concert at Carnegie Hall, I always said no, claiming that classical music bored me. (Yet later, with someone else, such music would become a mainstay of my life.) Whenever he entreated me to accompany him and Maisie on one of their park frolics, I begged off. (Yet later, with another dog, I would spend whole days there.) What rankled him even more than my refusals, moreover, was probably the suspicion that they owed less to any real difference in our temperaments than to an unwillingness on my part to join in, and thus enhance, his pleasure, as he had enhanced mine, say, every time he’d sat through an episode of I Love Lucy with me. For it was obvious that I was blaming on circumstance a disaffection to which, from blindness or selfishness, I would nonetheless not fess up. What was less obvious was the source of this disaffection. Clearly it was nothing so simple as a conflict in tastes—his for Joan Sutherland versus mine for Joni Mitchell—because such decorative kinks affection, in the long run, always smooths out. Nor was it the erotic threat of another, of Roy, for instance, against whose clean-cut positivity, even if he’d been around at that dark moment, I would have had to shield my eyes. Nor was it resentment at any mistreatment I believed myself to have suffered at Eli’s hands, for by then I had come to accept my own partial responsibility for our warfare. No, what I was feeling was something far more unreasoned than that, something more akin to the base antipathy that provokes one dog, without explanation, to growl at another. There is no pretty way to say this. I wanted to love Eli, I tried valiantly to love him, indeed, on some primitive level I probably did love him; but I didn’t like him.
There, I’ve said it. I didn’t like him. Very likely he didn’t like me, either. That he loved me I am fairly certain, in that heedless, indiscriminate way of siblings whom history has bound together, yet who within an hour of reuniting are at each other’s throats. And yet—the vast history of family life to the contrary—this is never a very good basis for conjugal union. You have to like each other as well as love each other, else the thousand irritating little details that make up the human spirit will drive you to rage—as, for instance, Eli’s habit of shucking off his clothes like a snake shedding his skin, which in someone else I might have found charming, drove me to grind my teeth, ball my hands into fists. Why? Because it was Eli. Nor was he indifferent to my aversion, which no doubt bruised his ego. And how unjust it must have seemed to him—yet another example of his fatedness—that at the very moment of his own fledgling happiness, I should be militating against our marital happiness! Still, there it was. He held back from expressing his frustration, while I remained immovably perched atop the slide of my destiny, too frightened to go down yet too proud to admit defeat.
My social life dwindled to nearly nothing. A few weeks earlier, a critic had published a diatribe against what he called the “scourge” of minimalism, thus initiating a media backlash against the “brat pack.” Around the same time Sam Stallings’s second novel came out to what could only be called barbarous reviews, at which point the party invitations dried up. This was just as well: I was hardly in the mood to see people. Instead, when I got bored or lonely, I talked over the phone with Liza, from whom the combination of our move uptown and her new infatuation with Ben Pollack had distanced Eli of late. No longer did she convene her old “afternoons” with Ethan, Janet, and the Amys; instead, she told me, she preferred to spend her time alone with Ben, with whom she insisted that she had fallen irretrievably in love—a declaration that Eli and I, quite naturally, took with a grain of salt; after all, throughout their long history, hadn’t she claimed on other occasions to have fallen hopelessly in love with men, only to give them up as soon as some pretty girl caught her attention? In our experience, Liza’s lesbianism was such an endemic fact of her character, even of her physiology, as to render moot any debate over sexual confusion. Yet now she was insisting not only that she loved Ben, but that she loved him in spite of a conscious decision she had made to commit herself unwaveringly to lesbianism—a decision, moreover, of which he was fully aware, and on which she had no intention of reneging.
“But, Liza,” I said in frustration, “isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant?” In response to which she shot back that in her view to reject someone you loved just because he was a man was as dishonest as to reject someone you loved just because she was a woman. Prejudice went both ways, she insisted; existed on both sides of the erotic divide.
Eli, for selfish reasons, would not be persuaded. Since the weekend at Nora Foy’s, he had been enjoying a rare equilibrium in his relationship with Liza, who appeared finally to have realized that she could no longer take their friendship for granted. For a long while she had been at his beck and call, free when he wanted her and undemanding when he didn’t; but then Ben had come along and, as is so often the case when someone has a new lover, suddenly she didn’t seem to need Eli anymore. Nor did his insistence that this didn’t bother him, that on the contrary, her sudden lack of availability came as a relief, sparing him from having to take part in the “cult of her crises,” keep him from needing to express, whenever her name came up, his disappointment at her “cowardice,” not to mention his conviction that by choosing Ben, she was merely buckling under to convention and trying to get back at Eli for what she saw as the shoddy way he had sometimes treated her. Meeting Ben might have made things easier for Eli, by giving a human face to her treachery; only Eli didn’t want to meet Ben. To him Ben wasn’t a person so much as a figurehead, allegorical snout thrust forward from the prow of that vast and totemic cruiser, heterosexuality. He and Liza talked for hours on the phone, they argued and hung up on each other and called each other back again, she tried ceaselessly to persuade him of her sincerity while he tried ceaselessly to dissuade her from her “betrayal.” Neither succeeded in convincing the other of anything. They had reached an impasse—not so much between conflicting ideologies, as between his old-fashioned belief that sexual identity was a fixed boundary, the violation of which amounted to a kind of treason, and her contrary pleas for a more supple definition of the erotic self.
Things only got worse after that. At the dinner that Eli and I, after much nagging from Liza, finally agreed to go to with her and Ben, Eli hardly spoke at all. Ben seemed a likable enough fellow—handsome in his way, and obviously intelligent, though timid, which was hardly surprising, given the slight, almost lewd, almost flirtatious, and in any case inquisitional smile that Eli, in his silence, kept casting toward him. To compensate for Eli’s refusal to open his mouth, I talked as much as I could, too much, in the end: I became, once again, the babbling youngest child who had so bored my brother and sister. Liza joined in: we filled the air with banter. Yet the dinner, despite our valiant efforts to salvage it, was a failure. Indeed, as Eli and I walked home afterward, he could only shake his head, interspersing sighs of disbelief with the occasional remark about how Liza had been dressed. “Did you notice she’s growing her hair long again?” “Did you notice she’s wearing two earrings again?” “Did you see she’s carrying a purse?”
“But, Eli, she’s always carried a purse.”
“Yes, but not like that. This time, walking away with him, that purse swinging from her arm, she might have been Sada.”
“She wasn’t wearing a skirt.”
“She will be next time.”
Alas, there was no next time. That evening, closing himself up with Maisie in Glenn’s bedroom, Eli called Liza on the telephone for the last time. For almost four hours they yelled at each other. Because I had the television in the living room switched on, I heard almost nothing of their fight. Nor, in truth, did I want to: I could guess in advance its import. Whenever Eli’s voice grew loud enough to penetrate the closed door, I turned the volume up higher. I remember that I was watching the porno channel on New York cable, the Voyeur Vision lady, whom men called for five dollars a minute to witness her live responses to their live lust.
“Voyeur Vision lady, I want to be your slave!”
“Yeah? You want to be my slave? Then get down on your knees and lick the television!”
After a while I must have fallen asleep, for when I opened my eyes again, instead of the Voyeur Vision lady, I found myself looking at Eli. He was smiling in that curiously lurid way he had smiled at Ben.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said, and stretched. “What time is it?”
“Three.”
“Have you been on the phone all this time?”
He nodded.
“What happened?”
“It’s over.” He repeated his smile. “Liza and me.”
I sat up. “Oh, Eli...”
“But it’s okay, Martin! In fact I’m glad. Because it’s been on the way for months, hasn’t it, when you think about it? And some relationships—this is what I told Liza—you just outgrow. They’re too fixed in their own time, they won’t mature, which means that to sustain them you also have to sustain the conditions that nurture them—and that would really be impossible, wouldn’t it, because Liza and I, we’re not college kids anymore, and if we pretended we were until we were old and gray—well, that wouldn’t be very attractive, would it?”
“Still, she’s your best friend.”
“Correction. You’re my best friend.” He kissed me. “And now, just think” (sitting next to me on the brocade sofa, he put his arm around my shoulder) “we’re finally free in a way we never have been. I mean, we don’t have to worry about Liza being competitive, or making demands, or insisting we all sleep in the same bed. Or her phone calls. Or all those tired rituals, that weekend at Nora’s, the afternoons.” He glanced at me guardedly, a little sadly. “Not that I’m suggesting that you should feel under any pressure to change your relationship with her—I mean, after all, your friendship with her is completely independent of mine. For instance, she’d love for you to come to the wedding—”
“What wedding?”
“But didn’t I tell you? That’s what started the fight in the first place. She and Ben are getting married.”
“But they’ve just met!”
“I know, I know. Needless to say I won’t be going. I can’t give this sort of thing my seal of approval. You’re another matter, though. You could go.”
“Are you kidding? Without you? Not a chance.” I rubbed my tired temples. “Oh, it seems so sad, Liza actually carrying through on all those old threats. I wonder if she’ll regret it, if someday she’ll wake up and think, What the hell have I done?”
“But she insists she’s still a lesbian. That’s what’s so strange. She says she’ll even keep writing about it—only she won’t act on it.” Eli sighed. “Well, I’d better take Maisie out. She’s about to burst.”
“Want me to come?”
He looked surprised. “That’s nice of you, Martin, only ... no thanks. I need to think. Anyway, it’s late.”
“Okay.”
He left then. Stepping into the bathroom, looking at myself in the big mirror, I tried to reconcile my reaction to the news of this rupture—a genuine feeling of remorse, not only for myself, but for Liza and Eli too—with what I knew would be the more fitting response of a loyal lover (not to mention the response most likely to gratify Eli), a combination of shock and relief. For as I tried to remind myself, only a year ago, in the days when Liza had seemed such a threat to me, it was exactly this sort of rift that I had hoped for. Only now, in the mirror, I was no longer the boy whom Roy Beckett had taken out for a postpanel Manhattan; instead, with my puffy eyes and unkempt hair, I looked more like Glenn than myself, as if his spirit, the spirit of his apartment, were possessing me.
Bankruptcy! Only now does it strike me that this chapter, the hardest in the book to write and the longest in gestation, is Chapter Eleven. Oh, why did I refuse so adamantly (when it would have helped) to name what was rising in my bones that night, and had been rising steadily since the hour of my mother’s death—as cold as the ache of a twisted ankle, an echo of which you know (and isn’t this the first sign that youth is over?) you’ll be feeling for the rest of your life: the penetrating chill of loss?
A few weeks after that, on the spur of the moment, Eli and I cashed in our frequent-flyer miles and went to Italy. What inspired us to make this trip, I think, was the delusion—so common to couples in trouble—that a change of scenery will automatically revive the inner scenery, freshening a tired love; and yet to believe this is to ignore the hermetic nature of marriage, which little outside itself can touch. At first, it was true, the shock of new sights and sounds perked us up a bit. Indeed, in Venice we were almost happy, tripping along the elevated boards that crisscross San Marco during acqua alta, when floodwaters turn the piazza into a wading pool. Yet it did not last. Instead this sensation of new possibilities, not only in the world but in ourselves, dissipated as we made our way down the peninsula. By Bologna I was depressed again, Eli frustrated, as always, at his inability to make me feel better. Then we tried the next desperate measure couples take under such circumstances: we invited someone else in to liven things up, in this case Glenn, whom Eli called from the train station in Florence. Yet as it turned out, Glenn was leaving that night for Paris. We had time only to drink a coffee with him, after which he graciously offered us his apartment on Via dei Neri to sleep in before departing himself for a new romance and some concerts of the Ensemble Intercomperain.
That afternoon, walking with Eli through the Piazza della Signoria, amid the spring traffic of tourists and pigeons I noticed a tall, hunched, familiar-looking woman posed earnestly before the statue of Perseus. “My God,” I said, “I think that’s Lise Schiffrin.” And stepping nearer to where this woman, Blue Guide in hand, was peering at the streaked bronze musculature of the sculpture, I saw that I was right: she was, unmistakably, Lise Schiffrin. “Hello,” I said, and she turned. It took her a second to register who I was, but once she did she smiled winningly, so that I could see the flecks of lipstick on her teeth. She was wearing a soft black leather coat, very expensive, and a lot of jewelry.
“Martin,” she said, offering me one of her long hands to shake, at which point I introduced her to Eli. “Oh, what a pleasure to meet you,” she told him, then turned to me and asked, “By the way, how’s that very good-looking friend of yours—you know, the one you stood us up for after the panel?”
Eli blinked. “Oh, Roy,” I said. “He’s fine, thanks. Listen, would you like to have a coffee? If you’re free, that is—we don’t want to interrupt your day. It’s just such a surprise and a pleasure, running into you—”
“No, I’d love to,” Lise said. “We’ll go to Rivoire.” And, taking Eli’s arm, she led us across the piazza to a big cafe from the tables of which, in nice weather, you could admire the fake David and the Palazzo Vecchio.
“Clearly you know Florence better than we do,” Eli said, sitting down.
“Oh, I try to come a couple of times a year. I’ve got a friend here, perhaps you know her...” (She named a hugely famous shoe designer.)
“Well, of course, by reputation,” I said.
“Oh, you should really meet her. She’s quite wonderful. Well!” And, smiling, she opened her enormous eyes to the fullest possible extent. “So how long has it been since that historic panel? More than a year! Is it possible?”
“I’m afraid it wasn’t the most stimulating evening.”
“Decidedly not. In fact, if it hadn’t been for you, Martin, it would have been a complete washout. He really saved the day,” she added for the benefit of Eli, who was busy trying to signal a waiter. “Poor Julia and I hardly knew what to say, while that awful what’s-her-name—Violet Hummingbird or whatever—”
“Wasn’t she terrible?”
“I’ll tell you, in all my years in New York—and though I haven’t been a writer for very long, I’ve traveled in other fairly, shall we say, or at least I used to think so, cosmopolitan circles—I’ve never met such an operator.”
Eli was now lifting his arm into the air, snapping his fingers at the waiter, who elected to ignore him. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “Such rudeness. And only because we’re foreigners.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” Lise assured him. “The waiters here are always rude. It’s their mandate. You shouldn’t take it personally. So that friend of yours, the good-looking one,” she continued to me, “what’s he—”
Eli was on his feet. “Signore,” he shouted in his opera Italian, “per favore, siamo aspettando. ”
“One moment, please,” the waiter shouted back, “stay calm, please.”
“No, I won’t stay calm. You’ve served four groups that arrived after we did, and—”
The waiter made a gesture, at which point Eli let fly an English obscenity that silenced Lise, and that the waiter must have understood, for suddenly he abandoned the old woman he was serving and marched over to our table in high dudgeon. Cheeks bulging, he and Eli stood eye to eye, nose to nose, and screamed.
“This is absurd. Just because we are Americans—”
“Ma non, it is not that you are American, it is that you are vulgar and ugly. You do not behave this way in my cafe—”
“And you do not behave this way to a paying customer who has come in good faith and expects to be—”
“Eli, please,” I interjected. “It’s not worth—”
“Shut up.”
“Please leave,” the waiter ordered.
“Perhaps we’d better go,” said Lise, standing.
“Eli,” I repeated, “I really don’t think this is worth—”
“Oh, this is wonderful,” Eli said, “thank you very much, Martin, for being such a support to me when I’m trying to defend myself. Excuse me, Lise, there’s no need for you to leave, you haven’t been asked to. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, but I can’t bear this anymore. I can’t bear any of it anymore.”
Then he yanked his jacket off the back of his chair and went. I stood. “Eli,” I called, as he ran toward Via Calzaiuoli, turned a comer onto one of the little side streets, and was lost.
I sat down again. People were looking. Lise, her purse on the table, was busily redoing her eye makeup.
“I’m sorry,” I said, laughing slightly. “I’m afraid that sometimes Eli gets a little—hot under the collar, shall we say.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she answered placidly; then, arching her face toward mine, she added, “Listen, if you want to go after him—”
“No, no. What’s the point? I wouldn’t find him. And anyway, I hardly want to seem to be giving the green light to this kind of behavior. Or to miss an opportunity to spend some time with you ...”
“That’s so sweet of you,” she said, trying to suppress—or so it seemed to me—the look of bottomless pity filling her eyes. “It must be ... difficult for you.”
“Yes,” I affirmed, in the tone of someone making a long-withheld confession. “Yes, it is.” At which point the waiter, at long last, came to take our orders.
An hour or so later, a little drunk from too many Campari and sodas, I returned to Glenn’s apartment on Via dei Neri. Eli wasn’t back yet, which was a relief: I didn’t feel up to talking to him. Instead I opened a program from a concert given the week before by the Orchestra della Toscana that I had noticed loitering on top of the piano. Looking in the back, I scanned the names of the double bassists until I came to “Pierluigi Pellegrini.” A phone book in the kitchen provided his address—Via Ghibellina, just around the comer—and telephone number, which I dialed.
“Pronto?” a youthful voice answered after one ring.
Then I explained that I was a friend of Glenn’s from New York, that I was staying at his apartment while he was in Paris, and that he had suggested I give him a call. To my surprise Pierluigi immediately invited me to tea at his apartment. “But when? Now?” I asked.
Why not indeed? “Great,” I said. “I’ll be over in a few minutes.” And, hurrying out of the apartment—making sure, first, that Eli wasn’t approaching from either direction on Via dei Neri—I walked briskly through the oncoming twilight to Via Ghibellina, where Pierluigi greeted me at the door to his flat, offered me Fanta because he had no tea, sat me down on his sofa, asked me if I did not agree that Glenn was the best and most loyal of friends, not to mention a genius, and pointed out a pair of Dante chairs he had inherited from his grandmother. “Why, I recognize that chair,” I said. “It’s in Glenn’s drawing of you...”
“You mean the drawing where I’m only wearing my boxer?”
I nodded. “I hope you don’t mind that he showed it to me.”
“Oh, no. I’m proud of my body.” He sat next to me. “I am so grateful to Glenn that he sent you to me,” he went on, putting his big, warm hands on my cheeks and pulling my face toward his crotch; nor did I object to the celerity, the lack of ceremony, with which he performed this maneuver. For it was what I had come for, I knew, so I did exactly what was expected of me, and not only by Pierluigi, but by Glenn, by Eli, most crucially, by myself. Letting go of all prudishness, I stripped him to his shorts. I posed him in the Dante chair. And then, for twenty minutes or so on a cold spring Florentine afternoon, I “had” him.