I BECAME A SLUT. It was the natural next step, this fall into the slipstream, this immersion in tongues and sensation where once there had been only ideas and screens. Now, instead of asking Eli to take me along when he went to visit his parents on weekends, I’d beg off his invitations, so that I could stay in New York and devote myself to sex. Nor was it difficult, even when he was with me, to deceive him, for we hardly spent any time together anymore. If I’d found out he’d been having an affair I would have been glad, for the simple reason that an adultery on his part would have lifted the onus from mine. (To such a low point had our great, our exemplary love sunk that I no longer thought in terms of ideals. I thought in terms of what I could get away with.)
Otherwise, when questioned, I lied. I said I had a date to eat kosher Chinese food with Sara Rosenzweig, or to see a movie with Kendall, when really I was planning to go to a safe sex club an advertisement for which I’d read in the back of the New York Native, a place where the customers were one another’s pornography, and “lifeguards” wearing pink armbands patrolled the premises to make sure no penis ever entered illegally into a mouth or anus. We were at a transitional moment in the scurrilous history of the AIDS epidemic. Activism—the glory years of ACT UP—remained for the future. At the same time those early days of panic and uncertainty, when total abstinence was urged as the only surefire method for avoiding infection—these, at least, were well behind us. No longer did fear of disease corrode every act of intimacy. Instead it was generally accepted that so long as one adhered rigorously to the rules of “safe sex,” HIV transmission could be dodged. Yet what were those rules? There lay the problem. For on procedural matters—which were, finally, the heart of the matter—none of the experts seemed to be in agreement; thus in Germany posters in gay bars advised oral sex as a safe alternative to fucking, even as in New York similar posters were asserting that oral sex could be just as risky as anal sex, even if the person whose penis you had taken in your mouth (I thought anxiously of Pierluigi) did not ejaculate. (Did this mean that what was dangerous in New York was safe in Düsseldorf?) Likewise, while the authorities were united, at least, on the point that condoms provided an effective means of blocking the virus, how many of us knew, back then, that the ones made out of lambskin (which later, naively, Roy and I used twice) gave no protection whatsoever? How many of us knew, for that matter, that Vaseline could cause a latex condom to erode? Confronted with such ambiguities, some people—most of them older than I—elected to give up sex altogether, on the theory that once you’d become inured to the licentious abandon of the “old days,” such a cramped approximation as safe sex, which was to sucking and fucking what a dietetic hard candy is to chocolate mousse, was simply beside the point.
More optimistic souls took on the role of cheerleaders for masturbation, of which a Gay Men’s Health Crisis brochure declared: “Not only is jerking off with a buddy risk-free and fun, it’s hot? Music to my ears! For though such a promotion might represent to the new celibates merely a futile and annoying attempt to make the unpalatable palatable—“It’ll never work,” Gerald Wexler argued, “people would always rather have real sex”—to me the prohibition had the odd effect of giving the green light to the acts I liked best. (Everything was ideological in those days; masturbation, according to post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS thinking, was not only childish but oppressive, a reminder of the closet and its privations.) In retrospect, I don’t know whether the patronage of safe sex that marked those years brought to the fore in me a strain of adolescent eroticism that social pressures had heretofore suppressed, or whether, in a subconscious response to the newfound intertwining of eros with disease, I had constructed a desire to suit the limitations with which I was faced. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. What is important is that those of us who had hang-ups stayed alive. (We were not the majority, though. Indeed, even at the safe sex club I couldn’t help but notice the rapacity with which, when the “lifeguard” was looking the other way, certain of my fellows would bolt down for a quick suck, as if what really excited them was not sex itself but the contravention of authority.)
Much later, I had a funny conversation about those clubs with the husband of a friend of mine, a man who could not fathom why I should find it arousing to be in a room where seventy-five men were masturbating all at once. “Well,” I countered, “wouldn’t you find it arousing to be in a room where seventy-five women were masturbating all at once?”—a scenario the appeal of which, he had to confess, made more sense to him, albeit purely on the level of fantasy: “Women wouldn’t put up with it,” he insisted, which was probably true. Yet with women or men, he went on, wouldn’t the room get boring after a while? I had to admit that it did; indeed, by my third or fourth visit to the safe sex club its allure had already begun to pall, much as tea grows weaker with every soak of the bag. I hated it when someone I knew waved or smiled at me, or a foolish voice called out of the mists, “Excuse me, but aren’t you Martin Bauman? I loved your stories”—words I shooed away like flies. For at that moment Martin Bauman was the last person I wanted to be; indeed, I wanted to forget him, the baggage—of which there was more every year—that he lugged around with him, and that made the footloose shamblings of his early youth seem so improbable.
Homosexual men are adepts at the banalization of the subversive. And this is in large part, I think, because we are men—no, worse than that, men besotted by masculinity, whose libidos no woman’s touch will ever temper. Proust may have been right when he implied that the “invert” is at heart a woman. Nonetheless there is much in him that is essentially and fatally male: habits of competition, relentlessness, denial, dissimulation. In fact it may be that when heterosexual men (including the friend mentioned earlier) balk not only at the effeminacy of queens, but at their lack of self-discipline, what they are really protesting is the degree to which we hold up a mirror to their own appetite, which perhaps only the influence of women keeps in check. (By the same token, if critics responded with ire to a theorist’s recent suggestion that male masturbation is in essence a homosexual act, it may have been less because the idea itself was outrageous than because in every man’s masculine self-regard the seed of homosexuality lies dormant.)
Around this time—summer returned, bringing with it a vague melancholic longing for sand and heat (and in my case, for that peculiar alternative to sand and heat, the arctic chill of the Sterlings’ apartment)—I received the following fan letter, sent care of my publisher. “Dear Martin Bauman,” it read:
Though I’m not in the habit of writing to authors, your book of stories, The Deviled-Egg Plate, moved and delighted me so much that I felt I had to acknowledge the pleasure. Thank you! I look forward to reading the novel promised on the dust jacket.
I am a member of a twelve-step group for sexually compulsive men that meets every Monday evening in Room 407 of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, which is located on West 13 th Street. I have the feeling that you would benefit from joining us. Remember, sexual compulsiveness is an illness, and one that can be treated with therapy. Help is nigh!
Yours sincerely,
Norman J. Parenti
My first reaction to this letter was to wonder whether, or when, I’d slept with its author—was he hot? Would I want to do it again? For so swifüy had I moved from a point where I could count the men I’d had sex with on one hand, to one in which it was impossible to keep track of their number, much less their names, that the possibility of my having done something with “Norman J. Parenti” I took not only as a given, but despite the distinct thrust of his communication, as an opportunity.
My second reaction—to which the first contributed as much as the letter itself—was indignation. How dare this stranger write me such a letter, I found myself thinking, a letter as unwelcome as it was impudent, and nervy enough to hint that just because I had a healthy attitude toward things libidinous, there was somehow something wrong with me? There was nothing wrong with me! On the contrary, if anyone had anything wrong with him, it was “Norman J. Parenti” with his faddish faith in twelve-step groups. (Here intellectual snobbery provided the perfect excuse not only for unreasoned disdain, but for closing the door on the question of why, if the letter was so silly, it had so upset me.) For in urging me to join his little group, what was Norman J. Parenti doing but dressing in the simpering language of self-help the very equation of pleasure with evil against which the men and women who had founded the Gay and Lesbian Community Center had struggled? Now I no longer see myself as being “above” the language of psychotherapy; I’m willing to admit my own sexual compulsiveness. Back then, however, to take such a letter seriously would have been to sanction a process of self-examination the stresses of which I refused, because they would have required me to do violence to my own illusions.
In July, advance reviews began to appear both for The Terrorist and for Eli’s first novel, History Lessons, which were scheduled to come out within a few weeks of each other. They were not good; indeed, in the case of The Terrorist, the review in Publishers Weekly was so bad as to merit mention at the front of the magazine, where, amid other bulleted news items (including the announcement of Stanley Flint’s imminent resignation from Hudson-Terrier), I read the following: “Coming on the heels of his promising story collection, The Deviled-Egg Plate, Martin Bauman’s first novel, The Terrorist, is a major disappointment.” Thank you, PW! To make matters worse, though the reviews for History Lessons were marginally more positive, Eli concluded from the rather nasty fuss that PW had kicked up that as in the past I had eclipsed him with the spectacle of my success, I was now going to eclipse him with the spectacle of my failure. “I mean, with all that, who’s even going to notice my book?” he complained. “It’s Mrs. Bauman all over again.” His projected bitterness started us fighting, only more nastily than before, since beneath the surface of our discord lay the unspoken fact of my chronic infidelity.
What boded worse for either of us than each other, however, was a third publication set to coincide with ours: that of Stanley Flint’s eight-hundred-page opus, The Writing Teacher. According to the buzz, this novel was going to be “the publishing event of the season”: “100,000-copy first printing,” I read at the bottom of the PW review (which was boxed and starred), “ 16-city author tour, major ad/promo.” And all this for Stanley Flint, who despite his demonstrable genius as a teacher and editor was as a writer, at least to judge from those few stories I’d read in college (as well as in his own estimation), utterly forgettable! Why him? I found myself asking. Had greatness touched him at midlife, as it had Proust? Perhaps. For if PW was to be believed, then The Writing Teacher was not merely “the literary tour de force of the decade,” not merely “a powerfully moving meditation on art, commerce, and sin,” not merely “a fascinating postmodernist conundrum, an interrogation of the self and of the border territory between fact and fiction,” but “one of those rare and original works of art that announces, almost from the outset, its destiny: this one will last.” Well! At the very least, I hoped, Flint’s projected success might give Eli and me reason to band together in the irony of our comparative puniness. Yet when I shared the review with him, and laughed over the fact that in the case of my own novel only fifteen thousand copies were being printed, and a book tour planned to encompass a mere eight cities, he reminded me tartly that he wasn’t being sent on any book tour at all.
Eager for news, I called Sara Rosenzweig, from whom I learned that Flint had left Hudson not, as was generally assumed, in order to devote himself entirely to the writer’s life, but because the powers that be there had finally had enough of him. For not only had none of the novels and story collections he’d signed up during his tenure done well, some of them had done so badly that both the company and its shadowy parent had felt the repercussions. Nor did he hold much truck with the principle (so often trumpeted by publishing people) that best-selling junk “pays” for serious books, as in his view the segregation of the “commercial” from the “serious” only led to the shortchanging of literature, which makes its profit in the long run: all this the nefarious doing, he was convinced, of the marketing people who had infiltrated the industry of late, and for whom he reserved his most passionate contempt. After all, it was they who were responsible for the sort of idiotic jacket copy then proliferating—“If you liked The Joy Luck Club and you thrilled to Watership Down, you’ll love Cats of the Chinese Temple”—and by which he was almost physically wounded; it was they who were forever rejecting the covers he proposed (severely elegant, all type) in favor of cheesy photographs, half-naked women, or flowers muted by a smear of Vaseline; it was they who were urging the new editors to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tacky novels about unhappy housewives being seduced by itinerant strangers—“jack-off books for middle-aged women,” he called them—merely because one novel of this ilk had done well, and no one had any originality anymore. “The bean counters are taking over,” he told Carey and me. “Mark my words, this sort of thing will lead to the demise of books. Why, soon the writer won’t matter at all, the book will be merely the occasion for a pretty jacket surrounding blank pages.” The memos of the bean counters, always ineptly written, pained him as much as Lopez’s affidavit had. More and more he had to walk every day against the wind, and the effort left him mired in contradiction.
Each week, Sara told me, he grew less jovial. What enraged him was not merely the spectacle of “unmitigated crap” coming out under Hudson’s noble imprimatur, but also the acquisition of books the supposed seriousness of which disguised, in his view, a rancid or hollow core. Thus when a Hudson author he loathed (“a split infinitive in the opening sentence!” he complained; like my mother, Flint was a grammatical puritan) won the Pulitzer Prize, he wrote an editorial for the New York Times disavowing all prizes, and even went so far as to withdraw The Writing Teacher from consideration for the National Book Award, for which it had just been nominated. (Before publication!) With Marge Preston he argued fiercely over her plan to promote Julia Baylor’s second novel as a potential bestseller, claiming that to do so would be to “rape a nun.” Naysayers muttered that this resistance really stemmed from fear lest one of his “darlings,” as a result of good publicity, should end up more famous than he was; Flint insisted that it was only the demeaning of literature to which he objected. And in Baylor’s case, alas, history proved him right, for Marge’s effort—far from succeeding—only resulted in a media backlash over the half-million-dollar advance that left her in the unenviable position of not being able to attract, for years, any publisher at all: not only was she hype, she was failed hype, and as such classified untouchable. For her mentor this was the last straw. Convinced that the advance itself had been responsible for his darling's ruin, he now declared himself opposed, on principle, to all advances. “Writers should only get royalties,” he averred, and to prove the point, returned the advance for his own novel. Later, when Henry Deane submitted his new book to Hudson, Flint offered an advance of a dollar. Henry’s agent laughed in his face, the powers that be were not amused, and he “resigned.”
Yet even as “the industry” was stripping Flint of his editorial crown, it was preparing the throne he would occupy as a writer. True, his refusal to lower his standards, the implicit challenge he posed to the conventional wisdom, had won him no friends in boardrooms; nonetheless these same qualities, when touted as the creative harvest of an author rather than the troublesome credo of an editor, would form the touchstone of his formidable reputation. For if the PW review was to be believed, then the virtuosic set piece of The Writing Teacher consisted of an extended and corrosive send-up of the very industry that—as if in blind ignorance of its own condemnation—was now preparing to pull out all the stops on the novel’s behalf: an irony of which the most vivid example (one in which, no doubt, he himself took wicked pleasure) was the rousing conclusion to the summary of The Writing Teacher offered as part of the press packet accompanying the bound galleys: “A savage indictment of the fashionable and timely, a vigorous defense of the immortal and timeless—in short, a novel for today!”
It was all very weird and upsetting, a coincidence in the light of which I found it hard to forget that Flint had not only loathed what he’d seen of The Terrorist, but had effectively told me to chuck it in the bin. Now, as he read my miserable PW review, was he gloating? He was in his way a prophet (how ironic that this word is a homonym for “profit”!), and what had his final warning been to me, so many years ago, but that I showed every likelihood of degenerating into a hack, a sellout, a pouncer on the first available sure thing? He, on the other hand, all his life, had gone his own way, and now he was being blessed with the very laudation I had craved.
Meanwhile the success/failure indicators for my own book were proving to be at best inauspicious. That summer my name had appeared—along with those of Cher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the south of France—on Broadway magazine’s annual “Out” list. (“Bungee jumping” topped the “in” list, with Stanley Flint running seventh. No other writers were mentioned.) This oughtn’t to have surprised me: indeed, it seemed somehow inevitable that the “brat pack” of which I was an unwilling member should now be finding itself the object of ridicule rather than adulation, a downward spiral other evidence for which included the execrable reviews that had greeted both Sam Stallings's and Violet Partridge’s second novels and an astoundingly vindictive article in Harper's in which a novelist I admired greatly, himself an open homosexual (so I could not file his attack under the convenient excuse of homophobia), had decried the “ossified prose” of “trendy but forgettable” writers like myself before declaring himself an “unapologetic maximalist.” As for Stanley Flint, that same week he appeared on the cover of New York magazine. He was opening the fall reading series at the 92nd Street Y. Perhaps I would have had an easier time contending with all the noise that was being made about him if I’d actually read his book: the known, after all, is never as scary as the guessed at, in addition to which great literature has an uncanny ability to get under your skin and thereby annihilate (or perhaps I should say cure) jealousy. From fear lest The Writing Teacher should make my own efforts seem sophomoric, however, I avoided the novel until one afternoon in late June when Henry Deane—just back from Madrid and so happy with his life abroad that he planned to extend it—called me up rather out of the blue at Glenn’s apartment. Given the cavalier treatment he’d received at Flint’s hands, he was the last person I would have expected to say anything good about him. Instead he turned out to be full of praise for The Writing Teacher, which he was reviewing for the New York Times Book Review. “Like it! I tell you, I’m shivering from it,” he said. “The depth of engagement, the pleasure, the sheer beauty! There’s been nothing to match it since Cheever.”
“Really,” I observed dully.
“Of course it can’t have been easy for you,” he went on.
“What?”
“What Flint said. Not exactly kind. I know I would have been upset if someone had written that about me. Still, it’s my most fervent belief, Martin, that when one writer tries to get revenge on another just because he doesn’t like the way he comes off in his book, then freedom of expression goes down the tubes. You not only hurt the other person, you hurt yourself. You hurt literature.” He paused dramatically.
“But, Henry,” I said in perplexity, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t read Flint’s novel yet.”
“You haven’t read it!” There was a sudden intake of breath. “Oh dear, but I just assumed ... well, but it’s really nothing, only a few pages, a dozen pages at most.”
“What’s nothing?”
“The part about you. Or I took it for granted that it was you. I could be wrong, of course, it could be someone else ... just a student of the narrator’s, a young homosexual he’s convinced is in love with him. The Flint figure—he’s never named—basically gets embarrassed, which was how I felt when a girl I was teaching fell in love with me a few years back ... Of course Seamus hates it. He hates everything these days that isn’t about AIDS. He hated your stories. Oh, and I should probably warn you, he’s going to review The Terrorist, and he hates that even more.”
At that moment the call-waiting clicked. Putting Henry off, I pushed down the buttons on top of the phone. It was Billie. “I feel I ought to warn you...,” she began.
“I know. Have you read it?”
“Not yet. Only heard through the grapevine. Of course he’ll probably deny it’s you.”
“Get me the galleys as quickly as you can,” I ordered, then, switching back to Henry, told him I couldn’t talk any longer: the dog needed to be walked.
An hour later the galleys of The Writing Teacher arrived by bicycle messenger. Eli was out, which was lucky: my hurried thumbing through Flint’s eight hundred pages—a process at which I had become, like Liza, an adept—wasn’t one I wanted him to witness. Yet as it turned out Flint's portrayal of the student, “Simon,” which I located within a matter of minutes, upset me less than I’d feared it would, for the simple reason that no depiction of me, no matter how offensive, could have possibly matched the scenarios I’d dreamed into being during the hour I’d spent waiting for the messenger to show up. In other words, because Flint did not write that Simon was ugly, or that he scratched his balls in class, or that he mooned at his teacher in some effeminate and unseemly way, I was actually able to experience, as I put the galleys down, a sensation of relief that at least the unflattering portrayal Flint did offer wasn’t worse. Indeed, so precise was his skewering of the starstruck and lovestruck Simon (Martin was more starstruck if less lovestruck) that as I came away from it I found myself charged with emotion, a combination of humbled surprise at the degree to which he had gotten me exactly right, and a connoisseur’s gratitude for the spectacle of a well-made thing. Nor did it matter that in certain crucial ways Simon did not conform remotely to his more ragged and self-contradictory model: what was important was that he conformed to himself, he was real and vivid to me in a way that I myself would never be. And this meant that when, in an incisive scene near the end of the novel, the Flint character steps out of his apartment building and observes Simon staring at him from across the street, his somewhat anxious reaction, his worry that Simon may turn out to be a stalker, makes perfect sense: Simon, in this regard, is a different person from Martin, whose real presence on that comer, you may recall, had more to do with the coincidence of proximity than with love. On this point, from sheer pride, I would have liked to correct Flint, though probably my correction would have been to him not of the slightest literary interest. As a novelist he viewed fact as merely one of many ingredients to throw into the stew, along with invention, hearsay, books, history, the news. Henry was right: there was no point in being offended by what Flint had written, especially when you considered that in my own book I had done to others exactly what Flint had done to me.
Most notably, our neighbors the Kellers, from whose story The Terrorist both derived and in crucial ways departed, had somehow gotten hold of a set of bound galleys and were none too happy about it. Indeed, so distraught had Mrs. Keller become upon finishing the book that she had burst into my father’s kitchen in tears, complained that thanks to his “insensitive son” the wound that was their daughter’s trial was about to be reopened, and even inveighed against my dead mother, whom she accused of having betrayed her confidence by sharing with me every secret that Mrs. Keller had shared with her; otherwise, she asked, how on earth could I have known enough to write the novel in the first place? Yet in fact, as I explained to my father, if I had gotten the Kellers so “right,” it was mostly as a result of guesswork, not any blabbing on my mother’s part. “All right,” he answered. “Fine. Only that isn’t going to make it any easier for me having to live next door to them.”
“I know it’s fiction. That’s the trouble. The only thing that upsets them more than the stuff you got right is the stuff you made up.”
“But that’s the whole point of fiction, isn’t it?”
It was no use. I couldn’t persuade him that the freedom to make a promiscuous hash of things was one upon which the imagination depends, while he couldn’t wake me up to the truth that because of my book, people were suffering. He was suffering. Later on, at his urging, I did write an apologetic letter to Mrs. Keller, in which I mentioned jokingly that I had been a “victim” of Stanley Flint in the same way that she had been a “victim” of me. A week later her reply arrived, in a pale blue envelope. I never opened it. I stuffed it into the inside pocket of a suitcase, which later, either at O’Hare Airport or between Chicago and Pittsburgh, disappeared. Perhaps someday it will turn up again, though I rather hope not.
Near the end of July, Eli and I packed Maisie, our clothes, and our computers into his mother’s station wagon and went to spend a month at Nora Foy’s house in East Hampton. Nora herself had accepted a residency at Yaddo and needed someone to take care of her dogs. So that we should have an opportunity to learn the house’s foibles before commencing our stay, she suggested that we come out the day before she was due to leave. When we pulled into the driveway she was waiting on the front porch, along with Charlus and Pimperl, who leapt from their mistress’s feet to yelp and sniff at Maisie almost the instant I opened the car door.
The briskness with which Nora strode over to greet us surprised me; at Sam Stallings's party, after all, she’d barely been able to pull herself out of her chair. Now, however, as a result of hip replacement surgery, she got around as well as any of the hardy widows one encountered on winter Sundays in East Hampton, feeding the ducks or taking great treks on the beach. Nor did anything in her appearance give away what distinguished her from those old ladies with their cropped white hair and benign faces. And this was entirely to the point, for as Eli had told me, even at that late date Nora remained hopelessly and rather needlessly closeted—an odd pretense, given that most of her readers accepted her lesbianism not merely as a given but a prerequisite of her work.
Even so, in a little autobiographical sketch she had recently composed, she had never once mentioned Hilda by name, referring instead only to a mysterious and genderless “companion.” “Poor thing, she acts as if no one knows,” Eli had said in the car. “But everyone knows.”
Still, he loved her: this was obvious from his grin when we arrived, the eagerness with which he jumped out of the car and swept her up into his arms, making her squeal. There was really something so heterosexual about Eli! He charmed women far more than men. “And this is Martin,” he said to Nora, as if my existence, my role in his life, was something they had already discussed at great length.
“Martin,” she repeated, clearly not remembering that we had already met, “what a pleasure.” And held out her arms. “May I kiss you?”
I colored. “Of course,” I said, moving my cheek toward her lips, which brushed dryly against them. Eli beamed. The pride he sometimes exhibited in my company—as if I were a prize he’d won by throwing balls through a hoop at a sideshow—both embarrassed and pained me. Also, why was it only when we were with other people that he expressed any gladness to have me as his partner? When we were alone everything I said seemed to vex him.
By now Nora had left my side and was grappling with Maisie, trying to hold her still long enough to examine her bite. “You haven’t trained her well,” she muttered to Eli. “Oh, she’s got a gay tail!”
Eli laughed. “A gay tail? What does that mean?”
“It curls upward.” Nora let Maisie go. “Still, you never intended her to be a show dog,” she added, brushing off her skirt as she made for the house. “Well! I’ll bet you’d like some coffee after your long drive, wouldn’t you?”
“Nora’s like my grandmother,” Eli said, leading me into the kitchen. “She doesn’t only drink coffee after dinner, she drinks coffee with dinner.
“Oh, and Eli, take note: if the water in the tap runs rusty, pay it no mind. It’ll clear after a few seconds. I know, I know, I need to have the place replumbed. And a new roof before this one collapses!” She rubbed her hip. “Well, someday ... Say, Martin, can’t you get one of your Hollywood friends to make a movie out of my new book, or one of your publishing friends to bring some of my old ones back into print, or ... No, I guess not. I guess I’ll just have to write a bestseller while I’m at Yaddo. Or maybe I could put on the cover, Author needs new roof!’” We laughed. “After all,” she added cryptically, “not all of us get huge advances like you and your friend Julia Baylor.”
“But I didn’t—”
She clapped her hands together. “Well, shall we take a tour of the house?”
“Let’s go,” Eli said.
Then she led us through spaces we already knew: the living room and the dining room, and the room with the twin beds, and the room with the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dolls, with its curtains of Chinese toile. Next she showed us her study, where Eli intended to set up his computer, and a little spare room next door, once Hilda’s sewing room, where it was my hope to start work on a novel about my mother’s death. (“Dying mothers and whacking off, whacking off and dying mothers,” Seamus Holt had written of me. “Can this boy speak of nothing else?”)
Finally we followed Nora up a steep little staircase to the attic, which was kept locked, and into which neither of us had previously stepped. The door required some fiddling before she could get it to budge; when it did, it revealed a long, low mansard, its clean geometries accented by rows of putty-colored metal shelving. Everything here was tidy and sparse: the manuscripts, the notebooks, even the frayed and yellowed letters and lists folded neatly in their dusty plastic sleeves. As for the books—and every book Nora had ever written was here, in every conceivable edition, from Japanese to Finnish to Icelandic—affixed to their spines were little labels bearing call numbers, Dewey decimal, written out in Hilda’s neat librarian’s hand. “She couldn’t stomach the demise of the Dewey decimal system,” Nora said. “Clung to it to the bitter end.” Pulling a small chair out from under a child-sized desk, she sat down. “Oh, I really can’t keep up with all of this since Hilda died! Why, just look over there!” And she pointed to a hasty pile of scraps and books, everything that had come in since Hilda had given up her guardianship, still waiting to be catalogued. “You know I’ve never been a very organized person,” she said to me—which I thought strange given that I hardly knew her. “Left to my own devices I’d live in a chaos. But Hilda—this was her calling. And now I feel I owe it to her to maintain what she began, which is why I’ve finally agreed to accept Yale’s offer and sell them the whole kit and caboodle. Do you think it’s all right, Eli? Do you think she’d mind?”
“Of course not,” Eli answered soothingly, rubbing his friend’s shoulders.
She sighed. “Thank you. I don’t get touched much anymore, except by doctors. Anyway, they’ve just upped the offer to fifty thousand. And I could do with the money right now, I must say. The hip replacement—I thought Medicare would pay for everything. But it turns out it only pays for part of everything! Ow!” She grimaced; Eli had pummeled too hard. “I’ll tell you, I expected old age to be a lot of things, I expected it to be boring and painful and frustrating. What I never expected was for it to be so damned expensive. People really live too long,” she concluded, as she had at Sam’s party, then stood again and led us back down the narrow staircase.
That night Nora slept in her own guest room, giving us the room with the double bed. She was leaving early in the morning, and we made sure to be up in time to see her off. As it turned out, however, not only had she risen before we had, she’d made us breakfast: an old-fashioned American breakfast, eggs and pancakes and sausages. “People live too long,” she repeated from the stove, where she was pouring batter onto a none-too-clean cast-iron griddle. “You remember that nice boy who used to run the bookstore, Eli? I’m sure you met him. Well, he has to give it up. He can’t earn enough off the shop to afford living out here—and his family’s been in East Hampton for two hundred years!” She made a noise of disgust. “And to think that when I bought this place it went for twelve thousand dollars, which at the time seemed like a fortune! But now my friend Pat, who’s in real estate, she says I could sell it in a second for half a million just because it’s south of the highway. And I just might. Who knows? The town’s not what it used to be, what with all those junky stores on Newtown Lane, the T-shirt shops and the Christmas-all-year shops and the Ralph what’s-his-name—isn’t he really Lipschitz? It reminds me of Revere Beach when I was a kid. Like one of those gimcrack little amusement park towns on the Atlantic. You never would have expected that here. Here we had Jackson Pollock.” She poured out the last of the batter. “Still, the last thing I want is to turn into one of those miserable old fools who devote their lives to being bulwarks against change, like Hilda with her Dewey decimal obsession. ‘Bulwarks against change.’ Do you like that, Eli?” He nodded. “Write it down for me, will you?”
“Sure thing,” Eli said, pulling a pad from his pocket, and leaving me to marvel once again at the strange ways writers adopt in each other’s company.
Later that morning, after we had safely planted Nora on the Hampton Jitney, we took Maisie for a walk through the town. Newtown Lane was, as Nora had promised, a curious mishmash of rubbish both expensive and cheap. Fly-by-night branches of New York boutiques elbowed the hardware store, while across the street a sentry of overpriced little antiques stores, their windows replete with painted New England dressers and Royal Crown Derby, flanked a pallid pizzeria; with the first fall leaves, we knew, their owners would close up shop, follow the rich and the warmth down south, to Palm Beach, where they maintained their winter headquarters.
As in New York, over the next few days we fell quickly into familiar habits, which was exactly what we’d hoped to avoid in the country. In the mornings we’d work, then eat lunch at an ersatz tearoom over which portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip presided, before riding down to the gay beach on a pair of rusty bicycles that Eli had dug out of Nora’s garage. I liked the gay beach, where sociable lesbians read mystery novels amid the tanned and oily bodybuilders. Compared to theirs, our towels were threadbare, our umbrella—like the bicycle, dug out of Nora’s garage—ill-tempered and prone to collapse. Still, we had fun. While Eli played with the dog, I took long strolls along the shore on the pretense of wanting to “think something out” and inevitably ended up in a zone of dunes and beach grass, lunar valleys where men lounged naked amid signs warning against Lyme disease. (Everywhere, it seemed, sex and disease were wed.)
Sometimes, when Eli was in New York for an opera, or to see his mother, I’d go to the beach at night. When I took off my shoes, the sand squished up between my toes, not burning as at noon but cool like the other side of a pillow. Often a fog reduced the other men scattered among the dunes to murky bulbs of shadow from which, as I approached, a figure might disjoin itself, veer toward me, then disappear into the tenebrous distance. I’d move on. And though we might meet again, that stranger and I, though he might even grope my chest and stomach like a blind man before a statue—not for pleasure, but simply to get a rough idea of what I felt like, whether I was muscly or soft, hairy or smooth—only rarely would we graduate to the next step, fingers fumbling with belts, the untangling of a penis already moist with the residue of some earlier encounter. Then the game would begin, that familiar and tiresome game; over and over you would bring each other to the point of orgasm and then back away, like children daring each other to jump into a cold pool—“you first”; “no, you first”—until it became clear that neither was willing to go first, at which point you would bid each other a resigned farewell, zip up your pants, and walk hurriedly away.
Once, on that beach, on a particularly foggy night, an alluring shadow beckoned me into the dunes, only to reveal itself to belong to Henry Deane. Both of us laughed from embarrassment. “I think it’s probably best if we don’t mention to anyone our running into each other this way,” he said as we made our way back to the parking lot.
“No, of course not,” I agreed. “And what are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Visiting Seamus. He’s got a place in Springs. He’s been coming out for years.” We had reached the tarmac. A car trained its brights on us, so that we had to squint. Trapped, for a few seconds, in the scrutiny of our nameless assessor, Henry smiled and waved, at which point the driver gunned his engines and fled in a fury.
“The thing is, Seamus would never approve of my coming to the beach at night,” Henry went on. “He’s very puritanical about such matters. Jesus, staying there’s like being in a nunnery! Fortunately he’s in New York this evening. And what about your Eli? Also in town?”
I nodded.
“Ah well, when the cat’s away the mice will play. And there must be honor among mice.”
“Of course.”
“Much more pleasant, this beach, than some bar. The other night, for instance, you’ll never guess who picked me up here—that fellow brat-packer of yours, what’s his name, the one they’re always comparing to Bret Easton Ellis.”
“Bart Donovan.”
“Right. I didn’t even know he was gay—he says he isn’t, he dates girls, too—only in his spare time he has a thing for older gentlemen like me. Anyway, he invited me back to his place. At first I was worried, he looked so innocent, with these big eyes like a basset hound’s, but then when we got there he opened up a suitcase and there were all these dildos. But I mean, huge dildos! And he wanted me to fuck them with him—him with them, sorry—from smallest to largest, leading up to the biggest of all, which was this horrifying thing, I don’t even know what to call it, in the shape of an arm and fist. It might have been the scale model for some Trotskyite monument! A real paean in the ass, if you get my drift. Ha!”
“And did you do it?”
“Of course! I didn’t want to disappoint the boy.”
“And?”
“Well, just as he promised, they all went straight in. No trouble at all! He didn’t even need poppers. So afterward, being naturally curious, I asked him how he managed it, and he just shrugged, and said, ‘Mind over matter, dude.’ Although of course I couldn’t help but wonder, if he needed that at twenty-whatever, what he was going to need when he got to be my age.” Henry touched my shoulder. “Don’t mention any of this to Seamus. If he finds out he’ll probably start calling up Bart and railing at him to come out of the closet, and guess who’ll get blamed? Moi! Oh, and by the way, how’s that nice dyke friend of yours? Lisa?”
“Liza. Getting married, actually.”
“Really! I’ve never been to a lesbian wedding, though I’ve heard—”
“She’s marrying a man.”
“Oh. And are you going?”
I shook my head. In fact, the question of whether to attend Liza’s wedding had in recent days become a source of contention between Eli and me, chiefly as a result of her having sent us two separate invitations, which he took as a hostile gesture: “As if a gay couple doesn’t deserve to be treated like any other couple,” he complained. It went without saying that Eli himself was planning to decline. And yet in contrast to earlier days, I thought I could hear beneath his anger a suppressed choke of regret, that for the sake of mere disapproval he was sacrificing the most enduring friendship of his life. Clearly it was pride, or mostly pride, that kept him from surrendering his posture of defiance. As for me, though I felt less strongly about the matter, the last thing I wanted was to provoke him. As it stood we were fighting far too much about things that I wasn’t conscious of doing for me to dare any deliberate provocation.
So we decided not to go, though at Harriet’s urging we sent a present. At first Eli wanted to send knives. “What’s wrong with knives?” he asked when I objected. “A nice set of knives makes for a good, practical gift.”
“But she might take it negatively. The sharpness and all.”
He sighed loudly; scratched his head. “You may be right. Well, to hell with it, then, I’ll call Fortunoff's and have a blender delivered. If you don’t think that’s too aggressive.”
“No, no.”
“I think a blender’s the perfect choice,” he continued, picking up the phone. “You know, because it carries no connotation of malice in its own right, and yet it’s so impersonal ... I’m sure she’ll get the message.”
A week later a thank-you note arrived, addressed, this time, to both of us, and bearing not Liza’s but Ben’s address. “Dear Eli and Martin,” it read:
Your lovely gift arrived yesterday, and we are thrilled! Already we’ve whipped up a gazpacho and a round of piña coladas. Thank you so much! We will remember you with every pesto!
Yours,
Liza and Ben
“Pina coladas!” Eli cried after he read the letter. “Can you imagine Liza drinking a pińa colada?” He shook his head. “And when I think of the letters she used to write me!” he added, his voice lilting with a pathos from which I failed to derive a single useful clue as to the degree to which sorrow might underlie his anger with me.
We were not settling in. In Nora’s house, away from newspapers and telephone calls, we had hoped to find a silence in which we could once again hear our own voices; instead New York—and specifically those aspects of New York with which we found it so difficult to cope—appeared, with a sort of canine loyalty, to have followed us out. Thus, not only were we always running into Marge Preston, in shorts and T-shirt, at the grocery store, but we were also always getting invitations—from Billie, from both our editors, even from Sam Stallings, who had rented a place in Amagansett—to cocktail parties. Worse, it seemed we could not leave the house without running into someone one of us knew—for instance, Donald Schindler, whom we encountered one evening in line at the movies, part of a crowd gazing bemusedly at a talking car, its lights flashing. (“Stand back,” it declared. “Do not approach.”) Yet another of those overmonied Wall Street whiz kids whose increasingly loud presence Nora so lamented, he immediately asked us to a barbecue at a place he had taken with “some people from Smith Barney.” The address was in the Northwest Woods, in a zone of cheaply built plywood spec houses the enormous rent for which ten or twelve remote acquaintances would divvy up, and where in a weird recapitulation of college days these men and women who lived normally in expensive if small apartments, and shared their beds only with lovers, would have to “bunk” in the same room with two or three virtual strangers. Eli and I, on the other hand, had the run of Nora’s vast if dilapidated manse, for which we paid nothing, though under normal circumstances it would have commanded a hefty price. In the mornings we lounged plaintively in the weedy back garden; in the evenings (and against our better judgment) we went to parties from which Eli, as a consequence of being written off one too many times as “Mrs. Bauman,” tended to emerge sullen or wrathful.
One night, at a dinner hosted by Henry’s agent (she turned out to be the fat lady from Sam Stallings’s launch), we ran into Seamus. With his tall, stooped figure, grizzled beard, and bushy eyebrows, he might have been some rabid Puritanical minister, a gay Roger Chillingworth. “Nora Foy!” he cried when we told him where we were staying. “That ridiculous cow, why doesn’t she come out?” (I felt the swoosh of heads turning.) “It infuriates me,” he went on, “when these people everyone knows perfectly well are queer refuse to fess up, especially at a moment of crisis. Why sometimes I’m tempted to drag her out myself, kicking and—”
“Now, Seamus, temper, temper,” interrupted Henry, who was with him.
“But isn’t it a question of generations?” Eli put in timidly. “I mean, Nora’s older than we are. Perhaps for her—”
“Generations, schmenerations, courage is courage and cowardice is cowardice.”
Kendall—always present at such functions—now changed the subject, as was his role. I worried that from then on Seamus might hate me even more than he hated my books, and was surprised, the next morning, to get a call from him. It seemed that the afternoon before, the Fundamentalist Christian owner of a café on Main Street, Delicious Delights, had fired his lesbian employee, claiming that she had kissed her lover on the lips at work. Now Seamus was putting together a picket in front of the shop of the sort that in New York he had already organized several times with great success, albeit on a larger scale and to protest larger injustices.
Dutifully, then, Eli and I drove over to Delicious Delights, where along with Henry and about a dozen other embarrassed-looking friends of Seamus’s, including Henry’s agent in dark sunglasses and a straw hat, we marched dolefully back and forth for an hour or so, muttering at Seamus’s urging, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, homophobia’s got to go,” while the smirking owner of the café videotaped us, and the lesbian whose firing had incited the fracas gave an interview to a youthful reporter from the East Hampton Star. I remember thinking how much less self-conscious I would have felt if I had been (as indeed I would soon be) one of thousands storming city hall in Manhattan, our defiance emboldened by the protective embrace of so many comrades. Instead the fired lesbian sounded demented as she gibbered to the reporter, and when Donald Schindler arrived with some of his Smith Barney pals for a prebeach cappuccino, a gust of shame ran through me. “What’s going on?” he asked. I explained. “Well, then, I guess I won’t go in,” he said, watching regretfully as his Wall Street confreres, slick boys and girls who did not share his historical association with queers, ignored him and me and strode blithely across the picket line.
Later—thirsty in the heat—I noticed Henry standing a little apart from the rest of the crowd, drinking a Coke. “Where did you get it?” I asked.
“At Delicious Delights,” he whispered. “Don’t tell Seamus, I snuck in while he was taking a whiz”—which was just like Henry. The fact that he was in many ways much more of a literary man than his friend justified, at least to my mind, his comparative lack of scruples, in which I took a giddy pleasure. For I admired the rebel in him, and recognized even then that Seamus, for all his troublemaking, in the end possessed the less radical soul.
The European grandeur of Henry’s writing, combined with his penchant for outrageous frankness, meant that he made many of his colleagues jealous, most notably an elderly, irascible author—like Henry, an expatriate—who had until recently enjoyed the distinction of being the only “mainstream” American novelist to live openly as a homosexual. A few weeks earlier, at a dinner party, Kendall had found himself seated next to this gentleman, who had spent the bulk of the meal railing against Henry, his words becoming more vituperative the more he drank, until in his stupor he reached for the wine and picked up a bottle of olive oil by mistake. Stunned and fascinated, Kendall watched the old man fill his glass, take a gulp, and splutter olive oil all over his shirt and tie. “You did that on purpose!” he cried while a servant mopped him. “You didn’t warn me! You all want me to die so you can elect Henry Deane king fag!”
As for Seamus, perhaps because he was less of a literary man than Henry, he had a bigger heart; you knew that you could count on him for help if you got into trouble. Seamus had mysterious reserves of money, and had been slaving for the last dozen years on a Great Work reputed to be already seven thousand pages long, the manuscript of which he carted back and forth in boxes every time he made his weekday trundle from Manhattan duplex to Springs beach house. Yet more than as a writer it was as a muckraker that he was becoming famous, a deliverer of fire and brimstone speeches to which people didn’t want to listen but listened anyway. Few could as yet smell the incipience of ACT UP in the air, of those days when rubber-gloved policemen would hoist protesters from the pavement of Manhattan streets, and wizened veterans of Stonewall would instruct boys fresh out of Harvard in the proper way to position their wrists so that the plastic garbage ties the cops used to bind them would not cut any veins. Those who did, though, looked to Seamus as a hero. Others flocked to his speeches for the sheer masochistic thrill of them, as some of my sister’s friends had once flocked to a certain Chinese restaurant in San Francisco simply for the pleasure of being bullied and insulted by its waiter, Edsel Ford Fong. And yet I am remiss if I suggest that Seamus’s diatribes were gratuitous, or purely sadistic. On the contrary, his anger was as genuine as it was defensible: he was furious at the mayor of New York for failing to prioritize AIDS; furious at the FDA for its slowness in approving new drugs; furious at the smugly apathetic gay men who paraded obliviously up and down the East Hampton beach in Calvin Klein swimsuits even as their brethren lay dying in understaffed hospitals. Their anomie—which revealed itself even under the flattering light of ballrooms, at five-hundred dollar a plate AMFAR benefits of the sort to which Roy would later take me—stood out for Seamus as the greatest sin of all, evidence not only of callousness but collaborationism. For in those years no one wanted to take what he had to say seriously, even at the five-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners, where, thunderous before a mob of perfectly coifed, elegantly employed young men, he would thrust out his finger like a demonic preacher, and scream, “In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead, dead, dead." And though afterward, over cigars, everyone would make a joke of his pronouncements, or try to soften the edges of his rantings by recasting them as a purely intellectual strategy, “an attention-getting tactic, and possibly an effective one,” nonetheless the disquiet he had generated was palpable. In the end, of course, history did prove him wrong, though not in the way his enemies would have predicted: five years later, not half, but three-quarters of the men in that room were dead, for no matter how extreme Seamus’s vision might have been, the virus’s was more so.
AIDS was the fashionable charity in East Hampton that summer: few weekends passed without some expensive benefit, usually held outdoors, in moonlight or sunlight, at a lavish beachfront mansion or in a prizewinning rose garden. The chief purpose of these galas, so far as I could tell, was to provide the overmonied denizens of the region with a tax-deductible means of demonstrating their altruistic impulses without actually having to touch or talk to the disease’s “victims.” The entertainments on offer ranged from wine tastings to lectures on botany to performances of “The Art of the Fugue” by a string quartet, as well as, at one comparatively lowbrow affair (the tickets went for only seventy-five dollars a head), a performance by a theater troupe all the members of which had AIDS. Unfortunately, at the last minute the troupe had had to cancel because too many of the actors were sick, which left the event’s organizer, the pastor at a local Episcopalian church, in the unenviable position of having to come up with an alternative amusement on less than twenty-four hours’ notice. His idea was to pull together a group reading by local writers, in which he asked me to take part.
Of course I agreed. Eli was reading Dickens in Nora’s living room when the call came.
“Who was that?” he asked when I hung up.
“That nice minister we met on the beach,” I said, and told him about the reading.
Eli put down his book. “I don’t suppose I should be surprised that he didn’t even think of inviting me,” he said.
“Oh, Eli, I’m sorry—”
“Or that it didn’t occur to you to suggest that he might invite me.”
“I’ll tell you what, why don’t I call him back right now?”
“Don’t bother.”
“But it’s easy—”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” He threw down his book. “Jesus, don’t you see? It only counts if you think of it. You make Liza look like Mother Teresa.”
“Okay, I’ll prove it to you,” I said, picking up the phone. “Here, I’m going to call—”
“I told you no.”
I started dialing.
“Hang up that phone!”
“No, I’m going to—”
“I said hang up that phone!”
He stormed toward me. For a few embarrassing seconds we tussled with the receiver, until Eli pulled the jack out of the wall. “Jesus!” I cried. But he had slammed out the door, into the yard. “Oh, why couldn’t I have just asked?” I lamented, for in those days I was forever announcing my better intentions, in the vague hope of winning praise or forgiveness.
Even so, as soon as he was out of earshot, I plugged the phone back into the wall and called the pastor, who said he would be happy to invite Eli; indeed, the only reason he hadn’t done so in the first place, he explained, was that he hadn’t known Eli was a writer.
Hanging up, I hurried outside. “Eli,” I called, “I just talked to Reverend Davis, and it’s okay. He’d love for you to read.”
“I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,” Eli answered tardy. But in the end, ambition—or perhaps a sense of duty—overcame his pride, and he agreed to participate. The event was to take place in Southampton, at the oddly un-South American mansion of an Argentinean lady who happened to be one of the pastor’s parishioners. Inside, the furniture was mostly Shaker, the decor Early American: quilts, frayed flags, evil-looking handmade dolls. A waiter in white gloves led us through the living room to the back garden, where the hostess stood greeting her guests. She had on a curiously countrified dress, a sort of milkmaid’s dress, very much at odds with her heavy black hair and Castilian accent. Meanwhile young men in uniforms were arranging plastic chairs in half-moons around a makeshift amphitheater and putting a photocopied program on each seat.
The waiter led us up onto the stage, where the pastor was chatting with those of the readers who had already arrived. Seamus was among them. Waving wildly, he hurried from his seat to greet us. “God, I can’t tell you what a relief it is to see some sisters,” he cried. “Amazing that at an AIDS benefit there should be so few homos—or perhaps they’re all too busy running around on that beach looking for a piece of dick!” He shook his head in disgust. “And how have you boys been getting along since we turned Main Street on its head?”
“Fine,” Eli said curdy.
“Martin, writing the great American gay novel I fully expect from you? I keep telling him,” he added to Eli, “that he has it in him to write it, if only he’d get over his obsession with stupid little picayune domestic details. I mean, whacking off in bed, for God’s sake—did Tolstoy write about whacking off in bed? Did Shakespeare?”
“Still, Seamus,” I said, “times have changed. And wasn’t the whole point of the sixties that it freed up the discourse on sex—”
“Sex, yes, fine—sex as an expression of love, as a metaphor for the nobility of our people ... but whacking off, and phone sex, and stealing straight boys’ underwear, that’s hardly the image we want to project, don’t you agree?” (Eli nodded vigorously.)
The pastor now approached us. “So glad you could come,” he said, offering his hand. “And have you met Mrs. González?”
“Not yet.”
“Carmencita’s an angel to host the event for us,” he went on, smiling in that bland, rehearsed manner I recognized from outings with Kendall. “And now come and meet your fellow readers. Let me see—oh, we’re still waiting for Gloria. She’s never on time!” I smiled. Introductions were tendered. All of the other readers were women, poets and murder mystery writers. One of them I recognized as the lover of the fired lesbian from Delicious Delights; it turned out she was the author of a hugely popular series of detective novels for teenage girls. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise,” she answered gruffly. “By the way, Seamus, Lorella’s found an attorney. He’s talking big bucks. Millions.”
“Good idea. Get the bastard for every cent he’s got! Gay people have got to fight the power.”
At last Gloria, who was never on time, arrived. Gathering us around him, the pastor gave a familiar little speech about the necessity of sticking to the ten-minute time limit. Speed was of the essence, he warned, fixing his gaze on Seamus, because Mrs. González needed everyone out by six in order to prepare for a dinner party.
“Oh, no problem,” I said.
“I’d rather only read for two minutes!” barked Lorella’s lover. But Seamus said nothing.
Though only half the seats were taken, Mrs. González signaled us that it was time to begin. Gloria read first, followed by Eli, then me. After that it was Seamus’s turn. Unlike the rest of us, he hadn’t brought along a book or pages from a manuscript, which I suppose we should have taken as a warning sign. Instead he walked to the podium and began to talk extemporaneously. His voice was low at first, hardly audible, as he spoke of the four former lovers he had just visited in the same ward at Bellevue, the grim conditions of the hospital, his five hundred friends who were dead. Five hundred! This was a figure he threw out routinely, and that people tended to dismiss as yet another example of his hyperbolic style, though in fact it represented, if anything, an understatement: all that was questionable was his definition of friendship. For time would soon diminish the shock value of that number, as the list of the dead grew longer, and people built up antibodies against such bardic invective. “It abashes me,” he intoned, “when our paper of record will not report justly or adequately on the gravest crisis since the Holocaust. It abashes me when my gay brothers refuse to recognize that by fucking without rubbers they are collaborating in their own extermination.” (At the word “rubbers,” a flinch of discomfiture rippled through the audience.) “It abashes me when even you people, yes, even you well-intentioned, liberal-minded straight people, sit by and imagine it will never happen to you, never your sons, never your husbands. But mark my words. It will.” In the distance a dog barked. The pastor checked his watch. “I tell you,” he went on, “in that squalid city you all avoid four months out of the year, on the stinking streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, I’m seeing miracles. I’m seeing men who barely have the strength to get out of bed in the morning dragging themselves to city hall to protest the callous greed of our disgusting mayor. I’m seeing people for whom it takes everything they have to fight the virus finding somewhere the extra bit of energy to battle greedy pharmaceutical companies, and an inept and compassionless national bureaucracy, and a hard-hearted medical establishment! And not only for their own sakes, but for your sakes, the sakes of your thankless sons and husbands! You stupid, stupid, careless people, don’t you see we’re dying? In the city we’re fucking dying, in agony? And all the while you sit out here on your asses and do nothing!”
He was quiet. In the distance the dog was still barking. Anxiously we watched as he took a cloth from his pocket, wiped his glasses, looked out at the audience, and, seeing its members braced with worry, stepped back. “Oh, why bother?” he muttered, then reclaimed his seat.
There was a silence then. For twenty seconds or so it stretched out, until just at the point when it seemed about to implode, a lone set of hands started clapping. I looked to see whose they were—it was Eli—and hearing him, joined in. The pastor clapped next. Then Mrs. González clapped, and then the other writers, and then, very gradually, the members of the audience started clapping too, as if what had been holding them back was not outrage so much as some insecurity as to what would be the proper response to such an onslaught. Protocol thus absorbed the sermon, robbing it of its power to sting.
Afterward, during the reception, Seamus was timid. He hid in a corner of the garden with a plate of petits fours. “What did you think of my speech?” he asked when I joined him. “Did I go too far? Do they hate me?” His voice had verged into a whine of innuendo, as if by pleading his own immaturity he might avoid some punishment—a slap on the rear, or being sent to bed without his supper. Such vacillations, as I would soon learn, were typical of him. Publicly ferocious, in private he could reveal unsuspected caches of vulnerability, which was why, though he pined for love, and was constantly plying Eli and me with requests to introduce him to eligible men, whenever he actually found himself in the presence of someone on whom he had a crush he would be reduced to a stutter of anxiety: the great orator, to whom words came so easily at a podium, could not find his voice when faced with the object of his affection. He also detested being alone, and was therefore forever summoning me to his house, either for dinners with ill-tempered friends, or to listen to a chapter of his novel, or to excoriate me for what he perceived as the great inadequacy of my own work: my refusal to write what he called the “big gay book, the gay War and Peace, the gay Crime and Punishment.” (Seamus was partial to the Russians.) For he admired epic scale and superlatives and monumentality, whereas I—love child of the magazine and Stanley Flint—believed in concision, leanness, getting the maximum effect out of the minimum number of words. Muriel Spark and Raymond Carver were my heroes, and further back, the Forster of Where Angels Fear to Tread, the Ford Madox Ford of The Good Soldier. (But not Parade's End, heavens no!) I didn’t believe books could ever change the world, whereas Seamus believed that if they didn’t they weren’t worth writing. This was why it vexed him that I’d as yet written nothing about AIDS. “I mean, how can you not write about it,” he’d ask, “when it’s to your generation what Vietnam was to mine?”
“I have to wait for the right story,” I’d answer. “Remember what Grace Paley says, there has to be a long time between knowing and telling—”
“But we don’t have a long time—not anymore!”
“And anyway,” I persisted (for I had ceased to be so afraid of him), “once you start dictating to writers what they can and can’t write, you’re robbing them of their most essential freedom. What you end up with isn’t literature, it’s propaganda.”
“Oh, pooh! Writers are no different than anyone else. We all have social obligations.”
“My only obligation is to myself, to write the very best I can,” I retorted. For I was every day more in agreement with Flint that when one set out to satisfy other people’s requirements, the result would be mediocrity. Only by listening for that strange little voice, the one that spoke at the least likely moments (and from the most improbable places), could one hope to produce something that would last.
Once, when Seamus called that summer, it was to tell us that we needed to go and get HIV tests immediately. “But why?” I asked. After all, until recently he had been urging gay men not to have HIV tests.
“I just got off the phone with Fauci,” Seamus answered. “He’s convinced me—absolutely convinced me—that this new drug, AZT, is the ticket. And not only for people who are already sick: also if you’re positive but asymptomatic, he says, it’ll keep the virus at reasonable levels. The report will hit the papers later this year—he let me in on the results early, he said, because as you’re probably aware there’s every probability I’m HIV-positive. And so I want to get the word out, trumpet the news: get the test”
This phone call, needless to say, upset me considerably. After all, until now Seamus’s antitesting stance, his conviction that the test represented only a veiled effort on the part of the government to establish an HIV “blacklist,” had given Eli and me the perfect excuse not to subject ourselves to what we both looked upon as an intimidating and gruesome ordeal. Though Eli’s fear, moreover, had at least a real world basis, deriving as it did from the knowledge that unlike me he actually had, on several occasions, been fucked without a condom, my own anxiety, despite its more hypothetical origins, was no less intense. For I had gone through too many weeks of awaiting, with my mother, the results of biopsies, ever to want to subject myself to that anguish again.
“What is it?” Eli asked as I put down the phone.
I told him. He mulled over the news for a moment, then said, “Well, I suppose it’s inevitable. I’ll call and make appointments—”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to have the test.”
“But, Martin, you said it yourself, given your history you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Exactly. So why should I need to be tested?”
“For the reassurance of knowing.”
“Yes, and what if I turn out to be positive? What reassurance is that going to be?”
“But you won’t turn out to be positive—unless you’ve been lying to me.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you been lying to me?”
“Of course not. I just—I mean, you know, there’s always the chance that you might have a microscopic cut on your finger or something—”
“You sound like Liza.”
“And then, if you find out you’re positive, there’s nothing you can do, and your life is basically ruined.”
“But I thought you said Seamus’s whole point was that there is something you can do. AZT.”
“Oh, they say that now,” I responded prophetically. “Only who’s to say that in two years they won’t find out that taking all that AZT only makes things worse?”
So we argued. Every day I found a fresh reason to persuade Eli not to make the doctor’s appointment. I wanted to finish my new novel first, I said—my new novel, of which I had so far produced a total of ten pages. As for Eli, whenever I went into his study, I couldn’t help but notice that the glowing green diodes on his computer always spelled out the words “Chapter One”—nothing else.
Sometimes, when Seamus called, it was because he was lonely. “I’m all by myself,” he said one Sunday, near the very end of our stay. “I’ve been writing the whole day, I haven’t talked to a living soul in hours, I need company.”
As it happened, that morning at the Amagansett Farmer’s Market, Eli and I had received a spontaneous invitation from his former boyfriend Derek Wexler (twin brother of Gerald) to an afternoon party—“nothing big,” Derek had insisted, “just a few boys, a little get-together”—so we suggested that Seamus meet us there.
“Fabulous,” he answered. “Perhaps I’ll find the great love of my life.” (This was always his hope.) “What’s the address?”
I told him. “Sagg Road!” he remarked admiringly. “So is your friend handsome and eligible, in addition to being rich?”
“I’m not sure if he’s single. He’s in arbitrage.”
“How old?”
“Mmm, I’ll have to doll up. See you soon.” He put down the phone. We ourselves did not doll up; indeed, almost as a point of honor, we wore our usual ratty jeans to Derek’s house, which managed to be very swanky without breaking the rules of a rigorously minimalist aesthetic: the sort of house in which the rooms are referred to as “volumes.” In the living volume—essentially a shingled cube—the blond parquet floor stretched blazingly toward windows framing a great swath of dune and ocean. Mapplethorpe prints hung over Mies van der Rohe chairs in the dining volume—all a far cry from Mrs. González’s mansion with its samplers and sorting tables.
We went outside, into the back garden. Around the crisply geometrical pool a dozen shellacked young men in Speedos had been languidly arranged. “They might as well be wearing price tags,” Eli whispered, as he cast his gaze over the little clot of guests gathered near the bar. “Oh, there’s Derek. Derek!” He waved. Derek detached himself.
“Eli, Martin, so glad you could come,” he said as he approached us. Unlike most of his guests, he was frilly dressed, in an old-fashioned morning suit and cravat. Like Gerald (they were fraternal twins), he had black hair and blue, benighted eyes, yet his skin was smoother than that of his brother; indeed, it had that rubbery cast, that alarming angularity that I would later come to associate with face-lift victims. “As you can see this is nothing formal,” he continued, pressing Eli’s biceps as he took in our attire, “just a little spontaneous get-together with friends.”
A waiter interrupted, bearing a tray of champagne flutes, which made me wonder what Derek’s more formal parties were like.
We walked to the bar. Not far from us, on the lawn, stood three movie moguls of great repute and wealth, men whose names routinely appeared on annual lists of America’s richest citizens. Dimly I recalled Seamus having flayed them alive in Queer Times a few months back, calling them the “troika of death,” or something on that order, because they had neither contributed enough money to AIDS groups nor helped to bring any of “our stories” to the big screen. I nudged Eli. “Oh dear,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” asked Derek.
“I’m afraid we may have unintentionally committed a bit of a gaffe,” Eli said. “You see, when you said ‘a few boys,’ I didn’t think—” Vaguely he indicated the lawn. “What I mean is, we’ve invited Seamus Holt to meet us here.”
Derek blanched. “Oh my God! You’ve got to stop him!”
“But how?”
“Head him off at the pass! Go! Go! Hurry!” He pushed us toward the driveway. No doubt the velocity of his transformation from suave host to deranged harridan would have amused us if we hadn’t been its cause. “But how could we have known?” I asked Eli.
We got into Nora’s battered station wagon. “Which route do you think he’d take?”
“I assume the highway.”
Eli turned the key in the ignition. “Do you even know what kind of car he drives?”
“Something Japanese. It’s blue. Don’t worry, I’ll recognize it.” We turned onto Sagaponack Main Street. Nothing passed us, however. Nor was any car remotely resembling Seamus’s to be seen at the traffic light on the Montauk Highway.
“Maybe he decided not to come,” Eli said hopefully.
“Let’s drive to his house and see,” I suggested. But when we got there, no blue car—no car of any color—was to be found.
Very haltingly, then, and terrified lest we should find bloodshed when we got there, we made our way back to the party, where that blue car for which we had searched in vain, the sighting of which anywhere else would have eased our racing hearts, sat snugly parked outside Derek’s sleek accretion of cubes. Eli switched off the engine. Almost lightheadedly we walked to the front door, which was open, crossed, once again, the exacting living room, and stepped into the garden. On the deck, price-tagged boys frolicked sluggishly. Some had taken off their Speedos. A few had jumped into the pool, where they were throwing a red ball back and forth.
We looked for Derek. He was nowhere to be seen. We looked for Seamus. Far away from us, near the dunes, he stood by himself, holding a beer, gazing out at the ocean. He seemed a very lonely figure, remote and elderly, especially when compared to his coevals, the “troika of death,” all of whom, no doubt, worked out with personal trainers, and spent an hour each morning at a tanning salon. Currently they were collected near the bar, enmeshed by a protective suite of admirers. Someone appeared to be telling a joke; in a few seconds I heard the laughter that is often the secret weapon of those best trained in social warfare.
Then Derek, from the kitchen door, made a summoning gesture with his fingertips.
We followed. “I’m sorry,” I said once we were inside.
“He must have taken a shortcut,” Eli added.
“Oh, it’s all right, think nothing of it,” answered Derek, who had apparently had a belt of something in the interval. “So far nothing’s happened. Still, it might be a good idea if ... you know...” He indicated Seamus with his elbow.
We understood. Patting Eli on the arm again, Derek went to talk with the “troika,” one member of which smiled at us as we strolled out toward Seamus. In his “dolled-up” outfit—purple shirt, tie-dyed bow tie—he looked both uncomfortable and disappointed.
“Sorry about this,” Eli said. “We had no idea—”
“When he invited us all he said was ‘a few boys,”’ I threw in.
“Oh, pshaw!” Seamus swatted the air. “Anyway it’s not your fault. It’s just that I was thinking...” He grinned. “Well, I suppose this is the price one pays for speaking one’s mind. Anyway, I should skedaddle. Or should I say scuttle? Scuttle’s more appropriate. Thanks for thinking of me. You were land...” His voice trailed off. “The thing is, I was absolutely convinced I was going to meet the great love of my life this afternoon, isn’t that ridiculous? And who knows? He might even be here.”
“I doubt it, in this crowd.”
Seamus, apparently consoled by this suggestion, kissed us both on the cheek, and left. Having seen him out, Eli and I made our way back to the bar. It was our intention to apologize one last time to Derek, then get the hell out of there; before we had a chance, though, a voice from the direction of the pool called Eli’s name. We turned. A giant of a fellow in running shorts and singlet, glib and thick-lipped and rudely handsome, was ambling toward us. “Eli, what a surprise,” he said, and then he was kissing him, while I breathed in the strongly masculine scent radiating from under his arms. His name, I soon learned, was Jonathan Horowitz; he and Eli had gone to college together; he was an in-house lawyer at Disney. “And what have you been doing all these years?” he asked Eli, throwing a brotherly arm around his shoulder. “Have you been here all summer? Why haven’t we seen each other? Oh, and how’s Liza? Man, when I got that invitation to her wedding, I nearly slung a clot. I always thought she was a dyke.”
“She is,” Eli said, laughing, and for a few minutes, in that rushed, catching-up way of classmates, they chatted about reunions and jobs, friends they had shared, teachers who had died. It seemed that Jonathan was renting a house in Watermill for the season, sharing it with his boyfriend, a wonderful fellow, we had to meet him. “Roy, come here!” he called. “I want to introduce an old pal of mine.”
Roy turned. I couldn’t help but smile. He had changed little in the year since I’d last seen him; indeed, in his pressed khakis and white polo shirt, he might merely have been the vacation version of that well-heeled gentleman about town, that paper doll, who not so long ago had carried me out of a dreary cafeteria and into a New York utterly remote from the one in which Eli and I tarried ... Yes, there was something that seemed always fresh-minted about Roy; even when he was drunk or exhausted, he gave off an air of mercantile newness and possibility. If Eli was the ancient teddy bear whose rips and stains endow him with an ever-increasing pathos, Roy was the shiny toy robot each child feels he will die if he doesn’t get for Christmas. His smile was bright, too bright: I wanted to squint against it, and bask in it too. “Martin!” he called, bypassing Eli, whom Jonathan Horowitz was holding out to him like a fisherman with his catch, “I can’t believe it’s you!” And taking my hand, he embraced me lightly, guyishly, but also with tenderness, filling my nostrils with a scent of limes that shook the past awake as brutally as smelling salts shoved under the nose of a fainting victim.
“Oh, you know each other?” Jonathan asked.
Roy nodded. “And you must be Eli,” he went on, letting me go. “What a pleasure finally to meet you. I’m Roy Beckett, by the way—Martin’s biggest fan.”
He winked. Eli regarded him with clinical dispassion. Later I wondered whether, with the grasping memory of the jealous spouse, he had been holding on to Roy’s name ever since that topsy-turvy afternoon in Florence when Lise Schiffrin had asked me about “my handsome friend”: Roy, royalty, king of hearts. The name itself roy-led the dark waters of his dreams withs its ad-royt-ness. Even the shape it imposed upon the lips was enough to give me away: the shape of a kiss.
We stood, then, the four of us, partners in an uncomfortable little square dance, while under our feet poles of habit and security shifted and the ground gave way. Roy asked about my new book: I told him it was coming out in a few weeks, then added clumsily—as if somehow it might soften the retribution I was expecting—“Eli’s got a novel coming out, too. It’s terrific, better than mine.”
“No it’s not.”
“Oh really? That’s great. I can’t wait to read it.” Roy felt in his pockets. “Say, has anyone got a pen?”
“I do,” said Eli.
Roy was pulling a business card out of his wallet. “I want to give you guys my number in Watermill,” he continued. “Thanks”—he took Eli’s pen—“in case you have any free time over the next few days.”
“Roy’s taking a week’s vacation,” Jonathan explained. “He doesn’t have to drive back to Manhattan tonight like the rest of us poor slobs.”
“Oh, how funny,” Eli said, “I’m planning to go into New York tomorrow morning myself.” He punched Jonathan lightly on the cheek. “Well, Jon, at least we won’t have to worry about the little women being bored, will we?”
“No, we’ll have to worry about them not being bored.” They both laughed. Roy gave me his card. A grimace of distaste had crossed his face. Not twenty-four hours later, in his bed, he’d be telling me how much it irritated him when men referred to themselves or each other in the feminine. For now, however, the manful way he reached to shake my hand seemed comment enough. “Good seeing you, Martin. And Eli—great to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
Then he and Jonathan disappeared, once again, into the party. In their absence, suddenly, Eli and I seemed to have nothing to say to each other.
“Well, ready to go?” I asked him after a minute.
“Whenever you are.”
So we bade our farewells to Derek and climbed into the car. We did not speak at all on the drive home. Almost as soon as we got there, Eli went to let out the dogs. I was just preparing a speech of self-defense, in which I would point out how unreasonable it was of him to resent an infidelity that had never taken place, when he came out of the kitchen. “There’s a message from your father,” he said. “You’d better listen.”
“Really? What is it?”
I followed him back into the kitchen, where he pressed the play button on the answering machine. “Hi, Martin,” my father said. “I’m sorry to be a pest, but I thought I should remind you that today is the anniversary of your mother’s death, and if you haven’t done so you ought to light a Yahrzeit candle. All’s well here. My best to Eli.”
A click. I sat down at the table. “Had you forgotten?” Eli asked.
I nodded. Stealing up behind me, he rubbed my shoulders, as weeks earlier he had rubbed Nora’s. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “it’s okay. The A&P should still be open. We can buy one there.”
“Can we?” Bad Jew that I was, I had no idea how easy (or difficult) it was to buy a Yahrzeit candle; indeed, I had only the vaguest conception of what a Yahrzeit candle was, though dimly I could recall my mother lighting one twice a year, on the anniversaries of her parents’ deaths, a glass cup of wax glowing on the ledge behind the kitchen sink.
We drove to the A&P. Because East Hampton still cleared out at the end of every weekend in those years, there were at most half a dozen cars in the parking lot. Inside, only a single checkout lane was open. While Eli stocked up on groceries, I headed for the kosher section, where amid the chilly freezer-bum smell emanating from the ice cream cases I found, just as he had promised, a cache of Yahrzeit candles for $1.99 each. When I picked one up, dust blackened my fingers. Here it was, a thick cup of wax into which some uncaring thumb had pressed an aluminum wick like a sequin. Homely and crude. And not for the first time it startled me, the ease with which Judaism transforms its mystic symbols into commonplace, even drab commodities: not only Yahrzeit candles, but the matzoh in its bright red and white boxes, so remote from the Old Testament’s “unleavened bread”; the lumps of gefilte fish in their cloudy juice, in big jars the labels of which listed as ingredients carp and pike, though my father had once told me that gefilte fish combined every fish in the sea. Of course there was no truth to that; the legend spoke more of his fancy than any tradition. Yet it had stayed with me over the years, from Passover to Passover, those dinners at which, being the youngest, I always got to ask the Four Questions ... And then after dinner, in mimicry of the egg hunts of Easter, we would search the house for the piece of matzoh my father had wrapped in a paper napkin and hidden, pirates avid for the prize, which was not much of a prize really, only a few of those weird jelly candies, shaped like slices of orange and lemon, and of which, along with matzoh and gefilte fish, the A&P kept an ample supply ... I threw my Yahrzeit candle into the cart and went to find Eli, who was in the fruit section.
After that we loaded up on apple cider, milk, yogurt, muesli, Pepperidge Farm cookies, Listerine, and cottage cheese, and got in line. Ahead of us a heavy man with a gray-flecked beard was smoking a cigar. Eli coughed. “How gross,” he muttered, just loudly enough to be heard.
No response. The man took another puff, exhaled. Eli coughed a second time. Nothing. He jabbed the man in the back.
“Excuse me.”
“Yeah?”
“Would you mind thinking of other people for once and not smoking that disgusting thing in a public place?”
The man, who was taller than Eli by a head, turned and gazed down at him. “What did you say?” he asked, laughing a little, as if he couldn’t quite believe his ears.
People looked. “Eli—” I whispered.
“I said, why don’t you put that thing out? It’s gross and selfish.”
“Yeah, and why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
“Yeah, and why don’t you stuff that fucking cigar up your goddamned fat ass, asshole? Just get it out of my face.”
“What, you own the fucking store, buddy?”
“It’s disgusting—”
“Just answer my question. You, own the fucking store?”
“Eli, don’t.” I pointed to the Yahrzeit candle.
“Oh great,” he said. “Great.” Suddenly he was bearing down on me. “Goddamn it, Martin, sometimes I wonder why I even bother. You won’t support me when I try to defend myself. You are so fucked up. This whole thing is so fucked up. Excuse me.” He pushed at my cart. “Excuse me.” The other people in the line stepped out of the way.
Then he was racing off, jumping the barrier at one of the closed lanes, flying out the automatic doors. Strangers gawked. Shaking his head, the man with the cigar said, “Goddamn queer.”
I waited. What else could I do? With a curious delicacy the cashier rang up my total. “That’s twenty-two sixty-three, honey,” she said, her voice smug with what sounded like pity as I paid, took my bags, and hurried outside. Eli was already in the car, his brights trained on the supermarket doors. I loaded the groceries in the back and climbed in.
“Eli,” I said.
“Shut up.” Brights still on, he turned onto Newtown Lane. A man crossing the street cursed us. Eli gunned the engine, hurtled to a stop as the light on the comer of Main Street switched to red.
“I’ll only say this once. I can’t bear you anymore. Tonight I’m going home to my mother and you’re not coming with me.”
I started to cry. “How can you say that when I don’t even have a mother?”
“How can you betray me—again? How can I trust you? You won’t even stand up for me.” The light turned green, and we swerved around the comer.
“But you were overreacting! You were acting like a lunatic!”
“Oh, so when I defend myself I’m a lunatic? Jesus, just because I’m not a goddamned wimp like you.”
“I’m not a wimp.”
“You’d let anyone walk over you, Billie, Liza, your father.”
“Shut up.”
“Anyway, I should think you’d be glad I’m leaving, it’ll give you a chance to fuck around with Roy what’s-his-name.”
“I said shut up!”
“What, do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I haven’t noticed that when you come back from your ‘walks’ your clothes always smell like smoke? Or the condoms in your wallet—”
“How dare you search my wallet.”
“I can break any rule I want because I don’t give a shit anymore.”
By now we were in Nora’s driveway. Brakes screeched. Without even taking the key out of the ignition Eli slammed into the house, up the stairs, ignoring the plaintive eagerness of the dogs, who were closed inside the kitchen. “Eli,” I called. “Please don’t be this way!”
“Go away!” he shouted through his study door.
“Eli, please! I’m not going away until you—”
“Leave me alone!” He was weeping. “God, can’t you ever leave anyone alone?”
“Not until you talk to me! Don’t you know how you’re hurting me?”
“Oh, so little Martin’s hurt! Isn’t that a pity! Is that all that matters to you, your own fucking hurt? Well, fuck you, then, because the world doesn’t revolve around your suffering, no matter what your mommy told you.”
“Don’t talk about my mother anymore!” And I smashed my fist, hard, into the locked door. He was silent. My wrist throbbing, I backed down the stairs, to where the dogs were trying to nudge their way out of the kitchen. I let them go. They ran to Eli’s door. Then I got the groceries from the car and put them away, very carefully, the milk in the refrigerator, the muesli in the pantry; I wiped the countertops; I scrubbed away some bits of food that were stuck to the inside of the sink. No noise ... Stealing upstairs again I saw that Eli, in his study, had switched off the light, that the dogs were sleeping, all three, outside his door.
I went back downstairs. In the kitchen I lit the Yahrzeit candle and put it on the ledge behind the sink, as I recalled my mother having done; for a moment the flame jerked, as if uncertain whether it wanted to catch, before taking hold. Then I took off my glasses and gazed at it. Shadows flew over the table. In the dark mirror of the window a moon was rising over cabinets, rivulets of hurled light, my own face, which might have been my mother’s. How far away she seemed—as far as the moon! Yet somehow she was also there, in that flame that writhed like a gypsy, a fierce little dancing girl, mutely convulsed by pity, pain, and love.