Martin Bauman Read online

  Today the red AIDS ribbon, like the pink triangle, provokes little reaction in me when I pass someone wearing one on the street; it is neither frightening nor chic because it is not new. And yet in the early eighties, when AIDS was still a vagueness, a rumor on the periphery of things, to carry a pink triangle balloon was to make a daring proclamation. Parading up and down the college walkways, giddy and at the same time frightened, my friends and I would attract stares from boys and girls who loathed us, as well as from those who wanted to but could not quite muster the courage to join us. Theirs was a position I understood well, as it had been mine until the year before; then I’d gone to the gay-straight raps as a straight participant. Now I organized and led them. A surprisingly large number of students always showed up, though curiously, Barb was never among them—not, I suspect, because she was closeted (far from it; she was the most intrepid among us), but because she saw her own ardors as things too fragile, too exalted, to survive the harsh light of a public airing.

  Alas, it was at one of these raps that I became the involuntary agent of her downfall. I remember that I was standing near the front of the common room, listening while my “cofacilitator,” an earnest crunchy named Erica, introduced the proceedings, when I noticed among the faces in the crowd that of a sophomore already famous among my friends, as she was considered a likely contender for the Olympic swim team. This sophomore, Tammy Lake, had jet-black hair and a friendly, oblong face. Although I knew her slightly—we lived in the same dormitory—I had no idea at first if she was a lesbian, or had simply come to the rap for the same reasons that other straight girls came to the raps: to prove her open-mindedness, or to expiate some childhood guilt, or because a boy on whom she had a crush had just come out to her. Nor, I think, would I have given the matter any further thought, had some recruitment instinct not compelled me to reappraise certain aspects of her appearance—short hair, muscled body, androgynous preppy garb—in light of their more obvious connotations. Was Tammy Lake, the proto-Olympic swimmer, gay? I found myself wondering. I certainly hoped so, because if she was, then her presence at the big rally on Saturday—that of a bona fide campus celebrity, a future face on the front of a Wheades box—could prove a great boon to us, almost as much of a boon as if the TV star who had enrolled the year before (and of whom I had so far caught only a glimpse) were to give a speech. And yet this TV star, though rumored to be a fixture at the off-campus parties that Gretchen, Schuyler, and their friends threw most weekends, had so far kept a low profile so far as GLAD week was concerned, whether out of discretion or disinterest I hadn’t a clue.

  As for Tammy, when the rap ended she made a point of coming up and saying hello to me, much to the annoyance of Erica, who was dying to meet her. Ignoring the importunate glances of my cofacilitator, I mentioned that I would be manning the GLAD information table outside the dining hall the next evening, a remark to which Tammy responded with a smile so open and frank that, emboldened, I went a step further. I asked her if she wanted to help out.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do I have to do?”

  “Just sit with me there for an hour or so, answer questions, sell buttons and balloons and T-shirts. Oh, and take signatures on our petition to support gay marriage.”

  Crossing her arms, Tammy seemed to consider the implications of my offer—but only for a moment. “Okay, why not?” she said. “I think I should be able to handle that.”

  After we had agreed to meet in the common room the next day at five, Tammy left. Very swiftly Erica began buttoning her jacket. “By the way,” she said, “I’d appreciate it if in future, when referring to the information tables, you’d use some other verb besides to man. It’s sexist.” And she strode out the door.

  The next afternoon found me, as promised, in the common room outside the dining hall, arranging on a folding table all those balloons and buttons and T-shirts and petitions, in what amounted to the leftist equivalent of a bake sale. Indeed, I was just smoothing out the black and purple banner (festooned, of course, with pink triangles) that hung over the edge of the table, when to my mild surprise Barb walked in. This was unusual only insofar as she lived off-campus and almost never ate at the dining hall.

  “Hi, Barb,” I said.

  Unsmiling, fists curled in her pockets, she bore down on me, her gray eyes wide with an urgency.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Tammy can’t come,” she said. Then, in a softer voice: “You shouldn’t have asked her.”

  “But she—”

  “You shouldn’t have asked her,” Barb repeated. “When she said she’d come, it was only because she felt pressured. Afterwards she had second thoughts. You have to realize, she has her future to consider.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to step on any toes.”

  “Don’t ever ask Tammy to do anything like this again,” Barb went on. “She’s not like other people. And please—don’t tell anyone I came here tonight.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Thank you.”

  Turning around, she left. I sat down in my folding chair. What I was experiencing was not so much surprise as a sense of corroboration: that famous of course that comes when the solution to a murder mystery is finally revealed, and you slap yourself for not having seen it coming. For suddenly I understood not only that Barb and Tammy were having a love affair, but that through her lover Barb was living out that fantasy the long gestation of which I had read, almost from the day I’d met her, in her face. Now, for the first time, much of her behavior made sense to me: her furtiveness, her isolation, the distance she kept from the festivities attending GLAD week. I recognized the masochistic nature of her longing, the sacrificial pleasure she took in this romance of which duty required her never to speak, but rather to cherish in secret, silent in the anonymous stands while by the pool, as the climax to that hallowed ceremony in which love itself forbade Barb from taking any role, a medal was draped around Tammy’s golden neck.

  After that, I assumed that Tammy would keep a low profile for the rest of GLAD week, that Barb would make sure she remained sequestered, in some sanctuary of her own devising, at least until the celebrations were over. Instead she was behind me in fine the next evening in the dining hall. “Hi,” she said casually. “Sorry about last night.”

  “No problem.”

  “Barb just didn’t think it was a good idea. Hope you understand.” “Sure.”

  To my slight bewilderment, Tammy suggested that we eat together. At a small banquette on the side of the dining hall she interrogated me for half an hour as to my own history, the lesbian community on campus, the presence (or absence) of gay and lesbian professors on the faculty. Not far away, in the center of the room, Gretchen and Schuyler were having dinner with a friend of theirs, a pretty, pale girl with a dissolute affect who was rumored to have just ended a love affair with the TV star. Stubbing out cigarettes into their largely untouched plates of soy bean casserole (all three were vegetarians), they did not speak, not even to one another; instead they seemed intent on providing for the audience of other diners a tableau vivant of metropolitan boredom, enervation, and glamour.

  “Who are those girls?” Tammy asked, indicating their table with her long neck. “I’ve seen them around.”

  “The two on the left are named Gretchen and Schuyler. I think Barb knows them.”

  “Are they lovers?”

  I nodded. “Or at least they used to be.”

  “And the other one?”

  “I think her name is Lauren.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Yes.”

  “Introduce me to her.”

  The authority with which Tammy issued this command—and it was a command, not a request—startled and bemused me, even as it made me fear for Barb, whose portrayal of her girlfriend as naive and requiring of protection I now recognized as saying more about Barb’s needs than Tammy’s. So I stood, and led her to the table where the three girls were sitting. Like wakened sleepers, they
blinked at us, as if our approach alone had roused them from drowsy stupefaction.

  “Hi,” I said. “Mind if we join you?”

  “It’s a free country,” Schuyler said.

  Pulling up chairs, we sat. “This is Tammy,” I said.

  Introductions were made. Between Lauren and Tammy there passed only the vaguest “Hi,” the most fluttering glance across the table and the food; and yet above the hum of conversation I was sure that I heard, as in one of those frequencies beyond the range of the human ear yet audible to dogs, an assignation being agreed upon, to take place later, in the dark, in one of their rooms.

  The next day was bright and sunny. Just after lunch I was standing outside the library with some friends of mine, with Erica and Donald Schindler and a few others, all of us holding our pink triangle balloons and enjoying the new sensation, after winter, of sunlight and warmth, when from the direction of the Economics department Barb came striding toward us. “Hi, Barb,” we all said in chorus, smiling, eager to share that good humor the warm weather had brought out in us.

  Without so much as a word she yanked the balloon out of my hand and with a powerful fist punched it into smithereens. I jumped. Her breath ragged, she moved toward the stairs that descended into the library.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Barb!” Erica shouted. “What’s eating you?”

  “Jesus, Barb!” Donald echoed, and turned to me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, gazing at the shriveled remnants of my balloon. Unlike Donald and Erica, I wasn’t angry, probably because—alone among the witnesses—I understood the reason for Barb’s outburst. No doubt, without much in the way of ceremony, Tammy had just dumped her. And yet at the same time, I remained uncertain as to one detail: had she chosen my balloon at random, because it was the first one to hand? Or was she protesting the role I had played, albeit unwittingly, in the quick decimation of her idyll?

  For surely it was the loss of this numinous ideal, more than of Tammy herself, that Barb was mourning that day. Like many young homosexual men and women, she had invested her vast and secret stores of erotic longing not simply in a dream lover but, as it were, in a dream scenario, one in which that longing, instead of terminating in barren solitude as we are taught that it must, finds issue in love. Certainly this was the happy ending for which I hoped; and indeed, if I felt such a strong identification with Barb’s fantasy of lovemaking in the Olympic Village, it was probably because her scenario, though differing from my own in every particular, nonetheless shared with it a common foundation in the desire to be redeemed by an exalted, even sacred passion.

  For instance: the other day, browsing in a record store, I happened to hear a fragment of music in response to which—though my mind could remember nothing of it—my body issued a tremolo of adolescent nostalgia the likes of which I hadn’t felt in years. Immediately I asked what the music was, and learned that it was the slow movement from Vivaldi’s Concerto for Guitar and Strings in D; the reason I recognized it, I soon realized, was that it had been part of the soundtrack of a movie I had gone to see over and over again during my senior year in high school, a movie in which a rich American girl, living in Paris with her parents, falls in love with a poor French boy. In the movie an old man (played by Laurence Olivier) tells the pair that according to legend, two lovers who kiss in a gondola beneath the Bridge of Sighs, at sunset, when the bells of the campanile toll, will love each other forever, at which point they decide to run away together to Venice. And though everything about this movie besotted me, what gave me the greatest pleasure were the images it offered of Paris and Venice in the spring, lush and green, and providing such a contrast to the drought-ridden landscape of my adolescence, a landscape in which the greedy soil, when my father aimed his garden hose at it, lapped up the water and was instantly dry again. At home my sister and I had to share bathwater, at school notices thumbtacked above the toilets read, IF IT’S YELLOW, LET IT MELLOW, IF IT’S BROWN, FLUSH IT DOWN, yet in the film water was everywhere: it plashed laxly in Paris fountains, in Venetian canals it flowed with a lassitude from which even the recklessness of the gondola, in the climactic scenes, could not seem to wake it. By contrast, the theater where I went to see the film—that theater with its brown upholstered walls, its acid smell of popcorn—contained only drinking fountains, and these had been shut off by order of the fire commissioner for the duration of the drought.

  How that film obsessed me! Soon I had seen it so many times that the old lady who took the tickets started looking at me with suspicion, as if she smelled inside my fervent attendance some unwholesome motive, such as a psychotic crush on one of the teenage stars. She was only partly right. What I desired wasn’t anything so clear-cut as that beautiful American girl, that handsome French boy; instead I wanted somehow to embody the very essence of their romance, to be ... not her, not him, but rather the wood of the boat, the moss on the walls, the tug of the water through which the gondolier’s pole propels them toward the sighing bridge, as bells toll. Thus my own dream scenario was born in a movie theater, as perhaps Barb’s had been, years before, in a high school locker room, where a beautiful runner was toweling off her limbs.

  My scenario ran as follows: I would be in Europe, in some rapturous and lovely place—a monastery, say, where monks sang Vespers, or a cathedral where the sunlight refracted through the many-hued stained-glass windows, or one of the museums where I hoped someday actually to see the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art the titles and locations of which I had memorized, along with Baylor, in the year of Stanley Flint—when across the vastness another pair of eyes would fix upon my own. It almost didn’t matter to whom the eyes belonged; what was important was the chanting, the light in the windows, in essence the noble and benevolent circumstances under which my friend and I would meet, and which we could recount, fifty years later, without compunction.

  Needless to say, none of it ever came to pass. Oh, something like it came to pass: that is to say, one summer I did go to Europe, and in a museum (the Brera in Milan, to be exact) I did meet a boy, a very handsome boy named Gianluca, American of Italian extraction, an architecture student at NYU. This Gianluca had thick hair, black eyes, a weak chin darkened by an incipient haze of beard, and I remember thinking: he is the one I have been waiting for. His name is Gianluca. He has a weak chin. It was as if the subject of a portrait for which the background has already been painted, and from which only the sitter himself is missing, had suddenly appeared, and by taking his place before the snaking river and olive groves, proved the foresight of the artist in knowing exactly how to frame a face he had never seen. But in the end nothing happened. I was too shy to make a pass at him, while he must have had bigger fish to fry, for he merely took me on a walk through the courtyard of the Brera, where the statues of the great architects stand, and said, “Someday I intend for my statue to be placed here next to theirs.” I clucked in awe, after which we shook hands and parted. I never saw him again.

  When I was young, I used to believe that delving into the past was necessarily like returning to a house in which one has spent the early part of one’s youth, only to be stunned at how much smaller everything seems than it did in childhood. In truth, I have since learned, the emotions rarely respect those laws of perspective that govern memory. Thus, though I’ve gone on to suffer worse humiliations than I did in Milan, just as I’ve had to wait for the results of tests far more consequential than the PSAT (and on which it was impossible to cheat), I won’t begrudge my adolescent self the legitimacy of his suffering. For in the end, all the experiences about which I’ve written here were rehearsals for those later hijackings of the spirit, vaster in extent if not intensity, that awaited me then, and await me still. (How trivial the PSAT seems when one has waited for a PSA!) In other words, “Practice,” as my mother used to tell me, “brings perspective”—the perspective of wisdom, which, while acknowledging the triviality of youth’s preoccupations, also refuses to underestimate its pain: something of whic
h I try to remind myself whenever I recall those weekends when she was awaiting the Monday results of a Friday biopsy, and I the Monday results of a Friday math test, and in my arrogance I believed our anguish to be equal.

  3. BECAUSE VERY FEW MICE KNOW HOW TO DANCE

  I HAVE A FRIEND, an antiquarian bookseller, above whose desk hang two credos, (i) “Never judge a book by its contents.” (2) “The worst thing you can do to a book is read it.”

  No doubt this friend would have loathed my mother, a great lover and destroyer of books. Because she liked to knit while she read, before she started a new book she would first break its spine, so that it lay flat on her lap. And the sharp, bone-cracking noise that the book issued when she did this—if truth be told, with real brutality and pleasure—was enough to make my brother grind his teeth and afterward regard the book with genuine pity, the way a compassionate nurse might regard a wounded soldier whose sufferings it is not within her power to allay. Our shelves were full of books my mother had thus maimed, their split spines listing inward, or finely ridged with lines not very different from those that creased her own forehead, or spilling whole signatures where the seams, either of glue or thread, had been violated. (Likewise my sister was a torturer where books were concerned, albeit of a different stripe: she had a fondness for reading in the bathtub and was forever dropping paperbacks into the soapy water, causing their pages to warp and yellow.)