Martin Bauman by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt [Leavitt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gay, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780618154517
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I date from that party the beginning of an intimacy the sediment of which, despite its comparatively short duration—it lasted only a few years, until Liza’s marriage to Ben Pollack estranged her from Eli, from whom I was soon after to be estranged myself—I can taste on my lips even today, years later; it is the flavor of the sugary batter left over in the bowl after a cake has been mixed—and that is exactly the sort of metaphor at which Liza excelled. For in memory taste, like sound, lasts longer than sight, which is why Liza’s voice—charming, querulous, a chalky blue color (if voices have colors)—can be dictating these words to me today, even though I haven’t heard it for more than a decade. As for her face, it is more or less lost to me: not surprising, given that since her wedding I’ve seen her only once, from a distance. She was standing on the corner of East 64th Street and Second Avenue, the same shapeless purse slung over her shoulder that she’d been carrying the night of Sam Stallings’s party, and dressed, despite the upheavals that had marked the intervening years—her marriage, my breakup with Eli, the birth of her child and deaths of our mothers—in exactly the same sort of vaguely masculine outfit about which Sada had always remonstrated. Then I wondered at the passage of time, which wears away the outer layers of experience while leaving the essential self intact. I didn’t say hello, though. There was too much to explain, and as it stood, I was already late for an appointment.

It had been over the course of the week immediately following Sam Stallings’s party—a week during which we talked or saw each other almost every day, until I had to fly back to Washington for the Christmas holidays—that my friendship with Liza, as well as my knowledge of her, really cemented. Most of our conversations took place over the telephone. Liza, who had a terror of solitude, more or less lived on the phone. Whether in New York or Minnesota, alone or with a lover, she never began her mornings without first making a call from bed—as I mentioned earlier, either to Eli, or a boy called Ethan, or in the absence of these two reliable confreres, as was the case that Christmas break, when Eli was bicycling in the south of France with his parents and sisters, and Ethan had gone off to visit a White Russian princess in Venice, someone else, some new discovery, in this instance myself.

The first call came the morning after the party, when in the stillness of my apartment—Will having already gone to the gym, and Dennis being asleep—Liza’s voice provided a welcome interruption. “Did I wake you?” she asked—which she had. Nonetheless I pretended to have been up for hours.

“Me, I’m still in bed,” Liza said. “You can probably hear it in my voice, I’m still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Incidentally, isn’t that a

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