The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (16 page)

One story in particular, “The Servant Problem,” reminds me of Simon. With all of their expectations and disillusionment, Simon and the narrator seemed interchangeable. The story follows Meade, a middle-aged “everyman,” during one of his routine therapy sessions. The plot is straightforward: Meade and his therapist exchange a battle of wits throughout the session, a humorous exchange at times that shows how two people can simultaneously lose an argument. Meade punches pillows with his therapist, vents about his malevolent friends, fantasizes about everything he’s not supposed to want. There is no central love interest; he has a maid and a house boy and somehow, that is an adequate substitute for romance. Meade’s therapist asks him, “Is it possible that all the people in this cottage that you fantasize are really your servants? That you can only trust people who are totally dependent on you?”

So, we sit at the diner and Simon continues on about his recent boy. He makes it sound like he rescued a stray dog or cat and nursed it back to health before it ran off to find its original owner. Simon is a chubby man in his forties. He overeats to the point of obesity and complains about his constant state of loneliness. When our group of friends meets, he gets lost in the shuffle of multiple conversations. There is gossip he is not involved with and references to people he despises and desires. He usually arrives with small entourages of twenty-year-olds who let him pay for drinks and then proceed to talk only with each other. One long vicious cycle. And yet, I wonder how long Simon could function without these characters beside him. This is one of the conversations Simon and I don’t have, about his obsession with youth.

What I wanted to say to him was “Look, I read this book. And it was good, for many reasons, but the reason why I want you to read it is because I learned something about you from it. I feel like all the worrying I do about you and all the times we’ve sat with you discussing your problems have been for nothing, because we’ve just not been able to put it all into context for you. Bur if you could just get a clear understanding, like I did, then at least we can figure out how to makes things better.” But I couldn’t say that. Not without the fear of sounding completely ridiculous. As much as I try to prove myself, he still equates me to the young men he surrounds himself with. From his perspective, I’ll always be too young and naïve to understand him. And the source of my empathy was a fiction book by a deceased author who’s out-of-print and that he’s not even going to read. If empathy can’t be forced, then neither can epiphany.

Instead, I listen to my husband and Simon kill time by talking about their jobs and I struggle to keep myself interested in business affairs of which I know absolutely nothing. My ears perk whenever a pop culture reference is made, which makes me wonder how juvenile I must still seem during serious conversation. When it’s my turn to introduce a subject, I mention Hall’s book and Simon slightly nods his head, as if preparing a poker face. I tell him about another story in the collection, “The Koan,” in which a young man has a crisis of conscience about living off a sugar daddy in a big house on Fire Island. “My question is how do you possibly end a story like this?” I ask. “Some overgrown teenager gets to live consequence-free in some guy’s house. If he leaves, what does he do with no money and no work experience? If he stays, what happens when he’s worn out his welcome or somebody newer and cuter arrives?” I stopped. Simon was looking at me funny.

“Sounds interesting,” Simon said with that high pitch meant to close off a conversation. I pulled
Couplings
out of my backpack anyway and put it on his side of the table. “There’s a naked guy on the cover. Is this one of your porn books?”

“No,” I assured him.

Throughout my childhood, books had been my escapism. I read young adult novels about orphans and Tolkeinesque fantasies. I took the job at the literary foundation thinking it was an opportunity to become a writer. Due to my employment, I was not eligible to submit to the Richard Hall Story Contest. My breakthrough novel did not materialize. But I continued to find books that inspired me. I was no longer reading to escape, but to learn. Hall’s stories were lessons on how to be a gay adult.

It's not that Simon’s incapable of understanding any of this. I offered to loan him the book. He shrugged and said that he wouldn’t have the time to read anyway (Simon isn’t a reader, many of my friends aren’t). It was a defeat — I felt defeated. That is, I felt I offered something that resembled his complicated life so intimately that he might have recognized himself. Idealistically, about 15 pages might have explained his attempts to possess unobtainable boys and why he keeps losing them. But in actuality, I was offering more of my sympathies, my attempt to have an intimate connection, to share something personal. And Simon rejected me.

We got our check and said our goodbyes. It can be exhilarating having dinner with your lover's friends; no matter how integrated, you're still one of the outsiders. You analyze them differently than you usually would; and they do the same to you. I wonder if I've maintained my good reputation with Simon, if he still finds me amusing and pleasant, a good catch for his friend and a decent addition to his larger circle of acquaintances. Did he realize that I withheld an opinion, that this book was supposd to be less about me and my thoughts and more about what he should be thinking? Much like Meade, it's doubtful Simon will ever change, or even recognize the potential for change. He'll continue to bring his fantasies home and report his highs and lows like the best gossip. I'll continue finding symbolism and explanations in stories, and be hesitant to share my interpretations with others. After leaving the restaurant, I went home and placed
Couplings
on my bookcase. Richard Hall holds court with Alasdair Gray and Andrew Holleran on a shelf of select favorites. It is still a book I go back to, for nostalgia's sake. I guess I'm just growing up.

Knopf, 1996

Aaron Hamburger

In his remarkable first novel J. S. Marcus takes us on a highly personalized tour of the fascinating mess that is Berlin.

“Berlin,” Marcus writes, “a capital of dead ideas; a card catalogue for a library that no longer exists; intricate, somehow superfluous; symbolic capital of the twentieth century, or else just capital of twentieth-century symbols.”

Imagine a European city with the sprawl of Los Angeles and the cultural life of New York. Something like London without the anchoring centerpieces of Oxford Street, Picadilly Circus, and Trafalgar Square, or Paris without the Champs Elysees and Arc de Triomphe.

Yet unlike that other European urban mess without a center, Rome, Berlin works. Every corner of the city is connected to each other by means of a Jackson Pollock-like network of underground and overground trains, street trams, buses, and taxis. New buildings are sprouting up all over the city like tulips after winter, including a new glass cathedral of a train station that promises to make Berlin a central transit hub of the new Europe. Tourists are flooding in from all over the globe (yet the city is constantly verging on bankruptcy).

The messiness extends to the ethnic life of Berlin, the most un-German of all German cities, which also happens to be the country’s newly restored capital. Native-born Germans compete for space with Turks (some who trace roots in Germany going back two generations), Russians, Africans, Italians, Americans, and Jews (who may be German, Polish, or citizens of the former Soviet Union). The heavy odors of beer and wurst compete with the spicy aroma of doner kebab stands on every corner. Women with spray-painted Mohawks jostle onto the U-bahn trains beside women in headscarves.

But perhaps the most important way in which Berlin is a mess is how that city’s complicated past has imprinted itself on the architectural landscape. You can walk down a single street and see one of the few Baroque buildings spared by Allied bombings, now beautifully restored and freshly painted, while its neighbor lies in shambles with World War II bulletholes still pocking the remains of the façade. Masterpieces of East Berlin Communist architecture are now adorned with ads for Coca Cola and McDonald’s. These compete for space with rows and rows of bland cement apartment buildings built in the 50s and 60s that look like giant air conditioners and are painted in garish shades of bright blue or orange. The latest vogue in architecture seems to be for sparkling new buildings comprised of little more than sheets of glass fitted into shining steel frames. Or sometimes, as in the case of the Reichstag, or the Café Josty in the new Potsdamer Platz, elements of old and new are fused into a new postmodern hybrid of both.

And occasionally, if you’re lucky, you’ll come to a point where the buildings mysteriously end, and there’s a strange gap of vacant lots, which indicate you’ve come across that snaking belt of emptiness where the Berlin Wall used to stand.

In the middle of all this mess and trying to make sense of it is J. S. Marcus, a queer American Jew who lived in Berlin during the mid-90s, and in his first novel explored that most forbidden love of all: the love of a Jew for Berlin. It’s a love I quickly learned to share during the past few years as I trekked back and forth to Germany’s old and now new capital to do research for a novel. Soon I found out I wasn’t the only American Jew in town. Artists, rabbis, singers, translators, English teachers, and of course, writers; here we all were, exploring the city where the Nazis once plotted our destruction, making a home for ourselves in the shadow of history.

I first discovered Marcus when I read an essay he wrote for an anthology called
Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing
, which I happened to bring with me on one of those trips. I saw in his biographical note that he was living in Berlin, and contacted him by email. He wrote me back to say that unfortunately he was going to be in the United States while I was in Berlin and vice versa. Oh well, I thought, maybe next time.

But there was no next time. I finished my research. I came home to New York to stay. I lost his email address. And then one day I was in the library and happened to come across his novel. For the hell of it, I checked it out, and began to read.

The first thing a reader might notice about
The Captain’s Fire
is its lack of paragraph breaks. Instead there are solid blocks of text and long sinewy snaking sentences that bleed into each other. Commas, parentheses, and words in italics do the work that is normally done by periods and paragraph breaks, in the manner of such noted German-language novelists as the late W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. The result is a densely-packed palimpsest, with fascinating nuggets of trivia, history, and characterization all fused into an interlacing pattern. The object is not to put these facts back into chronological order, but rather to experience them all at once, as a brilliant kaleidoscope that recreates the dizzying experience of an outsider delving into the city of Berlin.

Take a look at the book’s opening, in which Joel La Vine, the book’s narrator, has been asked by his German landlords to leave his apartment. “I just assume that they had been working for the secret police while the wall was up,” Marcus lets us know casually, then adds, with even more sinister overtones, “Their note, written in the old-fashioned German handwriting that Frau Kruger must have learned in the late 1930s, told me to be out of the apartment in two months, before the first of March.” The references to the old-fashioned German handwriting style (favored by the Nazis) as well as the time period of the late 1930s suggest the unavoidable creepiness of a German evicting a Jew (even an American Jew) in Berlin. Nothing can be innocent in Germany after Hitler. And yet, this encounter is entirely innocent, a simple business transaction.

This is exactly what life is like as a Jew in Berlin today: you’re constantly waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, but it never drops because after all that’s happened in Germany in the 20
^th
Century, there are no shoes left to drop.

Here is another typically Marcusian snaking sentence, whose structure echoes the mysterious layering of contemporary Berlin existence, always steeped in often noisome fragrances from the past. Again, we hear about the Krugers:

Any given sentence in
The Captain’s Fire
can veer from its seemingly intended purpose (here, to state the jobs of the Krugers) in order to delve into questions of history, public and private. This isn’t a lack of control on Marcus’s part. It’s the only way a sentient person can process this complicated terrain. A walk to your local grocery store can lead you unexpectedly past a statue of Lenin in full heroic mode plopped down for decoration in the parking lot of the local branch of the German version of Home Depot. On your way to a romantic restaurant for a date, you may trip over a memorial brass cobblestone set into the ground and etched with the name of a Jewish family deported from a building nearby.

Marcus’s sprawling style reflects not only the confusion of its setting — a divided Berlin trying to make itself whole — but also the confusion of its narrator, Joel La Vine, a bisexual (or lately “no-sexual”) American Jew attempting to make sense of himself and his infatuation with his adopted home. “Trying not to think about Nazis all the time,” he writes, “like (or not like) trying not to have an erection. (Trying not to think about Nazis in Germany: like trying not think about sex in a porno theater. Why go in at all?)”