The 16th Annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : THE ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION WINNER, MARK MERLIS : At the Edge of the Abyss : Excerpt from “American Studies”

Mark Merlis’ first novel accomplishes that great thing that gives fiction its claim on truth: It creates a world so real that readers believe they live in it. In “American Studies,” Merlis in effect writes an alternate social history of the 20th Century. Reeve, a man now approaching old age, contemplates the arid life of his mentor and love. Tom, who committed suicide decades earlier. Tom longed to touch the men he loved and courted, but that was a barrier he never learned to cross without horror. As Reeve dissects Tom’s loneliness in his memory, it becomes clear that Reeve has maintained an equally impenetrable solitude through his avid promiscuity.

Although superficially classifiable as “a gay novel”--and quite a graphic one at that: The story takes place while Reeve is hospitalized after a violent encounter with a hustler he brought home--this is a book that effortlessly transcends genre. Merlis’ precise and penetrating language will draw any reader to the edge of the abyss that Merlis persuasively shows divides one ostracized human soul from all others. In this excerpt, Reeve recalls the brief period of his greatest intimacy with Tom.

****

I learned, over the years, that most of Tom’s affairs were ended without ever having been consummated. Tom could wait forever for the auspicious moment: He never learned how rapidly that moment arrives, if it is to come at all. He not only failed to strike while the iron was hot, but--after spending a whole semester trying to decide whether his chosen ingot was hot for him or just naturally glowed--would watch the cooling with some relief, and would be positively exuberant when the unseized opportunity left town.

“Very nearly made a fool of myself,” he would say to me. I would eat my chowder and refrain from saying that he really had made a fool of himself, that the sensible thing was to do as I did, go directly for the goodies instead of stand debating until the help comes and wheels the buffet cart away. I am sure he would have had some crushing answer to this Auntie Mame sentiment. Besides, he must once or twice have made his way to the goodies before they were carted off and--given his limited repertoire--experienced only anticlimaxes. Of course it is a common enough thing for a man to find his greatest pleasure in the hunt. But perhaps for Tom the prize at the end was, not merely a letdown, but a horrible negation of everything that had led up to it.

I think I must have been a sort of experiment for him, his first and only genuine, readily identifiable fairy. When he might ordinarily have spent months building some sort of pure communion, only to see it spoiled in an hour, he found himself hurtling to bed with me before he even knew my first name.

Nothing happened, of course, not what I understood to be lovemaking. My offertory twitchings of my fanny that first night went unanswered. . . . I must have been insulted at first. But somehow I understood almost at once that he could not imagine what I meant him to do. I didn’t press him: I didn’t know how.

He hugged me for a long while, until, drunk on three glasses of sherry, I fell asleep. By my next visit we had already fallen into the routine that continued through our time together--half a year, I guess, or a little more. I would come over after waiting dinner in the refectory. We would talk in the living room--he would talk while I had a glass of the whiskey to which he had promoted me. Then we would go into his room and put on our pajamas. We would hold each other as he talked me to sleep and I breathed in his smell of soap and tobacco.

He was the one who broke it off. I was just turning 17: Our conjugal life was, in a word, insufficient. And I had happily begun to discover other--outlets, Tom might have called them. Down at the station hotel, mostly, where I was able to make my contribution to the war effort by offering some passing solace to our fighting boys.

I would still, most nights, come back to his bed and let him hold me. It still felt right for some reason, it would feel right if I could back up into his arms this minute. But it didn’t feel right to him. He knew what I was doing. He rarely spoke of it, and never openly disapproved. What could he say? He knew what he wasn’t giving me, couldn’t. And wasn’t my body under the covers just as warm as it had ever been, no matter where else I’d taken it that night? A perfectly comfortable arrangement: It seemed to me we could go on forever.

Perhaps my inconstancies were too constant a reminder of his own incapacity. Perhaps one night he smelled someone on me, or thought he could. Or maybe he meant it when he said--the night when he let me finish my whiskey but told me I couldn’t come to bed--that it was dangerous, he was taking too great a risk.

“Who’s going to know about it?” I said. “It’s not as though I’m going to tell anybody.”

“Are you certain? If they should corner you?”

“Who in the world would do that?” I said. “Anyway, I didn’t go to your fancy prep school, but I’m not a snitch.”

“Of course you aren’t. I could never have . . . become friends with a ‘snitch.’ It’s one thing I can always tell. I do at least try to be careful.”

“Well, I guess we have to.”

“At any rate, you must forgive me, but I’m afraid I’m too tired for any company just tonight.”

I forgave him all too readily and headed for East Station. The next night, and the next, I joined him for whiskey as always, expecting that he would relent. I don’t know if he really didn’t want to, or if he just couldn’t say the words, couldn’t pick up once more what had now lost the innocence of habit. We never shared a bed again.