“How come I’m the last one around here to know anything?”
“Mom, I just graduated magna cum laude from the University of Chicago. Can you try to be happy?”
That night we all went out to dinner at the Berghoff. As I expected, Seamus was scrutinizing the menu as if he were in a Torah study group, looking for anything without a trace of treyf, and Ruth blanched when she saw the prices. Then I announced that Rachel and I were using our prize money to treat everyone to dinner. Ruth turned to Joan, Rachel’s mother. “Do we have the most wonderful children in the world?”
“I would say so,” Joan replied. “Rachel and I are so close I tell everyone we’re more like sisters.”
“My son and daughter are best friends. That’s one of my proudest achievements as a mother.”
Sarah downed her wine and whispered to Rachel and me, “I’m going to need a lot of alcohol to get through the evening.”
“Me too,” Rachel murmured back, and swallowed her glass of wine.
Rachel and Sarah both laughed.
“What? What’s so funny?” Ruth exclaimed.
“Nothing, Mom,” I replied, and poured wine into her glass. Ruth drank it all in one gulp.
Then Joan asked me if I had ever been in therapy.
“Mom!” Rachel hissed.
I squeezed her hand under the table. “No, I haven’t,” I answered.
Ruth’s eyes were shiny from the alcohol. “Oh, he’d probably just tell the psychiatrist what a bad mother I was,” she commented.
Seamus, still puzzling over the menu, suddenly looked up and exclaimed, “Mom, I’m sure Seth would never do that! I’m sure Seth appreciates that you’ve tried your best to be a good mother.”
Joan returned her attention to me. “I think you might find therapy extremely helpful to your writing. I have a number of clients who are writers, and our therapy has helped them to unlock their creativity. I’ve been doing regression therapy with one of them, and he’s found it a very empowering experience.”
“I’m afraid if I regress any more I’ll turn into an embryo,” I told her.
Both Rachel and Sarah burst out laughing, but our mothers looked perplexed. Then Ruth said, “Well, actually, Seth and Sarah experienced a very traumatic birth.”
“Mom!” Sarah and I said simultaneously.
“Don’t tell that story at the table,” Sarah said.
But of course Ruth went ahead and told it. She recounted how after the obstetrician had untangled the cords, he had immediately put his mouth over mine and sucked out a plug of mucus. After Ruth related this detail, I turned to Rachel and said, “Now, aren’t you glad you know that? By the way, how are you enjoying your schnitzel?”
Ruth continued the story. We were on respirators for ten days, she said, and it was touch and go, but a rabbi came to pray over us. When she came to the part in which Sarah and I were finally able to breathe on our own, she said, “I thanked the doctor, but the doctor said, ‘Don’t thank me.’”
Sarah and I interjected in unison: “Was anybody praying!” My sister and I laughed, but Ruth looked distraught. “Thanks a lot,” she said to us. “Thanks for absolutely nothing!” I poured more wine into her glass. “Drink up, Mom. Try to be happy.”
TWO DAYS LATER, I sent my mother a copy of “A Stranger on the Planet.” On the way to the airport, she had reminded me three times to send her my story. She wrote back right away.
Dear Seth,
I cried when I read your story. I’m crying now, as I write this letter, just thinking about how beautiful it is. Your love for me comes through in the story, but it was still painful for me to see my faults so exposed. I cried the most when I came to the scene of you and me placing our fingertips on the balloon so that Nanny Esther would recognize the pressure from our fingers when the balloon reached heaven. Of course I remember the day we did that at Wollaston beach in Quincy, but you were only four years old. How could you possibly remember that? I know I wasn’t a very good mother to you, and I felt great guilt after reading the story. Well, I suppose that’s my cross to bear. I’m overwhelmed by your talent and memory.
Thank you for your love and honesty. May the next one hundred and twenty years be full of happiness for you.
Love,
Mom
Immediately after reading my mother’s letter, I walked from my dorm room to campus and found Professor Kadish in his office.
“Yes, Mr. Shapiro, what can I do for you?”
“Is my story really going to be published in the Chicago Quarterly?”
“Yes. I didn’t send an official letter of acceptance because I thought we had an understanding. Why? Do you want to try one of the national magazines? It’s fine with me if you do.”
“No, it’s not that. I think my story has some problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Some of it is too directly borrowed from Henderson the Rain King.”
“How so? I didn’t notice any similarities.”
I brought out my copy of the book. “On page thirty, Henderson’s Hungarian violin teacher says, ‘Dear, take de bow like dis vun, not like dis vun, so.’ In my story, the mother’s Romanian patient says, ‘No, darlink, you must do like dis one.’”
Kadish laughed. “That’s nothing. Not a big deal.”
I had never seen Kadish so warm and gracious.
“But I was very conscious of borrowing from Henderson.”
“Everything is fine, Mr. Shapiro. You’ve earned your success.”
Of course I really wasn’t concerned about any similarities between my story and Henderson the Rain King. When I read my mother’s letter, I thought of how she had sacrificed herself for me by fucking Abe Zelman. I thought of her lying beneath his huge brown belly for all those minutes because of the words I’d said and couldn’t say.
“Professor Kadish, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not publish the story.”
Kadish stared at me for a moment. “Very well. If that’s what you want.” Then he returned his attention to the papers on his desk. I felt shattered; he wasn’t even going to ask me why, or encourage me to reconsider.
“Some people might be very hurt if I publish the story.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t you see how that might be possible?”
Kadish looked up at me. “My daughter told me you were one of the nicest men she’s ever met,” he said.
He had discussed me with his daughter! He knew we were friends! For a moment I wanted to retract my retraction.
“Thank you,” I said, but I knew he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.
ON OUR LAST NIGHT TOGETHER, Rachel and I made love slowly and ardently. She was moving back to California the next day. I kissed every inch of her. Perhaps, despite all the kisses I had planted on her body over the past six months, I had missed a secret spot, like a hidden door, which, if kissed, would send her falling madly, hopelessly in love with me.
Afterward, she cried in my arms. “I don’t understand why I don’t love you more than I do,” she said. “You’re exactly the type of man I’ve always wanted to fall in love with. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Right city, wrong season,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Rachel asked.
“Don’t you remember that’s what Professor Krzyzowski said about teaching Tolstoy during the winter term? I keep thinking that applies to us. We’re in the right city, but something’s wrong.”
“We’ll be friends for life. I know we will.”
I didn’t really believe her. I recognized myself as emotionally lazy, not the type of person to keep up a long-distance friendship. But then six months after she moved to California, Rachel called me up and told me she had a woman lover. She asked me if I was weirded out. I said no, not at all. I was relieved, actually. Her revelation explained everything. When we were boyfriend and girlfriend, we had never discussed sex, but that was all we talked about after Rachel realized she loved women. We had
found our true topic, our theory of everything. In the years to come, we would go on vacations together, and we always shared the same bed. Camping out in the Sierras, or lying next to each other at night in a rental cottage on Wellfleet, enveloped by the scent of pine and sea air coming in through the bedroom window, she would tell me all about her lovers, tell me how one woman loves another woman. I felt as if I were hearing the deepest secrets a woman could tell a man, and I never wrote another story again.
THE GRAMMAR OF LOVE
• SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1984 •
Allbright, Moses. Allen, LaDonna. Bates, Jamal. I knew every name by heart, intoned each one to myself as I walked down the hall, but when I entered the room and told the class my name, no one wrote it down. A smile twitched my lips, and I repeated my name. No response. Was I really here? Would they notice if I turned around and walked out? I sat down and began calling out names. Beaton, Andre. Cummings, T. J. I paused to match faces with names, but no one looked me in the eye, and by the name Dalrymple, Daryl, I was in a panic that I would never teach these students anything. From the back of the room, I heard baby noises vibrating the air with longing and wonder. I looked up and met the baby’s gaze. His bright black eyes were fastened on me. He strained forward in his mother’s lap, one hand opening and closing like a summons. McDonald, Roland. Now the baby was responding to each name by clapping on the desk and letting out loud peals of delight. Washburn, Angela. Head bowed shyly, she spoke into the baby’s ear, quieting him. I watched them for four or five seconds, catching myself in a bad habit of staring too long at intimate moments in public places. The baby reached for her ear and my heart swelled. I repeated the name: “Angela Washburn.”
“Here,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” I replied.
I HAD LIVED IN HYDE PARK on Chicago’s South Side for ten years, having arrived as an avid eighteen-year-old, certain that literary fame and an exalted life of the mind awaited me, but I had never been south of Sixty-second Street before I began teaching at Martin Luther King State, a primarily black commuter college at Ninety-ffth and King Drive. Now, three mornings a week, I assailed the safe borders of my life and drove deep into the dark heart of south Chicago, past boarded-up storefronts, abandoned movie houses, and gutted, skeletal apartment buildings, past dealers in doorways and addicts swaying down the middle of the street in search of a morning fix; after fifteen blocks the desolation gradually gave way to supermarkets, hardware stores, used-car lots, small lawns, and bungalows. But in my nightmares my car stalled or ran out of gas before Seventy-ffth Street and a gang of black men closed in on me. “Let me go!” I shouted, holding my textbook, a bible of grammatical rules, high above my head. “I have important work to do! I’m teaching subject-verb agreement today!”
SIXTY-THIRD AND MARTIN LUTHER KING Drive. Sixty-fourth and King Drive. Sixty-ffth and King Drive.
“More education don’t hurt anybody.”
The second time I taught my class we went over exercises from the textbook. Each student read a faulty sentence out loud and then revised it. Their voices were wooden and uncertain, every face blank. Only the baby, reaching toward me like a castaway on a raft, seemed to truly recognize me.
“More education don’t hurt nobody,” said the student, Tanya Toney. She looked doubtful. “Man,” she sighed, “that don’t sound right neither.”
I asked if anyone could revise the sentence correctly. A few hands went up.
“More education doesn’t hurt anybody,” said a woman in the front row.
“Yes,” I said. “The faulty agreement is between the subject and verb, not between the verb and object. Does everyone understand?”
The baby’s head tilted and tottered like a gyroscope.
Look, we’re all in this together, I wanted to say. Can we agree on that? I’m probably unqualified for this job. I know very little about English grammar. I only memorized these rules last night. I’ve never been south of Sixty-second Street. So we’ll learn all these rules together. Is that a fair agreement? We’ll learn all about subjects and verbs, nouns and pronouns. We’ll memorize every irregular verb. All two hundred of them! Then we can really begin to understand each other!
AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, I moved out of the graduate-student apartment building where I had lived for six years and into a small one-bedroom apartment nearby. My new next-door neighbor was a blind man named Raymond. For years I had seen him walking around the neighborhood, his head raised and his white cane pointing to the ground in front of him like a divining rod. I always marveled that he knew exactly where he was going.
Two weeks after I moved in, Raymond and I approached the building at the same time. “You’re my new neighbor, aren’t you?” he asked, as I held the door open for him. How did he know me? My footsteps? An odor? I raised my elbow and buried my nose in my armpit. I’d passed him a number of times but had never thought of introducing myself. What would I have said? Excuse me, you don’t know me, but I see you all the time.
Raymond cheerfully invited me into his apartment for a beer. I had never imagined a blind person as being happy. Then I reminded myself that I had twenty-twenty vision and was miserable.
I told Raymond about my class.
“Did you study linguistics?” he asked.
“No, divinity.”
“Are you religious?”
“Not especially.”
He looked puzzled. “Did something happen?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” I said and laughed. “Religious belief isn’t a requirement for divinity school.” That’s the same explanation I had given my mother when I enrolled and she worried I was converting. The answer had never completely satisfied her. At my graduation, she had said, “So now what am I supposed to call you? Doctor? Father? Reverend?”
“What was your specialty?” Raymond said.
“Religion and literature.” I explained that I had analyzed similar modes of address to lovers and to God in metaphysical poetry. Then I told him that I had sent out more than fifty job queries but hadn’t landed a single interview. That’s why I was teaching basic English, part-time, at Martin Luther King State.
“Do you believe in the soul?” he asked hopefully.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Are you in love?”
“Yes. With a lesbian who lives two thousand miles away.”
Raymond laughed. “You’re in sad shape, brother.”
Rachel had recently completed her dissertation too, but with a PhD from the Stanford English Department and a sexier topic than mine—Colonizing Desire: Constructions of Sexuality in the Works of Caribbean Women Writers—she had received multiple job offers and had decided to accept a two-year postdoctoral position at Stanford because she had fallen in love with Lucinda, the woman she hoped to spend her life with, but it was all very complicated. Not only was Rachel’s lover married, but she also happened to be Rachel’s thesis adviser. Lucinda was coming up for tenure in the fall, and she didn’t want to compromise her chances by leaving her husband for a former student, so she and Rachel were keeping their relationship secret for another year. I was the only person who knew about them.
“What about you?” I replied. “What kind of shape are you in?”
“I’m religious. I believe in the soul. I’m not in love.”
He appeared to be in his midtwenties.
“Have you ever been?”
He shook his head, and I felt a little bad. Maybe I wouldn’t have asked him something so personal if he could see me. (But what I really wanted to know, the question I was dying to ask, was how he walked around the neighborhood. Was it an extrasensory feat? In the black world behind his eyelids, did he see the streets of the neighborhood like veins of light on a radar screen?)
Just before I left, Raymond said he thought we were going to be great friends.
“Why do you think that?” I asked him
He smiled with his lips pressed together. “Because I don’t think you have any friends
,” he said. Then held his fist to his mouth, trying to suppress a laugh.
“I’m glad to be such a source of amusement to you.”
But he was right. After six years of graduate school, I had formed no close attachments. Every woman I had slept with I had met in Regenstein; after a time, the relationships had begun to feel as transient and anonymous as prison dalliances. My emotional lifelines were my weekly phone calls with Sarah and Rachel.
As I moved to leave, Raymond asked if he could see my face.
“What?” I asked dumbly, though I knew exactly what he meant.
“Like this.” He placed his fingertips on my forehead, as if anointing me. With exquisite slowness, he drew his fingertips down my face, tracing eyebrows, nose, lips. My skin was burning, my muscles drawn tight. Our faces were inches apart. His mouth was half open, his eyeballs off target, like the eyes of someone looking through the dark side of a one-way window. I couldn’t fathom the reverence in his face. “Relax,” he whispered. I placed my hands over his. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really have to go.”
“CAN ANYBODY TELL ME WHICH verb ending is used with all singular nouns and third-person-singular pronouns?”
A man in the front row raised his hand. He was the shape and coppery brown color of a Bosc pear.
“Say your name,” he demanded.
“Excuse me?”
“Your name. How you say it?”
“Shapiro.”
“Spell that.”
He was glowering, but when I wrote my name on the board, he smiled with recognition. He had no upper teeth, only a ridge of shiny brown gum.
“Hey, man, you Eye-talian?”
“Italian? Me? No.”
He looked disappointed, as if he were sure he had had the right answer to a question.
“Damn if I didn’t think you was Eye-talian. Where y’all from, then?”
“You mean my family?”
“Right. What country they from?”
“The Ukraine.”
“Where’s that at?”
“Beyond the Pale.”
His name was Daryl Dalrymple. When his turn came, he read, “John and Mary asks a lot of questions.” He puzzled over the sentence, rubbing his brow, pressing down on his thighs. Then he looked up at me and winked conspiratorially.
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