by Lee Siegel
Of course what I had in mind was a very specific Russian-Jewishness, Menka’s experience of persecution, displacement, and economic hardship. And I was too young to see the multifaceted nature of weaknesses that made me tremble with weakness myself. I could not have seen the way tears and open feeling strengthened these people. Public emoting could scare off some of the world’s smaller predators—“Don’t you see what you’re doing to him? You’re playing with fire!”—and it could give the emoter time to think and figure out his next move behind the mask of emoting.
But whatever my nearsightedness about such matters, for me being Jewish meant drama and tears, open vulnerabilities and theatrical admittance of same. Bradley seemed as far from all these as Scandinavia was.
After unspeakable suffering, Lydia Bradley had rolled up her sleeves and immersed herself in nurturing the collective welfare. In 1892, she bought up a majority share of Parsons Horological Institute in La Porte, Indiana. It was the first institution created strictly for the training of watchmakers to be established in America. Not long afterward she moved the institute to her hometown of Peoria. In her will she stipulated that following her death the school be reconfigured to include a classical education, and also education in industrial arts and home economics: “it being,” as she wrote, “the first object of this institution to furnish its students with the means of living an independent, industrious and useful life by the aid of a practical knowledge of the useful arts and sciences.”
Four years later, William Rainey Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, persuaded Lydia not to wait until her own death to honor her children and her husband. In 1897 Bradley Polytechnic Institute opened its doors to the sons and daughters of the American Midwest who were passionate about making their way in the world. It became a college in 1920, and a university in 1946, just in time to welcome masses of maimed and shell-shocked men returning from war who desired to attend college on the GI Bill.
Reading the Bradley brochure back home in Paramus, with my door locked against my mother, who was wailing and sobbing in her bedroom, I grew excited. Bradley was clearly the place for me. I overlooked the fact that my father’s failure at Albatross had made me loathe anything having to do with business, and that I had elevated the intellect and the imagination over the concrete and actual. I felt, with an instinctual attraction to the opposite thing, that I could be the beneficiary of Bradley’s emphasis on practical life precisely because I so sorely needed improvement in that area. Since I despaired of the environment in which I had grown up, Bradley seemed like the ideal place to go to college.
The hospitable otherness of the school struck me on my very first day there. After depositing my things in my new dormitory room, I went off to the bursar to cash my student-loan check. Then I saw the girls. Strong-boned, clear-skinned, with moist eyes and bouncy, shiny, fragrant hair, they passed by, one after another. I was entranced. I was entranced with these descendants of pioneers, who blazed through the wilderness in defiance of every physical and human obstacle. I was in the midst of an America I’d had no idea existed.
One of the new species of girls, with a light sprinkling of freckles on her cheekbones, was standing on line in front of me. After paying the bursar, she turned and our eyes met. I looked at her and she looked away. Unaware of how ready someone’s closely guarded sexuality could be, and of how that made the display of indifference a necessary enticement, I let her walk by me as she left the bursar’s window. I paid my bill and then turned to leave. Behind me another girl was waiting. She was slight, fair, with short black hair and small coal-black eyes that were almost all pupil. Her name was Claire Halprin. She was Jewish, from a Chicago suburb. She had come to Bradley to study to be a teacher.
* * *
Bradley was, as I said, the only affordable school that I could find that offered an undergraduate degree in journalism. But I did not think of a career in journalism in a conventional way. Having shunned money as a perverse gravitational force that bent people away from their natural destiny, I was determined to make simply living my vocation, the way Erroll Garner made playing the piano a pure expression of who he was. The journalistic practice of transcribing life as it is lived seemed to me the perfect means by which I could make my life my work.
There were no undergraduate degrees in creative writing at the time that I was aware of, and, anyway, I had assimilated, despite all my resistance to it, Menka’s and my mother’s insistence on finding something that I could “fall back on.” So I channeled my love for literature into a halfhearted commitment to journalism. My ability to read well convinced me that I had gifts that were similar to the authors I read. I didn’t even think of them as authors, as writers, let alone as artists of any kind. They were human beings who were wise about life. I believed that if I could learn how to perform the journalist’s function of illuminating how people lived, then I would find myself in the realm of my cherished Hemingway, Twain, Melville, Joyce, Salinger, Bellow, Ellison, and all the other figures I imagined hovering around me and guiding my destiny.
Still, that did not stop me from writing one maudlin tale after another, each one so laden with big, impressive-sounding words that the language was just one step removed from Latin. One afternoon, seeing my destiny through the ever-hopeful eyes of the Old Man, I even sent one off to a famous magazine. It never responded, but later on, I fabricated some type of actual connection to the magazine by sending it a story every few months and convincing myself, as people do when they buy lottery tickets every week, that sheer persistence would guarantee a breakthrough sooner or later. I stuffed all my stories into my desk drawers after I wrote them. Before I left for Bradley I moved everything to a box that I hid in a corner of the basement.
* * *
The bus arrived at the Chicago Greyhound station early the next morning. It was a few hours before I could make the connection to Peoria. I called my mother collect from a pay phone in the station to tell her that I was okay. The movie began playing in her head and she burst into tears. This had the effect of choking me up, too, so I lied and told her that the bus to Peoria was pulling in.
I set down my luggage and took a seat in a row of plastic chairs. A pile of blankets and old ski jackets lay on the floor two chairs away from me. The jackets’ white filling was visible in places through the fraying outer shells. I thought that a custodian must have dropped the blankets and clothes there while he made his rounds. Suddenly the pile moved. Two arms and then a head emerged from it. It was a homeless person. His hair was filthy and matted, and his face was so red it looked sunburnt. But I realized that the burn was layers of dirt that had crusted his face and discolored it. He slowly turned his head and looked at me with thick, watery eyes. I jumped up, grabbing my luggage, and hurried, almost running, to a row of chairs on the other side of the station.
I had two suitcases, one large and one small. They were old Samsonite models that had once belonged to my mother. Both of them had faded, peeling decals that said “Bermuda,” where my parents had spent their honeymoon. A white-haired woman traveling alone and sitting two seats over from me noticed the decals. Have you been to Bermuda? she asked with what struck me as a new type of tenderness, native to that part of the world. I shook my head. Not yet, I said. Someday. I tried to fall asleep, but could not.
4
HEARTLAND
Tell me what you do with him, I said to Claire Halprin as we lay naked together in her dormitory bed.
We lie in bed, like this, she said.
And what do you do?
He touches me the way you’re touching me.
Like this?
Yes.
Does he do this?
Oh. Yes. Yes, he does.
And this?
Ohhhh.
Do you like it when he does that?
Shhhh. Stop talking.
This? You like this?
Yes. Oh, that feels nice.
Does he hold your wrists like this?
Shhhh. Yes
, yes.
And he goes into you like this?
Ah! Yes. Ohhh. Yes, yes, he does.
And like this? And this? And this? And this?
Ah, ah, ah. Keep doing it like that.
Kiss me the way you kiss him when he does this to you. Just like that. Is that how he kisses you? Is it? It is, isn’t it? Kiss me. Kiss me. Like that. Yes. Yes. Ohhhh. Ohhhh.
Are you finished?
Yeah.
Did it feel nice?
Yes, it did. Was it nice for you?
Yes, it was very nice.
Did you come?
No. But it was nice.
I’m sorry.
For what?
That you didn’t come.
It’s okay. I liked it.
You didn’t like it. I’m sorry. Next time I’ll make you come.
Stop. It was fine. Put your hand here. Touch me here. Keep touching me. Yes, like that. Just like that. Softer, softer. Yes, just like that, keep doing it just like that. Ohhh. Ohhhh.
Are you coming?
Yes. Shhhhh. Ohhhh.
Did you come?
Shhhh. Yes.
Do you still see him?
Shhhh. Shhhh.
Claire, do you still see him?
Shhh. Wait a minute.
Do you see him? Tell me.
Wait! I told you. We talk on the phone once in a while, and that’s all.
But you never see him.
No, never.
Does he call you or do you call him?
He calls me.
You’re a liar.
What?
You’re a liar.
How dare you call me that!
I know you called him.
What are you talking about?
Just tell me the truth.
I am telling you the truth. Stop this, please. You’re driving me crazy.
I know you’re lying because the other day when I came to see you, before I knocked, I heard you—
You were standing outside my door listening to me?
I wasn’t listening. I happened to be there.
You happened to be listening!
I happened to be there and heard you call him.
I can’t take this anymore.
Just admit it. You called him.
You’re insane.
You’re making me insane with your lies. Admit it.
Yes, I called him! He called me and I called him back. All right? Nothing is happening between us. You were listening, right? So you know nothing is going on.
I couldn’t hear you.
Oh yeah.
And then I knocked and you got off.
I can’t take this anymore. He was someone who was in my life so we talk once in a while. It’s no big deal. I’m with you. I’m only with you.
It’s a big deal for me.
Then go work it out by yourself.
And then the two of you can be together.
Go fuck yourself.
Go ahead. Fuck him all you want. I’m out of here.
I’m not fucking anyone! I’m fucking you!
I’m gone. I can’t put up with this shit anymore.
Go ahead.
You want me to go?
I never want to see you again. Get away from me.
You don’t mean that.
Oh yes I do.
Where will I go?
That’s your problem.
So you do love him. You do!
I don’t love anyone. I’m sick of the both of you. I just want everyone to leave me alone.
Aha! You wouldn’t be sick of him if you weren’t with him. You have to be with someone to be sick of them.
You’re sick.
I’m sick in love with you.
No, you’re not. You need help.
So help me. I love you, Claire.
Then why do you spy on me and call me a liar?
I don’t know.
You have to stop this. You have to start believing me.
I love you. You can do whatever you want. Really. I don’t care. I just want to be with you. You can fuck him every night if you want, as long as you come back and fuck me.
I don’t want to fuck him!
Yes you do.
You want to fuck him.
Me?
Yes, that’s what you want.
I want to fuck you.
You want me to fuck him.
You want to fuck him.
Okay, you’re right. I do.
You do!
Yes, I want to fuck him. I’m going to go to him tonight and fuck him and fuck him over and over again.
Do it. Fuck him. I want you to.
No you don’t.
Oh yes I do.
Oh no you don’t.
* * *
Before coming to Bradley, Claire had been at the University of Illinois in Champaign. There she had been involved with an older student, also from Illinois, named Doug. Until I made him the center of our erotic life, he had been safely in her past.
* * *
Like me, Claire was the child of divorced parents. Children of divorce often either portray their lives before their parents’ breakup as being unhappier than they were, in order to free themselves from guilt over their parents’ separation, or idyllic, so that they may think of themselves as being formed by joy rather than misery. Claire fell into the latter category.
Claire’s father, she told me, used to arrive home after work, eat dinner, and watch The Dick Van Dyke Show with his wife. Then one day he turned the “rec room” into a study, where he sat reading German philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—so as to make up for never attending college, he told Claire—until long after his wife went to bed. Next, he was gone.
Claire’s mother remarried quickly, in a daze. Her second husband had moved to suburban Illinois from rural Kentucky. Claire’s older brother was out of the house by that point. Claire’s stepfather swilled beer and raged against her on the slightest pretext. Once he felt secure in the marriage, he began to shout anti-Semitic slurs at her.
Numbed by the rapid replacement of her old life by her new one, her mother did not have the strength to warn him away. She could not have made it through another separation. She preferred to counsel Claire not to make trouble by defying him. The two of them whispered bitterly and excitedly about him whenever they could. With her daughter she could live out a vicarious rebellion against the new life that she had been dragged into by bad luck, and by her own insolvent will.
I saw Claire’s stepfather only once. He had quit his job as a cooling-system technician soon after marrying her mother, who was receiving substantial alimony and child support from her ex-husband. Her second husband had a complex vanity. The image of himself guzzling beer and screaming at a young girl did not suit how he liked to think of himself. So upon learning of Claire’s relationship with me, and without having met me, he reconstructed himself as Claire’s protector and forbade her to see me. He still screamed at her when he was drinking, but now he declared that it was for her own good, as he railed against what he characterized as my sex-crazed intentions.
I ended up encountering him because during extended weekends, holiday breaks, and summer vacation, I used to park my car, borrowed from new Chicago friends, down the street from Claire’s house. She would come meet me at our prearranged time. One evening, when she was nearly an hour late, I drove up to her split-level house. Getting out of the car, I walked along the concrete path across her front lawn toward her front door.
Before I reached her brick and concrete stoop, the door opened. Out walked her stepfather. He was holding a shotgun across his stomach, which bulged under an immaculate white shirt. I kept walking toward the house. Without pointing the gun at me, he stood there, grinning.
Claire’s mother appeared in the upstairs window. Please leave! she shouted at me. Just get out of here! Her tone was sharp, so as not to oppose her husband, but the expression on her face was sympathetic, imploring. Claire’s face, a sm
all, pale oval, rose up in the window next to her mother’s. She blew me a kiss. Raising her wrist to her face, she pointed at her watch. She knew her stepfather had come too far from his old life to jeopardize his new one by killing someone between her real father’s automatic sprinklers. Anyway, Orland Park did not seem like the kind of place where someone could ruin himself, go mad, or commit a crime.
* * *
Maybe because I was also the child of divorced parents, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I conceived of events as being isolated from each other by inevitable ruptures. This made me unable to grasp the importance of cause and effect in life. What would it have mattered if I had applied myself and done well in high school? Something would have happened to interrupt my smooth progress from there to college, career, and success. Of that I was certain.
Claire was more confident. She knew that she wanted to be a teacher. She arranged her college coursework to achieve her goal. But it was more the goal than the teaching itself that mattered to her. She needed a goal; and teaching presented itself. She frequently talked of following other paths through life: nurse, veterinarian, librarian, social worker. But like me she was poised for disappointment. She felt certain that even a vocation was not likely to last, and that one vocation, so long as it was in line with her temperament, was just as good and fleeting as another.
Working one summer afternoon as a candy striper at a Jewish hospital in Chicago when she was in high school, she was pushing a sick, elderly Orthodox Jew along the corridor in a wheelchair. The man in the wheelchair slowly turned around and stared at her. Are you Jewish? he asked. She smiled and nodded. He looked her over, then he spat on the floor. You’re not a Jew, he said.
That was the nature of reality. All of a sudden, where you thought you had a modest stepping-stone into the future you wanted for yourself, you found yourself falling through a trapdoor.
Young veterans of hidden trapdoors and sudden ruptures, Claire and I created our own world where cause and effect did not exist. We created a static realm of pure fantasy. Or rather, I created it. Habituated to solitude in my sickbed, driven further into myself by conflict with my parents, I guided her into the realm of withdrawal.