The Draw

by Lee Siegel

  The best people, the ones you could count on, were the ones who needed other people. Their need for others guaranteed that they would treat you decently. To need other people meant that you had a weak spot inside you that required shoring up. The bigger the weakness, the greater the need; the greater the need, the larger the decency and compassion. There was room for me in Thomas’s half-concealed injuries and shame, in Simon’s sorrowful face, in Eduardo’s impoverished background.

  Perhaps these special criteria of mine were just a way to shape my emotions into the same sort of expediencies I deplored in people who were materially well situated. But whatever the selfishness that might have been at its source, my radar for wound detection opened me up to others. My heart went out to Eduardo. Having been showered with financial aid by Bradley, he felt academically vulnerable. As I had with Tina Durrell, I thought I could lend him my support, or at least make him feel good about himself. He struggled with his literature papers and I stayed up night after night helping him write them. In return, Eduardo, who could see my distress, consoled me on the nights when I couldn’t sleep. Once in a while, he lent me money, too, when my mother’s checks failed to arrive.

  * * *

  Though about once a month my mother sent me a check for a hundred dollars, I could not meet all my monthly expenses without working. As I had planned on doing even before leaving for Bradley, I applied for and landed a job at Bergner’s department store in Peoria within weeks of my arriving at school. I worked there three nights a week and all day on Saturday until an incident that occurred one evening in the middle of winter.

  I had been hired to work as a salesman in the men’s department. The salesman I was replacing taught me how to fit jackets and pants, and how to make alterations marks with a piece of chalk. That evening a customer I had waited on returned to the store to pick up and try on a pair of pants he had bought. Exiting the fitting room wearing the pants, he complained to me that they were so tight that he couldn’t fasten the clasp.

  Come over here, I said. Let’s see what’s wrong.

  He was a big man; large-framed, not overweight. He must not have bought a nice pair of pants for a long time because he seemed astonished and on the verge of outrage that the pants didn’t fit. As usual, no matter who the person was whose expectations I had to satisfy, and no matter his moral position, I began to worry about displeasing him. As they always did when I was nervous, my telltale hands began to shake.

  In some pairs of pants there is a spare bit of material around the waistband that can be tightened or loosened. I put my hands into the back of his pants and let some out. This had the effect of loosening the pants too much around the waist, so I pulled the material tighter. Unfortunately, I did not realize, because the customer did not tell me, that the tightness was not around his waist but in his crotch. When I made the pants tighter, he cried out in distress. I had been kneeling, as I had seen other tailors do back in Bamberger’s in Paramus. Instinctively, in pain, he pushed me and I fell back onto the floor. You hurt me, you asshole, he cried.

  The department manager rushed over to pacify him, offering to give him his pants for free, with the corrective alterations on the house. I got off with a stern warning. But the scolding stung me, not only because the manager was only a few years older than I was but because I needed the job. I was also angry at myself for not having mastered the technique of making the alterations marks.

  Still, I felt resentful that the manager had not stuck up for me after I made what I considered to be an innocent mistake. I sensed resentment on his part, too. I could see that he had moved me mentally into the “potential pest” category. He had no feelings for or against me. He only wanted to have as much peace and quiet in his life as possible. He simply didn’t realize that pursuing peace and quiet was a full-time, nerve-rattling job.

  The tax on his time and nerves happened a few months later, near closing time. A man gathered up an armload of shirts and made a run for the front door.

  I heard the manager shouting as he ran out from the alterations room onto the floor of the men’s department.

  Catch him! he screamed at me. Get him!

  I stood there, moving my head this way and that to keep the shoplifter in sight.

  You! he said to me. Go after him!

  Me? I said.

  Go after him! he cried.

  The shoplifter was about to reach the door.

  He’s almost out of the store, I said.

  Well, go get him! the manager shouted. He walked to the edge of the men’s department platform. Eat me! he screamed at the shoplifter.

  I watched as the thief flung open the glass door and barreled out onto the street.

  Get him!! the manager was shrieking at me. He had forgotten about the shoplifter, except as the occasion to shriek at me.

  It’s too late, I said. He’s out of the store.

  The manager’s face was crimson.

  Then you get out there after him! Now! He’s in the parking lot! That’s store property!

  I doubt it, I said. He’s probably out of the parking lot. Or he’s driving away in a car.

  Go after him. The manager’s voice had returned to its normal range. I don’t know whether your unchanging character leads you to go through life having similar experiences, or you classify experiences according to similar ones you’ve had, but his soft tone reminded me of the sheriff who had paid the visit to our house the year before. He didn’t have to shout. If I didn’t run out of the store to apprehend someone for taking a few pieces of merchandise, I would be fired. Now that he was in a position to exercise an ultimate authority over me, he was perfectly calm.

  No, I said. I’m not going to do that.

  He winced slightly, but then he smiled.

  Don’t forget to cash out before you leave, he said over his shoulder as he walked away. The following Friday I had a note in my paycheck telling me that I had been let go.

  * * *

  Claire quickly got me a job as a short-order cook at a diner where she was working as a waitress. Her father had stopped sending child support when Claire turned eighteen. I met him just once. Over dinner in a restaurant to which he took Claire and me in Gary, Indiana—where bluish-yellow flames fluttered out of slender smokestacks like pilot lights under a metallic stovetop sky—he hectored me with an analysis of his favorite quote from Schopenhauer, once I told him that I was interested in philosophy: “Money is human happiness in the abstract. He who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.”

  I am utterly incapable of enjoying human happiness, said Mr. Halprin. I am very rich, he said, with megalomaniacal self-disparagement, and I am very empty. He turned to Claire. My daughter suffers as a result, he said. He kissed her on the top of her head.

  Have you ever had frog legs? he asked me. He placed a proprietary arm around her. They were sitting on a banquette. I was on a chair beside Claire.

  No, I said.

  They’re delicious, he said. I’ll order some for you.

  No thanks, I said.

  You’re afraid to, he said. He gave Claire, who was still sitting inside his embrace, a conspiratorial little jiggle with his arm.

  No, I replied. And, I said excitedly, ambitiously, Spinoza would agree with Schopenhauer. He said that money was the abstract of everything.

  That’s bullshit, he said. Money is money. Nothing is the abstract of anything. I’ll order the frog legs for you.

  Then he said: You’re clearly an expert on Spinoza. But what’s your philosophy?

  I didn’t even have to think about that one.

  Do it to him before he does it to you, I said. That was Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. He was telling Eva Marie Saint his, as he called it, “philosophy of life.” I had convinced myself that it was mine, too.

  Have you ever done that? he said.

  Done what? I asked him.

  Done it to someone before they did it to you, he said.


  I stared at him helplessly. Claire squeezed my hand.

  That’s also bullshit, he said.

  On the bus back to Peoria, Claire buried her face in my chest, and I sank my face into her soft black hair. For the first time, she told me that she loved me. As for me, “I love you” had become my war cry. I had been declaring it to her almost since we first met.

  I worked at the diner until I left Bradley. I eventually got fired from the diner, too, though aside from the time I spit into a chicken sandwich that a customer had returned after insulting Claire, I can’t think of any friction, or unpleasantness.

  I do remember Dino, who owned the place, teaching me how to determine the tenderness of a steak. This was his method: You make a tight fist and push the skin between your thumb and forefinger. That’s well done. Relax your fist a little and push again. That’s medium. Relax it a lot. Push. That’s rare. After working at the diner, I liked to joke that I saw myself and everyone I met as a dish fit for the gods, except that we all seemed pretty indigestible. Yuk, yuk, yuk.

  * * *

  By the time my first college summer came around, I had decided not to return home. I missed my friends, especially Paul, but the thought of living with my mother again sank my spirits.

  My chief reason, though, for staying in the Midwest was that I needed to be near Claire. I had invested in her the family feelings that had been orphaned by the troubled relationships with my mother and my father. She saw me as a nice, funny, intelligent, strange, and troubled boy who might or might not be someone she could have a future with. For me, she was companion, lover, savior, mother, friend, nurse. With me, she went out on dates. With her, I was on a life-or-death journey.

  Claire went home every summer to live with her mother and stepfather in Orland Park. Since staying with her was obviously not a possibility, I needed someone who would put me up in or around Chicago. That was how, at the end of May, in 1976, I went to live for three months with Eduardo and his family on Chicago’s South Side. When I had timidly dropped the hint to Eduardo that I needed a place to stay in Chicago, I said that I only expected to stay part of the summer. Eduardo insisted, with his usual generosity and that disconnected laugh of his, that I spend the entire summer with him.

  * * *

  Poverty is a condition that consumes your insides. Lacking money is a circumstance. You adapt to poverty, so that even as you are struggling to escape it, you are strengthening the forces keeping you there. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow are all the same. The sameness is why poor people are often wearing heavy winter coats on the first warm days of spring. They exist in a permanent season of vulnerability. If, on the other hand, you lack money but are not poor, tomorrow is another day with its own specific coordinates. You wear shorts on a warmish day in early March because you are adapting to the weather outside you, and not surrendering to the damp cold in your soul.

  Lacking money is a material situation, but the disease of poverty is that it is ultimately intangible. It enters your metabolism and lurks everywhere: in your absence of confidence, in your fear of getting sick, in your pessimism, in your impulsiveness, in how you gratify yourself, and how you protect yourself. In the same way, the power of terrorism lies in its capacity to infiltrate a mood or emotion. Poverty is a type of terror.

  My parents began by lacking money and slowly descended toward the condition of being poor. My father, especially, seemed more and more comfortable adapting to a condition of deprivation than seeing financial setback as another temporary event in life.

  Eduardo’s family was poor. The amount of money they possessed had little to do with their circumstances. They had mysterious infusions of money one day, and were just getting by the next, but even when they were flush, they acted rashly, worried excessively, were helplessly drawn for all their dreams of a better life to the worst scenario, and felt most comfortable with people in similar material circumstances. As for me, I took to the hard-pressed anarchic life of the Caravantes family like a fish to a different tank of water.

  Eduardo’s parents were divorced. His father worked as a foreman in a cheese factory, which he had also made his home, sleeping on a cot in his office. Eduardo lived in a dilapidated row house with his mother, his three brothers, and his sister. I never learned his two younger brothers’ given names because the other members of the family only referred to them by their nicknames: Gordo, meaning “the fat one,” for the older of the two; and Flaco, meaning “the skinny one,” for the younger boy.

  The youngest child was Susanna. She was twelve, and she spent the day sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, taking out the garbage, and working in the kitchen. Susanna was adopted. After so many sons, Eduardo’s mother, Perla, needed someone to help her with the work of raising them, and also to assist her in maintaining the house, which was under constant siege by her rampaging youngest boys. During the day, I could hear Perla barking commands at Susanna, or snapping at her when the girl failed to follow instructions or to fulfill a certain task. At night, however, Susanna experienced a transformation. She became the true daughter that Perla longed for in a corner of her bustling, hustling heart, where love had turned her into a ruthless administrator. At night, her broom and dustpan tucked away in the hall closet downstairs, Susanna spent hours in her mother’s room as Perla braided her long black hair, and the two of them traded gossip and told stories to each other.

  Apart from everyone else, yet vital to their fragile cohesion as a unit, was Mauricio, the oldest son. Mauricio was the family’s quiet center of gravity. He was another person for whom silence and soft speaking were hallmarks of his power.

  In the absence of a father, Mauricio was both precocious partriarch and the family’s hope and pride: its future. Tall and well built, he had a different physical aspect from his siblings. An Indian influence was much stronger in him. Eduardo had amiable good looks that immaturity had softened into a boyishness that made people overlook or ignore him. Mauricio, as if in some contrast premeditated by a higher power, possessed high, strong cheekbones, an angular face, and steady gray eyes. He rarely smiled, and even more rarely laughed, but when he smiled or laughed, it was always because something genuinely pleasant or humorous had occurred.

  Of all the siblings, Mauricio most resembled Perla. It was as if she had passed on the essence of herself to him, leaving traces of it for his brothers. Perla was a large woman with fair skin and thick black hair. She was about six feet tall and had shoulders like a fullback. The exertion of childbearing seemed to have taken the greater physical toll on her ex-husband, father of all her children. He was reedlike and small, as if drained and shrunk by the effort of producing four sons. But divorce, raising five children, struggling to earn a living had worn Perla out. Her eyes, by the late afternoon, were half-closed and wet with fatigue.

  When I knew her, she had an Italian boyfriend named Gino. Perla was in her midforties and he was in his early sixties. One afternoon I walked into the living room, thinking I was the only one in the house. Gino jumped up from the sofa, struggling to pull his pants up from where they had fallen over his shoes, and fell onto his face. Perla rose from the sofa, tugging on her skirt, her face flushed. Both of them laughed richly. Inviting me to drink brandy with them, they drew me into a conversation about Claire. The slightest lull in her feelings about me drove me into despair. Lately I had been spending part of the evening in the Caravanteses’ living room, drinking beer and staring into space. Las mujeres! Perla would say to me, laughing. No pueden vivir con ellas, no pueden vivir sin ellas! Then she would slap Gino on the leg and leave the two of us sitting there by ourselves, smiling to each other shyly, without anything to say.

  * * *

  Perla survived by the grace of Chicago’s mayor Richard J. Daley, who was in the last year of his twenty-three-year reign over Chicago. He died of a heart attack that winter. Daley had put Perla on his payroll. In return she worked as one of his operatives in the Mexican American community on the South Side, rounding up votes for Daley and the
other officials who were part of the machine he ran that ruled Chicago. The great thing about working for Daley, Eduardo told me, was that you didn’t have to work at all. Perla seldom went to an office. Instead, during that summer anyway, she conferred with her sons on an individual basis throughout the day, drank and made love with Gino, disappeared and suddenly reappeared, sometimes sweeping into the house with a new coffeemaker, or a vacuum for Susanna, or accompanied by a delivery man toting a new television up the stairs behind her. Then she would vanish again, leaving Susanna in the kitchen amid the smells of onions, cilantro, and chocolate simmering in a sauce on the stove.

  Perla lived from one isolated moment to the next, her comings and goings enigmatic, without order or structure or foreseeability, swept along from one contingency to the next, one need to the next. Decades later I would, briefly, from time to time, encounter celebrities, rich and famous people, who lived in the same way. I suppose that absolute excess of money and absolute deficiency of money sometimes create the same freedom from predictable patterns of existence—the crucial difference being the certainty, or not, of capital behind and below you, which also is the difference between a sense of freedom making you feel that you are flying, and a feeling of being unmoored that gives you the illusion of being free. One evening in July, leaping from the valley of one moment to the precipice of another, Eduardo’s father took the two of us out to dinner at the Pump Room, one of Chicago’s most expensive and most fashionable restaurants. Then he returned to his cot in the cheese factory.