The Draw

by Lee Siegel

  * * *

  Gordo and Flaco were too young too work. Eduardo found a summer position as a full-time assistant in a biology lab that processed medical tests. Mauricio also aspired to be a doctor, but he had a year-round job in the Chicago police gym. His acceptance by the Chicago police force, composed then mostly of Irish American cops, served as a kind of vindication for him. After performing his duties there, which consisted of keeping everything in order and occasionally spotting for some of the cops when they pressed weights on the bench, Mauricio worked out himself, keeping to a strict schedule. He turned the robust physique he had inherited from his mother into something nearly statuesque. His striking looks and his air of understated authority won him a captivating Mexican girfriend named Laura. She responded to my ogling stares by directing at me an occasional commiserating pout. Your guero looks so serious, she would tell Mauricio in front of me.

  Ever since coming to the Midwest, I had spoken to my mother on the phone once every few weeks. Before I left Peoria for Chicago, she informed me that since she assumed that I was going to be working full-time in Chicago all summer, as I had mentioned to her, she was going to discontinue her intermittent checks to me until school started up again in the fall. When I protested, she began to sob and accused me of sucking her dry.

  It would be years before I got either a checking or a savings account, and not until my forties did I, fleetingly, possess a credit card. I arrived at the Caravanteses’ without a penny to my name. Perla, seeing my situation, began stuffing twenty-dollar bills into my pockets, to Eduardo’s embarrassed delight, and Mauricio’s obvious distaste. She had spent so many years living her life in circumvention of the fluctuating presence of money that when money came, she did not establish a practical relationship to it. She put it at the disposal of whatever her immediate need was, no matter how wasteful, trivial, or unrelated to her self-interest. Her relationship to money moved me.

  I was grateful for her generosity to me and then, in tiny increments of self-absorption, I started to expect money from her. I even asked her once for enough money to take Claire to dinner and the movies, which she gave to me with a sly smile. The next day, she happily announced to me that she had found me a position at a medical book warehouse on the other side of town.

  That became my summer job. I awoke at dawn, took a bus to another bus, and waited outside the warehouse with the other employees for Ned, the manager, to arrive and let everyone in.

  * * *

  My responsibilities were to unload crates of books when they came in, and then to put the books in the right place on the vast rows of metal shelves. Though the work was boring, I threw myself into it. Running and working out in the gym had not yet become ways of life, and it had been years since I played sports. Hauling books back and forth on large dollies and in handcarts, loading boxes into the narrow metal platform that served as an elevator, shelving thousands of books a day, I felt renewed by physical effort.

  But I could not keep myself from taking furtive breaks now and then to read the medical books. I pored over heavy textbooks detailing heart ailments, every type of cancer, gastric maladies, bone fractures, gunshot wounds, bedsores, degenerative muscular conditions, and on and on through every variation of illness in the parallel yet separate life of the body. I was especially fascinated by the accompanying photographs: bedsores in the shape of flowers, dementia-causing tangles in the brain, plaque accumulating into what looked like snowdrifts inside the arteries. I could not take my eyes off the photographs of psoriasis in all its forms. My skin still erupted from time to time and seeing my condition delineated by the camera had a therapeutic effect similar to recognizing my troubles in a novel. The extreme cases of the disease, in which the skin hardens into calluses that resemble slabs of concrete, filled me with horrified relief. You are never fully aware of your body until some component of it breaks down, and then the terms of existence are suddenly reversed: your intellect and your consciousness become useless appendages, and your body starts thinking and speaking in pain and in resistance to pain. Reading and gazing at the medical textbooks while in possession of my health strengthened the illusion, so precious to me, of the sovereignty of my intellect and consciousness as they stood apart from the appalling data in my hands.

  Sometimes Ned, who periodically patrolled the warehouse’s several floors, caught me as I was absorbed in the books. Ned had graduated from the University of Chicago two decades earlier with a degree in English literature. Rather than admonishing me for reading on the job, he was happy to find me in an indolent moment, because it meant drawing me into a short conversation about literature. He adopted a kidding, faux mentorly tone with me. The basis of optimism, he would quote as he playfully wagged a scolding finger, is sheer terror. I loved that one. Then, with a mildness rooted in complicity with me, he would instruct me to return to work.

  Ned intrigued me. Witty, intelligent, and deeply cultured, he was unable to find a paying niche in life that corresponded to his rich personal qualities. Somehow he drifted into managing the medical book warehouse. He didn’t like the job, yet he eased into his daily duties with what looked for all the world like contentment. His dry skin was the color of Dentyne. He chain-smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, which had no filters. He settled comfortably into his uncomfortable position at the warehouse as the wry, cultivated, gently caustic supervisor of people who were not cultivated, wry, or caustic. If you said something that pleased him, he looked down at the ground and smiled to himself, as if giving you a lesson in his nature, which was rueful and ironic. His standing at an ironic angle to everyone else, his mildly caustic self-distancing, the striking air of solitariness about him that was nevertheless a type of invitation, made me assume that, like Thomas, he had a different life from the standard version.

  Ned rented an apartment in Hyde Park, the University of Chicago neighborhood where he had lived when he was a student. His favorite story was about Bruno Bettelheim, the famous Austrian American child psychologist. Bettelheim’s apartment was across an alley from Ned’s. Every day at three, the neighborhood children arrived home from school and began playing in the alley. And every day at three, Bettelheim, the distinguished child psychologist, threw open his window and screamed down at the children in a heavy Austrian accent: “Shaaaht aaahpp!!”

  Ned had a fondness for undercutting whatever was conventionally admired. His very existence was proof that the personal qualities society claimed to value—wit, kindness, intelligence—society had no interest in sustaining if those qualities were all a person had to offer. The grossly disillusioning medical textbooks were a great setting for him. Perhaps my own deadly earnestness about books and ideas marked me as another person headed for the margins and that was why, shyly, discreetly, Ned did whatever he could to protect me at the warehouse.

  I needed, if not protection, some kind of vigilance about me since I was one of only two white warehousemen on the floor. This was at a time when Chicago was still Balkanized. Eduardo had laid down for me the local dangers, which I understood in the following way: Mexicans or blacks would be murdered if they went to the white-ethnic enclave of Marquette Park; Mexicans would meet their demise in Marquette Park or along black Ashland Avenue; whites would be killed along Ashland Avenue or—without protectors—in the Mexican back of the yards; and black people, basically, would end up dead wherever they were.

  In the warehouse, the rest of the workers were divided into Mexicans and blacks. The two groups never interacted, even when they had to work side by side. On breaks they kept to themselves in parts of the warehouse that each group had staked out for itself. It was a little like a prison yard. Some of the Mexicans and blacks had the fantasy muscles of people who had been in the unreal nightmare of jail, where I imagined prisoners turning themselves into machines of superhuman density for the purpose of warding off other prisoners, and also to drive out excruciating prison time by using clockwork motions to make their bodies solid, and to rival the solid walls that confined them. T
he idea of prison terrified me.

  Both groups regarded me with hostile indifference or benign amusement. For my part, I was drawn to each of them for different reasons. The kindness with which Eduardo and his family treated me made me think that I shared an affinity with all Mexicans, especially in Chicago. And the association that I made in my mind of my grandfather with the black porters of Grand Central Station, along with the sympathetic bonds I had formed in Alexander’s, convinced me that the black workers would warm to me sooner or later. I was thrown for a loop when, sitting not far from the black group during our lunch break, I heard them boasting about shooting “gooks.” They had all been together in Vietnam, I learned then. The experience of authorized killing, after years of being the targets of authorized violence, had empowered them. They glowed like gods when they talked about it.

  * * *

  I spoke to my father by phone once in a great while. He had lost his new real estate job and had returned to teaching piano. Depression made him speak so softly that I could barely make out what he was saying. His habit of remaining silent where once he might have stuttered also complicated our conversations. He still called me Lee-boy and spoke romantically about my experience at Bradley. I bet you’re knocking them dead, he said to me; I bet you have to fight off all the girls. Prolonged setback and naive romantic expectations had divided him into two people. He said bright and optimistic things in tones muffled by despair.

  I was more frequently in touch with my mother. Increasingly, my relationship with her revolved around money: money, in my eyes, that she had promised to send me and that I felt she owed me; money, in her eyes, that she really didn’t have, or that she believed she was entitled to hold on to. Slowly she moved me into the same column as Menka and my father. Both of them, in their different ways, had deadened her desires. She had tried to bring her desires to life again by fighting over money. She fought about money with Menka, who accused her of bringing herself to the brink of penury by divorcing my father. She fought about money with my father, who was now unable to meet his child-support obligations, his only source of income the piano lessons he was giving each week. Before long, my mother seemed to live for bitter emotional combat with everyone around her. She spoke of her only close friend, Judy Baum, as a friend one day and as a treacherous adversary the next. On the phone, one minute she claimed, through sobs, to miss me. The next she lashed out, her voice shaking with emotion, at my father for not sending her money, and at me for asking her for it.

  After I talked with her on the phone, the momentum of growing up that I was gaining by being on my own at Bradley faded away. On the one hand, my need to talk with her out of old reflexes and also out of loneliness began to run up against my wish to be free of her. On the other hand, my struggle with her had the effect, as it always did, of making me more dependent on her the more pain my relationship with her caused me.

  On the third hand (“There is always a third hand, which is what gives a mythological dimension to people, and also what makes them so prone to misunderstanding each other.” —The Old Man, summer of 1977), I loved to make her laugh whenever we spoke. We shared the same impulse toward playfulness and make-believe, as well as the same deep gratification when we made other people laugh. I would mock some of my professors to her. Oh, they sound awful, she would say. Just awful.

  * * *

  I said goodbye to Perla and her family at the end of the summer, tearfully embracing this large Mexican woman as if she was my true mother. After my return to Bradley for my second fall semester there, I spent most of my evenings with Claire in her dorm room. I often returned to her after spending hours in the library’s red-carpeted reading room. Claire had a roommate named Gabriela who would be out long enough for Claire and me to be sexually intimate. Claire and she shared bunk beds, with Gabriela sleeping in the top bunk. She didn’t mind that I slept with Claire in her bed, so long as we were quiet and abstained from sex when she was there.

  None of Bradley’s dormitory rooms had kitchenettes, so Claire often cooked dinner for us on a hot plate. She was a resourceful cook, though she never thought anything of her culinary skills, any more than she gave much thought to her other gifts or qualities. She had been raised by her mother to think of her own kindness, modesty, and self-effacement as being the most admirable traits a human being could possess. This image of herself as a good girl, implanted in her since childhood, placed her to the side of everything that happened to her, lucky or unlucky. Her indifference, even blindness, to achievement and rewards protected her against disappointment when they didn’t arrive. For the same reason, her dreamy complacency prevented her from pursuing elevated goals.

  It was that angularity that she had to the world, similar to that of Eduardo and Simon, that bound me to her. I sensed that the retraction of her ego created ample space for me. I complimented her on her chicken with broccoli, her performance in her various classes, her lovely singing voice—she had joined the university choir—and the diplomatic way she dealt with both her mother and her father. She flushed slightly and laughed my compliments away, as if self-satisfaction was both beneath and above her. She struggled a little with her literature papers, and as I did with Eduardo’s, I took them in hand, revising and rewriting them. To my surprise she began to ask me for my help, a flash of ambition that I had not seen before. This was the right kind of ambition for me since it depended on my willingness to sustain it.

  * * *

  One night after dinner, Claire announced that she was going to join some other students in her educational development class who had formed a study group that met in a coffee shop. I had planned to spend the night with her.

  I’m sorry, she said, I promised that I’d be there.

  I’ll help you with your work, I said.

  No, she said. It’s not that kind of work. We want to expand on things we talked about in class.

  You never told me about the study group before, I said.

  We never had it before, she said. This is the first night.

  The first night, I said.

  Yes, she said, the first night.

  I accused her of lying to me. After several minutes of this, she’d had enough. Get out of here, she told me. I can’t take this anymore.

  Stay with me, I said. I grabbed her arm.

  She flung her arm away and started for the door.

  Don’t leave, I said.

  Oh Christ, she said. Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.

  Clutching my chest, I began to sob.

  Gabriela had been lying in her top bunk, reading a book. She raised herself on one elbow and took us in with her large, dewy brown eyes. She said to Claire, Be careful. You are playing with fire.

  I looked up at Gabriela and saw her as if for the first time. She always seemed to have come right out of the shower. Tonight she had thrown a towel over her shoulders. Her wet hair lay mostly flat on the towel, the ends of her hair tangled and askew like electrical wires that had been cut. The room was scented with the strong fragrance of her shampoo. She had dyed her hair blond but left the roots black. The contrast between her colored hair and her natural hair was disenchanting. It was as if she wanted to establish a fact about herself right up front so that she would never have to talk about it. Born in Puerto Rico, she and her parents had moved to Chicago when she was a girl, settling near Humboldt Park on the West Side, far from the Mexican neighborhood where Eduardo and his family lived. She flourished in school. Like Claire, she was studying to be a teacher.

  Gabriela had a vigilant air. It was as if she had once let her guard down and was resolved not to go through the consequences of that again. When she laughed, which she seldom did, she seemed to expand and acquire a new physical aspect, like someone you have worked with for months who one evening finally comes along with you and some other coworkers to a bar, and after a few beers relaxes and shows you a different side. Mostly, though, my presence kept her alert. She maintained her distance from me.

  In any case, he
r surprisingly sympathetic remark gave me heart. I sensed, as soon as I heard her warning to Claire, that she knew all about emotional distress and the perils of internal combustion. Perhaps on some level she thought she could handle me better than Claire was able to. I began to sob harder. I sank down onto Claire’s bed with my head in my hands.

  Claire had stopped at the door before opening it. She stood motionless, watching me. I had never broken down in front of her like that. Overcome with fright and self-pity, I continued to cry. At the same time, a familiar sadness enfolded me in a homelike feeling. From behind my curtain of genuine tears, I observed, with an impassive joy, how my display of emotion was magnetizing the other two people in the room.

  Gabriela slipped down off her bunk and sat next to me. I raised my head and lowered my hands so that she and Claire could see the tears on my face. Gabriela put her arm around me. Out of possessiveness and perhaps competition, but also because she was moved, Claire kneeled in front of me and took my hands in hers. In a few minutes, tears filled Claire’s eyes. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Gabriela wiping her own.

  A gladness swelled inside me. I no longer felt frightened or sorry for myself. Suddenly, the clouds parted: I was happy and hopeful again. I was still sitting on the bed, my hands in Claire’s, Gabriela’s arm around my shoulders. I felt powerful, dominant, even playful.

  We’re like those guys raising the flag on Iwo Jima, I said. I started to laugh. Claire began to laugh also. Gabriela, though, looked at me in disapproval and withdrew her arm from around my shoulders. Either she resented me for breaking the spell of communion between the three of us, or she was made uneasy by the way I jumped from one emotion to another. But, as if unable to help herself, she started to laugh, too. The three of us laughed, then fell silent, then slowly began talking and laughing about other things. That night Claire cooked some chicken for us on the hot plate. We ate dinner together by candlelight—three candles, one for each of us, that Gabriela stuck in a small pot of soil where a plant had once grown.