by Lee Siegel
My unhappiness at the gas station had little to do with the menial nature of the work itself. In fact I was enthralled by car engines. I knew absolutely nothing about cars, or about what made them go. But I felt joy whenever I had to lift a hood and check the oil, which was all I knew how to do under a hood.
One day, however, the woman who had hired me called me stupid for fumbling with the gas hose and spilling gas over a customer’s car. I told her to go fuck herself. My reaction took me by surprise. It was often like that. Inside me, I felt soft, subtle, complex, silken. But when I expressed myself in the world, through words or behavior, everything came out hard, brutal, direct, and rough.
Yet I was throbbing with her insult. So I said it again: Go fuck yourself. Then, regretting what I had said, I returned to work as if nothing had happened. About twenty minutes later, her son, who worked part-time in the office with her, tapped me gently on the arm.
You’re fired, he said. Get going.
My heart sank. I hated being thrown out of the familiar, reliable world of the gas station, where I had worked for several months.
You’re fired, he said again. I looked in his face for some satisfaction in saying the phrase for a second time, but he repeated it with distaste. I searched his face for compassion, but there was none of that, either. What happened in life offered you no guidance about how to proceed through it. My mother will pay you, he said.
In the office, the woman took some cash out of the desk she sat behind for most of the day. She put it in an envelope with crisp efficiency and handed the envelope to me.
You’re not cut out for this kind of work, she said matter-of-factly. There was no reproach in what she said, nor could I extract any irony from it. I was not cut out for that kind of work. I wanted to feel relieved, but I was hurt.
* * *
That evening, as Nathan, my mother, and I sat eating turkey TV dinners, I told her that I’d been fired.
Wow, said Nathan. He had taken stock of the situation at home, calculated that unlike me he had several more years of having to live there with my mother, and decided to make the wedge she had been driving between us for years a permanent one.
How’d you pull that off? he said.
How did you manage to have two pimples the exact same size in the exact same spot on either side of your face? I said.
My mother pushed out her cheek with her tongue and knowingly nodded her head.
What are you going to do now, Mr. Kafka? she said. All she thought she knew about Kafka was that he was a Jewish writer who had troubled relationships with other people, especially his family. Thus she had taken to referring to me as Mr. Kafka.
I’ll go back to the malls, I said. I’ll see if anything has opened up.
My mother said, Audrey Castor told me that she was in Stern’s the other day and she thought they were hiring.
Audrey Castor was someone my mother had met through teaching, another substitute or an administrative assistant, I don’t remember. She had shown my mother some kindness. In response, my mother had obviously poured her heart out to her and this woman had obviously absolved my mother of all guilt. Audrey Castor’s every word now possessed the authority of divine revelation. My mother quoted her all the time.
How would Audrey Castor know if they were hiring? I said.
How would Audrey Castor know if they were hiring? she mimicked. How would Audrey Castor know if they were hiring?
Nathan snickered. The by-product of my mother’s malice was often that she could be very funny. If I started to laugh, she would laugh, too, and the two of us would share a bond once again. On this occasion I didn’t laugh.
She knows people there, my mother said.
Oh, she knows people.
Don’t get on your intellectual high horse with your sarcasm, Mr. Kafka. Audrey is a wise woman. And she’s kind. She’s lived a full life and she has a lot to teach you. To teach everyone.
Maybe she should open her own university, I said.
At least she’s not a bumma. A bumma!
I’ll get a job! I yelled. I’ll get a job and get out of this fucking house once and for all!
Nathan snickered again.
Hey, Travis Bickle, I said. Go clean your weapon.
My mother regarded me with nodding head and protruding cheek.
You’ll get out of this “fucking” house once and for all, huh? Yeah, yeah. Out of this “fucking” house. She paused and sighed. Dreamer, she said. Just like your father. A family of dreamers.
A few days later, my head pounding with scenarios of vengeance against my mother and her new guru, Audrey Castor, I drove to Stern’s, a department store that was situated in the Bergen Mall, right across Route 4 from Alexander’s, to apply for a job. Hatred and rage would first strengthen me, then leave me feeling naked and weak and yearning for connection. I had never worked at Stern’s before, but my experience at Alexander’s, Bamberger’s, and Bergner’s—I assumed, rightly, that Stern’s would not go to the trouble of calling all the way to Peoria for a reference—made me a shoo-in for a position in the sporting goods department that had just become available.
After a couple of months at Stern’s, I saved some money and felt secure enough of at least a short-term future there to move in with Paul. For all his devotion to me, he wanted to be sure that I could give him two or three months’ rent up front.
Desperate to be among books again in some protected space, I also decided to enroll at Montclair State College, Angelo’s alma mater, which was just a few minutes away from where Paul was living. The school had expanded from a teachers college to a general one. Angelo raved about the place he said it had evolved into. I moved in with Paul and his roommate in the late spring of 1978 and registered to begin taking classes that fall. Just over a year had passed since I’d left Bradley. Because I had deferred the payments on my loans for just a few months after my status as full-time student ended, I was still current with them and was able to easily get another small loan to pay tuition at Montclair. The tuition wasn’t much, but my mother claimed to have nothing to give me. My father, from whom I was hiding in terror, was, so my mother said, living on welfare. For the moment, I had four walls of protection: my steady income, the student loan, the university, and Paul.
* * *
The first time I saw Gretchen Anderson was in a class on nineteenth-century German philosophy. We were seated in a small classroom. Snow was falling outside the windows. I was in the row in front of her and a little off to the side. It was a frigid February morning, two or three weeks into my second semester at Montclair.
Turning to the woman sitting next to her, she said: It was so cold this morning my skin hurt! She touched her face. Her eyes grew wider as she ran her fingers down onto her neck. Suddenly she laughed. Nothing seemed to exist for her except the fact that it was cold, and that she had felt her dry skin down to her neck. Noticing that I was looking at her, she looked back as if to say: Isn’t it something, the effect the cold can have on your skin! And how emotional it is making me! I could have been a lamb or a wolf and she would have given me the same look. Then she blushed, as if, her state of mind suddenly startled, she had knocked over a glass of red wine somewhere inside her that transformed her face. If it had not been for the blush, she would have seemed childlike, but after she blushed she looked down, lost for a moment in thought. I could see—I say see; now I see, or think I see, but then it was something I felt about her, or thought I felt—that there was some suppressed self-consciousness that was struggling and evolving inside her in secret. The woman kept changing places with the child. It made me want to keep looking at her. Sitting next to Gretchen, her classmate, a casual acquaintance of Gretchen’s, smiled. Yes, she said. It’s going to be a real snowstorm. Gretchen said: I don’t believe it’s going to be that bad. Then she added: At least, I hope it isn’t.
At the end of class, as I was walking to the door, someone touched me on the arm. Gretchen had my book The Philosophy of G. W. Hegel in her
hand. The other woman was standing behind her. Gretchen said: I think this is yours. Thanks, I said. That’s very thoughtful of you. The other woman giggled. I gazed at Gretchen, who allowed my eyes to linger on hers for a second. Then they walked out of the class.
* * *
In my midtwenties, in New York, I began going to a psychiatrist whom I would see, intermittently, for the next two decades. I ran to him in bursts of need. Years would sometimes pass between groups of sessions. At first he charged me nothing because I saw him under the auspices of a university community. Later, after I left the university, he charged me only what I was able to pay him.
He was tall and gaunt, and slightly stooped. As he got up from behind his desk, from where he conducted our sessions, he walked me to the door at the end of most of my visits to him. Standing at the threshold and saying goodbye, he stooped a little more to look at me, widening one eye and narrowing the other.
His office was piled with copies of literary magazines and intellectual journals. He himself had written a respected scholarly book about Darwin that examined the paradox of Darwin being both an invalid and a man capable of producing volumes of revolutionary work. His name was Ralph Colp Jr. Colpo means “blow” in Italian, and Colp sounds like culpa, which means “fault” in Latin. His name struck me as almost divinely ordained for a psychiatrist, and this strengthened my belief—for which psychoanalysis itself offers no treatment—that he was destined to heal me.
Several of our exchanges have stayed in my mind. In one of them, he asked me if I masturbated. Sometimes I do, I said. Then he asked what I thought about when I masturbated. I told him that I began by imagining kissing a woman and undressing her as I kissed her. He asked me if thinking about kissing her aroused me. I said that it did. He asked me if it was the most arousing part of my fantasy, even more than the sex itself. I thought for a minute and said, Yes, yes, I thought it was. It’s interesting, he said, that for you kissing a woman is more arousing than having intercourse with her.
For the rest of that session, and interwoven through several more, he pushed me on this subject. I responded defensively. There was something wanting in my libido. That was the implication in his line of reasoning. I was not thrusting myself into the world. I was not taking, seizing, gratifying myself, and building on these victories toward a concrete, satisfying future. For successful, competitive, aggressive men, the kiss was the means to the goal of total physical possession. For me, the kiss was an end in itself. The pleasure every human animal owes itself was something that I, instead, deferred to the future. I preferred the promise or tease of sex in a kiss, and a kiss’s emotional fulfillment.
It was true that something inside me recoiled at the thought of using another person for anything, even mutually agreed-to physical pleasure. I experienced the same heart-pounding, ATTEN-SHUN! that most humans did upon regarding another human as an object of desire. Sex preoccupied me, though the pursuit of it made me as anxious as it made me excited. It’s just that it took me some time to think of another person as an animal who would, in that animal experience, require me to also be an animal. I was working so hard on my intellectual and emotional life that I could not abruptly leave it in order to gratify my senses. My senses didn’t think. My senses didn’t comprehend. My senses didn’t console or reassure me. I had to work my way up to physical gratification. I needed to take my thoughts and emotions with me step by step—like a divorced father slowly getting his children used to his girlfriend.
For Colp the compassionate Darwinist, the septuagenarian Freudian, this was self-thwarting. It was why we spoke endlessly about my inability to earn money and, when I did manage to do so, to save or spend it wisely. He was trying to draw a parallel. I listened to him with hunger to make myself whole. Yet I had trouble following him. He made me feel that not dispatching my sexual obligations to myself in a timely fashion was somehow irresponsible. I could not really understand how all these forces of sex and money, of ambition, of moral and material consequence, could come together to either thwart or enable me.
It was also true, as I’ve said, that ambition appalled me. The ambition that I felt in myself beckoned me to enter the realm of social competition. There I would be judged by standard measurements of value, like everyone else. I, who prized my untested rarity and excellence, was not about to allow that to happen. As for ambition in others, it set off all my alarms. Ambitious people—ambitious for money, ambitious for professional and social status—had a nose for motion. They gravitated toward similar people who were instruments of motion. I was stuck in life, and so I turned toward the velocity of stories and ideas. You could tell, the minute I opened my mouth, that I was stuck and that all the motion in my life was in my head. Ambitious people like Claire’s father looked right past me when I spoke about matters that moved me. They looked at their watches.
I began to think of ambition as a sickness. Ambitious people were too busy looking at their watches to give you the time of day. As for helping out someone who needed it: with ambitious people you could forget it. Helping out was Joey Navas’s territory. He was dead as a result. Ambitious people died just as everyone else dies, but no ambitious person died, so I told myself, from helping out.
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor once wrote a repugnant essay that I cannot get out of my head. She wrote that the worst people survived the Holocaust, not the best. The animals were the ones who lived. They took food away from others, they informed on them, they beat and killed them if necessary to get their shoes and clothes, they killed or tortured someone because a guard dared them to in exchange for food or water or a chance to continue to exist. The woman who wrote the essay conceived of the life force as being fatal to life. She saw it as an obscenity that unleashed a fury to survive. In the world of the naked will to live, kindness and goodness were pathological. They led their practitioners to oblivion.
The essay itself, a product of some type of blinding rage, was obscene. Some people survived the camps because of luck. Others survived because of cunning that had nothing to do with destroying other people. The ones who did perform monstrous acts to survive often had children they wanted to live for. Or they made a calculation, unthinkable yet instinctive, that the people they killed or allowed to die in order to live themselves were going to die anyway. What was the point, therefore, of producing two corpses where there might be only one? Anyway, who could sit in judgment of people condemned to suffer in an alternate universe that is beyond human understanding? Were kindness and goodness pathological in that universe? Maybe. Passing judgment, by those outside it, on the poor souls who were trapped inside, certainly is.
Still, as I said, the essay has stayed in my mind since I read it.
* * *
The process of making prints with woodblocks is mesmerizing. You paint the wood with ink. Then you draw your picture on a piece of paper, lay the paper on the inky block, and trace the design on the paper onto the wood. After that, you carve the picture into the wood with a long, thin metal gouge to make lines. You use another type of gouge to scrape out the chips and shavings left by the first gouge. Then you mix more ink on a flat, smooth plate of glass and run a roller back and forth over it until the roller is saturated with ink. The dark ink bubbles and congeals on the clear glass until the glass also becomes dark. At last you run the ink roller over the carving you made in the wood, and you press a sheet of printing paper onto the pattern in the wood. Then you have your print.
Gretchen was studying fine arts at Montclair. The college had a first-rate department. She wanted to be a painter, but the program had her working in different media. I especially loved her prints. After we started seeing each other, I came to the studio to see her work as often as I could.
Something deep inside me thrilled to watch her work. The printmaking process was not a means to an end—to a paycheck or a commission. It was an end in itself. It was work, but it was also who Gretchen aspired to be. She was fulfilling in her work what she felt and hoped was her desti
ny. Like a higher power, the work organized and determined her—but only the more she applied herself to it. I sat sometimes for hours and watched her lose herself in her work late at night, after all the other students and the teachers had left.
We began to see each other regularly. Though I was still sharing an apartment with Paul, he was now in a serious relationship with a woman and he rarely slept at home. Gretchen, who was living in her parents’ house about twenty minutes from Paramus and twice that distance from Paul, stayed the night at my place more and more.
One night I read to her from a book in which the author described the ancient Greeks as holding an eternal fascination because they represented the childhood of humankind. A few days later, as I sat in the studio watching her finish a print, she raised it up for me to see. It was a picture of a group of people standing around a small fire. The figures were attenuated, symbolic. A planet, sun or moon or something unknown, appeared at the top of the picture. She said she called it The Ancients. Handing me the piece of paper, she said, The print is for you. On the paper she had written in a large, capacious hand: “For my fine, beautiful child.”
Gretchen’s younger brother had drowned in a pond in the woods behind her parents’ house when he was four or five and she was a few years older. The tragedy tore up her parents in opposite ways. Her father, an electrician, began to drink in quiet rage, exploding from time to time. Her mother became a nurse. According to Gretchen, who was quiet, but keen and watchful, her father surrendered to alcohol in order to press her mother into caring for him because he had lost the ability to take care of himself. Her mother, like Gretchen, was a born guardian. There are people like that. Joey Navas was like that. At night, as Gretchen passed by her parents’ bedroom, whose door was sometimes left half-open in distraction, she said that she could see her father leaning against her mother as the two of them sat in bed, his head in her arms.