by Lee Siegel
One night this torn, grieving man cornered Gretchen in the living room. Gretchen eventually told me the whole story. He called me a Jew-boy and declared that all I wanted was to fuck Gretchen and that, after I had fucked her as much as I liked, I would throw her out like garbage. He said it pretty much like that. He thought he was about to lose another child; he felt free to say what he believed was the ugly, unbearable truth. Her mother quieted him. At the time I shook with indignation, and with fear that Gretchen would leave me.
* * *
I saw Gretchen’s father once when I came to pick up Gretchen in the crisp-looking Dodge Dart Angelo’s brother-in-law had sold me for four hundred dollars. It had barely any miles on it. You need a car, he said with a broad grin, waving away my heartfelt thanks.
Two months later the Dodge stalled in the fast lane of the Garden State Parkway during the morning rush hour. Unable to get out as the cars sped by, I sat listening to a Chopin prelude on the radio. Rush hour would be over in about forty minutes, and I thought that the traffic would thin out at that point and I could escape. But the cars kept flying past. Now and then I heard a screech behind me as someone braked just in time. Then I noticed a tollbooth operator, a young black woman, frantically waving her arms on the side of the road. I turned off the music and rolled down my window. Get out of there! she cried. Get out!
Opening the door, I tried to step out but nearly got hit. I jumped back in and closed the door. She kept screaming for me to leave the car. Breathing deeply, I slowly emerged and stood with my back pressed to the car. Waving my hands and waiting until a car slowed down, I gradually made it to the side of the road, lane by lane. The tollbooth operator looked at me and shook her head. A minute later a car drove straight into the back of the Dodge, the first car’s hood crumpling like a playing card. The Dodge’s trunk buckled, sprang open, and waved slowly in the air. For months afterward, I had fantasies of beating Angelo’s brother-in-law to a pulp.
Sitting in the Dodge, I saw Gretchen’s father open the screen door in the front of the house and poke his head out. His fair Swedish-American complexion reddened. It was unnerving to see Gretchen’s high color, which also rose up in her during sex, spread across her father’s face.
The sight of me must have eaten away at him because a few nights later, he forbade Gretchen to continue seeing me. Gretchen refused. It was the late spring, and she was standing at the front door, about to leave the house. He slapped her face. Almost since our first kiss, sitting on a low cliff at the edge of campus, looking out across northern New Jersey at the Manhattan skyline that was wavering in the distance in a haze that was now golden, now blue, now rose colored, I had been asking her to live with me. When she arrived that night, she told me that she would. A few days later, her sister, two years younger, brought her things. Gretchen waited weeks to tell me that her father had struck her. Instead she drew portraits of us together, over and over, and burrowed her head into my chest as we went to sleep at night.
* * *
It is not uncommon for men to judge women quality by quality. A flaw in intellect, character, or appearance—the last usually more decisive than the first two—often means the end of male commitment. Women more often than not evaluate the whole package. If Gretchen had judged me one quality at a time, she wouldn’t have stayed with me for long.
I was still aroused by the thought of a woman I loved having sex with another man. Partly this was because my emotional need for Gretchen was so powerful that its fulfillment was more gratifying than sex. As a result, I could only enjoy sex with her if I severed her from my emotions.
But mostly, the reason for my fantasy was that imagining her returning to me, and only me, from the arms of another man meant, in the irrational logic of my imagination, that I had won a victory over the world. As my desire to break into a larger life became stronger, my need to form a mental picture of Gretchen entangled in bed with someone else grew more intense. I could reenact in my head being defeated by the world and then triumphing over it.
Gretchen herself submerged my quirk into the whole world of pleasure and fulfillment that we had created for ourselves.
Shyly at first, like a boy showing his friend buried pirate’s treasure, then with ardor and pride, as if revealing a secret pedigree, I introduced her to my books, and to all that I had learned from them, and to everything that I had tried to make from what I had learned. She tried to teach me how to draw. When that was unsuccessful, she introduced me to the history of art, about which I had known a little, but not much.
After a few months, we moved out of Paul’s apartment. We found a place on the second floor of an old frame house in the working-class town of Passaic. The landlords, an elderly Italian couple named Pariso—just think of Paris with an o, they told us—informed us that they would only rent to a married couple. They reacted suspiciously when we responded that we were indeed married. But the cash for the deposit and the first month’s rent, lent to us by Gretchen’s bighearted nurse of a mother, was in my hand. They took the money but persisted in their suspicions, sometimes coming in and inspecting the apartment when we were out. You should clean up your bedroom, Mrs. Pariso said to us once, from her position in her rocking chair on the porch, when we arrived home in the evening.
During the day we went to Montclair State together, separated to go to our classes, then joined up again for lunch in the cafeteria or outside when the weather was pleasant. At the end of the day we met at some prearranged place. Often it was Gretchen’s studio. From there we walked down the steep hill on which the college sat toward one of the levels in the vast tiered parking lot. By this point I had a new car, a used Dodge Charger, that I had bought with money saved from my job at Stern’s.
* * *
I had quit my job at Stern’s because it was too far away from the college and from our apartment. I also wanted to put as much distance between my mother and me as possible, though calm, unhysterical Gretchen seemed to throw my mother off balance.
With Gretchen, my mother seemed outgunned. Partly it was Gretchen’s appearance that intimidated her. My first true love had long blond hair, large gray-blue eyes, fair skin, and a slightly crooked mouth. For my mother, the Jewish daughter of Russian immigrants growing up in the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s, especially one whose aspiration to be an actress was never realized, Gretchen’s living, breathing blondness and blueness belonged to the social group that inherited life’s blessings, and that my mother could not relate to, or circumvent.
But the most impervious aspect of Gretchen was that she contained no piece of Lola. My mother could not work on anyone she was unable to identify with on some level. I watched her trying to maneuver with Gretchen, looking for an opening like a wrestler, smiling at her, sweetie-ing her to death, giving her absurd compliments on her flaws—You have Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, she told her. But nothing ever stuck. Inside Gretchen, the child of a Swedish American father and a Norwegian American mother, steep granite walls contained blows and disappointments. When cracks did form, from the weight of suppression, they spread slowly.
My mother, by flamboyant contrast, needed everything inside a person to be on the outside. At the end of an encounter with Gretchen, she would launch one last extravagantly insincere compliment: Sweetie, your teeth are so beautifully white! Then she would stand at the door waving goodbye, coaxing the tears from her eyes in hopes of provoking in Gretchen compassion for her, and also suspicions of her oldest son’s capacity for emotional betrayal. But all Gretchen ever said was: Your mother sure cries a lot. Lola was left standing on the front steps of the split-level house, forcing a smile for all the world to see her bravely forcing it, tears streaming down her face, a gleam of wistful malice in her eyes.
It pleased me to see my mother neutralized in this way, but after Claire, I took nothing for granted and stayed as far away from Paramus as possible.
* * *
There was a ShopRite supermarket on the other side of the stockade fence that marked the edge
of the Parisos’ tiny backyard. Gretchen got a cashier’s job there. Almost immediately she arranged for me to be hired as the person who hunts down shopping carts in the parking lot and brings them back to the front of the store.
Every now and then I swung inside and waved hello to Gretchen. Unlike me, she had been issued a full ShopRite uniform. She looked so opposite to herself that I could not resist setting my eyes on her as often as I could. I kept ducking into the store. Finally my supervisor told me that either I stayed in the parking lot and kept the shopping carts in order or I could find another job. He said this in front of Gretchen. I had no choice but to prove that I didn’t just devour volumes in the Modern Library series, I belonged in them as a protagonist, too. I quit on the spot. Gretchen deliberately lost herself in ringing up a customer, but she laughed softly as I passed by on my way out.
All these humiliations, at the gas station and ShopRite, in my old high school classroom and with my mother, made me burn more and more with dedication to suffering, like a Buddhist monk on fire. I returned to Paramus’s retail sanctuary and got a job in the shoe department of Herman’s World of Sporting Goods in the Garden State Plaza, which described itself as one of the largest malls on the planet.
* * *
In the evenings, Gretchen cooked a quick dinner, something easy like pasta or baked chicken. Cooking held no special appeal for her. She enjoyed it because it was new and adult, a sign of her independence. Then I would read poetry to her, or a passage from a novel or a philosophical work, or she would take out her art books and show me paintings that inspired her, instructing me in how color expressed emotion, and line, intellect and order. We both took pleasure in the more or less benign power we had over each other.
At the end of the night, I put on classical music. I had been listening to it ever since, in my early teens, I discovered the record bin at Korvettes, a discount department store just down the highway from Alexander’s.
Classical music served for me as a kind of superior escape from my father’s beloved jazz. It also appealed to my love for the serious depths of jazz, which I listened to, against my conscious will, as much as I could.
Sharing each other’s enthusiasms, we responded most passionately to Mahler. Discovering his music on the radio, I went out to buy a record and brought it home to play for Gretchen. Mahler used horns in a very dramatic and symbolic way. He liked to put them in conflict or agreement with the strings. In one of his symphonies the horns start off sounding lonely and lost, then fearful yet intrepid, then indomitable and successful, then overwhelmed by louder horns and the sinister strings. As the strings rose up to threaten the horns, I said to Gretchen, in the manner of an expert guide: That is death. She nodded gravely. When the horns triumphed in the end in a cacophonous fusion of all the instruments in the orchestra—Ta-ta!—she said, with a slight edge of admonishment: That is victory. We hugged for joy. Ta-ta! Ta-ta!
From the time we finished dinner to the time we went to bed, I was usually drunk. Since meeting Gretchen, as if in a sign of my own independence and adulthood, I had shifted from beer to red wine. I drank about a bottle a night. Gretchen, perhaps mindful of her father’s weakness, limited herself to a single glass.
Stopping, bending, stretching time, the wine reinforced my sense that we had created our own self-contained world, invulnerable to the wider world’s disappointments and injuries. We had no thought of anything we were doing leading to anything else. Everything for us existed in and of itself: people, experiences, works of art. Living in Passaic, studying at Montclair State, working part-time in supermarkets and shoe departments, we were living advertisements for the effects of a humanistic education: curious, contemplative, devoted to uncovering the essence of living beings, rather than what they could be exchanged for. I was convinced that you had to come from hard-pressed circumstances to believe in those lofty values enough to want to practice them. I had heard a rumor that one of the people in the Goldberg-Cohen crowd in my high school had actually written an essay about the importance of treating people as ends rather than means in order to get into Princeton. I was not so hopelessly earnest that I could not relish that, and use it to make Gretchen laugh with me at all the things I didn’t know I wanted.
* * *
In the nearly two years since I’d come back from Bradley, I had not seen my father. Yet I conceived of myself as a loving son because every time I thought of him my throat thickened and my eyes stung. It hardly ever occurred to me that I was not fulfilling my obligation to him as a son. When it did, I surprised myself by sounding like my mother and complaining, in my head, that he had not fulfilled his obligations to his family.
This was a flimsy justification of the simple fact was that I still was afraid to see him. I avoided him without even thinking about whether I really wanted to see him or not, let alone whether it was the right thing to do; the way you will reflexively pull your hand away from something—a flame, a snapping dog—that is about to hurt you.
I also continued to assume that since he had once again fallen on hard times he was reluctant to see me. I told myself that this must be the case since he had rarely called me at Bradley and never tried to reach me when I was living at my mother’s house. I was incapable of being honest with myself about the possibility that I was hurting him. For all I knew, his fear of being shunned by me was stronger than his desire to talk with me. And it was self-serving of me to resent him for not calling me at my mother’s house. My mother had probably told him never to call. It didn’t matter. The important thing was to protect myself. He would be there, I assured myself, when I grew strong and confident. At that time I would reclaim him as my father.
Gretchen never asked me anything about my father beyond what I told her. I made him out to be pitiable yet destructive to himself and to me. She nodded. She didn’t need to weigh the family dynamic from which I had come. She regarded me, as she assumed I regarded her, as an autonomous being existing apart from any influence beyond the books and works of art we had chosen as our true influences. Son of Shakespeare; daughter of Monet. Even when you are in your early twenties you speculate about marriage, but the subject never came up between us. We were part of each other’s life-building process, not the fruits of its completion.
Given my father’s absence from my life, I was surprised when Gretchen told me, after I came home one evening from selling running shoes, that she had spoken to him on the phone. He had sounded nice, she said; not sad at all. He had asked her if she was the woman of the house. That had made her laugh. She thought I should return his call.
Her sympathy for my father stirred my own buried love for him, and I called him at the number he had left. He sounded sad to me. Maybe he was just tired, I told myself. I arranged to meet him the following evening at a diner near where he was living. He asked me to invite Gretchen, but I would have brought her anyway.
* * *
My father had put on about thirty pounds. The wreath of wavy brown hair around the expanding bald spot on the top of his head had turned white. He had on different glasses. Instead of the black frames he had always worn, his glasses were now wire. Their thinness, combined with his white hair, would have given him an air of fragile dignity if it had not been for all the extra weight in his face, which made him look troubled and indolent. He was waiting for us in a booth by the window. His face brightened when Gretchen, blushing, smiled at him as I introduced them. He asked the waitress to bring him a ginger ale and a plate of cookies. When it was my turn to order, he grew animated.
They have seven-layer cake, Lee-boy, he said. That had always been my favorite dessert.
I’ll just have coffee, I said.
I could see the disappointment on his face.
Well, I said, I guess I’ll have the cake. Yes, I think I’ll have the cake. The waitress seemed to shoot him a celebratory wink. Did he, over his solitary meals, talk with her about me? When the cake came, I lost myself in it and devoured it like a child.
Perhaps reassur
ed by the thought that I had not drifted so far from him after all, my father began to speak openly to Gretchen and me. He explained that he was lucky to get his room in Elmwood Park. The room was cheap, he said, which was lucky for him since he was barely getting by on the money earned from his piano lessons. His trio had broken up and he was having trouble putting another one together so that he could start playing at weddings and bar mitzvahs again. He had a few students, but not many. Let me know if you know anyone who needs a piano teacher, he said, looking at me and then at Gretchen. He smiled. Gretchen put her hand on my leg under the table.
My father said: Something nice in my life. What is that? asked Gretchen. I have a girlfriend, he said. Her name is Marcie. That’s wonderful, Gretchen said. I nodded my head. That’s really great, I said. We talk about marriage, my father said, grinning. Oh, that’s so great! said Gretchen. Yes, I said. Congratulations, Dad. I’m glad you’re with someone. But there’s a problem, my father said. She has a dog. A German shepherd. Oh, said Gretchen. You have allergies. Like Lee. Yes, my father said. Since I was in my teens, I have allergies. It’s terrible. Five minutes in the same room as the dog and I can’t stop sneezing. I can’t breathe. Oh, said Gretchen. So I told Marcie, said my father, if you don’t get rid of the dog, we can’t live together. Yes, said Gretchen. That’s only right, I said. So of course the dog had to go, said Gretchen. No, said my father. Marcie said that the dog stays. She loves that dog, he said. But the good thing, he continued, is that she doesn’t want to leave me. So that’s where things stand now. Gretchen gently rubbed my leg.
We had been there for about an hour and I wanted to leave. Yet for once I did not feel threatened by my father’s defeated air. The confidence Gretchen aroused in me, the feeling that I now had a life separate from his, converted what would have been a feeling of terror in his presence into a painful but manageable sadness. So as not to hurt Monroe too much, I said: We both have to get to our jobs. I wish we could stay but we’ll see you soon, I promise.