by Lee Siegel
I motioned to the waitress to bring the check. You’re both working? my father said. I told him about Herman’s, and Gretchen told him about her job at ShopRite. My father nodded. He had a thoughtful look on his face. I noticed that he hadn’t asked me about school. I figured that since he was unable to help pay for it, he didn’t want to bring it up.
As we waited for the waitress to bring the check, my father continued to work away at my heart. I have a special radio now, he said. It only gets the weather. I listen to it as often as I can when I’m home. I love hearing about all the different weather patterns, and about what the weather is like in different places. It was snowing in Moscow last night. Another thing I like to do, he said, is to watch the Muppets on TV. Do you ever watch them? Oh, you should. They are delightful. They help me get to sleep.
The cookies and ginger ale are my treat, I declared.
Gretchen gradually fell behind my father and me as the three of us entered the parking lot. She and I had been holding hands, and I was almost pulling her along as I walked a step or two ahead of Monroe. My confidence, it turned out, had a limited duration, like a pain reliever. It was obvious to me that, by this point, I had to get away from him regardless of his feelings. But her heart went out to him just as it went out to me. I sometimes said to her: Be more assertive, more discriminating! I didn’t realize that if she had been as assertive and discriminating as I was—in constant rebellion against my essentially porous nature—she might not have stayed with me.
By the time I reached my Charger, Gretchen was standing about twenty-five feet away. I unlocked the car door and turned to face my father. Goodbye, Dad, I said. It was great to see you. I’m sorry we’ve been out of touch for so long. I’ve just been really busy with classes and work. Let’s see each other again soon.
The polite words came out in a rush. His face fell. I wanted to close my eyes and open them in some other place. I could flee from my father and pretend that this caused him no pain, but I could not withstand seeing the effects of my hurting him. He stared at my impatience to leave. Then he put his hand on my arm. He looked at me without speaking. He could not bear to say my name. Finally, he said: Could I ask you something? I hate to ask you this, but do you mind? Do you have a few bucks to lend your old man? Say twenty-five dollars? He was half grinning to mask the destruction of his self-respect.
The last of my fresh new confidence ebbed away. I could have fled from him right there. Or buried my head in his chest the way I had as a child. But he could not protect me from the feeling of naked emptiness that he himself aroused in me. I had only twenty dollars in my wallet, and I gave it to him. Gretchen walked up. My father smiled at her, too shy or too ashamed to embrace her. He hung his head over the parking lot.
The two of you look like you have the world on a string, he said, looking up at Gretchen. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you don’t, he said, with that grimace of a smile. Gretchen gave him her most hopeful expression, as if she knew that he was about to win the lottery. For a second, she reminded me of my father’s friend, the waitress. I could see from the grateful look on his face that Gretchen’s kind and hopeful smile meant as much to him as it did to me.
* * *
If American life is some sort of hundred-yard dash, whether you want it to be or not, then the true value of going to a respected college and graduating without debt gives you between twenty-five and fifty yards on everyone else.
But you cannot say this. If you do, you will traduce the beautiful idea of a meritocracy, which is that if you go to a poorly regarded school, and you work one, or two, or three jobs while you take a full load of courses; if you work until you are exhausted, sink into debt with student loans, take a year, or two, or three of extra time if you need it—then, your will almost extinguished by hard work, and worry, and distraction, your mind disheveled by academic and financial pressure; then, finally, at last, after all that, you will succeed in your wildest dreams. Unless you don’t. But if there are people who do triumph in this way—and there certainly are, though many fewer than the few there used to be—no one should have to. Working out your destiny through your work is difficult enough. You should not have to nearly kill yourself simply to get to the point where you can start applying yourself to your work.
The idea of a society based on merit is inspiring. Beyond it, there is the way things actually work. There are the prisons, where the hopeless poor are warehoused; and then the community colleges, where the luckier poor and the lower middle class pay to stay out of prison; and finally the state schools, where the children of the middle class earn the brass ring of a college degree but after graduating use up the youngest, most vital part of their lives as slaves to the debt they piled onto themselves in order to go to college, unable to buy a house, start a family, or follow their talents and inclinations. They are unable, that is to say, to lay the groundwork for their own children to shift around the ladders of inherited luck that make up the beautiful idea of American meritocracy and to rise up in society themselves. That is the absurdly consequential outcome of the superficial accident of birth or circumstance, or of low confidence and a weakened will.
And if you are fortunate enough to have a gift, then not having the opportunity to attend a college where you will be taught by and study with people who are similarly gifted, a place where you will be rewarded for your gift instead of mocked or marginalized for possessing it, a place where you can come into your own intellectually, spiritually, and professionally, a place where you can meet people who will help you fulfill your destiny in your work (call it “networking” if you like)—if you are not able to find the refuge of a college or university like that, then your heart and soul will shrivel up and die.
All of this was the callow, unequivocal way I saw the world not long after the reunion with my father, when I was twenty-one.
* * *
I threw myself into my courses at Montclair, favoring literature, philosophy, and history, in that order. I also plunged into French and German. Learning another language was a revelation to me. It resembled, in a higher key, the airborne, cushiony elasticity of being drunk—as if your brain were packed in polyurethane in a box about to be mailed a long distance. Time stood still as I struggled to speak and write the foreign words. The mental reminders of my shortcomings as a person and of the limitations of my circumstances, reminders that nagged at me in English, melted away.
Learning a new language was like starting a new life, but on better terms. You acquire your native language helter-skelter, without knowing how all the pieces fit together. By the time you are able to speak it fluently, the world is already all over you in a storm of perplexity. It is a mystery what the relationship is between what you want, what you speak, and what the world is. Mastering a foreign language, on the other hand, confers on you the illusion of growing into a new world and of understanding your relationship to it, both at the same time. I savored the conversion of old words into new words, proud of my growing acquisitions of new vocabulary.
I soon discovered that I wanted different things from my experience at Montclair than most of the other students did. Like William Paterson, the college at the time was a commuter school. Its reality as a campus, a separate space away from the bustling, raucous instrumentality of the outside world, was negligible. Angelo had overstated its qualities. The students, who were mostly the sons and daughters of first-generation Americans, brought the anxious, practical demands of the outside world with them into their classes. They arrived at class, listened, took notes, turned in their papers, and took their exams in an attitude of dutiful submission. When the class was over, they disbanded with efficiency and relief. College was a means to an end: to an income that turned over the engine of adulthood. Getting lost in reflection, in questioning the way things are and how they got to be that way, was about as helpful as getting a flat tire. Culture’s gray complexity was an obstacle to these students ambitious to make a better material life for themselves. There was nothi
ng coarse or unadmirable about that. The poor are born over an abyss; working-class and lower-middle-class kids are born on a narrow plank of stability teetering on a small mountain of their parents’ toiling hopes. They want more stability.
Before Montclair, working at the gas station, committed to my reading, thoughts, and ideas, I felt solitary. Here, among people who were visibly indifferent to the aspects of existence that defined me, I felt alone. Occasionally it was not indifference that I experienced but outright hostility. Answering a question in class, I spoke earnestly and at length. Some students grumbled to each other and looked at their watches just as Claire’s father had done.
Of course there were exceptions to the indifference I met at Montclair. From time to time, someone would say something in class, or give a presentation that filled Gretchen and me with a special feeling of admiration and affinity. But it was hard for all of us to form a bond with each other. Perhaps it is the nature of some people who are exceptions to a social norm to feel embarrassed in each other’s presence. And since almost no one lived on campus, and there were few social events that appealed to the small number of exceptions, Gretchen and I found it impossible to get close to people with whom we sensed we had something in common. On some level, we also preferred the insulated world that we had created for each other. That was why I was drifting further and further apart from my childhood friends, even Paul.
Insofar as we needed other people in that world with us, we directed our aspirations for community toward our professors. This made for some powerful attachments, especially for me, given my habit of treating my friendships and associations as all-or-nothing investments of emotion. I developed crushes on professors who I hoped might draw me up to their plane of awareness and sophistication.
* * *
Gretchen unsettled me by allowing herself to be mentored by her sculpture teacher. A lapsed Orthodox Jew, he commuted to Montclair every day from Crown Heights in Brooklyn. At his persistent behest, she modeled nude for his class twice a week. This made me hot with jealousy. No self-respecting Jewish girl would find work as a graven image, I joked to her.
Once I slipped into the side of the room when the teacher wasn’t looking—no visitors were allowed—and watched Gretchen being watched by him and by the other students. Her inanimate stillness fascinated and disturbed me. Her teacher was in fact a brilliant artist, much discussed in advanced artistic circles in New York. As far as I knew, however, he did nothing for or with Gretchen except look at her. The whole arrangement angered me, mystified me, aroused me, and, on account of his so-far innocent voyeurism, instilled in me a sense of relief. Still, I hovered over Gretchen’s relationship with him. She didn’t mind. She needed him as the irreproachable mentor, and me as the fanatically devoted boyfriend. Years later, I found it difficult to believe that they did not become physically intimate somewhere, sometime. But perhaps he never helped her professionally because she refused to give him the intimacy that he wanted. Neither Gretchen nor I ever brought the subject up. It was too far from the safely circumscribed world we had created for ourselves. And her teacher was too much of an actual threat for me to make him part of my fantasy.
As for me, an “A” scrawled on the first page of a paper or on an exam suffused me with faith in the future. Gradually the Old Man’s voice began to fade away. He was being replaced with confirmation of the rich, sensitive, cultivated person I had always hoped I was.
One or two professors at Montclair resented their lowly academic status, expressing their frustration by elevating mediocre students and harshly evaluating anyone with talent. For the most part, though, the people who taught there were grateful to find students drawn to the fields they had chosen to spend their lives working in. They responded with generosity to my ardor, and particularly to the oblique way I had of looking at things.
You use big, Latinate words, an Indian professor of classics said to me with a kind smile; they are as big as your ambition. Keep your ambition big, she said, but use smaller, Anglo-Saxon words. I was in the class she taught on Virgil’s Aeneid in English translation. I cherished the book’s theme of “the tears in things.” The image of the hero Aeneas carrying his aged father on his back out of burning Rome riveted me.
Her remark about my vocabulary at first had a crushing effect, especially coming as it did from a professor of Latin, of all things. One of the articles of faith that kept me going then was my conviction that I had an absolute command of the English language. There was also her use of the word “ambition.” As always, it made me feel stripped of my singularity; and it exposed my embarrassed ambition. After a while, though, getting into the practice of making a conversion like “teary-eyed” for “lachrymose”—one of my favorites—began to liberate me. It was as if I was finding within my native language a new foreign language that was closer to how I really thought.
* * *
While Gretchen had the Orthodox Jewish sculptor, I found my own mentor. David Einman, a professor of French and German, was in his early sixties. I had taken his course in intermediate French. Born in Brooklyn, he was short, bespectacled, soft-spoken, and wry.
Einman had an almost perfect dome of a bald head. Upon encountering him for the first time, you had no real impression of him, so predictably did his mild aspect seem to follow from his appearance. He did not reveal himself as a distinct personality until he removed his thick, obscuring bifocals. He did this from time to time to rub his eyes. They were light blue. As he rubbed them into a watery redness, carefully, with the backs of his bent fingers—he was fastidious about himself—you glimpsed a hidden steeliness.
Einman often surprised me by being balanced and objective where I expected—wanted—him to lose himself in some impassioned bias that I could share. He could also be unsparing in his mild way. What are you doing here? he asked me once, as we sat in a Montclair diner, drinking coffee after returning from a studio concert at WQXR, a classical music station once owned by The New York Times. The concerts were free, as I remember. Einman loved them. It made him happy to bring me along.
You invited me, I said.
No, he said. At Montclair State College.
I don’t know what you mean, I said defensively.
You should be in a more intellectually challenging place, he said.
Vous êtes très gentil, I murmured. My shame at feeling like a failure now gave way to my usual embarrassment at the thought that I might be a success. Then I exclaimed: That’s why I deserve to be in your class!
People who said kind things to me made me so grateful that I could not restrain myself from flattering them extravagantly—sweetie! honey!—in return. Einman moved his mouth and eyes to one side in an expression of exasperated incredulity, as if to say, “Well, we know that’s not true!”
I can give you some of what you need, he said, but not what you fundamentally need. He had the clear-eyed, rational soul of a French intellectual. I admired him for being able to correct the circumstances of his birth, and to remake himself in the place where he belonged.
I need people to tell me all the things I don’t know, I said. I need people to lead me to truthful things, and to beautiful things.
I lowered my eyes. I had meant to respond with all the wit and sophistication I believed I had in my head, and out came these undistilled thoughts straight from my heart.
There are people here who can do that, he said. Of course there are. But you need to be challenged more than you are here. And you need to be someplace where the degree is worth something. Somewhere that puts a higher value on your talents. A college that is valued more highly by the people you are going to need to help you.
Like where?
How about Columbia? Einman had gotten a degree in music from Columbia.
I was thinking, actually, of leaving school completely and becoming a writer, I said.
Einman looked at me.
That’s a hard life, he said. Better to get your degree and then go on and get a graduate degree and find a
teaching job. Transfer to a better college. That way you can get into a good graduate school. From there you can get a teaching job at a good place.
What about my writing?
Then you can write.
With the exception of Gretchen, I had not told anyone about my plan to write. Gretchen thought it was a brave idea.
* * *
After our coffee, we got into Einman’s ancient Volvo. He was going to take me back to my apartment, but first we had to stop at his son’s apartment and drop off some items he had bought for him at the grocery store earlier in the day.
The product of Einman’s first and only marriage, which ended in divorce, the son, Adam, lived by himself in Bloomfield in a garden apartment not far from Einman’s own modest apartment. Although in his midthirties, Adam was unable to take care of himself. Einman had told me about him, but this was the first time I had met him.
At first, aside from his unkempt appearance, you could not see anything more than a little eccentric about Adam. He put you in mind of a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary. He had nervous dark eyes and unruly matted hair, and a beard down to his chest. He wore blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and tan work boots. This made him look like Solzhenitsyn living in Vermont. Einman had told me that he never changed his clothes.
Adam talked in a high, querulous voice, almost singsong, as if, while he was searching for a way back to the theater after wandering offstage during his performance in an opera, his voice had lost its magical humanity. He had a compulsion to criticize and rebut everything that was said to him. When Einman introduced me as his student, he sneered. When his father told him that we had been to a concert in the city, he said that live concerts depressed him. Recorded sound was superior, he scolded, though still corrupted by technology. All the while he sneered as he talked. At the same time, he repeatedly asked me if I was comfortable. He brought me a glass of water. Then he asked me if it was the right temperature. Before I could answer him, he explained that I should not drink too much of it because the level of toxins in New Jersey tap water was unusually high.