The Draw

by Lee Siegel

  As his father went out to the car to bring in the groceries, Adam invited me into his room. Old editions of The New York Times were stacked against every wall to the ceiling. Adam continued to talk, jumping from one subject to another: politics, baseball, music, architecture. Behind his compulsive, hypercritical commentary, underneath his perpetual sneer, his anxious dark eyes appealed to me to understand him. I shuddered as a picture of him began to form in my mind. He was not a Russian revolutionary or a Russian dissident in exile. He was Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man! Two plus two equals five. Lucidity is a great disease. Madness and suffering are the price you pay for a special destiny. He kept sneering as he talked, while his eyes persisted in trying to draw my sympathy. I recognized the sneer: I had seen it on the faces of homeless people in New York, that knowing sneer that harbored the fantasy of a superior secret and which struck such terror in me. These people, sitting or lying on the sidewalk, pressed against the side of a building, also found refuge in the newspapers. They covered themselves with pages of The New York Times or the Daily News or the Post as they slept. I found it cruelly ironic that people so hurt by the cold, hard facts of life could seek protection underneath them. Perhaps they felt reduced to a cold, hard fact themselves. Or they instinctively felt that the newspaper’s rational organization of the facts would shelter them. The homeless and their rituals disturbed me.

  Gently telling Adam how much I liked his room, I went out to the living room, where Einman was playing a passage from the Mahler symphony he knew I loved, on the baby grand piano he kept in his son’s apartment.

  * * *

  When the next semester began, in the fall of 1979, I didn’t register. Like extracting a pearl from an oyster, I took to heart Einman’s encouraging words and discarded his warning about trying to succeed without a college degree. I could not imagine getting into Columbia, or being able to afford the tuition if I did.

  Life as a writer was not what I expected. I knew no other writers. I knew no writing teachers or editors. I had to draw every last bit of strength from the exalted notions I nursed about myself. Taking on more hours at Herman’s while Gretchen finished up her degree and worked as a waitress at an upscale restaurant in Montclair, I spent my spare time writing stories. I had sent out about a dozen of them, by this point to various magazines, with no luck. I just needed more time, I told myself. Meanwhile, my job at Herman’s was becoming untenable. I had a new boss who openly indulged some sort of irrational dislike of me. He insisted I work overtime for no additional pay. When I protested, he threatened to fire me. I finally asked him why he was pressing me to work more hours. Because, he said, you are my stupid cunt.

  That night Gretchen and I went over our budget and decided that we had enough money in our checking account—we had no savings account—for me to quit if I could find another job in three weeks. Because of my reluctance to walk away from any situation that had become familiar, it took me two weeks before I could bring myself to leave Herman’s. One week later, I had patched together enough part-time jobs in the malls to help keep us going.

  I worked on my writing at odd hours, depending on my schedule. The work went very slowly. Sitting outside on a bench at the Garden State Plaza during my lunch hour, I watched the people pass by and composed page after page in my head about who they were, where they were going, and what they were thinking. Driving home on the Garden State Parkway, listening to WQXR, I could barely suppress my excitement at the images unfolding through my mind. The expressive music enlarged and animated my thoughts. But when I got home and sat in the kitchen at the old card table that I used for a desk, I could think of nothing to say.

  After some months of this, I began putting the writing off. Instead I drank wine at night and listened to music as I enacted my stories in my head. I told myself that I needed to develop them before I set them down on paper. For a while this restored my confidence. In my head my stories seemed to find their proper dimensions. I kept them there, untested, waiting to ripen and mature. As a sort of interim exercise, I worked on my style. Sometimes I would spend an entire week describing the sunlight as it seemed to sweep the shadows across the street against the curb. Gretchen showed me a book of paintings that Monet had done of the facade of a cathedral at different times of day. I told her that I wanted to try that in prose. The idea excited her, she said. We affirmed ourselves through each other’s attempts at self-expression; the more quixotic or eccentric or even futile such attempts seemed, the more gratified we were that our emotional services would be required when it became clear to one of us that the other’s efforts were leading nowhere. To strengthen my confidence I read constantly. Reading established in me a sense of my own power and intelligence. I began to think that reading had something to do with my special destiny.

  Retail was losing its enchantment. Working in the sporting goods, men’s furnishings, and housewares departments of three different stores drained my energy. I began to eat more, as if taking my revenge on a world that was consuming me by day by consuming pieces of the world at night. On my way home I would buy a package of salami and a container of potato salad. Sitting in bed and reading, I dipped the salami in the potato salad and washed the food down with red wine. I continued to read, work my stories out in my head, and practice my style, certain as ever that my talents would be recognized in the end. But beneath my conscious existence my life was moving in a different direction.

  One morning I decided that I would sleep a little later rather than wake up to read or write before going to my job in the afternoon. The next day I did the same. Then I began going to sleep in the late afternoon after coming back from working the early shift. This went on for some weeks when, sitting at dinner one evening at the kitchen table with Gretchen, I began to cry and did not stop crying until the next morning. I dragged myself off to work and upon arriving home that afternoon made my way straight to bed. This pattern repeated itself for many weeks.

  * * *

  My mother’s cousin Hyman had helped her hang on to the house. He was a high-priced divorce lawyer in New York who had advised my mother free of charge. Weary irony about what he did for a living was one of the perks of his success. He could be sincere, too, and ardent. He had contributed ten thousand dollars to the political campaign of Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general who was running for senator from New York on a platform that mostly consisted of calling for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. Helping out Clark meant a great deal to Hyman, and he referred to it whenever he visited us. Then he would lapse back into weary, worldly irony, as if to maintain his balance, and tell another story. As a young lawyer, he had gone to visit Judy Garland, who was a client. When he arrived at her hotel suite, she was lying on the sofa, incapacitated by drugs and alcohol. In the half-darkened room, he at first mistook her for a pile of clothes, he said. My mother’s eyes widened every time she heard the anecdote. Hyman told that story many times.

  A cultivated man, with an offhand philosophical attitude toward life, Hyman engaged me in talk about books and writers when he came to visit. I was in my early teens. When I told him of my growing love for classical music, he made sure to ask me what I was listening to. He was a great teaser. Once he asked me what composer I loved most. Rachmaninoff, I said solemnly. Rachmaninoff! he said, shaking his head. Schmaltz, he said. Good for cooking. How about Brahms? he said. Oh yes, I said. Brahms. Brahms is incredible. He sighed. Brahms is Beethoven continued, he said. Brahms wrote strictly to make his mother proud. What do you think of Beethoven? Well, I said. It all starts there, doesn’t it? He shook his head again and laughed. Bach, he said. He’s the one. He married reason and emotion. Someday you’ll know what I mean. Right, Monny? he asked my father. My father could have written the history of jazz in musical notation, but he knew nothing about classical music. Isn’t Bach the heppest cat of all? Hyman asked. My mother, who had been listening to the exchange, laughed and sat down next to him on the green silk sofa. Hy, she said, laughing and patting his leg.

>   I decided to write Hyman a letter asking him to help me find a job in book publishing or at a magazine. According to my mother, he was well connected in New York. I figured his friends were all like him, cultivated people with a strong intellectual bent who would respond to my passion for art and literature.

  I also asked him for a loan that could tide me over for a year until I started the job. I felt certain that if I could have a year of freedom, I would achieve a breakthrough with my writing.

  I had no hesitation about asking him to lend me money. I had borrowed money from Paul, and then from Eduardo, Simon, and Claire. Perla had lent me money, along with giving it to me. Eventually I paid them all back. A feeling had grown in me that since I was living along a different trajectory than other people, I possessed an exceptional status that made borrowing money a natural extension of the life I had chosen for myself.

  I didn’t think the world owed me a living; not at all. Somewhere inside me I felt that borrowing money, which I would return down the road, was a legitimate form of income. It was money in exchange for the development of a talent-in-progress that one day would establish a place for me in the world. The nature of this income in the form of debt corresponded to the nature of my secret rite of passage. Both had to wait for the future to be fulfilled. In the lengthy gestation of my talent, I was borrowing against my youth. In the acceptance of money loaned to me, I was borrowing against the equity of my talent.

  I sat down at the used Smith-Corona I had bought for myself at a small typewriter store on Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair and wrote Hyman a letter. My aim was to convince him that I was a good investment. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, I worked my way up to the present day, weaving ideas and historical events together in order to demonstrate the effect each had on the other. I included everything I thought I knew. The mastery and power that I felt as I was writing transported me. I had experienced nothing like that when I was trying to write fiction. Perhaps this was what I was cut out for, I thought. To bring all the strands of knowledge and action together so that I could explain the world to other people. By the time I finished I was ecstatic. I had dispelled all of my doubts about myself. The letter was twenty-five pages long. I carefully sealed it in a large manila envelope, bounded off to the post office, and sent it to Hyman at his office in Manhattan.

  Two months later Hyman’s reply arrived in the mail. It was four sentences. In the first sentence, Hyman thanked me for writing to him. In the second, he said that he knew someone who owned a restaurant near Montclair who was looking for a busboy, and that I should call Hyman’s secretary for the number. In the third, he informed me that he was enclosing a check for two hundred dollars. Then he wished me luck.

  The letter knocked me out for a couple of days. I called in sick to my several jobs and stayed in bed. Gretchen cheered me by framing The Ancients and hanging it in our bedroom. Finally I roused myself through my trusty boosters of hatred and contempt. I sat down and wrote Hyman a terse response: “I am more concerned about lawyers’ fees / Than American involvement overseas.” Though I never sent it to him, the act of dismissing him in words steadied me.

  I deposited the check and told myself, to my great satisfaction, that I would never pay him back.

  * * *

  Gretchen and I had been toying with a plan B in a vague yet persistent way from the very beginning of our relationship. We thought we might like to live in another country. I believed that a new environment and new people in my life would aid me in the construction of a new self. I no longer drew strength from my friends. With them, I was still the same old Lee Siegel, clowning around, riffing on my encounters with art and ideas, trying to make people feel good about themselves the way I needed them to make me feel good about myself—until someone failed to respond to my distress signals, in which case I savaged the traitor to Gretchen, who listened with a mixture of solidarity and pity for me. Because I was closest to Paul, my friendship with him began to suffer the most. The more I drew on his emotional sustenance, and the more loyally he responded, the more a part of me recoiled from the familiar way he related to me. Couldn’t he see how I was evolving?

  Lacking a clear sense of how she was going to pursue her art after graduation, Gretchen shared my impatience to flee. Painter that she was, she found a more distinct shape to her future in the imaginative clarity of a faraway place than in the dreary familiar form of her life. School and work, school and work, with no line out of either to a larger existence, were becoming more oppressive for her every day. She also wanted to deal a blow to her father, who had refused to talk to her since she and I started to live together in Passaic.

  Gretchen did not at first present Norway as a possibility. Though her grandmother was her mother’s mother, asking her to allow us to stay with her while we established ourselves there would have brought Gretchen into direct conflict with her father, whom she feared all the more for defying him. Seeing her hesitation, I did not bring Norway up.

  Instead I hit on my own idea: Israel! Until that moment, I had not given a thought to my Jewish background since my low-key bar mitzvah. I was not even sure what Zionism meant, exactly. Of course I rooted for Israel in the country’s conflicts with its neighbors. Israel was the home team. But no one in my family had ever been to Israel. The idea of finding a spiritual home there was something that I had never considered.

  My closeness to Judaism mostly consisted of the sickbed obsession with the Holocaust I had when I was a child. Images of its atrocities were inscribed in my mind. It struck at the core of my identity to conceive of Judaism as a religion that had to go underground for centuries, nursing a secret destiny, only to reemerge and be brought to the brink of extinction in Nazi Europe. I thought of Judaism as another of those big, mighty-seeming entities that were actually vulnerable and exposed. The idea of Judaism as a positive spiritual and ethical system of values never occurred to me. I had read, however, that all Jews were welcome in the Promised Land, where they automatically became citizens. Gretchen and I began reading up on Zionism, the history of Israel, and the structure of a kibbutz.

  Within two weeks, after heated immersion in one volume after another on Jewish theology, history, literature, and religion, after excited nights discussing Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am and Gershom Scholem, after drawing up but never executing my plan to introduce myself to the famous liberal rabbi and intellectual Arthur Hertzberg, who I discovered led a congregation in nearby Teaneck—after this excited labor the upshot was that nothing affected us so much as Eva Marie Saint and Paul Newman in Exodus, which happened to be on television one night. Its vaguely Mahler-like musical score was the final touch.

  We visited the Israeli consulate in New York. Once through security, I walked in with a mixture of wariness and high expectation, like the prodigal son. Gretchen walked shyly as close behind me as she could. When the consular official, a woman, informed us that in order to be eligible for citizenship, we would have to marry and that Gretchen would have to convert, Gretchen looked at me for clarification. I protested the absurdity and the heartlessness of it. The woman, sincerely apologetic and harried, stuffed some brochures into our hands and looked with sympathy at Gretchen. Convert and come back, darling, she said. There will be a place for you in Israel.

  It was all too much for me to consider. I wanted to live in Israel to become me, not to become a son of Zion. I left disgusted with this disappointing outcome of six thousand years of Jewish history. Now the entire religion seemed to me to resemble those ambitious people I feared and disdained, who had no space or time for me. As for Gretchen, she seemed relieved.

  We then went to the Italian consulate, an unsuccessful effort for which we had read Dante and a book written in the nineteenth century called The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, followed by a visit to the French consulate, where my quoting Stendhal to the official in his native language had no effect. Finally, I abandoned my tiny store of discretion and pressed Gretchen to test the prospect of Norway with h
er mother. For Gretchen’s mother, the fact that her daughter seemed happy outweighed every argument against me. She urged Gretchen to write to Norway. Now in her eighties, Gretchen’s grandmother wrote back promptly with joy. She warned us that she could do nothing to make our stay in Norway permanent, but that she would be happy to let us live with her while we tried to make a life there.

  * * *

  The Parisos had finally had enough of our untidiness and asked us to leave. We moved to a small two-room place in a grand old apartment building in Montclair. In the winter of 1980, when I was twenty-two, as we were starting to make our rounds to the various consulates, Menka died. I had not seen him as much as I had when I was living in my mother’s house after coming back from Bradley. But despite his anger over my mother’s decision to leave my father, they had remained close, and my mother still made regular trips into the Bronx to bring Menka and Rose to Paramus for the day. I often came to visit with Gretchen when I knew he was going to be there.

  Whenever my brother or I alluded to my father, Menka shook his head and sighed. I interpreted this not as contempt but as a general sadness about my father’s fate. I could not endure the thought that Menka shared my mother’s antipathy toward my father. Menka occupied too special a place in my emotions. He was my grandfather. My Papa. Where my parents had flaws, he had inexplicable attributes. As I grew up, I could understand, or thought I understood, reasons for my parents’ behavior. But what Menka said and did started and stopped with Menka. The cause of my mother could have no cause himself.

  A small group of people had come to the funeral chapel on the Upper West Side where Menka’s body lay for viewing in an open coffin. Now married to a practicing Catholic, my mother had insisted to the Reform rabbi, a sympathetic man who had known our family for many years during our loose affiliation with his synagogue, on embalmment and viewing of the body, two exceptions to Jewish tradition.