by Lee Siegel
To my amazement, my mother was subdued. The situation had put her at center stage. Because people already pitied her for her loss, she did not have to attract attention to her grief through an emotional display. She could begin a new relationship with Rose, too, squatting in front of the chair Rose was sitting in and speaking softly to her. She was no longer in the tormented position of having to compete for Menka’s affection with the one person who had always defended her to Menka.
Hyman was in the small crowd of people at the chapel. He acknowledged me with a slight nod of his head and began to walk over to me. Hyman, I whispered to Gretchen. She had never seen him. Talk to him! she said. No, I snapped, and turned my back. I wanted desperately to talk with him, but I was afraid that if I surrendered my hatred of him, I would be giving up the fire of resilience that his letter had stoked in me. It was his letter, after all, that had made me resolve to go to Norway to start a new life. Gretchen started to walk toward him, but I placed my hand on her arm. She turned to look at me. She fixed her eyes on me and seemed about to say something. But then she stood beside me.
My brother came over to us from the coffin, his face transfixed with horror. He shrank! he said. My heart plunged. Death terrified me. I had never seen a dead person before. Forcing myself toward the coffin, I stood alongside it, peering in. Nathan was right. Menka had shrunk. He had become an object, a thing. I did not know what to think. People are not things. You are not prepared for when a person becomes a thing. I did not know what to think, and I could not understand what I was feeling. The empty residue of his life lying in the narrow box repelled me. I loved him. I wanted to touch him. But I could not touch It. As a child, I had been tempted to touch Menka’s swarthy, wrinkled hands as we played his favorite game, gin rummy, for hours, but I was afraid to. Why had I been so afraid to touch him when I was a child? I stretched out my hand. My brother whispered in my ear: No, don’t! You’ll push his face in! My mother stepped between us. They did a beautiful job, she said, wiping tears from her face. Look at the job they did. She slowly nodded her head. Yeah, yeah, she sighed. Yeah, yeah.
* * *
Gretchen graduated from Montclair in May, and we arranged to travel to Norway in September. We hoped that would give us enough time to save money for the trip. We mostly needed money for the journey there—plane tickets to London, train tickets to Newcastle, and then passage on a boat across the North Sea to Kristiansand. Once in Kristiansand we planned to catch a bus to Arendal, a small town on Norway’s southern coast, about five hours by train south of Oslo. A ferry ran from Arendal to Tromøy. There, at Gretchen’s grandmother’s house, we could live cheaply, buying and cooking our own food. Her grandmother had written to us again, telling us that she had already set a room aside for us.
The lease on our apartment was up in June. Paul, who was now living with his girlfriend, another student at Drew, offered to let us stay with him until September. We sold our furniture and put the rest of our possessions in a small storage locker that we rented in Passaic. The exception was the stories I had written and the writing exercises I had done. Both ran to hundreds of pages. I could not bear the thought of leaving them in the tomb-like storage locker. I packed them carefully in a large box and called my mother to ask if I could leave them with her along with the box of stories I had tucked away in the basement before going off to Bradley. Some deep part of me still turned to the house where I had grown up. By now Angelo had moved in with his three children, but my mother promised to find a place for my stories. When I arrived with the box, however, her mood had changed. There was no space, she said, throwing a reproachful look at Angelo, who was sitting beside her at the kitchen table, where we were talking. He waved his hand in the air in order to amiably exonerate himself from my mother’s charge of his complicity in my exclusion. I’ll make room in the garage, he said. He did not want to be the cause of any more friction between my mother and me. He said that he had found the box of stories I had left in the basement, and that he would put those in the larger box, too.
Our stay with Paul began well. Despite my growing disenchantment with the way my reliance on him tugged me back to my old life, in recent weeks our friendship had reached a peak of mutual sustenance. After I came home from work, he and I would drink, talk, and listen to music until well after midnight. His girlfriend, Marisa, would call to him from the bedroom to come in. In a minute, he would call back, winking at me. But one night in the middle of the summer, he got choked up.
You’re going to have to leave, he said. He nodded to the bedroom. I want you to stay, he said, you know that, man, but I have to keep the peace. He grunted. He had started grunting in stressful situations a few years earlier, around the time he stopped getting nosebleeds.
I laughed out of the old habit of attachment to him. I’ll talk to her, I said.
No, he said sternly. No is no.
He had never spoken to me like that before. Paul had a low tolerance both for being pushed around and for trouble in his life. Besides that, he was protecting his future.
We moved in with Terry Cushman, another friend I had kept up with since returning from Bradley. I had not been nearly as close to Terry as to Paul. In fact I had never really trusted him enough to think of him as a close friend because of the derision at the heart of his laughter whenever I made one of my jokes. But his distance from me existed side by side with his reliability. He was always ready with some kind of practical assistance, whether it was to pick me up when my car broke down or to meet me after one of my crippling fights with my mother for a heart-to-heart talk that never went very deep. He was happy to put us up for a couple of months before we left for Norway.
* * *
Does the gambler who keeps losing continue to gamble because he wants to keep losing? Does the woman who repeatedly gets involved with men who hurt her do so because she wants to be hurt? Does the man in over his head financially keep borrowing because he secretly wants to put himself in the power of other people? Was the real reason I wanted Gretchen to have sex with another man that I thought I didn’t deserve to be with her? Is everything you do that leads you into unhappiness the result of some dark thing that you want that lurks beneath everything you think you want? Or are our mistakes of unhappiness simply misjudgments, cognitive stumbles? Do we want the wrong things, no matter how painful they are when we get them, because we were aiming for something else but missed? Because this was the only way we knew how to try to get the right things? Because given the information that we have, and the character that we possess, and the conflicting desires that tear at us, this is the only way we know how to keep going toward happiness?
From the beginning, the sex Gretchen and I had was filled with emotion. This was the way I liked it. We would begin tenderly, and then proceed, becoming freer with each other as we grew to know each other. After we had been together for a while, our personalities started to dominate our sexual relations. Gretchen took as much pleasure for herself as she could quietly and deeply, while I tried to satisfy myself greedily, hungrily, as quickly as possible. To the extent that some degree of the old tender intimacy remained, Gretchen enjoyed herself the more she came to know me. For me, however, the opposite was true, as had always been the case with me. Though I required emotional intimacy to become aroused, I needed to burst the emotional intimacy to stay aroused. This was where the fantasy of the other man came in. I could take deep pleasure in this sexual fantasy that hovered in a phantasmal future and that would never be fulfilled.
At Paul’s apartment, and then at Terry’s, it was different. Perhaps it was because we had lost the safely enclosed home of our apartment. Out in the world, with no fixed place to live, we saw each other with fresh eyes, and with a kind of urgency, and this had the result of making me more open to what she wanted. Another man was the last thing in her mind. What she wanted was her own pleasure flowing out of the relationship with me. Now, at Terry’s, I kissed her and touched her until she asked to have me inside her. I loved to make
her shudder in my arms and to kiss her ice-cold mouth. It was wondrous and strange to me that all the physical heat we created in each other made her shudder and grow cold. It was like some mysterious contradiction echoing out of the distant future, when thirty years later I witnessed my wife laboring in agony for the joy of making a child. In gratitude for my tender shoot of self-surrender, Gretchen threw herself into pleasing me.
One hot August evening, as we sat drinking with Terry at a table in a bar, I urged her to kiss him. She was wearing a short summer dress and clogs. I had had two or three glasses of wine. My head began to pound. Terry stared at me in alarm. Gretchen looked at me in surprise. When I said it again, her eyes narrowed. They both leaned forward, laughing slightly in embarrassment, and clumsily kissed. They stopped kissing and gazed at each other. Then, without looking at me, they kissed again.
We went back to Terry’s bedroom in his apartment and took off our clothes. I watched her and Terry fuck. Then she and I fucked. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Terry leave the room and heard him urinating in the bathroom. He came back and we all drank some more wine. Everything became a blur. He began to throw her around in the bed as she laughed, her hair flying. She looked like a doll, a thing, getting tossed around and bouncing up and down on top of him. I was both horrified and aroused. In the middle of it she turned to look at me. She had hatred in her eyes. She began to fuck him harder, driving herself onto him. I could see that she hated me for making a harmless fantasy come true.
When we were all done, Gretchen and I walked back to the room we were staying in at the other end of the apartment. Once we were in bed, I asked her if she still loved me. No, I don’t, she said. I began to cry. She put her arms around me and pressed my head onto her breast. I love you, she said. Two weeks later we were on the plane on our journey to Norway. We never spoke about that night again. But the fantasy of the other man resurfaced after a while, and stayed with us.
* * *
In preparation for what we hoped would be our new lives in Norway, I had packed as many of my precious books as I could into a large, light blue Samsonite suitcase. The airline boarding agents weighed the suitcase at the airport: it came to seventy pounds. It was as if I wanted to entirely replace my old life with what I hoped would be the most dynamic contents of my new life. By the time we got to the house belonging to Elsa, Gretchen’s grandmother, the weight of my new existence had caused me to pull a muscle in my right arm and had nearly given me a hernia.
On the bus ride north toward Arendal along the coastline from Kristiansand, I marveled at the landscape. It was not the unfamiliar elements of it that aroused wonder in me—the rising and falling craggy edge of land, the choppy North Sea lying gray under the September sky. What entranced me was the way the sky and trees, aspects of the physical world that I had seen all my life, suddenly acquired an air of mystery. The sky and trees I was gazing at were someone else’s sky and trees. They seemed hidden behind eons of being looked at by people who spoke a different language and practiced different customs. I was thrilled by this alienation from the new world I was inhabiting. It meant that I could not easily understand the people who lived in it and that they could not easily understand me. It provided me with an opening toward starting over again in a place that had not made up its mind about me.
Elsa did not speak more than a few words of English. Her brother Lars and his wife, Anna, could slowly piece together rudimentary sentences. Elsa’s younger brother, Gyorg, a nimble, wiry, cheerful man in his sixties who drank nearly a bottle of vodka every night, spoke even less English than his sister. As for Gretchen and me, despite our immersion in the Teach Yourself Norwegian book we had been studying all summer, and my flair for languages, neither of us could communicate beyond the basics.
The so-called language barrier, as well as the so-called social and cultural barriers, were in fact no barriers for me at all. They made me gratifyingly unknowable. In New Jersey, I was transparent. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I felt like I was transparent. I felt that people could see right through me to the forces that had helped determine who I was. In Norway, I felt hidden and protected as if behind a window encrusted with ice and snow.
I timidly declared that I was a writer, and presto! Everyone treated me as a writer. Gretchen, who drew and painted in watercolors, was the artist. We woke up at dawn. Gretchen worked at her art and I read and wrote until dinnertime.
The part of Tromøy where Elsa lived was called Kjenna. It had its own library, which you reached by walking along a narrow path through a small forest. At least three times a week, Gretchen and I walked along that charmed path through the forest to the library. Once there we practiced reading Norwegian books, and also read the few books they had in English. Sometimes it snowed as we made our little journey, adding to the air of enchantment. One afternoon, standing at the edge of a row of shelves, reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in English, I noticed a Norwegian boy sitting at a table. He was about ten years younger than I was. A book lay in front of him, but he was staring out the window. For some reason, from time to time over all the years since then, the memory of him has returned to me and I have wondered what he was thinking as he looked at the world outside the window. Was it familiar? Or was it as strange to him as it was to me?
Elsa left lox on buttered bread or flatbread out for us for lunch. In the evenings, we had a simple dinner of fish or reindeer meatballs with Elsa and Gyorg. Like everything else, the reindeer meat had the dispensation of the strange. I would have eaten a fried kitten in that enchanted land of unmoored meanings. One evening, after Gretchen and I tried in tortuous Norwegian to explain how we would never have eaten reindeer back in the States, her relatives nodded their heads appreciatively. Erst kommt das Essen, I said, quoting a German playwright, dann die Moral, which means, roughly translated, “food before morality.” Gretchen blushed. The playwright was Bertolt Brecht, she told everyone. Yes, I added enthusiastically, it’s from The Threepenny Opera, one of my favorite works of literature! Her relatives nodded respectfully. I became a figure of awesome culture. Gyorg started inviting his closest friend over to hear me speak. The two of them sat listening to me after dinner for hours, nodding in deferential miscomprehension as I, joining them in their nightly vodka binges, extemporized on the central themes of Brecht’s play, and on the evolution of human knowledge in general.
* * *
A sixteenth-century French philosopher once wrote a book arguing that climate was the most important factor in the evolution of a society. I don’t remember the particulars of his theory, but it is not hard to develop it from his premise. Hot climates, for example, lead to a situation where outer reality engulfs the mind and makes it languid. Outer reality grows all the more intense as the mind weakens. The heat magnifies the most trivial event. An insult becomes a blow to the ego that can only be settled by a vendetta. A woman’s bareness in public threatens the stability of home. Tribal differences shatter self-esteem. Trauma inflicted by the outside world is impossible to overcome. The world must pay for it: trauma came from the outer world, and it must return to the outer world. The violation of a child’s innocence results, two decades later, in the child reenacting the explosion of his innocence. He blows himself up as his young life was blasted, this time exploding other people as he was exploded.
The Scandinavian climate was just right for me. The long nights, intense cold, and prolonged boredom of winter led to a mental condition in which the life of the mind was more vivid and real than the physical circumstances and events outside the mind. Turned inward by the ice and snow, overdeveloped imaginations exaggerated what lay beyond shuttered windows. Mountains housed giants. Trolls populated the forests. The sheltering mind animated every stone, tree, twig outside it as if the physical world were actually a mass of flickering thoughts. Maybe it was the imagination of disaster that gradually made these societies so humane. Free health care, affordable housing, free college tuition—they protect you against the roving monsters of sic
kness, homelessness, crushing debt.
I began to feel that I was inhabiting a Norse fairy tale: “The Traveler’s Opacity.”
A benevolent yet mischievous troll, who lived in the forest not far from Elsa’s house, became aware of my situation. Seeking to entertain his master by raising the hopes of a human to an impossible level, he gave me the gift of being opaque. Being a stranger in a foreign land hid my strangeness. No one could see through me to what I feared I was. All they could see was what I wanted them to see. I flourished so long as it lasted. I wrote many hundreds of pages of stories and essays that tried to make sense of what I was assimilating from all my frenzied reading. Sometimes in the middle of the night, excited by a thought, I would go to my desk, turn on the light, and type in throes of ecstasy on my Smith-Corona. One night, a drunken Gyorg opened the door to our room, having mistaken it for his own. I liked to sleep without any clothes on. There I was, naked, furiously typing. Gyorg smiled pleasantly, nodded to me, and went on his way. He never brought it up, and never did anything to make me or Gretchen think that he saw me that night. It could be that he was so drunk that the image of me never made it out of his stupor into his consciousness. But I don’t think so. What happened was that the troll had cast such a magical opacity over me that even in my most naked, transparent state, I was the figure I had long nursed in my imagination: a writer fulfilling his destiny through his work.
Little by little, though, the spell began to wear off. The troll had arranged it so that the more creative strength I drew from my opacity, the more I drained the opacity of its power.