by Lee Siegel
My single friend at Fit to Be Tied was the one black salesman there. You are my sole friend here, I intoned. He groaned. His name was Luke. He had been a high school basketball star, but an injured leg prevented him from getting a scholarship to college. Needing to work full-time, unable to pay for college even as a part-time student, he took a job at the store, where he had worked for several years. Luke and I were assigned the task of keeping the narrow stockroom’s shelves full. Together we carried large boxes out from the loading dock into the stockroom, and then shelved and reshelved the individual boxes of shoes that were in them. We often spent our lunch hours together, eating hamburgers and fries at a small metal table alongside the mall’s fountain. Coins shimmered beneath the undulating water.
Luke told me about his glory days and about the afternoon he tore up his leg, knowing with certainty, the instant he hit the ground writhing in pain, that his future was lost to him. I spoke of Bradley, and Bergner’s, the gas station and Montclair and Norway, and about my aspirations to become a writer. When I told him the story about the shoplifter in Bergner’s, he laughed. That was probably my cousin, he said. He was white, I said. Luke considered me thoughtfully.
One day, as we sat sipping our Cokes through straws, watching the jet of water shooting into the air and falling in thick plumes of droplets back into the pool below, Luke said, What are you doing here, man?
What are you doing here? I said. I thought he meant that I was unfit to sell shoes. I began to worry about my job.
Where am I going to go? he said. I’m lucky to be here at all. I have some fine women in my life, though.
Luke didn’t leer when he talked about sex, like the other salesmen in the store. He talked about it with a kind of reverence. He refused to have sex with customers in exchange for shoes, a choice that went unquestioned by Anthony and Patrick on account of Luke’s clear authority as a physical presence. He still possessed an athlete’s beauty and grace, though he squandered his vitality in New York sex clubs, to which he would go just about every weekend with one woman or another. Yet in some strange way, he was fulfilling his destiny in a tributary off the dammed-up river of his physical gifts. A large hole had been blasted in his self-esteem. Gratifying women and being gratified by them revived his inborn balance of mind and body. It did not offend me that he sometimes referred to women as bitches. I thought of my mother as a bitch. He, on the other hand, worshipped his mother and his grandmother. But so much of his life had been put beyond the controlling reach of his talents that he needed, in the way he used language, to control whatever his talents were able to attain. Then, too, since women had become the exclusive source of his strength, he had to establish a counterweight to their dominance. So these figures of nourishment and grace, whom he sought to win and to please, became bitches he enjoyed the illusion of mastering.
But he loved women. When Gretchen came into the store wearing her provocative outfit, Anthony and Patrick looked her over with a brazenness that bordered on insult. Luke, however, having heard me describe Gretchen’s aspirations, immediately drew her into a conversation about her art. He never let his eyes wander from hers, yet he never tried to hold her gaze, either. He was one of those people, like Ned, blessed with bountiful understanding and intuition, gifts that society offered no remunerative place for unless they were accompanied by a drive for self-advancement, which was a whole different quality altogether. We became close without becoming real friends. Once or twice, when I emerged from the bathroom drenched in shame from my exertions, Luke gently put his arm on mine for a second. Our different escapes into empty pleasures brought both of us pain.
Like many sexual beings, Luke’s extensive experience of the secret entanglements of thought, feeling, pleasure, and power gave him an intimate conversance with life’s subtleties. He was easy for me to talk to.
One day Luke said, I’m applying for a job as a mailman. Anthony and these guys, they’re nowhere, man. Nowhere. I got to get out of here.
I see what you mean, I said.
You want me to get you an application, too? he said.
Immediately my head filled with thoughts of life as a mailman, wearing a uniform, earning a steady income, driving a cool truck.
Yes, I said. I’d like that.
You’ve got to get out of here, too, man. You’ve just got to.
I nodded. But when, a few days later, he brought in the application for me, I thanked him and stuck it between some books on a shelf when I got home. I might have been struggling on the margins like Luke, but I did not feel that I had to settle for a job that did not fulfill me. In this case, social destiny had spotted me precious yards. He was black, and I was white.
* * *
Without Gretchen I was lost. With her, I was beginning to feel overburdened. She loved me so completely that she left it to me to decide which direction we should go in. I mistook her love for me for a passive inability to assert her own wants—despite the fact that if she had had the conventional desire for prosperity and family, I would not have been able to fulfill it. I could not see how aligned with me she was. I had become so emotionally corrupted by my dependence on her that I was unable to recognize the integrity of her attachment to me. Instead I felt that I had to provide twice the horsepower to launch us forward, out of our circumstances into the future. I was blind to the fact that she had decided that I was her future, and that she would accept any present we found ourselves in together. It bothered me also that she accepted our reduced circumstances—circumstances that I had led us into—without complaint.
When we moved into the Bergenfield studio, we had been unable to afford mattresses and slept on the floor in sleeping bags. Even after we had the money to buy an inexpensive full-size mattress, we remained in the sleeping bags. Gretchen was trying, without success, to draw in watercolors. She had taken a second part-time job in a telemarketing office not far from our apartment, and whenever she had time to herself was too tired to work. I had dragged a discarded kitchen table off the curb in front of someone’s house into the station wagon. Setting it up in the apartment, I put the Smith-Corona on it and sat down to write. But nothing came. My opacity was all used up. I could not get any traction going. I felt that I had no life to start from. I had given the post office my new address and was having my old mail forwarded from my mother’s house. One day a letter arrived, demanding that I start paying several hundred dollars a month on the loans I had taken out to attend Bradley and Montclair. I threw it into the garbage in disgust and disbelief.
At Montclair, I craved a more enlightened, cosmopolitan atmosphere. I felt liberated when I left. But my isolated poles of existence, at Fit to Be Tied and in our apartment, were growing unendurable. We had bought some cheap metal shelving and I had lined the walls of the apartment with books. But instead of being the magic portals they had always been, the rows of books became barriers between me and the world outside the studio’s single window.
One day, after putting down a book by Herman Melville that I had been reading, I noticed on the back of it the address of the book’s publisher, the New American Library. The New American Library was an august publisher of classic works of literature, mostly American, and it was right there, in Bergenfield! I had read so many books that appeared under its imprint that the mere sight of one of their volumes made me feel like I was in the presence of family—my true family. Perhaps I could find work there as an editor. I imagined sitting at a desk piled high with manuscripts, surrounded by literary people, receiving a steady income for the joy of reading.
In the morning on one of my days off, I set out for their offices. I knew that if I followed the railroad tracks that ran behind our building, I could find them. The walk was longer than I thought. After what seemed like an hour, I scrambled down the embankment from the tracks and turned onto a dead-end street lined with low, windowless rectangular buildings. I had brought the Melville with me to confirm the address. There it was. What I had imagined was the New American Library’s editor
ial offices was its warehouse.
A few days later, I roused myself from dejection. To my sudden delight, I remembered that I had left the two boxes of stories and essays with Angelo before leaving for Norway. I drove up to my mother’s house one Sunday to reclaim them. Fit to Be Tied was closed and Gretchen was at Howard Johnson’s. I figured that going back to some of my older work would give me the boost I needed to start writing again. I was also relieved at the thought of having something to read that I had written instead of staring at a blank page.
It was the middle of the day. Angelo came to the door. My mother, he said, was asleep. I reminded him of the boxes and told him that I had come to pick them up. Boxes? he said. What boxes? The boxes of stories and essays that I left with you before going to Norway, I said. Oh, he said, with an amiable smile, I had to throw them out. We just didn’t have the room. He made his declaration casually, in good humor, as if it was understood that we both shared the same aversion to trouble and clutter. Hadn’t the secret agreement between us to avoid trouble with my mother been responsible for him agreeing to hold on to the boxes to begin with? The situation had changed, but the objective was the same. No trouble. No problem. There was not a hint of underlying aggression or hostility to me in his attitude. There was simply his belief that I did not deserve anything more out of this life than he did. And that this was a natural cause of solidarity between us.
* * *
Ever since I was a boy, standing on the overpass that crossed Route 17 and looking at the Empire State Building in a quivering blue haze that was either how it appeared or the product of my emotions, I had been under the spell of Manhattan. In high school my friends and I had made breathless trips to the city, where we waited outside jazz clubs we could not afford to get into to talk to the musicians who emerged through the stage door when the night was over. I thought of New York as a teeming maelstrom that inverted or reversed the markers people used to sum you up. For all my desire to remake myself, I had always been afraid that I would lose myself in that commotion. Now, exhausted by my own shortcomings and by the limitations of where I found myself, I had nothing to lose. Gretchen, an aspiring artist who made almost weekly pilgrimages to the city’s museums and art galleries, with me in tow, was thrilled by the idea of living in New York.
At the same time, from the moment I stood on the campus of the University of Chicago, surrounded by those thick limestone walls, I knew that I belonged at a university. I thought that there my weaknesses and my strengths could be protected. The more enlightened and stimulating the university, the more, I believed, my weaknesses would be tolerated, even addressed in some way, and my strengths developed.
I began to spend all my off-hours in the Bergenfield library, poring over the college catalogs of public universities in New York that the university had on microfilm. Finally I narrowed them down to two: Brooklyn College and Queens College. My criterion for choosing them was my excited discovery of various distinguished writers, poets, and scholars who taught at one or the other of them.
On one of my days off during the week, when Gretchen was working at the telemarketer, I took several buses to the Brooklyn College campus in the heart of Brooklyn. A young Russian woman who worked in the admissions office, where I asked questions about requirements and about financial aid that had not been covered in the catalogs, smiled at me. She had lustrous dark eyes and I could not get her out of my mind for days afterward. To keep the thought of her at bay, I kept asking Gretchen to imagine with me what our life might be like in New York.
* * *
A short time after my trip to Brooklyn, Gretchen and I were lying on our sleeping bags, reading the Sunday New York Times. Look at this, she said. It was a full-page ad for an undergraduate program at something called the School of General Studies at Columbia University. According to the ad, the program was designed for older students who had, “for one reason or another,” not finished their bachelor’s degree. Students from diverse backgrounds were encouraged to apply. One phrase stood out for me: “Academic scholarships are available.”
Behind my resolve to make a life for myself without a college degree had been the certainty of rejection from the kind of school I longed to be at. The cost of a school like Columbia embodied my sense of exclusion. Even with a loan, I had barely been able to afford Montclair without working part-time. Tuition at a place like Columbia, far more than it had been at Bradley, was the equivalent of a barbed-wire fence.
That Sunday I began to have a different perspective. For one thing, the ad for Columbia rested in the hands of someone who had faith in me. For another, my desperation led me to take chances I never would have considered when my hopefulness that everything would turn out okay made me cautious. Most decisive of all was the fact that, academically, I was in a different place. I had not done well enough in high school to qualify for an academic scholarship at Bradley, and I had not done well enough at Bradley to win an academic scholarship there or at Montclair. But I believed that my grades at Montclair were sufficient to get me financial aid based on merit at Columbia.
The next day I called Columbia to request an application and rounded up the necessary transcripts and recommendations. I labored for days on a several-thousand-word personal essay that was a required part of the admissions process. A few weeks after I applied, I received an acceptance letter in the mail. I was so astonished that I called the admissions office to make sure that there had not been some sort of mistake.
I had sent a note to Einman to see if he would be willing to write me a recommendation. He immediately sat down and wrote what I assume, because of the surprising result, was a glowing letter. But though I wrote to thank him, I ignored the several notes he sent in reply asking to see me, and I was never in touch with him again. My flight from my father had become a universal reaction to anyone from my past who reminded me of me. Einman was a citizen of my past, governed by the bizarre rules I had devised in my attempt to escape from that narrow country.
Admission to Columbia had its obstacles, which I had expected. Though I had attended Bradley for two years and Montclair for one, Columbia would only accept credits that added up to one year of academic work. That meant that I would need three more years of full-time attendance to get my BA, at which point I would be twenty-six. But this was yet another impediment that, for me, presented itself as an opportunity. The longer I could find refuge within the protective walls of a university, and a great, cosmopolitan university at that, the better it was.
The more daunting obstacle was money. I was right about my performance at Montclair winning me a modest scholarship at Columbia. But after the Pell Grant and other forms of aid, I still owed a hefty amount of tuition, though the financial aid people at Columbia assured me that if I did well during my first year, I could receive enough scholarship money to pay my way after that.
Once again, I applied for a loan. This time I was turned down. I had defaulted on my earlier loans and I was not eligible for any new ones until I paid them off. Repaying the loans outright, however, was beyond the realm of possibility. The interest rate was 9 percent and by now the amount I owed had ballooned to nearly seven thousand dollars. And as I learned during the course of several frantic phone calls to the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, the agency that was administering the loans, it was too late to set up a monthly payment schedule, even if I could have afforded it.
I refused to give up. Feeling that my back was against the wall was the situation I felt most comfortable in. I called again and again, dismissing the final judgment of everyone I spoke to. I turned a lack of dignity and pride into an almost unstoppable force, submerging my ego in a desperate energy. I drew my energy from disappointment and self-abasement. These were the springs of despair for most people, but for me they were a return to the sources of all my efforts to remake myself. After a while, I thought I could tell from the sound of an agent’s voice how responsive he or she was. I started hanging up if I did not find someone’s tone promising. Then
one day, after countless calls, a woman named Mrs. Zagnit answered the phone.
I must have started off with an incoherent rush of words in an attempt to describe my situation, because the first thing she did was tell me to calm down. Shhh, she said, as if to a child. Shhh. Then she asked me to slowly and briefly give an account of my situation. After I managed to do so, she patiently laid out for me what my obligations had been when I signed for the loan, and why I had to fulfill them before taking out another. I listened to her without interrupting. After she finished, I told her the story of how Gretchen and I had reached the point we were at. I worked backward in time, telling her about Norway, and living in my mother’s house, and Bradley, and my parents’ divorce, and my father’s bankruptcy. I wanted her to feel sorry for me. Pity can be the midwife of mercy, and mercy, I was convinced, was the only emotion strong enough to curb the law. Yet I spoke plainly and tersely. I felt that any hint of manipulative emotion or self-pity would strain her patience. She seemed to be listening, as if to a heartbeat, to something underneath my circumstances. She wanted to know who this person was beneath the statistical problem. Finally I declared that there was an absurd distance between the precious intangibles of my life and my material circumstances. I said it just like that: it was a line from one of my stories. She laughed, not mockingly but in surprise. She was silent for a moment, and then she said: