The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  The teacher stepped closer and studied the painting, his head cocked slightly to one side, his fingers playing over its surface. He said:

  Don’t – don’t paint over it. Leave it. Just as it is.

  But it’s a mess.

  Says who?

  I do.

  And I say it’s perfect just as it is.

  Come off it!

  Rather than paint it over, why don’t you sell it to me? I’d like to have it.

  You’re pulling my leg.

  Name your price.

  That piece of crap? You must be joking! At least let me paint you something good.

  I want this one. I won’t accept substitutes.

  Fine, then take it. It’s yours.

  I insist on paying you for it.

  And I insist on giving the damn thing to you. Do you want it or not?

  In that case I accept.

  WHILE THE TEACHER brushed his teeth you lay under the covers with the lamp on, staring up at the ceiling, feeling nervous. You understood that a decision was to be made, and that you’d be making it very soon. As you lay staring at shadows being chased across the ceiling by the headlights of passing cars you anticipated that moment when, in his underwear, the teacher would slide under the covers next to you. What happened next would be largely – if not entirely – up to you and would determine the shape and direction not only of your relationship with the teacher but of your future in many other respects.

  And though you dreaded what you saw as, if not inevitable, a distinct possibility, you also knew that you would not resist, that your love for the teacher was such that it would overwhelm any form of resistance, that it would not be up to you, really, or anyway that you would not let it be up to you: you would not determine things one way or the other. You’d let him decide. That was your decision.

  Having decided, you lay there, waiting. After what seemed like an extremely long time, the teacher came out of the bathroom and got into the bed next to you.

  For a long time you lay there next to each other, with the table lamp switched off and the light of a streetlight spilling in through the blindless, curtainless window, both of you staring at the ceiling. Every few minutes a car or truck went by, its snow chains rattling, and together you watched the headlight beam chase another shadow across the walls. Neither of you moved. You heard the teacher’s ragged breathing – or were they your own ragged breaths? You lay perfectly still, both of you, not touching each other, afraid to move, trying not to swallow or even to breathe. Scared to death.

  The teacher’s voice broke the silence.

  May I – touch you? he said.

  Sure. Go ahead.

  Carefully, as if applying a poultice to a wound, the teacher placed his hand on your thigh. It felt cold and warm. Neither of you moved.

  You lay there like that for at least an hour, listening to the sounds of traffic moving through the snow, watching the play of shadows and lights, scarcely breathing. You lay there that way until you fell asleep.

  * * *

  DISCUSSING THAT NIGHT WITH ONE OF MANY THERAPISTS whose services you would engage in the coming years, she’d say:

  You have to forgive yourself.

  For what?

  For making your teacher reject you.

  How did I do that?

  By rejecting him first.

  When did I reject him?

  That night in your room.

  I didn’t reject him. He asked if he could touch me and I said sure.

  And you lay there with his hand on you and did nothing. That hand was an invitation. You refused it. A passive refusal is still a refusal. You might as well have slapped him in the face. It’s a wonder he ever spoke to you again.

  I left it up to him.

  Right, your therapist would say. And it was up to you. Whether or not you rejected your teacher is beside the point. In fact – if I may be frank – it seems to me quite clear that from the start your teacher’s actions were inappropriate. He should never have let you get that close to him. He was grossly derelict of duty, and if he wasn’t fired then he should have been. At best his behavior was ill-considered, at worst it was predatory.

  But it wasn’t like that! He wasn’t a bad man! He was a good man!

  Even good people sometimes do bad things. Whatever your teacher’s intentions may have been, the fact is he didn’t do right by you. He wanted something from you that you weren’t prepared to give to him, and that he was either too timid or decent to take. He took advantage of your need to feel special, and seduced you into idealistic dreams that gave you hope – but it was a false hope. He gave you something to believe in, an ecstatic, quasi-religious belief, when you believed in nothing, when your hyper-rational father’s atheism left you bereft of any faith. He filled that void in you. He played Christ to your Apostle, the Devil to your Faust. That was his crime, not his physical or sexual attraction to you. He interrupted your process of maturation and left you longing for an ideal that you and the world could never live up to. You have every right to be angry.

  But I’m not angry – I’m not!

  You should be.

  I don’t want to be!

  No one wants to be angry. Being angry isn’t any fun.

  I’d much rather remember the good things.

  And well you should. But those good parts cost you, Peter. They cost you dearly. They cost you your youth. You’re still paying for them. You bought them on the installment plan. Let’s hope you don’t end up paying for the rest of your life.

  IN A DRAWER OF MY FILE CABINET, AMONG BANK AND credit card statements, tax returns and receipts, in a thick folder I keep the letters the teacher wrote me. I’ve kept them for decades. There are over fifty of them, all of them handwritten, many on thin blue airmail stationary, the handwriting style neither print nor cursive but a blend of both, with long descenders and gracefully looped f’s and g’s, neat and graceful on the unlined paper. I take them out, put on a pair of drugstore reading glasses, and re-read them all. After reading them I spread them across the floor of my loft.

  A second portfolio holds the letters my father wrote me. There are just as many, though they aren’t handwritten but typed with two fingers on my father’s portable black Royal typewriter. I read them as well.

  Reading all those letters – my father’s and the teacher’s – takes me all morning. Apart from their contents, the letters amaze and shame by how much kindness and sympathy they express. Whatever their virtues and flaws, whatever else was true or not true about them, the men who wrote those letters cared for me very much. I didn’t appreciate just how much they really cared; like many young people, I was too caught up in myself. Now I realize it and feel ashamed and full of regret.

  Audrey’s connection with my father, who she never met: how she speaks of him all the time as if they had been buddies. She told her mother a story that went something like this: “When you and Daddy and Nonnie weren’t looking, I went up to heaven to play a ship game [?] with Daddy’s daddy. While I was up there I met a little girl named Pickle who was there looking for her mommy, whose name was Cabbage. Then I drove the car back down to Mommy. I drove very carefully.”

  It’s funny how Audrey thinks of her grandfather, since whenever I’m with her I imagine myself at her age and how I felt about him then, how I loved being with him. I remember especially those trips he took me on to New York City, how I came to equate that city with him and, for that reason among others, fell in love with it.

  I don’t miss New York City, but I do think of it often. We’re invented not only by the people we know and love but also by the places we visit and call home. As much as anyone or anything, New York is responsible for inventing me, for my having become – for better and worse – who I am.

  From Patent Number 2,964,641: “A graph showing a typical group of recognition signals produced when an engraving is identified.”

  XIV.

  The Boy on the Mountaintop

  New Orleans, Annandale, Ne
w York City, 1977 – 1979

  YOU WERE TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD.

  Now and then a letter arrived from the teacher. You would take it and your notebook to a park or a café, someplace where you could gather your thoughts and reflect and write him back – long letters, usually, some written under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. You’d go to Washington Square or Tompkins Square Park, buy a spliff, find a quiet bench, and write between tokes while keeping an eye peeled for cops.

  Your father wrote you as well.

  Dear Peter,

  I’m glad to have your letter to answer. I often feel the need to communicate, to express my thoughts. I suppose it’s what people mean about companionship. I don’t have to tell you I’m very much alone. At times I feel it more than others…

  This and other letters from your father would eventually find their way into a folder in a drawer of your file cabinet, next to one holding the teacher’s letters. But unlike the teacher’s letters, despite their warm, self-deprecating humor, your father’s letters vexed you. They filled you with the same anxiety you’d felt as a boy watching him enter various bodies of water – inch by painful inch, wincing and shuddering as though he were stepping into a vat of boiling oil.

  This morning I had a frustrating experience. I had to prepare three Color Coders to be shipped by Monday at the very latest. Two were O.K., but the third wouldn’t work right. I replaced everything that could conceivably go wrong. I didn’t know what to do. Finally I decided to build a circuit board from scratch with all new parts. It worked. To celebrate I bought a frame for one of my latest paintings. The sales girl there knows and asked about you, the one with red hair. I flirted with her, a 66 year-old man flirting with a girl of no more than 25. To be an old man is positively degrading.

  Vulnerability and self-deprecation weren’t what you wanted in a father, however sweetly expressed. What you wanted was someone to guide you with his firm grip and show you how to be a man in the world, someone to – speaking metaphorically – sling his arm around and take you fishing with him down at the ol’ creek, like Sheriff Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show. Strength, resolve, determination, direction: all the qualities that you yourself lacked – they’re what you wanted in a father. What you got were the saturnine sighs of a depressive old man:

  I’m thinking of scrapping the paint box I made and buying a new one, lighter and better and not too expensive. Which reminds me: I have a new painting technique: squeeze colors onto a palette, then transfer bits of paint, still pure, to a second surface, mix as needed with a brush, then transfer to an even smaller palette or to paper to get the right consistency. Sounds complicated, but I think it will work better, less muddy.

  Some day when, through a series of vicissitudes, you will have become the middle-aged man who writes these words, you will take all of your father’s letters out of their folder and spread them out on the floor of the loft of the A-frame where you live – just as you’ll do with the teacher’s letters. You’ll be shocked by how many letters there are, and by the vulnerability, sweetness, and warmth they express. By then your father will already have been dead for a decade. You’ll miss him terribly, and you’ll weep.

  … The other day I went to the little park near the library to try out my new painting system. I brought a folding chair with me. I’d been sitting there for no more than five minutes when this silly old woman camped herself there in front of me and asked me about 46 questions. She wouldn’t stop, nor would I answer.

  “Why don’t you answer me?” she said.

  “Because I don’t care to talk to you.”

  It worked: she left, and I convinced myself that it was the only way. Then I started to wonder if maybe the reason I dislike pushy people is because I can’t imitate them. It was because of things like this that my first wife Betty used to say I was a bad influence on our daughters.…

  But back when you first got them your father’s letters vexed you, and your vexation turned to guilt for being so unappreciative of this man who, after all, was doing his best to love you. Was it his fault that he was depressed? Could he help it if he was born the same year the Titanic sank?

  … I’m rambling, writing for myself more than for you. You do the same: it’s good for us both.

  Love,

  Papa der Eber*

  *German for boar, or wild pig. I love these German words that sound so totally unlike the things they mean. I also know I’m a very tame sort of pig, but I would love to be wild, with great crooked teeth.

  * * *

  THOUGH YOU ENJOYED PAINTING AND DRAWING, AND though a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, there were things you wanted to say that you couldn’t say with pictures. So you decided to become a writer.

  On the assumption that all writers did such things, you quit art school to hitchhike across the country. Your first ride took you all the way to Alabama, where your brother was an undergraduate at Auburn University, and where he offered to let you spend the night on the floor of his dorm room. While he went to class that afternoon you went to the library to write in your notebook.

  George had a collection of antique fountain pens with solid gold nibs and handles of malachite, Bakelite, coral, jade, and amber. He’d been collecting them for years. Your nineteen-cent Bic pen had run out of ink. Without asking, you “borrowed” one of George’s pens. You meant to return it, so you told yourself.

  The next morning, seeing his fountain pen jutting out of a pocket in your backpack, your brother accused you of theft. He called you a “moocher” and a “libertine” – a word you had to look up later. You called him a greedy capitalist pig.

  Hit the fucking road, your twin told you.

  With tears in your eyes you crossed the foggy morning campus.

  IN THE FRENCH Quarter of New Orleans a driver who’d gotten you stoned drove off with your backpack and all your traveler’s checks. You paid $2.50 for a bunk in a flophouse, then joined the teenagers and tourists walking up and down Bourbon Street. At sunset, while eating an ice cream cone, you watched a barge lumber down the Mississippi.

  You spent the rest of that summer in New Orleans, working at a cafe on the riverfront that served chicory laced café au lait and beignets.

  You’d been working there for three days when you met a fellow waiter named Don, a small older man with a droopy handlebar mustache, thin black hair pulled into a ponytail and a space between his front teeth that gave him a lisp and made him sound drunk (as he probably was). Don offered to share his apartment with you, a small kitchen and equally small bedroom divided by a curtain of colorful Mardi Gras beads.

  Shtep through my rainbow! said Don, parting them.

  The place had only one bed.

  True, said Don. But it’s big and I’m small. I’m sure we’ll both fit.

  Your first night there, you awoke to Don’s shiny forehead bobbing in the darkness over your groin. You pushed him off the bed. He apologized. After that, things were fine and you and Don became friends.

  EVERY SO OFTEN Don’s previous roommate, a junkie and hustler, would come looking for Don, hoping to trade sex for money. When Don refused him, his ex-roommate would beat and steal things from him. A few times you came home from your shift at the cafe to find him bleeding and bruised.

  One night you awoke to what sounded like artillery fire. You got up and stood on the balcony, watching the Fourth of July fireworks paint huge chrysanthemums across the river. As you stood there you reflected on how much you’d changed. You were no longer the naïve, innocent kid from Connecticut, the oversensitive, needy boy with his umbilical cord still attached to his eighth-grade English teacher. At last, you said to yourself as Don lay snoring in the darkness behind you, I’ve become a man.

  Just as you were thinking this you heard a rapping sound rising up the apartment’s rickety stairs. Moments later, Don’s ex-roommate stood before you. He wore the blouse of a Confederate uniform, its sleeves shorn, its bronze buttons dripping rainwater. His bare feet were filthy. He lea
ned on a cane.

  Happy Fourth of Joolie!

  By then Don was already in the bathroom, hiding. You sized up your opponent. He was exactly your height, with a thicker neck and broader sloped shoulders, his muscular arms filigreed with tattoos. He smelled of hot buttered popcorn. His face was sunburned the brown of glazed pottery. A wormy scar wriggled from his mouth to his ear. With his mop of curly hair he could have been your other twin, a cartoon version of you as dissolute drifter. He hummed a radio frequency from Mars.

  Who the fuck are you?

  I’m Don’s roommate, you said. Don’s not here.

  He passed through the beaded curtain into the kitchen.

  Believe this shit? Fourth of Joolie and the motherfucker’s got no fuckin’ beer.

  You grabbed a paring knife from the drawer and gripped it. Like a child scrutinizing a worm in a terrarium, Don’s ex-roommate eyed it. He hiked up his uniform blouse and touched his washboard belly to the knife’s tip.

  Go on: stick me! No? That case, put it away or someone’s likely to get hurt.

  With a Coke from the fridge he sat at the kitchen table, his cane propped against a chair. He lit one of Don’s cigarettes. You still held the paring knife. You didn’t know what to do with it. You had never stabbed anyone or come close to trying. You were still the naïve, sensitive kid from Connecticut. The paring knife trembled in your fist.

  Someday, in a fictionalized rendering of this encounter, you’d lunge at your antagonist, wrestle him to the floor, and pound his scarred filthy face. In that version of this story, hearing the cries of his ex-roommate, Don would burst out of the bathroom and, grabbing the cane, send you – the nice kid from Connecticut – running “blind with terror” out into the unanimous wet night.

  What actually happened:

  Shouting, What’s matter? Forget what your face looks like? Don’s ex-roommate banged on the bathroom door with his cane. Don came out. They argued. When you tried to intervene, Don gave you some change from his tip apron and sent you out to the corner deli for a bottle of cheap red wine and a jar of pickled pig’s feet. Do me that favor, Peter, would you, please?