“About what?” I said.
“You know,” Bill said.
“What? Oh. Yale? I got in.”
Both men were weepier than my mother.
“He’s got to get cracking now,” Bill said to Bud, who was wiping his eyes, blowing his nose, sniffing his fist. “Boy oh boy he’s got a hell of a lot of reading to do this summer.”
“Plato,” Bud said. “He should read The Republic right away.”
“Yes, yes,” Bud said, “they’ll start him on the Greeks, to be sure. But maybe he should read some plays. Aeschylus? Antigone? The Birds?”
“What about Thoreau and Emerson? How can he go wrong with Emerson?”
They took me around the store, filling a shopping bag with coverless books.
On my last day of work at the bookstore Bill and Bud and I stood in the back room, eating bagels and drinking champagne. A going-away party, though it felt like a funeral. “Listen,” Bill said to me, “Bud and I have been talking.”
They stared at me as though I were a caged bird they were getting ready to release into the wild.
“It might be wise,” Bud said, “to lower your expectations.”
“You seem—afraid for me,” I said.
Bill cleared his throat. “We just think there are some things you’re not—”
“Ready for,” Bud said.
“Like?”
“Disillusionment,” Bud said without hesitation.
Bill nodded.
Champagne nearly came through my nose.
“I thought you were going to say booze and drugs,” I said. “Or girls. Or rich kids. Or mean professors. But—disillusionment?”
“Disillusionment is more dangerous than all those things put together,” Bud said.
He explained, but I wasn’t listening. I was laughing too hard. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be sure to watch out for—disillusionment! Ha ha ha!” Bud gave his fist a vehement sniff. Bill smoothed his knit tie. Poor dopes, I thought. Hiding in the back room all this time had warped their minds. Disillusionment. How can I be disillusioned when everything from here on is going to be perfect?
We turned off the lights and left the store. I shook their hands and went one way, they went the other, and that was the last I ever saw of Bill and Bud. When I returned to Arizona that Christmas and visited the store, a man at the cash register told me they had been fired. He wouldn’t say why, and I could only hope it had nothing to do with all those coverless books.
“How are you going to get along without me?” I asked my mother at the airport.
She laughed, until she realized I wasn’t kidding. “Just take care of yourself,” she said. “And always know I’m happy thinking of the marvelous experiences you’re having.”
I wanted to stay in Arizona that summer, spend time with my mother. Absolutely not, she said. Sheryl had arranged for me to return to the law firm, to earn some spending money for college, and my mother wanted me to have as many days as possible going to Gilgo with Uncle Charlie and the men.
We sat, waiting for my flight to be called, looking at the screen listing the departures and arrivals. I said something about all the departures and arrivals in our life together. My mother hooked her arm through mine. “You’ll have lots of vacations,” she said. “Before you know it you’ll be coming—home.”
She still tripped over that word.
My flight began to board.
“You’d better go,” my mother said.
We stood.
“I should stay. A few weeks more.”
“Go.”
“But—”
“Go JR,” she said. “Go.”
We looked at each other, not as if we wouldn’t see each other for a long time, but as if we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We’d been concentrating so intently on getting by, and getting in, that we hadn’t taken a good look at each other for years. I looked at her now, her green-brown eyes wet, her lip trembling. I threw my arms around her and felt her hugging me back tighter than ever. “Go,” she said. “Please just go.”
Sitting on the plane, waiting to pull away from the gate, I looked out the window and berated myself for letting my mother down. At the pivotal moment of our good-bye I hadn’t said anything profound. If ever a moment called for profundity, that was it, and I’d muffed it. I felt even more ashamed about the reason. I wasn’t sufficiently traumatized. I was excited to be starting my life, which meant that I was an ingrate and a bad son. I was abandoning my mother without the slightest guilt, blithely waving good-bye over my shoulder.
Sometime after my plane took off I realized why I wasn’t traumatized about saying good-bye. I’d been saying good-bye to my mother since I was eleven. Sending me to Manhasset, urging me to bond with Uncle Charlie and the men, my mother had been weaning me from her, and herself from me, by imperceptible degrees. It might have been the fleecy clouds streaming by the window of the plane that made me understand. My mother had subtly, secretly snipped away a sliver of herself every summer.
Thereafter, I’d have to contend with all security blankets by myself. And none would be more secure, or more smothering, than Steve’s bar.
Part II
They say best men are molded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad
—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
twenty-one | THE DEVIL AND MERRIAM WEBSTER
The cabdriver set my suitcases on the curb outside Phelps Gate. There were families everywhere and he looked left and right for mine, as if I’d had a family when he picked me up at Union Station and they must have fallen out of the cab on the way to the campus.
“You alone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Need some help with your stuff?”
I nodded.
He hoisted one of my suitcases and we walked side by side under a tall archway, through a long dark tunnel, into the bright spacious green of Old Campus. Even Yale’s front door, I thought, is designed to reenact and symbolize the whole promise of the place—darkness yielding dramatically to light.
We asked for directions to Wright Hall, which turned out to be a century-old dormitory building not much sturdier than Grandpa’s house. My room was at the top of a five-flight staircase, and there were people already in it. One of my three new roommates was unpacking his underwear with the help of his parents and sisters. He and I shook hands while his mother lunged at the cabbie. “You must be so proud!” she cried. “Isn’t this a fabulous day to be a parent?”
Flustered, the cabdriver doffed his hat and shook the mother’s hand. She introduced herself and her husband, and before she could ask the cabdriver if he preferred to summer on the Vineyard or the Cape, I handed him his money and thanked him.
“Oh,” the mother said. “I didn’t—”
“Good luck,” the cabdriver said to me, doffing his hat again as he backed out the door.
Everyone looked at me. “Flying solo today,” I said.
The mother gave a fake smile. My son is living with this vagabond? The sisters went back to folding jockey shorts. “So,” my new roommate said, trying to break the tension, “what does JR stand for?”
A second roommate came through the door with his parents and his limousine driver right behind, toting a matching set of designer luggage. Introductions were made. The second roommate’s father, an elegant man with an ominous glare, cornered me and began bombarding me with questions. Where was I from? What high school did I attend? He then asked what I’d been doing with myself all summer. “Working at a law firm in Manhattan,” I said proudly.
“What firm?”
I told him the name. He didn’t react. “It’s a small firm,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.” He frowned. I’d lost him. I tried to recover. “Though the partners did break away from a much larger and more prestigious firm several years ago.”
This was true. And yet when the father asked which larger fi
rm that was, I drew a blank. I blurted the first three lawyerly names that came to mind—Hart, Schaffner and Marx. As luck would have it the father was in the clothing business. He knew Hart Schaffner Marx, makers of men’s suits, knew them well. I saw the father conclude that I was a liar and a fool and turn from me in disgust.
Time to get some air.
I hurried off to the same spreading elm where I’d retreated when I first visited Yale with my mother. Sitting with my back against the elm I watched my schoolmates arrive, a flotilla of families sailing with the wind up College Street, in cars that cost three times what my mother earned in one year. I never thought until that moment how odd I might appear, showing up at Yale alone, and I never anticipated how different my schoolmates would be from me. Aside from the tangibles—clothes, shoes, parents—what I noticed that first day was their self-confidence. I could almost see their self-confidence rising off the campus in shimmering waves, like the August heat, and like the heat it sapped my strength. I wondered if self-confidence could be acquired, or if, like fathers and flawless skin, it was just something you were born with.
One confident boy stood out from all the rest. He reminded me of a photo Bud had once shown me of a marble bust from antiquity. Caesar, I thought. His eyes gleamed with that same imperial confidence. They were the eyes of his father, or uncle, or whoever that man was helping him lug his stereo to his room, and they bedazzled everyone who walked by. This was the first day of the school year, and yet this boy gave all indication that he was about to graduate. He had Yale wired. He knew everyone, and those he didn’t know he stopped, eager to know them. He held up his chin slightly, as though each person he addressed were standing on a stepladder, a pose that accentuated his regal bearing, as well as his beaky nose and jutting jaw. He smiled as if he had a winning lottery ticket in his pocket, and I supposed he did. His success was that assured. He looked like someone to whom nothing bad would ever happen.
How could I attend the same school with such a boy? How could we occupy the same planet? He wasn’t a boy at all, but a full-grown man. If I were ever to stand beside him—an unlikely prospect—I’d feel as though I were wearing velvet shorts and holding a giant lollipop. He existed on another plane of reality, worlds removed from me, though there was also something gnawingly familiar about him. I stared and stared until I had it. He looked like Jedd.
Jedd. I wished I could phone him and ask his advice. Jedd would know what to do. But I hadn’t spoken to Jedd in years. I thought of phoning my mother, but that was out of the question. She’d hear the panic in my voice, and I couldn’t let her know I was losing heart on the first day.
Later that night I put Sinatra on my roommate’s turntable and stretched out on the window seat in our common room, leafing through the catalog of classes, which ran four hundred pages. This is why I came to Yale, I thought, cheering up. This would be my salvation. I’d tune out everything else and focus on Anthropology 370b, “The Study of American Culture,” or English 433b, “The Craft of the Writer,” or Psychology 242a, “Human Learning and Memory.” I’d learn Chinese! Or Greek! I’d read Dante in the original Italian! I’d take up fencing!
Then I spotted something called Directed Studies. A program open to a “select” number of freshmen, Directed Studies was a yearlong exhaustive survey of Western civilization, an intense immersion in the canon. I ran my finger along the list of writers and thinkers covered. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Aquinas, Goethe, Wordsworth, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville—and that was just the first semester. I looked out the window, thinking. A group of students was gathering in the courtyard below. Again I saw the supremely confident boy, Jedd Redux, holding forth. The Emperor of Yale. Directed Studies was the only way to compete with such a boy, the only way to contend with his confidence, and maybe acquire some of my own.
I phoned my mother and asked what she thought. She worried that I’d be biting off too much, too soon, but hearing in my voice the need to prove myself fast, she encouraged me to apply. And if somehow I got in, she said, I should skip taking a part-time job as we’d discussed. I should use all my spare time to study, study, study, she said, and if I needed money she would dip into the small settlement she got after her accident.
A new Yale notebook under my arm, two new pens in my pocket, I ran down Elm Street as the bells in Harkness chimed. A few leaves were already beginning to turn. I’d been accepted to Directed Studies, which I deemed an immense honor, though I found out later that the program accepted virtually every masochist willing to work four times harder than all other freshmen. Rushing to my first class, a literature seminar, I thought of all the times Uncle Charlie had told me to stop the clock, stay right there, freeze, usually at just those moments when I wanted life to hurry up. Now at last had come a time to savor.
My literature seminar was taught by a tall rawboned man in his forties, who had a Vandyke beard and eyebrows that were brown and constantly aflutter, like miller moths. He welcomed us officiously and told us about the glories we’d soon encounter, the prodigious minds, the timeless stories, the immemorial sentences so well crafted they had outlasted empires and epochs and would endure for millennia to come. He leaped from poem to play to novel, citing from memory the greatest lines and passages of The Divine Comedy and The Prelude and The Sound and the Fury—and his favorite, Paradise Lost, in which we’d soon be making the acquaintance of Satan. He spoke with particular sadness about the loss of paradise, and with peculiar admiration for Satan as a literary character, and it struck me that this professor, with his pointed beard and furry eyebrows, may have modeled himself in part on the Prince of Darkness. I drew a picture of him in my notebook, a sketch in the style of Minute Biographies, and beneath it I wrote: Professor Lucifer.
As one would expect of Lucifer, the professor sat magisterially at the head of the table and made a sales pitch for our souls. Everything we would be reading, he said with compelling gravitas, descended from two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These were the seedlings, he said, from which the great oak of Western literature had grown, and continued to grow, extending branches to each new generation. He envied us, he said, because we were about to encounter these two masterpieces for the first time. Though written nearly three thousand years ago, each poem remained as fresh and relevant as a story in that morning’s New York Times. “Why?” he asked. “Because each grapples with that timeless theme—the longing for home.” In my notebook I wrote, “Grappled—good word.” Then, seeing that my penmanship wasn’t quite perfect, I erased the notation and wrote it again, more neatly.
I loved the way Professor Lucifer pronounced certain words, especially “poem.” He didn’t rhyme it with “home,” as I did, but with “goyim.” Each time he said the word (“The thing to remember about this POY-um—”), he’d rest his bony right hand on his tattered copies of the poems, like a witness swearing on a Bible. Though his copies were twice my age, though their pages were a dark mustard yellow, I could see that they had been lovingly preserved, delicately handled, and underlined with geometric precision.
Our first assignment was to read half of the Iliad, then write a ten-page paper. I walked directly to Sterling Library and found a leather chair in the reading room. Beside me a window opened onto an enclosed garden, where a fountain burbled and birds chirped. Within minutes I faded into my leather chair, fell back into the folds of time, and landed with a thud on the wind-scoured beach of Ilium. I read for hours without a break, discovering to my delight that aside from the longing for home, the poem was also about men, and the tinfoil armor of manhood. I held my breath as I came upon the scene between Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, and his infant son. Hector, dressed for battle, says good-bye to the boy. Don’t go, Hector’s wife pleads—but Hector must. It’s not his will, but his fate. The battlefield calls. He holds the boy, “beautiful as a star shining,” kisses him good-bye, then says a prayer: “Some day let th
em say of him: he is better by far than his father.”
At midnight I went back to my room, my head teeming with ideas for my paper. I sat at my desk and turned on the gooseneck lamp over my desk. While my roommate snored in the top bunk I opened my new dictionary and made a list of very big words.
Professor Lucifer handed back our papers by throwing them down the length of the table. He told us he’d put as much effort into grading them as we’d put into writing them. He was “appalled,” he said, by our crude analyses of the POY-um. We were unworthy of Directed Studies. We were unworthy of Homer. He looked directly at me several times as he spoke. Everyone fished through the stack of papers and when I found mine my stomach dropped. A red “D+” was scrawled on the first page. The boy next to me found his paper and looked equally stricken. I peeked over his shoulder. He’d gotten a B-plus.
After class I took sanctuary under my spreading elm and read Professor Lucifer’s margin notes, which were written with a red pen that leaked, so the pages appeared blood-spattered. Some comments made me wince, others made me scratch my head. Repeatedly he’d circled the word “somehow,” and in the margin he’d written, “Intellectual laziness.” I hadn’t known that “somehow” was a sin. Why hadn’t Bill and Bud told me? Was there a bigger word for “somehow”?
Before beginning my next paper I went to the Yale bookstore and bought a bigger dictionary, from which I culled a list of bigger words, five-syllable jobs. I vowed to astonish Professor Lucifer, to make his Vandyke stand up. He gave my second paper a D. Again I retreated to my elm.
No matter how hard I studied that fall, no matter what I tried, the result was always a C or a D. For my paper about John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” I spent a week reading the poem backward and forward, memorizing it, saying it aloud while I brushed my teeth. Surely Professor Lucifer would see the difference. In his margin notes he said I’d written my worst paper of the semester. He said in so many words that I’d treated Keats’s urn as my personal urinal. He did not relish my phrase “A poem saved is a poem urned.”
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 19