*
Thinking on this so many years later, I realize how much I had taken for granted in getting away.
I treated grad school as a distraction, or as a kind of vacation from my life. I hadn’t thought it through, and in a way it was about nothing so much as to be in a city that was not New York. In a city where there was no Jerry.
I’d gotten a full scholarship, a “free ride,” and although it was at a fancy school, it was at a place known not so much for its creativity as for its genius-level gearheads. The going directive was “Eat, sleep, study—pick two.” Judging by the towering stacks of pizza boxes outside the library and the suffering wretches walking the halls at all hours, the kids there went in for the first and the last. The school had the highest suicide rate in the country. But the degree I was there for was new, experimental, comparatively “soft,” something called a SMACT, the ACT standing for architecture, civilization, and technology. The idea was to open the door for cross-disciplinary, hybrid work, but of course those of us in the tiny program were a hopelessly freaky, self-questioning, marginalized bunch. When we all came together for some fantastically awkward social occasion, everyone inevitably drank too much and fell into a kind of extensive, itemizing bitterness that would seem shamefully ungrateful to outsiders. We riffed for hours, saying we’d been smacked, were talking smack, had a smack habit, etc. One terrible evening at the dean’s house, I watched as the smartest and kindest among us abruptly excused himself from a conversation about Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism only to throw up violently in an umbrella stand. It just seemed a function of graduate school that you walked around feeling alienated.
I think this was also when I first understood the full meaning of the expression “imposter syndrome.”
By the second year I had wised up somewhat and got myself well away from the grad-school complaint scene, finding an apartment not in Cambridge or Boston proper but up above Somerville in a place called Medford. One of my profs, when I told her where I’d moved, said, Medford! That’s where you’re stuck living when you get your high school girlfriend pregnant. It was no kind of cool place, but I had a very decent deal sharing the top apartment of a New England three-decker with the grown daughter of the building’s owner, a woman who, once I told her my name, said the apartment was mine, sight unseen. You Italian? she said, and I sighed at the implications: Sure, I’m Italian, ma’am, but I might also be an ax murderer.
Mrs. Romano’s daughter, Rosemarie, was not what you would call a dynamic personality, but we got along fine. She collected owl tchotchkes, smoked menthol Benson & Hedges, and was fond of crocheting potholders made to look like oversized citrus slices. Rosemarie worked up the road as a cashier at the Stop & Shop, and when I made what I thought was the inevitable Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” reference, she looked at me as if I’d tweezed it out of a Twilight Zone–like receptacle of arcana. There’s a song? Her most characteristic response was a kind of impressed Tch! noise, employed when I said something that thrilled or amazed her, which seemed to be at least five times an hour: Chessie, God but you’re smaht. She was a true urban villager, someone who believed in all kinds of bizarre superstitions and had an enormous fear of the unknown.
Our block was a closed universe of Mary nooks, vinyl siding, and drawn blinds, and you could readily imagine all sorts of induction ceremonies going on behind closed doors, meaty trigger fingers being pricked, Saint Lucy prayer cards being burned, etc. I mean, it smelled pretty Mafia to me. But since I was living on about $23 a week—cigarettes, mostly—and my trip to the bus to the T to campus took forever, often I’d find myself staying hyper-local, kicking it around “greater” Medford. I became interested in the strangeness of the place, the quaint old Yankee stolidity with its grim Guido overlay. The town center, which always seemed to be almost completely depopulated, was a small miracle of bad city planning, a melancholy spaghetti of streets with ho-hum shops: credit union, storefront insurance company, doughnut shop, nails place, H&R Block. The gold-domed courthouse was cut off from sight by a long, cheerless medical building, but I liked going down to the old burying ground on Salem Street. There I could spend hours amid the slate headstones with their dreamlike winged skulls, the leafy plane trees, and the glorious old bones of one Sarah Bradlee Fulton, Heroine of the Revolution. I’d hike up to the Stop & Shop with a big canvas bag to shop for my groceries (De Cecco pasta forever on special: three boxes for five bucks), and if Rosemarie was working, we’d stand out in the parking lot and have a cig together. It got so that we could talk shit about anything—the weather, the BoSox, the Big Dig—and we evolved it into an art form, “personal” in a particularly Italian American way, as if any of these things were cousins who were failing us. I liked that Rosemarie said the name of her hometown like Meffid.
And sometimes up there during the long nights I’d get my mad insomnia and slip out of the house round about three a.m., walk down to the park by the Mystic River, and sit on a hard bench to look at the stars. There was something beautiful in it. I realized come that last semester that I’d gotten over my ethnographic snobbery and I’d become fond of the whole scene, of Meffid, of Rosemarie, of the cranky old deaf guy in a hairnet at the antique, mediocre bakery. And that in some way I was at peace with the emptiness of it, I was in love with modern moonlight, and it would be an easy place for a peasant like me to put down roots.
Which could only mean that I had to get back to New York City right quick.
*
But when I finally came back to stay, it was as if an era had ended. Something had gone from my city, I can’t tell you what it was.
My friendship with Fang had long tapered off, and any calls I made to revive it she left unreturned. On the other hand, Audrey called me so relentlessly from her parents’ house out in Pennsylvania that I grew to dread the sound of her voice. I was the level one, the problem-solver and listening ear, so when I tried to tell her my own confusions she couldn’t hear me at all. And she was so medded up that a simple conversation was like talking to a foreign-language speaker who despaired of finding an English equivalent for her words. I was in no kind of Mrs. Fix-it mood anyway; I was having trouble enough finding my own way. I had other friends, but really it was Trina who bore me up in these times. She was always there, with tart criticism or a loving word or some piece of goofiness that would distract me from my self-involved sadness.
They were still too much with me, the Marr-Löwensteins. I would think of us as still together. I’d see in my mind’s eye all of us in a house that existed somewhere else in time, enacting the same things over and over again. I would be falling in love over and over again. I felt like I was supposed to have stayed with Jerry. This was the way it was written, and I had chosen to ruin it.
“Chess, God love your melodrama,” Trina would say to me.
I got an apartment on the Southside, a big ugly place for $850 a month, got a job that was all right, felt embarrassingly overpaid for it, was surprised to be able to make new friends. Was surprised to find that people actually liked me. Guys I worked with would ask me out, and I’d demur or steer things to a friendly, meaningless lunch. Guys would chat me up in bookstores or bars or, in a strange spate that lasted for a few inexplicable months, in large-scale art installations at various museums and galleries. I wondered what they saw in my face that they were so quick to approach me while I read the graffiti on the walls of the Temple of Dendur. I fell into some dance of strangeness with an architect I worked with, and we would have evenings out that turned into endless talk sessions, but I’d always go to bed alone. There was something else going on in my heart.
I was slowly coming out of my disease of the past.
I remember that spring I felt my spirits lift. It was the first time I could “see” spring in years. I thought of a garden way up in Central Park, and how its allée of trees would be blooming pink just then. Though it was a long way from Brooklyn, one Sunday I felt like it was the only place I wanted to be, sitting
under the blossoms amid so much beauty. I got on the subway.
What a day it was. The park was crowded, but I didn’t mind, I was just glad to be around so much life and color. Couples in wedding clothes stood for photographs, and I walked the garden looking at the flowers, touched by the beauty of everything and how close at hand it was. Close at hand, and able to be shared by everyone: which I realized was my favorite thing in the world.
I sat down on a bench with my book, but instead I let my eyes close, grateful for the sun on my face.
“What are the chances?” a voice was saying.
“What are the chances?” the voice was saying again.
I opened my eyes and saw who it was.
“Fitz,” I said.
“Well, hello,” he said.
We beheld each other.
“I never come here—and you’re here,” he said. “I just had this feeling, it was such a beautiful day, I don’t know, it’s so strange, I just felt like being here.” He looked as I remembered him, thoughtful, kind-eyed. But even more open than he had been—artless, and frank.
“I never come here either,” I said.
He spoke to me so plainly.
“I can’t believe how happy I am to see you.”
I felt a rush of emotion. Words came tumbling out of me, joyful, unmediated, unequivocal.
“I feel so happy to see you too. I feel like…I missed you. God, I really missed you, Fitz.”
He sat beside me on the bench and peered into my face.
“You’re different,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do I tell you this? God, do I tell you? Yes, I think I do. You don’t know this, but I used to see you around all the time. I remember I saw you on the West Side one day, walking on the bike path with him. I saw you all over the East Village. I was at a table right by you in Veselka one day—you were with him and a woman with a skunk stripe in her hair. I know, I sound like a freaky stalker, but this was just the way it happened. You never would see me. I’d see you and him all over the place, I saw you at Sun Ra and Sonic Youth at Summerstage, I saw you at that DeLillo reading at the Ninety-Second Street Y, I saw you at the Richter show at Marian Goodman. And you never saw me at all.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I never saw you.”
“Don’t worry. It’s those cagey moves of mine—I can make myself disappear. And maybe I didn’t want you to know I saw you. You seemed…sad, to me. You always seemed sad. You’re different now, somehow.”
I sat looking at him, feeling my heart beating.
“You’re not with him anymore, are you?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He looked away, looked up at the sky, the trees blooming above us, and then back to me, trying not to smile.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Would you like to go get a coffee or a beer with me? Or a glass of wine? Or a carton of kefir or a shot of elderflower liqueur, like maybe right now? Maybe right now or tomorrow or the next day? Sorry, sorry, I’m just so glad to see you again. No pressure! Look, I’ve been in therapy for years, I’m doing everything I promised myself I wouldn’t do when I saw you again. But I just feel so happy!”
*
After we got together, I was amazed by how lucky I was. It was as if Fitz were the only person who could have pulled me out of the wreck of the past. But before I got there, for too long after it all ended, I still had the Marr-Löwensteins living in my head, driving my observations, my opinions, coloring my world. I’d dwell on the mystery of this both there in my mind and aloud to Fitz, hash things out endlessly, looking for an answer.
He was as patient as a foot soldier, until one day he was not. We were coming out of the Met at closing time, walking with the vacating throngs through the first-floor galleries, when I saw a chair. It was a nineteenth-century sedia savonarola, and it was up on a stand with a velvet braid running from its back to its cushion in case someone was tempted to make the mistake of trying to sit on it. I stopped and looked at it. This chair, this very same hundred-and-fifty-year-old chair, had stood in the entrance hall of the Marr-Löwenstein house. Where you could drop your coat on it, lean on it as you took off your shoes, actually sit on it.
I cut away and pushed through the crowd and out of the building. I ran down the stairs and then Fitz caught me by the arm.
“What is it?” he said.
“Why are they still in my head? Why can’t I get rid of this by now? My God, I look at that stupid chair and I think of Clarice and it’s a million years later but all I can think is, My God, was I so terrible? Was I really so terrible? Why didn’t she like me?”
Fitz held me hard by the arms and leaned down so that his face was right in front of mine.
“There’s no answer to that,” he said. “She’s fucked up and I’m sorry for that. I mean, I am and I’m not. Because if she weren’t so hateful, would we be together? I know you have to do this, I know it, but do you understand how you make me feel when you do this? And Chess, sometimes, guess what? There is no answer. Not one that will satisfy you, at least. It’s a puzzle that can’t be solved. And you just have to walk away and save yourself. Which is what you did. You have to find a way to not let it hurt you, because you’re only torturing yourself. Chess, please. Sometimes there is no mystery.”
And this did not switch it off forever, that’s just not the way I’m made, but somehow this was the thing Fitz gave me that allowed me to put this past mostly away. When I was finally able to put it away, so many other things came to the surface, things that I had avoided, things that I pretended didn’t hurt me anymore. I had so much grief over the sadness of my family, over our anger and our estrangement. I had so much grief over the cruelty of my father, over my mother’s refusal to see reality, what it did to my sisters and my brothers and me. I would spend years with this, trying to understand it and learn how to live with it, and this would be my new life course for a long time.
One night I had a strange dream. I was driving with my father in his beater car; we were driving through broken-down old Hilltop, past all the ruined houses where he used to live. We crossed a bridge called the Augustine Cut-off and then we drove through the ineffable, wooded neighborhood called Alapocas. Then we were driving up the Concord Pike, past the immense field where a cryptic old dairy farm sat crumbling and forgotten, left desolate and alone. And I saw that everything around us was encased in ice. I realized that the tide had risen and then frozen over, and that all of the places around us were—
—submerged, my father wanted to say. He wanted to supply the word for me, but he could not. Then I understood. He had been dead for so long that he had forgotten language. He turned to look at me, and his pale blue eyes were so sad. And I realized he was trying to say to me, I am sorry. My daughter, I am sorry I hurt you.
There was a great thaw, a great thaw in me, plenty of pain to come but somehow never like the past. I had this man now, a man who gave me so much, who listened and never made me ashamed of my childhood, never made me feel like I had something to hide. He just saw me, there in front of him as I was. And in time the story of the Marr-Löwenstein family and what they were supposed to mean to me diminished and turned itself inside-out. Until it occurred to me that maybe I met them not because they were to dictate my life, not because they were some impossible ne plus ultra, but because only through them would I find: Fitz.
Epilogue
After I read about Clarice’s death, I found myself thinking of the last word I’d had of each of the Marr-Löwensteins.
Some years before, Fitz and I had been at the Chelsea Flea Market on a Sunday afternoon. He had wandered in one direction and I in the other, and I found myself looking at a collection of odd things on a vendor’s table: letter openers disguised as Gothic daggers, jade page-cutters, tiny pistols that shot out flame for a cigarette. Everything was beautifully laid out, nestled in thick crushed velvet in fine old wooden display cases. I looked up to compliment the vendor, who stood on the
other side of the table rocking on his feet, hands behind his back, wearing a narrow British-style three-piece suit, which was very well made and which he was a bit too plump for. When I saw his florid Pre-Raphaelite face, the compliment died on my lips.
“Bertrand Marr-Löwenstein,” I said.
“Yes?” he said. He didn’t know me.
But neither did he seem the disdainful old jerk of the past. He was still Bertrand, but he looked indistinct, his face stretched to sagging by time, alcohol, marrons glacés.
“Hey,” Fitz said to me, coming up to the table.
“Fitz!” Bertrand said, lighting up.
They slapped their hands together in a shake like they were great old pals.
“Bert,” Fitz said, “old Bert Marr!”
“Still grinding knives?” Bertrand asked, and I realized he must have had some kind of crush on Fitz in those ancient days.
“God, no! I’m back in school finally to get my degree.”
“That’s grand, that’s just grand,” Bertrand said. “You always seemed like the brightest boy around, and yet so self-defeating in your maison de Goodwill clothes, really!”
“How about you—what are you up to?”
“I’ve been all right, up and down, you know? I had to give up the business in London, it was failing spectacularly. I had some losses. Many, really. My partner—well, we went our separate ways.”
It occurred to me that Bertrand had been made nice by disappointment.
“I came home a few years ago to check on the mater, and I’ve just kind of stayed. She’s, well, she’s had a hard time of it lately.” He looked at me now. “I remember you, dear, of course I do now. You were Kendrick’s great friend.”
“How is Kendra?”
Because she had disappeared into the ether. All the years I was with Jerry she never came back. For a long time I’d assumed she was dead, that she’d died a junkie, and I comforted myself by thinking that in the end, even if she was in some kind of squalid, wretched place, when she departed this earth her chemical mind would have been filled with the deepest bliss.
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