The Draw Page 5

  I returned from school and had my customary snack of cherry pie that my mother had picked up for me at the supermarket, and a glass of Coke. Then I retrieved the basketball from the garage. I started to throw the ball toward the net. Imagining that I was playing with friends, I shouted out their names as I pretended that I was passing them the ball and they were passing it back to me.

  * * *

  I was especially attached to Paul Dolcetto. Paul lived with his mother, stepsister, and stepfather in a bigger and newer split-level house on the other side of town. His mother had divorced his father, a sanitation worker, when Paul was a child. She remarried a gum-chewing captain in the Tenafly police department named Danny Clementino, who disciplined Paul with a blackjack.

  Paul played his electric bass guitar with the concentration of a chess grandmaster. He suffered from constant nosebleeds. He laughed until his nose bled, moaning, No, no! Stop! Enough! I can’t breathe! He responded to the beatings from his stepfather, he told me, by charging him, kicking and throwing punches.

  With his steep forehead, receding hairline even as a boy, and long, prominent nose cursed with its mysterious wound, he looked in profile like the image on an ancient Roman coin. The broad, steep forehead he got from his mother. The striking nose and the defiant spirit he must have inherited from his real father, whom I never met, the garbageman who, I imagined, threw bags of trash into the garbage truck with a noble, blood-racing fury that he suppressed with an effort of concentration.

  My other friends had made it clear to me in various ways, and not without awkward affection, that they did not have the emotional intensity I wished to share with them. I depended more and more on Paul. We shared a love for the bass guitar, for one thing. The bass stays hidden in the background but supplies an indispensable rhythm. On some level, that is how we thought of ourselves. Invisible yet indispensable.

  After school I would ride my bike over to Paul’s house with some of my father’s Erroll Garner records. I placed them in a carefully folded shopping bag that I put in the basket that hung from the handlebars. My father never knew I was borrowing them. Paul would listen with me to Garner playing “I’ll Remember April,” “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “How High the Moon.” As Garner swung and bounced and grunted his way through those songs—grunting as he played was his trademark—Paul listened intently, his head down, that grandmaster’s absorption in his light gray eyes. He understood Garner. That meant that he understood my father, which meant that he grasped the bond between my father and me.

  I loved him for that. I opened up to him about the disorder at home, divulging every detail. He listened sympathetically. He put his hand on my shoulder to reassure me. My mother screams and slaps me the same way yours does, he told me. They’re crazy. Crazy and unhappy.

  Together we plotted to take revenge on the county sheriff if we ever saw him. After a while, his mother would walk to the door of the basement, where we held our meetings, and scream down to us to come upstairs for milk and cannoli.

  In return for Paul’s sympathy, I entertained him by mocking the police captain. I imitated his small-time swagger and the cop stare that he would train on Paul beneath heavy-lidded eyes. Drop the cannoli and take the gum! I would cry, playing around with the famous line from The Godfather. The romantic gangster epic had opened that year and its spectacle of outsiders under siege established it at the center of our imaginative lives. I had quickly assimilated Brando’s performance, trying to summon up his menacing cool during those times when my mother went on one of her slapping rampages against me.

  Thinking of home, enraged at my mother, I did Danny as the ridiculous villain of a goombah police captain. Paul laughed until the blood flowed. Extracting a tissue from the reserve he kept crumpled up in his pants pocket, he held it under his nose as he leaned his head back over his chair. The white tissue slowly became soaked with blood. He might have been a dandy sniffing a rose in a Victorian photograph. It pleased me to see him vulnerable in this way. I felt that it guaranteed his friendship.

  But a few days after one of these Danny-bashing sessions, Paul would boast about Danny’s associations with gangsters. He spoke, with excited admiration, of Danny’s violent exploits in enforcing the law. Danny himself, on more than one occasion, went looking for the older boys who had been pushing Paul around after school. Drawing up next to them in his patrol car, he introduced himself, which always solved that particular problem. Paul hated his stepfather, yet he worshipped him, too.

  Since it was important for me to have solidarity with someone all the way through, this disconcerted me. It cast a haze between us. In response to Paul’s ambiguous status, and to my other friends’ inability to be available to me whenever I needed them, I found myself wanting to spend more and more time alone. Frequent illness had made me comfortable with solitude, even reliant on it as a way to allow my mind to wander in safety through fantasies of fulfillment.

  * * *

  That autumn afternoon I lost myself in shooting hoops in our driveway as the leaves drifted to the ground around me and the light began to weaken. My father pulled up in the brown Buick Electra, parking it on the street in order to allow me to continue playing ball. He waved to me as he walked down the driveway. I waved back. My father stood off to the side of the driveway, watching me. The sharp, aching light was vanishing quickly, as if its brightness had been an illusion.

  Too awkward and unsure of himself to make friends, alienated from his younger brother, who regarded Monroe with derision, estranged from his brittle mother, who had never recovered from her husband’s early death, driven away by my mother—hammered and banged up, he stood at the edge of the driveway, regarding me with longing.

  I saw him standing at the edge of the driveway in one of the expensive suits he used to wear when he was a realtor. The pathos of him going to one of his lessons dressed in that extravagant suit stung me. He must have seen the discomfort in my face, but not the pity. Pity was what he was in need of. He walked over to me.

  How are you, Lee-boy, he said.

  I’m fine, Dad.

  You look great. A strapping boy.

  Thanks.

  My strong, strapping boy. Do you have a minute?

  Yeah.

  You’re quite a ballplayer.

  I just like to shoot.

  You make every shot.

  No I don’t. I miss a lot.

  Well, you make almost every shot.

  I miss a lot, Dad. Anyway, the net is like only nine feet high. Remember? We messed up when we put it up. It’s tilted now, too.

  Ah, that doesn’t matter. You’re having fun. Do you want me to help you straighten it out?

  No, it’s okay.

  Come over here. Let me help you.

  No, it’s okay.

  Come over here. Help me push it straight.

  No, Dad. Come on. You’re wearing your nice clothes.

  Heh, your old man isn’t so bad, is he? He’s not so terrible to look at.

  Yeah.

  What do you think? Do you think the girls would give a second look at your old man?

  The post is okay the way it is, Dad. It’s always been like that. It doesn’t make a difference.

  Do you have a girlfriend? You must be fighting them off.

  I know a few girls.

  I bet you do. They must be following you around school.

  Not really.

  What?

  Not exactly.

  There must be someone special. Is there someone special?

  No. Not really.

  Well, that’s fine. The important thing is to have fun. To meet people. Then you find the right girl. You have plenty of time.

  Yeah.

  All the time in the world.

  Yeah. Yeah.

  You should go out for the basketball team. You’re a natural.

  I can’t even dribble.

  But you can shoot.

  Lots of guys can shoot.

  Just keep practicing. You’ll mak
e the team.

  I’m not interested, Dad. I just like to shoot.

  I think the ball needs air.

  It’s okay.

  It’s not bouncing right.

  It always does that in the cold.

  Are you cold? Do you want to go inside?

  No, I’m fine.

  It’s going to snow soon. We’re going to have a bad winter this year.

  I’m not cold.

  Did your mother take the car?

  She hasn’t come home yet.

  Did she go to the store?

  I don’t know.

  Is she still at school?

  I’m not sure.

  Sometimes she likes to stay late at school. She grades papers, talks to people. She loves to talk. To meet people. She works hard, your mother.

  I guess.

  No, be nice. Your mother works hard.

  I am being nice.

  We might fight, but she still loves you. You know that.

  Yeah.

  She just gets frustrated, but she loves you. You and your brother are her whole world.

  Yeah. I know.

  She’ll be home soon.

  Yeah.

  Can I talk to you?

  Well, yeah.

  I want to talk to you about what’s going on between me and your mother.

  Okay.

  We’ve been fighting a lot lately.

  Yeah. It gets pretty bad.

  I know it does.

  She’s, like, screaming at you every night.

  Your mother screams when she’s upset.

  But it’s, like, every night.

  We’re going through a bad time now.

  It’s pretty bad.

  We’re going through a bad time. But everything is going to be all right. Your mother. Me. The house. Everything. It’s all going to work out.

  She screams at me and hits me for no reason. Why does she do that?

  I have to tell you something, Lee-boy.

  Yeah. Okay.

  Can we talk for a minute?

  Yeah, Dad.

  I’m going to start sleeping downstairs in the den for a little while. Just for a little while. To help make the peace with your mother.

  Wow. Where? On the couch?

  It will just be for a little while.

  Wow. What does Mom say about that. Dad? What does Mom say? Dad, don’t cry. Dad, please don’t cry here. We’re outside. Please don’t cry.

  Your mother is in a lot of pain.

  Well, then maybe you should stay in your bedroom with her.

  No, this is what we’re going to do now. I have to make the peace. She’s in so much pain.

  Don’t cry, Dad. Jesus Christ! For Christ’s sake!

  I can’t have sex with your mother anymore. I’m not able to have sex with her.

  What?

  I can’t have an erection. I haven’t had an erection for about a year.

  What? I don’t understand. What are you saying?

  That’s why I’m going to sleep downstairs, Lee-boy. It’s easier for your mother. It’s easier for both of us.

  * * *

  People had called Leopold Lee. For that reason, my father had a hard time just calling me by my first name, so he often played with it. Lee-boy was his favorite pet name for me. But appealing to me was a way to recapture the old—so old in my father’s memory as to be mythological—“Lee.” That night he poured his heart out to his father’s ghost in the form of his living son.

  His confession was the final assault on my fragile sense of self. It must have been in that moment that I began to develop my habit of defining myself in opposition to other people. I feared that if I surrendered to this weak, childlike man I would disintegrate. I envied Paul Dolcetto his blackjack-wielding stepfather. That was a person Paul could fight. It is much harder to defend yourself against a destructive weakness that is pleading to be saved and understood.

  Opposing my father, angering him, whipping him up against me made him, at least, strong in my eyes. The following summer, on a weekend down the New Jersey shore, as I passed by him while he was standing on the fourth-floor terrace of our motel, leaning his elbows on the railing, I grabbed his shoulders, gave him a push, and then pulled him back again. His angry face, when he turned around, gratified me.

  * * *

  By the time Menka embraced me under the bright coin of a moon that late August night before I went away to college, mournfully asking what “she” was doing to us, my father’s crisis with Albatross and the sheriff’s visit to the house had made my mother resolve to leave my father.

  Meeting another man had been the catalyst behind her decision. He happened to be the principal of one of the elementary schools where she was teaching. He had a sonorous Sicilian American name: Angelo Bonanno. The only real problem, beyond the painful but unavoidable logistical hurdles on the path to divorce, was Menka.

  Menka had a practical attitude toward marriage that made him disapprove of divorce as the practical response to a failed marriage. He considered marriage to have little to do with happiness. Marriage provided the axis from which happiness could be pursued. Once married, you had a companion whose material and biological interests were aligned with yours. This meant that you had the blessing of someone you could trust in matters of life and death.

  Through the years the two of you established a common heritage, by means of which your identity maintained itself. Creating a countermotion to life’s erosions and disruptions in this way, you could continue to push back against the iron boundaries of existence by extending your vitality through children.

  There was no such animal as romantic love, any more than actually flying with your lover to the moon, if that were possible, would be anything less than a big physical and emotional letdown. What people called romantic love was perseverance with another person in the face of rising and falling disappointment, for the sake of safety, relative power, stability, effective functioning, and sporadic pleasure.

  Marriage was the only form this haven could take. Marriage was the way you carved out of the alien world a familiar world, something you recognized when you opened your eyes in the morning, the way you wake up and see the same sky, clouds, and sun every day.

  For Menka, an existence without marriage would have been a world where the paper-thin membrane of sky, clouds, and sun did not exist, a world where you spent your days running through the darkness, away from alien rocks hurtling toward you out of icy, indifferent outer space.

  But no one can stay rational about love and all the arrangements that have been constructed in its name. Rose stood in the way of Menka’s liaisons with prostitutes and struggling actresses at the hotel. Yet without Rose, he was lost. So Menka turned to money.

  He lavished presents on Rose. Half his income went to the prostitutes and the actresses, and the other half went to his wife. He showered Rose with trinkets, some of them valuable, left behind in the hotel that he passed off as gifts that he had bought.

  Rose was under no illusions about where Menka’s bounty came from. But it didn’t matter. Menka’s thoughtfulness, even if it was the product of guile, put her at the center of his life. The fact that his gifts were really appeasements, and that these were transparent, and that he knew she knew about them even as she pretended that she didn’t, gave her an extra power over him. The marriage continued not because Menka wanted it to, but because she allowed it to. He was the one making all the exertions, not her. On his part, Menka made a great display of his exertions, taking pride in what he believed was their effectiveness.

  In this way, each one thought he or she had the power over the other. But it was Rose who could instill terror in Menka simply by leveling at him a proprietary gaze while elegantly stubbing her cigarette out in an ashtray.

  So when my mother told her parents that she was divorcing my father, Rose said nothing to oppose it, while Menka considered it a disastrous step to take.

  For one thing, women didn’t upset the apple cart like that
. The vicious world outside of marriage was hard enough for men to deal with alone. My mother would find herself in the position of the indigent actresses he had known at the hotel, not just the young women struggling to succeed, but the older ones, washed up and washed out, alcoholic and alone. That fate was what he had tried to save my mother from when she was a girl.

  True, he had opposed the marriage to Monroe, a point that I heard my mother remind her father of over the phone when Menka was obviously lashing out at her over her decision to leave my father. On the phone, or fighting with her father on his visits to our home or on ours to his, whispering with her mother in another room so loudly that my brother and I could hear every word, Lola handled her pain the only way she knew how, by performing it so that everyone, friend or foe, became part of her crisis.

  Still, Menka reminded her, Monroe had come through in the end. They had a nice house in the suburbs, far from the crime-ridden city. They had two nice children, though the oldest child locked himself in his room playing loud music and stayed out late drinking with his friends. But that, Menka admonished my mother, was her fault, for letting the marriage get so out of hand that she had no time left over for her sons.

  If Monroe had stumbled—as Menka once predicted he would—at least he had learned his lesson. Already he was begging her not to leave him, vowing that he would return them to the solid financial footing they had once enjoyed.

  My mother’s retort to her father was simple and based on the following facts:

  After the sheriff’s visit to our house, my father announced to my mother his plans to use some legal maneuver that he might well have imagined to take out a second mortgage on the house. This way, he explained, he could fulfill his obligation to Albatross and get out from underneath the debt that was crippling them. They might, he added, even have some money left over to take a vacation, or buy a new car for my mother.