We Are Gathered Read online

  They had a regular Sunday afternoon date to go drive in the countryside. Josh would ask if I had had enough for one day, and I knew enough to say yes to that and no to their invitation to join them. The public schools of Troy, North Carolina, were not designed to generate scholars, but with our Sunday tutoring sessions, your father helped me eke out a degree. He told me I was smart, even tried to convince me to go to law school. He said the Jews had learned a few centuries ago that the only thing they can’t take from you is your education. Your brains will find you a place in the world when your blood fails you. More than once, I wished I’d listened to him, but at the time I thought I knew my place in the world. First it was North Carolina, then it was New York City. Then the world had other plans for me, and like some twisted version of The Wizard of Oz, a tornado called the U.S. Army came barreling through, found me, and tossed me over to the other side of the world to a place called Vietnam.

  I graduated with a degree in organizational behavior, the gut major that was chosen by the jocks and the losers, united at last—the skinny weed smokers and the thick-necked quarterbacks—in our academic failures. I moved back home, married Jenny, moved into a little rented house at the edge of town as far as I could get from my dad in tiny Troy, population 3,162. My degree got me a job at the hospital in Chapel Hill, an hour’s drive each way, where supposedly I did something in management, but mostly I doodled, read novels, snuck out back, and smoked pot.

  I discovered that my high school dream of being an artist hadn’t died, and I started painting. There was nothing else to do at the end of the day after I came home from work, ate the dinner Jenny had cooked, and screwed her. I’d paint in the garage, awful things, trying to be Lucian Freud or Kandinsky. Jenny would come out, smoking a cigarette, and laugh at me, comparing what I’d made to the scribblings of her nieces and nephews. I’d tell her she wouldn’t know art if it bit her in the ass, and she said, Maybe not, but I know what ain’t art. She was right. I got embarrassed and frustrated. Is that a good reason to hit someone? I think you would say no, Elizabeth.

  On our black-and-white television with the broken knob, I watched what was happening elsewhere, sit-ins, marches, love-ins, communes. But everything might have stayed the same if it hadn’t been for that crazy kid in the hospital. He crashed his car somewhere off Highway 109, then took off running when he saw the cops, jumped into the Pee Dee River, and almost drowned before they got him out and brought him to UNC. I was told by one of the nurses that he seemed calm at first, so they took off the handcuffs and his wet clothes. He let them dress him in a hospital gown and a warming blanket to stave off hypothermia. The Pee Dee is fed by springs, so the water’s usually around fifty degrees. Then, once he warmed up, he ignited, erupted, threw off the blanket, and ran out of the ER. First, he was screaming about the pigs, then the devil. He threw charts on the floor, crashed through the nurses’ station, sent glass bottles of medicine flying, and shrieked for a full-on minute before he burst into song in a foreign language that for all we knew was an aria. It was so loud that I heard it from the back room where my friends, the orderlies John Caswell and Rick Sherman, and I used to hide and sneak whiskey. That kid didn’t need technology to broadcast; his voice was high-pitched and urgent. John opened the door, and said, “What the fuck is that?”

  I followed the sound over the blue-gray carpeting and the tiles out to the front of the hospital where several nurses were trying to talk the kid down off the admissions desk. The kid looked like Jesus—so many of them did—with long hair and a scraggly beard, but instead of an apostle’s robe, he had a hospital gown. “It’s all going to end soon.” The perennial cry of the apostle. “And you all are gonna look back at your lives and say you never lived. You never loved. You never looked. You never saw anything, touched anything, felt anything. You’re dying. Rotting. Blighted. Petrified. But it’s okay.” He reached out his arms the way a rock star reaches out to his adoring audience. “It’s not too late. You can be saved.” I stared at him from the far corner of the room. The doctors and the nurses surrounded him, white coats and blue scrubs, a soft pool of colors he could safely jump into. “You can be saved,” he cried again. Salvation. Don’t trust anyone, Elizabeth, who has never yearned for it. It is the fundament of all religion and philosophy, to be delivered and saved from fear, meaninglessness, the vulnerability of the body, the loss of loved ones, and our own inevitable deaths. Not nice thoughts on a wedding day, but death and our need for salvation are the two basic facts of human life, and everything else, our desires, our hobbies—my painting, your horseback riding, great books, golf games, and, above all else, love—are the necessary distractions that enable us to live. Pick your distractions well, Elizabeth, they will define your life.

  It’s ridiculous to have one’s life changed by a college kid on an acid trip. I stood there in my khaki pants, my short-sleeved shirt from Penney’s, and my loafers, and felt as unfree as the most chained-and-bound prisoner. Sorry for the hyperbole. It is a common criticism of my work—colors too bright, brushstrokes too broad—but this is something you see in white male artists of my generation, truly the last white men to be freed from bondage, the bondage of our own creation, the uniform of suits and ties, neat houses with green lawns, pretty wives, and sweet children. We burst free. We burst free.

  The kid started throwing shit, staplers, pens and pencils, a coffee mug. He raised his feet and danced like some crazy Irishman. From the admissions desk, he climbed up onto a metal cabinet, the whole time shouting about how we were dying and he was living, we were darkness, he was light. You could see spit flying out of his mouth, his face flushed almost purple, until the head nurse, Mrs. Kilpatrick, got to him, jabbed a needle in his thigh, and let him tumble down into the waiting arms of the orderlies and nurses who, if there were any beauty in the world, would catch us all the way they caught that boy.

  Alan Casterman, a guy who sat a cubicle away from me and made me look bad by actually working, said, “That was fucked-up.” He went back to his cubicle.

  It was almost four o’clock. I left for the day.

  I went home to Jenny. She was in a sour mood, having spent the day with her younger sister and her sister’s two daughters, ages three and thirteen months. She was the only childless one in the park, her two arms dangling uselessly. If motherhood is the apotheosis of femininity, what is its opposite? I was in a sour mood, thinking the whole drive home of how much I hated my life. In every car I passed, there was a man, by himself behind a wheel, and the road stretched on and on and led nowhere. We were all living the same lives. We were interchangeable. If I could have caught the eye of the guy in the green Dodge Dart, we could have swapped places. I would drive to his house, he to mine, and our griefs and frustrations would be the same. I was Vladimir and he was Estragon, or I was Estragon and he was Vladimir. I make the kids in my Intro to Modernism class read Waiting for Godot, but existentialism is old news to them. They don’t care that their lives are meaningless; they check their email, they plan a hookup, they go on; duh, everyone goes on. In 1966, though, there were choices to be made.

  I am making excuses for myself, Elizabeth. Inside some people there is a block of rage, a hidden organ that you cannot see with a CT scan or exploratory surgery, but it is there, solid, pulsating, bloody, and inoperable, and it has a life of its own. It is passed from generation to generation. At times, I have consoled myself with the idea that it is in everyone; and in some lives, it is fed by circumstances, crappy parents, lashes with belts and switches, hungry bellies, disappointments in love, mush for brains, but I am not sure. If it is in you, Elizabeth, I am sure it is the tiniest nugget, vestigial like your appendix. It is in me, Elizabeth, and I wish the sight of a little girl I have loved, all grown-up, in a white gown, with the smoothest skin and a smile that forgives everything, could cure me. If anything could, you would think it would be that. It would be the fact that you once offered me a four-leaf clover that you had found after the most painstaking and concentrated search, g
ave it to me because you rightly sensed I needed the luck more than you did. I still have that clover, Elizabeth; they can last forever pressed into the pages of a book, dry and brittle but still green.

  I left Jenny behind. She was bruised and bloody. I knocked out a tooth, and she looked up at me, gap-toothed, with the face of a five-year-old. Do not forgive me when I say I vomited in the driveway before I got in the car and left. It was the splattered drops of blood that made me sick, not her injured face. I did not call a doctor or an ambulance. I left a coward. I did not want to go to jail. I did not want to face Jenny’s father or her sisters or her sisters’ husbands who might do to me what I had done to her. I drove away from North Carolina in 1966, a place where there were so many opportunities for heroism, where the blacks were facing down fire hoses and the students were protesting the war and children were signing up to become orphans rather than continue the ways of their parents. I landed in New York where you could call yourself an artist if you shot dope in your veins and stood up once a month and recited poetry or put a dab of color on something white and blank or kicked a leg in the air and called it a dance. I fell in love about a thousand times between 1966 and 1969. I could tell you about those years, or you could just listen to Leonard Cohen. I think I was happy; I am honestly not sure even though I wasn’t shooting as much dope then as I did when I came back from Vietnam. I loved the way heroin made me feel, but there were other things to do—walk down to the Battery and stare at the water, work a few shifts as an orderly at St. Vincent’s so I could buy food, cook a pot of soup, feed myself and anyone nearby. Buy paint and canvas, paint on the canvas, try to sell it in Washington Square. Sketch tourists outside the Metropolitan and try to sell them the sketches. The days went by in a blur of fucking and cooking and eating and drawing. I make a mean Hungarian goulash, Elizabeth. I will cook it for you and your husband one day, in one of those gleaming new pots and pans that are wrapped in white and tied with golden bows and sitting on the table in the foyer next to the guest book that I signed with a big scrawl because years from now I want someone to know I was here.

  Let me tell you something about the government of the United States of America. It is more powerful than God, omniscient, omnipotent. Letters notifying me that it was my turn to serve my country were mailed to every address I had ever lived at, three houses in Troy, five squats, two SROs, seven apartments. The envelopes went unopened. I knew what they were. Everyone who saw them or touched them or even sat in the same room with them knew what they were. They vibrated, they pulsed, they smelled, they emitted a signal that could be sensed by dogs, men under thirty, and their mothers. I ran away from them, all the way down to Atlanta, where your father was living in a ranch house on Lindbergh Drive near the Varsity Junior. He was married to your mom and starting his life. I missed the wedding. Unlike the draft letters, the invitation had not found me. Josh didn’t blink an eye when I showed up, didn’t ask how I had gotten there—dodging conductors on a series of trains because I couldn’t afford a ticket, hitchhiking, then finally walking down Piedmont Road past Cheshire Bridge and the strip joints and the head shops—you would not recognize it now. Where have all the peep shows gone? Long time passing, gone to Whole Foods, everyone; when will they ever learn? It was dinnertime, and your mother was making spaghetti and meatballs. Your father welcomed me in and your mother came out; she had on denim hip-huggers and a white shirt knotted at the waist and a frilly white apron, and there was a dab of sauce on her cheek, and, forgive me, I confused the smell of tomato sauce and the warmth of the house and the relief of seeing your father, my best friend, with love, and I do not say this justifies what I did, but I was pretty sure I would not be returning from Vietnam. They said the stupid and the soft did not survive, and I counted myself among them. I heard someone say, “Mommy,” and your brother toddled out in footy pajamas, hair freshly washed and brushed away from his face. Your mother picked him up, held him on her hip, and nuzzled his face, a spontaneous act of love the likes of which I had never seen or experienced. I honestly could not recall my mother ever kissing me, and I had a spasm of self-pity and envy, yes, envy of that two-year-old child.

  Your father, your kind and forgiving father, thought he could get me out of the draft. Technically, I was still married. If I enrolled in school and was married, I could seek a deferment. If that didn’t work, he said Marty would do it. He was done with med school, was a first-year resident. Marty could come up with a reason not to go, astigmatism, bone spurs. Annette put dinner on the table. Since college, she had grown her hair long and straight, and filled out. Did you know that your mother was only sixteen when she went to college? We were babies; at sixteen now, the kids are still being driven to parties. When my students get to college—eighteen years old at a minimum, sometimes older because they have taken gap years in Europe or Thailand or Argentina—they don’t even know how to do their laundry. With all their internet access and technology, they think they’re so grown-up, but they stay children so much longer now that the Russkies aren’t planting spies among us or sneaking missiles into Cuba, now that there’s no draft and the hookers and the homeless have been taken off the streets and sent to rehab, now that the crazy people are on the thirteenth floor of the public hospital, and now that it’s clear that Eliot was right and it will end with a whimper, not a bang, so what’s the point in carrying signs and protesting? Nothing changes, and a slow decline merits no tears. She looked so beautiful when she put the bowl of spaghetti on a table covered with a tablecloth in that house that she kept so clean, where I was sure no one had ever overdosed or slept in a pool of vomit or sloshed bleach over a bloodstain.

  The living room of the house on Lindbergh Drive had blue carpeting. I lay on the floor with my head on a pillow, and your father ran through the options. He was excited about the law as only people at the very beginning of their career can be. He warned me against fleeing to Canada or Mexico. Quoting legal precedent, he cited how I could be stripped of my citizenship, what this might mean for my career, for my Social Security earnings (paltry though they would be), or for my chances at graduate school. He judged that no one would be forgiving draft dodgers anytime soon, and though he and I and your mother all agreed that the war was unnecessary, we disagreed on the level of stupidity, the duplicity of our leaders, and the reason that it had started in the first place. They did not believe in conspiracy theories and had trouble conceiving of pure evil. Poor judgment was their tepid response to the slaughter of innocents, a response that can only come from the purely innocent.

  Your parents said good night to me and went into their bedroom, to the bed they shared together, and this being 1969 and your parents being from good breeding, this was likely the only bed each of them had ever shared with another person. I wasn’t tired. In New York, eleven o’clock was when everyone woke up. I had a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil, and I found their wedding picture. I thought I would make them a belated wedding present, a sketch from the photo. At the age of twenty-eight, I was absolutely certain of my inimitable talent. Now thirty-two years later, I am fully cognizant of my mediocrity. In fact, mediocrity is my aspiration, and I feel fairly certain that I often fall short of that. That is why we all miss our twenties, with its confusions and delusions. I started with your mother, in a long white dress and lace sleeves. I started with her hands, her arms, up to her face. I couldn’t get her face quite right, so I worked on her face over and over again. I had to separate the face I had seen that night, the fuller face, the longer hair, from the one in the picture. I didn’t know she was pregnant—she didn’t know she was pregnant—but the part of my brain that is an artist knew, and I knew she was different from the girl in the picture or the girl on the golf course or the girl waiting in the lobby of our freshman dorm for your father since no girls were allowed upstairs. I crumpled the paper. I had a joint in my backpack and went outside to smoke it. It was November. November was colder in the sixties than it is now. All the trees were bare. There was a crescent mo
on. The stars spiked the sky. I knew I was too lazy not to go to war. I didn’t love my life enough, and no one loved me enough to make it worth avoiding. In fact, no one had ever wanted me more than the U.S. Army wanted me at that moment. I went back inside, lay on the floor of the living room where I had left the pillow, and stared at the ceiling.

  I fell asleep. I woke when your mother came out to cover me with a blanket. She was wearing a white nightgown, and for a minute, in my sleepy haze, I thought she was someone else. I swear I did when I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward me. She stared at me for a minute, then said, “I didn’t want to wake you. I thought you might be cold. The house is old and drafty.”

  I said, “It’s a palace compared to where I have been.”

  “I hope that isn’t true.”