The Poison Tree (28 page)

“Reflecting on the past,” he said, with a familiar twitch of his jaw, “and on us.” I moved closer to the middle of the room, and saw by the candlelight
that he was much thinner and unshaven. He was sweating, and looked like he hadn't slept for days. He probably had a fever.

“Aren't you well?” I asked. He kept his face averted.

“Doing all right,” he muttered. “I'm okay, so long as …”

“What?” I couldn't understand him because of the low timbre of his voice and the crackling sign outside. “I asked if you were well.”

Adar cleared his throat and said something. His voice was so hoarse I couldn't hear.

“I'm doing fine,” I said. I wanted to sound fine, but not too fine. “I'm a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. But I guess you knew that? I'm better now … better than before, I mean. I mean I'm doing better than when I left… .” I was nervous, and couldn't stop filling silences with the sound of my own voice. I cut myself off and blurted, “Before I say anything further, I want to apologize to you, Adar. For leaving in that way. It was a cowardly thing, unworthy of me, and—I'm very, very sorry.”

Then there followed a long and terrible moment of silence, during which the only audible sound was the sign outside. Then Adar's body shuddered, and he stood up for the first time. Is he crying, I thought? Is he actually crying? I suddenly remembered his laugh, which wasn't even a real laugh; it was an old man's laugh. But I'd never heard him cry, and it made me afraid. In that moment, I had the very distinct feeling that one of us was going to die here. Why had I come? I had fallen into a trap. I had to get out!

Adar walked up so close to me so that our faces were just inches apart.

“I hate you!” His voice was now audible, and carried the threat of intense and immediate retribution. He pushed me onto the bed, and while I was lying there, slapped me hard across the face. Twice.

“You ruined my life!” he screamed, standing above me, shaking. You ruined both our lives. We were so close … had everything—our Union—and then … nothing. You hurt me. I think … I don't know what to do anymore. Abandoned me! You abandoned me!”

From towering above me on the bed, he moved to the floor, where he curled up in a corner, and began sobbing.

I had no idea how I would ever be able to extricate myself from that horrible room. He was obviously in great pain, and I had been the cause. At the same time, I knew now I had to leave. For the first time, I felt sorry for
him. Paradoxically, until he hit me, I always assumed he was the dominant one in our friendship. Now that he had slapped me, I knew our positions were reversed: I was the stronger. It was he who seemed lost. Lost and sick.

Adar slowly rose from the floor and added, “I'm sorry. I have no idea where all that came from.” He stood up and shuddered, then approached me again, laying his hands on both my shoulders. His hard grip felt strange, awkward, not like what I had expected. I had always wanted him to touch me when we were together before, not necessarily in a sexual way, just as a physical affirmation of what we meant to one another. Now his hands were on me—bony, an old man's touch— holding me captive, and his touch was repulsive. His face had a darkness I had not noticed before. The beetling brows, the clenching jaws, the slightly hooked nose—all repelled me. There was a weakness, a helplessness I had never noticed before. After a few uncomfortable seconds in this fixed position, the sign crackled again, and I tore myself away.

The room had only a sink, a miniature Ivory soap, and two dirty hand towels. The shower and toilet were down the hall. The two twin beds were metal cots maybe six inches apart. They had filthy striped mattresses, and the green walls had empty rectangles where pictures once hung. Below them there were dark red patches where bugs had been smashed against the walls. Although it was a different kind of seediness, I thought briefly of our last meeting in Canarsie, which changed our friendship.

I stayed, and we spent the night sitting on those creaking cots talking until noon the following day. Neither of us slept.

Sometime during the night, Adar asked if I was seeing girls. I was surprised at the question, and confessed that I had been seeing someone, although I no longer was.

“You felt you needed it?” he added, provocatively.

“I—I'm not sure what you mean,” I replied.

When I mentioned that the woman (I used the word “woman”) I had been seeing was older than me, married, and my teacher, he smiled. But it was a sinister smile—a sneer, really. He never said so, but it was obvious he was judging me for being with Laura.

Then he told me he asked because he was now free, free of sexual desire. If I was lucky, I too might reach that level of pure abstinence. After Laura,
being free of desire didn't seem all that fortunate, but I chose not to contradict him. I asked about his health, noting that he looked thinner. Yes, he had lost a good deal of weight, but that was only because of the healthy way he was eating. Fish and dairy products were now gone from his diet, and he had never felt better. He was sweating, his cheeks were hollow, and he looked far from healthy, but again, I didn't contradict him. He told me about a book by Alan Watts he was reading, and said he now practiced Buddhism. He would teach me to meditate if I wanted to learn. I saw his sallow skin and tight cheekbones covered with brown stubble, and imagined I saw his skull lurking beneath his taut face—a horrible image. Was this all my fault?

He stopped painting, he said, but would return to it soon. When I expressed shock, he said he needed to earn money. He worked at Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn, and although his job didn't pay much, he was trying to save money for tuition and put aside a little something each month for his parents, who were both sick. I don't know if this was said to make me feel guilty, or if he saw me avert my eyes.

I told Adar that leaving New York the way I did was shameful. I explained how impossible it had been for me to work for my uncle; I couldn't face going in there one more day. I knew he needed to earn money for his tuition, but I just couldn't go back. That was why I fled.

“I never realized you were so unhappy, so desperate,” Adar said, and apologized for unintentionally coercing me to work for my uncle just because he needed money.

“That was not worthy of me,” he said.

On the third day of our visit, I blurted out my anxiety about being “swallowed” by our friendship. I told him that however much I respected and admired him, it was better not to try and resume our friendship.

“I need to find out what kind of man I am, Adar.” The word “man” sounded strange in my mouth. Just strange, not false. “I don't think it would be wise for you to come back with me to Madison,” I said, frightened at the effect my words might provoke.

“I knew that the moment you opened the door,” he said. “Even before I saw your face. I knew by the sound of your walk.”

I didn't ask him what he meant.

Adar said he would remain a few more days at the Y. Perhaps a visit to
the Art Institute would inspire him to paint again. I thought of the strange old man at the desk downstairs, and wondered why anyone would spend even a second more here than was absolutely necessary.

Before I left, Adar gave me a small package wrapped in a page from the
Chicago Tribune
. It was a framed pencil and blue watercolor sketch of a young man in profile. It was what he had been working on when I intruded on him that first night. I studied the face, eyes cast down, head slightly averted.

It was me, furtive and insecure, poised awkwardly in between the boy I was, and the something else I might one day become. In a few strokes, he had managed to capture who I was at that moment, at the cusp between adolescence and manhood. I turned back to express my thanks. But he was turned away again, staring out at the flickering sign. He looked like a frail, old man. I closed the door gently.

According to the calendar, it was spring. Unfortunately, in Wisconsin the calendar was immaterial and spring might not show itself for months. Lake Mendota was still frozen solid. Ducks hopped around, desperate for breaks in the ice. But the freezing cold outside seemed only to whet the blazing heat of political activity sweeping the campus. A chair came crashing through a window in one of my classes, injuring a girl with broken glass. The National Guard was beginning to make its presence felt on a daily basis, and the sight of fresh-scrubbed eighteen year olds wielding bayonets outside classrooms was no longer shocking. Classes were routinely canceled. Sit-down strikes in Bascom Hall were a normal occurrence. The entire campus and the city of Madison had become a tiny fortress of radicalism within America's Dairyland. Dwayne Pfefferkorn was long gone, and he wrote me that his transfer to the University of Wisconsin's Oshkosh campus had now become official.

In my class on the modern novel, the professor was lecturing on Julien Sorel's arrival in Verriers when a small band of seven or eight radical students entered the lecture hall, mounted the little platform where the professor had his notes carefully assembled, and began fiddling with his papers. They deliberately mixed up the pages, “accidentally” dropping them on the floor, and talking to one another to disrupt the lecture. The professor kept his cool fairly well and continued speaking, but, seeing that he was ignoring their taunts, the students began to chant: “HO-HO-HO CHI MINH—THE VIET CONG'S GONNA WIN!” in counterpoint to the professor's comments on
The Red and the Black
. After a few minutes, one girl in front of me stood up and shouted at the protesters to leave. Then, several more students rose and started moving down the aisle to forcibly evict them. At that moment, when
violent confrontation seemed inevitable, a squad of helmeted policemen wielding clubs and shields stormed through the back entrance to the lecture theatre and chased the radicals out.

The professor erupted into a high-pitched squeal: “PIGS, PIGS! OUT OF MY CLASSROOM! ACADEMIC FREEDOM! I MUST HAVE ACADEMIC FREEDOM!”

Nothing made sense to me. I was confused by the scene of utter anarchy that ensued with the cops chasing the protesters out of the lecture hall. I wondered about the academic's tepid response to those who had disrupted his lecture, contrasted with his violent one toward the helmeted police who had restored order.

I turned eighteen, but with Grandma dead, no one remembered my birthday but the Selective Service. They sent me a second notice to register for the draft. Again, I disposed of it, not in protest against the war, but as a gesture of contempt for politics and the crazy world spinning around me. I was not a hawk, not a dove, nor a conscientious objector. What was I?

Since meeting Adar in that Chicago YMCA, I felt purged of my guilt. Nevertheless, I tried to adhere to some of his principles of spiritual purity. I ate no meat, did not socialize with others, and generally continued to feel superior to my benighted fellow classmates. I drew the line at levitation, which was, I conceded, probably unrealistic. I was no longer in Laura's class, but despite her announcement that we would not see one another anymore, we continued to meet every now and then for the next month or two, until we broke it off entirely. The sight of her striding in thigh-high boots across campus still made me feel uncomfortable—but now we were both ashamed of our desire. We met secretively, either underneath the glass case in the Historical Society, or off-campus at the Henry Vilas Zoo where the apes and reptiles offered tropical escape from the Wisconsin cold, and we were unlikely to be spotted by her fellow graduate students, who, according to Laura, lurked everywhere. I had been so in love with her, but all that remained now was impersonal, furtive sex. I lay on top of her, and through a thrusting of her hips and pelvis, she managed to raise and lower
us both, providing an anti-climactic climax. That seemed enough for a time, until it simply wasn't.

“It's time,” she said simply after one of our loveless outings, and I muttered a passionless, “Okay.” And that was it. I actually felt grateful that she had initiated our breakup. I never would have had the courage. She still had not told me her last name, and I never asked again.

I was still too much under Adar's influence to dabble in anything that would allow me to lose control. Unlike most of my peers, I never tried drugs. In childhood, my father exerted an unseen hand dictating all my actions; when I fell in love with Adar, another sort of authority was substituted—monastic self-absorption in a solitary palace of art. So, instead of trying any of the various opiates that proliferated, and in keeping with my self-image as a pure, solitary intellectual, I let my beard and hair grow, and even began smoking a pipe.

My father would have been displeased with the gradual changes in my appearance, but he hadn't seen me since Grandma's funeral. However, when he learned that I had not registered with the Selective Service, he was furious. The Selective Service wrote him at his home address since they received no response from me. They wrote saying I had to report to the Selective Service Bureau in New York for a mandatory physical immediately. Since I had not registered, I no longer had an automatic student deferment and was draft-eligible.

“YOU GODDAMN STUPID SONOFABITCH!” his voice boomed through the telephone. “I should let them just fucking drag you off to Vietnam. You deserve this, you idiot.”

I agreed that it was stupid to fail to register and claim the student deferment to which I was entitled. But secretly I thought that there were worse things for a young writer than the army. Tuning out his curses, I imagined the remarkable material I would get from a tour of duty in Vietnam. I thought of Hemingway and the young British poets of the First World War. Their exposure to mustard gas and war in the trenches made them into great artists. Then again, I had to admit to myself that many of them had been maimed physically and emotionally—or had never returned at all.