Excerpts

Part I 1 Kendrick Löwenstein. I'd heard her name for almost a whole semester before I ever saw her. I was taking a philosophy class, a terrible class actually, with a student-­hating, prehistoric professor who never gave lectures or "unpacked" anything but instead read aloud to us for the entire hour, as if we'd gathered there for a bedtime story. To eat up some time before turning to his disintegrating notebook and intoning his notes on Epictetus--­notes unchanged, was the word on the street, since the time of the '68 student protests, when a few subversive asides crept in, among them an oblique reference to the world actually having ended in 1908 due to the Tunguska Meteor Event--­he would call the roll. There were certain people who never showed up, and on these he would hang, repeating their names over and over again, a dull needle stuck in a bad groove. Kendrick Löwenstein, he would read. Getting no response, he would repeat: Kendrick Löwenstein. He'd look up, squinting his eyes under caterpillar eyebrows. Kendrick Löwenstein! he would demand, warning her that she risked giving offense and commanding her to appear. Kendrick Löwenstein? he would say finally, wistfully, lingering over the name as if he were a lover and she the one who got away. I remember very clearly the first time I finally saw her. It was about four in the morning, just after bar time, and I was trucking up Broadway with my motorcycle jacket stuffed with packs of Marlboros and a six of $2.99 Knickerbocker beer under my arm. I'm not even sure where I was going. Probably I'd been hanging out with Trina, Audrey, and Fang-­Hua and I'd volunteered to do the beer-­and-­cigarette run, or I'd been at a bar and I was out looking to prolong the mischief, but who can remember so many years down the line? Anyway, right there on the corner of Broadway and 116th was this girl. And she looked so dramatic, so absurdly exaggerated, that I almost laughed out loud. It was freezing cold, but the top of her coat was pulled down, swathed around her freakishly pale, almost alien-­white shoulders, and held closed over her breastbone with one long-­fingered hand. Worn like this it took on the aspect of an opera cape, or some last shred of grandeur clung to, literally, by deposed royalty. With her other hand she held by the corner an enormous clutch purse, which was covered in some kind of ancient linsey-­woolsey needlepoint fabric and which sagged with (I'd learn only later) masses and masses of stolen dexies. I remember thinking she had a kind of arrogant, indolent lower lip, and I got the feeling she had just left some louche company. She was like a tragic heroine, worse for the wear--­glamorous, haggard, in extremis--­and she was made up like a silent movie star. Except that she had electric-­blue hair. There was something to this. The thing of it was, she was a mess, standing there with her lips parted, smudge-­lidded and surprised at herself, with her sulky and offended face. But I knew from experience how much discipline it took to have blue hair. Green hair, we all knew, was easy. It was what you got when you tried to dye your hair blue. You'd bleach and bleach your brains out, but it was never enough, so your hair would go a crazy straw yellow. Then you'd slather on the Manic Panic blue dye and get . . . green hair. You had to have real patience, real technique, to have blue hair. And so, looking at this girl standing on the corner of 116th and Broadway at 4:12 a.m. on a cold winter night in the late 1980s, I thought, Here's a girl who, all evidence to the contrary, has a backup plan. "Got a light?" was the first thing she said to me. Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand. I lit her cigarette for her--­it was almost the same blue as her hair, with a long gold filter, a Nat Sherman Fantasia, I would learn--­and when it was clear she was going nowhere, I put down the six-­pack, took out my own cigarettes, and lit one. It felt wrong to leave her standing there on the corner. I was still holding the lighter when she took it out of my hand. "Cool," she said, turning it over and over and looking at it. "Why'd you paint it black?" "They made them like that during World War Two. To save the brass. And you could light up in the trenches and the metal wouldn't reflect the light." She flicked it open, lit the flame, snapped it shut. "Can I have it?" she said. I laughed. "Um, no?" I said. "Oh, come on, can't I have it?" she said. She was holding it up in front of her face, clicking it open, flicking the flame, snapping it shut again and again. I realized with this that she was a rich kid. Because middle-­class people, let alone working-­class, don't go around expecting stuff for free. I grabbed the lighter back on the last snap. "It was my dad's," I said, putting it in my pocket. "Your dad was in World War Two?" she said. I said yeah. "My dad's way old too," she said. "How old's your dad?" "He's dead," I said. "I wish my dad were dead," she said. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, threw her head back, and exhaled. She tilted her head down and looked at me fiercely. "Actually, I wish my fucking mother were dead. I could chuck her down a well." She was . . . theatrical. But there was also something strangely languid about her, distracted. She threw me off. I would later learn that her parted-­lip, surprised look was what her face settled into at rest. I would go on to wonder if this might have had something to do with her having done lots of drugs since the age of eleven. She took her hand from her coat and one side slipped down her shoulder, revealing a thin dress, cut '40s style, rhinestone clips pulling its neckline square. With her heavy-­lidded, rounded eyes, her pouting mouth and long neck, she reminded me of a Pontormo Madonna. But without any calm, without any quiet. "Aren't you fucking freezing?" is what I said to her. She smiled. "Don't you know," she said to me, "that crazy people don't feel the cold?" She made no move to pull her coat back up again. She seemed rooted to the spot, smoking her blue cigarette there on the corner by the Chock Full o'Nuts with its perpetually sweating windows. I really was freezing and I had to pee, but I couldn't leave her there. "You just hanging around out here?" I said to her. "Yeah, whatever," she said. Then she sang a line from "I'm Waiting for My Man." It seemed like a weirdly public place to be meeting a drug dealer. Then I wondered if she meant something else and she was actually, what, a prostitute? But you really didn't see a lot of punk-­rock prostitutes on the Upper West Side in the 1980s. "You live here?" I gestured down 116th Street. "Sort of," she said. "Do you?" "Yeah," I said, and pointed. Then I abruptly retracted my hand, because the building I'd pointed to was a dorm. She cocked an amused eyebrow at me. "You go to Barnard?" she asked. I cleared my throat, feeling deeply uncool. "Yeah," I admitted. She rolled her eyes in a complete 360-­degree lunatic circle. "So do I," she said. And with this, our pretensions that we were as bad as all that melted into air. "I'm Chess," I said, putting out my hand. "My name is Frances--­Francesca Varani, actually. But everyone calls me Chess." "Kendra," she said, "Kendra Löwenstein." "Damn, girl--­you're Kendrick Löwenstein?" I said. "You better get that shit to class!" * I should probably back up a moment and talk about what got me thinking of her. It was another cold winter, some twenty years later, when I got a piece of news that sent me right back to Kendra and her family. It was a pretty dire time jobwise, and I'd just stumbled into a new gig as a bid writer in a loony little office in the Garment District. The whole sick crew there sort of bears some words, as does where my head was at just about then, age thirty-­nine and feeling blindsided by how quickly time was passing. The Acme Corporation, as it was called, was a "language services" company that specialized in plucking consecutive interpreters out of the ether and dropping them into grim situations such as family court appearances, determinations of Medicaid fraud, and deportation hearings. As far as I could tell, though, no one in the Acme office did a lick of work. There was a sales guy, Walter, a friendly, mildly defeated fellow who dealt in uncontrollable sighs and who spent most of his days eating sad, crunchy snacks behind the privacy of his workstation divider. There was the team that dispatched the interpreters: a creepy manager (male) and four young and good-­looking women, all with long and lustrous hair, as if they'd been hired because they fulfilled a type. The three who did any kind of actual work were constantly quivering with disgust or terror, while the fourth, Nikki, an elaborately lazy yet hot-­tempered twentysomething from Staten Island, had the worst trash mouth I'd ever encountered at a job. She had near-­screaming conversations with the lecher of a dispatch manager where she'd yell across the office, You answer the fuckin' phone--­my nails are wet! I could not believe I had to work in this place. This is no mere flimsy figure of speech: I just could not believe I had to work there. I kept waiting for Allen Funt to pop down through the acoustic tile and say, Just kidding, hon! You can go now! But this was right when the first shocks of the recession were rippling through Manhattan, and no one in the industry I typically freelanced for--­architecture--­had a crumb to spare. Everywhere around us industries were tanking, and just a month before, my best friend, Trina, had been laid off from a media company where she'd been a photo editor for sixteen years as print media seemed to go the way of the eight-­track tape. And my own guy, Fitz, an artist who earned his bread in animation, had been thoroughly unemployed for months, as "outsourcing" and new technology killed off nearly every studio on the East Coast. So the prevailing notion was that one was lucky to have a job at all. However, "lucky to have a job" was an idea that, dating back to my first reading of Bartleby the Scrivener as a cringing, glasses-­wearing preteen, could only make me want to vomit. But! We had rent to pay. Fitz and I did have a little bit of savings, and he was getting $342 a week in unemployment, but the idea of blowing through this and having to tap a relative for a loan filled us with deep Catholic shame. Fitz ate himself alive trying to come up with something he could do to earn money, and went around the neighborhood picking up applications at every last Ukrainian grocer and taco shack until we did some basic math and realized that, going by the minimum wage of $7.15, after taxes he'd actually make more on unemployment. Plus, I reminded him--­all the while feeling huge discomfort over having become a "reminding" type of woman--­that the most important thing for him was to get his degree. He'd reenrolled at CUNY, and ditching college again just to fry up buffalo wings on Avenue D seemed criminal. Besides, truth be told, with my many years of schooling and "wide breadth of work experience"--­porca miseria!--­I was the employable one. Anyway, to get back to the story here, I'd got a random call from Acme telling me they'd just lost their bid writer and had something big in the pipeline. Could I come in for an interview? I hadn't spent any real time in the Garment District for years, and getting out of the subway at Penn Station and walking west, I was surprised to pass into the ominous cloud of dinge that hung over the streets, something to do with decades of underpaid labor and the still-­lingering scent of Gambino crime family stogies. I passed shops with names like Spandex House, Stretch World, Textile Kingdom, places that sold to the trade, al por mayor, their windows showing endless evidence of the strange trickle-­down from haute couture to discount-­bin schmatte. I was running early, and I stopped to look at a polka-­dot catsuit trimmed with military insignia and then, farther west, a beautifully made portrait of Barack Obama rendered entirely in sequins. More than anything, the vibe of the sweatshop still hung heavy over the terrain, and I got to thinking of my various great-­aunts who spent thirty, forty, fifty years hunched over sewing machines on these very streets, trying to sew their way up the fabric of the American Dream. I found myself in front of the building, a sooty old workhorse of a place with a retrofitted black-­marble lobby dating from the 1980s. The security fellow, a melancholy Gujarati whose strange habits I would come to know well, immediately guessed where I was going, which somehow surprised me. Upstairs on Acme's floor, I picked up the phone, and the man I'd spoken with, Mr. Walker--­Acme's president--­said he'd be right out. He'd sounded erratic earlier, voluble and strange, but I had no idea of the real degree of this until I saw the person who greeted me now. The first thing I noticed about Mr. Walker was his hair. It was copious, sculptural, and uncommonly blond. The second thing was that his glasses were on upside down. When I looked closer, however, I realized the problem was that they were actually women's glasses, of the gold-­braid-­trimmed, peekaboo-­stem variety. This idea was confirmed later, when I met his wife, Tootsie, who had exactly the same pair. Besides the glasses, Mr. Walker wore a wrinkled dress shirt, buttoned crookedly in sight-­gag fashion, and, one could not help but notice, overly tight trousers. He was lean and fit, with oddly bright eyes--­cokehead, I thought--­and he told me to call him, in all seriousness, Dee-­Dee. He talked a mile a minute in a constant yammer, asking and answering his own questions: So did you get here all right, of course you got here all right, you're here aren't you, you want a coffee, sure you want a coffee, it's free, I mean--­who doesn't like something free? By now he'd taken me into his office and closed the door. He told me they'd just got in a big Request for Proposal and unfortunately their bid writer, Mrs. Churtie-­Matz, had been afflicted with a persecutory delusional disorder and split the scene. Bad news for them, because this proposal was due right after the holidays and there was plenty to be done on it. All this time as I listened to him yammer I was trying not to react to his oddly filthy play-­grown-­up office (cracked vinyl Chesterfield sofa, Wayne Gretzky inspirational poster, orange carpeting covered in violent burn marks) or to his ludicrous hair and overall hophead manner. But I guess I passed some test, because in a moment he asked me to meet his second-­in-­command, Petey, as well as Cissy, the ops manager, and Will, the "money guy." All three spilled into his office immediately, as if they'd had their ears pressed to the door. Petey appeared at once paranoid and anesthetized and had the staring-­into-­the-­abyss look of a late-­career Francis Bacon, while Will seemed like some worried bear with a WTF look on his face (later I'd learn that he was amazed that anyone who had gone to "fancy schools" would want to work "in a dump like this"--­even though, not to put too fine a point on it, I did not want to work there). Cissy freaked me out because of the mean, witchy cast she had to her face, not to mention her totally crazy-­looking, seemingly Halloween-­themed dye job. I thought maybe her scowl signified that she was always shunted aside as an older woman in this world of men, so I was careful to acknowledge her and greet her especially, at which point she smiled, and the witchy aspect disappeared entirely. Well, we had a good meeting on the face of it. They told me they were partnering with a big D.C. firm on the proposal, because it was only together that they'd have the manpower to fulfill such huge, lucrative interpreting contracts. The D.C. firm already had the huge, lucrative contract for this or that arm of the Defense Department or the DOJ or Homeland Security--­whatever it was, it was worth billions. Dee-­Dee licked his lips. That was when I felt my back stiffen. From here the conversation took a different turn, and I began to understand why the place felt so sinister to me. "So the idea is to get in while the getting's good," Dee-­Dee told me, "because you know once Obama comes in . . ." He made a slice at his neck. Have I mentioned all this was taking place late in 2008? Dee-­Dee meant, of course, that he feared once Obama took office, he would cut off their livelihood. Oh, I realized, these people support the war. The wars. They support the wars because it's money in their pocket. They are Mutter Courage dragging their wares across the battlefield. I just didn't know people like this. I did know people who supported the wars for other bullshit "moral" reasons, but I'd never met anyone who got behind war because it was good business. "But the other side's good for us too, you know," Dee-­Dee went on, beaming his cokehead smile at me. "With Obama there'll be plenty of social services contracts: Medicaid, welfare--­all that shinola. You see, Frances, it's a win-­win for us. Interpreting's a recession-­proof industry." They were thrilled to make money off other people's misery. I must get out here, I thought to myself. "May I call you Franny?" Dee-­Dee said suddenly. "Absolutely not," I said. After I shook hands with the others, Dee-­Dee and I reconvened to talk turkey. I'd quoted him my usual rate on the phone, but in the next few minutes he slashed me down to an hourly rate that was less than half of that. Then he told me that sum was a lot more than what he'd been expecting to pay me, and named a figure that suggested I'd be better off frying up chicken wings on Avenue D. "I'll give you the good money," he said to me, "but don't expect a raise anytime soon--­you've screwed yourself out of that." I sat gazing at him as if he were Gogo, the talking dodo. He also told me they'd be interviewing other people, so don't get too cocky. It was hard not to make a flip comment at this, but I held my tongue, which is maybe what twelve years of Catholic school will do to you. He saw me to the door and shook my hand, which I immediately wiped off on my skirt. I couldn't wait to get home and tell Fitz how wacko the whole place was. When I got in it wasn't yet noon, and I found Fitz at the kitchen table, chin in hand, doing math calculations on the back of an envelope. He'd made us a big salad for lunch--­he was a man who cautiously invited one to admire his handiwork--­and even though it was early we were both ravenous, since anxiety had been causing us to pop out of bed fully awake and crazed with money worries at five every morning. I told Fitz about freakazoid Dee-­Dee, planet-­struck Petey, witchy Cissy, and worried Will, dwelling for comic effect on the office decor, Dee-­Dee's bait-­and-­switch stinginess, and the all-­around hideousness of capitalizing on the misery of others, something I could never possibly do. Fitz, with a look of concern--­he was a tall, skinny man, with a bit of a stoop and the kind of intelligent, sympathetic face that made women of a certain age want to take his arm--­told me I didn't have to take the job. We'd find a way to get by. Well, I said, they probably wouldn't hire me anyway. Just then the telephone rang, and when I picked it up, it was Cissy asking me could I start tomorrow at eight o'clock? * Thus I found myself actually working in that loony bin. I was Alice, abruptly fallen down the rabbit hole, all my nice ideas about myself smarting with insult. On my first day there, as I sat reading the three-­hundred-­page Request for Proposal, I looked around at the nearly blank workstation where I sat. That Mrs. Churtie-­Matz had been a desolate woman was abundantly clear. Heaped on her desk were manila folders covered with big, looping, I-­am-­so-­angry-­I-­can-­barely-­keep-­it-­together handwriting saying things like forms, forms, and other forms. Looking inside, I found them all empty. On her overhead shelf, instead of books was a neat row of family-­sized boxes of off-­brand high-­fiber cereal. But what got me was a little picture hanging at eye level directly in front of me. It was a gag picture of a cat sitting at a typewriter and wearing a pince-­nez, with the words You Want It When? beneath it. What made this so bad--­almost physically painful--­was the fact that I'd seen this very same picture pinned up in the workstation at my first temp job, some twenty years before. Twenty years. It seemed impossible. Looking at that picture of that cat with its stupid pince-­nez, I felt like anything I had done or gained or won for myself in those twenty years had vanished. That cat, with its stupid pince-­nez, told me that those twenty years of living, of learning, were really just for shit. I was spinning my wheels. I was, for all intents and purposes, just the same clueless, self-­deceived, hustling-­after-­chump-­change person I'd been twenty years before. I still reeked of the working class, I hadn't magically become the wise, age-­appropriate matron in a twinset making a gift of securities to my Seven Sisters alma mater. I was just twenty years older. I quietly took the cat with its pince-­nez down from the wall and, looking about me, crunched it in my fist and slammed it into the wastepaper basket. As the days went on and I attempted to adjust to my life's new rhythms, an enormous lassitude came over me. Fitz would pack my lunch each morning, and every day at one o'clock I'd stop work to eat, there at my desk. But this took no time at all, and the monotony of Acme would creep over me, and inevitably I would grab my coat and flee. On the west facade of Macy's was a big video screen, and sometimes-- ­after hours of notating the RFP and its many hundred pages of addenda--­I'd find myself stopping to stare at it and mumble aloud words like "The Macy's Bra Event" with Kaspar Hauser-­like fascination. But standing too long on the sidewalk only meant getting violently shoved aside. People were shopping! In the stores on Thirty-­Fourth Street you could buy shoes, exfoliators, basketballs, but I'd never been much of a shopper unless you're talking books, and I couldn't afford to buy anything anyway. So instead I'd find myself walking. It was cold outside. I'd be bundled up in my big black parka, scarf swaddled around my face like Mort from Bazooka Joe, but as I walked along Thirty-­Fourth Street the December wind blew right through me. Signs of the newly lean times were everywhere, from the heavy traffic in and out of Central Medicaid on the south side of the street, to the number of people lined up for the discount BoltBus to Philly on the north side, to actual signs, such as the sandwich board in front of Soul Fixins' advertising the Bail-­Out Special (fried chicken and vegetable) for only $7.99--­which seemed like a lot of cash to me. It was on one of these early, gloomy days that I came upon a church just past Ninth Avenue. It was hemmed in by big buildings and faced in rusticated limestone, with a series of arched doorways leading inside. It was called St. Michael's, after the archangel. This seemed like a good sign, because Saint Michael was a favorite of mine from way back, perhaps because I started life as a child both fanciful and furious and I dearly wanted a sword with which to smite my enemies. The door was open. Inside was a big statue of Saint Michael in the famous pose, from Guido Reni: the saint stands contrapposto with his weight on his right foot, left foot on the head of Satan. In his hand he holds his sword, and he rears back to bring it down on the devil's writhing neck. I went over to Saint Michael and stood looking at him for a moment. Then I started to cry. I was crying for my mother. I was crying for my friend Keith, who had died of an AIDS-­related illness the year before. Linked in my mind to the death of Keith was the death of my friend Sal, who had died a similarly avoidable death by falling off his fucking roof. None of this I ever got over. I was crying for myself, and for the many things that had been lost. I was crying for the past, and being young then, and having had expectations. I realized mass was about to start, and though I was utterly lapsed, disgusted by the politics of the Church, and no sort of "good Catholic" at all, I wiped my face, went to a pew, and sat myself down. Looking about me, I felt the beauty of the church thrilling me as it would any medieval peasant. It was decorated for Christmas, with great sprays of red poinsettias banking its altar, and though it was cold inside, the silver lamps that hung from the ceiling gave off an aura of comforting warmth. Sitting there, I really did understand how a serf in wooden shoes, covered in mud and wearing burlap underpants, could believe this was the house of God. As the mass went on I spaced out, as I always had as a child, idly looking at the others in attendance: an older man in a pile-­collar coat, a big lady in a yellow hat, a skinny auntie with a floral scarf. I started to fix on the back of a woman who sat a few rows ahead of me. The blue blazer she wore was strange--­severely cut, with shoulders padded in an exaggerated style that wasn't really worn anymore. Plus, it was cold outside: where was her coat? I tuned in enough to hear the reading, which, I remember, was full of hectoring, repetitive verses: I am writing to you, little children . . . I am writing to you, fathers . . . I am writing to you, young people . . . In typically Catholic fashion I didn't know my Bible, and I found myself wondering if the reading was from Paul, because the guy was always such a dick. Suffer not a woman to teach! Better to marry than to burn! I was about to roll my eyes when I looked up at the very old man reading and saw that he was looking right at me. He read: . . . because all that is in the world (the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the arrogance produced by material possessions) is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away with all its desires, but the person who does the will of God remains forever. I felt a prick of strange sensation, of odd familiarity. It was the strong, beautiful language, but it was also the feeling given me by the words the desire of the eyes. How can I explain this? I blinked through my own wanting present and those words took me back to Kendra and her family. The desire of the eyes. Because my eyes in those days had been filled with desire. Kendra Löwenstein. Kendrick Marr-­Löwenstein, properly speaking. The Marr-­Löwenstein family, out of the past. My mind must have flown away thinking about them, because next thing I knew it was the kiss of peace. I remembered that the handshake had largely gone out of style since my childhood and more often than not people would just sort of turn and wave. Each of us was alone on our island. But the young woman in the blue blazer turned to me and actually reached her hand across the pew. We shook hands warmly, and that was when I saw the insignia on her arm and understood: she was a cop. Afterward, as I walked down Thirty-­Fourth Street, another pair of cops caught my eye. These were women too, walking arm in arm like Europeans, both also wearing dress blues; one of them, sharp and cute, had white gloves tucked under her right epaulette. And when I got to Seventh Avenue it was as if a dam had burst. Hundreds of cops spilled out all over the sidewalks outside Madison Square Garden in their fancy blues, hundreds of them. The academy had graduated new cadets, of course! And in my mind's eye I saw a thousand white gloves being thrown into the air all at once, like a huge flock of birds taking wing. The crush on the sidewalk was abruptly too much for me, and I got bumped out onto Thirty-­Fourth Street. I leapt back up on the curb just as a bus sailed by, blaring its horn. I had instant crowd panic and I was almost panting waiting for the light to change. It changed and I ran across Thirty-­Fourth Street, through the moving streams of people, and bounded up on the curb. There was a newsstand at the corner, and as I turned I caught a glimpse of the front page of the New York Times. I stopped in my tracks. What? What was this elaborate trick? What was this freaky, synchronic moment? Because I looked to see, on the front page of the newspaper, the obituary of Clarice Marr. Kendra's mother. Oh my God, I thought. The old bitch finally died. Excerpted from Seminary Boy: A Memoir by John Cornwell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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