The Poison Tree (22 page)

“Where is your self-discipline?” Adar said derisively. “You're treating the whole thing like a joke.”

“It is a joke.”

“Anything I do is an extension of myself,” he said. “Anything. My job is important by virtue of its being done by me.”

The words sounded oddly pompous when he said them.

“We're learning to inventory jackets and cut pants, for God's sake. You can dress it up, but it's not important, or worthy of us.” I used the word “worthy” because it was a part of the vocabulary we had cultivated, and therefore one I thought Adar would respond to. Instead, it was just the opposite.

“You have no idea what you're talking about. You sound like a typical spoiled rich kid from Horace Mann.” My cheeks crimsoned with shame. Then, he mollified his attack, adding, “You're not, but you do sound like one when you talk like that.”

It was the first time we'd had a disagreement of any kind. I loved Adar. Not in an overtly physical way, perhaps, but spiritually. Now he had contempt for me, while I, for the first time, found him self-righteous and smug. It was not my fault he had to earn his own tuition. For the rest of the afternoon we didn't speak, and at our mid-afternoon break, he turned his back and walked away. I tried to make eye contact, but he avoided me.

After a day or two of sulking, we both decided to make up. The plan was to celebrate our friendship with a game of basketball, just like at Surprise Lake. Then we'd have dinner and see the Ingmar Bergman movie playing at the Thalia at Broadway and 95th.

“What if we have dinner at your house?” Adar asked. “It's not that far from the Thalia, and it would save us money and time.”

“True,” I said, all the while trying to invent an excuse. He had been up to my house once before, but it was only to use the bathroom, and my
mother and Bobby were not home. While he was there, I looked around at the apartment with his eyes and felt disgust. There were soiled clothes everywhere, including a pile overflowing a white plastic hamper right beside the bathroom door. The tub and sink both had filthy brown rings. A large plastic bottle of peroxide stood on the floor, along with Bobby's magic wand and disappearing ink. Since my futile attempt to clean had ended in disaster, I had ignored these things. Now I saw them again. I had to get a stack of paper towels from the kitchen so Adar could dry his hands. I saw an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna and started to panic. All this was a betrayal of what we believed life should be. Obviously, he noticed everything (how could he not), but chose to say nothing afterwards.

Now he was suggesting a meal. Impossible. If I told her, my mother would insist on cooking for us (hamburgers?), and then the subject of my vegetarianism (which I had so far managed to conceal) would come out, leading who knew where? She would secretly blame my friend, I knew, for turning me into some kind of religious fanatic. A vegetarian—who else besides a crazy person didn't eat meat? Besides, wasn't I skinny enough already? When I went to summer camp in Maine, she ordered the camp director to make sure I was served malted milks with raw eggs in them every day to help me gain weight. And every afternoon at precisely 2:00 p.m. I left naptime with the other campers, and was forced to trudge to the dining room where I had to drink my malted. All the other kids knew about it, and, although some were envious, I was sure they all laughed behind my back at my having to be force-fed milkshakes on my mother's orders. On the return walk back to my bunk, I imagined a yellow yolk floating around in my belly, trying to squirm its way out.

It was bad enough that Adar saw my family all day at work; I hated to have him see how I lived. If that happened, all would be lost. He would see my world in all its sordid reality, and it would shame me forever. The thought of him seeing my mother's wine bottles and spouting Shakespeare was a humiliation I could not endure. Worse, my brother, always starved for affection, might be home. He would show Adar his magic tricks, or worse, his toy handcuffs and lock him in the bathroom. Or he might trot out the pack of Sygam the Great business cards Uncle Lee had printed for his tenth birthday. Adar might not show it, but any chance of convincing him of my worthiness to follow him in the Life of the Spirit would be doomed.

I convinced him to meet me instead at his apartment in Brooklyn. I had never actually been to Brooklyn before, and it seemed like an adventure to visit him there. Adar wrote out directions with a mechanical pencil on graph paper in his beautifully precise handwriting. On a Saturday afternoon in August I set out for his apartment.

I really hadn't thought much about what I would find there besides him. The important thing was not to let him see my world at close range. As I emerged from the Canarsie subway station, I was met by a tangle of green high-rise blocks. As soon as I entered his building, I felt suffocated by an overwhelming smell of cat piss. At the same time, I was furious at my own puerile response: Adar was absolutely right; I was just a spoiled rich kid. I couldn't even walk inside a high-rise without feeling faint. Where was my strength, my courage? Was this how I was going to become master of myself—by passing out? I followed a line of green ooze along the wall of his floor, which led me to his apartment. I breathed in heavily and rang the bell.

“Ya vant ta see da boy?” An old man in a sleeveless undershirt answered the door.

“Yes, please.”

“Zout.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Zout.”

“I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.”

“‘Zout! The boy iz out,” an old woman said, emerging from the darkness.

“Oh, I see,” I said, staring.

Then she yawned loudly and stretched. “Iss so hot. Makes me sleepy,” she said. Her underarms were full of dense, black hair. She wore a thin sleeveless housecoat, and carried a red ball of yarn. I noticed her legs were covered with the same coarse hair as her armpits.

“Dat's vat I told him,” the man in the undershirt protested.

“I'm sorry, I didn't understand you the first time.” The house stank of boiled chicken.

“You want zit down kitchen?” she said. “Zome zoup mebbe?”

“No thank you,” I said. “I'll—uh—wait out here for Adar. I mean, if it's all right with you?”

“Ya ever see such a skinny boy?” the old man said to his wife pointing at me as though I wasn't present.

“Yah, nothing but skin an' bones,” she replied. “You sure you don' wan' zoup? We got also stuffed chalupses an' kasha an' shells. Adar don't eat no meat—so the chalupses go to waste if you don't eat some.”

“I'm vegetarian, too,” I said proudly.

“Oy vay—not another one!” she said, “Vell, make yourself at home; he'll be back soon. You vanna go his room? Ya need mebbe use da toilet?”

“No, thank you,” I said, speaking very slowly. Then, I ventured with a smile, “I didn't know Adar's grandparents lived here too.”

The old woman began laughing hysterically, rocking back and forth and squeezing her arms across her bra-less breasts to keep the hilarity inside. “Heeeheeeheeee! Heeheeeheee! Ve ain't his grandparents, ve're his parents. You like my son?”

“Very much.” I didn't know what else to say, or where to look. I just stood by the door, my hands nailed to my sides. For what seemed like hours. Then Adar walked in frowning, and led me into his room.

“You've met them, I see.”

“Yes. They're very nice.” Again, I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“What's the matter? You look pale.”

“No, why would I be?” I said.

“They're very old. They had me late. After the war.”

“Well, maybe they're a little older than I expected, but …”

“I thought I had told you. What's the matter with you?”

I felt nervous, like I was suddenly talking to a stranger. I changed the subject. “Sorry, I got here early; I didn't know how long it would take. I made really good time.”

“Sit down,” Adar said.

There were no chairs; just a small trundle bed, a bookcase, and an easel. “Where should I sit?” I asked.

“The bed, of course.” I hesitated a moment, and a look of annoyance crossed his face. “Just sit down, will you?” he said irritably.

Something had changed and that change had begun to make us strangers. Seeing him in that environment affected me more than I dared admit. It wasn't simply the neighborhood, the building, his old parents, or the poverty; it was the juxtaposition between the esteem with which I held him, and the commonness of his real life. To me, he was a hero, a mentor. I was also in love. This was a young man who talked so passionately about the Law of the Spirit that he believed he might learn to free himself from the earth and fly. Yet his upbringing was as ugly as my own, although obviously in a very different way. I was ashamed of my own inability to separate the appearance of his circumstances from the reality of his being. Because he grew up in Canarsie in a filthy housing project, it didn't mean he could not transform himself into something beautiful, did it? No more than my world and upbringing had condemned me to a life of ugliness. It was ridiculous. And hypocritical.

I longed to be strong enough to rise above what I saw. I wanted our friendship returned to its romantic luster. But, it did not. Something was missing. Something neither one of us was able to admit, or articulate. A few months before, when I was reading Blake in the Donnell Library, I came across the poem, “A Poison Tree.” The poem astonished me. Instead of being all flowers and clouds, this poem was simple as a nursery rhyme and nightmarish as a horror story:

I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears:

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,

When the night had veild the pole;

In the morning glad I see;

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Something had come between us, but it couldn't be uttered and was left unspoken. I felt ashamed of my dear friend, unable to reconcile his spiritual questing with his common background. And Adar? Did he feel hostility and envy toward me for all the things I had and took for granted—money, privilege, education? How absurdly easy and uncomplicated my life must have seemed from his perspective! Lots of money, private schools, the assumption that I would attend college and never have to pay a dime—it must have seemed like a fairy tale! I could do whatever I wanted—except of course, I couldn't. From my vantage point, Adar's life seemed one of complete freedom—since he lacked a father bent on controlling and contradicting … no … annihilating every independent and creative impulse.

Whatever that something was that had come between us, it had borne fruit like the poison in Blake's poem. Our relationship had, I thought, been predicated on complete honesty—yet, I was unable to share with my friend any of my true feelings. As a result, I became a colder, calculating, and above all, more secretive and evasive person. My father always said I was a congenital liar. Now I discovered he was right.

During the days that followed, we pretended to communicate with our old intensity—Ayn Rand, vegetarianism, painting, the Spirit—but our former authenticity was missing. We went through the motions, but it was a parody of what we once shared. We continued to be friends. But previously, we had been something much more than that.

One morning, I woke up gasping, unable to breathe. I felt hot and clammy and threw the covers on the floor. I felt like I couldn't spend even one more day working at MacLaren's. Then I realized it was not the job I had to leave—it was Adar! I could have managed to put up with a boring job a few weeks more until school began, but what I could not accept was that our
friendship, our “Union” as we called it, was not what I thought it to be. I had sworn such loyalty, such devotion. Now everything was swirling around: love, anger, guilt, and betrayal, until I was suffocating.

I called him at work and said I had the flu. My hands were trembling. There was silence on the other end. Did he suspect something? Probably.

But I wasn't lying, not really. I couldn't have gotten out of bed even if I wanted to. I watched cartoons, like I did when I had to stay home sick when I was a kid. Mom even brought me a tray with Cream of Wheat. She put a pat of butter in it like she did when I was home sick as a child. For lunch I had Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup and saltines. For dinner, she made me her special “Egyptian” eggs: a sunny-side up egg served underneath a slice of fried bread with a hole cut in the center. Then, she put the missing hole of the bread back on top of the “eye” again. I hadn't had those since I was five or six. I even asked her about my favorite children's book,
A Touchdown for Doc
. She thought I was joking about the book, which of course she never could have located anyway, and went back to the kitchen. I wasn't joking. But then I remembered my father had taken the book and ripped it up years before during one of his rages when he caught me reading instead of doing homework.

My grandparents vacationed at precisely the same time each year. In winter, they went to The Breakers in Palm Beach; in summer, they went to the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. As with everything else, including eating and sleeping, they operated on separate schedules: Grandpa flew; Grandma took the train.

It was late summer and I had just turned sixteen. I couldn't go back to work. I had no intention of living at home with my mother, and I couldn't confront Adar about my changed feelings. So, in the middle of the night, I grabbed a few things and, without a word, decided to head to New Hampshire. I didn't even flush the toilet for fear it might wake Bobby. If he knew I was leaving, he would wake Mom and ruin everything. And if she woke up and found out what I was doing, she would call the police to stop me. I managed to lock the front door as I made my getaway. Feverishly, I walked
all the way down to the Port Authority terminal from 72nd Street. I thought the walk would refresh me. It didn't.