The Tender Bar (19 page)

“What are you reading in school right now?” Bill asked.

“Scarlett’s Letter,”
I said.

He put a hand over his eyes. Bud sniffed his fist. “It’s—
The Scarlet Letter,
” Bud said. “Not Scarlett’s. It’s not the sequel to
Gone With the Wind
.”

“Do you like it?” Bill asked.

“Kind of boring,” I said.

“Of course,” Bud said. “You have no frame of reference. You’re thirteen.”

“I actually turned fourteen last—”

“You know all about lust and nothing about shame,” Bud said.

“He needs a nice healthy dose of Jack London,” Bill said to Bud.

“Maybe Twain?” Bud said.

“Maybe,” Bill said. “But the boy’s from the East Coast—he should read New York writers. Dos Passos. Wharton. Dreiser.”

“Dreiser! You want to turn him into a cynic like you? And no one reads Dos Passos anymore. Dos Passos is Dos Passé. If he wants to read about the East Coast, let him read Cheever.”

“Who’s Cheever?” I asked.

They turned slowly toward me.

“That settles that,” Bud said.

“Come with me,” Bill said.

He took me to the fiction section and pulled down every title by John Cheever, including the thick collection of short stories that had just been published. He brought the books into the stockroom and quickly ripped the cover off each one. It seemed to cause him pain, like ripping off a bandage. I asked what he was doing. He said bookstores couldn’t return every unsold paperback to the publishers—the publishers didn’t have room for them all—so they returned only the covers. When Bill and Bud wanted a book they simply ripped off the cover and mailed it to the publisher, who reimbursed the chain, “and everyone is happy.” He assured me this wasn’t stealing. I couldn’t have cared less.

I spent that weekend reading Cheever, swimming in Cheever, falling in love with Cheever. I didn’t know sentences could be made like that. Cheever did with words what Seaver did with fastballs. He described a garden full of roses as smelling like strawberry jam. He wrote about longing for a more “peaceable world.” He wrote about my world, the suburbs outside Manhattan, scented with woodsmoke (his favorite word) and peopled with men hurrying from train stations to bars and back again. Each story revolved around cocktails and the sea, and each one therefore seemed as though it were set in Manhasset. One actually was. The first story in the collection mentioned Manhasset by name.

On Friday afternoons Bill and Bud would quiz me about what I’d read that week in school. They would then cluck with disgust and take me around the bookstore, filling a shopping bag with coverless books. “Every book is a miracle,” Bill said. “Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly—and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake—and tried to tell the rest of us a story.” Bud could talk ceaselessly about the hope of books, the promise of books. He said it was no accident that a book opened just like a door. Also, he said, intuiting one of my neuroses, I could use books to put order to chaos. At fourteen I felt more vulnerable than ever to chaos. My body grew, sprouted hair, shuddered with urges I didn’t understand. And the world beyond my body seemed equally volatile and capricious. My days were controlled by teachers, my future was in the hands of heredity and luck. Bill and Bud promised, however, that my brain was my own and always would be. They said that by choosing books, the right books, and reading them slowly, carefully, I could always retain control of at least that one thing.

Books were the main part of Bill and Bud’s lesson plan, but not the only part. They tackled how I talked, teaching me to modify my Long Island accent. When I said I was going for “cawffee,” they made me stop and say it again. They tried to improve how I dressed. Though hardly fashion plates themselves, they had learned a thing or two from scouring the Italian and French magazines they ordered for the store, and they often asked salesgirls from boutiques in the mall to advise me about stretching my “trousseau.” They broke me of my habit of wearing nothing but jeans and white T-shirts, and Bud gave me Lacoste shirts he’d “outgrown,” though I suspected the shirts were gifts from his mother and actually too big for him. They supplied me with basic information about art, architecture, and especially music. Sinatra was fine, Bud said, but there were other “immortals.” Sniffing his fist he made a list of records “every cultured young man must own.” Dvorák. Schubert. Debussy. Mozart. Especially Mozart. Bud was devoted to Mozart. I folded his list and put it in my pocket and saved it for years, because it was such a touching and earnest recipe for betterment. I told Bud, however, that I couldn’t afford records. The next day he brought in all the records on the list from his own collection. Call it a loan, he said. We sat in the stockroom, Bud playing the records on a portable turntable, conducting with a pencil, explaining why Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major was perfection, why Beethoven’s trios were sublime, why Holst’s
Planets Suite
was frightening. While Bud tutored me in music Bill made the greater sacrifice. He manned the cash register all afternoon. For me, he said, and only me, he would deal with the “madding crowd.”

Not long before the end of my freshman year, Bill and Bud asked what colleges I was considering. The subject of college always depressed me, because my mother and I had no money. In that case, Bill and Bud said, you need to get into one of the best colleges, because only the best pay your tuition. I told them jokingly about my mother’s bedtime lullaby when I was younger: “Harvard and Yale, babe, Harvard and Yale.”

“Not Harvard,” Bud said. “What do you want to be—an accountant? Ha.”

“No. A lawyer.”

“Dear God.” He fell onto his stool and sniffed his wrist furiously. Bill lit a cigarette and stretched out on his lawn chair. “How about Yale?” he said.

“Yes,” Bud said.
“Yale.”

I told them in a wounded voice that they were cruel to be kidding me like that. “Yale is for rich kids,” I said. “Smart kids. Other kids.”

“No,” Bud said. “Yale is for all kinds of kids. That’s the great thing about Yale.”

They were suddenly talking over each other, rhapsodizing about Yale, recounting its history, its roll call of famous graduates, from Noah Webster to Nathan Hale to Cole Porter. They sang a few bars of the Yale fight song, praised the professors in Yale’s English department—the finest in the world, they assured me. I was shocked by how much they knew. Later I realized that they must have once dreamed of attending Yale themselves.

“Yalies are smart,” Bill said, “but not geniuses.”

“A Yalie doesn’t know everything about one thing,” Bud said, holding up one finger. “A Yalie knows one thing about everything.”

“A Yalie is urbane,” Bill said. “You know what ‘urbane’ means, right?”

“Yes,” I said, laughing.

They waited.

“It means you live in a city.”

Bud handed me a dictionary.

“A Yalie is a man of the world,” Bill said. “A Renaissance man. That’s what you want to be. A Yalie can shoot a gun, dance a fox-trot, mix a martini, tie a bow tie, conjugate a French verb—though he doesn’t go so far as to speak the whole language—and tell you which of Mozart’s symphonies were written in Prague, and which in Vienna.”

“A Yalie is so very F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Bud said. “You’ll remember that every character in Fitzgerald is a Yale man. Nick Carraway, for one.”

I averted my eyes. With a groan Bill rose from his lawn chair and went out to the sales floor to rip the cover off
The Great Gatsby.

Not wanting to explain to Bill and Bud that my mother and I were the kind of people who didn’t
get in,
I simply said, “It’s just too frightening to think about—
Yale
.” It was the wrong thing to say, and the right thing.

“Then it’s decided,” Bud said. He rose from his stool and came toward me, sniffing his fist, adjusting his Buddy Holly glasses. “You must do everything that frightens you, JR. Everything. I’m not talking about risking your life, but everything else. Think about fear, decide right now how you’re going to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success, and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear? Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain. Think of fear as your guide, your pathfinder—your Natty Bumppo.”

I thought this an odd speech from a man who hid in the stockroom of a bookstore in a semiabandoned mall. But it struck me that Bud might have been so passionate on the subject because he was giving me the advice no one had given him. I saw that this was a pivotal moment between us, that something profound should be said, but I couldn’t think of anything, so I smiled tentatively and said, “Who’s Natty Bumppo?”

He breathed loudly through his nose. “What are they teaching you in that school?”

That night over dinner I told my mother two things. I wanted to save up and buy Bill a new lawn chair for Christmas. And I’d decided to apply to Yale. I tried to make it sound like my own decision, but she got me to recount my discussion with Bill and Bud. “You charmed them,” she said with a half smile.

“What do you mean?”

“I knew you would.”

But it was the other way around. They had ripped the cover off me.

Somehow, months after declaring bankruptcy, my mother was able to get another credit card. She used it to buy me a plane ticket to New York that May—she was determined I spend every summer in Manhasset, because I enjoyed the men so much—and a ticket for herself that August, so that we could drive up to Yale together and have a look around before I started my sophomore year of high school. We borrowed Uncle Charlie’s Cadillac, and Grandma and Sheryl came along for the ride.

As my mother drove I sat beside her and cringed at the conversation swirling around the Cadillac. Instead of Colt and Bobo talking about who was “boning” whom at Dickens, the women were clucking about fashion and cooking and hairstyles. Sacrilege. To provide a corrective to the conversation I interjected random items from the Yale brochure in my lap. “Did you know Yale was founded in 1701? That means it’s almost as old as Manhasset. Did you know Yale’s motto is
Lux et Veritas
? That means ‘Light and Truth’ in Latin. Did you know the first Ph.D. ever was awarded by Yale?”

“Does it say in your little book there how much the whole shebang costs?” Sheryl asked from the backseat.

I read aloud. “‘A reasonable estimate of the total cost of a year at Yale is eleven thousand three hundred and ninety dollars.’”

Silence.

“Why don’t we listen to some nice music?” Grandma said.

Before we saw Yale we heard it. As we pulled into New Haven the bells were ringing in Harkness Tower. I almost couldn’t bear how beautiful they sounded. I stuck my head out of the car and thought,
Yale has a voice, and it’s speaking to me
. Something inside me answered to those bells, some explosive mix of poverty and naïveté. I was already prone to see everything I admired as sacred, and the bells exploited this delusion, casting a hallowed aura over the campus. I was also prone to turn every place that barred me into a castle, and here was Yale, deliberately decorated with turrets, battlements and gargoyles. But there was also a moat—the canal outside our apartment in Arizona. As we parked the Cadillac and walked around, I began to panic.

Our first stop was Sterling Library. With its dark nave, vaulted ceilings and medieval archways the library was meant to evoke a church, a house of worship for readers, and we were appropriately pious. Our footsteps on the stone floors rang out like gunshots as we walked down a hall into a reading room, where summer-school students curled up with books in old, fat, hunter green leather chairs. We left Sterling and walked across a broad lawn to Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, home of Yale’s priceless treasures. A squat building, its walls were adorned with small marble squares that turned different colors as the sun slid across the sky. We passed Commons, the freshman dining hall, with its immense marble columns and the names of World War I battles etched along its façade. By now I was overwhelmed with despair, and my mother saw. She suggested we take a break. In a sandwich shop at the edge of the campus I sat with my cheeks on my fists. Eat your hamburger, Grandma said. He needs a beer, Sheryl said. My mother asked me to speak, to put into words what was upsetting me. I didn’t want to say aloud that I would give anything to go to Yale, that life wouldn’t be worth living if I couldn’t get in, but that I surely would not get in, because we weren’t the “getting in” kind. I didn’t have to say. My mother squeezed my hand. “We’ll get in,” she said.

I excused myself and bolted from the sandwich shop. Like an escaped lunatic I staggered around campus, staring at students, peering in windows. Every window framed a more idyllic scene. Professors talking about ideas. Students drinking coffee and thinking brilliant thoughts. I walked into the Yale bookstore and nearly fainted when I saw the walls and walls of books. I sat in a corner and listened to the silence. Bill and Bud hadn’t warned me. They had told me about Yale’s history, its allure, but they hadn’t prepared me for its tranquillity. They didn’t tell me that Yale was the more peaceable world for which I’d been longing. Again the bells started ringing. I wanted to throw myself on the ground and weep.