What I Loved Page 13

  The summer Matt turned nine, he began to include a character in almost all of his urban drawings: an older man with a beard. He was usually seen through the window of his tiny apartment, and like a Hopper recluse he was always alone. A gray cat sometimes prowled on the windowsill or curled up on the floor at his feet, but he never had any human company. In one drawing I noticed that the man sat hunched in a chair with his head in his hands.

  "This poor fellow keeps coming back," I said.

  "That's Dave," Matt said. "I named him Dave."

  "Why Dave?" I said.

  "I don't know, but that's his name. He's a lonely guy, and I keep thinking that he should meet somebody, but when I get around to drawing him, he's always by himself."

  "He looks unhappy," I said.

  "I feel sorry for him. His only friend is Durango." He pointed at the cat. "And you know cats, Dad, they don't really care."

  "Well," I said. "Maybe he'll find a friend ..."

  "You'd think I could just do it, because I made him up, but Uncle Bill says that it doesn't work that way, that you have to feel what's right, and sometimes what's right in art is sad."

  I looked into my son's earnest face and then down at Dave. Matt had included veins in the old man's hands. A coffee cup and a plate lay near his feet. It was still a child's drawing. Matt's perspective was shaky, his anatomy a little askew, but the lines that etched the body of that solitary man affected me strongly, and I began to look for Dave whenever Matt handed me one of his cityscapes.

  In the late afternoons we took walks down the mountain on the dirt road. We drove to Dutton's farm stand and picked out tomatoes and peppers and beans for dinner. On sunny days, we swam in the pond that was only yards from the house. Bill rarely accompanied us anywhere. He worked longer hours than the rest of us. He never cooked—he washed dishes. But on a couple of blazing afternoons every summer, he would leave Bowery Two and join us for a dip. We would see him walking across the field and watch him strip down to his boxer shorts by the pond. Bill was ageless then. I couldn't see that he looked a day older than when I had met him. He entered the pond slowly and made shocked noises as he waded farther and farther out Often he held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, elevating the smoking butt over the water's surface. Only once in the five summers we were in Vermont did I see him duck, wet his head, and actually swim. On that occasion, however, I noticed that his strokes were both strong and fast.

  The summer after I turned fifty-six, I suddenly noticed that my body had changed. It happened the day Bill swam, and I listened to Matt and Mark cheer him on as he moved across the pond. I had been swimming myself and was sitting by the water in my black bathing trunks. When I looked down at myself, I discovered that my toes were gnarled and bony. A long varicose vein had popped out in my left leg, and the wispy hairs on my chest had turned white. My shoulders and upper body seemed oddly diminished, and my pale skin was now marred by red and brown discolorations. But more surprising to me were the soft white folds of fat that had lodged themselves around my middle. I had always been lean, and although I had noticed a suspicious tightness around my waist when I zipped my pants in the morning, I hadn't been particularly alarmed. The truth was that I hadn't kept up with myself. I had walked around with a self-image that was completely out-of-date. After all, when did I actually see myself? When I shaved, I looked only at my face. Occasionally I caught a reflection of myself in a window or glass door in the city. When I showered, I scrubbed myself but didn't study my flaws. I had become an anachronism to myself. When I asked Erica why she hadn't mentioned these unattractive changes in me, she pinched the flesh around my waist and said, "Don't worry, darling. I like you old and fat." For a time, I entertained hopes for a metamorphosis. I bought dumbbells during an outing in Manchester and made attempts to eat more of the broccoli on my plate and less of the roast beef, but my resolve soon vanished. My vanity simply wasn't strong enough to endure deprivation.

  The last week of every August, Lazlo arrived to help Bill pack up his work. I can still see him hauling materials from Bowery Two across the field to Bill's truck, wearing tight red pants, black patent-leather boots and a deadpan expression. It wasn't Lazlo's face but his hairdo that gave him character. The blond brush that rose from his head suggested strains of humor hidden deep within the Finkelman persona. Like a silent comedian's prop, it spoke for him—lending him the look of a hapless and naive fictional hero, a contemporary Candide, whose response to the world was one of profound and never-ending surprise. In truth, Lazlo was a mild and diffident person. He would examine a frog carefully when Matt presented him with one, would make brief pronouncements on any subject when asked, and would dry dishes very slowly and methodically when called upon. It was this evenness of temper that made Erica pronounce him "sweet."

  Erica launched every August with a migraine, which often lasted two or three days. The white or pink stars that floated in the periphery of her left eye were followed by pain so fierce she writhed and vomited. The headache stole all the color from her face and turned the skin under her eyes nearly black. She slept and she woke. She ate almost nothing and didn't want anyone near her. Every noise hurt her, and throughout it all she would blame herself and continually mumble to me that she was sorry.

  When Erica fell sick for the third summer in a row, Violet intervened. The day the headache hit, the weather was damp and humid. Erica sequestered herself in our bedroom, and early that afternoon I went to check on her. I opened the door and found the shutters closed. Violet was sitting on Erica's back, kneading her shoulders. Without speaking, I pulled the door shut. When I returned an hour later, I heard Violet's voice from inside the room—a barely audible but steady sound. I opened the door. Erica was lying on the bed with her head on Violet's chest. At the sound of the door opening, she lifted her face and smiled at me. "I'm better, Leo," she said. "I'm better." I don't know whether Violet had miraculous healing powers or whether the migraine had simply run its course, but whichever it was, Erica turned to Violet after that. When the pain arrived in the first week of our stay, Violet performed her ritual of whispering and massage. I never asked what Violet said to Erica. The affinity between them had thickened into a relationship I interpreted as darkly feminine—a girlish intimacy between women that included caresses, giggling, and secrets.

  There were other intimacies in that house as well—most of them entirely banal. I saw Violet in her pajamas and she saw me in mine. I discovered that bobby pins helped along the tousle in her hair. I noticed that although Bill always washed with turpentine and soap before dinner, he bathed infrequently, and that he was sullen before his cup of coffee in the morning. Erica and I heard Violet moan to Bill about housework he didn't do and listened to Bill complain about Violet's impossible domestic standards. Bill and Violet heard Erica accuse me of forgetting groceries and of wearing pants I "should have thrown away years ago." I picked up Mark's socks that had turned stiff with dirt and his frayed underpants along with Matt's. One evening, I saw spots of blood on the toilet seat and knew that it wasn't Erica who was menstruating. I took a sheet of toilet paper, wet it, and wiped away the stains. At the time, I didn't know that those spots were important, but that same night, Erica and I heard Violet sobbing from the bedroom down the hall, and through the crying, we heard Bill's low voice.

  "She's crying about the baby," Erica said.

  "What baby?"

  "The baby she can't have."

  Erica had been keeping a secret. For over two years, Violet had been trying to get pregnant. The doctors hadn't found anything wrong with either her or Bill, but Violet had started fertility treatments, and so far they had failed. "She got her period today," Erica said.

  Just as Violet's crying stopped, I remembered Bill saying that he had always wanted children—"thousands of children."

  There was no television in the house, and its absence returned us to the entertainments of another era. Every evening after dinner, one of the adults read stories aloud, usually
a fairy tale. When it was my turn to read, I would page through one of the many volumes of collected folktales Bill had brought with him and choose a story, carefully avoiding the ones that began with a king and queen who longed for a child. Bill was the best reader among us. He read quietly but with nuance, changing the tempo of his sentences according to their meaning. He paused for effect. Sometimes he winked at the boys or pulled Mark, who was usually leaning on him, a little closer. Bill never tired of the stories. All day he reinvented those tales in the studio, and at night he was ready to read more of them. Whatever Bill's project happened to be, it became the obsessive thread of his existence, one he would follow indefatigably to its end. His enthusiasm was infectious and also a little wearing. He quoted scholarly articles to me, handed over xeroxed drawings, discoursed on the significance of threes—three sons, three daughters, three wishes. He played folk songs that were distantly related to his investigations and put penciled X's by works he thought I must read. I rarely resisted him. When Bill came to me with a new thought, he never raised his voice or showed excitement with his body. It was all in his eyes. They burned with whatever insight he may have had, and when he turned them on me, I felt I had no choice but to listen.

  In five years, Bill produced over two hundred boxes. He illustrated a book of poetry written by a friend, continued to make paintings and drawings, many of them portraits of Violet and Mark, and he was usually building some contraption or vehicle for the boys. These brightly colored playthings rolled or flew or spun like windmills. Mark and Matt were particularly fond of a crazed-looking boy puppet who performed a single trick: when you pulled a lever in his back, his tongue popped out of his mouth and his trousers fell to his ankles. Making toys was a vacation for Bill from the grueling work of the fairy-tale boxes. They were all the same size—about three feet by four feet. He used flat and three-dimensional figures, combined real objects with painted ones, and used contemporary images to tell the old stories. The boxes were divided into sections that resembled small rooms. "They're two-D and three-D comics without the balloons," he told me. But this description was misleading. The miniature proportions of the boxes drew on the ordinary fascination people have with peeping into dollhouses and the pleasures of discovering them, but the content of Bill's small worlds subverted expectation and often created a feeling of the uncanny. Although their form and some of the magical content recalled Joseph Cornell, Bill's works were larger, tougher, and far less lyrical. The tension inside each work reminded me of a visual argument. In the early pieces, Bill counted on the spectator's familiarity with a story to retell it. His dark-skinned and dark-haired Sleeping Beauty doll lay in a coma on a bed in a hospital room. IV tubing and the wires of a heart monitor entangled themselves with elaborate floral arrangements sent by well-wishers—gigantic gladioli, carnations, roses, birds-of-paradise, and ferns that choked the room. Ivy from a pink basket wove itself into her hair and curled into the receiver of the Princess telephone that lay on a table beside her bed. In a later scene, a cutout of a naked man with an erect penis hung in the air over her bed as she slept. The man held a large pair of open scissors in his hand. In the final image the girl was seen sitting up in bed with her eyes open. The man had disappeared, but the flowers, tubes, and wires had all been cut and were lying in a knee-deep mess on the floor.

  Later, Bill adapted more obscure stories for the boxes, including one we had read together in Andrew Lang's The Violet Fairy Book: "The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy." A princess disguises herself as a young man in order to save her father's kingdom. After numerous adventures, including rescuing a captured princess, the heroine finds that her trials have transformed her into a hero. The final image of nine squares showed the story's protagonist standing in front of a mirror dressed in a suit and tie. At her crotch was the unmistakable bump of manhood.

  The summer of 1987, Bill finished a piece called The Changeling. It's still my favorite work of that series. It was Jack's favorite work, too, though for him the piece was about contemporary art—a play on identities, replicas, and pastiche. But I was closer to Bill than he was, and I couldn't help but believe that the artwork with its seven rooms was a parable of sorts taken from his own inner life.

  In the first room, a small sculpted figure of a boy stood in his pajamas in front of a window with his hands on the sill. He looked to be about the same age as Matt and Mark were then—ten or eleven. Outside, night had fallen, and three windows from the adjacent building glowed with electric light. On each window Bill had painted a scene—a man talking on the telephone, an old woman with a dog, and two lovers lying naked in bed flat on their backs. The boy's room was messy, strewn with clothes and toys. Some of these things had been painted onto the floor. Others were tiny sculptures. When I moved very close to the box, I noticed that the boy was holding a needle and a spool of thread in his right hand.

  In the second room of the box, the boy had gone to sleep. To his right, a paper-doll woman was entering the room through the window. The drawn figure was striking because it was crude. With her big head, short arms, and knees that bent at an impossible angle, she looked like a child's drawing. One of her legs had poked itself through the opening, and I noticed right away that attached to the paper foot was a miniature loafer.

  In the third scene, this curious little woman had lifted the still sleeping boy from his bed. The next square wasn't a room at all but a flat painted panel that had been attached to the front of the box. The canvas showed the woman carrying the boy through a Manhattan street, which looked to be somewhere in the Diamond District. In the painting the formerly flat woman had gained the illusion of depth. She no longer looked like a paper doll but appeared to be in three dimensions, like the child she carried. Her back was bent and her knees buckled as she stepped forward with him in her arms. Only the woman's face remained the same—two dots for eyes, a vertical line for a nose, and another horizontal slash for the mouth. Inside the fifth room, the woman had become a sculpture with the same primitive face painted on her oval head. She stood over the boy and looked down at him where he slept inside a glass box, still gripping his needle and thread. Beside her stood another boy with his eyes shut—a figure who was identical in every way to the child who was lying in the transparent coffin. The work's sixth panel was an exact copy of the fourth—stooped woman, sleeping boy, Diamond District. The first time I saw it, I looked very closely at this second painting, searching to find a distinguishing feature, some hint of difference, but there was nothing. The final scene took up the entire bottom of the box. The woman had disappeared. One of the boys, probably the second, was sitting up in bed in a room exactly like the one that began the narrative. He was smiling and had raised his arms to stretch in the well-lit room. It was obviously morning.

  I first saw the piece in Bowery Two on a rainy day in late August. Bill and I were alone. The light coming through the windows that afternoon was weak and gray. When I asked Bill where he had found the unusual story, he told me he had made it up. "There's a lot of folklore about changelings," he said. "Goblins steal a baby, replace it with an identical copy, and nobody can tell the difference. It's just one version of countless doubling myths, which crop up everywhere, from the walking sculptures of Daedalus and Pygmalion to Old English lore and American Indian stories. Twins, doubles, mirrors. Did I ever tell you the story about Descartes? I read it somewhere or maybe somebody told me that he always traveled with an automaton of a beloved niece who had drowned."

  "That can't be true," I said.

  "It's not, but it's a good story. The hysterics started me on all this. When they were hypnotized, Charcot's women became changelings in a way. Even though they remained in their own bodies, they were like copies of themselves. And just think of all those UFO stories about people inhabited by aliens. It's all part of the same idea—the impostor, the fake self, the empty vessel that comes to life, or a living being that's turned into a dead thing ..."

  I bent over and pointed at the loafer. "Is the shoe another
double?" I said. "Of the one in the painting of Violet?"

  For an instant Bill looked confused. "That's right," he said slowly. "I used Lucille's shoe for that picture. I'd forgotten."

  "I thought it might have been intentional."

  "No." Bill turned away from the box and picked up a screwdriver that was lying on his worktable. He turned it over in his hands. "She's going to marry that guy she's been seeing," he said.

  "Really? Who is he?"

  "A writer. He wrote that novel Egg Parade. He teaches at Princeton."

  "What's his name?"

  "Philip Richman."

  "It doesn't ring any bells," I said.

  Bill rubbed the handle of the screwdriver. "You know, I can hardly believe that I was married to her now. I often wonder what the hell I was doing. She didn't even like me, much less love me. She wasn't even attracted to me."

  "How can you say that, Bill?"

  "She told me."

  "People say all kinds of things when they're angry. If she told you that, I'm sure it was just to hurt you. It's ridiculous."

  "She never told me directly. She told somebody else who told me."