What I Loved Page 14

  I remembered Lucille's and Bill's voices through the window on that spring afternoon long ago. "Nevertheless," I went on, "it can't have been true. I mean, why would she have married you? It certainly wasn't for your money. You had nothing then."

  "Lucille isn't a liar. I can say that for her. She told a mutual friend—a person who's known for calling people with vicious gossip and then commiserating with them. The irony was that this time the gossip had originated with my own wife."

  "Why didn't she talk to you herself?"

  "She couldn't, I suppose." Bill paused. "It wasn't until I was living with Violet that I saw how bizarre my life had been with Lucille. Violet's so present, so vital. She grabs me all the time and tells me she loves me. Lucille never said that." Bill stopped talking. "Not once." He looked up from the screwdriver. "For years, day in and day out, I lived with a fictional character, a person I'd invented."

  "That doesn't explain why she married you."

  "I pressed her, Leo. She was weak."

  "No, Bill. People are responsible for what they do. She chose to marry you."

  Bill returned his eyes to the screwdriver. "She's pregnant," he said. "She told me it was an accident, but he's going to marry her. She sounded happy about it. She's moving to Princeton."

  "Does she want Mark to move there with her?"

  "I'm not sure. I've learned that if I insist on having him, she insists that she wants him. When I don't, she's less interested. I think she's willing to let Mark make up his mind. Violet's worried that Lucille will take Mark away from us, that something will happen. She's... she's almost superstitious when it comes to Lucille.''

  "Superstitious?"

  "Yes, I think that's the right word. She seems to think that Lucille has some vague power over us—not just when it comes to Mark, but in other ways.. "

  I didn't pursue this turn in the conversation. I told myself that Lucille deserved happiness, a new marriage, another child. She would finally escape that gloomy apartment on East Third Street. And yet beneath my good wishes lay a turbulent awareness that Lucille was someone I didn't understand.

  The very last night we stayed in the house in Vermont, I woke up and saw Erica sitting on the edge of the bed. I assumed she was going to the bathroom and turned over to go back to sleep, but as I lay in bed only half awake, I heard her footsteps in the hallway. She had passed the bathroom. I followed her into the hall and saw her standing outside Matt and Mark's bedroom door. Her eyes were open as she touched the doorknob lightly with her fingers. She didn't turn it. She withdrew her hands and then waved her fingers over it the way a magician might before performing a trick. When I approached her, she looked at me. The boys used a night-light that shone through the crack at the bottom of the door, and her face was barely lit from below. I knew then that she wasn't awake and, remembering the old advice about not waking sleepwalkers, I gently took her arm to lead her back to bed. But at the touch of my hand, she cried out in a loud emphatic voice, "Mutti!" The exclamation startled me. I dropped her arm, and she turned back to the doorknob, touching it once with her index finger and then withdrawing it instantly as if the metal were hot. I began to whisper to her. "It's me, Erica. It's Leo. I'm going to take you back to bed." She looked straight at me again and said, "Oh, it's you, Leo. Where were you?" With one arm around her shoulder, I walked her down the hallway and gently pressed her onto the bed. For at least an hour, I stayed awake with my hand on her back, watching her for signs of movement, but Erica didn't stir again.

  I had called my mother "Mutti," too, and the word opened up a chasm inside me. I thought of my mother, not when she was old but when she was young, and for a short while as I lay in bed I recovered the smell of her as she bent over me—powder and a little perfume—and I felt her breath on my cheek and her fingers in my hair as she stroked my head. Du musst schlafen, Liebling. Du musst schlafen. There was no window in my room in London. I picked at the peeling wallpaper of looping ivy near my bed until I had exposed a long narrow stretch of bare yellow wall.

  When the Weeks Gallery showed Bill's fairy-tale boxes in September, the crash on Wall Street, less than a month away and only a few blocks south, seemed as unlikely as the end of the world. Two hundred or more people pushed their way into the gallery for the opening, and as I looked at them they seemed to merge into one large, giddy mass—a many-headed, many-limbed being driven by a will of its own. I was knocked about that night, jostled, spilled on, elbowed, and pushed into corners. Through the din of the party, I heard prices quoted—not only for Bill's boxes but for the works of other artists that had "gone through the roof"—an expression that made me think of dollars floating over the skyline. I knew for a fact that the woman who claimed to know what a fairy-tale box was selling for had raised its price by several thousand dollars. The cost was no secret; Bernie had a list of prices in his office for anybody who was interested. The woman's inflation probably wasn't intentional. Her sentence began with "I heard..." Rumor was as good as the truth anyway. As with the stock market, buzz generated reality. And yet few people in the gallery would have connected the paintings, sculptures, installations, and conceptual somethings that were flourishing in lower Manhattan to junk bonds, swollen numbers, and clanging bells on Wall Street.

  The last to arrive were the first to go. Little galleries in the East Village vanished and were instantly replaced by boutiques that sold leather clothing and spiked belts. SoHo began to wilt. The established galleries withstood the shock, but they cut back on expenses. Bernie stayed open, but he had to drop the stipends he had been handing out to younger artists, and he quietly sold his private collection of master drawings from the back room. When an English collector cleaned house by dumping the works of several "hot eighties artists," their reputations cooled instantly, and within months their names receded into the nostalgic past and were often prefaced by the word "remember." Others were forgotten. The very famous survived, but sometimes without a house in Quogue or Bridgehampton.

  Bill's work dropped in value, but his collectors didn't abandon him. Most of the pieces were in Europe anyway, and there he had gained a singular status because his work attracted young people not normally interested in art. In France, his gallery did a brisk business in posters of the fairy-tale boxes, and a book of reproductions was in the works. During their flush period, Violet had bought some fashionable clothes and pieces of furniture for their loft, but Bill's nonconsumerism had never wavered. "He doesn't want anything," Violet said to me. "I bought a side table for the living room, and it took him a week to notice it. He would put down a book or leave a glass on it, but it was days before he suddenly said, 'Is this new?' " Bill weathered the slump because he had money in the bank, and he had money in the bank because he lived in fear of his past—the grim poverty that had meant plastering and wall painting. He had been married to Lucille then, and I noticed that as time went on Bill talked about that period in his life with increasing gloom, as if in hindsight it had grown darker and more painful than when he was actually living it. Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

  That fall I finished my book. Six hundred pages in manuscript, it was called A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting. When I'd started it, I had hoped that an epistemological rigor would carry me through, that the book would be a synthetic argument about artistic vision and its philosophical and ideological underpinnings, but as I worked, the thing grew longer, looser, more speculative, and, I believe, more honest. Ambiguities intruded that fit no schema, and I let them stand as questions. Erica, my first reader and editor, influenced both the prose and some of my clarifications, w
hich I acknowleged, but I dedicated the book to Bill. It wasn't only an act of friendship but one of humility. Inevitably, good works of art have what I call an "excess" or "plethora" that escapes the interpreter's eye.

  On November seventh, Erica turned forty-six. The birthday, which brought fifty into sudden view, seemed to accelerate her. She started taking a yoga class. She lunged and breathed and stood on her head and tied herself into knots on the living room floor and insisted that these tortured exertions made her feel "wonderful." She created a flurry at the MLA convention with her paper "Underneath The Golden Bowl" published three of her finished chapters in journals, and the English department at Berkeley offered her a job at a much higher salary, which she turned down. But the steady diet of yoga, publication, and flattery suited her. Her nerves quieted. She suffered fewer headaches, and I noticed that when she was in repose her forehead no longer looked permanently wrinkled. Erica's libido soared. She grabbed my hips while I was brushing my teeth. She nibbled at my back or slid her hand down my pants in the hallway. She stripped naked in the middle of the room when I was reading, then sidled over to the bed and climbed on top of me. I welcomed these assaults and found that the night tumbles left their traces on the morning. There were many days that year when I left the house whistling.

  According to Matt, Mrs. Rankleham's fifth-grade class churned with intrigue. Popularity reigned as the supreme dictate for ten-and eleven-year-olds. The grade had splintered into hierarchical factions that either fought each other openly or employed more subtle cruelties reminiscent of the French court. I gathered that certain boys and certain girls were "going together"—a vague phrase that denoted everything from sharing a slice of pizza to furtive necking. As far as I could tell, these pairings changed weekly, but Matt was never among the chosen. While he longed for insider status, I sensed that he wasn't prepared to seek it. On a day in October when I picked up Matt after school for a dentist appointment, I understood why. I recognized several girls from Matt's class whom I had known for years, girls who played pivotal roles in the dramas Matt was reporting on at dinner. They looked like women. Many inches taller than when I had last seen them, they had grown breasts. Their hips had widened. I saw lipstick gleaming on a couple of mouths. I watched them as they sashayed past Matt and several other runty boys who were throwing fish-shaped crackers at one another's heads. Approaching one of those girls required either great courage or monumental stupidity. Matt, it seemed, was possessed of neither.

  He played with Mark and a couple of other friends after school. He threw himself into baseball and his drawing and the race for good grades. He puzzled over arithmetic and science, composed little essays with painstaking care and terrible spelling, and zealously pursued his at-home projects—a Bookland collage, a Spanish galleon in clay that melted in the oven, and the memorably interminable business of a solar system in papier-mâché. For a week Matt, Erica, and I labored over slimy pieces of newspaper, wrapping and pasting and measuring the dimensions of Venus and Mars and Uranus and the moon. Three times Saturn's ring slumped and had to be redone. When the project was all finished and hung from thin silver wires, Matt turned to me and said, "I like the Earth best," and it was true. His Earth was beautiful.

  On Saturdays when Mark was visiting his mother, who now lived in Cranbury, New Jersey, with her new husband, Matt often went to visit Bill at the studio. We allowed him to walk alone to the Bowery and would anxiously wait for him to call us when he arrived. On one of those Saturdays, Matt spent six hours alone with Bill. When I asked what he and Bill had done for all that time, Matt said, "We talked and we worked." I waited for details, but the answer was final. A couple of times that spring Matt exploded at me and Erica for trivial offenses. When he was really out of sorts, he posted a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door. Without the sign we might not have been aware of the brooding reveries taking place inside his room, but the message pointed to his seclusion, and whenever I passed it, Matt's defensive solitude seemed to penetrate my bones like a physical memory of my own early adolescence. But Matt's hormonal funks seldom lasted very long. Eventually he would emerge from his room, usually in buoyant spirits, and the three of us would have lively talks over dinner—which ranged in subject matter from the risqué wardrobe of an eleven-year old named Tanya Farley to American foreign policy during World War II. Erica and I adopted a parental policy of laissez-faire, rarely commenting on Matt's fluctuating moods. It seemed senseless to blame him for ups and downs he didn't understand himself.

  Through Matt I recovered my own days of awe and secrecy. I remembered warm fluid on my thighs and belly that soon turned cold after the dream, the rolls of toilet paper I hid under the bed for evening bouts of masturbation, and my clandestine trips to the bathroom to flush the soiled wads, one breathless step at a time, as if those emissions from my own body were stolen goods. Time has turned my young body into a comic thing, but it wasn't funny then. I touched the three strands of pubic hair I grew overnight and examined my underarms every morning for further growth. I shuddered in arousal and then withdrew into the aching loneliness under my tender skin. Miss Reed, a person I hadn't thought of in years, returned to me as well. My dancing teacher had peppermint on her breath and freckles on her chest. She wore full-skirted dresses with thin straps over her round white shoulders, and every once in a while, during the fox-trot or the tango, a strap would fall. It will all come to Matt, I thought, and there is no way to tell the story so that it becomes easier. The growing body has its own language, and solitude is its first teacher. On several occasions in the spring, I found Matt standing in front of the Self-Portrait that had hung on our wall for thirteen years. His eyes traveled over the plump young Violet and onto the little taxi that rested near her pudendum, and I saw the canvas again as though for the first time—with its full erotic force.

  That early painting and the others in the series began to look oracular—as if Bill had known long ago that one day Violet would carry around inside her the bodies of people who ate themselves to immensity or starved themselves to tininess. That year Violet paid regular visits to a young woman in Queens who weighed four hundred pounds. Angie Knott never left the house in Flushing where she lived with her mother, who was also obese, but not as obese as her daughter. Mrs. Knott had a small business making custom curtains in the neigborhood. Angie did the books. "After she left school at sixteen, she got fatter and fatter," Violet said. "But she was a fat baby and a fat little girl and her mother stuffed food into her from the beginning. She's a walking mouth, a repository for cupcakes and Fudgsicles and boxes of pretzels and mountains of sugared cereal. We talk about the fat," Violet added, showing me Angie's picture. "She's turned her own body into a cave where she can hide, and the strange thing is, I understand it, Leo. I mean, from her point of view, everything outside herself is dangerous. She feels safe in all that padding, even though she's in danger of getting diabetes and heart disease. She's out of the sexual marketplace. Nobody can get through all that blubber, and that's what she wants."

  There were days when Violet would leave Angie to visit Cathy, who was being treated at New York Hospital. Violet called her Saint Catherine, after Catherine Benincasa, the Dominican saint from Siena who fasted herself to death. "She's a monster of purity," she said, "fiercer and more righteous than any nun. Her mind moves in these narrow little channels, but it moves well in them, and she spins out arguments for starving like some hermetic medieval scholar. If she eats half a cracker, she feels sullied and guilty. She looks horrible, but her eyes shine with pride. Her parents waited way too long. They let it go. She was always such a good girl, and they just can't understand what happened to her. She's the flip side of Angie, protected not by fat but by her virginal armor. They're worried about her electrolyte balance. She could die." Violet wrote Angie and Cathy into her book along with dozens of others. She gave them different names and analyzed their pathologies as the result of both their personal histories and the American "hysteria" about food—which she called "a sociolog
ical virus." She told me that she used the word virus because a virus is neither living nor dead. Its animation depends on its host. I don't know whether Violet's girls found their way into Bill's new work or whether he was simply returning to an old theme, but as he continued to work on his new piece, I noticed that hunger had once again found a place in his art.

  O's Journey was organized around the alphabet. Erica was the first to refer to its twenty-six boxes as "Bill's great American novel." He liked the phrase and began to use it himself, saying that it would take a long time to finish, like a big novel. Each box was a small freestanding twelve-inch glass cube, which allowed the spectator to view it from all sides. The characters inside the clear glass were identified by large letters that had been sewn or painted onto their chests—in the manner of Hester Prynne. O, the "novel's" young painter-hero, bore a striking resemblance to Lazlo, except that he had red hair, not blond, and a longer nose, which I took as a reference to Pinocchio. Bill lost himself in those cubes. The studio floated with hundreds of drawings, tiny paintings, scraps of fabric for miniature clothes, notebooks filled with quotations and Bill's own musings. On a single page, I found a comment from the linguist Roman Jakobson, a reference to the Cabbalists, and a reminder to himself about a particular cartoon featuring Daffy Duck. In the drawings, O grew and shrank, depending on his circumstances. In one of my favorite sketches, an emaciated O was lying on a narrow bed, his feeble head turned toward his own painting of a roast beef.

  I made regular visits to the studio that year. Bill gave me a set of keys so that I could let myself in without disturbing him. One afternoon, I found him lying on the floor staring fixedly at the ceiling. Four empty cubes and several small dolls lay scattered around him. When he heard me, Bill didn't move. I took a chair several feet away from him and waited. After about five minutes, he sat up. "Thank you, Leo," he said. "I had to think through a problem with B. It couldn't wait" But other times, I would find him sitting cross-legged on the floor, sewing small clothes or entire figures by hand, and without looking up from his work he would greet me warmly and start to talk. "Leo, I'm glad you're here," he said one evening. "Meet O's mother." He held up a tall thin plastic figure with pink eyes. "This is O's poor mother, long-suffering, kindhearted, but a bit of a lush. I'm calling her X. Y is O's father. He's never going to appear in the flesh, you see. He's just a letter hovering in the distance or over O's head, a thought, an idea. Nevertheless, X and Y begot O. It makes sense, don't you think? X as in former, the once-was ex-wife, or X marks the spot, but also X as in a kiss at the bottom of a letter. You see, she loves him. And then there's Y, the big missing Y as in W-H-Y?" Bill laughed. The sound of his voice and his face made me think of Dan, and I asked Bill about his brother out of the blue. "He's the same," Bill said to me. His eyes clouded for an instant. "He's the same."