What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

  Violet dropped my finger and returned to her chair. "I ran out of the apartment. I almost knocked down a lemon tree." She paused. "You know, Leo, lots of men have tried to seduce me. I was used to that, but this was different. He scared me, because the whole thing was about mixing.

  "I'm not sure I understand you," I said.

  "When he squeezed my finger, it was like Jules was doing it, don't you see? Jules and Monsieur Renasse were all mixed up together. I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me."

  "But maybe Monsieur Renasse was attracted to you, and you to him, and he just used Jules."

  "No, Leo," she said. "I wasn't attracted to Monsieur Renasse at all. I knew it was Jules. Jules had set it up, and I was attracted to the idea of acting out one of Jules's fantasies."

  "But weren't you already Jules's lover?"

  "Of course, but that's just it. It wasn't enough. He wanted a third person in it."

  I didn't answer her. I understood the story better than she imagined, and whatever had happened in that plant-filled apartment, I felt as though the story now included me, that the chain of erotic electricity continued unbroken.

  "I've decided that mixing is a key term. It's better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn't: I think, therefore I am. It's: I am because you are. That's Hegel—well, the short version."

  "A little too short," I said.

  Violet flapped her hand dismissively. "What matters is that we're always mixing with other people. Sometimes it's normal and good, and sometimes it's dangerous. The piano lesson is just an obvious example of what feels dangerous to me. Bill mixes in his paintings. Writers do it in books. We do it all the time. Think of the witch."

  "Bill's witch, you mean?"

  "Yes, 'Hansel and Gretel' is Mark's story. It's like his very own fairy tale, the one that speaks to him personally. Bill painted it because of Mark. Sometimes Mark says to me, 'You're my real mommy' and then, two minutes later, he gets angry and says, 'You're not my real mommy. I hate you.' All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there."

  "You mean that you're always moving between good mother and witch in his eyes?"

  "Wait and I'll explain," she said. "For over a year now, Mark and I have been playing a game after his bath. He lets me see him naked now. He never used to. The game is called Master Fremont. It goes like this. Mark is Master Fremont and I'm his servant. I wrap him up in his robe and carry him out of the bathroom to his bed. I put him down on the bed and then I start hugging and kissing my little master. He pretends to be very angry and he fires me. I promise to be good and never hug him again, but I can't control myself, and I throw myself at him and kiss him and hug him all over again. He fires me again. I beg to be given another chance. I get down on my knees. I pretend to cry. He relents, and the game starts all over again. He could play it forever."

  "You're too obscure, Violet."

  "It's Lucille, don't you see? It's Lucille."

  "The game," I said slowly.

  "Yes, it's a mixing game. He gets to reject me, send me away and then take me back over and over again. He has the power. In the game, I play Mark. He plays ..."

  "His mother," I said.

  "Yes," Violet said. "Lucille's never going to leave us."

  A month after that conversation, I found myself alone with Lucille. We hadn't been in touch during her year in Houston, and after she'd returned to the city in the fall, my encounters with her had been limited to chance hellos or short talks in the hallway when she came by to pick up Mark. Violet's stories about "mixing" in the Giorgione painting, in the piano lesson, and in the Master Fremont game have a curious relevance to what happened between me and Lucille. I've come to think that even though she and I were the only people in the room that night, we weren't really alone.

  It began on a Saturday evening. Erica and I attended a large party on Wooster Street given for the supporters of a downtown theater group. When I first saw her, Lucille was in deep conversation with a very young man, probably in his early twenties. She had put her hair up, which showed off her slender neck, and she was wearing a gray dress, far prettier then anything I had ever seen her in before. I noticed that as she talked to the man, she occasionally grabbed his forearm in an emphatic and surprisingly forceful way. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn't see me. It was one of those crowded events, during which most conversation is scattershot at best and the lights are too low to see anyone properly. After a while we lost sight of her.

  We had been at the party for about a half an hour when Erica said to me, "See that kid over there?"

  I turned around. Across the room I saw a tall thin boy with thick black glasses and a shock of blond hair that stood straight up from the top of his head, a hairdo that looked very much like the straw end of a broom.

  * /

  The boy was hovering near the food table. I saw his hand dart out toward a plate of food. He snatched several bread sticks and stuffed them quickly into the pockets of his long raincoat—an inappropriate garment for a warm spring night with no rain. Within minutes, he had squirreled away rolls, grapes, two whole cheeses, and at least half a pound of ham in various pockets of the coat. Apparently satisfied with his hoard and looking very lumpy, the boy began to make his way toward the door.

  "I'm going to talk to him," Erica said.

  "No, don't, you'll embarrass him," I said.

  "I'm not going to tell him to put it back. I just want to find out who he is."

  Not long after that, Erica introduced me to Lazlo Finkelman. When I shook his hand, he gave a strangled nod. I noticed that the coat was buttoned directly under his chin, and he seemed to have stored more food in the vicinity of his collar. Lazlo didn't stay to chat. We watched him lumber toward the door and disappear.

  "The boy's starving, Leo. He's only twenty years old. He lives in Brooklyn—in Greenpoint. He's some kind of an artist. He feeds himself by raiding happy-hour tables and crashing parties like this one. I invited him to dinner next week. I want to help him."

  "He should last a month on the haul he made tonight," I said.

  "I got his number," Erica said. "I'm going to call and make sure he comes."

  On our way out the door, we saw Lucille again. She was standing alone and had slumped against the wall. Erica walked over to her.

  "Lucille? Are you okay?" she said.

  Lucille lifted her face and looked at Erica, then at me. "Leo," she said. Her eyes glittered and her face had a softness I'd never seen before. The joints of her normally stiff body had loosened like a marionette's, and as we stood in front of her, her knees buckled and she began to slide down the wall. Erica grabbed her.

  "Where's Scott?" she said.

  "I don't know Scott," Erica said gently. Then, turning to me, she said, "He must have ditched her. We can't leave her here. She's had way too much to drink."

  Erica walked back to Greene Street and relieved Grace from her baby-sitting duties. I escorted Lucille home in a cab to East Third Street between Avenues A and B. By the time she was fumbling for her keys on the steps to her building, Lucille had sobered up a little. Although her flabby gestures lagged behind her will, I could see a veil of self-consciousness returning as she struggled to fit the key into the lock The small railroad apartment on the second floor of the building was silent except for a faucet dripping somewhere in a hidden room. There were several pieces of clothing draped over the sofa, a large pile of papers on a desk, and toys scattered on the floor. Lucille dropped down on the sofa and looked up at me. Her hair had come undone and fell in long strands over her flushed face.

  "Mark's with Bill tonight?" I asked.

  "Ye
s." She tentatively pushed her hand through her hair, as if she was uncertain about what to do with it. "I appreciate this," she said.

  "Are you okay?" I said. "Can I get you anything?"

  In an abrupt motion, she grabbed my wrist. "Stay for a while," she said. "Please stay."

  I wasn't eager to stay. It was after midnight and the noise of the party had tired me, but I sat down beside her. "We haven't really talked since you came back from Texas," I said. "Did you meet any cowboys?"

  Lucille smiled at me. Alcohol suited her, I decided, because its effects continued to relax her features, and the smile she gave me was far less inhibited than usual. "No," she said. "The closest I came was Jesse. Once in a while he wore a cowboy hat."

  "And who was Jesse?"

  "He was my student, but he was also my boyfriend. It started when I edited his poems. He did not like my suggestions, and his anger interested me."

  "So you fell in love with this Jesse?" I said.

  Lucille looked me steadily in the eyes, "My interest in him was very strong. I followed him for two days once. I wanted to find out what he did when I was not with him. I followed him without his knowing it."

  "Did you think he was with another woman?" I said.

  "No."

  "What did he do when he wasn't with you?"

  "He rode his motorcycle. He read. He talked to his landlady, who had blond hair and wore a lot of makeup. He ate. He watched more television than was good for him. One night, I slept in his garage. I liked doing it, because he never knew. I arrived at his house, watched him through his window for a while, and then I slept in the garage and left before he got up in the morning."

  "That must have been uncomfortable."

  "There was a tarp," she said.

  "It sounds like love to me," I said. "A little obsessive maybe, but still love."

  Lucille's eyes narrowed as she continued to look at me. Her face was pale and her eyes had dark circles under them. She shook her head. "No," she said. "I did not love him, but I wanted to be near him. Once, in the beginning, he told me to go away, but he did not mean what he said, because he was angry. I went away. He came after me and we were together again. Then, months later, he said it again. That time he was calm, and I knew he meant what he said, but I stayed until he pushed me out the door."

  I looked at Lucille in silence. Why was she telling me this? Had she enmired herself in a semantic riddle—what does love mean?—or was she confessing a lack of feeling? Why did she describe deeply personal, even humiliating stories as if they were puzzling exercises in a beginning logic textbook? When I looked into Lucille's clear blue eyes, I found their cold steadiness both fascinating and irritating, and all of a sudden, I felt like slapping her. Or kissing her. Either one would have satisfied the urge that came over me, an intense desire to smash the brittle surface of her impassive face. I leaned toward her, and Lucille responded instantly. She clutched my shoulders, pulled me toward her, and kissed me on the lips. When I returned the kiss, she pushed her tongue far into my mouth. Her aggression surprised me, because it seemed out of character, but I was no longer examining her motives or mine. As I began to unbutton her dress from the back, she moved her mouth to my neck, and I felt her tongue and then her teeth as she nipped my skin. The bite ran through my body like a small shock, and I understood its hint of violence. Lucille didn't want gentleness, and she may have felt all along that my desire for her was very close to anger anyway. I grabbed Lucille by the shoulders, threw her back onto the sofa, listened to her gasp, and then I looked down at her face. Lucille was smiling. It was a dim, barely detectable smile, but I saw it and the look of triumph in her eyes, goading me on. I pushed her dress up around her waist, tugging at her pantyhose and underpants. She helped me pull them down and then kicked the beige mess onto the floor. I didn't undress. I unzipped my pants, seized her thighs, and pushed them apart. When I entered her, Lucille made a small grunting sound. After that, she didn't make much noise, but she was fierce as she dug her fingers into my back and thrust her hips against mine. While I sweated and grunted over her, the air on my skin felt warm and moist and I could smell her perfume or soap, a musky scent that mingled with the dry odor of dust in the apartment. I don't think it lasted very long. She made a throttled cry. I came seconds later, and then we were sitting beside each other on the sofa again.

  She stood up and I watched her leave the room. As soon as she was gone, regret settled in my chest like an iron bar. When she returned and handed me a maroon towel to wipe myself, my body felt heavier than I could remember, like a tank that had run out of gas.

  In Lucille's bathroom, I washed my penis with soap. As I dried myself with another maroon towel, I could feel a rift forming between myself and the present moment, as if I had already left the apartment. Only minutes before, my need for Lucille had been furious and real. I had acted on that need, and had taken pleasure from it, but already the sex was becoming remote, like an apparition of itself. When I pulled up my pants, I remembered Jack quoting the artist Norman Bluhm: "All men are prisoners of their peckers." The words rose in my mind as I stood there eyeing Lucille's night creams and an ice-blue streak of toothpaste that had hardened onto her sink.

  After staying in the bathroom too long, I returned to Lucille, who was sitting in her partly unbuttoned dress on the sofa. Seeing her made me want to apologize, but I knew that it would have been tactless—the admission of a mistake. I sat down beside her, took her hand and began several sentences in my mind: I love Erica. I don't know what came over me ... Lucille, this was not... I think we should talk about... I canceled every hackneyed phrase and instead said nothing.

  Lucille turned to me. "Leo." She spoke slowly, enunciating every word. "I will not tell anybody." Her eyes measured mine, and after she spoke those words, her mouth tightened. At first I felt relieved, although I hadn't come so far in my thoughts as to suspect that she might tell other people about the tryst. A second later, I wondered why she had mentioned this before anything else—that she wouldn't tell. Why had 'anybody' popped up as a character in this drama between us? I had been wondering how I might extricate myself from the entanglement without hurting her feelings. All at once I sensed that she had raced ahead of me, that she didn't want more of me at all. She had wanted this time, and this time only.

  I said it then: "I love Erica very much. She is more dear to me than anything in the world. I was rash ..." I stopped. Lucille was smiling at me again, more broadly than before, and it wasn't a smile of satisfaction or sympathy. She looked embarrassed. Her face had turned red. "I'm sorry," I stuttered, the apology running out from me in spite of myself. I stood up. "Can I get you something?" I asked. "A glass of water? I could make coffee." I was filling the air with speech, rattling on to block out her blush.

  "No, Leo," she said. She reached for my hand and examined it, turning the palm toward her. "You have long fingers," she said, "and a rectangular palm. In a book I saw once, it said that hands like yours belong to psychics."

  "In my case," I said, "I'm afraid the book was wrong."

  She nodded. "Good night, Leo."

  "Good night." I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. As I did it, I made a great effort to check my awkwardness. And then, although I wanted to run from the apartment, I lingered, overcome by a feeling that the business between us was unfinished. I looked down at the floor and noticed a toy at my feet. I recognized the black-and-red object, because Matt had several of them. The toy, called a Transformer, could be changed from a vehicle into a robotic creature with more or less human form. The thing was in a half-and-half state—part thing, part man. On a sudden impulse, I picked it up. For some reason, I couldn't leave it untouched. I flipped one side of it downward to finish the change. It became all robot—two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso. I could feel Lucille watching me. "An ugly toy," she said.

  I nodded and lay the Transformer on the table. We said good night again and I left.

  When I crawled into bed beside Erica, she woke u
p for a few seconds. "Was Lucille okay?" she said. I told her yes. Then I said she had wanted to talk, and I had stayed with her for a while. Erica rolled over and went back to sleep. Her shoulder and arm lay over the covers and I stared at the thin strap of her nightgown in the obscure light of the room. Erica would never suspect my betrayal, and her trust sickened me. Had she been a woman who doubted my loyalty, I would have felt less guilt. In the morning, I repeated the lie to Erica without flinching. I lied so well that the night before appeared to harden into what should have happened, rather than what had happened. "I will not tell anybody." Lucille's promise was our bond, one that would help erase the reality of my having had sex with her. As I sat with Erica and Matt at the table that Sunday morning, a basket filled with bagels in front of me, I listened to Matt talking about Ling. Ling had left the grocery next door for another job. "I'll probably never ever see Ling again," he said, and while he continued to talk I remembered Lucille's teeth on my neck and saw her pale brown pubic hair against her white skin. Lucille had not wanted an affair; I felt quite sure of that. But she had wanted something from me. I say something, because whatever it was, it had merely taken the form of sex. The more I thought about it, the more troubling it became, because I began to suspect that the something was connected to Bill.

  I didn't see Lucille for months after that. Either I missed her comings and goings in our building or she rarely came for Mark anymore, because she had made new arrangements with Bill. But only a few weeks after I had sex with her, I asked Bill about Lucille's illness, the one he had mentioned to me years before.

  His direct answer turned my years of reticence into folly. "She tried to commit suicide," he said. "I found her in her dorm room with her wrists cut, bleeding all over the floor." Bill paused and closed his eyes for a moment "She was sitting on the floor holding her arms out in front of her, watching herself bleed very calmly. I grabbed her, wrapped her wrists in towels, and started yelling for help. Afterward the doctors said the cuts weren't very deep, that she probably hadn't meant to kill herself. Years later, she told me that she had liked watching the blood." Bill paused. "She said a strange thing about it. She said, 'It had authenticity.' She was in a hospital for a while, and then she lived with her parents. They wouldn't let me see her. They thought I was a bad influence. You see, when she did it, she knew I wasn't far away. She knew I would come looking for her. I think her parents thought that with me around, she might do it again." Bill grimaced for an instant and shook his head. "I still feel bad about it," he said.