What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

  The day before Mark took over the room, I opened the door, walked inside, and sat on the bed for a long time. My enthusiasm for the change was replaced by an aching awareness that it was too late to go back on my word. I studied Matt's watercolor. It would have to stay. I decided to mention it to Mark as my only stipulation. I didn't need a memorial space for Matt, I told myself; he lived in me. But as soon as I had thought of the words, the comforting cliché turned gruesome. I imagined Matt in his coffin, his small bones and his hair and his skull under the earth, and I started to shake. The old fantasy of substitution rose up inside me, and I cursed the fact that I hadn't been able to take his place.

  Mark brought paper and magazines and scissors and glue and wire and a brand-new boom box to his "studio." Throughout the spring, he spent an hour or so in the room every Sunday, cutting and pasting pictures onto cardboard. He rarely worked for more than fifteen minutes at a time. He was constantly interrupting himself to come out and tell me a joke, make a telephone call, or run to the corner to get "some chips."

  Not long after Mark had settled in, Bill came to see me and asked to take a look at the room. He nodded approvingly at the magazine clippings and cardboard, the pile of notebooks and cup full of pencils and pens.

  "I'm glad he has this place," Bill said. "It's neutral. It's not his mother's house and it's not mine."

  "He never talks about his life at Lucille's," I said, realizing suddenly that this was true.

  "He doesn't tell us anything either." Bill paused for several seconds. "And when I talk to Lucille, all she does is complain."

  "About what?"

  "Money. I pay all of Mark's expenses, his clothes, his school, his medical bills—everything except food at her house—but just the other day, she told me that her grocery bills are sky-high because he eats so much. She actually labels the food in the refrigerator she doesn't want him to eat. She counts every penny."

  "Maybe she has to. Are their salaries low?"

  Bill gave me a hard, angry look. "Even when I didn't have two nickels to rub together, I didn't resent feeding my kid."

  By June, Mark had stopped knocking. He had his own key. Matt's nearly empty room had been transformed into a cluttered teen pad. Records, CDs, T-shirts, and baggy pants filled the closet. Notebooks, flyers, and magazines were piled on the desk. Mark lived between rooms, coming and going as if the two lofts were all one house. Sometimes he arrived as Harpo and rushed around the living room with a horn he had bought at a yard sale near Princeton. He often kept the act going, and I would discover that he was standing beside me with his knee looped through my arm. If Mark made collages that summer, he kept them to himself. He relaxed, read a little, and listened to music I didn't understand, but then by the time it reached my ears in the living room, it was no more than a mechanical thumping that resembled the bass rhythm of a disco song— fast, steady, interminable. He came and went. For six weeks he attended a camp in Connecticut, and he spent another week with his mother on the Cape. Bill and Violet rented a house in Alaine for four of the weeks Mark was at camp, and the building seemed to die. Erica decided not to visit. "I don't want to open the wound," she wrote. I lived alone with Goya and missed them all.

  In the fall, Mark fell back into his old rhythm of weekend visits. He usually took a train from Princeton on Friday evening and made an appearance at my loft on Saturday. Often he returned on Sunday as well for an hour or so. My meals with Bill and Violet dropped off to about twice a month, and I came to rely on Mark's faithful visits as a respite from myself. Sometime in October he mentioned "raves" for the first time— huge gatherings of young people that lasted through the night. According to Mark, finding a rave required connections with people in the know. Apparently, tens of thousands of other teenagers were also among the cognoscenti, but that didn't dampen Mark's enthusiasm. The word "rave" was enough to sharpen his features with expectation.

  "It's a form of mass hysteria," Violet said to me, "a revival meeting without religion, a nineties love-in. The kids work themselves up into a frenzy of good feeling. I've heard there are drugs, but I've never noticed any signs that Mark is high when he gets home. They don't allow alcohol." Violet sighed and rubbed her neck with her hand. "He's fifteen. All that energy has to go somewhere." She sighed again. "Still, I worry. I feel that Lucille ..."

  "Lucille?" I said to her.

  "It's not important," she said. "I'm probably just paranoid."

  In November, I noticed an ad in the Voice for a reading Lucille was giving only six blocks away, on Spring Street. I hadn't spoken to her since Matthew's funeral, and seeing her name in print prompted an urge to hear her read. Mark had become a part-time resident of my apartment and my intimacy with him drew me toward Lucille, but I also think that my decision to go was fueled by Violet's unfinished remark and Bill's earlier comment about Lucille's stinginess. It wasn't like him to be uncharitable, and I suppose I wanted to judge for myself.

  The site of Lucille's reading was a woody bar with poor lighting. As soon as I walked through the door, I looked through the gloom and saw Lucille standing near the far wall with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Her hair was tied back and her pale face was lit by a small overhead lamp that deepened the shadows under her eyes. From that distance, I thought she looked lovely—waiflike and solitary. I walked toward her. She lifted her face to mine, and after a moment she smiled stiffly without opening her mouth. When she spoke, however, her voice was even and reassuring. "Leo, this is a surprise."

  "I wanted to hear you read," I said.

  "Thank you."

  We were both silent.

  Lucille looked uncomfortable. The "thank you" hung between us with an air of finality.

  "That was the wrong response, wasn't it?" she said, and shook her head. "I'm not supposed to say 'Thank you.' I should have said 'It was nice of you to come' or 'Thank you for coming.' If you had spoken to me after the reading and said, 'I like your poems,' then I could have said a flat 'thank you,' and we would not be standing here wondering what had just happened."

  "The land mines of social intercourse," I said. The word intercourse made me pause for a second. A bad choice, I thought.

  She ignored the comment and looked down at her papers. Her hands were trembling. "Readings are hard for me," she said. "I'm going to prepare for a few minutes." Lucille walked away, sat down on a chair, and began to read to herself. Her lips moved and her hands continued to shake.

  About thirty people came to listen to her. We sat at tables, and a number of the guests drank beer and smoked while she read. In a poem called "Kitchen," Lucille named objects, one after the other. As the list grew, it began to form a crowded verbal still life, and I closed my eyes from time to time to listen to every beat of the syllables as she read. In another poem, she dissected a sentence uttered by a nameless friend: "You don't really mean that." It was a witty, logical, and convoluted analysis of the intimidation inherent in such a statement. I think I smiled through every line of the poem. As she read on, I began to understand that the tone of the work never varied. Scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance, the poems allowed no object, person, or insight to take precedence over any other. The field of the poet's experience was democratized to a degree that leveled it to one enormous field of closely observed particulars—both physical and mental. I was amazed that I had never noticed this before. I remembered sitting beside her, my eyes on the words she had written, and I remembered her voice as she explained the reasoning behind a decision in her clean economical sentences, and I felt nostalgic for the lost camaraderie between us.

  I bought her book, Category, after the reading and waited in line for her to sign it. I was the last person of seven. She wrote "for Leo" and looked up at me.

  "I would like to write something amusing but my mind is blank."

  I leaned over the table where she was sitting. "Just put 'from your friend Lucille.'"

  As I watched her pen move across the page, I asked her if she wante
d me to find her a cab or walk her to wherever she was going. She said she was headed for Penn Station, and we stepped outside into the cold November night. The wind blew past us, bringing with it the smell of gasoline and Asian food. As we walked down the street, I looked at her long beige raincoat and saw that the worn garment was missing a button. The sight of the loose thread dangling from her open coat sparked a feeling of sympathy for her that was immediately followed by a memory of her gray dress twisted around her waist and her hair falling across her face as I held her by the shoulders and pushed her down onto the sofa.

  As we walked, I said, "I'm glad I came. The poems are good, very good. I think we should stay in touch, particularly now that I see so much of Mark"

  She turned her head and looked up at me, her face puzzled. "You see him more than before?"

  I stopped walking. "Because of the room, you know?"

  Lucille paused on the sidewalk. Under the streetlamp I noticed the deep lines around her mouth as she gave me a puzzled look. "The room?"

  I felt a growing pressure on my lungs. "I've given him Matthew's room as a studio. He began to use it last spring. He comes every weekend."

  Lucille continued walking. "I didn't know that," she said evenly.

  I began several questions in my mind, but I noticed that Lucille had quickened her step. She lifted her hand for a taxi and turned to me. "Thank you for coming," she said, speaking the line she had missed earlier, but only her eyes showed amusement.

  "It was a pleasure," I said, and took her hand. For an instant, I contemplated kissing her cheek, but her set jaw and compressed lips stopped me, and I squeezed her hand instead.

  We were on West Broadway by then, and as I watched the cab drive north, I noticed the moon in the sky over Washington Square Park. It was still early. The crescent shape of that moon with a wisp of cloud across it replicated almost exactly the painted moon I had been looking at that afternoon in one of Goya's early witchcraft paintings. Pan, in the form of a goat, is surrounded by a circle of witches. Despite the gruesome cabal around him, the pagan god looks rather innocent with his empty eyes and goofy expression. Two of the witches offer him infants. One is a gray and emaciated child, the other plump and rosy. From the position of his hoof, it's clear that Pan wants the fat baby. As I crossed the street, I thought of Bill's witch, Violet's comments on hexed maternity, and then I wondered what she had meant to say about Lucille. I also wondered about Mark's silence. What did it mean? I imagined asking him, but the question "Why didn't you tell your mother about Matthew's room?" had an absurd ring to it. When I turned the corner onto Greene and walked down the sidewalk toward my building, I realized that my mood had suddenly dropped and a growing sadness was following me home.

  Mark's night life escalated in the following months. I heard his feet on the stairs as he leapt down them to rush out for the evening. The girls laughed and shrieked. The boys shouted and cursed in the deep voices of men. Mark's love for Harpo was supplanted by DJs and techno, and his pants grew ever wider, but his smooth young face never lost its expression of childish wonder, and he always seemed to have time for me. While we talked, he would lean against my kitchen wall and fiddle with a spatula or literally hang in my doorway with his hands on the lintel and his legs swinging. It's odd how little I've retained of what we actually said to each other. The content of Mark's conversation was usually dull and attenuated, but his delivery was superb and that's what I recall best—the earnest, plaintive tone of his voice, his bursts of laughter, and the languid movements of his long body.

  On a Saturday morning in late January, my relationship with Mark took a small tum I hadn't expected. I was sitting in the kitchen reading the Times and drinking a cup of coffee when I heard a faint whistling noise from somewhere near the back of the apartment. I froze, listened, and heard it again. Following the sound to Matthew's room, I opened the door and discovered Mark sprawled on the bed whistling through his nose while he slept He was wearing a T-shirt that had been torn in half and then reattached with what looked like several hundred safety pins. A slice of bare skin showed through the gap. His huge beltless pants had slipped down to his thighs, revealing a pair of underpants with the maker's name written across the elastic band. His pubic hair curled out from between his legs, and for the first time, I recognized that Mark was a man—at least physically a man—and for some reason, this truth appalled me.

  I had never said he could sleep in the room, and the idea that he had arrived in the middle of the night without my permission irritated me. I glanced around the room. Mark's backpack and coat lay in a pile on the floor beside one of his sneakers. When I turned toward Matt's picture, I saw that pasted onto the glass were pictures of five pale, thin girls in short skirts and platform shoes. Over their heads were the words THE GIRLS OF CLUB USA. My irritation turned to anger. I walked to the bed, grabbed Mark by the shoulders, and began to shake him. He moaned and then opened his eyes. He looked at me without recognition. "Go away," he said.

  "What are you doing here?" I demanded.

  He blinked. "Uncle Leo." He smiled weakly, pushed himself up on his elbows, and looked around. His mouth hung open. His face looked flaccid, moronic. "Wow,' he said. "I didn't think you'd be so upset."

  "Mark, this is my apartment. You have a room here to do your artwork or listen to music, but you have to ask me if it's all right to sleep here. Bill and Violet must be worried sick."

  Mark's eyes were slowly gaining focus. "Yeah," he said. "But I couldn't get in upstairs. I didn't know what to do, so I came here. I didn't want to wake you up, because it was late. Besides," he said, and cocked his head to one side, "I know you sometimes have trouble sleeping."

  I lowered my voice. "Did you lose your key?"

  "I don't know how it happened. It must have fallen off my ring somehow. I didn't want to wake up Dad and Violet either, and I still had your key, so I used it." Mark's eyes widened as he spoke to me. "I probably made the wrong decision." He sighed.

  "You'd better go upstairs right now and tell your father and Violet that you're all right."

  "I'm on my way," he said.

  Before he left, Mark put his hand on my arm and looked me directly in the eyes. "I just want you to know that you're a real friend to me, Uncle Leo, a real friend."

  After Mark left, I returned to my cold coffee. Within minutes, I regretted my anger. Mark's offense had been caused by poor judgment— nothing more. Had I ever actually said that he couldn't spend the night? The problem wasn't Mark but Matthew. The sight of Mark's mature body on my son's bed had shaken me. Was it that the six-foot boy-man had violated the invisible but sacred outlines of the eleven-year-old child whom I still imagined sleeping in that bed? Maybe, but I wasn't really angry until I saw the stickers. I had told him that the watercolor was the single object in the room that mustn't be touched. Mark had agreed with me: "That's cool. Matt was a great artist." Mark hadn't been thinking, I said to myself. He might be thoughtless, but he isn't malicious. Remorse shriveled my righteous anger to nothing, and I decided to walk upstairs and apologize to him immediately.

  Violet opened the door. She was wearing only a long white T-shirt, probably Bill's, and I could see her nipples through the material. Her cheeks were flushed. Several sweaty strands of hair hung down in her forehead. She smiled and said my name. Bill was standing a few feet behind her, wearing a white bathrobe and smoking a cigarette. Not knowing where to look, I glanced down at the floor and said, "I actually came up to see Mark. I wanted to tell him something. "

  Bill answered. "Sorry, Leo. He was going to come this weekend, but he decided at the last minute to stay with his mother. She's taking him and Oliver riding at some stables near there."

  I looked at Bill and then at Violet, who smiled and said, "We're having a dissipated weekend." She let her head fall back and stretched. The T-shirt rose up her thighs.

  I excused myself. I hadn't been prepared for Violet's breasts under her shirt. I hadn't been prepared to see the faint darkness of her
pubic hair under the thin white cloth or her face looking a little soft and silly after sex. Without pausing, I walked downstairs, found a razor blade, and scraped off the stickers that were covering up Matt's painting.

  When I confronted Mark about lying to me the following weekend, he looked surprised. "I didn't lie, Uncle Leo. I changed my plans with Mom. I called Dad, but they were out. I came up to New York anyway to see some friends, and then I had the key problem.''

  "But why didn't you tell Bill and Violet that you were here?"

  "I was going to, but it seemed kind of complicated, and I remembered that I had to get a bus back to Mom's, because I promised her that I'd take care of Ollie in the afternoon."

  I accepted the story for two reasons. I recognized that the truth is often muddled, a tangle of mishaps and blunders that converge to appear unlikely, and when I looked at Mark as he stood before me with his large steady blue eyes, I was absolutely convinced that he was telling the truth.

  "I know I mess up," he said. "But I really don't mean to."

  "We all mess up," I said.

  The image of Violet late that Saturday morning colored my memory like a deep stain I couldn't rub out, and when I remembered her, I always remembered Bill, too, standing behind her with a cigarette, his eyes fixed on mine and his large body heavy with spent pleasure. That picture of the two of them kept me awake at night. I would lie on my bed with speeding nerves and a body that hovered over the sheets rather than settled into them. Sometimes I would get up, go to my desk, and check my drawer, emptying its contents slowly and methodically. I touched Erica's socks and studied Matt's picture of Dave and Durango. I examined my aunt and uncle's wedding picture. One night I counted the roses among the other flowers in Marta's bouquet. There were seven roses. The number made me think of Bill's cube for seven and the thick layer of dirt that covered its bottom. If you held up the cube, you could see the white number from below, not whole but in pieces, like a disintegrating body. I fingered the waxy bit of cardboard that I had saved from the fire on the roof, and then I stared down at my hands and the blue veins that stood out from the bones below my knuckles. Lucille had once called them psychic's hands, and I wondered what it would be like to penetrate the minds of others. I knew little enough about myself. I continued to examine my hands, and the longer I looked at them the more foreign they seemed, as if they belonged to another person. I felt guilty. At least that was the name I gave to the lowering ache beneath my ribs. I was guilty of greed—a rapacious longing that I fought every day—but its object wasn't clear. Violet was only a single strand in the thick knot of my desires. My guilt was bound up in the whole story. I turned to look at my painting of Violet I walked over to it and stood in front of her image and reached out to touch the shadow of a man that Bill had painted into the canvas— his shadow. I remembered that when I first saw it, I had mistaken it for my own.