What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

After his lies were exposed, Mark looked like a slightly compressed version of his former self. He gave off an attitude of generalized sorrow—head down, shoulders slumped, and wide hurt eyes—but when asked directly why he had manufactured the deception, he could only answer in a dull voice that he thought his father would be disappointed if he quit the job. He agreed that lying had been "dumb" and said he was "embarrassed" about it. When I said that the stories he had fed me about the job effectively annihilated all our conversations, he vehemently insisted that he had lied only about the job but not about anything else. "I care about you, Uncle Leo. I really do. I was just stupid."

  Bill and Violet grounded him for three months. When I asked Mark if Lucille was also punishing him, he gave me a surprised look and said, "I didn't do anything to her." He added that Princeton was "boring" anyway. Nothing "good" ever happened there, so whether he was grounded or not mattered little when it came to the pursuit of fun. He was sitting on my sofa when he said this, resting his elbows on his knees while he cupped his chin in his hands. He jiggled his knees idly and stared straight ahead. All at once, I found him repugnant, shallow, alien. But then he turned his face to me, his eyes large with pain, and I pitied him.

  I didn't see Mark again until well into October, when he was given a one-night reprieve to attend his father's opening of the one hundred and one doors at the Weeks Gallery. The smallest door was a mere six inches tall, which meant that the viewer had to lie on the floor to open it and look inside. The largest door rose to twelve feet, nearly touching the gallery's ceiling. The crowded opening was noisy, not only with conversation but with the sound of doors shutting. People stood in line to enter the large ones and took turns peering into the smaller ones.

  Each space was different. Some were figurative, others abstract, and some had three-dimensional figures and objects behind them, like the one I had first seen of the boy who floated in a mirror under a mound of plaster. Behind one door the viewer found that three side walls and the floor were all paintings of the same Victorian room, each rendered in a radically different style. Behind another, the walls and floor were painted to look like more doors, each one bearing a DO NOT ENTER sign. One little room had been painted entirely in red. A tiny sculpture of a woman was seated on the floor, her chin raised in laughter. She was holding her stomach in an effort to control her hilarity, and when you looked closely, you could see glistening polyurethane tears on her cheeks. A life-sized figure of a baby, wearing a diaper, wept on the floor behind one of the tall doors. Another door, only a foot and half high, opened onto a green man whose head grazed the ceiling of the little room. He was holding a wrapped gift in his outstretched hands with a large tag on it that said FOR YOU. Some of the figures behind the doors were flat, like color photographs. Others were canvas cutouts, still others cartoons. In one, a two-dimensional black-and-white cartoon man made love to a three-dimensional woman who seemed to have walked out of a Boucher painting. Her frilly skirts were lifted and her supernaturally pale and flawless thighs were parted to allow entrance for the man's absurdly large paper penis. One interior resembled an aquarium with acrylic fish that swam behind thick plastic. Numbers and letters appeared on other walls, sometimes in human positions. A number 5 sat on a small chair at a table with a teacup. A huge letter B lay on a bed on top of the covers. Behind other doors, the viewer discovered only one part of a person—the latex head of an old man with thinning hair who grinned up at you after you opened the door, or a little woman with no arms and legs clenching a paintbrush between her teeth. Behind one door there were four television screens, all black. Except for their size, the doors were identical from the outside. They were made of stained oak with brass knobs, and the outer walls of all the rooms were white.

  When I looked at Bill that evening, I felt relieved that he had nearly finished the project before Freund's revelation. The attention he was given at the opening appeared to hurt him, as if every warm congratulation were another dagger in his gut. He had always been shy of publicity and crowds, but on other occasions I had seen him deflect pointed questions with a joke or avoid small talk by conducting a long conversation with someone he liked. That evening, he looked poised for another abrupt exit to Fanelli's. But Bill stayed. Violet, Lazlo, and I all checked on him regularly. Once, I heard Violet whispering to him that he should slow down on the wine. "Sweetheart," she said, "you'll be completely sloshed before dinner."

  Mark, on the other hand, looked well. His confinement had probably increased his eagerness for any form of social life, and I watched him as he chatted with one person after another. While he was talking to someone, he was all attention. He leaned forward or bent his head as if to hear better, and sometimes he narrowed his eyes as he listened. When he smiled, his eyes never strayed from the other person's face. The technique was simple, its effect powerful. A woman in an expensive black suit patted his arm. An older man I recognized as one of Bill's French collectors laughed at something Mark said, and then a few seconds later, he gave Mark a hug.

  At around seven o'clock, I saw Teddy Giles enter the gallery with Henry Hasseborg. Giles was thoroughly transformed from the last time I had seen him. He wore a pair of jeans and a leather jacket and had no makeup on his face. I watched him smile at a woman and then turn to Hasseborg and begin to talk, his face sober and intent I started to worry that Bill would see them, and just as I was entertaining the ridiculous idea of standing in front of them to block Bill's view, I heard a child yell, "No! No! I want to stay in here with the moon! No, Mommy, no!" I turned toward the sound of the voice and saw a woman on all fours outside one of the doors, conducting a conversation with the small person inside. The child was happily ensconced behind a door with a space just large enough to hold him or her. "People are waiting, darling. They want to see the moon, too."

  Behind that door were many moons—a map of the moon, a photograph of the moon, Neil Armstrong lifting a foot on the moon, van Gogh's moon in Starry Night, discs and slivers in white and red and orange and yellow, and fifty other renditions of the moon, including one made of cheese and another as a crescent with eyes, a nose, and a mouth. As I watched the mother reach inside for what turned out to be a kicking, wailing little girl, I turned to look for Giles and Hasseborg and couldn't find them. I walked quickly around the gallery. When I passed the child, who was now tearfully muttering the word "moon" in her mother's arms, I guessed that she was no more than two and a half. "We'll come back," the mother said as she stroked her daughter's dark head. "We'll come back and visit the moon."

  I turned toward Bernie's office door and saw Giles and Mark leaning against it. Mark was much taller than Giles and had to bend over to listen to him. A big woman wearing a shawl was standing in front of me and blocked part of my view, but I leaned to one side and caught what appeared to be an exchange of a small object between them. Mark slipped his hand into his pocket and grinned happily. Drugs, I thought. I marched toward them, and Mark raised his chin to look at me. He smiled, pulled his hand out of his pocket, and said brightly, "Look what Teddy gave me? It belonged to his mom."

  Mark opened his palm and showed me a small round locket. He opened it, and inside were two tiny photos.

  "That's me when I was six months old, and that's me when I was five," Giles said as he pointed from one picture to the other. He held out his hand. "You may not remember me. Theodore Giles."

  I shook his hand. He had a firm grip.

  "I actually have another party tonight," he said briskly. "It was very nice to see you again, Professor Hertzberg. I'm sure we'll meet again."

  As he strode off toward the door with long confident steps, I turned back to Mark. The change in Giles's demeanor, the saccharine gift of a locket with baby pictures of himself, the return of the mysterious mother, prostitute, waitress, or God-knows-what mingled to create such confusion in my mind that I gaped at Mark.

  He smiled at me. "What's the matter, Uncle Leo?"

  "He's completely different."

  "I told you it was a
n act. You know, part of his art. That's the real Teddy."

  Mark looked down at the locket. "I think this is the nicest present I ever got. What a sweet guy." He paused for several seconds as he stared at the floor. "I wanted to talk to you about something," he said. "I've been thinking. I'm grounded, but I was hoping I could still come and visit you on Saturdays and Sundays like I used to." He hung his head. "I miss you. I wouldn't be leaving the building, and I don't think Dad and Violet would mind if we ask them." He bit his lip and his forehead wrinkled. "What do you think?"

  "I think it can be arranged," I said.

  That fall was quiet. Paragraph by paragraph the Goya book inched ahead. I looked forward to a trip to Madrid that summer and to the long hours I would spend at the Prado. I worked closely with Suzanna Fields, who was writing her thesis on David's portraits and their relation to revolution, counterrevolution and the role women had played in both. Suzanna was a grave, shuffling girl with wire-rimmed glasses and a severe haircut, but over time I came to find her plain round face with its thick eyebrows rather attractive. Of course, deprivation had made many women attractive to me. On the streets, in the subway, in coffee shops and restaurants, I studied women of all ages and all shapes. As they sat and sipped their coffee or read their newspapers and books or hurried on their way to an appointment, I stripped them slowly in my mind and imagined them naked. At night, Violet still played the piano in my dreams.

  The real Violet was listening to her collection of tapes—hundreds of hours of people answering the same questions: "How do you see yourself?" and "What do you want?" When I was at home during the day, their voices came through the ceiling from Violet's study. I could rarely hear what they were saying, but I heard mumbles and whispers, laughter, coughs, stammers, and every once in a while the throaty noise of sobs. I also heard the sound of the tape rewinding and understood that Violet was playing the same sentence or phrase over and over again. She had stopped talking to me about her book, and Erica reported that Violet had become a little mysterious about its content with her, too. All Erica knew for certain was that Violet had rethought her project completely. "She doesn't want to talk about it yet," Erica wrote to me. "But I have a feeling the change in the book has something to do with Mark and his lies."

  Mark remained under house arrest every weekend until the first week in December. Bill and Violet allowed him to visit me when he was in New York, and he came faithfully every Saturday for a couple of hours. On Sunday he would turn up again for a short talk before he returned to Cranbury. In the beginning, I was wary of Mark and a little severe with him, but as the weeks passed I found it hard to stay angry. When I openly doubted his word, he looked so hurt, I stopped asking whether I could believe him. Every Friday he saw Dr. Monk, an M.D. and psychotherapist, and I felt those weekly talks steadied and sobered him. I also met Mark's girlfriend, Lisa, and the simple fact that Lisa cared about Mark softened me toward him. Although all of Mark's friends were welcome to visit him, Teenie, Giles, and the strange boy called Me never came to Greene Street, and Mark never mentioned them—nor did he wear the locket Giles had given him. Lisa came. Seventeen, pretty and blond, Lisa was an enthusiast. She flapped her hands at the sides of her face when she talked about her vegetarianism, global warming, or a species of tiger that was nearly extinct. When the two of them visited me, I noticed that Lisa would often reach out and touch Mark's arm or take his hand in hers. These gestures reminded me of Violet, and I wondered if Mark had felt their likeness. Lisa was obviously in love with Mark, and when I thought of the injured Teenie, I rejoiced at his improved taste. Lisa's "life goal," as she called it, was to become a teacher for autistic children. "My younger brother's autistic," she said, "and Charlie's been doing much better since he started this music-therapy program. The music kind of unblocks him."

  "She's very moral," Mark said to me on the Saturday in December that marked the last day of his punishment. "When she was fourteen, she got involved with drugs for a while, but then she went into a program and has been clean ever since. She doesn't even have a beer. She doesn't believe in it."

  As I nodded at the nobility of her abstinence, Mark volunteered information about their sex life, which I could have done without. "We haven't had intercourse yet," he said. "We both think it should be planned, you know, talked about before. It's a big thing, and you can't just rush into it"

  I didn't know what to say. "Rush" is a word that pretty much covered every initial sexual encounter I had ever had in my life, and the fact that these two young people felt it necessary to deliberate over sex made me feel a little sad. I have known women who withdrew from me at the last moment and women who regretted their passion the next morning, but a precoital committee meeting had never been a part of my experience.

  Mark continued to visit every Saturday and Sunday into the spring. He arrived punctually at eleven on Saturday and often accompanied me on my ritual errands, to the bank, to the grocery store and the wine shop. On Sundays he always returned for a good-bye. I was touched by Mark's loyalty and heartened by his news about school. He told me proudly about the 98s he was receiving on his vocabulary quizzes, a paper on The Scarlet Letter he had "aced," and more about Lisa, the ideal girl.

  In March, Violet called me late one afternoon and asked if she could come down and talk to me alone. Her request was so unusual that when she arrived, I said, "Are you all right? Has anything happened?"

  "I'm fine, Leo." Violet sat down at my table, motioned for me to sit opposite her, and said, "What do you think of Lisa?"

  "I like her very much," I said.

  "So do I." Violet looked down at the table. "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something wrong with it?"

  "With it? Lisa, you mean?"

  "No, with Mark and Lisa. With the whole thing."

  "I think she's really in love with Mark."

  "I do, too," she said.

  "Well?"

  Violet put her elbows on the table and leaned toward me. "Did you ever play that game when you were a kid: 'What's wrong with this picture?' You would look at a drawing of a room or a street scene or a house, and when you started to look at it closely, you would see that a lamp shade was upside down or a bird had fur instead of feathers or a candy cane was sticking out of an Easter display? Well, that's how I'm feeling about Mark and Lisa. They're the picture, and the longer I look at them, the more I feel like there's something out of whack, but I don't know what it is."

  "What does Bill think?"

  "I haven't said anything to him. He's had such a terrible time. He couldn't work after Mark's lie about the job, and now he's just coming back to himself. He's impressed with Mark's improvement, with Lisa, the therapy with Dr. Monk. I don't have the heart to mention something that's just a gut feeling."

  "It's very hard to trust someone who lied in such a spectacular way," I said. "But I haven't noticed any obvious lies, have you?"

  "No."

  "Then I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt."

  "I hoped you would say that. I've been so afraid that something's happening." Violet's eyes filled with tears. "At night I lie awake worrying about who he is. I think he hides so much of himself that it scares me. For a long time, Leo. I mean, since Mark was a kid ..." She didn't finish.

  "Tell me, Violet," I said. "Don't stop."

  "Every once in a while, not, not always, just now and then, I talk to him, and I get this weird feeling that..."

  "That..." I prompted.

  "That I'm talking to somebody else."

  I narrowed my eyes. Violet was hunched over the table. "It's made me awfully shaky, and Bill, well, Bill's had to fight his way out of a depression. He has great hopes for Mark, great hopes, and I don't want him to be disappointed." She let the tears fall, and she started to shake. I stood up, walked around the table, and put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered once and stopped crying very suddenly. She thanked me in a whisper, and after that, she hugged me. For hours afterward, I felt her warm body against me and
her wet face on my neck.

  On the third Saturday in May, I walked to the bank much earlier than usual. The end of the semester and the sunny weather lured me outside. The morning sun and the still-empty streets buoyed my spirits as I headed north toward the Citibank above Houston Street. There was no line at the bank, and I walked directly to the cash machine to take out my money for the week. When I removed my wallet from my pocket and opened it, I couldn't find my bank card. Befuddled, I tried to think when I had last used it. The Saturday before. I always replaced my card. Turning to the machine's screen with its sign that said, "May I help you?" I started thinking about the word "I" in that sentence. Did the automated teller deserve that pronoun? The thing sent messages and performed operations. Was that all that was needed to claim the privilege of the first person? And then, as if the answer had been given to me by the text on the screen, I knew. The clear wounding truth hit me suddenly, and it hit me hard. I always left my wallet and keys by the telephone in the hallway when I was at home. This habit prevented me from having to search through various jackets and coats before I left for work. I remembered Mark asking, "When's your birthday, Uncle Leo?" 21930. My pin number. Mark had never observed my birthday. How many times had he accompanied me to the bank? Many times. Didn't he always leave me to go to the bathroom or visit Matt's room, passing my billfold, which was laid out in full view? Several people had entered the bank, and a line had formed behind me. A woman gave me a questioning look as I stood ogling my open wallet. I rushed past her and half-ran, half-walked home.

  Once inside my apartment, I yanked out my bank records and removed my checks. I rarely bothered to look closely at either of them.

  When statements arrived in the mail, I filed the papers and forgot about them until tax time. My checking account was untouched, but a Day-to-Day Savings Account where I had kept $7,000 in fees from articles and the small advance I had received for my Goya book had all but disappeared. It was the money I had saved for Spain. I had told Mark about my trip, had even mentioned the account. All that remained of it was $6.31. Withdrawals had been made from all over the city since December, some from banks I had never heard of, often during the wee hours of the morning, and all of the recorded dates were Saturdays.