What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

  I nodded at Mark then. Up until that moment, I had kept my distance, maintaining the hard, suspicious attitude I had learned to adopt with him, but I could feel myself beginning to weaken.

  "I'm going to show you," he said in a loud determined voice. "I'm going to show you because I can't show Dad, and you're going to see ..." He dropped his head to his chest and squinted through his tears at the floor. "Please believe me," he said, his voice shaking with emotion. "Please believe me."

  I stood up from my chair and walked over to him. When he lifted his head to look at me, I saw Bill. The resemblance came suddenly, a flare of recognition that called up the father in the son. The likeness caught me off guard, and during the seconds that followed it, I felt the loss of Bill in my body, as a pain in my gut that rose into my chest and lungs and seemed to choke off my breath. Both Mark and Violet had greater claims on Bill, and I had hidden my own pain out of deference to them, had suppressed the depths of my unhappiness even from myself, and then, like a revenant, Bill had appeared in Mark for an instant and vanished. Suddenly, I wanted him back and I was enraged that I couldn't have him. I wanted to pummel Mark with my fists and shout at him to return Bill. I felt that the kid had the power to do it, that he was the one who had worn his father to death, killed him with worry and anguish and fear, and now it was time to reverse the story and bring Bill to life again. These were insane thoughts, and I knew just how unhinged they were as I stood in front of Mark and realized that he had been telling me that he was guilty and wanted everything to be different from now on. I had a hundred dollars in my hand. He shook his head back and forth, repeating the refrain, "Please believe me." When I looked down, I saw that his sneakers had small pools of tears between the laces and the toes. "I believe you," I said in a voice that sounded peculiar, not because it was filled with emotion but because its tone was flat and normal and didn't begin to represent what I was feeling. "Your father," I said to him, "was more to me than you can possibly know. He meant the world to me." It was a stupid, banal phrase, but when I uttered it, the words seemed invigorated by a truth I had been keeping to myself for some time.

  Mark's disappearance the following weekend had the quality of reenactment. He told us that he was going to visit his mother. Violet gave him money for the train and sent him off alone. The following morning, she discovered that $200 was missing from her purse and called Lucille, but Lucille knew nothing about the weekend visit. Three days later, Mark reappeared on Greene Street and heatedly denied that he had taken the money. While Violet cried, I stood beside her and played the role of disappointed father in Bill's absence, which didn't take any acting on my part, because only a week earlier I had believed that Mark meant what he said. I began to wonder if it wasn't exactly such moments that set him off, that in order to enact a betrayal, he had to first convince whomever it was of his unwavering sincerity. Like a machine of perfect repetition, Mark was driven to do what he had done before: lie, steal, vanish, reappear, and finally, after recriminations, fury, and tears, reconcile with his stepmother.

  Proximity and belief are closely connected. I lived close to Mark. That immediacy and contact flooded my senses and played on my emotions. When I was only inches away from him, I inevitably believed at least a part of what he was saying. To believe nothing would have meant complete withdrawal, exile not only from Mark but from Violet, and I organized my days around the two of them. While I read and worked and shopped for dinner, I anticipated the aura of the evening—the food, Violet's strange, ecstatic face when she returned from the studio, Mark's chatter about DJs and techno, Violet's hand on my arm or shoulder, her lips on my cheek when I said good night, and the smell of her—that mixture of Bill's scents with her own skin and perfume.

  For me and maybe for Violet, too, Mark's lapse into his old pattern and the punishment Violet imposed—another grounding—had the remote quality of bad theater. We saw what was happening, but the story and the dialogue were so stilted and familiar, it made our emotions seem a little absurd. I suppose that was the problem. It wasn't that we stopped feeling pained by Mark's crimes but that we recognized that our pain had come from the lowest kind of manipulation. Yet again, we had been duped by the same old dreary plot. Violet tolerated Mark's treachery because she loved him, but also because she didn't have the strength to confront the meaning of his fresh betrayals.

  Three weeks later, Mark disappeared again. This time he took a Han horse from my bookshelf and Violet's jewelry box. In it were pearls from her mother and a pair of sapphire and diamond earrings Bill had given her on their last anniversary. The earrings alone were worth almost five thousand dollars. I don't know how he managed to squirrel the horse out of my apartment. It wasn't very large, and he could have done it on a number of occasions when I wasn't watching him, but I didn't notice that it was missing until the morning after he left. This time Mark didn't show up after a couple of days. When Violet called the bookstore to ask if they had seen him, the manager told her he hadn't been there in weeks. "One day he didn't come in. I tried calling, but the telephone number he gave us didn't work, and when I looked up William Wechsler, the number was unlisted. I hired somebody else."

  Violet waited for Mark to return. Three days passed, then four, and with each passing day Violet seemed to diminish. Early on, I thought her shrinking was an illusion, a visual metaphor that expressed our shared anxiety about Mark's absence, but on the fifth day, I noticed that Violet's pants were hanging loosely around her middle and that the familiar roundness of her neck and shoulders and arms was gone. That evening at dinner, I insisted that she try to get some food into her, but she shook her head at me and her eyes filled with tears. "I've called Lucille and all his school friends. Nobody knows where he is. I'm afraid he's dead." She stood up, opened a kitchen cabinet, and began to remove every cup and dish from it. For two nights after that, I watched Violet clean cupboards, wash floors, scrape dirt from under the stove with a knife, and bleach the loft's bathrooms. On the third evening, I walked upstairs with a bag of groceries for our dinner, and when she answered the door, Violet was wearing rubber gloves and had a pail of soapy water in her hand. I didn't say hello. I said "Stop. Stop cleaning. It's over, Violet." After giving me a surprised glance, she put down the pail. Then I walked over to the phone and called Lazlo in Williamsburg.

  Within half an hour, he buzzed from the front door. When Violet pressed the intercom and heard Lazlo's voice, she made a noise of astonishment. The clogged bridges, traffic jams, and lazy subway lines that slowed travel for every other inhabitant of New York didn't seem to hinder Lazlo Finkelman. "Did you fly?" Violet asked him when she opened the door. Lazlo smiled faintly, strode into the room, and sat down. Just looking at Lazlo had a soothing effect on me. His familiar hairdo, big black glasses, and long poker face inspired me even before he said he would look into Mark's disappearance. "Keep track of your hours," Violet said to him. "And I'll add on the extra money when I pay you at the end of the week."

  Lazlo shrugged.

  "I mean it," she said.

  "I get around anyway," he said. He followed this vague statement by saying to Violet, "Dan said I should tell you he's writing you a play."

  "He told me he calls you," Violet said. "I hope he's not bothering you too much."

  Lazlo shook his head. "I've got it down to one poem a day."

  "He reads you poems over the telephone?" I said.

  "Yup, but I told him I could only deal with one a day. I had to ward off inspiration overload."

  "You're very kind, Lazlo," Violet said.

  Lazlo squinted behind his glasses. "No." He lifted a finger toward the ceiling and I recognized Bill's gesture. "Sing loudly," Lazlo said, "Into the dead face. Bang hard on the deaf ears. Jump up and down on the corpse and wake it up."

  "Poor Dan," Violet said. "Bill won't wake up."

  Lazlo leaned forward. "Dan told me that it was a poem about Mark."

  Violet looked at him steadily for a couple of seconds and then lowered her eyes.


  After Lazlo left, I made dinner. While I prepared the food, Violet sat quietly at the table. Every now and then, she would smooth back her hair or touch her arm, but when I put the plates of food on the table, she said, "Tomorrow morning I'm going to call the police. He's always come back before."

  "Worry about that tomorrow," I said. "Right now you have to eat."

  Violet looked down at her food. "Isn't it funny? All my life I've worked hard not to get too fat. I used to eat when I was sad, but now it just won't go down anymore. I look at it, and it's gray."

  "It's not gray," I said. "Look at that nice pork chop—a lovely Castilian brown—beside those attractive green beans—the color of dark jade. Now, ponder the brown and green in relation to the pallor of the mashed potatoes. They aren't quite white, but tinged by the faintest of yellows, and I put the tomato slice near the beans for color—a clear red to brighten the plate and give pleasure to your eyes." I moved into the chair beside her. "But the visual satisfaction, my dear, is only the beginning of the feast."

  Violet continued to look glumly at her plate. "And after writing a whole book on eating disorders," she said.

  "You're not listening to me," I said.

  "Yes, I am."

  "Then relax. We're here to have dinner. Have some wine."

  "But you're not eating, Leo. Your food is getting cold."

  "I can eat later." I reached for her glass and brought it to her mouth. She took a small sip. "Look here," I said, "your napkin's still on the table." With the pretentious flourish of a waiter, I grabbed the napkin by one corner, waved it open, and let it fall to her lap.

  Violet smiled.

  I leaned across her plate, picked up her knife and fork, cut a small piece off the pork chop, and then added a bit of mashed potatoes to the bite.

  "What are you doing, Leo?" she said.

  As I lifted the fork off the plate, she turned to me and I saw two wrinkles form between her eyebrows. When her mouth quivered for an instant, I thought she might cry, but she didn't. I brought the food to her lips, nodded at her as she hesitated, and then she opened her mouth like a small child and I gave her the meat and potatoes.

  Violet let me feed her. I worked very slowly, making sure that she had plenty of time to chew and swallow, that she was allowed a pause between forkfuls and took drinks of the wine. I think my scrutiny made her eat more decorously than usual, because she chewed slowly with her mouth closed, revealing her small overbite only when her lips parted to take in the morsel. We were both silent for the first few minutes, and I pretended that I didn't see her glistening eyes or hear the noise she made every time she swallowed. Her throat must have been small and tight from anxiety, because she gulped rather loudly and then blushed at the sound. I started talking to distract her—mostly nonsense, a chain of culinary free associations. I talked about a lemon pasta I had eaten in Siena under a sky full of stars and the twenty different kinds of herring Jack had ingested in Stockholm. I talked about squids and their indigo ink in a Venetian risotto, the underground business of sneaking unpasteurized cheese into New York, and a pig I had once seen in the south of France snuffling while truffling. Violet didn't say a word, but her eyes cleared and the corners of her mouth showed signs of amusement when I began telling her about a maître d' in a local restaurant who tripped and fell over a small elderly woman as he ran to greet a movie actor who had just walked through the door.

  In the end, only the tomato was left on the plate. I pierced it and brought it to Violet's mouth, but as I slid the gelatinous red slice between her teeth, a few seeds and their juice escaped and ran down her chin. I grabbed her napkin and began gently dabbing her face with it. Violet closed her eyes, leaned her head back a little, and smiled. When she opened her eyes she was still smiling. "Thank you," she said. "The meal was delicious."

  The next day, Violet filed a missing-persons report with the police department, and although she didn't mention the theft to the person on the telephone, she did say that Mark had disappeared before. She tried calling Lazlo, but he wasn't home, and then late that same afternoon after spending only a couple of hours at the studio, Violet invited me upstairs to listen to the sections of her tapes that were connected to Teddy Giles. "I have this feeling that Mark is with Giles," she said, "but his number is unlisted and the gallery won't give it to me." As we sat in her study and listened, I noticed that Violet's drawn face tightened with interest and her gestures had a quickness I hadn't seen in weeks.

  "This is a girl who calls herself Virgina," Violet said. "With a long second i, like 'virgin' and Vagina.' "

  A young female voice began to speak in midsentence. "... a family. That's how we think of it. Teddy's like the head of the family, you know, 'cause he's older than us."

  Violet's voice interrupted her. "How old is he exactly?"

  "Twenty-seven. "

  "Do you know anything about his life before he came to New York?"

  "He told me the whole story. He was born in Florida. His mom died, and he never knew his dad. He was raised by his uncle, who beat him up all the time, so he ran away to Canada, where he worked as a mailman, and after that he came here and got into clubs and art."

  "I've heard several versions of his life story," Violet's voice said.

  "I know this is the real one on account of the way he told me. He was like really sad about his childhood."

  Violet mentioned the rumor about Rafael and the chopped finger.

  "I heard that, too. I don't believe it, though. This kid we call Toad— he's got acne real bad—was spreading that around. You know what else he said? He said that Teddy killed his own mother, pushed her down the stairs, but nobody found out, because it looked like an accident. That's the kind of stuff Teddy says to keep up his She-Monster act, but he's a super-gentle guy, really. Toad's pretty stupid, and how's Teddy going to kill somebody who died before he was even born?"

  "His mother couldn't have died before he was born."

  Silence. "No, I guess I mean right when he was born, but the point is, Teddy's sweet. He showed me his collection of salt and pepper shakers— soooo cute. Oh my God, little animals and flowers and these two teeny-weeny guys playing guitars with holes in their heads for the salt and pepper ..."

  Violet stopped the tape and moved it forward. "Now I want you to listen to this boy named Lee. I don't know much about him, except that he's on his own. He might be a runaway." She pressed PLAY, and Lee started talking. "Teddy's for freedom, man. That's what I appreciate about him—he's for self-expression, for the higher consciousness. He's going against all that normalcy shit and telling it like it is. Our society is bullshit and he knows it. His art gives me a rush. It's real, man."

  "What do you mean by real?" Violet asked him.

  "I mean real, honest."

  Silence.

  "I'll tell you something," Lee continued. "When I had nowhere to go, Ted took me in. Without him, I would've been pissing in the streets."

  Violet moved the tape forward. "This is Jackie." I heard a man's voice. "Giles is a pig, honey, a liar and a fake. And I tell you this from firsthand knowledge. Artifice is my life. This gorgeous body didn't come cheap. I've made myself into myself, but when I say he's fake, I mean fake on the inside. I mean that little creep has got a falsie where his soul ought to be. She-Monster—what a load of B.S." Jackie's voice rose into a dynamic falsetto. "That She-Monster act is ugly and it's cruel and it's stupid, and I tell you, Violet, I'm shocked, really shocked that that fact isn't crystal clear to anybody with a single brain cell in his or her head."

  Violet stopped the machine. "That's all there is about Teddy Giles. It doesn't get us very far."

  "Did you ever ask Mark about that weird message on the tape?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I knew if there was anything in it, he wouldn't tell me, and I didn't want him to feel that the tape was connected to Bill's heart attack."

  "You think it was?"

  "I don't know."

/>   "Do you think Bill knew something that we don't?"

  "If he did, he found out that same day. He wouldn't have kept it from me. I'm sure of that."

  I didn't have to feed Violet that night. We cooked together in my apartment for a change, and she finished all her pasta. After I poured her a second glass of wine, she said, "Did I ever tell you about Blanche Wittmann? I think her real name was Marie Wittmann, but she's usually called Blanche."

  "I don't think so, but it rings a bell."

  "They called her 'the Queen of the Hysterics.' She was featured in Charcot's demonstrations of hysteria and hypnosis. They were very popular, you know. All of fashionable Paris came to watch the ladies chirp like birds, hop around on one leg, and get lanced by pins. But after Charcot died, Blanche Wittmann never had another hysterical attack."

  "You're saying that she had them for him?"

  "She adored Charcot and wanted to please him, so she gave him what he wanted. In the newspapers she was often compared to Sarah Bernhardt. After the master died, she didn't want to leave the Salpêtrière. She stayed on and became a radiology technician. Those were the early days of X-rays. She died of the poisoning. One by one she lost her limbs."

  "Is there some reason for this story?" I said.

  "Yes. Trickery, deception, lying, and susceptibility to hypnosis were supposedly symptoms of hysteria. That's like Mark, isn't it?"

  "Yes, but Mark isn't paralyzed or having fits, is he?"

  "No, but that's not how we want him to behave, is it? Charcot wanted the women to perform, and they did. We want Mark to seem to care for other people, and when he's with us, that's how he appears. He gives us the performance he thinks we want."

  "But Mark isn't hypnotized, and I really don't think we can call him a hysteric."

  "I'm not saying that Mark is hysterical. Medical language keeps changing. Illnesses overlap. One thing mutates into another. Hypnosis merely lowers a person's resistance to suggestion. I'm not sure Mark has all that much resistance to begin with. What I'm saying is something very simple. It's not always easy to separate the actor from his act."