What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

  Indigo was a seventeen-year-old heroin addict, but Arthur said that he repeated his story without variation over and over again, and although the police hadn't found a single blood stain in Giles's apartment, they had noted a stain on the carpet under the bed where Indigo had spent the night, and the waitress at Puffy's, who had had blue hair at the time, remembered him. She had noticed him particularly because he had been shaking and crying over his espresso. When confronted with Indigo West, Teddy Giles accepted a plea bargain. The charges against him were reduced to aggravated manslaughter and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Indigo West had been given immunity for his testimony, and neither he nor Mark was charged with anything. For a week the papers carried articles on the end of the case, and then it vanished from the spotlight. Arthur guessed that the D.A didn't want to risk going to trial with two witnesses of dubious character. Indigo West had already served a sentence for drug possession in a juvenile correctional institution. The boy was a mess, but I believe that he was an honest mess.

  Nevertheless, there was a magical quality to his appearance. When I discovered that Lazlo was the person who had found Indigo, my astonishment diminished somewhat. With Arthur's blessing, Lazlo had pursued his own leads, which included talking to the gossip columnist who had printed the story of a witness. The columnist didn't know Indigo, but his stepdaughter had heard through a friend that a kid who spent every Thursday night at the Tunnel had heard through someone else that there was a third person who had seen the murder. The rumor chain led to Indigo West, whose real name was Nathan Furbank. The question was, why had Lazlo been able to locate a witness when the police had not? I couldn't help but attribute that success to the prodigious qualities of the Finkelman eyes, ears, and nose.

  During the case, Violet had called Lucille regularly to give her news. Sometimes they spoke amicably, but more often than not Violet wanted something from Lucille that Lucille wouldn't or couldn't give her. Violet wanted Lucille to acknowledge the extremity of what had happened to Mark. She wanted animal pain, anguish, and desperation, but Lucille would only say that she was "worried" and "deeply concerned" about him. After Giles was sentenced, Lucille became even more tranquil. During her conversations with Violet, she blamed Mark's problems on drugs. The drugs had muted his feelings and his reactions. The most important thing was for him to stay off drugs. Lucille's defense of Mark wasn't unreasonable; Mark's drug use had always been a muddled issue. But while Lucille labored to stay soft-spoken and polite, Violet inevitably grew more and more upset.

  One evening in late November, the telephone rang a few minutes after Violet and I had finished eating dinner. From the restrained tone of Violet's voice, I instantly knew that Lucille was on the other end of the line. Mark had stayed briefly with his mother and stepfather after the case was over. He'd then moved into a house with friends and found a job in a veterinary clinic. Lucille calmly told Violet that Mark had filched cash from one of his housemates and then stolen his car. He hadn't gone to work and he hadn't been seen for three days. Violet kept her temper. She told Lucille there was nothing either of them could do, but when she hung up the phone, her face was flushed and her hand was trembling.

  "I think Lucille means well," I said to Violet.

  Violet looked at me for several seconds, then she started yelling. "Don't you know that she's only half alive! Part of her is dead!" Her pale face and the broken cry in her voice shocked me, and I couldn't find an answer. She grabbed my upper arms and began to shake me, snarling through her teeth. "Don't you know that she was slowly killing Bill? I saw it right away. And Mark, my boy. He was my boy, too. I loved them. I loved them. She didn't. She can't." Her eyes opened as if she were suddenly afraid.

  "Remember? I asked you to take care of Bill." She shook me harder as her eyes filled with tears. "I thought you understood! I thought you knew!"

  I looked down at her. Her fingers had loosened their grip, but she was still hanging on to me, and I could feel the weight of her body tug at my arms for an instant before she let go. She was breathing hard from her rage, which was quickly turning into sobs. I listened to her cry loudly, and the noise caused a contraction in my chest, as if it were my own grief that I was hearing, or as if hers and mine were one and the same. She bent over, covering her face with her hands. I reached out for her and pulled her into my arms. The pressure in my lungs seemed unbearable. Her face was pressed into my neck, and I could feel her breasts against me and her arms hugging me tightly. My hand moved to her hip, and I let my fingers press the bone beneath it while I clutched her harder.

  "I love you," I said. "Don't you understand that I love you. I'll take care of you, be with you forever. I would do anything for you." I tried to kiss her. I grabbed her face and pressed it into mine, tilting my glasses in the process. She gave a small cry and pushed me away.

  Violet was looking at me with startled eyes. She lifted her hands as if she were pleading for something and then she lowered them. When I looked at her standing there near the turquoise table with a piece of hair falling onto her forehead, I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was my hold on the world, what I suffered over and loved, and I knew in that instant that I was losing her, and the knowledge turned me cold. I sat down at the table, folded my hands, and stared at them without saying a word. I felt her eyes on me as she stood in the middle of the room. I heard her breathing, and a couple of seconds later, the sound of her footsteps coming toward me. When I felt her fingers touching my head, I didn't look up at her. She said "Leo" several times, and then her voice cracked. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I, I didn't mean to push you away, I..." She knelt on the floor beside me and said, "Please talk to me. Please look at me." Her voice was hoarse and choked. "I feel so bad."

  I spoke to the table. "I think it's better that we say nothing. It was ridiculous of me to think that you might return my feelings, when I know better than anybody what you and Bill were to each other."

  "Turn your chair around," she said, "so I can see you. You must talk to me. You must."

  I resisted her request, but after a couple of seconds my stubbornness seemed so childish that I obeyed. Without getting up, I shifted the position of the chair, and once I was facing her I saw that tears were running down her cheeks and she was pressing her fist against her mouth to steady herself. She swallowed, moved her hand away from her face, and said, "It's so complicated, Leo, much more complicated than you think. There's nobody like you. You're good, you're generous ..."

  I lowered my eyes and began to shake my head.

  "Please, I want you to understand that without you ..."

  "Don't, Violet," I said. "It's all right. You don't have to make excuses for me."

  "I'm not. I want you to understand that even before Bill died, I needed you." Violet's lips were trembling. "There was an obtuse side to Bill—a hidden, unknowing, unknowable core that he let out in his work. He was obsessed. There were times when I felt neglected, and it hurt."

  "He adored you. You should have heard the way he talked about you."

  "And I adored him back." She pressed her hands together so hard her arms began to shake, but her voice sounded a little more composed. "The fact is, my own husband was less accessible to me than many other people. There was always something I couldn't get to in him, something remote, and I wanted that thing I could never have. It kept me alive and it kept me in love, because whatever it was, I could never find it."

  "But you were such good friends," I said.

  "The best of friends," she said, and took hold of both my hands. I felt her squeeze them. "We talked about everything all the time. After he died, I kept saying to myself, 'We were each other.' But knowing and being are two different things."

  "Always the philosopher," I said. The comment had an edge to it, and Violet reacted to my hint of cruelty by withdrawing her hands.

  "You're right to be angry. I've taken advantage of you. You've cooked for me and taken care of me and stayed with me, and I've just taken and t
aken and taken ..." Her voice grew louder and her eyes filled with more tears.

  Her distress made me guilty. "That's not true,'' I said.

  She was nodding at me. "Oh, yes it is. I'm selfish, Leo, and I have something cold and hard in me. I'm full of hate. I hate Mark. I used to love him. Of course, I didn't love him right away, but I learned to love him slowly, and then later to hate him, and I ask myself, Would I hate him if I had given birth to him, if he were my son? But the really terrible question is this: What was it that I loved?"

  Violet was silent for a few seconds, and I studied my hands, which were resting on my knees. They looked old, veiny, and discolored. Like my mother's hands when she got old, I thought.

  "Remember when Lucille took Mark to Texas with her, and then she decided she couldn't handle having him and sent him back to us?"

  I nodded.

  "He was really difficult, always acting up, but after she came to visit at Christmas and left again, he really went nuts. He pushed me, hit me, screamed at me. He wouldn't go to sleep. Every night, he threw a fit. I was nice to him, but it's hard to like someone who's awful to you—even when it's just a six-year-old kid. Bill decided that Mark missed his mother too much, that he had to go back to her, and they flew to Houston. I think it was a fatal mistake, Leo. I understood that not long ago. A week later, Lucille called Bill and told him that Mark was 'perfect.' That was the word she used. It meant obedient, cooperative, sweet. A couple of weeks later, Mark bit a little girl in school on the arm so hard that she bled, but at home he was no trouble at all. By the time he came back to New York, the furious little wild man had disappeared for good. It was like somebody had cast a spell on him and turned him into a docile, agreeable replica of himself. But that was the thing I learned to love— that automaton." Violet's eyes were dry and she clenched her jaw while she looked at me.

  I examined her tight face and said, "But I thought you didn't understand what happened to Mark."

  "I don't understand what happened to him. All I know is that he went away one thing and came back another. It took a long, long time to even begin to see that clearly. He had to demonstrate his falseness for years before I could really look behind the mask. Bill refused to see it, but he and I were both part of it. Did we cause it? I don't know. Did we ruin him? I don't know, but I think he must have felt that we were throwing him away. I'll tell you this, I hate Lucille, too, even though she can't help the way she is—all boarded up and shut down like a condemned house. That's how I think of her. I felt sorry for her in the beginning, after Bill left her, but all that pity is gone. And I hate Bill, too, for dying on me. He never went to the doctor. He smoked and drank and stewed in his own melancholy, and I keep thinking he should have been harder, tougher, meaner, angrier, not so goddamned guilty about everything all the time, that he should have been stronger for me!" She paused for several seconds. Her lashes were shiny black from her tears and I could see the small red veins in her eyes. She swallowed. "I needed somebody, Leo. I've been so alone with my hate. You've been so kind to me, and I used your kindness."

  I started to smile then. At first, I had no idea why I was amused. It was a little like giggling at a funeral or laughing when someone brings you news of a terrible car accident, but I realized that it was her honesty that made me smile. She was trying so hard to tell me the truth about herself as she knew it, and after the innumerable lies and thefts and the murder we had lived through together, her self-criticism seemed comic. It made me think of a nun in the confessional booth whispering her meager sins to a priest who is guilty of far worse.

  When she saw the smile, she said, "It's not funny, Leo."

  "Yes," I said, "it is. People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts, and as far as I can tell, you've done nothing wrong. When you and Bill sent Mark back to Lucille, you thought you were doing what was right. People can't do more than that. Now it's your turn to listen to me. As it turns out, I have no power over my feelings either, but it was a mistake to talk to you about them. I wish I could take back what I said— for my sake as well as yours. I lost my head. It's that simple, but there's nothing I can do about it now."

  Violet's green eyes regarded me steadily as she put her hands on my shoulders and began to stroke my arms. I was caught off guard for a moment by her touch, but I couldn't resist the happiness it brought me, and I felt my muscles relax. It had been a long time since I had felt someone's hands on me like that, and I actually tried to remember the last time. When Erica came for Bill's funeral, I thought.

  "I've decided to go away," Violet said. "I can't be here anymore. It's not Bill. I like being close to his things. It's Mark. I can't be near him anymore, not even in the same city. I don't want to see him again. A friend of mine in Paris invited me to give a seminar at the American University, and I've decided to do it, even though it's just for a few months. I'm leaving in two weeks. I was going to tell you at dinner but then the phone rang, and ..." Her face contorted for a second and then she continued, "I'm lucky that you love me. I'm really lucky."

  I began a reply, but Violet put her finger to my lips. "Don't talk. I have to tell you something else. I don't think it could go on, because I'm too confused. I'm broken, you see, not whole." She moved her hands to my neck and rubbed it softly. "But we can be together tonight if you want. I do love you very much, maybe not exactly the way you would like me to, but..."

  She stopped talking because I reached for her hands and pulled them gently away from my neck. I continued to hold them in mine while I looked at her face. I knew that I wanted her badly. I had forgotten what it was not to want her, but I didn't want her sacrifice—that sweet offering she held out to me, because I imagined my greed and lust accepted but not returned, and that picture of my desire made me quail. I shook my head at her while two large tears spilled onto her cheeks. She had been kneeling throughout our talk and she put her head down on one of my thighs for a second before she stood up, led me over to the sofa, sat down beside me, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and we sat together for a long time without saying anything.

  I remembered Bill in Vermont then, walking out the door of Bowery Two just before dinner. I saw him through the kitchen window of the Vermont house, and although it was an uncommonly lucid memory, I felt no emotion or nostalgia. I was merely a voyeur of my own life, a cold spectator who looks on at other people going about their daily routines. Bill lifted his hand to greet Matthew and Mark from the top of the stairs, and then paused to light a cigarette. I saw him stride across the lawn toward the farmhouse while Matt tugged at his arm, my son looking up at Bill. Mark was grinning as he staggered behind them and feigned a spastic disorder—holding one arm akimbo and waving the other helplessly in front of him. I surveyed the large kitchen in my mind and saw Erica and Violet pitting olives at the table. I heard the screen door slam, and at the sound, the two women looked up at Bill. Smoke rose up from the butt between his fingers, which were stained with blue and green paint, and as he sucked on the cigarette, I could see that his thoughts were still in the studio, that he wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet. Behind him, the boys had crouched down to look for the garter snake who lived under the front step. No one spoke, and in the quiet, I could hear the ticking of the clock that hung to the right of the door—a big-faced old school clock with clear black numbers—and I found myself struggling to understand how time can be measured on a disc, a circle with hands that return to the same positions over and over again. That logical revolution looked like a mistake. Time isn't circular, I thought. That's wrong. But the memory didn't let go of me. It continued—vehement, acute, inescapable. Violet glanced at the clock and pointed at Bill. "You're a stinky mess, my love. Go wash. You've got exactly twenty minutes."

  Violet left New York on December ninth in the late afternoon. The low sky was beginning to darken, and a few tiny flakes of snow had started to fall. I carried her heavy suitcase down the stairs and left it on the sidewalk while I hailed a cab for her. Sh
e was wearing her long navy blue coat, which tied around her waist, and a white fur hat that I had always liked.

  The driver popped the trunk, and we lifted the suitcase into it together. While we said good-bye, I clutched at what was there—-Violet's face coming toward mine, the smell of her in the cold air, the hug, and then the quick kiss on my mouth, not my cheek, the sound of the car door opening, then slamming, her hand at the window and her eyes with a tender, sorry look in them under the fringe of her hat. I followed the yellow taxi up Greene Street as Violet craned her neck and waved again. At the end of block, I watched the cab turn onto Grand Street I didn't leave until it had traveled some distance from me—a shrunken yellow thing lost in the jumble of traffic. When I felt that it was just about the size of the taxi in my painting, I walked back up the block to my door.

  My eyes started to go on me the following year. I thought that the haze in my vision was caused by strain from my work or maybe cataracts. When the ophthalmologist told me there was nothing to be done, because the form of macular degeneration I had was of the wet rather than the dry sort, I nodded, thanked him, and stood up to leave. He must have found my response perverse, because he frowned at me. I told him I had been lucky with my health so far, and I wasn't surprised by illnesses that had no cure. He said that was un-American, and I agreed. Over the years the haze turned into fog, and then into the thick clouds that block my vision now. I've always been able to see the periphery of things, which allows me to walk without a cane, and I can still negotiate my way on the subway. The daily effort of shaving became too hard, however, and I grew a beard. I have it trimmed every month by a man in the Village who insists on calling me Leon. I don't bother to correct him anymore.