What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

  Erica remains a half presence in my life. We talk more often on the telephone and write fewer letters, and every July we spend two weeks together in Vermont This July was our third year, and I'm sure we will continue the tradition. Fourteen days out of 365 seems to be enough for us. We don't stay in the old farmhouse, but we aren't far away, and last year we drove up the hill, parked the car, walked around the lawn, and peeked through the windows of the empty house. Erica isn't strong. Headaches continue to interrupt her life, rendering her a semi-invalid for days, sometimes weeks, but she still teaches with fervor and writes a lot. In April 1998, Erica published Nanda's Tears: Repression and Release in the Work of Henry James. At home in Berkeley, she often spends the weekends with Daisy, now a pudgy eight-year-old girl enamoured of rap music.

  Next spring, I will finally retire. My world will shrink then, and I'll miss my students and Avery Library and my office and Jack. Because my colleagues and students know what I've lost—Matthew, Erica, and my eyes—they have turned me into a venerable figure. I suppose a near-blind art history professor gives off a whiff of the romantic. But nobody at Columbia knows that I lost Violet, too. As it turns out, she and Erica are about equidistant from me these days, one in Paris, one in Berkeley, and I, who never moved, occupy the middle ground in New York. Violet lives in a small apartment in the Marais not far from the Bastille. Every December, she returns to New York for a few days before she flies home to Minnesota for Christmas. She always spends a day with Dan in New Jersey, who, she says, is doing a little better. He still paces, chain-smokes, makes the O sign with his fingers, and speaks several decibels louder than most people, and he has yet to master the ordinary business of living day to day. It's all hard—cleaning, shopping, preparing meals—and yet Violet feels that everything about Dan is a little less Dan than before, as if his whole being has subsided a notch or turned one shade lighter. He is still writing poems and occasionally a scene for a play but is less prolific than he once was, and the scraps of paper and manuscript pages that lie scattered about his one-room apartment are covered with verse or bits of dialogue followed by ellipses. Age and thirty years of potent drugs have dulled Dan a bit, but that muting seems to have made his life a bit easier.

  Four years ago, Violet's sister, Alice, married Edward. A year later, at the age of forty, she gave birth to a daughter named Rose. Violet is crazy about Rose, and every year she arrives in New York with a suitcase stuffed with Parisian dolls and dresses to bring to the angel in Minneapolis. I hear from Violet every two or three months. She sends me an audiotape in lieu of a letter, and I listen to her news and her rambling thoughts about her work. Her book The Automatons of Late Capitalism includes chapters entitled "Manic Shopping," "Advertising and the Artificial Body," "Lies and the Internet," and "The Parasitic Pyschopath as Ideal Consumer." Her research has taken her from the eighteenth century into the present, from the French physician Pinel to a living psychiatrist named Kernberg. The terms and etiologies of the illness she is studying have changed with time, but Violet has tracked it in all its shifting incarnations: folie lucide, moral insanity, moral idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality—ASP for short. These days psychiatrists use checklists for the disorder, which they revise and update by committee, but among the features most often included are glibness and charm, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse, impulsivity, cunning and manipulativeness, early behavior problems, and a failure to learn from mistakes or respond to punishment. Every broad idea in the book will be illustrated by individual cases—the countless stories Violet has been collecting from people over the years.

  Neither Violet nor I ever mention the night I told her I loved her, but my confession still lies between us like a shared bruise. It has created a new delicacy and inhibition in us that I regret, but no real discomfort. She always spends an evening with me when she comes for her yearly visit, and while I'm making her dinner, I notice that I try to suppress the most obvious signs of my joy, but after an hour or so I lose that self-consciousness, and we lapse into a familiar intimacy that is almost, but not quite, what it was before. Erica tells me that there is a man called Yves in Violet's life and that they have an "arrangement"—a circumscribed liason that involves hotels—but Violet doesn't speak to me of him. We talk about the people we have in common: Erica, Lazlo, Pinky, Bernie, Bill, Matthew, and Mark.

  Mark turns up every once in a while, and then he vanishes again. With money Bill had set aside for him, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and impressed his mother and even Violet (who followed his school career from Paris) with his first-semester grades, which arrived in the mail—all As and B's. But when Lucille called the registrar's office for some information during Mark's second semester, she discovered that Mark wasn't a student. The grades were clever forgeries done on a computer. After a week and a half of school in the fall, he had collected his tuition money, which was refunded directly to him, and had run off with a girl named Mickey. In the spring, he had enrolled again, taken the money again, and disappeared. He calls his mother from time to time, saying that he's in New Orleans or California or Michigan, but nobody knows for sure. Teenie Gold, who is now twenty-two and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, sends me a Christmas card every year. Two years ago, she wrote that a friend of hers thought he had spotted Mark in New York leaving a music store with a pile of CDs, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure.

  I don't want to see Mark again or speak to him again, but that doesn't mean that I'm free of him. At night, when every sound is amplified by the relative quiet of the building, my nerves race, and I feel blind in the darkness. I hear him in the hallway outside my door or on the fire escape. I hear him in Matt's room, even though I know he isn't there. I see him, too, in visions that are half memory, half invention. I see him in Bill's arms, his small head nestled against his father's shoulder. I see Violet throwing a towel around him after his bath and kissing his neck. I see him with Matt outside the house in Vermont, walking toward the woods with their arms over each other's shoulders. I see him wrapping a cigar box in masking tape. I see him as Harpo Marx honking madly on his horn, and I see him outside the hotel room in Nashville, looking on while Teddy Giles slams my head into the wall.

  Lazlo tells me that Teddy Giles is a model prisoner. In the beginning there were those who speculated that Giles might be killed in prison for a crime unpopular even among criminals, but it seems that he is well liked by everyone, especially the guards. Not long after his arrest, the New Yorker carried an article on Giles. The journalist had done his homework, and some mysteries were solved. I discovered that Giles's mother had never been a prostitute or a waitress. She wasn't dead, but alive in Tucson, Arizona, refusing to speak to the press. Teddy Giles (who was christened Allan Johnson) grew up in a middle-class suburb outside Cleveland. His father, who worked as an accountant, left his wife when Teddy was one and a half and moved to Florida, but he continued to support his wife and son. According to one of Giles's aunts, Mrs. Johnson suffered a severe depression and was hospitalized a month after her husband's departure. Giles was farmed out to a grandmother and spent most of his early years between his mother and various other family members. At fourteen, he was expelled from school and began to travel. After that, the journalist lost Allan Johnson's trail and didn't pick it up again until he surfaced in New York as Teddy Giles. The writer made the usual comments about violence, pornography, and American culture. He pondered the ugly content of Giles's work, its brief, sensational rise in the art world, the dangers of censorship, and the bleakness of it all. The man wrote well and soberly, but as I read the article I was overcome by a feeling that he was saying what he knew his readers expected him to say, that the article, with its smooth language and received ideas, would unsettle nobody. On one of the pages there was a photograph of Allan Johnson when he was seven—one of those badly taken grade-school portraits with a fake sky as the backdrop. He had once been a cute kid with blond hair and protruding ears.

 
Lazlo works for me in the afternoons. He sees well what I see poorly, and together we make an efficient team. I pay him a good salary, and I think he mostly enjoys the work. Three evenings a week, he comes and reads to me purely for pleasure. When Pinky can get the baby-sitter to stay late, she comes along, too, but often falls asleep on the sofa before the reading is over. Will, also known as Willy, Wee Willy, Winky, and the Winker was two and a half last month. The Finkelman offspring is a devil for running, hopping, and climbing. When his parents bring him over for a visit, he leaps on me as if I were his personal jungle gym and leaves no part of my aging body untrampled. I'm fond of the redheaded little dervish, however, and sometimes when he crawls over me and puts his fingers on my face or touches my head, I feel a small vibration in his hands that makes me wonder if the Winker hasn't inherited his father's unusual sensitivities.

  Will, however, isn't ready for an evening of The Man Without Qualities, which his father has been reading to me for the past two months. For such a laconic person, Lazlo reads pretty well. He is careful about punctuation and rarely stumbles over words. From time to time, he pauses after a passage and makes a sound—a kind of snort that moves from his throat and up through his nose. I look forward to the snorts, which I've dubbed "Finkelmanian laughter," because by matching snort to sentence, I've finally gained access to the comic depths in Lazlo I always suspected were there. His is a dry, restrained, often black humor, well suited to Musil. At thirty-five, Laz isn't young anymore. I have no impression that he's aged physically at all, but that may be because he's never modified his hair, glasses, or neon trousers, and my eyes are fuzzy. Lazlo has a dealer now, but he sells too little to make the dealer happy. Nevertheless, he plows on with his kinetic Tinkertoys, which now hold small objects and flags with quotations on them. I know he reads Musil with an eye for a sharp quote. Like his mentor, Bill, Lazlo is attracted to purity. He has an ascetic streak. But Laz belongs to another generation, and his observant eyes have been fixed too long on the vanities, corruptions, cruelties, foibles, fortunes, and foils of New York's art world to have remained untouched by it. A tone of cynicism sometimes creeps into his voice when he talks about shows.

  Last spring, he and I started listening to Mets games on the radio. It's late August now and there's excited talk about a possible Subway Series. Neither Laz nor I has ever been a rabid fan. We listen for two fans who died, and we take their pleasure in soaring home runs, hard-hit doubles, beautiful slides into third and a scuffle on first about whether the guy was really out. I enjoy the language of baseball—sliders, fastballs, knuckle-balls, a can of corn—and I like listening to the games on the radio and to Bob Murphy inviting us to stay tuned for "the happy recap." The play-by-play has started to excite me more than I would have expected. Last week, I actually popped up from my chair and cheered.

  Lazlo likes to take out the portfolios of Matt's drawings and look at them. When my eyes tire, he sometimes describes the scenes to me. I lie back in my chair and listen to him tell about the tiny people in Matthew's New York. Last week, he described a picture of Dave: "Dave's chilling out in his chair. He's looking kind of beat, but his eyes are open. I like the way Matt did the old guy's beard with those little squiggly lines and the white craypas over them. Good old Dave," Lazlo said. "He's dreaming about some old girlfriend probably. He's going over the whole sad mess in his mind. I can tell, because Matt stuck a little wrinkle between his eyebrows."

  Lazlo's been my right-hand man when it comes to the book on Bill. For several years it's been growing and shrinking and then growing again. I want it to be finished before Bill's retrospective in 2002 at the Whitney. Early in the summer, I stopped the revisions I was dictating to Lazlo in order to write these pages. I told him I had a personal project that I had to take care of before we could continue. He suspects the truth. He knows that I dusted off my old manual typewriter for the occasion and have been typing in a trance every day for hours. I chose my old Olympia because my fingers don't lose their position on the keys as easily as on a computer. "You're straining your eyes, Leo," he tells me. "You should let me help you with whatever it is." But he can't help me with this story.

  Before she left for Paris, Violet told me that she had left a box of Bill's books on the Bowery for me. She had saved volumes she knew I would like and that might help me with my work. "They're all marked," she said, "and some of them have long notes in the margins." I didn't pick up those books for over two months. When I finally went to get them, Mr. Bob trailed after me, sweeping while he delivered his harangue. I was robbing Bill's ghost, violating the sacred ground of the dead, cheating Beauty of her inheritance. When I pointed to my name written in Violet's hand on a cardboard box, Bob was tongue-tied for a moment but rebounded immediately with a long discourse on a possessed breakfront he had tracked down in Flushing twenty years earlier. When I walked out the front door carrying the small box in my arms, he punished me with a rather perfunctory blessing.

  Violet hasn't given up the Bowery studio. She still pays the rent for herself and Mr. Bob. Eventually, Mr. Aiello or his heirs will want to do something with the building, but for now it's a sagging, forgotten structure inhabited by a mad but highly articulate old man. Bob gets most of his nourishment in soup kitchens these days. About once a month, I go and check on him or send Lazlo to do it when I feel I'm not up to the old man's monologues. Whenever I make the trip, I bring along a bag of groceries and am forced to endure Bob's whining about my choices. Once he accused me of having "no palate." Nevertheless, I've sensed a slight softening in his attitude toward me. His hostility is a little less vituperative, and his benedictions have become longer and more florid. It isn't altruism that prompts my visits to Mr. Bob but my eagerness to listen to his ornate farewells, to hear him invoke the radiance of the Godhead, the seraphim, the Holy Dove, and the Bloody Lamb. I look forward to his creative perversions of the psalms. His favorite is Psalm 38, which he alters freely for his purposes, calling on God to keep my loins free of loathsome disease and to maintain the soundness of my flesh. "O Lord, let him not be bowed down greatly," Bob bellowed after me the last time I was on the Bowery. "Let him not go mourning all the day long."

  I didn't find Violet's letters until May. I had opened some of the other books, but never the volume of da Vinci drawings. I was saving it for when I began to research Icarus. I felt sure that Bill's unfinished work had been influenced by the drawings, not in any direct way but because the artist had made drawings for a flying bird-machine. I had been avoiding Icarus. It seemed impossible to write about it without mentioning Mark. As soon as I opened the volume, the five letters spilled out. After only seconds, I understood what I had found and started reading. I read and rested, read and rested, nearly panting from the strain, but hungry for the next word. It's good that no one saw me deciphering those love letters. Heaving, dizzy, blinking, and straining, I finally managed to get through all five during the course of a couple of hours, and then I closed my eyes and kept them shut for a long time.

  "Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never liked my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees." The letters were full of little thoughts like that one, but she also wrote: "It's important now to tell you that I love you. I held back, because I was a coward. But I'm yelling it now. And even if I lose you, I'll always say to myself, 'I had that. I had him, and it was delirious and sacred and sweet.' If you let me, I'll always dote on your whole odd, savage, painting self."

  Before I mailed the letters to Violet in Paris, I xeroxed them and put the copies in my drawer. I wish I had been nobler. To resist reading them was probably beyond me, but if my eyes had been better, I might not have made those copies. I don't keep them to study their contents. That's too difficult. I keep the letters as objects, charmed by their various metonymies. When I take out my things now, I rarely separate Violet's letters to Bill from the little pho
to of the two of them, but I keep the bit of cardboard and Matthew's knife far away from the other things. The doughnuts eaten in secret and the stolen gift are heavy with Mark and with my fear. The fear pre-dates the murder of Rafael Hernandez, and when I play my game of mobile objects, I'm often tempted to move the photographs of my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and the twins near the knife and the fragment of the box. Then the game flirts with terror. It moves me so close to the edge that I have a sensation of falling, as if I had hurled myself off the edge of a building. I plummet downward, and in the speed of the fall I lose myself in something formless but deafening. It's like entering a scream—being a scream.

  And then I withdraw, backing away from the edge like a phobic. I make a different arrangement. Talismans, icons, incantations—these fragments are my frail shields of meaning. The game's moves must be rational. I force myself to make a coherent argument for every grouping, but at bottom the game is magic. I'm its necromancer calling on the spirits of the dead, the missing, and the imaginary. Like O painting a slab of beef because he's hungry, I invoke ghosts that can't satisfy me. But the invocation has a power all its own. The objects become muses of memory.

  Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak. The trail behind us is sometimes marked by stones like the ones Hansel first left behind him. Other times, the path is gone, because the birds flew down and ate up all the crumbs at sunrise. The story flies over the blanks, filling them in with the hypotaxis of an "and" or an "and then." I've done it in these pages to stay on a path I know is interrupted by shallow pits and several deep holes. Writing is a way to trace my hunger, and hunger is nothing if not a void.