What I Loved

  "But it wasn't your fault."

  "I know. I feel bad because I liked that craziness in her. I found it dramatic. She was very beautiful then. People used to say she looked like Grace Kelly. It's awful, but a beautiful, bleeding girl is more compelling than a plain bleeding girl. I was twenty years old and a total idiot."

  And I'm fifty-five, I thought to myself, and I'm still a total idiot. Bill stood up and began pacing. As I watched him move back and forth across the floor, I knew that if I wasn't careful, the secret between me and Lucille could fester like a sore. I also knew that I had to keep it. Nothing would come of confession, except my own relief. "Lucille will always be with us," Violet had said. Perhaps that was exactly what Lucille wanted.

  After a month of delays, Lazlo Finkelman finally came for dinner. A good part of Erica's pleasure in his company that evening came from watching him eat. He ingested heaps of mashed potatoes, six pieces of chicken, and smaller but significant amounts of carrots and broccoli. After he had consumed three pieces of apple tart, he appeared to be ready for conversation. But talking to Lazlo was like climbing a steep hill. He was almost perversely laconic, answering our questions in monosyllables or sentences that evolved so slowly I was bored before he managed to end them. Nevertheless, by the time Lazlo went home, we had gathered that he had grown up in Indianapolis and that he was an orphan. His father had died when he was nine, and then seven years later his mother had died. At sixteen he had been taken in by his aunt and uncle, who, in his words, were "okay." When he was eighteen, however, he had left them for New York City "to do my art."

  Lazlo had worked many jobs. He had been a busboy, a clerk in a hardware store, and a bicycle messenger. During one desperate period, he had collected bottles on the street for their refunds. At the time, he was a cashier at a store in Brooklyn with the dubious name of La Bagel Delight. When I asked Lazlo about his art, he immediately produced slides from his bag. The boy's work reminded me of the Tinkertoys my mother had bought for me not long after we arrived in New York. As I studied the oddly shaped sculptures, it dawned on me that these sticks resembled genitalia, both male and female.

  "Does all your work have a sexual theme?" Erica said to him. She was smiling as she said it, but Lazlo seemed immune to her humor. He studied Erica from behind his glasses and nodded soberly. His blond broom nodded with him. "It's what I do," he said.

  Erica was the one who approached Bill on Lazlo's behalf. For some time, Bill had been talking about hiring an assistant, and Erica was convinced that Lazlo would "be perfect." I was more skeptical about the boy's qualifications, but Bill couldn't resist Erica, and Lazlo became a fixture in our lives. He started working for Bill on the Bowery every afternoon. Erica fed him about once a month, and Matt loved him. Lazlo did nothing to court Matthew. He didn't play with Matt or speak much more to him than he did to us. But the young man's apparent coolness didn't deter Matt in the least. He climbed onto Laz's lap and touched his fascinating hair and rattled on to him about his growing passion for baseball, and every once in a while, Matt would clasp his hands on either side of Lazlo's face and kiss him. During these onslaughts of Matt's passion, Lazlo would sit impassively in his chair, speaking as little as possible, his expression uniformly morose. And yet, one evening as I watched Matt throw his arms around the skinny Finkelman legs as they were about to stride through the door for dinner, I had the sudden thought that Lazlo's lack of resistance to Matt was in itself a form of affection. It was simply the best he could do at the time.

  That January, my colleague Jack Newman began his liason with Sara Wang, a graduate student whom he had taught in one of his courses. She was a pretty young woman with brown eyes and black hair that fell to the middle of her back. There had been others before her—Jane and Delia and the six-foot-one-inch Tina, whose sexual appetite had apparently been as large as she was. Jack was lonely. His book, Urinals and Campbell's Soup, which he had been working on for five years, wasn't enough to fill the evening hours spent in his large apartment on Riverside Drive. The affairs didn't last very long. Jack's love objects weren't necessarily pretty, but they were always bright. He once told me rather sadly that he had never managed to get a stupid girl into bed. But even the smart girls soon tired of Jack. I suppose they understood that he wasn't serious, that he loved the game more than he loved them. Perhaps they woke up in the morning and looked over at the balding character in bed next to them and wondered what had happened to last night's magic. I don't know, but Jack lost them all. Late one afternoon, I walked down the hall to Jack's office. I had stayed on to correct papers and had come across a remarkable little essay on Fra Angelico by a young man named Fred Ciccio that I wanted to show Jack. When I put my eye to the small window of his office, I saw him and Sara in a clinch. His right hand had disappeared inside Sara's blouse, and although her hands were hidden somewhere beneath the desk, the look on Jack's face suggested that they weren't idle. As soon as I understood what I was seeing, I turned around, leaned my head against the window to block the view, and fell victim to a sudden, explosive coughing fit before I knocked. Sara, rebuttoned but red in the face, fled as soon as I walked through the door.

  I didn't wait to speak to Jack. I sat down in the chair across from him and gave him my standard lecture. I warned him that his lack of discretion could ruin everything for him in the department. The climate was bad for seducing students. He would have to break it off or hide her.

  Jack sighed, looked at me grimly, and said, "I'm in love with her, Leo."

  "You were in love with all of them, Jack," I said.

  He shook his head. "No, Sara's different. Did I ever use that word before?"

  I couldn't remember whether Jack had said he loved Tina or Delia or Jane. I thought of Lucille then and the curious distinction she had made between "strong interest" and the state of being "in love."

  "I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything," I told him.

  On the IRT I pondered my own words. They had sprung from my lips without hesitation—a pithy comeback to Jack's confession—but what had I meant by them? Had I said it because I didn't believe in Jack's love for Sara or because I did? Not once in all the years of my marriage had I asked myself whether I loved Erica. For about a year after we met, I had been thoroughly unhinged by her. My heart had pounded. My nerves had tensed with longing until I could almost hear them buzz. My appetite had vanished, and I had withdrawal symptoms when I wasn't with her. That mania had gradually ended, but as I walked up the steps out of the subway and into the cold gray air, I realized that I couldn't wait to see her. At home I found Erica and Grace and Matthew in the kitchen. I grabbed Erica, tipped her backward over my arm, and kissed her forcefully on the mouth. Grace laughed. Matt gaped, and Erica said, "Do it again. I liked it." I did it again. "Now do it to me, Daddy!" Matt cried. I bent down, threw Matt over my arm, and gave him a kiss on his small pursed mouth. These demonstrations amused Grace so much that she pulled out a kitchen chair, fell into it, and laughed for a good minute.

  It was a small incident, and yet I have often gone back to that moment in my mind. Years later, I began to imagine the episode from a distance, as though the man walking through the door had been caught on film. I watch him take off his coat and place his keys and wallet near the telephone in the entryway. I see him set his briefcase on the floor and then stride into the kitchen. The middle-aged man with a receding hairline, who is mostly but not entirely gray, grabs a tall, still-young woman with dark brown hair and a little mole above her lip and kisses her. I kissed Erica that day on a whim, and yet my sudden desire could be traced back to Jack's office, where he said that he loved Sara, and, even further, to Lucille's sofa, where she had tied herself into linguistic knots over the same word. No one but I could track that kiss. Its trail was invisible, a muddled path of human interaction that climaxed in my impulsive gesture of reaffirmation. I'm fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly hav
e. When I concentrate, I see Erica's eyes close and her thick lashes brush the delicate skin beneath her eyes. I see her hair fall away from her forehead and feel the weight of her body on my arm. I can remember what she was wearing—a long-sleeved striped T-shirt. Its round neck was cut out to reveal her collarbones and the even pallor of her winter skin.

  That August was the first of four Augusts the two families spent together in Vermont. Matt and Mark turned eight, nine, ten, and finally eleven in the big old farmhouse we rented every year—a rambling, run-down place with seven bedrooms. At various junctures during its 150 years, additions had made the house larger and then larger again to accommodate growing families, but by the time we saw it, nobody was living there during the other months of the year. An old woman had willed it to her eight godchildren, now older people themselves, and the house languished as a mostly forgotten asset. It lay on top of a hill, which the locals called a mountain, not far from Newfane—a town pretty enough to be obsessively photographed as an archetypal village of cozy New England. The summer days have run together in my mind, and I can't always separate one vacation year from another, but the four months we spent there are now touched by a quality I can only call imaginary. It isn't that I doubt the truth of them. My memory is clear. I remember every room as though I had been in it yesterday. I can see the view from the little window where I used to sit and work on my book. I can hear the boys playing downstairs and Erica humming to herself not far from them. I can smell corn boiling. No, it's that the ordinary comfort and pleasure of that house has been reconfigured in my mind by "the past." Because what was has disappeared, that was has become idyllic. Had it been only one summer, the green mountain could never have held the magic it has for me now. Repetition enchanted it: the drive north in our car and Bill's truck, loaded down with books, art supplies, and toys, the settling into our musty rooms, the cleaning rituals led by Violet, the cooking and the eating and the reading and the bedtime songs, the four adults sitting beside the woodstove and talking into the night. There were warm days, a few sultry ones, and stretches of rain that chilled the house and rattled the windows. There were nights when we lay on blankets and studied the constellations that shone out as plain and clear as the points on an astronomical map. From our beds at night we heard black bears calling to each other in voices that sounded like owls. Deer came to gaze at the house from the wood's edge, and once a great blue heron landed a foot from the house and peered in at Matt, who was standing near the window. He didn't know what it was, and when he came to me to explain what he had seen, his face was still pale from the sudden apparition of a bird too large to be real.

  Bill and Violet and Erica and I worked while the boys attended a day camp in Weston until two in the afternoon, when one of the four parents would take the twenty-minute drive to fetch them. Erica, Violet, and I worked in the house. Bill set up a studio in an outbuilding on the property, a sagging structure he called Bowery Two. Those childless hours when each of us pursued his or her work remind me now of collective dreaming. I heard the soft sound of Erica's electric typewriter as she wrote the book that was eventually published under the title Henry James and the Ambiguities of Dialogue. From Violet's room I listened to the hushed drone of girls speaking on tape. Once, that first summer, I walked past her door on my way to get a glass of water, and I heard a childish voice say: "I like to see my bones. I like to see them and feel them. When there's too much fat between me and my bones, I feel farther away from myself. Do you understand?" From Bill's workplace I heard hammering, the occasional bangs and crashes, and the low and distant sound of music—Charlie Mingus, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, the Talking Heads, arias from Mozart and Verdi, Schubert's songs. Bill was making fairy-tale boxes. Each one contained a story, and because I usually knew the story he was working on, images of impossibly long hair, overgrown castles, and pricked fingers would sometimes float into my consciousness as I bent over a reproduction of a Duccio madonna. I love the flatness and mystery of medieval and early Renaissance art, and I labored over interpreting its didactic codes in terms of the sweep of history. The triptychs and panels of the Passion, of the Virgin's life, of the lives of the saints in all their bloody Christian strangeness sometimes overlapped with Bill's magical narratives or with Violet's starving girls, young women for whom denial and self-inflicted pain were virtues. And because Erica read to me from her book almost every afternoon, I found that the attenuated sentences of Henry James (with their numerous qualifying clauses, which inevitably cast doubt on the abstract noun or nominal phrase that had come before them) sometimes infected my prose, and I had to revise my paragraphs to rid them of a writer's influence that had drifted onto my page through Erica's voice.

  After camp, the boys played outside. They dug holes and filled them up again. They built forts from dead logs and old blankets and caught newts and beetles and several enormous June bugs. They grew. The two small children of the first summer had little in common with the long- legged boys of the last summer. Matt played and laughed and ran like all children, but I continued to feel an undertow in his personality that separated him from his peers, a passionate core that was taking him in his own direction. Because he and Mark had always known each other, because their relation was almost fraternal, a mutual tolerance of their differences lay at the bottom of the friendship. Mark was more easygoing than Matt. After the age of about seven, he'd become an unusually agreeable child. Whatever hardships he had endured, they seemed to have left no trace on his character. Matt, on the other hand, lived intensely. He rarely cried over cuts or bruises, but when he felt slighted or mistreated, the tears rushed out of him. His conscience was severe, even cruel, and Erica worried that we had accidentally created a child with a monstrous superego. Even before a reprimand was out of my mouth, Matt was apologizing. "I'm so sorry, Daddy. I'm so, so sorry!" He meted out his own punishment, and Erica and I generally ended up comforting rather than scolding him.

  Matt had learned to read slowly but steadily with the help of a tutor, and at night we continued to read to him. The books grew ever longer and more complicated, and they, along with several movies, strongly affected his imagination. He was orphaned and imprisoned. He led mutinies and endured shipwrecks. He explored new galaxies. For a time he and Mark had a Round Table in the woods. But Matt's overriding fantasy was baseball. He carried his glove everywhere. He practiced his stance and his swing. He stood in front of the mirror in his uniform and caught imaginary balls in his glove. He collected cards, read from The Baseball Encyclopedia nightly, and invented games in his mind that often ended in a suicide squeeze. For Matt's sake, I sometimes wished he were a better player. When he was nine, he started wearing glasses, and his hitting improved, but the progress he made as a Little League player was more the product of his ferocious, indefatigable will than any native talent. When I watched him run the bases—the new glasses strapped to his head, his knees and arms pumping wildly—I could see that his running style had less grace than some of the other boys' and that in spite of his determination, he wasn't all that fast. But then, he wasn't alone. At least in the first years, Little League is a comedy of errors, of children who dream on the bases and forget the rules, who miss balls headed straight for their outstretched gloves or who stumble and fall once the ball is caught. Matt made every mistake except that of flagging alertness. As Bill said, "He has the concentration of a champion." What he lacked was a champion's body.

  The intricacies of the game tightened the bonds between Bill and Matt. Like a gnostic priest initiating a young disciple into the sect, Bill fed Matt obscure RBIs and ERAs. He instructed him in methods of decoding the waving, flapping, nose touching, and ear tugging of coaching signs, and he pitched and threw to Matt in the yard until the light faded and the ball all but vanished in the darkness. His own son's interest in the game was lackadaisical. Sometimes Mark joined the two fanatics; other times he wandered off to collect insects in jars or just lie on the grass and stare at the sky. I never detected any jealousy in Mark towar
d Matt. He seemed perfectly contented with the growing friendship between his father and his best friend.

  In a single body, Bill combined Matt's two great passions: baseball and art, and I watched as his affection for Bill gradually turned to hero worship. The last two Augusts we were in Vermont, Matt began to wait for Bill to finish working. He would sit patiently on the wooden steps outside the squat studio building, usually with a drawing on his lap. When he heard footsteps followed by the squeak of the screen door, Matt would jump up and wave the sheet of paper. I often saw this scene enacted from the kitchen, where I was engaged in my assigned task— chopping vegetables. Bill would exit the little building and pause outside the door. On warm days he would wipe his forehead and cheeks with one of the paint rags he carried in his pockets as Matt ran up the remaining stairs toward him. Bill would take the drawing, smile, nod, and often he would reach out and ruffle Matt's hair. One of those pictures was a gift to Bill—a drawing Matt had done in colored pencils of Jackie Robinson at the plate. He'd worked for days on it. When Bill returned to New York in September, he hung it up in his studio, where it remained for years.

  Although Matt was always sketching baseball diamonds and players, he never stopped drawing and painting New York City. Over time, these pictures became more and more complex. He painted the city in sunshine and under quiet gray skies. He painted it in high winds and in rain and in whirling snowstorms. He drew views of the city from above, from the side, and from below, and he peopled its streets with sturdy businessmen and chic artists and skinny models and bums and the chattering lunatics we saw every day on the way to school. He drew the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty and the Chrysler Building and the Twin Towers. When he brought me these urban scenes, I would always take my time with them, because I knew that only scrutiny would reveal their details—a couple entwined in the park, a child sobbing on a street corner beside its helpless mother, lost tourists, pickpockets, and three-card monte cheats.