What I Loved

  I think it was Maria Livingston who said, "Are you all right, Professor Herzberg?"

  I cleared my throat, removed my glasses, and wiped my eyes. "The water," I said in a low voice. "The glass of water is very moving to me." I looked up and saw the surprised faces of my students. "The water is a sign of..." I paused. "The water seems to be a sign of absence."

  I remained silent, but I could feel warm tears running down my cheeks. My students continued to look at me. "I believe that's all for today," I told them in a tremulous voice. "Go outside and enjoy the weather."

  I watched my twelve students leave the room in silence, and I noticed with some surprise that Letitia Reeves had beautiful legs, which must have been hidden under trousers until that day. I listened to the door close. In the hallway, I heard the students break into low conversations. The sun lit the empty classroom and a wind rose up and blew through the windows and across my face. I tried not to make any noise, but I know that I did. I gulped for air and I gagged and deep ugly sounds came from my throat as I sobbed for what seemed to be a very long time.

  Weeks later, I came across my calendar from 1989, the little agenda in which I had marked down appointments and events. I paged through it, pausing at Matt's baseball games, his teacher conferences, an art show at his school. When I turned to April, I noticed that I had written METS GAME in large letters on the fourteenth. Exactly one year to the day, I had broken down in class over the Chardin painting. I remembered my conversation with Matt that night. I remembered exactly where I had been sitting on his bed. I remembered his face as he talked to me and how for part of the time he had addressed the ceiling. I remembered his room, his socks on the floor, the plaid cotton blanket he had pulled up to his chest, the Mets T-shirt he had been wearing instead of pajamas. I remembered his lamp with the base designed to look like a pencil, the light it shed on the night table, and the glass of water that stood underneath it—flanked on the left by his wristwatch. I had brought hundreds of glasses of water to Matt's bedside, and after his death I had drunk many more, since I always kept a glass beside me at night. A real glass of water had not once reminded me of my son, but the image of a glass of water rendered 230 years earlier had catapulted me suddenly and irrevocably into the painful awareness that I was still alive.

  After that day in the classroom, my grief took a new turn. For months I had lived in a state of self-enforced rigor mortis, interrupted only by the playacting of my work, which didn't disturb the entombment I had chosen for myself, but a part of me had known that a crack was inevitable. Chardin became the instrument of the break, because the little painting took me by surprise. I hadn't girded myself for its attack on my senses, and I went to pieces. The truth is, I had avoided resurrection because I must have known that it would be excruciating. That summer, light, noise, color, smells, the slightest motion of the air rubbed me raw with their stimuli. I wore sunglasses all the time. Every shift in brightness hurt me. Car horns ripped at my eardrums. The conversations of pedestrians, their laughter, their hoots, even the lone person singing in the street felt like an assault. I couldn't bear shades of red. Crimson sweaters and shirts, the red mouth of a pretty girl hailing a cab forced me to turn my head. Ordinary jostling on the sidewalk—a person's arm or elbow brushing my body, the jab of a stranger's shoulder, sent a shudder up my spine. Wind blew through rather than over me, and I thought I could feel my skeleton rattle. Garbage baking in the streets gave me fits of nausea and dizziness, but so did the aromas of food from restaurants—smoking burgers and chicken and the pungent spices of Asian food. My nostrils took in every human odor, both artificial and real, colognes and oils and sweat and the rank, sour, and tart odors of people's breath. I was bombarded and couldn't escape.

  But the worst was that during those months of hypersensitivity, I sometimes forgot Matthew. Minutes would pass when I didn't think of him. When he was alive, I had felt no need to think of him constantly. I knew that he was there. Forgetfulness was normal. After he died, I had turned my body into a memorial—an inert gravestone for him. To be awake meant that there were moments of amnesia, and those moments seemed to annihilate Matthew twice. When I forgot him, Matthew was nowhere—not in the world or in my mind. I think my collection was a way to answer those blanks. As Erica and I continued to sort through Matthew's things, I chose a few of them to put in my drawer with the photographs of my parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and the twins. My selection was purely a matter of instinct. I chose a green rock, the Roberto Clemente baseball card Bill had given him for his birthday one year in Vermont, the program he had designed for the fourth-grade production of Horton Hears a Who, and a small picture he had done of Dave with Durango. It had more humor than many of the pictures of Dave. The old man was sleeping on the sofa with a newspaper over his face while the cat licked his naked toes.

  Erica moved away in early August, five days before Matt's birthday. She said she needed several weeks to settle into her apartment in Berkeley. I helped her pack up books, and we mailed them to her new address. She had to leave Dr. Trimble, and I sometimes felt that she dreaded leaving her more than Rutgers, more than Bill and Violet, more than me. But Erica had the name of another doctor in Berkeley, whom she began seeing only a few days after she arrived. That morning, I carried her suitcase and walked her down the stairs and outside the building to find a taxi. It was a cloudy day but with a strong glare from the sun, and although I was protected by sunglasses, I winced from the light. After I had hailed the cab, I told the driver to turn on the meter and wait for a couple of moments. When I turned to say good-bye, Erica began to tremble.

  "We've been better, you know," I said. "Lately."

  Erica looked down at her feet. I noticed that despite her weight gain, the skirt she was wearing hung too low around her waist. "It's because I shook things up, Leo. You started to hate me. Now you won't." Erica lifted her chin and smiled at me. "We ... we... we ..Her voice cracked and she laughed. "I don't know what I'm saying. I'll call you when I get there." She fell toward me and put her arms around my back. I felt her body against mine—her small breasts and her shoulders. Her damp face was crushed into my neck. When she withdrew from me, she smiled again. The lines around her eyes wrinkled and I looked at the mole over her lip. Then I leaned forward and kissed it. She knew I had targeted the mole and smiled, "I liked that," she said. "Do it again."

  I kissed her again.

  When she slid into the car, I looked down at her legs, which had stayed white all summer. I had an impulse to slide my hand between her thighs and feel their skin. The warm flood of sexual feeling made me shake inwardly. I listened to the car door slam shut and stood on the side-walk while it drove up Greene Street and turned right. Now you want her—after all these months, I said to myself, and as I turned to walk back into the building, I understood how well Erica knew me.

  The apartment didn't look much different. There were a few empty places on the bookshelves. Our closet in the bedroom was roomier. When all was said and done, Erica had taken very little with her. Nevertheless, as I walked through the loft and surveyed the gaps in the shelves, the empty hangers, the bare floor where Erica's shoes had been lined up only the day before, I found myself gasping for breath. For months I had been prepared for the moment of her departure, but I hadn't guessed that I would feel what I felt—cold, pinching fear. I clutched at the rightness of it, my punishment come due. I stalked from one room to another, letting the cold anxiety squeeze my lungs. I turned on the television to hear voices. I turned it off to get rid of them. An hour passed and then another. By four o'clock I was exhausted from flying around the apartment like a terrified bird. I continued to walk from room to room, but I paced myself, going more slowly. In the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet and studied an old toothbrush of Erica's and a lipstick. I removed the lipstick from the shelf and opened it. I screwed it up from the bottom and examined the brownish-red shade. After lowering it and replacing its top, I walked to my desk, opened my drawer, and put the lipstick
inside. I chose two other objects to keep there—a small pair of black socks and two barrettes that were lying on her night table. The absurdity of the hoarding was obvious to me, but I didn't care. The act of closing the drawer on these things that belonged to Erica soothed me. By the time Bill arrived, I was calm. He stayed longer than he usually did, however, and I'm sure he did it because he sensed that under my apparent equilibrium lay panic.

  Erica called that night. Her voice sounded high and a little squeaky. "When I put the key in the door, I felt glad," she said, "but when I walked inside, sat down, and looked around, I thought I'd gone completely mad. I've been watching TV, Leo. I never watch TV."

  "I miss you," I said.

  "Yes."

  That was her response. She didn't say that she missed me, too. "I'm going to write to you. I don't like the phone."

  The first letter came at the end of the week. It was a long letter dense with domestic particulars—the spider plant she had bought for the apartment, the drizzly weather that day, her trip to Cody's bookstore, her course plans. She explained her preference for letters. "I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or on the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be waiting time—a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law—that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully. In letters I can only tell you about my wildness. It isn't the wildness itself, and I am wild and savage over Matt. Letters can't scream. Telephones can. When I got back from Cody's today, I put my books on the table and went to the bathroom, stuffed a washcloth in my mouth, and walked into the bedroom so that I could lie on the bed and scream without making too much noise. But I'm beginning to see him again, not dead but alive. For a whole year, I've only seen him dead on that gurney. Far away with only letters between us, we may begin to find our way back to each other. Love, Erica."

  I wrote back the same evening, and Erica and I embarked on the epistolary chapter of our marriage. I stuck to the bargain and didn't call her, but I wrote long and hard. I kept her informed about my work and the apartment. I told her my colleague Ron Bellinger was trying a new drug for his narcolepsy that made him a little owl-eyed but less apt to drop off in committee meetings, and that Jack Newman was still going at it with Sara. I told her that Olga, the cleaning lady I had hired, had scrubbed the stove with such ferocity that the printed words FRONT and BACK to indicate the burners had vanished into her little ball of steel wool, and I told her that I had been distraught when I understood that she was gone, really gone. She answered me, and so it went. What neither one of us could know was what the other omitted. Every correspondence is skewered by invisible perforations, the small holes of the unwritten but not the unthought, and as time went on, I hoped fervently that it wasn't a man who was missing from those pages I received every week.

  Over and over again during the months that followed, I found myself on the stairs walking up to Bill and Violet's loft for dinner. Violet would call me in the early evening and ask if she should set an extra place, and I would say yes. It was hard to say with any conviction that I preferred to eat scrambled eggs or corn flakes downstairs. I let Bill and Violet take care of me, and while they took care of me, I found myself looking at them all over again. Like a man who had crawled out of a dungeon after years in murk and shadow, I was a little shocked by their vividness. Violet kissed my cheeks and touched my arms and my hands and my shoulders. Her laugh had a raucous timbre, and sometimes she made little sounds of pleasure while she ate. But I also detected lapses in her that I hadn't seen before—five or six seconds here and there when she moved inward to reflect sadly on someone or something. If she was stirring a sauce, her hand would stop, a wrinkle would form between her brows, and she would look vacantly at the stove until she caught herself and began stirring again. Bill's voice seemed both hoarser and more musical than I remembered. Age and cigarettes perhaps, but I listened to it rise and fall and to its frequent pauses with new attentiveness. I felt an added gravity in him, the almost palpable heft of a life that had grown more dense. Violet and Bill seemed a little different, as if their life together had shifted from a major to a minor key. It could have been that Matt's death had changed them, too. It could have been that because Matt had died, I saw in them what I had never seen before, or it could have been that without Matt, my vision of things would never be the same.

  The only person who appeared unchanged was Mark. He had never taken up much room in my life, except as Matt's amiable sidekick, and when Matt had died, Mark had vanished for me as well. But I began to look at him more closely during those meals we shared upstairs. He had grown a little taller, but not much. He had just turned thirteen, but he still had a soft, round, childish face, which I found remarkably sweet. Mark was a very good-looking boy, but his sweetness was separate from his beauty. It came from his facial expressions, which conveyed a perpetual, untouchable innocence, not unlike his hero of the moment—Harpo Marx. At the dinner table, Mark chuckled and clowned and made Harpo's "googly face." He read us passages from Harpo Speaks and sang "Hail Fredonia," from Duck Soup. But he also talked about his pity for New York's homeless people, the stupidities of racism, and the cruelty of chicken farmers. He never went deeply into any of these subjects, but whenever he spoke of injustice, his voice, still high and boyish, touched me with its inflections of sympathy. Airy, buoyant, and kind, Mark made me feel lighter. I began to look forward to seeing him, and when he left on the weekends to visit his mother, stepfather, and little brother, Oliver, in Cranbury, New Jersey, I discovered that I missed him.

  Over winter break, a few days before they flew to Minnesota for Christmas with the Bloms, Bill and Violet threw a belated birthday party for Mark. He had turned thirteen months earlier, but for Bill the event served as a kind of secular bar mitzvah, a way to acknowledge tradition without ritual. Bill and Violet sent an invitation to Erica, but she chose not to come. In a letter, she informed me that she had decided to remain in Berkeley over the vacation. For weeks I stewed over a gift for Mark. In the end I settled on a chess set, a beautiful board with carved pieces that reminded me of my father, who had taught me the game. I knew that Mark had never learned to play, and I wanted to compose the note that accompanied the present very carefully. In the first draft, I mentioned Matthew. In the second, I didn't. I wrote a third, short and to the point: "Happy late thirteenth birthday. This gift includes lessons from the giver. Love, Uncle Leo."

  I had planned to do well at Mark's party. I had wanted to do well, but I found I couldn't. I took several trips to the bathroom, not to relieve myself but to grab the sink and hyperventilate for a couple of minutes before returning to the crowd. There must have been sixty people at the party, but I knew only a few of them. Violet rushed from one person to another and then back to the kitchen, where she gave instructions to the three waiters. Bill wandered around with a glass of wine, which he refilled often, his eyes a little red and his voice a little strained. I said hello to Al and Regina, and I greeted Mark, who looked remarkably comfortable in his blue blazer, red tie, and gray flannel pants. He grinned at me and gave me a warm hug just before he shook the hand of Lise Bochart, a sculptor in her early sixties. "I think your piece at the Whitney is really cool," Mark told her. Lise cocked her head to one side and her face wrinkled into a big smile. Then she leaned over and gave him a kiss. Mark didn't blush or look away. He eyed her confidently, and after a couple of seconds moved on to another guest.

  I had grown used to Mark and was becoming more and more fond of him, but several of Matt's old school friends were among the guests, and as I recognized them one by one, the permanent ache in my chest sharpened into pain. Lou Kleinman had grown at least six inches since I had last seen him. He stood in the corner with Jerry Loo, another buddy of Matt's, snickering over an ad for phone sex he must have picked up in the street, b
ecause it had a heel print on its upper-right-hand corner. Another boy, Tim Andersen, hadn't changed at all. I remembered that Matt had felt sorry for the stunted, pale kid who wheezed too much to play sports. I didn't talk to Tim or even look at him, but I seated myself in a chair near where he was standing. From that spot, I could hear him breathing. I had just wanted to take a look at the boy, but instead I sat with my back to him and listened to his asthmatic lungs with a sudden terrible fascination. I hung on to each noisy exhalation as proof that he was alive—frail, runty, ill, maybe—but alive. I listened to the hoarse, greedy life in him and let it torture me. There were so many other noises—one voice on top of another talking—laughing, the clink of silverware on plates, but all I wanted to hear was the noise of Tim's breathing. I yearned to get closer to him, to bend over and put my ear to his mouth. I didn't do it, but I realized that I was sitting in the chair with clenched fists, swallowing audibly to keep down a quaking misery and rage, and then Dan saved me.

  Disheveled and dirty, Dan was heading toward me with long strides. He bumped a woman's elbow, spilled her wine, apologized loudly into her startled face, and then continued toward me. "Leo!" he yelled from a distance of no more than four feet. "They changed my meds, Leo! The Haldol was making me stiffen up like a board, and I couldn't bend." Dan held his arms out in front of him and finished his walk toward me like Frankenstein's monster. "Too much pacing, Leo. Too much talking to myself. So they hauled me into St. Luke's for an adjustment. I read my play to Sandy. She's a nurse. It's called Odd Boy and the Odd Body." He paused, leaned over, and said confidingly, "Leo, guess what? You're in it."