What I Loved

  Dan was very close to me, grinning with his mouth open so that I looked directly at his badly stained teeth. I had never felt so moved by him or so grateful to be near him. For the first time, his madness felt curiously comforting and familiar.

  "You put me in your play?" I said to him. "I'm honored."

  Dan looked sheepish. "Your character doesn't have any lines."

  "No lines?" I said. "Just a walk-on?"

  "No, Leo's lying down through the whole play."

  "Dead?" I said.

  "No!" Dan boomed at me. He looked shocked. "Sleeping."

  "Oh, I'm a sleeper." I smiled, but Dan didn't smile back.

  "No, I mean it, Leo. I've got you in here." He tapped a finger to his temple.

  "I'm glad," I said, and I was.

  After everyone else had gone home, Dan and I were sitting on the sofa several feet apart. We weren't talking, but we had staked out a place for ourselves together. The insane brother and the broken-down "uncle" had formed a temporary alliance to survive the party. Bill seated himself between us, putting one arm around each of us, but his eyes were on Mark, who was in the kitchen picking frosting off what was left of the cake. It wasn't until that moment that I remembered Lucille. "Shouldn't Lucille and Philip and Oliver have been here?" I said to Bill.

  "They wouldn't come," he said. "She gave me an odd explanation. She said that Philip doesn't want Oliver in the city."

  "Why on earth not?" I said.

  "I don't know," he said, and wrinkled his forehead. That was all that was said about Lucille. Even at a distance, I realized, she had a way of stopping conversation. Her peculiar responses to ordinary talk or, in this case, a simple invitation, often left others in bewildered silence.

  I was standing over Mark when he ripped the paper off my gift and saw the chessboard. He leapt up from the floor and threw his arms around my waist. It had been a long, hard birthday party, and I wasn't prepared for his excitement. I clung to him and looked over at Bill, Violet, and Dan, who were all on the sofa. Dan was sound asleep, but Bill and Violet were both smiling with tears in their eyes, and their emotion made it much harder for me to check mine. I stared hard at Dan to keep control of myself. Mark must have felt the heaving in my chest, and when he withdrew from the hug, he must have seen the spasm I felt moving across my face, but he continued to look at me happily, and for reasons difficult to articulate, I felt hugely relieved that I hadn't mentioned Matthew in my note.

  Mark learned chess fast. He was a nimble and intelligent player, and his ability excited me. I told him the truth: not only did he understand the moves, but he had the unruffled demeanor necessary to play well, that calculated indifference I had never mastered but which could unnerve even a superior opponent. As my enthusiasm waxed, however, Mark's waned. I told him he should join the chess team at school, and he said that he would look into it, but I don't believe he ever did. I sensed that he was humoring me rather than pleasing himself, and I tactfully withdrew. If he wants to play, I said to Bill, he can ask. He never asked.

  I sank into another life. My writing that year was all for Erica. I wrote no articles, no essays, had no thoughts for another book, but I told Erica everything in long letters that I sent off weekly. I wrote that my teaching had become more passionate and that I spent more time with my students. I wrote that I allowed some of them to ramble on about their private lives during office hours and that I didn't always hear what they were saying, but I recognized their need to say whatever it was and discovered that my distant but benevolent presence was met with gratitude. I wrote about my dinners with Bill and Violet and Mark. I recorded for her the titles of the books I found for Mark on silent comedy and the movie stills from A Night at the Opera and Horse Feathers I bought for him at a shop on Eighth Street, and I described his happy face when he received my gifts. I also told her that since Matt had died, O's Journey had taken on an afterlife that inhabited my hours alone. Sometimes when I sat in my chair in the evenings, I would see parts of the narrative in my mind—the fat figure of B with wings sprouting from her back as she straddled O, her heavy arms outstretched in orgasm and her face a parodie imitation of Bernini's Saint Theresa. I saw the two M's, O's little brothers, clinging to each other behind a door while a burglar robs the house, stealing one of O's paintings—a portrait of the two young M's. But most often, I saw O's last canvas, the one he leaves behind after he disappears. That canvas has no image, only the letter B—the mark of O's creator and the fat woman who embodied him in the work.

  I didn't tell Erica that there were evenings when I returned home after dinner and I smelled Violet on my shirt—her perfume and soap and something else, her skin maybe, an odor that deepened the others and made the floral scent corporeal, human. I didn't tell Erica that I liked to breathe in that faint smell, and I didn't tell her that I tried to resist it at the same time. On some nights, I would remove the shirt and throw it into the hamper.

  In March, Bill and Violet asked me if I would stay with Mark for a long weekend. They were headed for Los Angeles, where a gallery was showing O's Journey. Lucille was also traveling and thought it best not to burden Philip with two children. I moved upstairs with Mark. We were easy together, and Mark was helpful. He did dishes, carried out the garbage, and tidied up after himself. On Saturday night, he put on a tape and lip- synched a pop song for me. He leapt around the living room with an imaginary guitar. Gyrating madly, he affected a tortured expression and finally collapsed to the floor as he imitated the agonies of a rock 'n' roll star whose name I can't remember anymore.

  As we talked, however, I noticed that Mark had absorbed little of the subjects generally taught in school—geography, politics, history—and that his ignorance had a willed quality to it. Matthew had served as a scale upon which to weigh differences among boys of his age, but then who was to say that Matt was a barometer of normality? Before he died, his brain had been loaded with information, both trivial and important, from baseball statistics to the battles of the American Civil War. He knew the names of all sixty-four flavors of his favorite brand of ice cream and could identify dozens of contemporary painters, many of whom I didn't recognize. Except for his love of Harpo, Mark's interests were more ordinary—popular music, action and horror movies—and yet he brought to these subjects the same agility of mind, the same fleet brain that had made itself felt in chess. What he lacked in content, he seemed to make up for in quickness.

  Mark resisted going to bed. Every night I was with him, he lingered in the doorway of Bill and Violet's bedroom, where I was reading, as if he was unwilling to tear himself away. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes would pass as he leaned in the doorway and chatted. All three nights, I had to tell him that I was turning in and that he should do the same.

  The single hitch in our weekend together was over doughnuts. On Saturday afternoon, I looked for a box of doughnuts I had bought the day before. I searched the pantry but couldn't find them. "Did you eat the doughnuts?" I called out to Mark, who was in the next room. He walked into the kitchen and looked at me. "Doughnuts? No."

  "I could have sworn I put them in this cupboard, and now they aren't here. It's strange."

  "Too bad," he said. "I like doughnuts. I guess it's one of those household mysteries. Violet always says that the house eats things when you're not looking." He shook his head, smiled at me, and disappeared into his room. An instant later, I heard him whistling a pop song—high, sweet, and melodic.

  At around three o'clock the following afternoon, I answered the telephone. A woman was screaming at me through the receiver in a piercing, angry voice. "Your son started a fire! I want you over here right now!" I forgot where I was, forgot everything. Too shocked to speak, I breathed into the receiver once and said, "I don't understand you. My son is dead."

  Silence.

  "Aren't you William Wechsler?"

  I explained. She explained. Mark and her son had started a fire on the roof.

  "That's not possible," I said. "He's in his room rea
ding."

  "Wanna bet?" she said loudly. "He's standing here right in front of me."

  After confirming that Mark wasn't in his room, I walked downstairs and went to retrieve him from the building next door. When she let me into the apartment, the woman was still shaking. "Where did they get the matches?" she screeched at me when I walked through the door. "You're responsible for him, aren't you? Well, aren't you?" I mumbled yes, and then I said that boys could pick up matches almost anywhere. What kind of fire was it? I wanted to know. "A fire! A fire! What does it matter what kind?" When I turned to Mark, his face was vacant. There was no belligerence in it—there was nothing. The other boy, who looked to be no more than ten years old, had wet, red eyes. Snot leaked from his nose as he repeatedly pushed away his bangs, which instantly fell back into his face. I apologized weakly and led Mark home in silence.

  We talked it over in Mark's room. He told me that he had met the kid, Dirk, on the roof, and that Dirk had already started the fire. "All I did was stand there and watch."

  I asked him what they had burned.

  "Just some paper and stuff. It was nothing."

  I warned him that fires could quickly get out of control. I told him that he should have let me know that he was leaving. He listened, his eyes calmly taking in my comments. Then he said in a voice that was surprisingly hostile. "That kid's mother was crazy!"

  Mark's eyes were illegible. They bore a striking resemblance to Bill's, but they had none of his father's energy. "I think she was scared, not crazy," I said. "She was really scared for her son."

  "I guess so," he said.

  "Mark, don't do anything like that again. It was your job to stop it. You're a lot older than that boy."

  "You're right, Uncle Leo," he said. I heard conviction in his voice, and it relieved me.

  In the morning, I made Mark French toast and sent him off to school. When we said good-bye, I gave him my hand, but he hugged me instead. When I put my arms around him, he felt small, and the way he pressed his cheek against me made me think of Matthew, not when my son was eleven but when he was four or five.

  After Mark left, I climbed the stairs to the roof to look for remnants of the fire. I had thought that I might have to cross over to the next building, where Dirk lived, but I discovered a heap of ash and litter on the roof of our building, and I squatted down to examine it. Feeling both underhanded and a little ridiculous, I stirred the charred debris with a wire hanger that lay nearby. This had not been a bonfire, just a small conflagration that couldn't have lasted very long. I noticed a few partly burned rags and picked one up, part of an athletic sock. Green shards of a broken bottle were scattered among bits of paper, and then I saw a piece of the incompletely burned box—the empty doughnut box. I could still read a few letters on the label: ENTE.

  Mark had lied to me. He had quoted Violet so smoothly. He had smiled so easily. It had never occurred to me to doubt him, but even more curious was the fact that if he had told me he had eaten the doughnuts, I wouldn't have cared. When I bought them, I had been thinking of him. I held the bit of cardboard in my hand and looked over the bleak landscape of lower Manhattan's roofs, with their rusted water towers and peeling tar. A wan sun was trying to break through the clouds and a wind had started to blow. I swept the ash and glass into an old grocery bag someone had abandoned on the roof, and as I watched my hands turn gray from the ashes, I had an unexpected feeling of guilt, as though I were somehow implicated in Mark's lie. When I left the roof, I didn't add the piece of burned box to the bag with the rest of the garbage. I walked downstairs and carefully deposited what was left of it in my drawer.

  I said nothing to Bill and Violet about the fire. Mark must have been glad that I didn't mention it, must have felt he had an ally in Uncle Leo downstairs, and that's how I wanted it. The fire incident receded the way dreams often do, leaving behind it no more than a sensation of vague discomfort. I seldom thought about it, except when I opened my drawer to inspect my collection, and then I wondered why I had decided to keep that piece of cardboard.

  I didn't move it, however, and I didn't throw it away. Some part of me must have felt that it belonged there.

  In the fall of 1991, the University of Minnesota Press published Locked Bodies: An Exploration of Contemporary Body Images and Eating Disorders. As I read Violet's book, the missing doughnuts and the burned box floated back into my consciousness from time to time. The book began with simple questions: Why are thousands of girls in the West starving themselves now? Why are others gorging and vomiting? Why is obesity on the rise? Why did these once rare diseases become epidemics?

  "Food," Violet wrote, "is our pleasure and our penance, our good and evil. Like hysteria a hundred years ago, it has become the focus of a cultural obsession that has infected huge numbers of people who never become seriously ill with eating disorders. Fanatical running, the rise of the health club and the health-food store, Rolfing, massage, vitamin therapy, colonics, diet centers, bodybuilding, plastic surgery, a moral horror of smoking and sugar, and a terror of pollutants all testify to an idea of the body as extremely vulnerable—one with failing thresholds, one that is under constant threat."

  The argument continued for almost four hundred pages. The first chapter served as a historical introduction. It ran quickly through the Greeks and the ideal bodies of their gods, lingered for a while on medieval Christianity, its female saints and cult of physical suffering and the broader phenomena of plagues and famines. It touched on neoclassical Renaissance bodies and then the Reformation's suppression of the Virgin and her maternal body. It galloped through eighteenth-century medical drawings and the dissection obsessions born of the Enlightenment and eventually made its way to hunger artists and to the starving girls of Dr. Lasègue, the physician who had first used the word "anorexia" to describe their illness. In passing through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Violet noted Lord Byron's fasts and binges, J. M. Barrie's intractable self-denial, which may have stunted his growth, and Binswanger's case study of Ellen West, a tormented young altruist who died of starvation in 1930, when anorexia was still considered extremely rare.

  Violet insisted that our bodies are made of ideas as much as of flesh, that the contemporary obsession with thinness can't be blamed on fashion—which is merely one expression of the wider culture. In an age that has absorbed the nuclear threat, biological warfare, and AIDS, the perfect body has become armor—hard, shiny, and impenetrable. She marshaled evidence from exercise tapes and advertisements for programs and machines, including the telling phrases "buns of steel" and "bulletproof abs." Saint Catherine starved against church authority for Jesus. Late-twentieth-century girls starve for themselves against their parents and a hostile, borderless world. Emaciation in the midst of plenty shows that you are above ordinary desire, obesity that you are protected by stuffing that can ward off all attacks. Violet quoted psychologists and analysts and doctors. She discussed the widely held view that anorexia in particular is a misguided bid for autonomy among girls whose bodies are sites of rebellion for what they can't say. But private histories don't explain epidemics, and Violet made strong arguments that social upheavals lie behind eating disorders, including the breakdown of courting rituals and sexual codes, which leaves young women formless and vulnerable, and she elaborated her idea of "mixing"—citing developmental research on "attachment" and studies of infants and young children for whom food becomes the tangible site of an emotional battle.

  A large part of the book was taken up by stories, and as I read on, I found the individual cases most absorbing. Raymond, a hugely fat seven-year-old, told his therapist that he thought his body was made of jelly and that if his skin was punctured, his insides would run out. After months of reducing the amounts of food she ingested, Berenice made a meal of a single raisin. She cut it into four pieces with a knife, sucked on the quarters for a good hour and a half, and then, when the last one had dissolved in her mouth, she declared herself "stuffed." Naomi went to her mother's house
to gorge. Sitting at the kitchen table, she wolfed down vast quantities of food and then vomited the contents of her stomach into plastic bags, which she tied up and hid in various rooms for her mother to find. Anita had a horror of lumps in her food. She solved the problem with a liquid diet. After a while, she turned against color, too. The liquid had to be both pure and clear. Living only on water and one-calorie Sprite, she died at fifteen.

  While I didn't suspect Mark of excesses like the ones Violet recounted, I wondered if he hadn't lied about the doughnuts because he was guilty about eating them. Violet stressed that people who are rigorously honest in most ways often lie about food when their relationship to it has been tainted. I remembered the brown dish of beans and limp vegetables Lucille had cooked the evening I first met her, and in the same instant I recovered an image of her coffee table the night we were together. Lying on top of a pile of other magazines were several copies of one called Prevention.

  Erica didn't answer my letters as promptly as she had in the beginning. Sometimes two weeks would pass before a letter arrived from her, and I sweated out the days. Her tone wasn't quite the same either. Although she wrote in a straightforward, honest way, I felt a lack of urgency in her telling. Much of what she wrote me, she must have told Dr. Richter, too—her psychiatrist, pyschoanalyst, psychotherapist, whom she saw twice a week. She had also become the close friend of a young woman in her department named Renata Doppler—who, among other things, wrote dense, scholarly articles on pornography. She must have talked often to Renata as well, and I know that she called Violet and Bill regularly. I tried not to think of those telephone conversations, tried not to imagine Bill and Violet hearing Erica's voice. My wife's world had expanded, and as it grew, I guessed that my place in it had shrunk. And yet, there were a few sentences here and there to which I clung as evidence of some lingering passion. "I think of you at night, Leo. I haven't forgotten."