In one version of the story, the burnt piece of doughnut box might stand for hunger. I think Mark was always starved for something. But what? He wanted me to believe him, admire him. He wanted it badly for at least as long as he looked into my eyes. Maybe that need was the one thing that was whole and true in him, and it made him radiant. It didn't matter that he felt little or nothing for me or that he had to pretend to get my admiration. What mattered was that he felt my belief. But the pleasure he took in pleasing others never lasted. Insatiable, he gorged on crackers and doughnuts, on stolen things and money, on pharmaceuticals and on the chase itself.
I have no object for Lucille in my drawer. It would have been easy to save some scrap of her, but I never did. Bill pursued her for a long time, a creature in his mind whom he could never locate. Maybe Mark was looking for her, too. I don't know. Even I followed her for a while, until I came to a dead end. The idea of Lucille was strong, but I don't know what that idea was except maybe evasion itself, which is best expressed by nothing. Bill turned what eluded him into real things that would carry the weight of his needs and doubts and wishes—paintings, boxes, doors, and all those children on videotape. Father of thousands. Dirt and paint and wine and cigarettes and hope. Bill. Father of Mark. I can still see him rocking his little boy in the blue boat bed he built for him on the Bowery, and I can hear him singing in a voice that was low and hoarse, "Take a walk on the wild side." Bill loved his changeling child, his blank son, his Ghosty Boy. He loved the boy-man who is still roaming from city to city and is still reaching into his traveling bag to find a face to wear and a voice to use.
Violet is still looking for the sickness that moves in the air, the Zeitgeist that mumbles to its victims: scream, starve, eat, kill. She's looking for the idea-winds that gust through people's minds and then become scars on the landscape. But how the contagions move from outside to inside isn't clear. They move in language, pictures, feelings, and in something else I can't name, something between and among us. There are days when I find myself walking through the rooms of an apartment in Berlin— Mommsenstrasse 11. The furniture is a little blurry and all the people are gone, but I can feel the sweep of the empty rooms and the light that comes through the windows. A bitter nowhere. I turn away from the place as my father did, and I think about the day he stopped looking for their names on the lists, about the day he knew. It's hard to live with nonsense—gruesome, unspeakable nonsense. He couldn't do it. Before she died, my mother shrank. She looked very small in the hospital bed, and her freckled arm over the sheet was like a stick with pale loose skin. It was all Berlin and flight and Hampstead and German and confusion by then. Forty years had vanished from her head, and she called out for my father. Mutti in the dark.
Violet packed up Bill's work clothes and took them along to Paris. I imagine that she still puts them on from time to time, for comfort. When I think of Violet in Bill's ragged shirt and paint-smeared jeans, I give her a Camel to smoke, and I call the image in my mind Self-Portrait. I never imagine her at the piano anymore. The lesson finally ended with a real kiss that sent her far away from me. It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another. Matthew drew an old man many times, and he called him Dave. Years go by, and it turns out that he was drawing his own father. I am Dave now, Dave with patches on his eyes.
Another family has moved in upstairs. Two years ago, Violet sold the loft for a lot of money to the Wakefields. Every evening I hear their two children, Jacob and Chloe. They shake the light fixtures on my ceiling with their ritual war dances before they go to bed. Jacob is five and Chloe is three, and noise is their business. I suppose if they thumped for hours on end, I would be annoyed, but I've grown accustomed to their routine explosions around seven o'clock. Jacob sleeps in Mark's old room, and Chloe sleeps in what used to be Violet's study. In the living room, there's a plastic slide where the red sofa used to be. Every true story has several possible endings. This is mine: the children upstairs must be asleep, because the rooms above me are quiet. It's eight-thirty in the evening on August 30, 2000. I've had my supper, and I've put away the dishes. I'm going to stop typing now, move to my chair, and rest my eyes. In half an hour, Lazlo is coming to read to me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although this book is a work of fiction and its story and characters are imaginary, the numerous references to hysteria, eating disorders, and psychopathy are taken from a wide range of sources. Among them are Georges Didi-Huberman's Invention de l'hysterie (Macula); A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, volume 4, general editors Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, volume editor Michelle Perrot (Harvard University Press), in which I found the barking women of Josselin; Hilde Bruch's Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within (Basic Books), which includes the story of the fat little boy who thinks his insides are made of jelly; and Rudolph M. Bell's Holy Anorexia (University of Chicago Press), in which Bell gives an analysis of Catherine Benincasa's extreme fasting. The evolving terminology, checklists, general descriptions, and possible etiologies of what is now called psychopathy or antisocial personality were culled from several works: The Roots of Crime by Edward Glover, M.D. (International Universities Press); the third and fourth editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-HI and DSM-IV); Abnormalities of the Personality: Within and Beyond the Realm of Treatment by Michael H. Stone, M.D. (W. W. Norton and Co.); lmpulsivity: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment, edited by Christopher D. Webster and Margaret A Jackson (Guilford Press); Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (Yale University Press) and Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (Yale University Press), both by Otto F. Kernberg; the three volumes of John Bowlby's Attachment and Loss (Basic Books); Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity, fifth edition (Emily S. Cleckley); and the following books by D. W. Winnicott: Deprivation and Delinquency (Roudedge), The Maturatioml Process and the Facilitating Environment (Maresfield Library), The Family and Individual Development (Roudedge), Holding and Interpretation (Grove Press), and Playing and Reality (Roudedge).
I want to thank Ricky Jay for Jay's Journal of Anomalies, from which I borrowed the hunger artist Sacco, who starved for crowds in London, and the apocryphal story of Descartes's automaton. He was also kind enough to let me peek into several rare volumes in his private library that contained medical reports on the status of people who purported to subsist on nothing but air and odors.
I am also indebted to Dr. Finn Skarderud, both for his books and for his conversations with me about contemporary culture and eating disorders. The references in the novel to J. M. Barrie and Lord Byron, as well as the story of the bulimic patient who vomited into plastic bags and left them hidden in her mother's house, come from him. His books include: Sultekutistemere (Hunger Artists), Sterk Svak: Handboken om spise for-styrrelser (Strong Weak: A Handbook on Eating Disorders), and Uro: En reise i det moderne selvet (Unrest: A Journey in the Modern Self).
Last, I am deeply grateful to my sister, Asti Hustvedt, for her original research and thoughts on hysteria. The ideas in Violet's dissertation closely resemble those in Asti's unpublished Ph.D. thesis, "Science Fictions: Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's L'eve future and Late-Nineteenth-Century Medical Constructions of Femininity" (New York University, 1996). I benefited too from the research she has done in the Salpêtrière Hospital archives for her forthcoming book, Living Dolls, to be published by Norton. I also want to thank her for her close reading of the novel and its references to hysteria and for her ongoing conversations with me about the mysteries of culture, medicine, and illness.
Table of Contents
Title page
ONE
TWO
THREE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved
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