What I Loved (13 page)

Not long after Mark left for Texas, Gunna died. The death of this imaginary boy, who had been around for two years, was followed by the arrival of a new person Matt called "the Ghosty Boy." When Erica asked Matt how Gunna died, he told her, "He got too old and couldn't live anymore."

One evening after his story, Erica and I were sitting on the end of Matt's bed. "I have the Ghosty Boy feeling," he said.

"Who's the Ghosty Boy?" Erica asked, leaning over him. She put her lips to his forehead.

"He's a boy in my dreams."

"Do you dream about him a lot?" I asked.

Matt nodded. "He doesn't have a face and he can't talk, but he can fly. Not like Peter Pan, just a little bit off the ground and then he sinks down. Sometimes he's here, but other times he's away."

"Where does he go?" Erica asked.

"I don't know. I've never been there."

"Does he have a name," I said, "other than Ghosty Boy?"

"Yes, but he can't talk, Dad, so he can't say!"

"Oh yes, I forgot."

"He doesn't frighten you, does he, Matt?" Erica said. "No, Mom," he said. "He's kind of in me, you see. Half in me, and half out of me, and I know he's not really real."

We accepted this cryptic explanation and kissed Matt good night. The Ghosty Boy came and went for years. After a while he became a memory for Matt, a personage he would refer to in the past tense. Erica and I came to understand that the boy was a damaged creature, someone to be pitied. Matthew would shake his head when he talked about the boy's feeble attempts at flight, which lifted him only inches off the ground. His tone was oddly superior. He talked as if he, Matthew Hertzberg, unlike his figment, were soaring regularly over New York City with a large and highly efficient pair of wings.

The Ghosty Boy was still active when Violet defended her dissertation in May. She and Erica spent hours discussing what Violet should wear for the event. When I interrupted them to say that defense committees never look at a doctoral candidate's clothes, Erica cut me off. "You're not a woman. What do you know?" Violet decided on a conservative skirt, a blouse, and low heels, but underneath she wore a whalebone corset that she had rented from a costume company in the Village. Before she left for her defense, she appeared in our doorway to model herself. "The corset's for good luck," Violet said as she spun around for me and Erica. "It makes me feel closer to my hysterics, but it also squishes me in the right places." She looked down at her belly. "I've gotten kind of fat from sitting on my butt all these months."

"You're not fat, Violet," Erica said. "You're voluptuous."

"I'm pudgy and you know it." Violet kissed Erica and then she kissed me. Five hours later, she returned in triumph. "It must be good for something," she said about the Ph.D. "I know there aren't any jobs around here. Last week a friend told me there were only three positions in French history in the entire country. I'm destined for unemployment. Maybe I'll turn into one of those overeducated, hyperarticulate cab-drivers who whiz around the boroughs singing Puccini arias or quoting Voltaire to their passengers in the backseat, who keep praying they'll just shut up and drive."

Violet didn't become a cabdriver, and she didn't become a professor. A year later, the University of Minnesota Press published
Hysteria and Suggestion: Compliance
,
Rebellion, and Illness at the
Salpêtrière.
The teaching jobs Violet might have secured were in far-flung places like Nebraska or Georgia, and she didn't want to leave New York. A contemporary art museum in Spain had bought Bill's three large hysteria works, and many of the smaller pieces had sold to collectors. His money worries had lifted, at least for a while. But well before her first book was published, Violet had begun research for a second book about another cultural epidemic.

She had decided to write about eating disorders. Although Violet exaggerated her plumpness, it was true that her full curves had come to resemble the rounder movie queens of my youth. She knew her body was unfashionable, particularly in Manhattan, where thinness was a requirement for the truly chic. Violet's work inevitably turned on her private passions, and food was one of them. She cooked well and she ate with gusto
—
often dribbling in the process. Nearly every time Erica and I shared a meal with Bill and Violet, it ended with Bill, napkin in hand, delicately wiping Violet's face to clean up errant bits of food or spots of juice.

Violet's book would take years to write, and it would be more than a cool, academic study. Violet was on a mission to uncover the afflictions she called "inverted hysterias." "Nowadays girls
make
boundaries," she said. "The hysterics wanted to explode them. Anorexics build them up." She pored over historical materials. She studied the saints who starved themselves of earthly nourishment in order to taste the heavenly food of Christ's body in their visions
—
his blood, the pus from his wounds, even his lost foreskin. She dug up medical reports of girls who were said to eat nothing for months at a time, women who sustained themselves on the scent of flowers or from watching others eat. She explored the lives of the hunger artists who performed in cities all over Europe and America in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. She told me about a man named Sacco in London who fasted publicly in a glass box while hundreds of visitors filed past his wasted body. She also visited clinics and hospitals. She interviewed women and girls suffering from anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and obesity. She spoke to doctors, therapists, pyschoanalysts, and the editors of womens' magazines. In her small study upstairs, Violet accumulated hours and hours of tapes for her book, and every time we saw her, she had given it a new facetious tide:
Blimps and Bones
,
Monster Mouths,
and my favorite,
Broad Broads and Tiny Teens
.

Bill invited me to his studio three or four times while the
Hansel and Gretel
works were under way. During my third visit, I suddenly realized that the fairy tale Bill had chosen was also about food. The whole story turned on the problems of eating, of not eating, and of being eaten. Bill told
Hansel
and
Gretel
in
nine
separate
works. During the narrative, the figures and images grew steadily larger, reaching human scale only in the last piece. Bill's Hansel and Gretel were starved children, famine victims whose frail limbs and immense eyes brought to mind the hundreds of photographs that document twentieth-century misery, and he dressed the children in ragged sweatshirts, blue jeans, and sneakers.

The first piece was a box, about two feet square, that resembled a dollhouse
—
one wall lifted off for viewing. The cutout figures of Hansel and Gretel could be seen at the top of a stairway. Below them were two more cutouts of a man and a woman sitting on a sofa as a television flickered in front of them
—
its pulsating light provided by a small bulb hidden behind the painting. I couldn't see the man's face. His features were muted by shadows, but the woman's face, which she had turned toward her husband, resembled a tight, hard mask. The four characters had been drawn in black ink (etched in a style that reminded me a little of the Dick Tracy cartoon strip) and then set into the interior of the house, which had been painted in color.

The three pieces that followed were paintings. Each canvas was framed in the heavy gilt style of museums, and each was a little larger than the one that came before it. The colors and style of the paintings reminded me at first of
Friedrich,
but then I realized that they bore a closer resemblance to Rider's romantic American landscapes. The first painting showed the children from a great distance, after they had awoken in the forest to find their parents gone. The tiny figures were clinging to each other under a high, eerie moon, its cool light shining on Hansel's pebbles. Bill followed that picture with another landscape of the forest floor. A long trail of bread crumbs glowed like pale tubers under a blue-black sky. The sleeping children were barely visible in this painting
—
mere shadows that lay beside each other on the ground. In the third canvas, Bill had painted the birds diving for bits of bread as a thin gold sun rose through the trees. Hansel and Gretel were nowhere to be seen.

To depict the candy house, Bill abandoned framed canvases for a larger one that had been cut into the shape of a house. The children were separate cutouts attached to the roof. He had painted the house and children with broad, wild strokes, using colors far more brilliant than any that had preceded them. The two starved and abandoned children sprawled on the candy house and gorged themselves. Hansel's palm was pressed tightly against his mouth as he stuffed himself with chocolates. Gretel's eyes squinted with pleasure as she bit into a Tootsie Pop. Every sweet on the house was recognizable. Some were painted. Others were boxes and bags from real candies Bill had glued to the surface of the house
—
Chuckles and Hershey bars, Sweetarts, Jujyfruits, Kit Kats, and Almond Joys.

The witch didn't appear until the sixth work, also a painting. Inside another house-shaped canvas, painted in colors more subdued than the one before it, an old woman stood over the sleeping boy and girl, who had the blissful, bloated look of sated gluttons. Near the three figures was a table covered with dirty dishes. Bill had painted bread crumbs and bits of hamburger, as well as the red streaks left on their plates from ketchup. The interior of that room was as banal and dreary as any in America, but it was painted with an energy that reminded me of Manet. Again Bill had included a television, and on the screen he had painted an ad for peanut butter. The witch was wearing a dirty brassiere and a pair of flesh-colored panty hose, through which you could see her flattened pubic hair and soft swollen belly. Her shriveled breasts under the bra and the two thin rolls of skin around her waist were unpleasant to look at, but her face was truly monstrous. Distorted by rage, her eyes bulged behind the lenses of her thick glasses. Her gaping mouth looked enormous as she bared her teeth to reveal rows of gleaming silver fillings. In Bill's witch, the fairy tale's literal horror came true. The woman was a cannibal.

In the seventh piece, Bill changed the format again. Inside a real iron cage, he had placed a canvas cutout of Hansel. The flat painted boy was down on his hands and knees, and when I looked through the bars, I saw that he was much fatter than in his earlier incarnations. His old clothes no longer fit him, and his belly hung out over his unsnapped jeans. At the bottom of the cage lay a real wishbone from a chicken
—
clean and dry and white. The eighth piece showed Gretel standing in front of a stove. The girl was a thick paper cutout that resembled her earlier cartoon self but much chubbier. Bill had painted both sides of her, back and front, because she was meant to be viewed from both sides. The stove she faced was real, and its oven door hung wide open. But inside the oven there was no burned corpse. The back of the stove had been removed, and all that could be seen was the blank wall behind it.

The last work showed two well-fed children stepping out of a doorway that had been cut out of a large rectangular canvas
—
ten feet long and seven feet high. No longer a candy house, the structure was a classic ranch, borrowed from the landscape of a thousand American suburbs, and it was painted to resemble a fading color photograph. Bill had included a thin white frame around the canvas, like those found on older snapshots. In their flat hands, the children were clutching a real rope. A few feet in front of them was a life-sized, three-dimensional sculpture of a man. He was kneeling on the floor as he gripped the other end of the rope and appeared to be pulling the children toward him and out of the story. Near his feet lay a real axe. The father figure had been painted solid blue. Over the blue, covering his body in white letters, was the complete story of "Hansel and Gretel." "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel."

Words of rescue, I said to myself when I saw the writing on the man's body. Exactly what I meant by this I didn't know, but I thought it nevertheless. The night after I saw the finished
Hansel and Gretel
,
I dreamed that I lifted my arm and discovered words written into my skin. I couldn't understand how the words had gotten there, and I couldn't read them, but I could identify the nouns, because they were all capitalized. I tried to rub off the letters, but they wouldn't go away. When I woke from the dream, I guessed that it had been inspired by Bill's father figure, but then I remembered the image of the woman with a bleeding inscription and the pale marks Violet's name had made on her skin. "Hansel and
Gretel"
was a story about feast and famine and childhood fears, but Bill's work, with its skeletal children, had unearthed another
association
in my dreaming mind
—
the uppercase nouns of my first language had mutated into the numbers that were burned into the arms of people after they arrived at the Nazi death camps. My Uncle David had been the only member of my family who had lived long enough to be branded with a number. For a long time, I lay awake in bed and listened to Erica's breathing. After about an hour, I quietly left the room, went to my desk, and dug out the wedding photo of David and Marta, which I kept in my desk drawer. At four o'clock in the morning, Greene Street was remarkably quiet. I listened to a few trucks rumble down Canal and examined the picture. I studied Marta's elegant ankle-length dress and my uncle's suit. David had been better looking than my father, but I could see the resemblance between the two, especially around the jaw and brow. I have a single memory of my uncle. I am walking with my father to meet him. We are in a park and the sun that shines through the trees makes patterns of light and shade on the grass. I am looking intently at the grass, and then suddenly Uncle David is there and he has taken me by the waist and lifted me high above his head. I remember the pleasure of sailing up and then down, and that I admired his strength and confidence. My father wanted him to leave Germany with us. I don't remember that they argued that day, but I know there were many fights between them and that David adamantly refused to leave the country he loved.