What I Loved (20 page)

There were days when Violet would leave Angie to visit Cathy, who was being treated at New York Hospital. Violet called her Saint Catherine, after Catherine Benincasa, the Dominican saint from Siena who fasted herself to death. "She's a monster of purity," she said, "fiercer and more righteous than any nun. Her mind moves in these narrow little channels, but it moves well in them, and she spins out arguments for starving like some hermetic medieval scholar. If she eats half a cracker, she feels sullied and guilty. She looks horrible, but her eyes shine with pride. Her parents waited way too long. They let it go. She was always such a good girl, and they just can't understand what happened to her. She's the flip side of Angie, protected not by fat but by her virginal armor. They're worried about her electrolyte balance. She could die." Violet wrote Angie and Cathy into her book along with dozens of others. She gave them different names and analyzed their pathologies as the result of both their personal histories and the American "hysteria" about food
—
which she called "a sociological virus." She told me that she used the word
virus
because a virus is neither living nor dead. Its animation depends on its host. I don't know whether Violet's girls found their way into Bill's new work or whether he was simply returning to an old theme, but as he continued to work on his new piece, I noticed that hunger had once again found a place in his art.

O's Journey
was organized around the alphabet. Erica was the first to refer to its twenty-six boxes as "Bill's great American novel." He liked the phrase and began to use it himself, saying that it would take a long time to finish, like a big novel. Each box was a small freestanding twelve-inch glass cube, which allowed the spectator to view it from all sides. The characters inside the clear glass were identified by large letters that had been sewn or painted onto their chests
—
in the manner of Hester Prynne. O, the "novel's" young painter-hero, bore a striking resemblance to Lazlo, except that he had red hair, not blond, and a longer nose, which I took as a reference to Pinocchio. Bill lost himself in those cubes. The studio floated with hundreds of drawings, tiny paintings, scraps of fabric for miniature clothes, notebooks filled with quotations and Bill's own musings. On a single page, I found a comment from the linguist Roman
Jakobson,
a reference to the Cabbalists, and a reminder to himself about a particular cartoon featuring Daffy Duck. In the drawings, O grew and shrank, depending on his circumstances. In one of my favorite sketches, an emaciated O was lying on a narrow bed, his feeble head turned toward his own painting of a roast beef.

I made regular visits to the studio that year. Bill gave me a set of keys so that I could let myself in without disturbing him. One afternoon, I found him lying on the floor staring fixedly at the ceiling. Four empty cubes and several small dolls lay scattered around him. When he heard me, Bill didn't move. I took a chair several feet away from him and waited. After about five minutes, he sat up. "Thank you, Leo," he said. "I had to think through a problem with B. It couldn't wait" But other times, I would find him sitting cross-legged on the floor, sewing small clothes or entire figures by hand, and without looking up from his work he would greet me warmly and start to talk. "Leo, I'm glad you're here," he said one evening. "Meet O's mother." He held up a tall thin plastic figure with pink eyes. "This is O's poor mother, long-suffering, kindhearted, but a bit of a lush. I'm calling her X.
Y
is O's father. He's never going to appear in the flesh, you see. He's just a letter hovering in the distance or over O's head, a thought, an idea. Nevertheless, X and
Y
begot O. It makes sense, don't you think? X as in former, the once-was ex-wife, or X marks the spot, but also X as in a kiss at the bottom of a letter. You see, she loves him. And then there's Y, the big missing
Y
as in W-H-Y?" Bill laughed. The sound of his voice and his face made me think of Dan, and I asked Bill about his brother out of the blue. "He's the same," Bill said to me. His eyes clouded for an instant. "He's the same."

Every time I visited, I would find more characters lying out on the desk and on the floor. One afternoon in March, I picked up a two-dimensional figure that had been fashioned from wire and covered with a thin muslin fabric, which looked more like a transparent skin than a dress. The girl doll was on her knees with her arms raised upward in a beseeching gesture. When I saw the C pinned to her chest, I thought of Saint Catherine. "That's one of O's girlfriends," Bill said. "She starves herself to death." Only a minute later, I noticed two small fabric dolls locked in an embrace. I picked up the double figure and saw that the two little boys
—
one black-headed and one brown
—
had been attached at their waists and that each child had a letter
M
sewn to his chest. The blatant reference to Matthew and Mark unsettled me for a moment. I examined the two painted faces for distinguishing features, but the children were identical.

"You've put the boys in it?" I said.

Bill looked up and smiled. "A version of them," he said. "They're O's little brothers."

I carefully lowered them back to their resting place on the glass cube in front of me. "Have you seen Mark's baby brother?"

Bill's eyes narrowed. "Is this free association or are you divining hidden meanings in my M's?"

"I was just wondering."

"No
—
I've only seen a snapshot of a red wrinkled newborn with a big mouth."

Although
O's Journey
didn't mirror Bill's life in any of its details, I began to think of the personified letters and their movements from one cube to another as Bill's fabular autobiography
—
a translation of sorts from the language of the outside world into the hieroglyphs of inner life. Bill told me that by the end of the work O would disappear
—
not die, just vanish. In the penultimate cube, he would be only half visible
—
a specter of himself. In the final cube, O would be gone, but in his room the viewer would see a half-finished canvas. What Bill intended to put on that canvas, I didn't know, and I don't think he knew either.

Sometime in December of that year, there was a real disappearance. It was a small one, but mysterious nevertheless. For his eleventh birthday I had given Matt a Swiss Army knife engraved with his initials. The knife had come with a short lecture on its responsible use, and Matt had agreed to every restriction. The most important of them was that he couldn't take it to school. Matt loved that knife. He attached it to a small chain and let it hang from his belt. "I like to have it handy," he said. "It's so useful." Its utility may have been secondary to its symbolism, however. He wore that knife the way some janitors parade their keys, as an emblem of male pride. When he wasn't checking to make sure that his weapon hadn't fallen off him, it was swinging from his belt like an extra appendage. Before he went to sleep he laid it reverently on his bedside table. And then one afternoon, he couldn't find it. He and Erica and Mark and Grace ransacked the closet and drawers and searched under the bed. By the time I returned from work, Matt was in tears and Grace had ripped off the bedsheets to see if the knife had fallen into them during the night. Was he certain that he had put it on the night table? Had he seen the knife that morning? Matt thought so, but the more he thought, the more confused he became. We searched for days, but the knife didn't turn up. I told him that if he still longed for the same knife when his twelfth birthday approached, I would buy him another one.

That year, Matt and Mark decided they wanted to go to "sleep-away" summer camp together. In late January, Bill, Violet, Erica, and I perused a fat book of camp listings. By February we had narrowed our choices and were dissecting the literature sent by seven camps. All our hermeneutic talents were brought to bear on the innocent brochures and xeroxed flyers. What was actually meant by "noncompetitive philosophy"? Did it suggest a healthy lack of a winning-is-all mentality or was it an excuse for laxness? Bill studied the photographs for clues. If their style was too glossy and artificial, he was suspicious. I dismissed two camps because their literature was studded with grammatical errors, and Erica worried about the qualifications of the counselors. In the end, a camp called Green Hill in Pennsylvania won the competition. The boys liked the picture on the cover of its catalogue
—
twenty boys and girls with Green Hill T-shirts beaming out at the spectator from under a canopy of leafy trees. The camp had everything we had hoped for
—
baseball, basketball, swimming, sailing, canoeing, and an arts program that included painting, dance, music, and theater. The decision had been made. We sent off our checks.

In April, not long before the Columbia semester ended, Bill, Mark, Matthew, and I drove to Shea Stadium on a Friday evening for
a Mets
game. The home team came from behind and rallied to win the game in the ninth inning. Matt scrutinized every pitch and every play. After mumbling the statistics for each player aloud, he offered his analysis of the man's prospects at the plate. As the game progressed, he agonized, suffered, and rejoiced, depending on the fate of the
Mets
at the moment, and because his emotions ran so high, I found myself both exhausted and relieved when it was all over.

It was late when I walked into Matt's room that night with a glass of water to put on his night table. Erica had already left him. I leaned over and kissed his cheek, but he didn't kiss me back. He squinted at the ceiling for a couple of moments and then said, "You know, Dad, I'm always thinking about how many people there are in the world. I was thinking about it between innings at the game, and I got this really funny feeling, you know, how everybody is thinking thoughts at the same time, billions of thoughts."

"Yes," I said. "A flood of thoughts that we can't hear."

"Yeah. And then I got this weird idea about how all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else."

"You
mean that every person has a different way of seeing the world?"

"No, Dad, I mean really and truly. I mean that because we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us. It was the same game, but I could've noticed something those guys didn't. And then I thought, if I was sitting over there, I'd see something else. And not just the game. I mean they saw me and I saw them, but I didn't see myself and they didn't see themselves. Do you get what I mean?"

"I know just what you mean. I've thought about it a lot, Matt. The place where I am is missing from my view. It's like that for everybody. We don't see ourselves in the picture, do we? It's a kind of hole."

"And when I put that together with people thinking their zillions of thoughts
—
right now they're out there thinking and thinking
—
I get this floaty feeling." He paused. "On the way home in the car when we were all quiet, I thought about how everybody's thoughts keep changing. The thoughts that people were having during the game turned into new thoughts when we were in the car. That was then, but this is now, but then that now is gone, and there's a new now. Right now, I'm saying right now, but it's over before I've finished saying it."

"In a way," I said to him, "that
now
you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present. Does that make sense to you?"

"Yes," he said. "Definitely. I like things to last for a long, long time." Matthew looked up at me. Then he took a breath. "I've made up my mind, Dad. I'm going to be an artist. When I was little I thought I would try for the Major Leagues. I'll always play ball, but that's not going to be my job. No, I'm going to have a studio right here in the neighborhood and an apartment close by, so I can visit you and Mom whenever I want." He closed his eyes. "Sometimes I think I'll make great big paintings, and other times I think I'll make pretty small ones. I don't know which yet."

"You have time to decide," I said. Matt turned onto his stomach and gripped the covers. I leaned down and kissed his forehead.

When I left Matthew's room that night, I stopped in the hallway and leaned against the wall for a couple of minutes. I was proud of my son. Like a rush of air in my lungs, the feeling grew, and then I wondered if my pride wasn't a form of reflected vanity. Matthew's thoughts echoed mine, and that night when I listened to him, I heard myself, and yet as I stood there I knew that I also admired a quality in Matthew that I didn't have. At eleven, he was bolder and more certain than I had ever been. When I told Erica about our talk, she said, "We're lucky. We're lucky to have him. He's the best boy on earth." And after that hyperbolic declaration, she rolled over and fell asleep.

On June twenty-seventh, the six of us crowded into a rented minivan and drove to Pennsylvania. Bill and I carried two leaden duffel bags into a cabin Matt and Mark were going to share with seven other boys and greeted their counselors, Jim and Jason. The pair reminded me of an adolescent version of Laurel and Hardy
—
one thin, the other rotund
—
both grinning broadly. We briefly met the camp director, a hairy man with a pumping handshake and a hoarse voice. We strolled around the grounds and admired the mess hall, the lake, the tennis courts, and the theater. We lingered over our good-byes. Matt threw himself into my arms and hugged me. Only at night did I get such affectionate treatment anymore, but he had clearly made an exception for that farewell. I felt his ribs through his T-shirt as he pressed himself against me, and I looked down into his
face.
"I love you, Dad," he said in a low voice. I answered him as I always did. "And I love you, Matt. I love you." I watched him embrace Erica, and I noticed that he found it a little hard to withdraw from his mother. Erica removed his
Mets
cap and stroked his hair away from his forehead.