What I Loved (25 page)

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."

In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New York for a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didn't mean a resumption of our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream. The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didn't excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangle that feeling of injury but couldn't do it—not fully. I knew, however, that Matt was suddenly everywhere.

The loft reverberated with his voice. The furniture seemed to hold the imprint of his body. Even the light from the window conjured Matthew. It won't work, I thought to myself. It's not going to work. As soon as Erica stepped through the door, she started crying.

We didn't fight. We talked in the intimate way of old lovers who haven't seen each other for a long time but hold no grudges. One night, we ate dinner with Bill and Violet in a restaurant and Erica laughed so hard at a Henny Youngman joke Bill told about a man hiding in a closet that she almost choked, and Violet had to beat her on the back. At least once a day Erica stood in the doorway of Matt's room for several minutes and looked in at what remained of it—the bed, his desk and chair, and the watercolor of the city Bill had given me and which I had framed. We made love twice. My physical loneliness had taken on shades of desperation, and when Erica leaned close to kiss me, I leapt at her. She trembled through my attack and had no orgasm. Her lack of pleasure soured my release, and afterward I felt empty. The night before she left, we tried again. I wanted to be careful with her, gentle. I touched her arm cautiously and then kissed it, but my hesitation seemed to irritate her. She lunged for me, grabbed my hips, and pinched my skin with her fingers. She kissed me hungrily and climbed on top of me. When she came, she made a small, sharp noise, and she sighed again and again, even after I had ejaculated. But under our lovemaking I felt a bleakness that couldn't be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed.

In the morning, Erica reassured me that she didn't want a divorce unless I wanted one. I said I didn't. "I love your letters," she said. "They're beautiful."

The comment annoyed me. "I think you're glad you're leaving," I said.

Erica moved her face close to mine and narrowed her eyes. "Aren't
you
glad I'm leaving?"

"I don't know," I said. "I really don't know."

She put her hand on my face and stroked it. "We're broken, Leo. It's not our fault. When Matt died it was like our story stopped. There was so much of you in him ..."

"You'd think we could at least have each other," I said to her.

"I know," she said, "I know."

After she was gone, I felt guilty because, turbulent as my feelings were, I detected in them the relief Erica had been brave enough to mention. At two o'clock in the afternoon, I drank a glass of Scotch in my chair like an old booze hound. As I told myself not to drink in the afternoon again, I felt the alcohol move into my head and then into my limbs. I leaned back into the fraying cushions of my chair and knew what had happened to me and Erica. We wanted other people. Not new people. Old ones. We wanted ourselves before Matthew died, and nothing we did for the rest of our days would ever bring those people back.

That summer I began to work on Goya's "black paintings." Studying his monsters and ghouls and witches kept me occupied for hours at a time during the day, and his demons helped to keep mine at a distance. But when night came, I walked through other imaginary spaces, subjunctive realms in which I saw Matt talking and drawing, and Erica near me— unchanged. These waking fantasies were pure exercises in self-torture, but around that same time Matthew started to come to me in my dreams, and when he came, he was as much there as he had been in life. His body was as real, as whole, as palpable as it had always been. I held him, spoke to him, touched his hair, his hands, and I had what I couldn't have when I was awake—the unshakable, joyous certainty that Matthew was alive.

While Goya didn't feed my gloom, his savage paintings gave new license to my thoughts—permission to open doors that in my former life I had left closed. Without Goya's ardent images, I'm not sure that Violet's piano lesson would have come surging back with such surprising force. The daydream began after I had seen Bill and Violet for dinner. Violet was wearing a pink sundress that showed her breasts. A long walk in the sun that afternoon had turned her cheeks and nose a little red, and while she talked to me about her next book, which had something to do with extreme narcissism, mass culture, pictures, instant communications, and a new illness of late capitalism, I found it hard to listen to her. My eyes kept wandering onto her flushed face and over her bare arms and onto her breasts and then to her fingers, with their pink polish. I left dinner early that evening, spent some time with the objects in my drawer, and then began leafing through a large book of Goya's drawings, starting with the ones for the
Tauromaquia.
While I admit that the artist's sketches of a bullfight have little in common with Violet's piano lesson and her encounter with Monsieur Renasse, the loose energy of his lines and his fierce rendering affected me like an aphrodisiac. I kept turning the pages, eager for more pictures of brutes and monsters. I knew every one of them by heart, but that night their carnal fury scorched my mind like a fire, and when I looked again at the drawing of a young, naked woman riding a goat on a witches' Sabbath, I felt that she was all speed and hunger, that her crazed ride, born of Goya's sure, swift hand, was ink bruising paper. His beast runs, but his rider is out of control. Her head has fallen back Her hair streams out behind her and her legs may not cling much longer to the animal's body. I touched the woman's shaded thigh and pale knee, and the gesture sent me to Paris.

I changed the fantasy as it suited me. There were nights when I was content to watch the lesson through a window across the street and other nights when I became Monsieur Renasse. There were nights when I was Jules peeking through a keyhole or floating magically above the scene, but Violet was always on the bench beside one of us, and one of us would always reach out and grab her finger in an abrupt, violent motion and whisper "Jules" into her ear in a hoarse, insistent voice, and at the sound of the name, Violet's body would always tighten with desire and her head would fall back, and one of us or the other would have her right there on the piano bench, would pull up her pink dress from behind and lower the small underpants of varying colors and descriptions and enter her as she made loud noises of pleasure, or one of' us would drag her under a potted palm and part her legs on the floor and make raucous love to her while she screamed her way to orgasm. I released untold amounts of semen into that fantasy and inevitably felt let down afterward. My pornography was no-more idiotic than most, and I knew I wasn't the only man who indulged himself in harmless mental romps with the wife of a friend, but the secret pained me nevertheless. I would often think of Erica afterward and then of Bill. Sometimes I tried to supplant Violet with another figure, a nameless stand-in who could take her place, but it never worked. It had to be Violet and it had to be that story, not of two people but of three.

Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like
O's Journey,
the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large—about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He took a number between zero and nine and played with it in a single piece. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion—to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, to the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like
A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons
and
Thinner Thighs in Seven Days.
Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called
The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often
lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised—one, won; two, too, and Tuesday, four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometrical figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word
drei
is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked together to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection—and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.