What I Loved (52 page)

When she saw the smile, she said, "It's not funny, Leo."

"Yes," I said, "it is. People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts, and as far as I can tell, you've done nothing wrong. When you and Bill sent Mark back to Lucille, you thought you were doing what was right. People can't do more than that. Now it's your turn to listen to me. As it turns out, I have no power over my feelings either, but it was a mistake to talk to you about them. I wish I could take back what I said— for my sake as well as yours. I lost my head. It's that simple, but there's nothing I can do about it now."

Violet's green eyes regarded me steadily as she put her hands on my shoulders and began to stroke my arms. I was caught off guard for a moment by her touch, but I couldn't resist the happiness it brought me, and I felt my muscles relax. It had been a long time since I had felt someone's hands on me like that, and I actually tried to remember the last time. When Erica came for Bill's funeral, I thought.

"I've decided to go away," Violet said. "I can't be here anymore. It's not Bill. I like being close to his things. It's Mark. I can't be near him anymore, not even in the same city. I don't want to see him again. A friend of mine in Paris invited me to give a seminar at the American University, and I've decided to do it, even though it's just for a few months. I'm leaving in two weeks. I was going to tell you at dinner but then the phone rang, and ..." Her face contorted for a second and then she continued, "I'm lucky that you love me. I'm really lucky."

I began a reply, but Violet put her finger to my lips. "Don't talk. I have to tell you something else. I don't think it could go on, because I'm too confused. I'm broken, you see, not whole." She moved her hands to my neck and rubbed it softly. "But we can be together tonight if you want. I do love you very much, maybe not exactly the way you would like me to, but..."

She stopped talking because I reached for her hands and pulled them gently away from my neck. I continued to hold them in mine while I looked at her face. I knew that I wanted her badly. I had forgotten what it was not to want her, but I didn't want her sacrifice—that sweet offering she held out to me, because I imagined my greed and lust accepted but not returned, and that picture of my desire made me quail. I shook my head at her while two large tears spilled onto her cheeks. She had been kneeling throughout our talk and she put her head down on one of my thighs for a second before she stood up, led me over to the sofa, sat down beside me, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and we sat together for a long time without saying anything.

I remembered Bill in Vermont then, walking out the door of Bowery Two just before dinner. I saw him through the kitchen window of the Vermont house, and although it was an uncommonly lucid memory, I felt no emotion or nostalgia. I was merely a voyeur of my own life, a cold spectator who looks on at other people going about their daily routines. Bill lifted his hand to greet Matthew and Mark from the top of the stairs, and then paused to light a cigarette. I saw him stride across the lawn toward the farmhouse while Matt tugged at his arm, my son looking up at Bill. Mark was grinning as he staggered behind them and feigned a spastic disorder—holding one arm akimbo and waving the other helplessly in front of him. I surveyed the large kitchen in my mind and saw Erica and Violet pitting olives at the table. I heard the screen door slam, and at the sound, the two women looked up at Bill. Smoke rose up from the butt between his fingers, which were stained with blue and green paint, and as he sucked on the cigarette, I could see that his thoughts were still in the studio, that he wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet. Behind him, the boys had crouched down to look for the garter snake who lived under the front step. No one spoke, and in the quiet, I could hear the ticking of the clock that hung to the right of the door—a big-faced old school clock with clear black numbers—and I found myself struggling to understand how time can be measured on a disc, a circle with hands that return to the same positions over and over again. That logical revolution looked like a mistake. Time isn't circular, I thought. That's wrong. But the memory didn't let go of me. It continued—vehement, acute, inescapable. Violet glanced at the clock and pointed at Bill. "You're a stinky mess, my love. Go wash. You've got exactly twenty minutes."

Violet left New York on December ninth in the late afternoon. The low sky was beginning to darken, and a few tiny flakes of snow had started to fall. I carried her heavy suitcase down the stairs and left it on the sidewalk while I hailed a cab for her. She was wearing her long navy blue coat, which tied around her waist, and a white fur hat that I had always liked.

The driver popped the trunk, and we lifted the suitcase into it together. While we said good-bye, I clutched at what was there—-Violet's face coming toward mine, the smell of her in the cold air, the hug, and then the quick kiss on my mouth, not my cheek, the sound of the car door opening, then slamming, her hand at the window and her eyes with a tender, sorry look in them under the fringe of her hat. I followed the yellow taxi up Greene Street as Violet craned her neck and waved again. At the end of block, I watched the cab turn onto Grand Street I didn't leave until it had traveled some distance from me—a shrunken yellow thing lost in the jumble of traffic. When I felt that it was just about the size of the taxi in my painting, I walked back up the block to my door.

My eyes started to go on me the following year. I thought that the haze in my vision was caused by strain from my work or maybe cataracts. When the ophthalmologist told me there was nothing to be done, because the form of macular degeneration I had was of the wet rather than the dry sort, I nodded, thanked him, and stood up to leave. He must have found my response perverse, because he frowned at me. I told him I had been lucky with my health so far, and I wasn't surprised by illnesses that had no cure. He said that was un-American, and I agreed. Over the years the haze turned into fog, and then into the thick clouds that block my vision now. I've always been able to see the periphery of things, which allows me to walk without a cane, and I can still negotiate my way on the subway. The daily effort of shaving became too hard, however, and I grew a beard. I have it trimmed every month by a man in the Village who insists on calling me Leon. I don't bother to correct him anymore.

Erica remains a half presence in my life. We talk more often on the telephone and write fewer letters, and every July we spend two weeks together in Vermont This July was our third year, and I'm sure we will continue the tradition. Fourteen days out of 365 seems to be enough for us. We don't stay in the old farmhouse, but we aren't far away, and last year we drove up the hill, parked the car, walked around the lawn, and peeked through the windows of the empty house. Erica isn't strong. Headaches continue to interrupt her life, rendering her a semi-invalid for days, sometimes weeks, but she still teaches with fervor and writes a lot. In April 1998, Erica published
Nanda's Tears: Repression and Release in the Work of Henry James.
At home in Berkeley, she often spends the weekends with Daisy, now a pudgy eight-year-old girl enamoured of rap music.

Next spring, I will finally retire. My world will shrink then, and I'll miss my students and Avery Library and my office and Jack. Because my colleagues and students know what I've lost—Matthew, Erica, and my eyes—they have turned me into a venerable figure. I suppose a near-blind art history professor gives off a whiff of the romantic. But nobody at Columbia knows that I lost Violet, too. As it turns out, she and Erica are about equidistant from me these days, one in Paris, one in Berkeley, and I, who never moved, occupy the middle ground in New York. Violet lives in a small apartment in the Marais not far from the Bastille. Every December, she returns to New York for a few days before she flies home to Minnesota for Christmas. She always spends a day with Dan in New Jersey, who, she says, is doing a little better. He still paces, chain-smokes, makes the O sign with his fingers, and speaks several decibels louder than most people, and he has yet to master the ordinary business of living day to day. It's all hard—cleaning, shopping, preparing meals—and yet Violet feels that everything about Dan is a little less Dan than before, as if his whole being has subsided a notch or turned one shade lighter. He is still writing poems and occasionally a scene for a play but is less prolific than he once was, and the scraps of paper and manuscript pages that lie scattered about his one-room apartment are covered with verse or bits of dialogue followed by ellipses. Age and thirty years of potent drugs have dulled Dan a bit, but that muting seems to have made his life a bit easier.

Four years ago, Violet's sister, Alice, married Edward. A year later, at the age of forty, she gave birth to a daughter named Rose. Violet is crazy about Rose, and every year she arrives in New York with a suitcase stuffed with Parisian dolls and dresses to bring to the angel in Minneapolis. I hear from Violet every two or three months. She sends me an audiotape in lieu of a letter, and I listen to her news and her rambling thoughts about her work. Her book
The Automatons of Late Capitalism
includes chapters entitled "Manic Shopping," "Advertising and the Artificial Body," "Lies and the Internet," and "The Parasitic Pyschopath as Ideal Consumer." Her research has taken her from the eighteenth century into the present, from the French physician Pinel to a living psychiatrist named Kernberg. The terms and etiologies of the illness she is studying have changed with time, but Violet has tracked it in all its shifting incarnations:
folie lucide
, moral insanity, moral idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality—ASP for short. These days psychiatrists use checklists for the disorder, which they revise and update by committee, but among the features most often included are glibness and charm, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse, impulsivity, cunning and manipulativeness, early behavior problems, and a failure to learn from mistakes or respond to punishment. Every broad idea in the book will be illustrated by individual cases—the countless stories Violet has been collecting from people over the years.

Neither Violet nor I ever mention the night I told her I loved her, but my confession still lies between us like a shared bruise. It has created a new delicacy and inhibition in us that I regret, but no real discomfort. She always spends an evening with me when she comes for her yearly visit, and while I'm making her dinner, I notice that I try to suppress the most obvious signs of my joy, but after an hour or so I lose that self-consciousness, and we lapse into a familiar intimacy that is almost, but not quite, what it was before. Erica tells me that there is a man called Yves in Violet's life and that they have an "arrangement"—a circumscribed liason that involves hotels—but Violet doesn't speak to me of him. We talk about the people we have in common: Erica, Lazlo, Pinky, Bernie, Bill, Matthew, and Mark.

Mark turns up every once in a while, and then he vanishes again. With money Bill had set aside for him, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and impressed his mother and even Violet (who followed his school career from Paris) with his first-semester grades, which arrived in the mail—all As and B's. But when Lucille called the registrar's office for some information during Mark's second semester, she discovered that Mark wasn't a student. The grades were clever forgeries done on a computer. After a week and a half of school in the fall, he had collected his tuition money, which was refunded directly to him, and had run off with a girl named Mickey. In the spring, he had enrolled again, taken the money again, and disappeared. He calls his mother from time to time, saying that he's in New Orleans or California or Michigan, but nobody knows for sure. Teenie Gold, who is now twenty-two and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, sends me a Christmas card every year. Two years ago, she wrote that a friend of hers thought he had spotted Mark in New York leaving a music store with a pile of CDs, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure.

I don't want to see Mark again or speak to him again, but that doesn't mean that I'm free of him. At night, when every sound is amplified by the relative quiet of the building, my nerves race, and I feel blind in the darkness. I hear him in the hallway outside my door or on the fire escape. I hear him in Matt's room, even though I know he isn't there. I see him, too, in visions that are half memory, half invention. I see him in Bill's arms, his small head nestled against his father's shoulder. I see Violet throwing a towel around him after his bath and kissing his neck. I see him with Matt outside the house in Vermont, walking toward the woods with their arms over each other's shoulders. I see him wrapping a cigar box in masking tape. I see him as Harpo Marx honking madly on his horn, and I see him outside the hotel room in Nashville, looking on while Teddy Giles slams my head into the wall.

Lazlo tells me that Teddy Giles is a model prisoner. In the beginning there were those who speculated that Giles might be killed in prison for a crime unpopular even among criminals, but it seems that he is well liked by everyone, especially the guards. Not long after his arrest, the
New Yorker
carried an article on Giles. The journalist had done his homework, and some mysteries were solved. I discovered that Giles's mother had never been a prostitute or a waitress. She wasn't dead, but alive in Tucson, Arizona, refusing to speak to the press. Teddy Giles (who was christened Allan Johnson) grew up in a middle-class suburb outside Cleveland. His father, who worked as an accountant, left his wife when Teddy was one and a half and moved to Florida, but he continued to support his wife and son. According to one of Giles's aunts, Mrs. Johnson suffered a severe depression and was hospitalized a month after her husband's departure. Giles was farmed out to a grandmother and spent most of his early years between his mother and various other family members. At fourteen, he was expelled from school and began to travel. After that, the journalist lost Allan Johnson's trail and didn't pick it up again until he surfaced in New York as Teddy Giles. The writer made the usual comments about violence, pornography, and American culture. He pondered the ugly content of Giles's work, its brief, sensational rise in the art world, the dangers of censorship, and the bleakness of it all. The man wrote well and soberly, but as I read the article I was overcome by a feeling that he was saying what he knew his readers expected him to say, that the article, with its smooth language and received ideas, would unsettle nobody. On one of the pages there was a photograph of Allan Johnson when he was seven—one of those badly taken grade-school portraits with a fake sky as the backdrop. He had once been a cute kid with blond hair and protruding ears.