What I Loved (16 page)

"No, Leo," she said. She reached for my hand and examined it, turning the palm toward her. "You have long fingers," she said, "and a rectangular palm. In a book I saw once, it said that hands like yours belong to psychics."

"In my case," I said, "I'm afraid the book was wrong."

She nodded. "Good night, Leo."

"Good night." I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. As I did it, I made a great effort to check my awkwardness. And then, although I wanted to run from the apartment, I lingered, overcome by a feeling that the business between us was unfinished. I looked down at the floor and noticed a toy at my feet. I recognized the black-and-red object, because Matt had several of them. The toy, called a Transformer, could be changed from a vehicle into a robotic creature with more or less human form. The thing was in a half-and-half state
—
part thing, part man. On a sudden impulse, I picked it up. For some reason, I couldn't leave it untouched. I flipped one side of it downward to finish the change. It became all robot
—
two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso. I could feel Lucille watching me. "An ugly toy," she said.

I nodded and lay the Transformer on the table. We said good night again and I left.

When I crawled into bed beside Erica, she woke up for a few seconds. "Was Lucille okay?" she said. I told her yes. Then I said she had wanted to talk, and I had stayed with her for a while. Erica rolled over and went back to sleep. Her shoulder and arm lay over the covers and I stared at the thin strap of her nightgown in the obscure light of the room. Erica would never suspect my betrayal, and her trust sickened me. Had she been a woman who doubted my loyalty, I would have felt less guilt. In the morning, I repeated the lie to Erica without flinching. I lied so well that the night before appeared to harden into what should have happened, rather than what had happened. "I will not tell anybody." Lucille's promise was our bond, one that would help erase the reality of my having had sex with her. As I sat with Erica and Matt at the table that Sunday morning, a basket filled with bagels in front of me, I listened to Matt talking about Ling. Ling had left the grocery next door for another job. "I'll probably never ever see Ling again," he said, and while he continued to talk I remembered Lucille's teeth on my neck and saw her pale brown pubic hair against her white skin. Lucille had not wanted an affair; I felt quite sure of that. But she had wanted something from me. I say
something,
because whatever it was, it had merely taken the form of sex. The more I thought about it, the more troubling it became, because I began to suspect that the
something
was connected to Bill.

I didn't see Lucille for months after that. Either I missed her comings and goings in our building or she rarely came for Mark anymore, because she had made new arrangements with Bill. But only a few weeks after I had sex with her, I asked Bill about Lucille's illness, the one he had mentioned to me years before.

His direct answer turned my years of reticence into folly. "She tried to commit suicide," he said. "I found her in her dorm room with her wrists cut, bleeding all over the floor." Bill paused and closed his eyes for a moment "She was sitting on the floor holding her arms out in front of her, watching herself bleed very calmly. I grabbed her, wrapped her wrists in towels, and started yelling for help. Afterward the doctors said the cuts weren't very deep, that she probably hadn't meant to kill herself. Years later, she told me that she had liked watching the blood." Bill paused. "She said a strange thing about it. She said, 'It had authenticity.' She was in a hospital for a while, and then she lived with her parents. They wouldn't let me see her. They thought I was a bad influence. You see, when she did it, she knew I wasn't far away. She knew I would come looking for her. I think her parents thought that with me around, she might do it again." Bill grimaced for an instant and shook his head. "I still feel bad about it," he said.

"But it wasn't your fault."

"I know. I feel bad because I liked that craziness in her. I found it dramatic. She was very beautiful then. People used to say she looked like Grace Kelly. It's awful, but a beautiful, bleeding girl is more compelling than a plain bleeding girl. I was twenty years old and a total idiot."

And I'm fifty-five, I thought to myself, and I'm still a total idiot. Bill stood up and began pacing. As I watched him move back and forth across the floor, I knew that if I wasn't careful, the secret between me and Lucille could fester like a sore. I also knew that I had to keep it. Nothing would come of confession, except my own relief. "Lucille will always be with us," Violet had said. Perhaps that was exactly what Lucille wanted.

After a month of delays, Lazlo Finkelman finally came for dinner. A good part of Erica's pleasure in his company that evening came from watching him eat. He ingested heaps of mashed potatoes, six pieces of chicken, and smaller but significant amounts of carrots and broccoli. After he had consumed three pieces of apple tart, he appeared to be ready for conversation. But talking to Lazlo was like climbing a steep hill. He was almost perversely laconic, answering our questions in monosyllables or sentences that evolved so slowly I was bored before he managed to end them. Nevertheless, by the time Lazlo went home, we had gathered that he had grown up in Indianapolis and that he was an orphan. His father had died when he was nine, and then seven years later his mother had died. At sixteen he had been taken in by his aunt and uncle, who, in his words, were "okay." When he was eighteen, however, he had left them for New York City "to do my art."

Lazlo had worked many jobs. He had been a busboy, a clerk in a hardware store, and a bicycle messenger. During one desperate period, he had collected bottles on the street for their refunds. At the time, he was a cashier at a store in Brooklyn with the dubious name of La Bagel Delight. When I asked Lazlo about his art, he immediately produced slides from his bag. The boy's work reminded me of the Tinkertoys my mother had bought for me not long after we arrived in New York. As I studied the oddly shaped sculptures, it dawned on me that these sticks resembled genitalia, both male and female.

"Does all your work have a sexual theme?" Erica said to him. She was smiling as she said it, but Lazlo seemed immune to her humor. He studied Erica from behind his glasses and nodded soberly. His blond broom nodded with him. "It's what I do," he said.

Erica was the one who approached Bill on Lazlo's behalf. For some time, Bill had been talking about hiring an assistant, and Erica was convinced that Lazlo would "be perfect." I was more skeptical about the boy's qualifications, but Bill couldn't resist Erica, and Lazlo became a fixture in our lives. He started working for Bill on the Bowery every afternoon. Erica fed him about once a month, and Matt loved him. Lazlo did nothing to court Matthew. He didn't play with Matt or speak much more to him than he did to us. But the young man's apparent coolness didn't deter Matt in the least. He climbed onto Laz's lap and touched his fascinating hair and rattled on to him about his growing passion for baseball, and every once in a while, Matt would clasp his hands on either side of Lazlo's face and kiss him. During these onslaughts of Matt's passion, Lazlo would sit impassively in his chair, speaking as little as possible, his expression uniformly morose. And yet, one evening as I watched Matt throw his arms around the skinny Finkelman legs as they were about to stride through the door for dinner, I had the sudden thought that Lazlo's lack of resistance to Matt was in itself a form of affection. It was simply the best he could do at the time.

That January, my colleague Jack Newman began his liason with Sara Wang, a graduate student whom he had taught in one of his courses. She was a pretty young woman with brown eyes and black hair that fell to the middle of her back. There had been others before her—Jane and Delia and the six-foot-one-inch Tina, whose sexual appetite had apparently been as large as she was. Jack was lonely. His book,
Urinals and Campbell's Soup
,
which he had been working on for five years, wasn't enough to fill the evening hours spent in his large apartment on Riverside Drive. The affairs didn't last very long. Jack's love objects weren't necessarily pretty, but they were always bright. He once told me rather sadly that he had never managed to get a stupid girl into bed. But even the smart girls soon tired of Jack. I suppose they understood that he wasn't serious, that he loved the game more than he loved them. Perhaps they woke up in the morning and looked over at the balding character in bed next to them and wondered what had happened to last night's magic. I don't know, but Jack lost them all. Late one afternoon, I walked down the hall to Jack's office. I had stayed on to correct papers and had come across a remarkable little essay on Fra Angelico by a young man named Fred Ciccio that I wanted to show Jack. When I put my eye to the small window of his office, I saw him and Sara in a clinch. His right hand had disappeared inside Sara's blouse, and although her hands were hidden somewhere beneath the desk, the look on Jack's face suggested that they weren't idle. As soon as I understood what I was seeing, I turned around, leaned my head against the window to block the view, and fell victim to a sudden, explosive coughing fit before I knocked. Sara, rebuttoned but red in the face, fled as soon as I walked through the door.

I didn't wait to speak to Jack. I sat down in the chair across from him and gave him my standard lecture. I warned him that his lack of discretion could ruin everything for him in the department. The climate was bad for seducing students. He would have to break it off or hide her.

Jack sighed, looked at me grimly, and said, "I'm in love with her, Leo."

"You were in love with all of them, Jack," I said.

He shook his head. "No, Sara's different. Did I ever use that word before?"

I couldn't remember whether Jack had said he loved Tina or Delia or Jane. I thought of Lucille then and the curious distinction she had made between "strong interest" and the state of being "in love."

"I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything," I told him.

On the IRT I pondered my own words. They had sprung from my lips without hesitation
—
a pithy comeback to Jack's confession
—
but what had I meant by them? Had I said it because I didn't believe in Jack's love for Sara or because I did? Not once in all the years of my marriage had I asked myself whether I loved Erica. For about a year after we met, I had been thoroughly unhinged by her. My heart had pounded. My nerves had tensed with longing until I could almost hear them buzz. My appetite had vanished, and I had withdrawal symptoms when I wasn't with her. That mania had gradually ended, but as I walked up the steps out of the subway and into the cold gray air, I realized that I couldn't wait to see her. At home I found Erica and Grace and Matthew in the kitchen. I grabbed Erica, tipped her backward over my arm, and kissed her forcefully on the mouth. Grace laughed. Matt gaped, and Erica said, "Do it again. I liked it." I did it again. "Now do it to me, Daddy!" Matt cried. I bent down, threw Matt over my arm, and gave him a kiss on his small pursed mouth. These demonstrations amused Grace so much that she pulled out a kitchen chair, fell into it, and laughed for a good minute.

It was a small incident, and yet I have often gone back to that moment in my mind. Years later, I began to imagine the episode from a distance, as though the man walking through the door had been caught on film. I watch him take off his coat and place his keys and wallet near the telephone in the entryway. I see him set his briefcase on the floor and then stride into the kitchen. The middle-aged man with a receding hairline, who is mostly but not entirely gray, grabs a tall, still-young woman with dark brown hair and a little mole above her lip and kisses her. I kissed Erica that day on a whim, and yet my sudden desire could be traced back to Jack's office, where he said that he loved Sara, and, even further, to Lucille's sofa, where she had tied herself into linguistic knots over the same word. No one but I could track that kiss. Its trail was invisible, a muddled path of human interaction that climaxed in my impulsive gesture of reaffirmation. I'm fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly have. When I concentrate, I see Erica's eyes close and her thick lashes brush the delicate skin beneath her eyes. I see her hair fall away from her forehead and feel the weight of her body on my arm. I can remember what she was wearing
—
a long-sleeved striped T-shirt. Its round neck was cut out to reveal her collarbones and the even pallor of her winter skin.

That August was the first of four Augusts the two families spent together in Vermont. Matt and Mark turned eight, nine, ten, and finally eleven in the big old farmhouse we rented every year
—
a rambling, run-down place with seven bedrooms. At various junctures during its
150
years, additions had made the house larger and then larger again to accommodate growing families, but by the time we saw it, nobody was living there during the other months of the year. An old woman had willed it to her eight godchildren, now older people themselves, and the house languished as a mostly forgotten asset. It lay on top of a hill, which the locals called a mountain, not far from Newfane
—
a town pretty enough to be obsessively photographed as an archetypal village of cozy New England. The summer days have run together in my mind, and I can't always separate one vacation year from another, but the four months we spent there are now touched by a quality I can only call imaginary. It isn't that I doubt the truth of them. My memory is clear. I remember every room as though I had been in it yesterday. I can see the view from the little window where I used to sit and work on my book. I can hear the boys playing downstairs and Erica humming to herself not far from them. I can smell corn boiling. No, it's that the ordinary comfort and pleasure of that house has been reconfigured in my mind by "the past." Because what was has disappeared, that
was
has become idyllic. Had it been only one summer, the green mountain could never have held the magic it has for me now. Repetition enchanted it: the drive north in our car and Bill's truck, loaded down with books, art supplies, and toys, the settling into our musty rooms, the cleaning rituals led by Violet, the cooking and the eating and the reading and the bedtime songs, the four adults sitting beside the woodstove and talking into the night. There were warm days, a few sultry ones, and stretches of rain that chilled the house and rattled the windows. There were nights when we lay on blankets and studied the constellations that shone out as plain and clear as the points on an astronomical map. From our beds at night we heard black bears calling to each other in voices that sounded like owls. Deer came to gaze at the house from the wood's edge, and once a great blue heron landed a foot from the house and peered in at Matt, who was standing near the window. He didn't know what it was, and when he came to me to explain what he had seen, his face was still pale from the sudden apparition of a bird too large to be real.