What I Loved (21 page)

"Matty," she said. "I'll embarrass you with a letter every day."

"That's not embarrassing, Mom," he said. He held her tightly and pressed his cheek into her collarbone. Then he lifted his chin and smiled. "This is embarrassing."

Erica and Violet prolonged our departure with futile reminders that Matt and Mark brush their teeth, wash themselves, and get enough sleep. When we reached the car, I turned around to look at the boys. They were standing on the wide mowed lawn beside the camp's main building. A large oak tree spread its branches over them, and behind them the afternoon sun shone on the lake, its light catching the ruffle of waves on the water's surface. Bill was driving the first leg of the trip home, and after I had taken my seat beside Violet in the back, I turned again to watch the two figures recede as the van moved down the long driveway toward the road. Matthew had raised his hand to wave at us. From that distance, he looked like a very small boy wearing clothes that were too big for him. I noticed how thin his legs were under his wide shorts and the narrow line of his neck above his billowing T-shirt. He was still holding his cap in his hand, and I saw a tuft of his hair blow up and away from his face in the wind.

TWO

EIGHT DAYS LATER MATT DIED. ON JULY FIFTH AT ABOUT THREE  o'clock in the afternoon, he went canoeing on the Delaware River with three counselors and six other boys. His canoe hit a rock and capsized. Matt was hurled out, hit his head on another boulder, and was knocked unconscious. He drowned in the shallow water before anybody could get to him. For months, Erica and I went over the sequence of events, looking for the guilty party. At first we blamed Matt's counselor Jason, who had been in the stern, because it was all a matter of inches. Had Jason steered two or three inches to the right, there wouldn't have been an accident. An inch to the left, the collision would have occurred, but Matt wouldn't have hit the rock in the water. We also blamed a boy named Rusty. A few seconds before the crash, he had raised himself up and out of his seat in the middle of the canoe and wiggled his buttocks at Jason. In those seconds, the counselor lost sight of the shallow rapids in front of him. Inches and seconds. When Jim and a boy named Cyrus pulled Matthew out of the river, they didn't know that he was dead. Jim performed mouth-to-mouth, blowing air in and out of Matt's still body.

They flagged down a car on the road, and the driver, a Mr. Hodenfield, sped across the border to the nearest hospital, in Callicoon, New York— Grover M. Hermann Community Hospital. Jim never stopped breathing into Matt. He pressed on his chest and blew air into him over and over, but at the hospital Matthew was pronounced dead. It is a strange word, "pronounced." He had died already, but in the emergency room, they spoke the words and it was over. The pronouncement made it real.

Erica took the telephone call late that afternoon. I was standing only a few feet away from her in the kitchen. I saw her face change, watched her clutch the counter, and heard her gasp the word "No." It was a hot day, but we hadn't turned on the air conditioners. I was sweating. Looking at her, I began to sweat more. Erica scribbled words on a pad. Her hand shook. She gulped for air as she listened to the voice. I knew that the call was about Matthew. Erica had repeated the word "accident," then written down the name of the hospital. I was ready to leave. Adrenaline surged through my body. I ran for my wallet and the car keys. When I returned to the living room with the keys in my hand, Erica said, "Leo, that man on the telephone. That man said that Matthew is dead." I stopped breathing, shut my eyes, and said to myself what Erica had said aloud. I said no. Nausea welled up into my mouth. My knees buckled, and I grabbed the table to steady myself. I heard the keys jangle as my hand hit the wooden surface. Then I sat down. Erica had gripped the other side of the table. I looked at her white knuckles, then up at her contorted face. "We have to go to him," she said.

I drove. The white and yellow lines on the black road in front of me held my complete attention. I concentrated on the lines and watched them disappear under the wheels. The sun glared through the windshield, and I squinted now and then through my sunglasses. Beside me sat a woman I hardly recognized—pale, motionless, and dumb. I know that Erica and I saw him in the hospital and that he looked thin. His legs were brown from the sun, but his face had changed color. His lips were blue and his cheeks gray. He was Matthew and he wasn't Matthew. Erica and I walked down hallways and spoke to the medical examiner and we made arrangements in the hushed atmosphere of deference that surrounds people who have just stepped into grief, but the fact was that the world didn't seem to be the world anymore, and when I think back on that week, on the funeral and the cemetery and the people who came, there is a shallowness to all of it, as though my vision had changed and everything I saw had been robbed of its thickness.

I suppose that the loss of depth came from disbelief. Knowing the truth isn't enough. My whole being refuted Matt's death, and I was always expecting him to walk through the door. I heard him moving around in his room and coming up the stairs. Once I heard him say "Dad." The sound of his voice was as distinct as if he had been a foot away from me. Belief would come very slowly, and it would come sparingly, in moments that bored holes into the curious stage set that had replaced the world around me. Two days after the funeral, I was wandering around the apartment and heard noises from Matthew's room. When I looked through the door, I saw Erica lying in Matt's bed. She had curled up under his sheets and was rocking back and forth as she clutched his pillow and bit into it I walked over to her and sat down at the edge of the bed. She continued to rock. The pillow case was wet with ragged spots of saliva and tears. I put my hand on her shoulder, but she wrenched her torso toward the wall and began to scream. Her howls rose up from deep inside her throat—hoarse and guttural. "I want my baby! Get away! I want my baby!" I withdrew my hand. She punched the wall and beat the bed. She sobbed and bellowed out the words over and over. Her cries seemed to gouge my lungs, and I stopped breathing each time they came. As I sat there and listened to Erica, I felt afraid, not of her grief but of my own. I let her noises tear and scrape through me. Yes, I said to myself. This is true. These sounds are real. I looked at the floor and imagined myself lying on it.
To
stop, I thought, just to stop. I felt dry. That was the problem. I was dry as an old bone—and I envied Erica her flailing and her shouting. I couldn't find it in me, and I let her do it instead. She ended up with her head in my lap, and I looked down at her squashed face with its red nose and swollen eyes. I put four fingers on her cheek and let them run to her chin. "Matthew," I said to her. Then I said it again. "Matthew."

Erica looked up at me. Her lips were trembling. "Leo," she said. "How are we going to live?"

The days were long. I must have had thoughts but I don't remember them. Mostly I sat. I didn't read or cry or rock or move. I sat in the chair where I often sit now, and I looked out the window. I watched the traffic and the pedestrians with their shopping bags. I studied the yellow cabs, the tourists dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and then after I had been sitting for hours, I would go into Matt's room and touch his things. I never picked up anything. I let my fingers move over his rock collection. I touched his T-shirts in his drawer. I laid my hands on his backpack, still stuffed with dirty clothes from camp. I felt his unmade bed. We didn't make the bed all summer, and we didn't move a single object in his room. By the time morning came, Erica had often made her way to Matthew's bed. Sometimes she remembered climbing into it in the middle of the night. Other times she didn't.

She had started walking in her sleep again, not every night, but a couple of times a week. During these ambulatory trances, Erica was always searching for something. She yanked open drawers in the kitchen and dug into closets. She pulled books off the shelf in her study and peered at the bare wood where the volumes had been. One night I found her standing in the middle of the hallway. Her hand turned an invisible knob and she thrust open an invisible door and began to clutch and grab at the Mr. I let her look because I was afraid of disturbing her. Asleep, she had a determination she had lost in wakefulness, and when I felt her stirring beside me and sitting up in bed, I would rouse myself and dutifully stand up to follow her around the loft until the ritual searching was over. I became a nocturnal spectator, a vigilant second to Erica's unconscious roaming. There were nights when I stood in front of the door that led to the landing, worried that she might leave and take her search out into the streets, but whatever it was that she wanted to find, the thing was lost in the apartment. Sometimes she mumbled, "I know I put it somewhere. It was here." But she never named the object. After a while, she would give up, walk to Matthew's room, climb into his bed, and sleep until morning. During the early weeks of her wandering, I spoke to her about it, but after a while, I stopped. There was nothing left to tell her, and my descriptions of her unconscious rummaging only made her suffer more.

We didn't know how to give him up, how to be. We couldn't find the rhythms of ordinary life. The simple business of waking, retrieving the paper from outside the door, and sitting down to eat breakfast became a cruel pantomime of the everyday enacted in the gaping absence of our son. And although she sat at the table with her bowl of cereal in front of her, Erica couldn't eat. She had never been a big eater, had always been thin, but by the end of the summer she had lost fifteen pounds. Her cheeks sank into her face, and when I sat across from her I could see her skull. I nagged her about eating, but my prompting was halfhearted because I tasted nothing on my plate either and had to force the food into my mouth. Violet was the one who fed us. She started cooking dinner for me and Erica the day after Matt died and didn't stop until well into the fall. In the beginning, she knocked before she entered. After that, we left the door open for her. Every evening, I would hear her steps on the stairs and see her walk in, carrying pans with tinfoil over them. Violet never said much to us in the early days after Matt's death, and her silence was a relief. She would announce the names of the foods— "Lasagna, salad," or "Chicken cutlets with green beans and rice," and then she would plop the plates on the table, uncover them, and dish out the food. By August she was staying to encourage Erica to eat. She cut up her food for her, and while Erica took hesitant bites, Violet massaged her shoulders or stroked her back She touched me, too, but differently. She would grab my upper arm and squeeze it hard—to steady me or shake me, I don't know which.

We depended on her, and when I think back on it now, I'm aware of how hard she worked. If she and Bill were going out to dinner, she would cook for us anyway and drop off the food. When they vacationed for two weeks in August, she arrived with dinners for our freezer, labeled with the days of the week. She called us every day at ten in the morning from Connecticut to check on us and closed her conversation by saying, "Take out Wednesday right now, and it will be defrosted by dinner time."

Bill came to us alone. Neither Violet nor Bill ever mentioned it, but I think they did their duties separately rather than together so that Erica and I would have more hours of company. About two weeks after the funeral, Bill brought a watercolor with him that Matt had done during a visit to his studio. It was another cityscape. When Erica saw it, she said to Bill, "I think I'll look at it later, if you don't mind. I can't now. I just can't..." She left us, walked down the hallway, and I heard the sound of our bedroom door closing behind her. Bill pulled up a chair next to mine, placed the watercolor on the coffee table in front of us, and began to talk. "Do you see the wind?" he said.

I looked down at the scene.

"Look at these trees pulled hard by the wind and the buildings. The whole city is shaking with it. The picture is trembling. Eleven years old, Leo, and he did this." Bill moved his finger across the images. "Look at this woman collecting cans, and the little girl in the ballerina costume with her mother. Look at this man's body over here, the way he's walking, fighting the wind. And here's Dave feeding Durango ..."

Through a window I saw the old man. He was bent over toward the floor with a bowl in his hands. Because of his stooped posture, Dave's beard hung away from his body. "Yes," I said. "Dave is always there somewhere."

"He made this picture for you," Bill said. "It's for you." He picked up the watercolor and put it on my lap. I held it very carefully and studied the street with its people. A plastic bag and a newspaper were flying in the wind near the pavement and then, as I looked up, I noticed a tiny figure on the roof of Dave's building—the outline of a boy.

Bill pointed at the child. "There's no face on him. Matt told me he wanted it like that..."

I brought the paper closer to my eyes. "And his feet aren't on the ground," I said slowly. The featureless child had something in his hand—a knife with its many blades opened like the points on a star. "It's the Ghosty Boy," I said, "with Matt's lost knife."

"It's for you," Bill repeated. At the time, I accepted this explanation, but now I wonder if Bill didn't invent the story of the gift. He laid a hand on my shoulder. I had been afraid of this. I didn't want him to touch me and remained rigid. But when I turned to the man beside me, I saw that he was crying. Tears ran down his cheeks, and then he sobbed loudly.

After that, Bill came every day to sit with me by the window. He came home from his studio earlier than usual, always at the same time: five o'clock. Often Bill would put his hand on the arm of my chair and leave it there until he left, about an hour later. He told me stories from his childhood with Dan and stories from when he was a young artist roaming Italy. He described his first house-painting job in New York—in a brothel where most of the customers were Hasidic Jews. He read to me from
Artforum.
He talked to me about Philip Guston's conversion, Art Spiegelman's
Maus,
and Paul Celan's poems. I rarely interrupted him, and he demanded no response. He didn't avoid Matthew as a subject Sometimes he reported on conversations they had had at the studio. "He wanted to know about line, Leo. I mean metaphysically, about the edges of things as you look at them, if blocks of color have lines, if painting is superior to drawing. He told me that he had dreamed several times that he was walking into the sun and that he couldn't see. The light blinded him."