What I Loved (4 page)

Cicero's speaker walked through spacious, well-lit rooms he remembered and dropped words onto tables and chairs where they could be easily retrieved. No doubt I have assigned a vocabulary to the architecture of my first five years
—
one mediated through the mind of a man who knows the horror that would arrive after the little boy was gone from the apartment. During the last year we were in Berlin, my mother left a light burning in the hallway to calm me before I slept. I had nightmares, and I would wake to a strangling fear and the sound of my own screaming.
Nervös
was the word my father used
—
Dos
Kind
ist nervös.
My parents didn't speak to me about the Nazis, only about our preparations to leave home, and it's hard to know to what degree my childish fears were related to the fear that every Jew in Germany must have felt at the time. The way my mother told it was that she was taken by surprise. A party whose views had seemed absurd and contemptible suddenly and inexplicably took hold of the country. Both she and my father were patriotic, and while they were still in Berlin, they regarded National Socialism as something distinctly un-German.

On August
13, 1935,
my parents and I left for Paris, and from there we traveled to London. My mother packed sandwiches for the train
—
brown bread with sausage. I remember the sandwich on my lap, because beside it on a wrinkled square of wax paper was a
Mobrenkopf—
a ball of pastry filled with custard and covered with chocolate. I have no memory of eating it, but I distinctly recall my delight at the thought that it would soon be mine. The
Mobrenkopf
is vivid. I see it in the light of the train window. I see my bare knees and the hem of my navy blue shorts. That is all that remains of our exodus. Around the
Mobrenkopf
is emptiness, a void that can be filled with other people's stories, historical accounts, numbers, and facts. Not until I turned six do I have anything like a continuous memory, and by then I was living in Hampstead. Only weeks after I was sitting on that train, the Nuremberg Laws were passed. Jews were no longer citizens of the Reich, and the opportunities to leave had diminished. My grandmother, my uncle and aunt, and their twin daughters, Anna and Ruth, never left. We were living in New York when my father found out that his family had been pushed onto a train for Auschwitz in June of
1944.
They were all murdered. I keep their photographs in my drawer
—
my grandmother in an elegant hat with a feather standing beside my grandfather, who would be killed in
1917
at Flanders. I have the formal wedding portrait of my Uncle David and Aunt Marta, and a picture of the twins in short wool coats with ribbons in their hair. Beneath each girl in the white border of the photo, Marta wrote their names, to avoid confusion. Anna on the left, Ruth on the right The black- and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory, and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

The longer I live the more convinced I am that when I say "I," I am really saying "we."

In Bill's last finished portrait of Violet Blom, she was naked and starved. Her entire body was darkened by the enormous shadow of an unseen spectator who loomed over her. When I stood close to the canvas, I noticed that parts of her body were covered with a fine hair. Bill called it "lanugo" and said that the starving body often grows hair for protection. He said that he had spent hours studying medical and documentary photographs to get it right. Her skeletal body was painful to look at, and her huge eyes gleamed as if she had a fever. Bill had painted her emaciated body in color, first rendering her with painstaking realism and then going over her body with bold, expressionistic strokes, using blue and green and dabs of red on her thighs and neck. The black-and- white background resembled an aging photograph, like the ones I keep in my drawer. On the floor behind Violet were several pairs of shoes
—
men's, women's, and children's, painted in gray tones. When I asked Bill if this portrait referred to the death camps, he said yes, and we talked about
Adorno
for over an hour. The philosopher had said there could be no art after the camps.

I knew Bernie Weeks through a colleague at Columbia, Jack Newman. The Weeks Gallery on West Broadway had done well, because Bernie had a talent for sniffing out new artists, and he had connections. He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody." "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful. When I introduced Bernie to Bill, Bernie was probably about forty-five, but his age was subsumed by his youthful presence. He wore immaculate, up-to-the-minute suits with brightly colored sneakers. The casual shoes gave him a faint air of eccentricity always welcome in the art world, but they also added to what I thought of as Bernie's bounce. He never stopped moving. He ran up stairs, hopped into elevators, rocked back and forth on his heels when he examined a piece of art, and jiggled his knees through most conversations. By drawing attention to his feet, he alerted the world to his indefatigable go-getting and nonstop pursuit of newness. He had a breathless patter to go with the bounce, and his speech, although sometimes fractured, was never stupid. I pushed Bernie to look at Bill's work and had Jack call Bernie as well. Jack had already been to Bill's studio and had become a convert to what he called "the growing and shrinking Violets."

I wasn't on the Bowery when Bernie came to look at the work, but it ended as I had hoped. The paintings were shown the following fall. "They're weird," Bernie said to me. "Good weird. I think the fat/thin angle is going to fly. Everybody's on a diet, for Christ's sake, and the self-portrait bit. It's good. It's a little risky to show new figurative work right now, but he's got something. And, I like the quotations. Vermeer,
de
Kooning, and Guston after his revolution."

By the time the show opened, Violet Blom had flown off to Paris. I met her just once before she left
—
on the stairway in
89
Bowery. I was coming. She was going. I recognized her, introduced myself, and she paused on the steps. Violet was more beautiful than Bill's paintings of her. She had large green eyes with dark lashes that dominated her round face. Curling brown hair fell over her shoulders, and although her body was hidden under a long coat, I came to the conclusion that she was not thin but didn't qualify as chubby either. She shook my hand warmly, said she had heard all about me, and added, "I love the fat one with the taxi." She then said she was sorry she had to run and raced down the stairs. As I continued my climb, I heard her call my name. When I turned around, I saw that she was already standing in front of the door to the street. "You don't mind if I call you Leo, do you?" I shook my head.

She ran back up the stairs, stopped a couple of steps below me, and said, "Bill really likes you." She hesitated. "I'm going away, you see. I'd like to be able to think that you're there for him."

I nodded. She took a couple more steps, reached up for my shoulder, and squeezed it as if to confirm that she really meant what she was saying. Then she stood very still and looked straight at me for several seconds. "You have a nice face," she said. "Especially your nose. You have a beautiful nose." Before I had time to respond to this compliment, she had turned around and was running down the steps. I watched the door slam behind her.

That night when I brushed my teeth and for many nights after, I examined my nose in the mirror. I turned my head to one side and then to the other and tried to catch a glimpse of my profile. I had never spent much time on my nose, had rather disparaged it than admired it, and I can't say that I found it particularly attractive, but that feature in the middle of my face was nevertheless changed forever, transformed by the words of a beautiful young woman, whose image I saw every day hanging on my wall.

Bill asked me to write an essay for the show. I had never written about a living artist and Bill had never been written about before. The little work I called "Multiple Selves" has now been reprinted and translated into several languages, but at the time I regarded its twelve pages as an act of admiration and friendship. There was no catalogue. The essay was stapled together and handed out at the opening. I wrote it over a period of three months, between correcting papers and committee meetings and student conferences, jotting down thoughts as they came to me after class and on the subway. Bernie knew that Bill needed critical support if he was going "to get away with" his work at a moment when minimalism reigned in most galleries. The argument I made was that Bill's art referred to the history of Western painting but turned its assumptions inside out, and that he did it in a way that was essentially different from earlier modernists. By including a viewer's shadow in each canvas, Bill called attention to the space between the viewer and the painting where the real action of all painting takes place
—
a picture becomes itself in the moment of being seen. But the space the viewer occupies also belongs to the painter. The viewer stands in the painter's position and looks at a self-portrait, but what he or she sees is not an image of the man who has signed the painting in the right-hand corner but somebody else: a woman. Looking at women in painting is an established erotic convention that essentially turns every viewer into a man dreaming of sexual conquest. Any number of great painters have painted pictures of women that subvert the fantasy
—
Giorgione, Rubens, Vermeer, Manet
—
but as far as I know not a single male painter has ever announced to the viewer that the woman was himself. It was Erica who elaborated the point one evening. "The truth is," she said, "we all have a man and a woman inside us. We're made from a father and a mother, after all. When I'm looking at a beautiful, sexy woman in a picture, I'm always both her and the person who's looking at her. The eroticism comes from the fact that I can imagine I'm him looking at me. You have to be both people or nothing will happen."

Erica was sitting up in bed reading the indecipherable work of Jacques
Lacan
when she made this statement. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton nightgown cut low at the neck, and she had tied her hair back, so that I could see her soft earlobes. "Thank you, Professor Stein," I said to her, and put my hand on her belly. "Is there really someone in there?" Erica put her book down and kissed me on the forehead. She was almost three months pregnant, and it was still our secret. The exhaustion and nausea of the first two months had lifted, but Erica had changed. There were days when she shone with happiness and other days when she seemed always to be on the brink of tears. Erica had never been steady, but her moods were even more volatile now. One morning at breakfast she sobbed noisily over an article about foster care in New York City that featured a four-year-old boy named Joey who had been booted out of one home after another. One night she woke up weeping after she dreamed that she left her newborn on a ship and it sailed away as she stood on the dock. Another afternoon, I found her sitting on the sofa with tears streaming down her cheeks. When I asked her what was the matter, she sniffled and said, "Life is sad, Leo. I've been sitting here thinking about how sad it all is."

These changes in my wife, physical and emotional, also affected my essay on Bill. Violet's body, which grew and shrank in the canvases, did more than hint at fertility and its transformations. One of the fantasies between the viewer/painter and the female object had to be impregnation. After all, conception is plurality
—
the two in the one
—
the male and the female. After he read the piece, Bill grinned. He shook his head and felt his unshaven face before he said a word to me. In spite of my confidence, I felt a rush of anxiety. "It's good," he said. "It's very good. Of course half of it never crossed my mind." Bill was silent for about a minute. He hesitated, seemed about to speak, and then paused again. Finally, he said, "We haven't told anybody yet, but Lucille is two months pregnant. We've been trying for over a year. The whole time I was working with Violet, we were hoping that we would have a child." After I told Bill about Erica, he said, "I've always wanted kids, Leo, lots of kids. For years I've had this daydream about traveling around the world and populating the earth. I like to imagine myself as the father of hundreds, thousands of children." I laughed when he said it, but I never forgot that fantasy of extravagant potency and multiplication. Bill dreamed of covering the earth with himself.

About halfway through his own opening, Bill disappeared. He told me later that he went to Fanelli's for a Scotch. He had looked pretty miserable from the start as he stood under the
NO SMOKING
sign, inhaling deeply on a cigarette and tapping the ashes into the pocket of a jacket that was too small for him. Bernie always attracted a good crowd. The guests milled about the big white space with glasses of wine and talked loudly. My essay sat on the desk in a pile. I had given papers at conferences and seminars, had published in journals and magazines, but my work had never been distributed as a leaflet. The novelty pleased me, and I surveyed the takers. A pretty redhead picked it up and read the first few sentences. I felt particularly gratified when she moved her lips as she read. It seemed to suggest an added interest in my words. The piece had also been taped to the wall, and a few people glanced at it. One young man wearing leather pants appeared to read it in its entirety. Jack Newman showed up and slouched around the gallery, one eyebrow raised in an expression of bemused irony. Erica introduced Jack to Lucille, and he cornered her for a good half hour. Every time I looked up, I saw him leaning over her, an inch closer than he should have been. Jack had been married and divorced twice. His lack of success with wives hadn't stopped him from pursuing less permanent  encounters, and his wit more than compensated for his lack of physical charm. Jack was comfortable with his jowly face, big belly, and stubby legs, and he made women comfortable with them, too. I had seen him go after the most unlikely people time and time again and succeed. He seduced them with the well-turned compliment. I watched his mouth move as he stood beside Lucille, and I wondered what baroque quips he was using on her that evening. When Jack sidled up to me later to say good-bye, he rubbed his jaw, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, "So what about Wechsler's wife? Do you think she melts in the sack or stays frozen?"