What I Loved (22 page)

Bill would always pause after he mentioned Matt. When Erica felt strong enough to be with us, she would lie on the sofa several feet away. I know she listened, because sometimes she would lift her head and say, "Go on, Bill." He would always continue his monologue then. I heard everything he said, but his words sounded muffled, as if he were speaking through a handkerchief. Before he left, he would move his hand off the armchair, squeeze my arm firmly, and say, "I'm here, Leo. We're here." Bill came every day he was in New York for a year. When he was traveling, he called me around the same time. Without Bill, I think I would have dried up completely and blown away.

Grace stayed with us through the first week of September. Matt's death had made her quiet, but whenever she mentioned him, she called him "my little boy." Her grief seemed to lodge itself in her chest and the way she breathed. Her full breasts rose and fell while she shook her head. "It can't be understood," she said to me. "It's outside our powers." She got
a
job with another family in the neighborhood, and on the day she left us, I found myself examining her body. Matt had always loved the plenitude of Grace. He had once told Erica that when he sat on Grace's lap there were no bones sticking out to interfere with his comfort. But the woman's fullness was spiritual as well as physical. Grace eventually moved to Sunrise, Florida, where she now lives with Mr. Thelwell in a condominium. She and Erica still write to each other after all these years, and Erica tells me that Grace keeps a photograph of Matt in the living room beside the pictures of her six grandchildren.

Just before Erica and I returned to work that fall, Lazlo came to visit us. We hadn't seen him since the funeral. He walked through the door with a grocery box, greeted us with a nod, and set it down on the floor. He proceeded to unwrap the object inside and then place it on the coffee table. The blue sticks of the small sculpture had nothing to do with the anatomical works I had seen before. Fragile open rectangles rose up from a flat dark blue board. The piece looked like a toothpick city. Taped to its base was a title:
In Memory of Matthew
Hertzberg.
Lazlo was unable to look at us. "I'd better be going," he mumbled, but before he could take a step, Erica reached out for him. She grabbed him around his narrow waist and hugged him. Lazlo's arms swung up and out. For a moment he stood with his arms extended at his sides as if hesitant about whether he should take flight or not, but then he brought them around to Erica's back. His fingers rested lightly there for a couple of seconds and then he dropped his chin onto her head. There was a momentary spasm in his face, a wrinkling around his mouth, and then it was gone. I shook Lazlo's hand, and as his warm fingers pressed mine, I swallowed hard and swallowed again, the gulps resounding in my ears like distant gunfire.

After Lazlo left, Erica turned to me. "You don't cry, Leo. You haven't cried at all, not once."

I looked at Erica's red eyes, her wet nose and trembling mouth. She repulsed me. "No." I said. "I haven't." She heard the repressed rage in my voice and her mouth dropped open. I turned around and stalked down the hallway. I walked into Matthew's room and stood by his bed. Then I put my fist through the wall. The Sheetrock buckled under the blow and pain shot through my hand. The pain felt good—no, more than good. For an instant, I felt intense soaring relief, but it didn't last. I could feel Erica's eyes on my back as she stood in the doorway. When I turned around to look at her, she said, " What have you done? What have you done to Matt's wall?"

Erica and I both worked hard at our jobs, but the sameness and familiarity of our duties felt more like a reenactment than a continuation of our old lives. I recalled perfectly the Leo Hertzberg who had taught in the art history department before Matthew's death, and I found that I could impersonate him smoothly. After all, my students didn't need me. They needed him: the man who lectured, corrected papers, and held office hours. If anything, I performed my duties more scrupulously than before. As long as I didn't stop working, I couldn't be faulted, and I soon discovered that because my colleagues and students knew that my son had died, they protected me with their own walls of silent respect. I could see that Erica had adopted a similar posture. For about an hour after she came home from Rutgers, her gestures were brisk and mechanical. She insisted on staying up late to correct papers. When she spoke to her colleagues on the phone, her voice sounded like a movie parody of an efficient secretary. In her tight determined face, I saw myself, but I didn't like the reflection, and the more I looked at it, the uglier I found it. The difference between us was that Erica's pose collapsed daily. By the end of the summer, she stopped walking in her sleep. Instead, she would go to Matt's room and weep on his bed until she was too tired to cry anymore. Erica's misery was volatile. For months, I went to sit beside her on Matt's bed, not knowing what to expect. There were nights when she would grab me and kiss my hands and face and chest and nights when she beat my arms and pummeled my chest. There were nights when she begged me to hold her and then when I had her in my arms, she would push me away. After a while, I discovered that my responses to Erica were robotic. I performed my duties of holding her or, if she didn't want me near her, sitting silently in a chair a few feet away, but the gestures and words that passed between us seemed to evaporate immediately and leave nothing behind them. When Erica brought up Rusty or Jason, I wanted to go deaf. When she accused me of being "catatonic," I closed my eyes. We no longer slept in the same bed. There was no sex between us, and I didn't touch myself. I was tempted to masturbate, but the relief it promised me also seemed to threaten disintegration.

In December, Erica went to a doctor about her weight, and he directed her to another doctor who was also an analyst. Every Friday, she visited Dr. Trimble in her office on Central Park West. Dr. Trimble asked to see me, but I refused to go. The last thing I wanted was some stranger prodding my mind for childhood traumas and quizzing me about my parents. But I should have gone. I can see that now. I should have gone because Erica wanted me to go. My refusal became the sign of my withdrawal from her without hope of return. While Erica talked to Dr. Trimble, I sat at home and listened to Bill for an hour and then, after he left, I looked out the window. My body hurt all over. Pain had settled into my arms and legs, and I suffered from a chronic stiffness in my muscles. My right hand, the one that had gone through the wall, took a long time to heal. I had broken my middle finger and the collision had left a large bump near my knuckle. This small disfigurement and my aching body were my sole satisfactions, and I would often rub the lumpy finger while I sat in my chair.

Erica drank cans of liquid sustenance called Ensure. In the evening, she took a sleeping pill. As the months passed, she became much kinder to me than she had been, but her new solicitude had an impersonal quality, as if she were tending a homeless man on the street rather than her husband. She stopped sleeping in Matt's bed and returned to ours, but I rarely joined her, choosing instead to sleep in my chair. One night in February, I woke up to find Erica covering me with a blanket. Rather than opening my eyes, I pretended that I was still asleep. When she put her lips to my head, I imagined myself pulling her toward me and kissing her neck and shoulders, but I didn't do it. At the time, I was like a man encased in a heavy suit of armor, and inside that corporeal fortress I lived with a single-minded wish:
I will not be comforted.
As perverse as it was, this desire felt like a lifeline, the only shred of truth left to me. I feel quite sure that Erica knew what I felt, and in March she announced a change.

"I've decided to accept the position at Berkeley, Leo. They still want me."

We were eating Chinese food out of boxes. I looked up from the chicken and broccoli to study her face. "Is this your way of saying that you want a divorce?" The word "divorce" had a curious ring to it. I realized that it had never occurred to me.

Erica shook her head and looked down at the table. "No, I don't want a divorce. I don't know if I'll stay there. All I know is that I can't live anymore in the place where Matt was, and I can't be here with you anymore, because ..." She paused. "You've gone dead, too, Leo. I didn't help. I know that. I was so crazy for a long time and I was mean."

"No," I said. "You weren't mean." I couldn't bear to look at her, so I turned my head and spoke to the wall. "Are you sure that you want to go away? Moving is hard on people, too."

"I know," she said.

We were silent for a while and then she continued: "I remember what you said about your father—the way he was after he found out about his family. You said, 'He went still.' "

I didn't move. I kept my eyes on the wall. "He had a stroke."

"Before the stroke. You said it happened before the stroke."

I saw my father in his chair. His back was to me as he sat in front of the fireplace. I nodded before I looked at Erica. When our eyes met, I saw that she was half-smiling and half-crying. "I'm not saying it's over between us, Leo. I want to come visit you if you'll let me. I'd like to write to you and tell you what I'm doing."

"Yes." I began to nod over and over, like one of those dolls whose heads are on a spring. I felt my two-day beard with both my hands and rubbed my face as I continued to nod.

"Also," she said, "we have to go through Matthew's things. I thought that you could sort his drawings. We can frame some and put the others in portfolios. I'll take care of his clothes and the toys. Some of them can go to Mark..."

That job took over our evenings, and I discovered that I was able to do it. I bought folders and storage boxes and began to organize hundreds of drawings, school art projects, notebooks, and letters that had belonged to Matt. Erica folded his T-shirts and pants and shorts very carefully. She saved his
ART NOW
shirt and a pair of camouflage pants that he had loved. She put the rest into boxes for Mark or for Goodwill. She gathered up his toys and separated the good ones from the junk. While Erica sat on the floor of Matt's room with cardboard boxes around her, I filed drawings at his desk. We worked slowly. Erica lingered over Matthew's clothes, his shirts and underpants and socks. How strange they were—at once terrible and banal. One evening, I started tracing the lines of his drawings with my finger—his people and buildings and animals. I found the motion of his living hand that way, and once I had started it, I couldn't stop. On an evening in April, Erica came and stood behind me. She watched my hand moving over the page, and then she reached out and put her finger on Dave and made the rounds of the old man's body. She cried then, and I understood how much I had hated her tears, because for some reason I didn't hate them then.

Erica's imminent departure changed us. The knowledge that we would soon be separated made us both more indulgent, relieving us of a burden I still can't name. I didn't want her to go away, and yet the fact that she was going away loosened a bolt in the machinery of our marriage. It had become a machine by then, a churning repetitious engine of mourning.

That spring I was teaching a seminar on still life to twelve graduate students, and in April I taught one of my last classes. When I walked in that day, one of the students, Edward Paperno, was opening the windows in the classroom to let the warm air into the room. The sunshine, the breeze, the fact that the semester was almost over all contributed to an atmosphere of languor and fatigue. As I sat down to begin the discussion, I yawned and covered my mouth. On the table in front of me I had my notes and a reproduction of Chardin 's
Glass of Water and a Coffee Pot.
My students had read Diderot and Proust and the Goncourt brothers on Chardin. They had been to the Frick to study the still lifes in that collection. We had already discussed several paintings. I began by pointing out how simple the painting was, two objects, three heads of garlic, and the sprig of an herb. I mentioned the light on the pot's rim and handle, the whiteness of the garlic, and the silver hues of the water. And then I found myself staring down at the glass of water in the picture. I moved very close to it. The strokes were visible. I could see them plainly. A precise quiver of the brush had made light. I swallowed, breathed heavily, and choked.

I think it was Maria Livingston who said, "Are you all right, Professor Herzberg?"

I cleared my throat, removed my glasses, and wiped my eyes. "The water," I said in a low voice. "The glass of water is very moving to me." I looked up and saw the surprised faces of my students. "The water is a sign of..." I paused. "The water seems to be a sign of absence."

I remained silent, but I could feel warm tears running down my cheeks. My students continued to look at me. "I believe that's all for today," I told them in a tremulous voice. "Go outside and enjoy the weather."

I watched my twelve students leave the room in silence, and I noticed with some surprise that Letitia Reeves had beautiful legs, which must have been hidden under trousers until that day. I listened to the door close. In the hallway, I heard the students break into low conversations. The sun lit the empty classroom and a wind rose up and blew through the windows and across my face. I tried not to make any noise, but I know that I did. I gulped for air and I gagged and deep ugly sounds came from my throat as I sobbed for what seemed to be a very long time.

Weeks later, I came across my calendar from 1989, the little agenda in which I had marked down appointments and events. I paged through it, pausing at Matt's baseball games, his teacher conferences, an art show at his school. When I turned to April, I noticed that I had written METS GAME in large letters on the fourteenth. Exactly one year to the day, I had broken down in class over the Chardin painting. I remembered my conversation with Matt that night. I remembered exactly where I had been sitting on his bed. I remembered his face as he talked to me and how for part of the time he had addressed the ceiling. I remembered his room, his socks on the floor, the plaid cotton blanket he had pulled up to his chest, the Mets T-shirt he had been wearing instead of pajamas. I remembered his lamp with the base designed to look like a pencil, the light it shed on the night table, and the glass of water that stood underneath it—flanked on the left by his wristwatch. I had brought hundreds of glasses of water to Matt's bedside, and after his death I had drunk many more, since I always kept a glass beside me at night. A real glass of water had not once reminded me of my son, but the image of a glass of water rendered 230 years earlier had catapulted me suddenly and irrevocably into the painful awareness that I was still alive.