What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

“That’s the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what’s in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt.” He stopped and smiled at me. “Because that’s what we’re sure of.”

When I pointed out the razor stubble he had included on the thin woman’s legs, he said that when he was with another person, his eyes were often drawn to a single detail—a chipped tooth, a Band-Aid on a finger, a vein, a cut, a rash, a mole, and that for a moment the isolated feature took over his vision, and he wanted to reproduce those seconds in his work. “Seeing is flux,” he said. I mentioned the hidden narratives in his work, and he said that for him stories were like blood running through a body—paths of a life. It was a revealing metaphor, and I never forgot it. As an artist, Bill was hunting the unseen in the seen. The paradox was that he had chosen to present this invisible movement in figurative painting, which is nothing if not a frozen apparition—a surface.

She talked as if she were observing her own sentences, looking at them from afar, judging their sounds and shapes even as they came from her mouth. Every word she spoke rang with honesty, and yet this earnestness was matched by a simultaneous irony. Lucille amused herself by occupying two positions at once. She was both the subject and object of her own statements.

“A woman sits by the window. She thinks / And while she thinks, she despairs / She despairs because she is who she is / And not somebody else.”

It is ironic and sad that perhaps the most important inhabitant of that room was and would always be Bill’s father. Alive, Sy Wechsler was the incarnation of his son’s unfulfilled longing. He was one of those people who were never fully present at the events of their own lives. A part of him was not there, and it was this absent quality in his father that Bill never stopped pursuing—even after the man was dead.

I suppose we are all the products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

We practiced panting and blowing as we silently corrected Jean’s grammar every time she told us “to lay down on the floor.”

Lucille’s complaints were banal—the familiar stuff of joyless intimacy. I’ve always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

But nagging is a strategy of the powerless, and there is nothing mysterious about it.

Expensive work from every period must be impregnated by the intangible—an idea of worth. This idea has the paradoxical effect of detaching the name of the artist from the thing, and the name becomes the commodity that is bought and sold. The object merely trails after the name as its solid proof. Of course, the artist himself or herself has little to do with any of it.

Envy and cruelty inevitably accompany fame, however small that fame may be. It doesn’t matter where it rises—in the schoolyard, in boardrooms, in the hallways of universities, or on a gallery’s white walls. Out in the big world, the name William Wechsler meant very little, but in the incestuous circle of collectors and museums in New York, Bill’s reputation was getting warmer, and even a dim glow had the power to burn the likes of Henry Hasseborg.

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.

“I don’t know, but that’s his name. He’s a lonely guy, and I keep thinking that he should meet somebody, but when I get around to drawing him, he’s always by himself.” “He looks unhappy,” I said. “I feel sorry for him. His only friend is Durango.” He pointed at the cat. “And you know cats, Dad, they don’t really care.” “Well,” I said. “Maybe he’ll find a friend …” “You’d think I could just do it, because I made him up, but Uncle Bill says that it doesn’t work that way, that you have to feel what’s right, and sometimes what’s right in art is sad.” I looked into my son’s earnest face and then down at Dave. Matt had included veins in the old man’s hands. A coffee cup and a plate lay near his feet. It was still a child’s drawing. Matt’s perspective was shaky, his anatomy a little askew, but the lines that etched the body of that solitary man affected me strongly, and I began to look for Dave whenever Matt handed me one of his cityscapes.

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Every correspondence is skewered by invisible perforations, the small holes of the unwritten but not the unthought, and as time went on, I hoped fervently that it wasn’t a man who was missing from those pages I received every week.

Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn’t say but might have said. When you stop lying, the gap between your words and inner belief closes, and you continue on a path of trying to match your spoken words to the language of your thoughts, at least those fit for other peoples’ consumption.

Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

The difficulty of seeing clearly haunted me long before my eyes went bad, in life as well as in art. It’s a problem of the viewer’s perspective—as Matt pointed out that night in his room when he noted that when we look at people and things, we’re missing from our own picture. The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero. I’m only whole to myself in mirrors and photographs and the rare home movie, and I’ve often longed to escape that confinement and take a far view of myself from the top of a hill—a small “he” rather than an “I” traveling in the valley below from one point to another. And yet, remove doesn’t guarantee accuracy either, although sometimes it helps. Over the years, Bill had become a moving reference for me, a person I had always kept in view. At the same time, he had often eluded me. Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn’t bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

And then, as if it were a footnote to my thoughts, I remembered that I had read somewhere, perhaps it was in Gershom Scholem, that in Hebrew “to repent” and “to return” are the same word.

Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak.

Writing is a way to trace my hunger, and hunger is nothing if not a void.