What I Loved

of Matt at home with Grace, and I wondered how to write about these boxes as I watched Bill put his arm around Violet, who was still talking to Erica. "They turned living women into things," she said. "Charcot called the hypnotized women 'artificial hysterics.' That was his term. Dermagraphism makes the idea more potent. Doctors like Barthélémy signed women's bodies just as if they were works of art."
    "It smacks of fraud," I said. "Bleeding names. A mere touch of the skin and drawings appear."
    "They didn't fake that, Leo. It's true that the whole scene was pretty theatrical. Charcot had his study done completely in black. He was fascinated with historical accounts of demonism, witchcraft, and faith healing. I suppose he thought he could explain it all through science, but the dermagraphism was real. Even I can do it."
    Violet sat down on the floor. "It takes a little while," she said. "Be patient." She closed her eyes and began to breathe in and out. Her shoulders sank. Her lips parted. Bill glanced down at her, shook his head, and smiled. Violet opened her eyes and looked straight ahead. She held out her forearm and traced the inside of it lightly with the index finger of her free hand. The name Violet Blom appeared on her skin as a pale inscription, which at first was the color of a pink rose and then deepened slightly. She closed her eyes, breathed again, and an instant later, she opened her eyes. "Magic," she said. "Real magic."
    Violet rubbed the looping letters with her fingers as she held her arm out for us to examine. While I continued to look at the words on the flushed skin of her inner arm, the distance between me and the doctors in the Salpêtrière closed. Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted — something between a real woman and a beautiful thing. Violet was smiling. She lowered her arm to her side, and I thought of Ovid's Pygmalion kissing, embracing, and dressing the girl he had carved out of ivory. When his wish comes true, he touches her new warm skin and his fingers leave an imprint. The name inscribed on Violet's arm was still visible as she sat cross-legged on the floor with her arms in her lap. The hypnotized women had obeyed every command: Bend over, kneel, lift your arm, crawl. They had dropped their blouses over their shoulders and turned their naked backs to the physician's magic wand. Only a touch was needed and the words in his mind became words in flesh. Omnipotent dreams. We all have them, but usually they live only in stories and waking fantasies, where they have license to roam. I thought of one of the little paintings I had just seen, now hidden behind a closed door — the young man presses the nub of his fountain pen into the soft: buttock of the reclining woman. It had seemed comic when I'd looked at it, but remembering it caused a warm sensation in me that ended with Bill's voice. "Well, Leo," he said. "Any thoughts?"
    I answered him, but I said nothing about Violet's arm or Pygmalion or the erotic pen.
    By abandoning the flatness of painting, Bill had leapt into new territory. At the same time, he continued to play with the idea of painting by opposing two-dimensional images with three-dimensional spaces and dolls. He continued to work in contrasting styles, to refer to the history of painting and to cultural images in general — including advertisements. I discovered that the plastic "skin" on the boxes had been densely printed with old and new ads for everything from corsets to coffee. Among the ads were poems, by Dickinson, Hölderlin, Hopkins, Artaud, and Celan— the lonely poets. There were also quotations from Shakespeare and Dickens, mostly ones that had entered the language, like: "All the world's a stage" and "The law is a ass." Over one of the doors, I found Dan's poem "Charge Brothers W," and near the poem I deciphered the title of another work I recognized: " Mystery : A Play Cut in Half by Daniel Wechsler."
    For several weeks, I abandoned my book to write a short essay — seven pages. Again my piece was xeroxed and put out on a table in the Weeks Gallery, this time accompanied by postcard-sized reproductions of the boxes and a few of the smaller works. Bill was pleased with the short essay. I had done all that I could reasonably do under the circumstances, but the truth was that I needed years, not a month, to think through those pieces. At the time I didn't understand what I do