What I Loved

ten feet long and seven feet high. No longer a candy house, the structure was a classic ranch, borrowed from the landscape of a thousand American suburbs, and it was painted to resemble a fading color photograph. Bill had included a thin white frame around the canvas, like those found on older snapshots. In their flat hands, the children were clutching a real rope. A few feet in front of them was a life-sized, three-dimensional sculpture of a man. He was kneeling on the floor as he gripped the other end of the rope and appeared to be pulling the children toward him and out of the story. Near his feet lay a real axe. The father figure had been painted solid blue. Over the blue, covering his body in white letters, was the complete story of "Hansel and Gretel." "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel."
    Words of rescue, I said to myself when I saw the writing on the man's body. Exactly what I meant by this I didn't know, but I thought it nevertheless. The night after I saw the finished Hansel and Gretel , I dreamed that I lifted my arm and discovered words written into my skin. I couldn't understand how the words had gotten there, and I couldn't read them, but I could identify the nouns, because they were all capitalized. I tried to rub off the letters, but they wouldn't go away. When I woke from the dream, I guessed that it had been inspired by Bill's father figure, but then I remembered the image of the woman with a bleeding inscription and the pale marks Violet's name had made on her skin. "Hansel and Gretel" was a story about feast and famine and childhood fears, but Bill's work, with its skeletal children, had unearthed another association in my dreaming mind — the uppercase nouns of my first language had mutated into the numbers that were burned into the arms of people after they arrived at the Nazi death camps. My Uncle David had been the only member of my family who had lived long enough to be branded with a number. For a long time, I lay awake in bed and listened to Erica's breathing. After about an hour, I quietly left the room, went to my desk, and dug out the wedding photo of David and Marta, which I kept in my desk drawer. At four o'clock in the morning, Greene Street was remarkably quiet. I listened to a few trucks rumble down Canal and examined the picture. I studied Marta's elegant ankle-length dress and my uncle's suit. David had been better looking than my father, but I could see the resemblance between the two, especially around the jaw and brow. I have a single memory of my uncle. I am walking with my father to meet him. We are in a park and the sun that shines through the trees makes patterns of light and shade on the grass. I am looking intently at the grass, and then suddenly Uncle David is there and he has taken me by the waist and lifted me high above his head. I remember the pleasure of sailing up and then down, and that I admired his strength and confidence. My father wanted him to leave Germany with us. I don't remember that they argued that day, but I know there were many fights between them and that David adamantly refused to leave the country he loved.
    When the Hansel and Gretel works were shown, they caused a ruckus. The man behind the uproar was Henry Hasseborg, who had written an article for DASH: The Downtown Arts Scene Herald with the headline GLAMOUR BOY'S MISOGYNIST VISION . Hasseborg first accused Bill of adopting "the dressed-down macho look of the Abstract Expressionists to pander to wealthy European collectors." He then blasted the work as "facile illustration" and went on to call it "the most blatant artistic expression of the hatred of women in recent memory." In three tightly packed columns of print, Hasseborg fumed and boiled and spat venom. The article included a large photograph of Bill wearing sunglasses and looking very much like a movie star. Bill was stunned. Violet cried. Erica referred to the article as an example of "narcissistic hatred," and Jack chuckled, "Imagine that little skunk masquerading as a feminist. Talk about pandering!"
    My own feeling was that Hasseborg had been waiting to strike. By the time the article appeared, Bill had received enough attention to be deeply resented by a few people. 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,