What I Loved

in buoyant spirits, and the three of us would have lively talks over dinner — which ranged in subject matter from the risqué wardrobe of an eleven-year old named Tanya Farley to American foreign policy during World War II. Erica and I adopted a parental policy of laissez-faire, rarely commenting on Matt's fluctuating moods. It seemed senseless to blame him for ups and downs he didn't understand himself.
    Through Matt I recovered my own days of awe and secrecy. I remembered warm fluid on my thighs and belly that soon turned cold after the dream, the rolls of toilet paper I hid under the bed for evening bouts of masturbation, and my clandestine trips to the bathroom to flush the soiled wads, one breathless step at a time, as if those emissions from my own body were stolen goods. Time has turned my young body into a comic thing, but it wasn't funny then. I touched the three strands of pubic hair I grew overnight and examined my underarms every morning for further growth. I shuddered in arousal and then withdrew into the aching loneliness under my tender skin. Miss Reed, a person I hadn't thought of in years, returned to me as well. My dancing teacher had peppermint on her breath and freckles on her chest. She wore full-skirted dresses with thin straps over her round white shoulders, and every once in a while, during the fox-trot or the tango, a strap would fall. It will all come to Matt, I thought, and there is no way to tell the story so that it becomes easier. The growing body has its own language, and solitude is its first teacher. On several occasions in the spring, I found Matt standing in front of the Self-Portrait that had hung on our wall for thirteen years. His eyes traveled over the plump young Violet and onto the little taxi that rested near her pudendum, and I saw the canvas again as though for the first time — with its full erotic force.
    That early painting and the others in the series began to look oracular — as if Bill had known long ago that one day Violet would carry around inside her the bodies of people who ate themselves to immensity or starved themselves to tininess. That year Violet paid regular visits to a young woman in Queens who weighed four hundred pounds. Angie Knott never left the house in Flushing where she lived with her mother, who was also obese, but not as obese as her daughter. Mrs. Knott had a small business making custom curtains in the neigborhood. Angie did the books. "After she left school at sixteen, she got fatter and fatter," Violet said. "But she was a fat baby and a fat little girl and her mother stuffed food into her from the beginning. She's a walking mouth, a repository for cupcakes and Fudgsicles and boxes of pretzels and mountains of sugared cereal. We talk about the fat," Violet added, showing me Angie's picture. "She's turned her own body into a cave where she can hide, and the strange thing is, I understand it, Leo. I mean, from her point of view, everything outside herself is dangerous. She feels safe in all that padding, even though she's in danger of getting diabetes and heart disease. She's out of the sexual marketplace. Nobody can get through all that blubber, and that's what she wants."
    There were days when Violet would leave Angie to visit Cathy, who was being treated at New York Hospital. Violet called her Saint Catherine, after Catherine Benincasa, the Dominican saint from Siena who fasted herself to death. "She's a monster of purity," she said, "fiercer and more righteous than any nun. Her mind moves in these narrow little channels, but it moves well in them, and she spins out arguments for starving like some hermetic medieval scholar. If she eats half a cracker, she feels sullied and guilty. She looks horrible, but her eyes shine with pride. Her parents waited way too long. They let it go. She was always such a good girl, and they just can't understand what happened to her. She's the flip side of Angie, protected not by fat but by her virginal armor. They're worried about her electrolyte balance. She could die." Violet wrote Angie and Cathy into her book along with dozens of others. She gave them different names and analyzed their pathologies as the result of both their personal histories and the American "hysteria" about food — which she called "a sociological virus." She told me that she used the word virus because a virus is neither living nor dead. Its animation depends on its host. I don't know whether Violet's girls found their way into