What I Loved

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