What I Loved (14 page)

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, 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.

Over the years, Bill would regularly inspire hatred in people who didn't know him, and every time it happened, he felt wounded and surprised. His handsome face cursed him, but far more damaging was the fact that strangers, usually in the form of journalists, dimly perceived his code of honor, that maddening certainty that accepted no compromise. To some, usually Europeans, this made him a romantic figure
—
a fascinating and mysterious genius. To others, usually Americans, Bill's stringent convictions were like a slap in the face, a frank acknowledgment that he was not "a regular guy." The truth was that much of what Bill produced he didn't show. His exhibitions were the result of severe purgings, during which he edited the work down to what he regarded as essential. The rest he hid. Some of the works he thought of as failures, others as redundant, and still others were pieces he considered unique and isolated, which meant they couldn't be displayed as part of a group. Although Bernie did sell some of the unshown work from his back room, a lot of it Bill simply kept to himself. He didn't need the money, he told me, and he liked having his paintings and boxes and little sculptures around him "like old friends." In light of this, Hasseborg's accusation that Bill styled himself to please collectors was laughable, but it was born of an urgent wish. For Henry
Hasseborg,
the admission that there were artists who were not driven by a preening vanity to advance their careers would have amounted to an
annihilation
of himself. The stakes were high, and the tone of the article reflected the man's desperation.

After the article was published, I asked Bernie to tell me more about
Hasseborg.
It turned out that before he became a writer, he had been a painter. According to Bernie,
Hasseborg
had produced muddy, semiabstract canvases nobody wanted, and after years of struggle had finally abandoned the calling and launched himself as an art critic and novelist In the early seventies he published a book about a drug dealer on the Lower East Side who meditates on the condition of the world between transactions. The book had gotten some good reviews, but in the ten years since its publication,
Hasseborg
had not managed to finish another. He had written many reviews, however, and Bill wasn't Hasseborg's first victim. In the seventies, Bernie had shown an artist named Alicia Cupp. Her delicate sculptures of fragmented bodies and bits of lace had sold very well in the Weeks Gallery. In the fall of
'79, Hasseborg
ravaged her work in a review for
Art in America.
"Alicia was always pretty fragile," Bernie told me, "but that article pushed her right over the edge. She was in Bellevue for a while and then she packed up and went to live in Maine. Last I heard, she was walled up in some little cabin with thirty cats. I called her once and asked her if she wanted to sell some work through me. I said she didn't have to come to New York. You know what she told me? 'I don't do that anymore, Bernie. I stopped.'
"

The unintended twist to the story was that Hasseborg's spleen inspired three other articles on
Hansel and Gretel
—
one equally hostile to it and two others that praised it. One of the positive articles appeared in
Artforum,
a magazine more important than
DASH
,
and the contentious debate brought more and more people to the gallery. They came to see the witch. It was Bill's witch who had ostensibly driven
Hasseborg
into a fury. Her panty hose had so offended him that he had devoted an entire paragraph to the stockings and pubic hair beneath. The woman who reviewed the work for
Artforum
continued the panty-hose discursus with three paragraphs defending Bill's use of the garment. After that, several artists Bill had never met telephoned with their sympathies and praise for his work-
Hasseborg
hadn't meant to do it, but he had coaxed Bill's witch out into the open, and she, in turn, had cast a spell over the art world through the magic of controversy.

The witch returned in a conversation on a Saturday afternoon in April. When Violet knocked, I was sitting at my desk, looking down at a large reproduction of a Giorgione
—
his painted door of Judith standing with her foot on the severed head of Holofernes. After Violet dropped a borrowed book on my desk, she put one hand on my shoulder and leaned over me to get a better look at the picture. With her naked foot on the head of the man she has just decapitated, Judith seems be smiling, ever so slightly. The head is almost smiling, too, as if the woman and the bodiless head are sharing a secret.

"Holofernes looks like he enjoyed being killed,'' Violet said. "The picture doesn't feel a bit violent, does it?"

"No," I said. "I think it's erotic. It suggests the quiet after sex, the silence of satisfaction."

Violet moved her hand down my arm. The intimate gesture was natural for her, but I felt suddenly conscious of her fingers through my shirt. "You're right, Leo. Of course you're right."

She moved to the side of the desk and leaned over it "Judith fasted, didn't she?" She ran her finger down Judith's long body. "It's like the two of them are mingled, isn't it, mixed up in each other? I suppose that's what sex is." Violet turned her head to one side. "Erica's not home?"

"She's doing errands with Matt."

Violet pulled up a chair and sat down opposite me. She took the book and turned the picture toward her. "Yes, he seems to have gotten it here. It's very mysterious, the mixing thing."

"Is this a new idea?"

"Not really," she said. "It started because I was looking for a way to talk about the threat anorexics feel from the outside. Those girls have overmixed, if you see what I mean. They find it hard to separate the needs and desires of other people from their own. After a while, they rebel by shutting down. They want to close up all their openings so nothing and nobody can get in. But mixing is the way of the world. The world passes through us
—
food, books, pictures, other people." Violet put her elbows on the desk and frowned. "When you're young, I think it's harder to know what you want, how much of others you're willing to take in. When I was living in Paris, I tried on ideas about myself like dresses. I was always reinventing who I was. Chasing after the stories about those girls in the ward made me itchy and restless. I used to roam around the streets in the late afternoon, stopping for a coffee here and there. One day, I met a young man named Jules in
a café.
He told me that he had just gotten out of prison
—
that very day. He had been serving eight months on an extortion charge. I thought that was very interesting, and I asked him about prison, what it was like. He told me that it was terrible, but that he had done a lot of reading in his cell. He was a very handsome guy with big brown eyes and those
soft lips,
you know, the slightly bruised kind that look like they're always kissing. Anyway, I fell for him. He had this idea that I, Violet Blom, was a wild young American thing, a late-twentieth-century
femme fatale
who had been unleashed on Paris. It was all very silly, but I liked it. The whole time I was with him, I watched myself like I was some character in a movie."

Violet lifted her hand off my desk and gestured to her right. "Look, there she is in
a café
with him. The scene is well lit, but a little fuzzy to make her look better. Cheesy music is playing in the background. She gives him that look
—
ironic, distant, unknowable." Violet clapped her hands. "Cut!" She looked across the room and pointed. "There she is again. Dyeing her hair in the sink. She's turning around. Violet's gone. It's V. Platinum V walks out into the night to meet Jules."

"You dyed your hair blond," I said.

"Yes, and you know what Jules said to me when he saw my new hair?"

"No."

"He said, You look like a girl who needs piano lessons.'"

I laughed.

"Well, you may laugh, Leo, but that's how it started. Jules recommended a teacher."

"You mean you actually went just because he said you needed piano lessons?"

"It was my mood. It was a dare and a command at the same time
—
very sexy. And why not take piano lessons? I went to this apartment in the
Marais.
The man's name was Renasse. He had lots of plants, big trees and little spiky cacti and ferns
—
a real jungle. As soon as I walked in there, I had the feeling that something was going on, but I couldn't tell what it was. Monsieur Renasse was stiff and well-mannered. We started from the beginning. I was probably one of the only children in America who never played the piano. I played the drums. Anyway, I went to Monsieur Renasse every Tuesday for a month. I learned little pieces. He was always
très
correct
,
boringly so, and yet, when I sat beside him, I felt my body so intensely that it was like it wasn't mine. My breasts seemed too big. My butt on the bench took up too much room. My new white hair felt like it was blazing. As I played, I squeezed my thighs together. During the third lesson, he was a little fiercer and scolded me a couple of times. But it was during the fourth lesson that he got really frustrated. He stopped suddenly and yelled,
''Vous êtes une femme incorrigible
.' And
then he took my index finger like this." Violet leaned over the desk, grabbed my hand, then my finger, and squeezed it hard. She stood up, still holding on to my finger, and bent over me. With her mouth to my ear, she said, "And then he whispered like this." In a low, hoarse voice, Violet said, "Jules."

Violet dropped my finger and returned to her chair. "I ran out of the apartment. I almost knocked down a lemon tree." She paused. "You know, Leo, lots of men have tried to seduce me. I was used to that, but this was different. He scared me, because the whole thing was about mixing.

"I'm not sure I understand you," I said.

"When he squeezed my finger, it was like Jules was doing it, don't you see? Jules and Monsieur Renasse were all mixed up together. I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me."

"But maybe Monsieur Renasse was attracted to you, and you to him, and he just used Jules."

"No, Leo," she said. "I wasn't attracted to Monsieur Renasse at all. I knew it was Jules. Jules had set it up, and I was attracted to the idea of acting out one of Jules's fantasies."

"But weren't you already Jules's lover?"

"Of course, but that's just it. It wasn't enough. He wanted a third person in it."

I didn't answer her. I understood the story better than she imagined, and whatever had happened in that plant-filled apartment, I felt as though the story now included me, that the chain of erotic electricity continued unbroken.

"I've decided that
mixing
is a key term. It's better than
suggestion
,
which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn't: I think, therefore I am. It's: I am because you are. That's Hegel
—
well, the short version."

"A little too short," I said.

Violet flapped her hand dismissively. "What matters is that we're always mixing with other people. Sometimes it's normal and good, and sometimes it's dangerous. The piano lesson is just an obvious example of what feels dangerous to me. Bill mixes in his paintings. Writers do it in books. We do it all the time. Think of the witch."