Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti

Author:Michael Paterniti [Paterniti, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9751-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

As a child, the boy obsessively draws. He draws humans and animals. He does crude landscapes in watercolor. When he holds a brush in his hand, when he puts that brush to paper, he becomes invisible. He cannot be seen. He has no history, no scars.

He becomes the first in the Williams family to graduate from high school, then goes to community college. In his freshman biology class, he sketches a frog, the insides of a frog, with amazing accuracy and clarity. When his instructor sees it, she tells him about universities where one can learn to draw the insides of frogs—and other animals, including humans.

David the artist may be an enigma to his factory-working parents, but his younger brother, Greg, is an aberration. While David is short, stocky, and a loner, Greg is tall, angular, and outgoing. As David has his art and science, Greg toys with the idea of becoming a priest.

If the brothers dwell in alternative realities, they unconsciously remain each other’s lodestars, each other’s partial reason for hope. For they have the same goal: to escape the blue-collar drudgery of gray Muskegon and a house that has slowly gone from Norman Rockwell portrait to Ingmar Bergman film, mother listing into alcoholism and mental illness, father burdened by some deeply hidden guilt from his own unspoken past. Each son is searching for some kind of euphoria to obliterate the pain of growing up in this house. At the age of twenty, David abruptly moves to Hamburg to live with a woman he has met when she was visiting the States and who loves him, his scarred self, something he once thought impossible. Greg finds theater and opera, then men and drugs.

Years pass. Greg moves to Detroit, New York City. David splits with the woman in Hamburg, returns home, is accepted into the University of Cincinnati’s medical-illustration program, meets his wife, a schoolteacher, after being set up in a Muskegon bar. Shortly after they marry, he encounters the Book for the first time.

He remembers the exact particle reality of that moment. At the university, he lives in an almost obsessive world in which people spend a hundred hours drawing a horse hock or the tendons of a human arm, in thrall to brush on paper. One of his professors has purchased Pernkopf’s Anatomy, a mythic work Williams has heard defined as pure genius, and he goes to the professor’s office to see it.

The books are enormous, with blank green cloth covers. Inside could be almost anything—Monet’s water lilies, pornography, the detailed mechanics of a car—but when he opens them, when the bindings crack and the dry-cleaned scent of new pages and ink wafts up to his nostrils, there appear before him hundreds of thick, glossy sheets, these wild colors, these vibrant human bodies!

It’s an electric moment, a pinnacle, of which a life may contain not more than a handful. But it is more than just the bright frisson of discovery, the wordless awe before some greater fluency. If

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