“But then of course I’ve always hated food.

“Say something like… ‘His dearest fantasy was to survive without eating, perfect and pure.’ Lay it on quite thick. This is relevant to the novels, I promise.

“You could start with when you met me, the thing with the brandy. But I see no reason not to proceed chronologically.”

As a child in the seventies, Richard Leoneck stole copies of the New York Post from the auxiliary kitchen where the nanny ate and brought them to his room overlooking the park. From those paronomastic pages he acquired his fascination with emptiness. He most loved the Munchausen-by-proxy stories: all those young mothers with bad hair, pouring vodka or salt down their babies’ feeding tubes. Their angels.

The eight-year-old Richard wanted a feeding tube more than he had ever wanted anything before, and perhaps ever would after. It seemed a great injustice that he’d been forced to eat three times a day for his entire conscious life.

At dinnertime, he’d sit and stare at the carrots and skinless poached chicken on his plate and inwardly curse the nanny for telling him that this repulsive, lukewarm matter was something he should put into his body. Placing a pre-cut bite of chicken in his mouth triggered a closing of the throat paired with a secretion of saliva heralding vomit. He’d manage two or three bites, but after that it was senseless even to try. The chicken became flesh, the vegetables fibrous and loamy. His glass of milk tasted warm and vulgar, making his lips shut and his stomach tighten.

Later, from his analyst, he learned that his aversion to solid food was at once a longing for the breast he’d never had and a stubborn, spiteful reenactment of his infancy, during which women who were not his mother fed him mass-produced nutritional supplements while his actual mother jetted off to Gstaad. He came to understand that his refusal to feed himself and his consequent stunted growth were the manifestation of a desire to return to an impossible and never-experienced childhood.

By choking down cans of Sego Liquid Diet Food (chocolate malt flavor), Leoneck made it through his adolescence.

“And then Mother died.

“You could say… ‘A lacuna opened in his life.’ Maybe that I ‘fell through it,’ somehow. You’ll find something suitable.

“I’ve already sent along her medical records. I find I cannot go into detail. It was pancreatic, the —

“The —

“You see. Well. You can look all that up. Lie all you want about me, I won’t be here to read it, but about her, no, I cannot let you.

“You can add that she was furious. She felt cheated, and she did not wish to fight, to be a fighter. Throw in some de Beauvoir. ‘In this moment of truth she did not choose to utter insincere words.’ She spent four months punishing my father for all those affairs she’d let pass by with a smile. Just to make sure he wouldn’t love her too much in the last days of consciousness.

“And punishing me, too.

“I suppose you’ll ask how. I have the sense that she kept me from visiting the hospital, though that can’t be right. Consult the notebooks there. They know more than I do.”

When, in 2001, his mother died, a hole in time opened, and Leoneck fell through it. He quit seeing his analyst. He moved to London, to the family home at Cadogan Place; it was important to put an ocean between himself and Alma Leoneck’s body. He began to write.

What he wrote was Her Taste, a book of under two hundred pages that, despite its brevity, enlisted most of his spirit and energy during three long years of complex mourning.

The novel was extractive, barely fictionalized. Its narrator was destabilized by the death of his mother, a highborn Englishwoman in New York married to a canny entrepreneurial physician who laundered his pharmaceutical money through her hyphenated good name. And yet it was her husband’s name that made its way onto museum wings in Kensington Gardens and on the Upper East Side. His name would be immortal. The erasure of her bloodline and her being by a husband who wanted to suck her dry of value was the subject of the book.

As he wrote, Leoneck imagined why this mother might have neglected her young son all throughout his tender years. Surely she had been kept busy with the maintenance of her figure, her marriage, her home.

His narrator experienced a kind of reverse transubstantiation at Frank E. Campbell’s, seeing her body there in the chapel, seeing it as a thing. Bringing the tips of the fingers to his lips. Her features refused to resolve into their imperious mask. It wasn’t her fault that she’d abandoned him. She hadn’t known any better.

This, Leoneck believed, was empathy. He had, he believed, forgiven her. He considered this moment the highest point of his moral life.

“Look up some of the interviews I gave around that time. I kept going on about how she suffered. Some women aren’t meant to bear children, I’d say. What’s inside them is too delicate to share space with another being. And I’d tell the interviewer, winningly, how I had been a selfish child, residing in my own imagination, demanding distance and attention at once. I was so content with myself. You can quote from those directly, darling, if you think that’s what I deserve.”

The novel earned praise. He knew the right people. And this praise gave him, briefly, an appetite. He especially enjoyed the highly processed meats of the English underclass and had his staff pop into the South Kensington Tesco Express for microwavable sausage rolls, which his chef would reheat and deliver to his bedroom. He’d have one sausage roll around eleven when he woke up, and another immediately before falling asleep. For months.

The predictability of this diet soothed him, and soothed him, and soothed him, until suddenly it did not.

By the fall of 2008, he could no longer eat. It was nothing to do with the economy. This was something else. Sausage rolls, with their twin vaginal slits in a greased plane of pastry, now repelled him. He grew shakier, paler. He lay at home and watched Dallas and did a lot of blow.

There was a short period during which he quit the cocaine but did not replace it with food, slept for nineteen hours a day, and woke only to compose an epic poem about Dallas.

When Leoneck emerged from this cocoon into a muted Belgravia May, he read through the fragmentary poem he’d composed, declared it terrible, and resolved to begin his next novel that very afternoon.

That very afternoon, he resolved to begin his next novel perhaps a bit later. Perhaps that summer, which he planned to spend in Provincetown, in the pigeon-gray saltbox house he owned at the better end of Commercial Street. Travel required preparation, and preparation precluded composition. He needed, for instance, to find a way to keep himself alive. He asked a friend at the Fine Arts Work Center to sniff around for a young person suitable and desperate enough to serve as his personal assistant.

Which was how he found Beata.

“Put in anything you like about yourself, my love.

“If I were writing this — though of course I’m not — I’d remark how your face stilled men’s expressions when you entered a room. And how, that summer, when they’d gotten over your face, their eyes moved down to your belly, and they went a little pale. You must have been five months along.”

He hadn’t thought through the limits of the position, its responsibilities. It was best to let the assistant determine these herself. That was how one told a good assistant from a bad one: her ability to take initiative.

Beata to Leoneck, that first morning: “You don’t want lunch.” Her tone was declarative. He nodded once and that was it. She was indispensable.

She took over his email and learned his written tone. (Subjects of sentences elided; hard returns instead of full stops; initials only, never “Richard.”)

She let him know of events at the Center that were worth attending, who else would be there, what they had written lately, and who had hated it.

She typed up the handwritten pages of his drafts and excised infelicities, added connective tissue, and rendered the ambiguous clear, though never entirely explicit.

Yet these were secondary responsibilities. Her most important job was to manage his appetite.

At six each evening, she placed a goose-shaped decanter of brandy in his study. Then she sat sideways in the mauve-silk wingback chair, with her legs swung over one upholstered arm, and placed both hands on her just-swelling belly. She watched as he poured himself a glass, took a sip, swished it around, and spat the backwashed brandy directly into the decanter. Then she took the heavy glass goose back downstairs, bearing it forward on her flat palms like a relic.

Beata understood that Leoneck lived in hell. She didn’t punish him for this. She accepted it.

One morning, Beata returned from up Cape with a string bag of yellow heirloom tomatoes. Nine of them, ribbed and asymmetrical.

“Eat one,” Leoneck said.

She took a knife from the kitchen block and Leoneck shook his head.

“No. Like a fruit.” He mimed taking a bite from an apple.

Beata obliged. Yellow juice ran in a slick from lip to chin, where it clung and then fell in two fat drops.

“And the stem,” he said.

This took her several minutes of chewing thickly. By the end her eyes shone. He saw the lump move down her throat.

“Another,” he said.

She did. She ate all nine. She was crying by the end, but she didn’t say a word.

“Why aren’t you sick?” he asked her, his eyes now shining too. “You should be sick. Why aren’t you getting sick?”

The next day, he began his second book.

Had Leoneck been a more curious person, he might have wondered why Beata tolerated this behavior. Why she indulged his grossest desires and seemed to take pride in her ability to fulfill them. How she might be acting out a fantasy of her own.

“It was you, my dear, who showed me I hadn’t forgiven her at all.”

The second book, Alma, was narrated by a young American woman, the wife of an oil tycoon. She lived in one silent, empty wing of a Houston estate. Alma compulsively pinched the skin below her navel to test its elasticity and consumed no more than nine hundred calories per day. She had just learned she was pregnant.

Leoneck wrote long, stream-of-consciousness passages from Alma’s perspective while he was in a hypnagogic state, finding the vulnerability of near-sleep conducive to imagining the shameful grotesqueries that populated her psychic landscape. Faceless, eyeless beings with imbricated mouths.

Alma, he wrote, didn’t feel the embryonic presence in her abdomen was a parasite, exactly. She just didn’t believe it was real. Possibly this was a symptom of her fear that it would be a boy, that the boy would grow into a man, and that the man would overtake her.

Had she treated her body the way it deserved to be treated, she felt, she never would have been infected with this child. 

She began to starve it out.

Her husband had purchased religious literature by the yard to fill his library (mahogany paneling, Doric columns, the deed to Monticello displayed in its own glass case), and there, on an empty day, she found a book by Simone Weil. “The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.” This sounded correct to her. Sin and error were familiar, ancient states. She underlined this sentence in the book and placed it on her nightstand of pink Italian marble.

Alma managed to keep the pregnancy a secret from the oil tycoon for months. In the first twelve weeks, she lost seven pounds. Wouldn’t see a doctor. On her chrome-plated scale, the numbers kept going down. She went up to a pack and a half a day.

By the seventeenth week, she could no longer conceal the bump from the staff. It was small but looked ungainly and inorganic, taut and firm, and she routinely went to smooth her dress and smacked it with her fingers, forgetting it was there. The staff belonged to her husband and advocated telling him immediately. Alma refused. “I don’t want to worry him,” she’d say sweetly, and would request sleeveless linen dresses and for the air conditioning to be turned up. Her husband slept in a different room so his women could come and go.

But although they kept her secret, the staff considered it their duty to manipulate Alma’s body for the benefit of their employer’s heir. They forbade her from pacing in the paved garden, claiming sun would harm the baby. They made her stay in bed until two in the afternoon, saying the baby needed rest. They removed the Weil from her nightstand, telling her that thinking about dark things would give her baby a godless personality. They fed her ambrosia salad.

Each week, she thought, This is the week when it will feel good to eat. This is the week when I’ll understand that I am feeding not myself, but an infant, a person who cannot fend for himself, and I will make sacrifices for my child, as I am meant to do. And each week, she pushed away plates half-full of ambrosia salad and hid the crackers that the staff brought her in the pockets of her nightdress and left cigarette butts in small ceramic dishes all around her room. She lay in bed in pale yellow sheets and slipped into a tunnel of thought so soundless she felt she would never emerge. She considered death as if it were an object she was holding up to the light.

Alma knew the staff had finally told her husband when he stopped looking her in the eyes. He rarely touched her anyway. He stayed in his room, and she stayed in hers. “All good in there?” he asked her once, pausing at the gilded front door, the porter carrying his suitcases — he was going to Odessa again on business — and she was so startled she said nothing. He waited, grumbled, and then turned. The door swung shut.

When the baby was born, at 33 weeks, he weighed four and a half pounds.

Alma cried as she stood beside the plastic Isolette in the neonatal ward.

Leoneck spent weeks writing this moment: Alma, belly distended where her womb hadn’t yet shrunk back to its original size, clasping her skinny upper arms, bending over her infant son.

The oxygen meter taped to his tiny foot. The cannula. The way his lips would curl when the feeding tube engaged.

Alma stood there weeping. She wanted to rip the tube from his small, lovely mouth.

“In a way, that scene was for you, Beata.

“I knew about the baby when I chose you to assist me, of course. That was part of your appeal. I was writing about motherhood; it was research.

“In the early weeks, I would catch you, in quiet moments, whispering to your belly. You had some new knowledge, and I wanted to take it from you, but it couldn’t be shared.

“You said to me one night, Richard, I’m so afraid he won’t make it. And I said whatever I said, mumbled it away, because how could I tell you, with your shining eyes, that in some way that was what I wanted?

“I did wonder if that desire of mine — if it left a mark on you. Sometimes I’d imagine you standing before me in a linen skirt, hemorrhaging blood on the carpet.

“But you know, darling, I want to tell you now, since I didn’t then. That fear of yours, it’s a selfish fear, at bottom. The fear is for yourself.”

Beata’s phone was ringing. Her bag sat slumped on the heavy round table in Richard’s foyer where she’d dropped it when they came in, because her son had been fussing and had needed all of her attention and both of her hands. She’d unbuckled him from his stroller and walked him around the big empty house, showing him the view of the bay from the second floor.

Everything smelled of the lemon-scented disinfectant the staging company had used. Much of Richard’s furniture and art remained. He had taste, after all, and it was better not to transfer certain pieces to his vault in Switzerland if they were going to be sold in New York. The staging company felt, too, that in a house that had belonged to a writer, the writer’s desk should be displayed. An artist’s home: it had a romantic appeal to buyers of a certain frame of mind.

She’d come for one of Richard’s notebooks, one she needed to complete the draft of Alma he’d been working on. 

The phone stopped ringing.

Thank God, she thought. She stroked her son’s hair, the thin patch at the back. Just last week he’d learned to hold up his head and look with sustained attention at distant objects. Now he stared at the enormous white orchid that stood in a brushed-brass vase on the table in the foyer. She looked down at the pale globe of his cheek, the folds of fat at his little wrists. He reached out a tiny perfect hand to touch one flower’s lip.

“I know,” she told him. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She touched the flower too.

Her phone rang again.

“Ewuh,” he said, still looking at the flower, and put his index finger in his mouth. He was probably hungry; he hadn’t nursed in a couple of hours. Her breasts felt heavy and tight.

“Good, sweetie,” she said. “Eat your finger.” She picked up her phone.

It was the Sotheby’s people again. There were photographs to be taken, a catalog to be developed. Beata liked talking to the Sotheby’s people. Everyone else, by now, was calling from billing departments. The Campbell’s people. The Sloan-Kettering people.

Beata confirmed that yes, she would be available on the fifteenth.

Her son began to cry.

It started low and even. His face reddened. His mouth was a moue of minor anguish. She muted herself and cooed at him, told him to wait just a moment.

“ — between ten and two,” said the man from Sotheby’s, his voice curt.

The crying stopped. Beata unmuted herself and said yes, that was fine.

But the baby had only been pausing to inhale, and now he sobbed. Purple-faced, hands up, baffled and despairing. Beata felt the pulse of her milk coming in. She wedged her phone between chin and shoulder and began to unbutton her shirt.

“Sorry,” she said to the man on the phone, “I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back. I have to feed my son.”