What I Loved

  Erica wrote that she was worried about Violet. "She's plagued by irrational fears about Mark. I think the fact that she couldn't have a child has finally caught up with her. She hates sharing Mark with Lucille. On the telephone the other day she kept saying, 'I wish he were mine. I'm afraid.' But when I asked her what frightened her, she said she didn't know. When Bill is gone on his trips to Japan and Germany, I think you should check on her. You know how much I care about her, and think of what she did for us after Matt died."

  Two nights later, Bill and Violet invited me for dinner upstairs. Mark was at his mother's, and the three of us stayed up late. The conversation moved from Goya to Violet's ongoing analysis of popular culture to Bill's new project—making a hundred and one doors that opened onto rooms—to Mark. Mark was flunking chemistry. He had pierced his lip. He lived for raves. None of this was extraordinary, but during the evening I noticed that whenever Violet talked about Mark, she couldn't finish her sentences. On every other topic, she spoke as she always did, easily and fluently, rounding off her statements with periods, but Mark made her hesitant, and her words were left hanging without ends.

  Bill drank a lot that night. By midnight, he had his arms around Violet on the sofa and was declaring her the most wonderfiil and beautiful woman that had ever lived. Violet untangled herself from Bill's embrace and said, "That's it. When you start in on your undying love for me, I know you've had too much. It's time to call it a night."

  "I'm fine," Bill said. His voice was thick and grumpy.

  Violet turned to him. "You are fine," she said, trailing her finger along his unshaven cheek. "Nobody is finer than you." I watched the motion of her hand as she smiled at him. Her eyes were as steady and clear as I had ever seen them.

  Bill softened under her touch. "A last toast," he said.

  We lifted our glasses.

  "To the people dearest to my heart. To Violet, my beloved and indomitable wife, to Leo, my closest and most loyal friend, and to Mark, my son. May he weather the harrowing years of adolescence."

  Violet smiled at the slur.

  Bill continued. "May we always be a family as we are now. May we love each other for as long as we live."

  That night there was no piano lesson. When I closed my eyes, the only person I saw was Bill.

  I didn't visit the Bowery until the following fall. Bill drew and planned but didn't start the construction of his doors until September. It was a Sunday afternoon in late October. The sky was cloudy and the weather had turned very cold. After I turned my key in the lock of the steel door, I stepped into the dingy, darkened hallway and heard the noise of a door opening to my right. Startled by the sound of life from long-abandoned rooms, I turned and noticed two eyes, a pair of white eyebrows, and the dark brown nose of a man from between several chains. "Who's that?" he boomed at me in a voice so deep and rich I expected an echo.

  "I'm a friend of Bill Wechsler's," I said, and immediately wondered why I had bothered to explain my presence to this stranger.

  Instead of answering me, he shut the door fast. A loud rattle and two clinks followed his disappearance. As I climbed the stairs, wondering about the new tenant, I saw Lazlo leaving and took note of his orange vinyl pants and pointed black shoes. When we met, he drawled out a cool, "Hey, Leo," smiled at me, and I saw his teeth. One front tooth overlapped the other slightly, not an unusual feature, but in that instant, I knew that I had never seen his teeth before. Lazlo paused on a step.

  "Read your views book," he said. "Got it from Bill."

  "Really?"

  "It was great, man."

  "Why, thank you, Lazlo. I'm very flattered."

  Lazlo didn't move. He looked down at the step. "Thought I'd take you out to eat sometime, you know." He paused, moved his head up and down and beat a brief rhythm on his orange thigh as if an inaudible jazz tune had suddenly interrupted his speech. "You and Erica helped me out." Five more beats to his thigh. "You know."

  The muttered "you know" seemed to stand in place of "Would that be all right?" I said that I would be delighted to have dinner with him. Lazlo said, "Cool" and continued down the stairs. On the way, he patted the railing and moved his head to the beat of that same music, which must have been playing somewhere in the invisible corridors of his mind.

  "What's up with Lazlo?" I said to Bill. "First he smiled at me and then he invited me to dinner."

  "He's in love," Bill said. "He's madly, passionately in love with a girl named Pinky Navatsky. She's a great-looking dancer who performs with a company called Broken. A lot of shaking and contortion and sudden violent kicks. Maybe you've read about them."

  I shook my head.

  "His work's getting better, too. He's computerized those sticks. They move now, and I think the stuff is interesting. He's in a group show at P.S. 1."

  "And the stentorian voice on the first floor?"

  "Mr. Bob."

  "I didn't know those rooms had been rented."

  "They're not. He's squatting. He hasn't been here long. I don't know how he got in, but he's in now. He introduced himself to me as 'Mr. Bob.' We've got a deal that I keep him a secret from the landlord. Mr. Aiello almost never comes in from Bayonne anyway."

  "Mad?" I said.

  "Probably. Doesn't bother me. I've lived with crazy people all my life, and he needs a roof. I gave him some old kitchen stuff and Violet packed up a blanket and some dishes and a hot plate she had from her apartment. He likes Violet. Calls her 'Beauty.' "

  The studio had become a vast construction zone, crowded with materials, which made it look smaller than it really was. Doors of varying sizes lay in piles near the window along with stacks of Sheetrock. Sawdust and lumber scraps covered the floor. In front of me, however, were three oak doors of different heights attached to small rooms that were no wider or higher than the doors, although their depths seemed to vary.

  "Try the middle one," Bill said. "You have to go inside and close the door behind you. You're not claustrophobic, are you?"

  I shook my head.

  The door was only five feet five inches tall, which meant that I had to bend down to enter the space. After pulling the door shut behind me, I found myself hunched over in a plain white box, about six feet deep, with a glass ceiling for light and a cloudy mirrored floor. At my feet, I noticed what appeared to be a small pile of rags. Standing was so uncomfortable that I kneeled down to examine the rags, but when I touched them, I discovered that they were made of plaster. At first I saw only the murky reflection of my own gray, beaky face staring up at me, but then I noticed that there was a hole in the plaster. I put my cheek to the mirror and looked into it. A splintered image of a child had been painted onto the underside of the plaster, which was then reflected onto the mirror. The little boy seemed to float in the mirror—his arms and legs detached from his torso. It wasn't a picture of violence or war, but something dreamlike and weirdly familiar—an image I couldn't look at without also seeing my own muzzy face. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the mirror looked watery, uterine, the boy more distant, and I realized that I didn't want to see it anymore. I felt a little dizzy and then nauseated. I stood up too quickly, hit my head on the ceiling, and grabbed the doorknob. It stuck. Suddenly, I desperately needed to get out of that place. After I gave it a fierce tug, the door opened and I nearly fell onto Bill.

  "Are you okay?" he said. "You're sweating."

  Bill had to help me to a chair. I stammered out my embarrassment and apology as I breathed deeply and wondered what had happened to me behind the door. We were silent for at least a minute while I recovered from my bout of faintness. I thought again about the reflection under that clump of plaster. Maybe it had been more like a pile of bandages. The boy had seemed to float in an oily, heavy liquid, his body in pieces. He would never emerge intact.

  I spoke breathlessly. "Matt. Drowning. I didn't understand it until now."

  When I looked up at Bill, he looked startled. "I had no intention..."

  I interrupted him.
"I know that. It just hit me that way."

  Bill placed his hands on both my shoulders and squeezed them for a moment. Then he walked over to the one clear space near the window and looked out. He was silent for several seconds before he said, "I loved Matthew, you know." He spoke very quietly. "That year before he died, I understood what he was and what was in him." Bill moved his hand to the pane.

  I rose from the chair and walked toward him.

  "I envied you," he said. "I wished..." He paused and breathed through his nose. "I still wish that Mark were more like him, and I feel bad for wishing it. Matt was open to everything. He didn't always agree with me." Bill smiled at the memory. "He argued with me. I wish Mark..."

  I said nothing. After another short pause, he continued talking. "It would've been so much better for Mark if Matthew had lived. For all of us, of course, but Matt felt the ground under his feet." Bill looked down at the Bowery. I saw gray in his hair. He's aging fast now, I thought. "Matt wanted to grow up. He would've become an artist. I believe that. He had the talent. He had the need. He had the lust for work." Bill rubbed his hair. "Mark's still a baby. He has great gifts, but somehow he's not equipped to use them. I'm afraid for him, Leo. He's like Peter Pan in exile from Never-Never-Land." Bill was silent for several seconds. "My memories of being a teenager don't help me. I never liked crowds. Fads didn't interest me. If everybody loved it, I wasn't interested. Drugs, flower power, rock 'n' roll. It wasn't for me. I was looking at icons, copying Caravaggio and seventeenth-century drawings. I wasn't even a good rebel. I was against the war. I marched in protests, but the truth was, a lot of the rhetoric grated on me. All I really wanted to do was paint." Bill turned toward me and lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match as though he were outside in a wind. He pressed his lips together and said, "He lies, Leo. Mark lies."

  I looked at Bill's pained face. "Yes," I said. "I've sometimes wondered about that."

  "I catch him in little lies, lies that don't make any sense. I sometimes think he lies just to lie."

  "It might be a phase," I said.

  Bill looked away from me. "He's been lying for a long time. Ever since he was a little boy."

  Bill's frank statement jarred me. I hadn't been aware of a history of lying. He had lied about eating the doughnuts and he had probably lied to me the morning after he slept in Matt's room, but I knew nothing of more lies.

  "At the same time," Bill said, "he has a good heart. He's a gentle soul, my son." He waved the cigarette at me. "He likes you, Leo. He told me that he feels free with you, that he can talk to you."

  I went to stand by Bill at the window. "I like seeing him. These last few months, we've talked quite a bit." I turned toward the street. "He's listened to my stories. I've listened to his. You know, he told me that when he was living in Texas, he used to pretend that Matt was there with him. He called him 'Imaginary Matt.' He said he used to have conversations with 'Imaginary Matt' in the bathroom before he went to school." I looked out at the roofs across the Bowery and then down at a man lying on the sidewalk, his feet in two brown paper bags.

  "I didn't know that," he said.

  I stood beside him until he finished the cigarette. His eyes were distant. "Imaginary Matt," he said once and then fell silent for a while. He stubbed out the cigarette beneath his foot and turned back to the window. "Of course," he said, "my father thought I was crazy, thought I'd never make a living."

  I left Bill soon after that. At the bottom of the stairs, I opened the door to the street and heard the voice of Mr. Bob again, this time from behind me. Resonant and beautiful, its round bass tones forced me to listen, and I stopped on the threshold. "May God shine down upon you. May God shine down upon your head and your shoulders and your arms and legs and upon your whole body with radiant beneficence. May he save you and keep you in his mercy and goodness from the shattering ways of Satan. God go with you, my son." I didn't turn around, but I felt quite sure that Mr. Bob had delivered his benediction through a tiny crack in the door. Outside I squinted in the glare of the sun as it pushed its way through the clouds, and by the time I turned onto Canal Street, I realized that the squatter's strange blessing had lightened my step.

  The following January, Mark introduced me to Teenie Gold. About five feet tall and seriously underweight, Teenie had white skin that was tinged with gray beneath her eyes and on her lips. A shock of blue colored her otherwise platinum hair, and a gold ring glittered in her nose. She was wearing a shirt with pink teddy bears on it that looked as if it might once have belonged to a two-year-old. When I offered her my hand, she took it with an air of surprise, like a stranger performing a bizarre greeting ritual on a remote island. Once she had retrieved her limp hand from me, she stared at the floor. While Mark ran to find something he had left in Matt's room, I asked Teenie polite questions, which she answered in short, anxious fragments, without once raising her eyes. Her school was Nightingale. She lived on Park Avenue. She wanted to be a fashion designer. When Mark returned, he said, "I'll get Teenie to show you some of her drawings. She's amazingly talented. Guess what, it's Teenie's birthday today."

  "Happy birthday, Teenie," I said.

  She stared at the floor and moved her head back and forth as her face turned red, but she didn't answer.

  "Hey," Mark said. "That reminds me. When's your birthday, Uncle Leo?"

  "February nineteenth," I said.

  Mark nodded. "Nineteen thirty, right?"

  "Right," I said, a little baffled, but before I could say anything, they disappeared out the door.

  Teenie Gold left an odd impression on me—something wistful and eerie, akin to the feeling I'd once had in London after strolling past hundreds of dolls in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. Part baby, part clown, part woman with a broken heart, Teenie looked damaged, as if her neuroses had written themselves onto her body. Although Mark had begun to look a little absurd in his teen getup—the big pants, the little gold stud that gleamed from under his bottom lip, the platform sneakers he had taken to wearing that elevated him to a massive six foot five—his poise and open, friendly manner contrasted sharply with Teenie's lowered gaze and thin, tense body.

  In themselves, clothes are unimportant, but I observed that Mark's new friends cultivated a wan, undernourished aesthetic that reminded me of the way the Romantics had glorified tuberculosis. Mark and his friends had an idea of themselves, and illness played a role in that idea, but I couldn't name the sickness. Drawn faces, thin, pierced bodies, colored hair, and platform shoes seemed innocuous enough. After all, stranger fads had come and gone. I remembered the stories of young men who threw themselves out windows in yellow jackets after reading Werther. A rage for suicide. Goethe came to detest the novel, but in its day the book stormed the ranks of the young and vulnerable. Teenie inspired thoughts of faddish deaths not only because she looked sicker than Mark's other friends, but because I had begun to understand that in that circle, looking unwell was considered attractive.

  I saw very little of Bill and Violet that spring. I still shared the occasional dinner with them upstairs, and Bill telephoned me from time to time, but the life they were living took them away from me. They went to Paris for a week in March for a show of the number pieces and from there they traveled to Barcelona, where Bill lectured to students at an art school. Even when they were at home, they often left for the evening to attend dinners and openings. Bill hired two more assistants, a whistling carpenter named Damion Dapino to help build the doors and a gloomy young woman named Mercy Banks to answer his mail. Bill regularly turned down invitations to teach, discuss, lecture, or sit on panels all over the world, and he needed Mercy to pen his "no thank yous."

  One afternoon while I was waiting in line at the Grand Union, I paged through a copy of New York magazine and found a small picture of Bill and Violet at an art opening. Bill had his arm around his wife and was looking down at her as Violet smiled into the camera. The photograph was evidence of Bill's changing status, a glimmer of fame even
in his critical hometown. It had been under way for a long time—that slide into the third person that had turned his proper name into a salable commodity. I bought the magazine. At home, I cut out the picture and put it in my drawer. I wanted the picture there, because the photo's small dimensions imitated the proportions of distance—two figures standing very far away from me. I had never put anything to remind me of Bill and Violet in the drawer before that, and I understood why. It was a place to record what I missed.

  Despite its morbid qualities, I didn't use my drawer for grief or self-pity. I had begun to think of it as a ghostly anatomy in which each object articulated one piece of a larger body that was still unfinished. Each thing was a bone that signified absence, and I took pleasure in arranging these fragments according to different principles. Chronology provided one logic, but even this could change, depending on how I read each object. Were Erica's socks the sign of her leaving for California or were they really a token of the day Matt died and our marriage began to fail? For days I worked on possible time tables and then abandoned them for more secret, associative systems, playing with every possible connection. I put Erica's lipstick beside Matt's baseball card one day and moved it near the doughnut box on another. The link between the latter two objects was delightfully obscure but plain once I noticed it. The lipstick conjured Erica's colored mouth, the doughnut box Mark's hungry one. The connection was oral. I grouped the photograph of my twin cousins, Anna and Ruth, with the wedding picture of their parents for a while, but then I shifted it to sit beside Matt's play program on one side and the photo of Bill and Violet on another. Their meanings depended on their placement, what I thought of as a mobile syntax. I played this game only at night before I went to bed. After a couple of hours, the intense mental effort required to justify moving objects from one position to another made me tired. My drawer proved to be an effective sedative.