What I Loved

  "I'm coming right now."

  Through the window of the taxi, I saw the familiar streets and signs and crowds on Canal Street, and while I saw everything with uncommon clarity, I felt that these sights didn't belong to me anymore, that they weren't tangible and that if the cab stopped and I stepped out, I wouldn't be able to grasp any of it. I knew the feeling. I had had it before, and I continued to feel it as I walked into the building and heard Mr. Bob praying behind the door of the old locksmith shop. His voice didn't boom with the same Shakespearean resonance I had grown used to. He droned indistinctly in a chant that rose and fell and grew fainter as I neared the top floor and began to hear another voice—Violet's half whisper coming from inside the room a few steps above me. The door to the studio was standing ajar, but not fully open. Violet's low voice continued speaking, but I couldn't make out her words. I stopped behind the door, and for an instant I hesitated, because I knew that I would see Bill in the room. It wasn't fear I felt as much as an unwillingness to cross over into the inviolate strangeness of the dead, but the sensation was brief, and I pulled the door wide open. The lights were off and the late-afternoon sun filled the windows and cast a hazy light on Violet's hair. She was sitting cross- legged on the floor at the far end of the room, near the desk She had Bill's head in her lap and was bent over him, talking in the same barely audible voice she had first used with me on the telephone. Even from that distance, I could see that Bill was dead. The stillness of his body couldn't be mistaken for repose or sleep. I had seen that inexorable quiet in my parents and in my son, and when I looked across the room at Bill, I knew right away that Violet was holding a corpse.

  She didn't hear me enter, and for a few seconds I didn't move. I stood in the doorway of the large familiar room and looked at the many rows of canvases against the wall, the boxes stored on shelves above it, the portfolios filled with thousands of drawings that were piled high below the windows, the familiar sagging bookshelves, the wooden crates of tools. I took it all in, and I noticed the specks of dust hovering in the dimming sunlight that fell in three long rectangular blocks to the floor. I began walking toward Violet, and at the sound of my footsteps, she lifted her chin and her eyes met mine. For a fraction of a second, her face contorted, but she covered her hand with her mouth and when she removed it, her features were once again calm.

  I stopped beside Violet and looked down at Bill. His eyes were open and empty. There was nothing behind them, and their vacancy hurt me. She should close them, I thought to myself. She should close his eyes. I lifted my hands in a meaningless gesture.

  "You see," she said, "I don't want them to take him away, but I know they have to. I've been here for a while." She narrowed her eyes. "What time is it?"

  I looked at my watch. "It's five-ten."

  Bill's expression was serene. It showed no sign of struggle or pain, and his skin looked younger and smoother than I remembered, as though death had stolen years from his face. He was wearing a blue work shirt stained with spots of what may have been grease, and seeing those dark flecks on his breast pocket made me shake. I felt my mouth move suddenly, and a small involuntary noise came from me—a grunt that I quickly suppressed.

  "I came at about four," Violet was saying. "Mark got out of school early today." She nodded. "Yes, I was here at four." Then she looked up at me and said fiercely, "Do it! Go call!"

  I walked to the telephone, looked down at it, and dialed 911. I didn't know any other number. I gave them the address. I think he had a heart attack, I said, but I don't know. The woman said they would send police officers. When I protested, she said that it was procedure. They would stay until the medical examiner arrived and determined the cause of death. When I hung up the phone, Violet looked at me harshly and said, "Now I want you to go, so I can be with him. Wait downstairs for the people to come."

  I didn't wait downstairs. I seated myself on the step just outside the room, and I left the door ajar. As I sat there, I noticed a large crack in the wall I had never seen before. I put my fingers to it and let them run down the fissure as I waited and listened to the sound of Violet whispering to Bill, telling him things I didn't try to understand. I also heard Bob chanting downstairs, and I heard the noise of the traffic outside and impatient drivers honking their horns on the Manhattan Bridge. There was very little light on the stairway, but the steel door below me that led to the street was illuminated by a dull shine that must have come from a lamp inside Bob's rooms. I put my head in my hands and I breathed in the familiar smell that came from the studio—paint, mildewed rags, and sawdust. Like his father, I thought, he dropped dead, fell to the ground and died, and I wondered if Bill knew when the pains or spasm hit that his death was coming. For some reason, I imagined that he did and that his placid face meant that he had accepted that his life had come to an end. But that might have been a lie I was telling myself to soften the picture of his corpse on the floor.

  I tried to re-create the conversation I'd had with him the day before about editing the videotapes. He had said that he planned to begin in a couple of months and was explaining the machine to me, the process of cutting. When it had become obvious that I understood very little, he had laughed and said, "I'm boring you to death, aren't I?" But it wasn't true. I hadn't been bored at all, and I had said as much. Nevertheless, while I was sitting there on the step, I worried that I hadn't been adamant enough, that perhaps when I had said good-bye to him the day before, there had been a small unspoken cleft between us, seen only as a hint of disappointment in Bill's eyes. Perhaps he'd sensed my reservations about his sudden enthusiasm for video and had felt a little hurt. I knew that it was silly to focus on this insignificant exchange at the very end of a friendship that had lasted for twenty years, but the memory stung me nevertheless, and with it came a keen awareness that I would never be able to speak to him again about the tapes or anything else.

  After a while, I realized that Violet had stopped talking. I didn't hear Mr. Bob either. Disturbed by the silence, I stood up and looked through the door into the room, Violet had lain down beside Bill and put her head on his chest. One of her arms had disappeared under his torso and the other arm was looped around his neck. She looked small next to him, and she looked alive, even though she wasn't moving. The light had changed during the minutes I had been gone, and although I could still see both of them, their bodies were now in shadow. I saw the outline of Bill's profile and the back of Violet's head, and then I saw her lift her arm from around his neck and move it to his shoulder. While I watched, she began to stroke his shoulder over and over again, and while she did it, she rocked herself against his large motionless body.

  In these last years, there have been times when I wished I hadn't witnessed that moment. Even then, while I was looking at the two of them lying together on the floor, the truth of my own solitary life closed over me like a large glass cage. I was the man in the hallway, the one who looked on at a final scene being played out inside a room where I had spent countless hours, but I wouldn't allow myself to step across the threshold. And yet, now I am glad that I saw Violet clinging to the minutes she had left with Bill's body, and I must have known that it was important for me to look at them, because I didn't turn my head away, and I didn't return to the step. I stood in the doorway and watched over them until I heard the buzzer and let in the two young officers who had come to perform their peculiar duty—hanging around until another official came and pronounced Bill dead of natural causes.

  THREE

  MY FATHER ONCE TOLD ME A STORY ABOUT GETTING LOST. IT happened the summer after he had turned ten in the countryside near Potsdam, where his parents had a vacation house. He had spent every summer there since he was born and knew the woods and hills and meadows surrounding that house by heart My father made a point of telling me that just before he walked off into the woods he had been quarreling with his brother. David, who was then thirteen, had pushed his younger brother out of the room they shared and locked the door, shouting that he needed privacy
. After the fight, my father ran off, hot with anger and resentment, but after a while his temper cooled, and he began to enjoy moving through the trees, stopping to examine the tracks left by animals, and listening to the sounds of the birds. He walked and walked, and then, all at once, he no longer knew where he was. He turned around and tried to retrace his steps, but not a single clearing, rock, or tree seemed familiar to him anymore. Finally, he made his way out of the woods and found himself on a hill looking down at a house and a meadow. He saw a car and a garden, but he recognized nothing. Several seconds passed before he understood that the view was of his own house and garden and his family's dark blue automobile. When he told me the story, he shook his head and said that he had never forgotten the moment, that for him it illustrated the mysteries of cognition and the brain. He called it uncharted territory and followed up the story with a lecture on neurological devastations that leave their victims unable to recognize anything or anyone.

  Years after my father died, I had a similar experience in New York. I was meeting a colleague who teaches in Paris for a drink in the bar of his hotel, and after asking a clerk for directions, I found myself walking down a long shining corridor with a marble floor. A man in an overcoat was striding toward me. Several seconds passed before I realized that the man I had taken for a stranger was my own reflection in a mirror at the end of the hall. Such brief intervals of disorientation aren't uncommon, but they interest me more and more, because they suggest that recognition is far more feeble than we suppose. Only a week ago, I poured myself what I imagined was a glass of orange juice, but it was milk. For several seconds, I couldn't say that it was milk I had tasted, only that the juice was disgusting. I like milk very much, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is that I expected one thing and got another.

  The bewildering estrangement of such moments, when the familiar turns radically foreign, isn't merely a trick of the brain but a loss of the external signposts that structure vision. Had my father not lost his way, he would have recognized his family's house. Had I known there was a mirror in front of me, I would have seen myself immediately, and had I identified the milk as milk, it would have tasted like itself. During the year that followed Bill's death, I continually found myself at a loss—either I didn't know what I was seeing or I didn't know how to read what I saw. Those experiences have left their traces in me as a nearly perpetual disquiet. Although there are times when it vanishes altogether, usually I can feel it, lurking beneath the ordinary activities of my day—an inner shadow cast by the memory of having been completely lost.

  It is ironic that after spending years thinking through the historical conventions of painting and how they influenced perception, I found myself in the position of Dürer drawing a rhinoceros from hearsay. The artist's famous creature bears a strong resemblance to the real animal, but he got a number of crucial bits wrong, as did I when it came to reconstructing the people and the events that were a part of my life that year. My subjects were human, of course, and therefore notoriously difficult to get right, perhaps impossible, but I made a number of errors that were grave enough to qualify as a false picture.

  The difficulty of seeing clearly haunted me long before my eyes went bad, in life as well as in art. It's a problem of the viewer's perspective— as Matt pointed out that night in his room when he noted that when we look at people and things, we're missing from our own picture. The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero. I'm only whole to myself in mirrors and photographs and the rare home movie, and I've often longed to escape that confinement and take a far view of myself from the top of a hill—a small "he" rather than an "I" traveling in the valley below from one point to another. And yet, remove doesn't guarantee accuracy either, although sometimes it helps. Over the years, Bill had become a moving reference for me, a person I had always kept in view. At the same time, he had often eluded me. Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

  But most people aren't comfortable with ambiguity. The job of piecing together a picture of Bill's life and work began almost immediately after his death with an obituary in the New York Times. It was a rather long and muddled article that included, among more flattering statements, a quotation from an excoriating review in the same newspaper. It labeled Bill a "cult artist" who had mysteriously attracted large followings in Europe, South America, and Japan. Violet hated the article. She railed against the writer and the paper. She shook the page in my face and said that she recognized the photograph of Bill but couldn't find him anywhere in the seven paragraphs that had been devoted to him, that he was missing from his own obituary. It didn't help to remind her that most journalists are merely conduits of received opinion, and it's the rare obituary writer who can turn out something other than a dull summary pieced together from equally witless articles on the man or woman in question. But as the weeks went on, Violet was comforted by the letters that came to her from all over the world, written by people who had seen Bill's work and found something in it to take away for themselves. Many of them were young, and many of them weren't artists or collectors but ordinary people who had somehow stumbled onto the work, often only in reproduction.

  The incidents of blindness to art that is later pronounced "great" are so frequent in history that they have become clichés. Van Gogh is now worshiped as much for his martyrdom to the cause of "No Recognition in His Lifetime" as for his paintings. After hundreds of years in obscurity, Botticelli was reborn in the nineteenth century. The change in their reputations was simply a matter of reorientation, a new set of conventions that made understanding possible. Bill's work was complicated and cerebral enough to threaten art critics, but it also had a simple, often narrative power that engaged the untrained eye. I believe that O's Journey, for example, will last, that after the faddish jokes and winking absurdities that crowd the galleries have had their day in the sun, they'll wither like so much before them, and the glass boxes with their alphabetical characters will stand. It's impossible to know whether I'm right, but I hold fast to the belief, and so far, I haven't been proved wrong. In the five years since his death, Bill's reputation has grown stronger.

  He left a lot of work behind him, including much that had never been shown. Violet, Bernie, and several gallery assistants began the task of organizing the canvases, boxes, sculptures, prints, drawings, notebooks, as well as the incomplete tapes that had been part of Bill's last project. In the early stages of the sorting, Violet asked me to come along, because she "needed someone to lean on." In a month, the cluttered storehouse of a man's life was transformed into a spare, eerie room with a desk and chair, mostly empty shelves, and crates illuminated by the changing sunlight nobody could take away. There were discoveries: delicate drawings of Mark as a baby, several paintings of Lucille that none of us had known existed. In one, she is writing in a notebook, and although part of her face is hidden, the intent focus she is giving to the words on the page is clear from her eyes and forehead. Written in longhand across the middle of the canvas are the large words "It cried and cried." The script cuts Lucille through the chest and shoulders and seems to exist on another plane from the one she occupies. The canvas was dated October 1977. There was also a drawing of me and Erica that Bill must have done from memory, because we hadn't posed for it and I had never seen it. We are sitting together on Adirondack chairs outside the Vermont house. Erica is leaning toward me and has placed her hand on the arm of my chair. As soon as she found the drawing, Violet gave it to me, and I took it to the framers the very next day. Erica had come and gone by then. The New York trip she had imagined—a trip she had hinted might result in a reconciliation between us—had become instead a miserable journey to bury a friend. We never did get around to talking about ourselves. I hung Bill's drawing on the wall near my desk and looked at it often. In the quick lines
that were Erica's hand, Bill seemed to have caught my wife's tremulous fingers, and looking at the sketch, I would invariably remember how she had shaken at his funeral, how her whole body had vibrated with a slight but visible palsy. I would remember taking her cold hand and clasping it between both of mine, and I would remember that despite my firm hold on her, the quiver, generated from somewhere deep in her nerves, did not stop.

  Whenever an artist dies, the work slowly begins to replace his body, becoming a corporeal substitute for him in the world. It can't be helped, I suppose. Useful objects, like chairs and dishes, passed down from one generation to another, may briefly feel haunted by their former owners, but that quality vanishes rather quickly into their pragmatic functions. Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it. Art historians don't like to speak of this, because it suggests the magical thinking attached to icons and fetishes, but I have experienced it time and time again, and I felt it in Bill's studio. When the art movers came and carried out the meticulously packed and carefully labeled crates and boxes as Violet, Bernie, and I watched, I was reminded of the two men from the funeral home who had put Bill's body into a vinyl bag and hauled it out of the same room two months earlier.

  Although I knew better than most people that Bill himself and Bill's art were not identical, I understood the need to grant an aura to the work he had left behind him—a kind of spiritual halo that resists the harsh truths of burial and decay. When Bill's coffin was lowered into the ground, Dan rocked back and forth beside the grave. He folded his arms across his chest, bent forward from his waist, and then threw himself backward, over and over again. Like an Orthodox Jew at his prayers, he seemed to find comfort in the physical repetition, and I rather envied him his freedom. But when I walked over to him and looked into his face, it was ravaged and his eyes were wild and staring. Later that day on Greene Street, Violet gave Dan a tiny canvas that Bill had done of the letter W with a real key set into it. Dan put it under his shirt and hugged the little painting throughout the afternoon. It was warm, and I worried that he was sweating all over it, but I knew why he was holding the object next to his skin. He wanted no separation between himself and the little painting, because somewhere in the wood and canvas and metal he imagined that he was touching his older brother.