What I Loved

  I brought Bill back to life in my dreams. He would come walking through my door or appear beside my desk, and I would always say to him, "But I thought you were dead," and he would say, "I am. I just came back for a talk," or "I'm here to check on you—to make sure you're all right." In one dream, however, when I asked him the same question, he said, "Yes, I'm dead. I'm with my son now." I began to argue with him. "No, I said, Matthew is my son. Mark is your son," but Bill wouldn't admit to it, and in the dream I was furious and woke up tormented by the misunderstanding.

  Even after most of Bill's work had been taken from the studio, Violet continued to go to the Bowery every day. She told me she was taking care of odds and ends, sorting through Bill's personal things, mostly letters and books. I often saw her leaving the building in the morning with a heavy leather bag over her shoulder. She didn't return until six, sometimes seven o'clock at night, and when she did, she often had dinner with me. I cooked for her, and even though my culinary skills were inferior to hers, she always thanked me vociferously. I began to notice that for about half an hour after she arrived at my apartment, Violet looked strange. Her eyes had a glassy look, an oblique, shiny expression that alarmed me, especially in the first few minutes after she had stepped through the door. I didn't comment on it, because I could barely put what I was seeing into words. Instead I made small talk about the food or a book I was reading, and very slowly her face began to look more familiar and more present, as if she were returning to the here and now. Although I had heard Violet crying a couple of times since Bill died, had listened to her anguished sobs coming through the ceiling of my bedroom at night, she didn't grieve in front of me. Her strength was admirable, but it had a brittle, determined air about it that every once in a while made me uncomfortable. I guessed that her toughness was Blomian—a Scandinavian trait inherited from a long line of people who had believed in suffering alone.

  It may have been that same pride that caused Violet to ask Mark to come and live with her. She told Lucille that starting in July he could stay with her and find work in the city. Mark had managed to graduate from high school, but he hadn't applied to college, and his future lay in front of him like a great unmapped wilderness. When I asked Violet whether she was in any shape to take care of Mark, she bristled at me, saying that Bill would have wanted her to do it. She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together to indicate that she had made her decision and no further discussion was wanted.

  The night before Mark moved in with her, Violet didn't return from the studio. She had called me in the morning to say that she wanted to take me out to dinner in the neighborhood. "Don't buy food," she said. "I'll be home by seven." At eight o'clock, I called her. The line was busy.

  Half an hour later, it was still busy. I walked to the Bowery.

  The door to the street was wide open, and when I looked through it, I saw Mr. Bob's entire person for the first time. A man of uncertain age, he had a rounded spine and thin legs, which contrasted sharply with his muscular arms. He was sweeping the hallway and nudged a thick pile of dust past my feet onto the sidewalk. "Mr. Bob?" I said.

  Without raising his head to look at me, he glowered at the floor.

  "I got worried about Violet," I said. "We were supposed to have dinner."

  The man didn't answer me and he didn't move. I stepped around him and began to climb the stairs.

  "Watch your step," he boomed.

  Just as I reached the top, he added, "Watch your step with Beauty!"

  The door to the studio was also open, and I drew a breath before I walked through it. The only light in the room came from a lamp on Bill's desk that illuminated a stack of papers lying beneath it. Although I had seen the naked loft in daylight, the evening murk seemed to enlarge the barren space, because my eyes didn't take in its perimeter. At first, I saw- nobody, and then, as I looked toward the windows, I thought I saw Bill step into the blurry light that came from outside. As I looked at the apparition, I stopped breathing. Bill's withered ghost was standing in front of the pane smoking a cigarette. He had his back to me—baseball cap, blue work shirt, black jeans. I walked toward him, and at the sound of my steps, the deformed shrunken Bill turned around and he was Violet. I had never seen Violet smoke. She was holding the cigarette between her thumb and index finger the way Bill used to hold his butts when there was little left but the filter. She walked toward me.

  "What time is it?" she said.

  "It's after nine."

  "Nine?" she said, as if she were trying to fix the number in her thoughts. "You shouldn't have come." She let the cigarette fall and stepped on it.

  "We were going to have dinner."

  Violet squinted at me. "Oh yes." She looked confused. "I forgot." After a few seconds, she said. "Well, you're here." She looked down at herself and stroked the sleeve of Bill's shirt with one hand. "You look worried. Don't worry. I'm all right. The day after Bill died, I came back here. I wanted to look around alone. His clothes were lying in the corner, and I found the carton of cigarettes on the desk. I put them away in the cupboard above the sink. I told Bernie that everything in there was personal, that he couldn't touch it. After Bernie was finished organizing the art, I started coming again. It's my work now—to come here and stay. One afternoon, I went to the cupboard and took out his pants and shirt and the cigarettes. At first, I just looked at them and touched them. His other clothes are still at home, but most of them are clean, and because they're clean, they're dead. These have paint on them. He worked in these clothes, and then after a while, I didn't want to just touch them anymore. It wasn't enough. I wanted his clothes on me, touching my body, and I wanted to smoke the Camels. I've been smoking one a day. It helps."

  "Violet," I said.

  She acted as if I hadn't spoken, and looked around the room. I noticed a single open box on the floor and tubes of paint lined up in rows. "I feel comforted here," she said.

  Matt's drawing of Jackie Robinson was still hanging on the wall not far from Bill's desk. I thought of asking about it, but I didn't. Violet leaned toward me and put her hand on my arm. "I was afraid he would die," she said. "I never told you or anybody else, because we're all afraid that people we love are going to die. It doesn't mean much really. But I began to think he wasn't well. He breathed too hard. He couldn't sleep. Once, he told me that he didn't like to close his eyes, because he thought that he might die in the night. After Mark stole your money, he'd sit up late and drink whiskey instead of coming to bed. I'd find him dozing on the sofa at three o'clock in the morning with the television still on. I'd pull off his shoes and his pants and cover him up out there or I'd get him into our bed." She glanced at the floor for a moment. "He was in bad shape, gloomy all the time. He talked about his father a lot. He talked about Dan's illness and how he had tried to help him, but nothing had worked. He started thinking about the child we never had together. Sometimes he said we should adopt a baby, but then he said it was too risky. He'd tried to be a good father, but he must have done it all wrong. When it was really bad, he would quote every mean sentence anybody had ever written about him. He had never seemed to care much about that stuff before, but it added up, Leo. Reviewers roughed him up pretty bad. Their spite seemed to come from the fact that there were other people who were so fanatically devoted to his work, but he forgot all the good things that had happened to him." Violet stared across the room and stroked her arm again. "Except me. He never forgot me. I would whisper in his ear, 'Come to bed now,' and he would put his hands on my face and kiss me. He was usually still a little drunk, and he'd say, 'My darling. I love you so much,' and other mushy things. The last few months were better. He seemed happy with the kids and his videotapes. I really thought the filming would keep him alive." Violet turned her head to the wall. "Every day it gets a little harder for me to go home. I just want to stay here and be with him."

  Violet took the pack of Camels out of Bill's shirt pocket. She lit a cigarette, and as she shook out the match, she said. "I'm going to have on
e more today." She blew a long stream of smoke out of her mouth. After that, we didn't speak to each other for at least a minute. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the room seemed brighter. I studied the tubes of oil paints on the floor.

  Violet broke the silence. "There's something I want you to hear. It's on the answering machine. I listened to it the same day I found the clothes." Violet walked to the desk and pressed the button on the machine several times. A girl's voice said, "M&M knows they killed me." That was all.

  For a second, I heard Bernie's voice begin another message, then Violet turned off the machine. "Bill heard it the day he died. The light wasn't blinking. He must have listened to the messages when he came in."

  "But it's nonsense."

  Violet nodded. "I know, but I think it's the same girl who called me that night about Giles. He couldn't have known that, because he didn't talk to her." She looked up at me and put her hand on mine. "They call Mark M&M, did you know that?"

  "Yes."

  Violet began to squeeze the top of my hand. She gripped it hard and I could feel her shaking.

  "Oh, Violet," I said.

  My voice seemed to break her. Her lips quivered, her knees buckled, and she fell into me. I put my arms around her as she grabbed me around my waist and pressed her cheek against my neck. I removed the baseball cap and kissed her head once, just once. While I held her shuddering body and listened to her sobs, I smelled Bill—cigarettes, turpentine, and sawdust.

  In Mark, mourning looked like deflation. His body reminded me of a squashed, airless tire that needed pumping up. He seemed unable to raise his chin or lift his hand without tremendous effort. When he wasn't working at his job as a clerk in a local bookstore, he was lying on the sofa wired to his Walkman or wandering sluggishly from one room to another, eating crackers from the box or gnawing at a Twinkie. He nibbled, munched, and gobbled all day and throughout the evening, leaving a trail of cellophane, plastic, and cardboard behind him. Dinner held little interest for him. He would pick at the meal and then leave most of the food on his plate. Violet never said a word to Mark about his eating habits. I guess she had decided that if Mark wanted to chew his way through the loss of his father, she wasn't going to stop him.

  Despite the fact that Violet didn't eat much dinner either, sharing the evening meal became a habit that lasted well into the following year. Preparing food was an important ritual that defined the day for all three of us. I bought the food and did most of the cooking. Violet chopped the vegetables, and Mark managed to keep himself upright long enough to stack the dishes in the dishwasher. After that chore was over, he would often lie on the sofa and watch television. Violet and I would sometimes join him, but after a couple of weeks the moronic sitcoms and garish dramas, which featured rapists and serial killers, began to annoy me, and I either excused myself and went downstairs or read quietly in a corner of the big room.

  From my chair I made a study of the two of them. Mark held Violet's hand or rested his head on her chest. He draped his legs over hers or curled up on the sofa close to her. If his gestures hadn't been so infantile, I might have found them unseemly, but when Mark snuggled into his stepmother, he looked like a gigantic toddler exhausted from a long day at nursery school. I interpreted his clinging to Violet as another response to Bill's death, even though I had seen him lean on both his father and Violet in much the same way earlier. When my father died, I worked hard to play the man with my mother, and after a while the performance began to seem real, and then it was real. About a year after his death, I came home from school and found my mother sitting in the living room of our apartment. She was slumped over in the chair with her hands on her face. When I walked over to her, I could see that she had been crying. Except for the day my father died, I had never heard or seen my mother weep, and when she lifted her red swollen face toward me, she looked like a stranger, as if she weren't my mother at all. Then I saw the photo album sitting beside her on a table. I asked her if she was all right. She took my hands and answered me first in German, then in English. "Sie sind alle tot. They are all dead." She reached out for me and laid her cheek just above my belt and I remember that the pressure of her head pushed the buckle into my skin and pinched me. It was an awkward embrace, but I remained standing and was relieved that she didn't cry. She hugged me very tightly for a minute or so, but during that time I felt unusually lucid, as though I had suddenly gained a commanding focus of everything in the room and everything beyond it I squeezed my mother's shoulders to make her understand that I would protect her, and when she withdrew from me, she was smiling.

  I was eighteen then, an authority on nothing and no one, a boy who could study hard but who floundered from one day to the next. Nevertheless, my mother had read my intention to be worthy of more and better, and it was all in her face—pride, sorrow, and a touch of amusement at my fit of manliness. I wondered if Mark would be able to shake off his torpor and console Violet, but the truth was, I didn't understand what lay beneath his lethargy. He was needy but not demanding, and his constant fatigue looked more like boredom than the paralysis of someone who has suffered a trauma. I sometimes wondered whether he really understood that his father wasn't coming back. It seemed possible that he had hidden that truth somewhere inside him where it wasn't available to his conscious thoughts. His face was so untouched by grief, it made me think that perhaps he had developed an immunity to very idea of mortality.

  In the weeks following the night Violet broke down in the studio, she spoke more openly about her sadness, and her body began to look less rigid. She continued to walk to the Bowery every morning, and although she didn't talk about what she did there, she told me, "I'm doing what I have to do." I felt quite sure that when she arrived at the studio, she dressed herself in Bill's clothes and smoked her daily cigarette and did whatever else it was that she did in that room to observe her husband's death. I believe that while she was away Violet mourned intensely and deliberately, but once she came home to Mark, she did her best to take care of him. She picked up after him, washed his clothes, and cleaned the apartment. In the evenings when I looked at her as she sat beside him in front of the television, I could tell she wasn't watching the show. She simply wanted to be near him. While she stroked Mark's head or arm, Violet would often turn away from the TV altogether and look off into a corner, but she rarely stopped touching him, and I began to think that despite his childish dependency, she needed him as much as he needed her, perhaps more. On a couple of occasions, they fell asleep on the sofa together. Because I knew that Violet sometimes couldn't sleep at all, I didn't wake them. I stood up quietly and left the room.

  I didn't forget that Mark had stolen my money, but after Bill died the theft seemed to belong to another era, to a time when Mark's criminal behavior took up more room inside me. The truth was that my rage had already been dissipated by Bill's suffering. He had done penance instead of Mark, had taken on the guilt as if it were his own. Through his self-flagellating atonements, Bill had managed to turn my missing $7,000 into his paternal failure. I hadn't wanted his contrition. I had wanted an apology from Mark, but he had never come to me and asked for forgiveness. He had made his weekly payments, delivered in increments of ten, twenty, or thirty dollars, but when Bill was no longer there to supervise the transaction, the money stopped coming, and I couldn't bring myself to ask for it. So when Mark showed up at my door one Friday in early August and handed me a hundred dollars, I was surprised.

  Mark didn't sit down after he gave me the bills; he leaned against my table and looked at the floor. I waited for him to say something, and after a long pause he looked up at me and said, "I'm going to pay you back every penny. I've been thinking about it a lot."

  Again he was silent, and I decided not to help him out by responding.

  "I want to do what Dad would want," he said finally. "I can't believe I'm never going to see him again. I didn't think he'd die before I changed."

  "Changed?" I said. "What are you talking about?"

/>   "I've always known that I would change. You know, do the right thing and go to college and get married and everything, that Dad would be proud of me and we could forget all the bad stuff that happened and go back to the way we used to be. I know I hurt him, and it bothers me now. I can't sleep sometimes."

  "You're always sleeping," I said.

  "Not at night. I lie in bed and think about Dad and it gets to me. He was the best thing in my life. Violet's really nice to me, but she's not like Dad. He believed in me and he knew that deep down I have a lot of good in me and it made all the difference. I thought I was going to have time to prove myself."

  Mark's eyes began to leak tears. They ran down his cheeks in two continuous clear streams. He didn't make any noise and his expression didn't change. I realized that I'd never seen anyone cry quite like that. He didn't sniffle or sob, but he produced a lot of liquid. "Dad loved me a lot," he said.