What I Loved

  "Not much."

  "You were eating crackers when I called you yesterday, Dan," Bill said, interrupting us.

  Dan smiled. "That's right. I was!" He said this happily and then stood up from the table and began to pace. With his shoulders hunched and his head lowered toward the floor, he made a curious gesture with his left hand as he walked. He turned his thumb and index finger into an O, then closed his hand into a fist, and after a second of clenching repeated the O sign again.

  Bill ignored his brother and continued his conversation with Erica and Violet. Matt and Mark sat for a few minutes longer and then jumped up from the table and began to run, announcing loudly that they were "superheroes." Dan paced. The warped floorboards creaked as he trod back and forth, back and forth. While he paced he muttered to himself and interrupted his own monologue with short bursts of laughter. Violet glanced at him repeatedly and then looked at Bill, but Bill shook his head at her, telling her not to interfere.

  When we had finished dessert, I noticed that Dan had retreated to the far end of the room and was sitting on the stool near Bill's worktable. I stood up and walked toward him. As I came closer, I heard him say, "Your brother won't let you go back to that stinking joint. Mother's old now. She just pretends to like you anyway."

  I said his name.

  The sound of my voice must have startled him, because I saw his whole body jerk to attention. "I'm sorry," he said. "I hope it's okay to be here. I had to think. I've been thinking pretty hard."

  I sat down beside him. I could smell him. Dan reeked of sweat, and there were big wet patches under the arms of his shirt. "What are you thinking about?"

  "Mystery," he said. He pulled at several hairs on his forearm and began to twist them into a small knot "I told Bill about it. It's funny, because it has two sides—male and female."

  "Does it?" I said. "In what way?"

  "It's like this—it can be Mr. Ree or Miss Tery. You see what I mean?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "They're the hero and heroine of the play I'm writing." He gave the hairs on his arm a severe wrench, lit another cigarette, and stared at the ceiling. Dan's eyes were circled with blackness, but his gaunt profile resembled Bill's, and for a moment I imagined the two of them as small boys standing in a driveway. Dan lapsed into his own thoughts and the O sign reappeared, his fingers going through the motions urgently and rapidly. He stood up and paced again. Violet interrupted us.

  "Would you like to join us at the table for a cognac?" she said.

  "Thank you, Violet," Dan said politely. "But I'd rather smoke and pace."

  After several minutes Dan did come to the table. He seated himself next to Bill, leaned close to his brother, and vigorously began to pat his shoulder. "My big bro," he said. "Big Bill, old B.B., the Big Boom Bill…"

  Bill stopped Dan's patter by putting his arm around him. "I'm glad you decided to come. It's good to have you here."

  Dan grinned hugely and took a sip from the snifter that was standing in front of him.

  An hour later, the dishes had been washed and put away. The two boys were playing with blocks near the windows while Violet, Erica, Bill, and I stood over the mattress where Dan had fallen into a dead sleep. He was curled up into a tight ball, hugging his knees as he wheezed softly with his mouth open. A broken cigarette and his lighter lay on the blanket beside him. "I probably shouldn't have let him have that brandy," Bill said. "It might have interacted with the lithium."

  Dan didn't come often to the Bowery, but I know that Bill spoke to him on the telephone regularly, sometimes every day. Poor Dan was all cracks. His life was a daily struggle to ward off a breakdown that would land him in the hospital again. Wracked by bursts of paranoia, he would call to ask Bill if he still liked him or, worse, if Bill was out to kill him. And yet despite his illness, Dan had traits that linked him to his brother. They both coursed with emotions that weren't easy to contain. In Bill that potent feeling found an exit in work. "I work to live," he once told me, and after meeting Dan I understood far better what he had meant by those words. Making art was necessary for Bill to maintain a minimal equilibrium, to keep himself going. Dan's plays and poems were mostly unfinished, the tattered products of a mind that ran in circles and could never leap out of itself. The older brother's brain and nerves and private history had given him the strength to withstand the strains of ordinary life. The younger brother's had not.

  I heard Lucille walking above us every day. She had a particular step, light with a little drag to it. When I met her on the stairs, she would always smile self-consciously before we began to talk. She never mentioned Bill or Violet, and although I always asked her about her work, she never asked me to read her poems again. At my urging, Erica invited Lucille and Mark for an early dinner that spring. She put on a dress for the occasion, an odd beige sack that was very unflattering. Although her body was hidden under it, the badly chosen dress touched me. I read it as yet another sign of her unworldiness, and rather than repelling me, I found its ugliness poignant. As she sat across the table from me that evening, I wondered at the strict composure of her pale oval face. Her restraint gave her an aura that was almost inanimate, as if by some supernatural fluke she were a painting of herself made centuries before she was born.

  That night Mark and Matt dug out their Halloween costumes and roared about the room. Mark wore a thin nylon skeleton suit, black with white bones printed on it, and Matt was a skinny midget Superman in blue pajamas with a red felt S sewed onto the chest and a cape in the same material. Matt began calling Mark "Skeley-man" and "Boney-head." After a couple of minutes, the nicknames turned into a loud chant: "Bones bones dead down." The two little boys tromped in a circle near the windows of our loft. Like two mad grave diggers, they repeated the chant over and over again: "Bones! Bones! Dead! Down!" Erica watched them, and I turned my head several times to make sure they were not working themselves up into a frenzy that would end in tears, but Lucille didn't seem to notice her son or hear the song Matt had made up for their game.

  She told us that she was considering taking a job she had been offered teaching creative writing at Rice University in Houston. "I have never been to Texas," she said. "I hope that if I take the job, I will meet a cowboy or two. I have never met one." Lucille often avoided contractions in her speech, a small tic I hadn't noticed until that dinner. She went on. "Cowboys have interested me since I was a child, not real ones, of course, but the ones I invented for myself. The real thing might disappoint me terribly."

  Lucille took that job and left for Texas with Mark in early August. By then she and Bill had been divorced for two months. Five days after the divorce was final, Bill and Violet were married. The wedding was held in the Bowery loft on June 16th, the same day Joyce's Jewish Ulysses had wandered around Dublin. A few minutes before the exchange of vows, I noted that Violet's last name, Blom, was only an o away from Bloom, and that meaningless link led me to reflect on Bill's name, Wechsler, which carries the German root for change, changing, and making change. Blooming and changing, I thought.

  Bill and Violet had wanted to be married in Paris away from family and friends. That is what they had told Regina and Violet's parents they were doing, but the romantic fancy was stymied by a tangle of French laws, and they married quickly before they left for France. The only people who actually witnessed the event were Matt and Dan and Erica and I. Mark and Lucille were on Cape Cod with her family. Regina and Al were on a cruise somewhere, and the Bloms planned a reception for the couple in Minnesota later that year.

  The six of us sweltered as the temperature rose to near a hundred degrees. The ceiling fan pushed the sultry air round and round, squeaking as it turned through the short ceremony conducted by a small bald man from the Ethical Culture Society. After saying a few words and reading "The Good-Morrow" by John Donne, he pronounced Bill and Violet husband and wife. Only minutes later, the wind rose and blew in through the windows and it rained. It rained in sheets and it thundered while we danced to tapes of
the Supremes and drank champagne. We all danced. Dan danced with Violet and Erica and with Matt and with me. He pounded the floor with his feet and let out a low rumbling laugh every now and again, before he was lured away by the desire to pace and smoke in a corner alone. Erica had dressed Matt in a blazer with a bow tie and gray pants, but he danced barefoot in nothing but his white shirt and underpants. He wiggled his hands over his head and swayed back and forth to the music. The bride and groom danced, too. Violet shimmied and kicked and threw her head back, and Bill moved with her. On a sudden impulse, he picked her up, carried her through the loft's door, out onto the landing, and then returned with her.

  "What's Uncle Bill doing to Violet?" Matt asked me.

  "He's carrying her over the threshold." I crouched down beside him to explain the symbolism of doors. Matt stared at me with wide eyes and wanted to know if I had done it to Mommy. I hadn't, and when I looked in his face, I felt my masculinity pale a little beside vigorous Uncle Bill's.

  Bill hadn't wanted Lucille to leave New York with Mark, but the more he'd insisted that she stay, the more stubborn Lucille had become, and he'd lost that first battle over his son. Bill kept the loft that had been bought with his inheritance. His truck, his savings account, the furniture he and Lucille had bought together, and three portraits of Mark disappeared in the agreement. By the time Bill and Violet returned from France, Lucille and Mark had flown off to Texas, and the loft above us had been stripped bare except for Bill's books. Violet cleaned it hard and then they moved in. But in late September, only weeks after her move to Texas, Lucille called Bill and told him that she was unable to take care of Mark and teach her classes. She put Mark on a plane and sent him home to his father. Mark landed back on Greene Street with Bill and Violet, in the same place where he had lived with his mother for a couple of years. It must have looked very different to him. Lucille was an indifferent housekeeper. Although not as slovenly as Bill, she had lived with piles of books on her floor, toys underfoot, and a large family of dust mice. Violet inhabited the new apartment with typical zeal. The largely empty rooms sparkled from her severe purgings. The day I first saw it in its new incarnation, a clear glass vase had been placed on a simple new table that Bill had built and Violet had painted a deep shade of turquoise. The vase was filled with twenty brilliant red tulips.

  By the time the hysteria pieces were up for exhibition in late October of 1983, the SoHo Erica and I had moved to in 1975 was gone. It's mostly vacant streets and quiet dumpiness had been replaced by a new sheen. One gallery after another opened—their doors stripped and freshly painted. Clothing stores popped up suddenly to display seven or eight dresses, skirts, or sweaters in huge pale rooms, as if those garments were also works of art. Bernie renovated his large, white second-floor gallery on West Broadway into a smoother, larger, whiter second-floor gallery, and as his art sales mounted, Bernie ran faster and bounced higher. Whenever I bumped into him on a corner or in a café, he rocked and jiggled and rattled on about this new artist or that one, grinning broadly about sold-out shows and rising prices. Bernie wasn't queasy about money. He embraced it with an exuberance and immodesty I couldn't help but admire. Booms and busts have come and gone in New York with rhythmical succession, but I have never felt so close to large sums of money as I did then. Those dollars pulled hordes of unfamiliar people into the neighborhood. Buses made stops on West Broadway and unloaded tourists, most of them female and most of them middle-aged. These women padded around the neighborhood in groups, visiting one gallery after another. They were usually dressed in running suits, a fashion that had the distasteful effect of making them look like aging infants. Young Europeans arrived and bought up lofts. After decorating their new digs according to the minimal fashion of the time, they headed for the streets and restaurants and galleries, where they loitered for hours, as shiftless as they were well-dressed.

  Art is mysterious, but selling art may be even more mysterious. The object itself is bought and sold, handed from one person to another, and yet countless factors are at work within the transaction. In order to grow in value, a work of art requires a particular psychological climate. At that moment, SoHo provided exactly the right amount of mental heat for art to thrive and for prices to soar. Expensive work from every period must be impregnated by the intangible—an idea of worth. This idea has the paradoxical effect of detaching the name of the artist from the thing, and the name becomes the commodity that is bought and sold. The object merely trails after the name as its solid proof. Of course, the artist himself or herself has little to do with any of it. But in those years, whenever I went for groceries or stood in line at the post office, I heard the names. Schnabel, Salle, Fischl, Sherman were magic words then, like the ones in the fairy tales I read to Matt every night. They opened sealed doors and filled empty pouches with gold. The name Wechsler wasn't fated for full-blown enchantment then, but after Bernie's show, it was whispered here and there, and I sensed that slowly Bill too might lose his name to the strange weather that hung over SoHo for a number of years before it stopped, suddenly, on another October day in 1987.

  In August, Erica and I were invited to look at three of the finished hysteria pieces on the Bowery. Dozens of smaller works on the same theme, paintings, drawings, and little constructions, were still under way. When we entered the room, I saw three huge shallow boxes—each ten feet high, seven feet wide, and a foot deep—standing in the middle of the room. Canvas had been stretched across their frames, and the material glowed, lit by electric lights sealed inside the boxes. At first, all I noticed were their surfaces: hallways, stairs, windows, and doors painted in muted colors—browns, ochers, deep greens, and blues. Steps led to a ceiling with no access to another floor. Windows opened onto brick walls. Doors lay on their sides or were tilted at impossible angles. A fire escape seemed to crawl through a hole from a painted outside to a painted inside, bringing a long cluster of ivy with it.

  A covering that reminded me of Saran Wrap was pulled tightly over the fronts of the three painted boxes. Texts and images had been impressed into the plastic, leaving an imprint but no color. The effect of these words and pictures was more subliminal than anything else, because they were hard to make out. Near the bottom of the right-hand corner of the third box was a three-dimensional man, about six inches tall, dressed in a top hat and a long coat. He was pushing on a door that appeared to be ajar. Looking closer, I saw that the door was real. It opened on a hinge, and through the crack I could see a street that looked like ours—Greene Street between Canal and Grand.

  Erica found a door in the first box and opened it. Drawing close to her, I peeked into a small room, harshly lit by a miniature ceiling lamp that shone on an old black-and-white photograph that had been pasted to the far wall. It showed a woman's head and torso from behind. The word SATAN had been written in large letters on the skin between her shoulder blades. In front of the photo was the image of another woman kneeling on the ground. She had been painted on heavy canvas and then cut out. For her exposed back and arms, Bill had used pearly, idealized flesh tones reminiscent of Titian. The nightgown she had pulled down over her shoulders was the palest of blues. The third figure in the room was a man, a small wax sculpture. He stood over the cutout woman with a pointer, like the ones used in geography classes, and seemed to be tracing something onto her skin—a crude landscape of a tree, a house, and a cloud.

  Erica withdrew her head and said to Violet, "Dermagraphism."

  "Yes, they wrote on them," Bill said to me. "The doctors traced their bodies with a blunt instrument and the words or pictures would appear on their skin. Then they took photographs of the writing."

  Bill opened another door, and I looked into a second room in the same box. Its back wall was covered with the painted image of a woman looking out a window. Her long dark hair had been pulled to one side to bare her shoulders. The style of the painting was straight from seventeenth-century Holland, but Bill had complicated the image by lightly drawing over it in black. The draw
ing was of the same woman, but the style of the rendering was different, and the sketch on top of the painting made me feel that the woman was standing with her own ghost. Written twice on her arm, once with red paint and once with black crayon, was: T. BARTHÉLÉMY. The letters appeared to be bleeding.

  "Didi-Huberman mentions Barthélémy," Violet said. "He was a doctor somewhere in France who wrote his name on a woman, and then commanded her to bleed from the letters at four o'clock the same afternoon. She bled, and according to the report, the name remained visible for three months." I continued to look into the small illuminated room. On the floor in front of the painting of Augustine were tiny articles of clothing—a petticoat, a miniature corset, stockings and tiny boots.

  Violet pulled open a third door. This all-white room was lit from above by a small electric chandelier. A tiny painting in an ornate gold frame had been propped against the back wall. The canvas showed a fully dressed man and a naked woman in what appeared to be a hallway. You couldn't see the woman's face, but her body reminded me of Violet's. She was lying on the floor as the young man straddled her back. Gripping a large pen in his left hand, he appeared to be writing vigorously on one of her buttocks.

  The middle box had two doors. Behind the first was a small doll who made me think of Goldilocks—long blond curls, checkered dress, and white pinafore. The little figure was having a tantrum. Her eyes were screwed shut and her mouth was stretched wide in a silent scream as she clamped her arms around a pole that divided the little room in half. In her fit she had contorted her body to one side so that her dress had twisted up around her waist, and when I scrutinized her little face more closely, I saw that a long bloody scratch ran down one of her cheeks. On the walls that surrounded her, Bill had painted ten shadowy male figures in black and white. Each man was holding a book and had turned his gray eyes toward the howling girl.