What I Loved

ONE

YESTERDAY, I FOUND VIOLET'S LETTERS TO BILL. THEY WERE hidden between the pages of one of his books and came tumbling out and fell to the floor. I had known about the letters for years, but neither Bill nor Violet had ever told me what was in them. What they did tell me was that minutes after reading the fifth and last letter, Bill changed his mind about his marriage to Lucille, walked out the door of the building on Greene Street, and headed straight for Violet's apartment in the East Village. When I held the letters in my hands, I felt they had the uncanny weight of things enchanted by stories that are told and retold and then told again. My eyes are bad now, and it took me a long time to read them, but in the end I managed to make out every word. When I put the letters down, I knew that I would start writing this book today.

"While I was lying on the floor in the studio," she wrote in the fourth letter, "I watched you while you painted me. I looked at your arms and your shoulders and especially at your hands while you worked on the canvas. I wanted you to turn around and walk over to me and rub my skin the way you rubbed the painting. I wanted you to press hard on me with your thumb the way you pressed on the picture, and I thought that if you didn't, I would go crazy, but I didn't go crazy, and you never touched me then, not once. You didn't even shake my hand."

I first saw the painting Violet was writing about twenty-five years ago in a gallery on Prince Street in SoHo. I didn't know either Bill or Violet at the time. Most of the canvases in the group show were thin minimalist works that didn't interest me. Bill's painting hung alone on a wall. It was a large picture, about six feet high and eight feet long, that showed a young woman lying on the floor in an empty room. She was propped up on one elbow, and she seemed to be looking at something beyond the edge of the painting. Brilliant light streamed into the room from that side of the canvas and illuminated her face and chest. Her right hand was resting on her pubic bone, and when I moved closer, I saw that she was holding a little taxi in that hand—a miniature version of the ubiquitous yellow cab that moves up and down the streets of New York.

It took me about a minute to understand that there were actually three people in the painting. Far to my right, on the dark side of the canvas, I noticed that a woman was leaving the picture. Only her foot and ankle could be seen inside the frame, but the loafer she was wearing had been rendered with excruciating care, and once I had seen it, I kept looking back at it. The invisible woman became as important as the one who dominated the canvas. The third person was only a shadow. For a moment I mistook the shadow for my own, but then I understood that the artist had included it in the work. The beautiful woman, who was wearing only a man's T-shirt, was being looked at by someone outside the painting, a spectator who seemed to be standing just where I was standing when I noticed the darkness that fell over her belly and her thighs.

To the right of the canvas I read the small typed card: Self-Portrait by William Wechsler. At first I thought the artist was joking, but then I changed my mind. Did that title next to a man's name suggest a feminine part of himself or a trio of selves? Maybe the oblique narrative of two women and a viewer referred directly to the artist, or maybe the title didn't refer to the content of the picture at all, but to its form. The hand that had painted the picture hid itself in some parts of the painting and made itself known in others. It disappeared in the photographic illusion of the woman's face, in the light that came from the invisible window, and in the hyperrealism of the loafer. The woman's long hair, however, was a tangle of heavy paint with forceful dabs of red, green, and blue. Around the shoe and the ankle above it, I noticed thick stripes of black, gray, and white that may have been applied with a knife, and in those dense strokes of pigment I could see the marks left by a man's thumb. It looked as if his gesture had been sudden, even violent.

That painting is here in the room with me. When I turn my head I can see it, although it too has been altered by my failing eyesight. I bought it from the dealer for $2,500 about a week after I saw it. Erica was standing only a few feet away from where I am sitting now when she first looked at the canvas. She examined it calmly and said, "It's like looking at another person's dream, isn't it?"

When I turned to the picture after Erica spoke, I saw that its mixed styles and shifting focus did remind me of the distortions in dreams. The woman's lips were parted, and her two front teeth protruded slightly. The artist had made them shiny white and a little too long, almost like an animal's. It was then that I noticed a bruise just below her knee. I had seen it before, but at that moment its purple cast, which was yellow- green at one edge, pulled my eyes toward it, as if this little wound were really the subject of the painting. I walked over, put my finger on the canvas, and traced the outline of the bruise. The gesture aroused me. I turned to look at Erica. It was a warm September day, and her arms were bare. I bent over her and kissed the freckles on her shoulders, then lifted the hair off her neck and kissed the soft skin underneath it. Kneeling in front of her, I pushed up the material of her skirt, ran my fingers along her thighs, and then I used my tongue. Her knees bent slightly toward me. She pulled down her underpants, tossed them onto the sofa with a grin, and pushed me gently backward onto the floor. Erica straddled me and her hair fell forward onto my face as she kissed me. Then she sat back, pulled off her T-shirt, and removed her bra. I loved that view of my wife. I touched her breasts and let my finger circle a perfectly round mole on the left one, before she leaned over me again. She kissed my forehead and cheeks and chin and then began fumbling with the zipper of my pants.

In those days, Erica and I lived in a state of almost constant sexual excitement. Just about anything could spark off a session of wild grappling on the bed, the floor, and, once, on the dining room table. Since high school, girlfriends had come and gone in my life. I had had brief affairs and longer ones, but always there had been gaps between them— painful stretches of no women and no sex. Erica said that suffering had made me a better lover—that I didn't take a woman's body for granted. On that afternoon, however, we made love because of the painting. I have often wondered since why the image of a sore on a woman's body should have been erotic to me. Later, Erica said that she thought my response had something to do with a desire to leave a mark on another person's body. "Skin is soft," she said. "We're easily cut and bruised. It's not like she looks beaten or anything. It's an ordinary little black-and-blue mark, but the way it's painted makes it stick out. It's like he loved doing it, like he wanted to make a little wound that would last forever."

Erica was thirty-four years old then. I was eleven years older than that, and we had been married for a year. We'd literally bumped into each other in Butler Library at Columbia. It was late on a Saturday morning in October, and the stacks were mostly empty. I had heard her steps, had felt her presence behind the dim rows of books illuminated by a timed light that gave off a low humming sound. I found the book I was looking for and walked toward the elevator. Except for the lamp, I heard nothing. I turned the corner and tripped over Erica, who had seated herself on the floor at the end of the stack. I managed to keep my footing, but my glasses sailed off my face. She picked them up, and as I bent over to take them from her, she began to stand up and her head knocked against my chin. When she looked at me, she was smiling: "A few more like that, and we might have something going—a regular slapstick routine."

I had fallen over a pretty woman. She had a wide mouth and thick dark hair cropped to her chin. The narrow skirt she was wearing had moved up her legs in our collision, and I glanced at her thighs as she tugged at her hem. After adjusting her skirt, she looked up at me and smiled again. During the second smile, her bottom lip quivered for an instant, and I took that small sign of nervousness or embarrassment to mean that she was susceptible to an invitation. Without it, I'm quite sure I would have apologized again and walked away. But that momentary tremor in her lip, gone in a moment, exposed a softness in her character and offered me a glimpse of what I guessed was her carefully guarded sensuality. I asked her to have coffee with me. Coffee turned into lunch, and lunch into dinner, and the following morning I was lying next to Erica Stein in the bed of my old apartment on Riverside Drive. She was still sleeping. The light came through the window and illuminated her face and hair. Very carefully I put my hand on her head. I left it there for several minutes while I looked at her and hoped she would stay.

By then we had talked for hours. It turned out that Erica and I came from the same world. Her parents were German Jews who left Berlin as teenagers in 1933. Her father became a prominent psychoanalyst and her mother a voice teacher at Juilliard. The Steins were both dead. They died within months of each other the year before I met Erica, which was the same year my mother died: 1973. I was born in Berlin and lived there for five years. My memories of that city are fragmentary, and some may be false, images and stories I shaped from what my mother told me about my early life. Erica was born on the Upper West Side, where I ended up after spending three years in a Hampstead flat in London. It was Erica who prompted me to leave the West Side and my comfortable Columbia apartment. Before we married, she told me she wanted to "emigrate." When I asked her what she meant, she said that it was time for her to sell her parents' apartment on West Eighty-second Street and take the long subway ride downtown. "I smell death up here," she said, "and antiseptic and hospitals and stale Sacher torte. I have to move." Erica and I left the familiar ground of our childhoods and staked out new turf among the artists and bohemians farther south. We used the money we had inherited from our parents and moved to a loft on Greene Street between Canal and Grand.

The new neighborhood with its empty streets, low buildings, and young tenants freed me from bonds I had never thought of as constraints. My father died in 1947, when he was only forty-three years old, but my mother lived on. I was their only child, and after my father was gone, my mother and I shared his ghost. My mother grew old and arthritic, but my father remained young and brilliant and promising—a doctor who might have done anything. That anything became everything for my mother. For twenty-six years she lived in the same apartment on Eighty-fourth Street between Broadway and Riverside with my father's missing future. Every once in a while, when I was first teaching, a student would refer to me as "Dr. Hertzberg" rather than "Professor," and I would inevitably think of my father. Living in SoHo didn't erase my past or induce forgetfulness, but when I turned a corner or crossed a street, there were no reminders of my displaced childhood and youth. Erica and I were both the children of exiles from a world that has disappeared. Our parents were assimilated middle-class Jews for whom Judaism was a religion their great-grandparents had practiced. Before 1933 they had thought of themselves as "Jewish Germans," a phrase that no longer exists in any language.

When we met, Erica was an assistant professor in English at Rutgers, and I had already been teaching at Columbia in the art history department for twelve years. My degree came from Harvard, hers from Columbia, which explained why she was wandering in the stacks that Saturday morning with an alumni pass. I had fallen in love before, but in almost every case I had arrived at a moment of fatigue and boredom. Erica never bored me. She sometimes irritated and exasperated me, but she never bored me. Erica's comment about Bill's self-portrait was typical of her—simple, direct, and penetrating. I never condescended to Erica.

I had walked past 89 Bowery many times without ever stopping to look at it. The run-down, four-story brick building between Hester and Canal had never been more than the humble quarters of a wholesale business, but those days of modest respectability were long over by the time I arrived to visit William Wechsler. The windows of what had once been a storefront were boarded up, and the heavy metal door at street level was gouged and dented, as if somebody had attacked it with a hammer. A man with a beard and a drink in a paper bag was lounging on the single front step. He grunted in my direction when I asked him to move and then half-rolled, half-slid off the step.

My first impressions of people are often clouded by what I come to know about them later, but in Bill's case, at least one aspect of those first seconds remained throughout our friendship. Bill had glamour—that mysterious quality of attraction that seduces strangers. When he met me at the door, he looked almost as disheveled as the man on the front step. He had a two-day beard. His thick black hair bushed out from the top and sides of his head, and his clothes were covered with dirt as well as paint And yet when he looked at me, I found myself pulled toward him. His complexion was very dark for a white man, and his clear green eyes had an Asiatic tilt to them. He had a square jaw and chin, broad shoulders, and powerful arms. At six-two, he seemed to tower over me even though I couldn't have been more than a few inches shorter. I later decided that his almost magical appeal had something to do with his eyes. When he looked at me, he did so directly and without embarrassment, but at the same time I sensed his inwardness, his distraction. Although his curiosity about me seemed genuine, I also felt that he didn't want a thing from me. Bill gave off an air of autonomy so complete, it was irresistible.

"I took it for the light," he said to me when we walked through the door of the loft space on the fourth floor. Three long windows at the far end of the single room were shining with the afternoon sun. The building had sagged, which meant the back of the place was considerably lower than the front. The floor had warped as well, and as I looked toward the windows, I noticed bulges in the boards like shallow waves on a lake. The high end of the loft was spare, furnished only with a stool, a table constructed from two sawhorses and an old door, and stereo equipment, surrounded by hundreds of records and tapes in plastic milk crates. Rows of canvases had been stacked against the wall. The room smelled strongly of paint, turpentine, and must.

All the necessities for daily life had been crowded into the low end. A table knocked up against an old claw-foot bathtub. A double bed had been placed near a table, not far from a sink, and the stove protruded from an opening in an enormous bookcase crammed with books. There were also books piled in stacks on the floor beside it, and dozens more on an armchair that looked as if it hadn't been sat on in years. The chaos of the loft's living quarters revealed not only Bill's poverty but his obliviousness to the objects of domestic life. Time would make him richer, but his indifference to things never changed. He remained curiously unattached to the places where he lived and blind to the details of their arrangements.

Even on that first day, I felt Bill's asceticism, his almost brutal desire for purity and his resistance to compromise. The feeling came both from what he said and from his physical presence. He was calm, soft-spoken, a little restrained in his movements, and yet an intensity of purpose emanated from him and seemed to fill up the room. Unlike other large personalities, Bill wasn't loud or arrogant or uncommonly charming. Nevertheless, when I stood next to him and looked at the paintings, I felt like a dwarf who had just been introduced to a giant. The feeling made my comments sharper and more thoughtful. I was fighting for space.

He showed me six paintings that afternoon. Three were finished. The three others had just been started—sketchy lines and large fields of color. My canvas belonged to the same series, which were all of the dark- haired young woman, but from one work to another, the woman's size fluctuated. In the first painting, she was obese, a mountain of pale flesh in tight nylon shorts and a T-shirt—an image of gluttony and abandon so huge that her body appeared to have been squeezed into the frame. She was clutching a baby's rattle in her fat fist. A man's elongated shadow fell across her right breast and huge belly and then dwindled to a mere line at her hips. In the second, the woman was much thinner. She was lying on a mattress in her underwear looking down at her own body with an expression that seemed to be at once autoerotic and self-critical. She was gripping a large fountain pen in her hand, about twice the size of a normal pen. In the third picture, the woman had gained a few pounds, but she wasn't as plump as the person in the canvas I had bought She was wearing a ragged flannel nightgown and sitting on the edge of the bed, her thighs casually parted. A pair of red knee socks lay at her feet. When I looked at her legs, I noticed that just below her knees were faint red lines left by the elastic of the socks.

"It reminds me of Jan Steen's painting of the woman at her morning toilet, taking off her sock," I said. "The small painting in the Rijksmuseum."

Bill smiled at me for the first time. "I saw that painting in Amsterdam when I was twenty-three, and it got me thinking about skin. I'm not interested in nudes. They're too arty, but I'm really interested in skin."

For a while we talked about skin in paintings. I mentioned the beautiful red stigmata on the hand of Zurbaran's Saint Francis. Bill talked about the skin color of Grünewald's dead Christ and the rosy skin of Boucher's nudes, whom he referred to as "soft porn ladies." We discussed the changing conventions of crucifixions and pietàs and depositions. I said Pontormo's Mannerism had always interested me, and Bill brought up R. Crumb. "I love his rawness," he said. "The ugly courage of his work." I asked him about George Grosz, and Bill nodded.

"A relative," he said. "The two are definitely artistic relatives. Did you ever see Crumb's series Tales from the Land of Genitalia? Penises running around in boots."

"Like Gogol's nose," I said.

Bill showed me medical drawings then, a field I knew little about. He pulled out dozens of books from his shelves with illustrations from different periods—diagrams of medieval humors, eighteenth-century anatomical pictures, a nineteenth-century picture of a man's head with phrenological bumps, and one from around the same time of female genitalia. The latter was a curious drawing of the view between a woman's splayed thighs. We stood beside each other and stared down at the detailed rendering of vulva, clitoris, labia, and the small blackened hole of a vaginal entrance. The lines were harsh and exacting.

"It looks like a diagram for machinery," I said.

"Yes," he said. "I never thought of that." He looked down at the picture. "It's a mean picture. Everything is in the right place, but it's a nasty cartoon. Of course the artist thought it was science."

"I don't think anything is ever just science," I said.

He nodded. "That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt" He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we're sure of."

"Is that why you've made your woman fat and thin and in between?" I said.

"To be honest, it was more of an urge than an idea."

"And the mixture of styles?" I said.

Bill walked to the window and lit a cigarette. He inhaled and let the ash drop on the floor. He looked up at me. His large eyes were so penetrating, I wanted to turn away from them, but I didn't. "I'm thirty-one years old, and you're the first person who ever bought one of my paintings, unless you count my mother. I've been working for ten years. Dealers have rejected the work hundreds of times."

"De Kooning didn't have his first show until he was forty," I said.

"You misunderstand me," he said, speaking slowly. "I don't ask that anyone be interested. Why should they be interested? I'm wondering why you are interested."

I told him. We sat down on the floor with the paintings in front of us, and I said that I liked ambiguity, that I liked not knowing where to look on his canvases, that a lot of modern figurative painting bored me, but his pictures didn't. We talked about de Kooning, especially one small work that Bill had found inspiring, Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother. We talked about Hopper's strangeness, and about Duchamp. Bill called him "the knife that cut art to pieces." I thought he meant this in a derogatory way, but then he added, "He was a great con artist. I love him."

When I pointed out the razor stubble he had included on the thin woman's legs, he said that when he was with another person, his eyes were often drawn to a angle detail—a chipped tooth, a Band-Aid on a finger, a vein, a cut, a rash, a mole, and that for a moment the isolated feature took over his vision, and he wanted to reproduce those seconds in his work. "Seeing is flux," he said. I mentioned the hidden narratives in his work, and he said that for him stories were like blood running through a body—paths of a life. It was a revealing metaphor, and I never forgot it. As an artist, Bill was hunting the unseen in the seen. The paradox was that he had chosen to present this invisible movement in figurative painting, which is nothing if not a frozen apparition—a surface.

Bill told me that he had grown up in the New Jersey suburbs, where his father had started a cardboard-box business and eventually made a success of it. His mother volunteered for Jewish charities, was a den mother for the Cub Scouts, and had later gotten a real estate license. Neither of his parents had gone to college, and there were few books in the house. I imagined the green lawns and quiet houses of South Orange—bicycles in driveways, the street signs, the two-car garages. "I was good at drawing," he said, "but for a long time baseball was much more important to me than art."

I told him that I had suffered through sports at the Fieldston School. I was thin and nearsighted and had stood in the outfield and hoped that nobody would hit the ball in my direction. "Any sport that required a utensil was impossible for me," I said. "I could run and I could swim, but put something in my hand and I dropped it."

In high school, Bill began his pilgrimages to the Met, to MoMA, to the Frick, to galleries, and, as he put it, "to the streets." "I liked the streets as much as museums, and I spent hours in the city wandering around, inhaling the garbage." When he was a junior, his parents divorced. That same year he quit the cross-country team, the basketball team, the baseball team. "I stopped working out," he said. "I got thin." Bill went to college at Yale, took studio art, art history, and literature courses. That was where he met Lucille Alcott, whose father was a professor at the law school. "We were married three years ago," he said. I found myself looking for traces left by a woman in the loft, but I saw nothing. "Is she at work?" I said to him.

"She's a poet. She rents a little room a couple of blocks from here. That's where she writes. She's also a freelance copy editor. She copy-edits. I paint and plaster for contractors. We get by."

A sympathetic doctor saved Bill from Vietnam. Throughout his childhood and youth he had suffered from severe allergies. When they were bad his face swelled up and he sneezed so hard he got a neckache. Before he reported to the draft board in Newark, the physician added the phrase "with a tendency toward asthma" to the word "allergies." A couple of years later, a tendency might not have earned Bill 1-Y status, but this was 1966 and the full force of Vietnam resistance was still in the future. After college, he spent a year working as a bartender in New Jersey. He lived with his mother, saved all his earnings, and traveled in Europe for two years. He moved from Rome to Amsterdam to Paris. To keep himself going, he took odd jobs. He worked as a desk clerk for an English magazine in Amsterdam, a tour guide of the catacombs in Rome, and a reader of English novels for an old man in Paris. "When I read to him, I had to lie on the sofa. He was very particular about my position. I had to take off my shoes. It was important to him that he had a clear view of my socks. The money was good, and I put up with it for a week. Then I quit. I took my three hundred francs and left. It was all the money I had in the world. I walked into the street. It was about eleven at night, and there was this wasted old man standing on the sidewalk with his hand out. I gave the money to him."

"Why?" I said.

Bill turned to me. "I don't know. I felt like it. It was stupid, but I never regretted it. It made me feel free. I didn't eat for two days."

"An act of bravado," I said.

He turned to me and said, "Of independence."

"Where was Lucille?"

"She was living in New Haven with her parents. She wasn't very well then. We wrote to each other."

I didn't ask about Lucille's illness. When he mentioned it, he looked away from me, and I saw his eyes narrow in an expression of pain.

I changed the subject. "Why did you call the painting I bought a self-portrait?"

"They're all self-portraits," he said. "While I was working with Violet, I realized that I was mapping out a territory in myself I hadn't seen before, or maybe a territory between her and me. The title popped into my head, and I used it. Self-portrait seemed right."

"Who is she?" I said.

"Violet Blom. She's a graduate student at NYU. She gave me that drawing I showed you—the one that looks like machinery."

"What's she studying?"

"History. She's writing about hysteria in France at the turn of the century." Bill lit another cigarette and glanced at the ceiling. "She's a very smart girl—unusual." He blew the smoke up, and I watched its faint circles combine with specks of dust in the window light.

"I don't think most men would portray themselves as a woman. You borrowed her to show yourself. What does she think?"

He laughed for an instant and then said, "She likes it. She says it's subversive, especially because I like women, not men."

"And the shadows?" I asked him.

"They're mine, too."

"Too bad," I said. "I thought they were mine."

Bill looked at me. "They can be yours, too." He gripped my lower arm with his hand and shook it. This sudden gesture of camaraderie, even affection, made me unusually happy. I have thought about it often, because that small exchange about shadows altered the course of my life. It marks the moment when a meandering conversation between two men took an irrevocable turn toward friendship.

"She floated through the dance," Bill said to me a week later over coffee. "She didn't seem to know how pretty she was. I chased her for years. It was on again and off again. Something kept bringing me back." Bill made no mention of Lucille's illness in the following weeks, but the way he talked about her led me to think she was frail, a woman who needed protection from something he had chosen not to talk about.

The first time I saw Lucille Alcott, she was standing in the doorway of the Bowery loft, and I thought she looked like a woman in a Flemish painting. She had pale skin, light brown hair, which she had tied back, and large, almost lashless blue eyes. Erica and I had been invited to have dinner on the Bowery. It was raining that November night, and while we ate we heard the rain on the roof above us. Somebody had swept the floor of dust and ashes and cigarette butts for our visit, and somebody had put a large white cloth over Bill's worktable and set eight candles on top of it. Lucille took credit for cooking the meal, a tasteless brown concoction of unrecognizable vegetables. When Erica politely inquired after the name of the dish, Lucille looked down at her plate and said in perfect French, "Flageolets aux légumes." She paused, raised her eyes, and smiled. "But the flageolets seem to be traveling incognito." After stopping for a second, she continued, "I would like to cook more attentively. It called for parsley." She peered down at her plate. "I left out the parsley. Bill would prefer meat. He ate a lot of meat before, but he knows that I don't cook meat, because I have convinced myself that it is not good for us. I don't understand what it is about recipes. I am very particular when I write. I am always worrying about verbs."

"Her verbs are terrific," Bill said and poured Erica more wine.

Lucille looked at her husband and smiled a little stiffly. I didn't understand the uneasiness of the smile, because Bill's comment had been made without irony. He had told me several times how much he admired her poems and had promised to give me copies of them.

Behind Lucille, I could see the obese portrait of Violet Blom and wondered if Bill's craving for meat had been translated into that huge female body, but later my theory was proven wrong. When we had lunch together, I often saw Bill chewing happily on corned-beef sandwiches, hamburgers, and BLTs.

"I make rules for myself," Lucille said about her poems. "Not the usual rules of metrics, but an anatomy I choose, and then I dissect it."

Numbers are helpful. They're clear, irrefutable. Some of the lines are numbered." Everything Lucille said was characterized by a similarly rigid bluntness. She seemed to make no concessions to decorous conversation or small talk. At the same time, underneath nearly every remark she made, I felt a strain of humor. She talked as if she were observing her own sentences, looking at them from afar, judging their sounds and shapes even as they came from her mouth. Every word she spoke rang with honesty, and yet this earnestness was matched by a simultaneous irony. Lucille amused herself by occupying two positions at once. She was both the subject and object of her own statements.

I don't think Erica heard Lucille's comment about rules. She was talking about novels with Bill. I can't imagine that Bill had heard it either, but during the discussion between them, rules came up again. Erica leaned toward Bill and smiled. "So you agree, the novel is a bag that can hold anything."

"Tristram Shandy, chapter four, on Horace's ab ovo," Bill said, pointing his index finger at the ceiling. He began to quote, as if he were hearing an inaudible voice somewhere to his right. "'Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: but that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy—(I forgot which);—besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;—for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived.'" Bill's voice rose on the final clause, and Erica threw back her head and laughed. They meandered from Henry James to Samuel Beckett to Louis-Ferdinand Céline as Erica discovered for herself that Bill was a voracious reader of novels. It launched a friendship between them that had little to do with me. By the time our dessert arrived—a weary-looking fruit salad—Erica was inviting him to Rutgers to speak to her students. Bill hesitated at first, and then agreed.

Erica was too polite to ignore Lucille, who was sitting beside her, and some time after she asked Bill to visit one of her classes, she focused all her attention on Lucille. My wife nodded at Lucille when she listened, and when she talked her face was a map of shifting emotions and thoughts. In contrast, Lucille's composed face betrayed almost no feeling. As the evening went on, her peculiar remarks gained a kind of philosophical rhythm, the clipped tone of a tortured logic, which reminded me a little of reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus. When Erica told Lucille she knew of her father by reputation, Lucille said, "Yes, his reputation as a law professor is very good." After a moment, she added, "I would have liked to study law, but I couldn't. I used to try to read my father's law books in his library. I was eleven. I knew that one sentence led to another, but by the time I got to the second sentence, I had forgotten the first, and then during the third, I forgot the second."

"You were only eleven," Erica said.

"No," she said. "It was not my age. I still forget."

"Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs."

"But if we've forgotten," Lucille said, turning to me, "we don't always remember that we forgot, so that to remember that we forgot is not exactly forgetting, is it?"

I smiled at her and said, "I'm looking forward to reading your work. Bill's talked about it with a lot of admiration."

Bill lifted his glass. "To our work," he said loudly. "To letters and to paint." He had let himself go and I could see he was a little drunk. His voice cracked on the word "paint." I found his high spirits endearing, but when I turned to Lucille with my glass lifted for the toast, she smiled that tense, forced smile a second time. It was hard to tell whether her husband had brought on that expression or whether it was merely the result of her own inhibition.

Before we left, Lucille handed me two small magazines in which her work had appeared. When I shook her hand, she took mine limply. I squeezed her palm in return, and she didn't seem to mind. Bill hugged me good-bye, and he hugged and kissed Erica. His eyes were shiny with wine, and he smelled of cigarettes. In the doorway, he put his arm around Lucille's shoulder and pulled her close to him. Next to her husband, she looked very small and very self-conscious.

It was still raining when we stepped outside onto the Bowery.

After I put up our umbrella, Erica turned to me and said, "Did you notice that she was wearing the loafers?"

"What are you talking about?" I said.

"Lucille was wearing the shoes, or rather the shoe, in our painting. She's the woman walking away."

I looked at Erica, absorbing her statement. "I guess I didn't look at her feet."

"I'm surprised. You looked pretty closely at the rest of her." Erica grinned, and I saw that she was teasing me. "Don't you find that evocative about the shoe, Leo? And then there's the other woman. Every time I looked up, I saw her—that skinny girl looking down at her underpants, a little greedy and excited. She looked so alive, I felt like they should have set a place for her at the table."

I pulled Erica toward me with my free hand, and holding the umbrella over us, I kissed her. After the kiss, she put her arm around my waist and we walked toward Canal Street. "Well," she said, "I wonder what her work is like."

All three of the poems Lucille had published were similar—works of obsessive, analytic scrutiny that hovered somewhere between the funny and the sad. I remember only four lines from those poems, because they were unusually poignant, and I repeated them to myself. "A woman sits by the window. She thinks / And while she thinks, she despairs / She despairs because she is who she is / And not somebody else."

The doctors tell me that it won't come to blindness. I have a condition called macular degeneration—clouds in my eyes. I have been nearsighted since I was eight years old. Blur is nothing new to me, but with glasses I used to see everything perfectly. I still have my peripheral vision, but directly in front of me there is always a ragged gray spot, and it's growing thicker. My pictures of the past are still vivid. It's the present that's been affected, and those people who were in my past and whom I still see have turned into beings blotted by clouds. This truth startled me in the beginning, but I have discovered from fellow patients and from my doctors that what I have experienced is perfectly normal. Lazlo Finkelman, for example, who comes several times a week to read to me, has lost some definition, and neither my memory of him from before my eyes dimmed nor my peripheral vision is enough to sustain a clear picture. I can say what Lazlo looks like, because I remember the words I used to describe him to myself—narrow pale face, tall bush of blond hair that stands straight up at attention, black glasses with large frames over small gray eyes. But when I look straight at him now, his face won't come into focus, and the words I once used are left hanging. The person they are meant to delineate is a clouded version of an earlier picture I can no longer bring fully to mind, because my eyes are too tired to be always peeking at him from the side. More and more, I rely on Lazlo's voice. But in his even, quiet tone as he reads to me, I have found new sides to his cryptic personality—resonances of feeling that I never saw on his face.

Even though my eyes have been crucial to my work, poor vision is preferable to senility. I can't see well enough anymore to wander through galleries or return to museums to look at works I know by heart. Nevertheless, I keep a catalogue in my mind of remembered paintings, and I can leaf through it and usually find the work I need. In class, I have given up using a pointer for slides, and refer to details instead of pointing at them. My remedy for insomnia these days is to search for the mental image of a painting and work to see it again as clearly as possible. Lately, I've been calling up Piero della Francesca. Over forty years ago, I wrote my dissertation on his De prospectiva pingendi, and by concentrating on the rigorous geometries of his paintings I once analyzed so closely, I fend off other pictures that rise up to torment me and keep me awake. I shut out noises from the street and the intruder I imagine is lurking on the fire escape outside my room. The technique has been working. Last night, the Urbino panels began to melt into my own semisleep dreams, and soon after, I lost consciousness.

For some time, I have had to struggle to ward off dread when I he alone and try to sleep. My mind is large, but my body feels smaller than it once did, as though I am steadily shrinking. My fantasy of reduction is probably connected to growing older and more vulnerable. The circle of a lifetime has begun to close, and I've been thinking more often about my early childhood—what I can remember from Mommsenstrasse 11 in Berlin. It isn't that I recall every part of the apartment where we lived, but I can still take the mental walk up two flights of stairs and past the window with etched glass to our door. Once inside, I know that my father's office is to the left and the parlor rooms lie ahead of me. Although I have retained only a few details of the apartment's furniture and objects, I have a general memory of its spaces—of its large rooms, high ceilings, and changing light. My room was located down a small corridor off the apartment's biggest room. That was where my father played the cello on the third Thursday of every month with three other musical doctors, and I remember that my mother would open the door to my room so that I could hear them play while I was lying in bed. I can still walk through the door of my room and climb up onto the window casement. I climb, because in memory I am as tall as I was then. Below I can see the courtyard at night, detect the lines of the paving bricks and the blackness of the bushes. When I take this walk, the apartment is always empty. I move through it like a phantom, and I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

Cicero's speaker walked through spacious, well-lit rooms he remembered and dropped words onto tables and chairs where they could be easily retrieved. No doubt I have assigned a vocabulary to the architecture of my first five years—one mediated through the mind of a man who knows the horror that would arrive after the little boy was gone from the apartment. During the last year we were in Berlin, my mother left a light burning in the hallway to calm me before I slept. I had nightmares, and I would wake to a strangling fear and the sound of my own screaming. Nervös was the word my father used—Dos Kind ist nervös. My parents didn't speak to me about the Nazis, only about our preparations to leave home, and it's hard to know to what degree my childish fears were related to the fear that every Jew in Germany must have felt at the time. The way my mother told it was that she was taken by surprise. A party whose views had seemed absurd and contemptible suddenly and inexplicably took hold of the country. Both she and my father were patriotic, and while they were still in Berlin, they regarded National Socialism as something distinctly un-German.

On August 13, 1935, my parents and I left for Paris, and from there we traveled to London. My mother packed sandwiches for the train— brown bread with sausage. I remember the sandwich on my lap, because beside it on a wrinkled square of wax paper was a Mobrenkopf— a ball of pastry filled with custard and covered with chocolate. I have no memory of eating it, but I distinctly recall my delight at the thought that it would soon be mine. The Mobrenkopf is vivid. I see it in the light of the train window. I see my bare knees and the hem of my navy blue shorts. That is all that remains of our exodus. Around the Mobrenkopf is emptiness, a void that can be filled with other people's stories, historical accounts, numbers, and facts. Not until I turned six do I have anything like a continuous memory, and by then I was living in Hampstead. Only weeks after I was sitting on that train, the Nuremberg Laws were passed. Jews were no longer citizens of the Reich, and the opportunities to leave had diminished. My grandmother, my uncle and aunt, and their twin daughters, Anna and Ruth, never left. We were living in New York when my father found out that his family had been pushed onto a train for Auschwitz in June of 1944. They were all murdered. I keep their photographs in my drawer—my grandmother in an elegant hat with a feather standing beside my grandfather, who would be killed in 1917 at Flanders. I have the formal wedding portrait of my Uncle David and Aunt Marta, and a picture of the twins in short wool coats with ribbons in their hair. Beneath each girl in the white border of the photo, Marta wrote their names, to avoid confusion. Anna on the left, Ruth on the right The black- and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory, and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

The longer I live the more convinced I am that when I say "I," I am really saying "we."

In Bill's last finished portrait of Violet Blom, she was naked and starved. Her entire body was darkened by the enormous shadow of an unseen spectator who loomed over her. When I stood close to the canvas, I noticed that parts of her body were covered with a fine hair. Bill called it "lanugo" and said that the starving body often grows hair for protection. He said that he had spent hours studying medical and documentary photographs to get it right. Her skeletal body was painful to look at, and her huge eyes gleamed as if she had a fever. Bill had painted her emaciated body in color, first rendering her with painstaking realism and then going over her body with bold, expressionistic strokes, using blue and green and dabs of red on her thighs and neck. The black-and- white background resembled an aging photograph, like the ones I keep in my drawer. On the floor behind Violet were several pairs of shoes— men's, women's, and children's, painted in gray tones. When I asked Bill if this portrait referred to the death camps, he said yes, and we talked about Adorno for over an hour. The philosopher had said there could be no art after the camps.

I knew Bernie Weeks through a colleague at Columbia, Jack Newman. The Weeks Gallery on West Broadway had done well, because Bernie had a talent for sniffing out new artists, and he had connections. He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody." "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful. When I introduced Bernie to Bill, Bernie was probably about forty-five, but his age was subsumed by his youthful presence. He wore immaculate, up-to-the-minute suits with brightly colored sneakers. The casual shoes gave him a faint air of eccentricity always welcome in the art world, but they also added to what I thought of as Bernie's bounce. He never stopped moving. He ran up stairs, hopped into elevators, rocked back and forth on his heels when he examined a piece of art, and jiggled his knees through most conversations. By drawing attention to his feet, he alerted the world to his indefatigable go-getting and nonstop pursuit of newness. He had a breathless patter to go with the bounce, and his speech, although sometimes fractured, was never stupid. I pushed Bernie to look at Bill's work and had Jack call Bernie as well. Jack had already been to Bill's studio and had become a convert to what he called "the growing and shrinking Violets."

I wasn't on the Bowery when Bernie came to look at the work, but it ended as I had hoped. The paintings were shown the following fall. "They're weird," Bernie said to me. "Good weird. I think the fat/thin angle is going to fly. Everybody's on a diet, for Christ's sake, and the self-portrait bit. It's good. It's a little risky to show new figurative work right now, but he's got something. And, I like the quotations. Vermeer, de Kooning, and Guston after his revolution."

By the time the show opened, Violet Blom had flown off to Paris. I met her just once before she left—on the stairway in 89 Bowery. I was coming. She was going. I recognized her, introduced myself, and she paused on the steps. Violet was more beautiful than Bill's paintings of her. She had large green eyes with dark lashes that dominated her round face. Curling brown hair fell over her shoulders, and although her body was hidden under a long coat, I came to the conclusion that she was not thin but didn't qualify as chubby either. She shook my hand warmly, said she had heard all about me, and added, "I love the fat one with the taxi." She then said she was sorry she had to run and raced down the stairs. As I continued my climb, I heard her call my name. When I turned around, I saw that she was already standing in front of the door to the street. "You don't mind if I call you Leo, do you?" I shook my head.

She ran back up the stairs, stopped a couple of steps below me, and said, "Bill really likes you." She hesitated. "I'm going away, you see. I'd like to be able to think that you're there for him."

I nodded. She took a couple more steps, reached up for my shoulder, and squeezed it as if to confirm that she really meant what she was saying. Then she stood very still and looked straight at me for several seconds. "You have a nice face," she said. "Especially your nose. You have a beautiful nose." Before I had time to respond to this compliment, she had turned around and was running down the steps. I watched the door slam behind her.

That night when I brushed my teeth and for many nights after, I examined my nose in the mirror. I turned my head to one side and then to the other and tried to catch a glimpse of my profile. I had never spent much time on my nose, had rather disparaged it than admired it, and I can't say that I found it particularly attractive, but that feature in the middle of my face was nevertheless changed forever, transformed by the words of a beautiful young woman, whose image I saw every day hanging on my wall.

Bill asked me to write an essay for the show. I had never written about a living artist and Bill had never been written about before. The little work I called "Multiple Selves" has now been reprinted and translated into several languages, but at the time I regarded its twelve pages as an act of admiration and friendship. There was no catalogue. The essay was stapled together and handed out at the opening. I wrote it over a period of three months, between correcting papers and committee meetings and student conferences, jotting down thoughts as they came to me after class and on the subway. Bernie knew that Bill needed critical support if he was going "to get away with" his work at a moment when minimalism reigned in most galleries. The argument I made was that Bill's art referred to the history of Western painting but turned its assumptions inside out, and that he did it in a way that was essentially different from earlier modernists. By including a viewer's shadow in each canvas, Bill called attention to the space between the viewer and the painting where the real action of all painting takes place—a picture becomes itself in the moment of being seen. But the space the viewer occupies also belongs to the painter. The viewer stands in the painter's position and looks at a self-portrait, but what he or she sees is not an image of the man who has signed the painting in the right-hand corner but somebody else: a woman. Looking at women in painting is an established erotic convention that essentially turns every viewer into a man dreaming of sexual conquest. Any number of great painters have painted pictures of women that subvert the fantasy—Giorgione, Rubens, Vermeer, Manet—but as far as I know not a single male painter has ever announced to the viewer that the woman was himself. It was Erica who elaborated the point one evening. "The truth is," she said, "we all have a man and a woman inside us. We're made from a father and a mother, after all. When I'm looking at a beautiful, sexy woman in a picture, I'm always both her and the person who's looking at her. The eroticism comes from the fact that I can imagine I'm him looking at me. You have to be both people or nothing will happen."

Erica was sitting up in bed reading the indecipherable work of Jacques Lacan when she made this statement. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton nightgown cut low at the neck, and she had tied her hair back, so that I could see her soft earlobes. "Thank you, Professor Stein," I said to her, and put my hand on her belly. "Is there really someone in there?" Erica put her book down and kissed me on the forehead. She was almost three months pregnant, and it was still our secret. The exhaustion and nausea of the first two months had lifted, but Erica had changed. There were days when she shone with happiness and other days when she seemed always to be on the brink of tears. Erica had never been steady, but her moods were even more volatile now. One morning at breakfast she sobbed noisily over an article about foster care in New York City that featured a four-year-old boy named Joey who had been booted out of one home after another. One night she woke up weeping after she dreamed that she left her newborn on a ship and it sailed away as she stood on the dock. Another afternoon, I found her sitting on the sofa with tears streaming down her cheeks. When I asked her what was the matter, she sniffled and said, "Life is sad, Leo. I've been sitting here thinking about how sad it all is."

These changes in my wife, physical and emotional, also affected my essay on Bill. Violet's body, which grew and shrank in the canvases, did more than hint at fertility and its transformations. One of the fantasies between the viewer/painter and the female object had to be impregnation. After all, conception is plurality—the two in the one—the male and the female. After he read the piece, Bill grinned. He shook his head and felt his unshaven face before he said a word to me. In spite of my confidence, I felt a rush of anxiety. "It's good," he said. "It's very good. Of course half of it never crossed my mind." Bill was silent for about a minute. He hesitated, seemed about to speak, and then paused again. Finally, he said, "We haven't told anybody yet, but Lucille is two months pregnant. We've been trying for over a year. The whole time I was working with Violet, we were hoping that we would have a child." After I told Bill about Erica, he said, "I've always wanted kids, Leo, lots of kids. For years I've had this daydream about traveling around the world and populating the earth. I like to imagine myself as the father of hundreds, thousands of children." I laughed when he said it, but I never forgot that fantasy of extravagant potency and multiplication. Bill dreamed of covering the earth with himself.

About halfway through his own opening, Bill disappeared. He told me later that he went to Fanelli's for a Scotch. He had looked pretty miserable from the start as he stood under the NO SMOKING sign, inhaling deeply on a cigarette and tapping the ashes into the pocket of a jacket that was too small for him. Bernie always attracted a good crowd. The guests milled about the big white space with glasses of wine and talked loudly. My essay sat on the desk in a pile. I had given papers at conferences and seminars, had published in journals and magazines, but my work had never been distributed as a leaflet. The novelty pleased me, and I surveyed the takers. A pretty redhead picked it up and read the first few sentences. I felt particularly gratified when she moved her lips as she read. It seemed to suggest an added interest in my words. The piece had also been taped to the wall, and a few people glanced at it. One young man wearing leather pants appeared to read it in its entirety. Jack Newman showed up and slouched around the gallery, one eyebrow raised in an expression of bemused irony. Erica introduced Jack to Lucille, and he cornered her for a good half hour. Every time I looked up, I saw him leaning over her, an inch closer than he should have been. Jack had been married and divorced twice. His lack of success with wives hadn't stopped him from pursuing less permanent encounters, and his wit more than compensated for his lack of physical charm. Jack was comfortable with his jowly face, big belly, and stubby legs, and he made women comfortable with them, too. I had seen him go after the most unlikely people time and time again and succeed. He seduced them with the well-turned compliment. I watched his mouth move as he stood beside Lucille, and I wondered what baroque quips he was using on her that evening. When Jack sidled up to me later to say good-bye, he rubbed his jaw, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, "So what about Wechsler's wife? Do you think she melts in the sack or stays frozen?"

"I have no idea," I said. "But I hope you don't have any leanings in that direction. She's not one of your student nymphettes, and she's pregnant, for God's sake."

Jack lifted his palms toward me and gave me a look of mock horror. "Heaven forbid," he said. "The thought never entered my mind."

Before Bill escaped to Fanelli's, he introduced me to his parents. Regina Wechsler, who had become Regina Cohen after her second marriage, was a tall, attractive woman with a large bust, thick black hair, considerable amounts of gold jewelry, and a sweet, lilting voice. When she spoke, she cocked her head sideways and glanced up at me from under her long eyelashes. She undulated her shoulders as she declared the evening "wonderful" and referred to the toilet, before she went off to use it, as "the powder room." And yet Regina wasn't all artifice. She sized up the soberly dressed crowd in a few seconds, pointed to her red suit, and said, "I feel like a fire engine." She let out a deep, sudden laugh, and her humor cut straight through her posing. Her husband, Al, was a pink-faced man with a square jaw and a deep voice, who seemed genuinely interested in Bill and his work. "They take you by surprise, don't they?" he said about the paintings, and I had to agree.

Before Regina left, I saw her hand Bill a letter. I was standing right beside her, and I suppose she thought I deserved an explanation. "It's from his brother Dan, who couldn't be here tonight." An instant later, she turned to Bill and said, "Your father just walked in. I'm going to say hello to him before we leave."

I watched Regina approach a tall man who had just come out of the elevator. The resemblance between father and son was striking. Sy Wechsler had a narrower face than Bill, but his dark eyes and skin, his broad shoulders and strong limbs were so much like his son's that the two could have been mistaken for each other if viewed from behind, a fact I would remember later when Bill began a portrait series of his father. While Regina spoke to him, Sy nodded and answered, but his expression was vague. I guessed that the encounter was awkward for him and that he was bearing up by adopting a polite but distant attitude toward his ex-wife, but the expression on his face never changed. When he approached Bill, he stuck out his hand and Bill shook it. He thanked his father for coming and introduced me. When we shook hands, I looked into the man's eyes and he returned the look, but there was little recognition in his face. He nodded at me, said, "Congratulations and good luck," and then turned to his pregnant daughter-in-law and said exactly the same thing. He did not comment on his forthcoming grandchild, who by then was a small bump under Lucille's dress. He glanced at the paintings as if they were the work of some stranger, and left the gallery. I don't know whether the suddenness of his father's arrival and departure rattled Bill enough to make him leave or whether it was just the pressure of finding himself under scrutiny by an art world he feared might reject him.

As it turned out, the critics both rejected and accepted him. That first show set the tone for the rest of Bill's career. He would always have passionate defenders and violent detractors, but as painful or pleasant as it might have been for Bill to be hated by some people and worshiped by others, he would become far more important to reviewers and journalists than they ever would be to him. By the time of his first show, Bill was already too old and too stubborn to be swayed by critics. He was the most private person I have ever known, and only a few people were ever allowed to enter the secret room of his imagination. It is ironic and sad that perhaps the most important inhabitant of that room was and would always be Bill's father. Alive, Sy Wechsler was the incarnation of his son's unfulfilled longing. He was one of those people who were never fully present at the events of their own lives. A part of him was not there, and it was this absent quality in his father that Bill never stopped pursuing— even after the man was dead.

Bill showed up for the small dinner at Bernie's loft after the opening, but he was mostly silent, and we all went home early. The next day, a Saturday, I went to see him on the Bowery. Lucille was visiting her parents in New Haven, and Bill told me the story of his father. Sy's parents were immigrants who had left Russia as small children and ended up on the Lower East Side. Bill told me that his grandfather had abandoned his wife and three children when Sy, the oldest, was ten. The story in the family was that Moishe ran off to Canada with another woman, where he became a wealthy man and fathered three other children. At his grandmother's funeral, Bill had met a woman named Esther Feuerstein, and it was through Esther that he learned what no one in the family had ever mentioned. The day after her husband left, Rachael Wechsler had walked into the tiny kitchen in their tenement on Rivington Street and stuck her head in the oven. It was Sy who had pounded on Esther's door and Sy who helped Esther pull a screaming Rachael away from the gas. Despite her encounter with early death, Bill's grandmother lived to be eighty-nine years old. His description of the old lady was unsentimental. "She was nuts," he said. "She used to howl at me in Yiddish, and when I didn't understand her, she'd whack me with her purse."

"My father always favored Dan," Bill said. He didn't make this statement with any bitterness. I already knew that Dan had been an unstable, high-strung child and that sometime in his early twenties he had had a schizophrenic breakdown. Since then, Bill's younger brother had been in and out of hospitals and halfway houses and mental health clinics. Bill said that his father was touched by weakness, that he had a natural attraction to people who needed a helping hand. One of Bill's cousins had Down's syndrome, and Sy Wechsler had never forgotten Larry's birthday, although he sometimes forgot his older son's. "I want you to read the note Dan sent me," Bill said. "It will give you a good idea of what goes on in his head. He's mad, but he's not stupid. I sometimes think he's got the life of at least five people in him." Bill handed me a wrinkled, smudged piece of paper, written by hand.

CHARGE BRO THE RS W.!

REACH THE ACHE!

HEAR THE BEAT.

TO THE ROSE, THE COAT,

THE CAR, THE RATS, THE BOAT.

TO BEER. TO WAR.

TO HERE. TO THERE.

TO HER.

WE WERE, ARE

HER.

LOVE, DAN (I) EL. (NO) DENIAL.

After I read the note, I said, "It's a kind of anagram."

"It took me a while to figure it out, but if you look at it closely, all the words in the poem are made up of the letters in the first line—except the last ones, when he signs off."

"Who is the 'her'? Did he know about your paintings?"

"My mother might have told him. He writes plays, too. Some of them rhyme. Dan's sickness isn't anybody's fault. I think my mother always felt that something was wrong, even when he was a baby, but at the same time, it didn't help that my parents were, well, not really together. By the time he was born, my mother was pretty disappointed. I don't think she had had any idea who she was marrying. By the time she found out, it was too late."

I suppose we are all the products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes. That afternoon, sitting in a chair not far from the bathtub, while Bill sat on the floor, I told him about my father's death, a story I had only told to Erica. I was seventeen when my father died. He had three strokes. The first one paralyzed his left side, which distorted his face and made speaking difficult. He slurred his speech. He complained of a cloud in his brain that snatched words from his consciousness, and he spent hours typing out sentences with his good hand, often pausing for minutes to retrieve a missing phrase. I hated the sight of my debilitated father. I still dream that I wake up and find that a leg or arm is paralyzed or has simply dropped off my body. My father was a proud, formal man whose relation to me was principally one of answering my questions, sometimes more thoroughly than I wished. A question of only a few seconds could easily yield a half-hour lecture. My father didn't talk down to me. He had great confidence in my understanding, but the truth was that his discourses on the nervous system or the heart or liberalism or Machiavelli often bored me. And yet, I never wanted him to stop talking. I liked to have his eyes on me, liked to sit near him, and I would wait for the signs of affection that always concluded his talks—a pat on my arm, on my knee, or the tender quiver in his voice when he rounded off his speech by saying my name.

In New York, my father read the Aufbau, a weekly paper for German Jews in America. During the war it published lists of missing people, and my father read every name before he read anything else in the paper. I dreaded the arrival of the Aufbau, dreaded my father's absorption, his hunched shoulders, the blank look on his face as he read down the lists. The hunt for his family took place in silence. He never said, I am checking to see if their names are here. He said nothing. My mother and I choked on his silence, but we never never interrupted it by speaking.

The third stroke killed him. My mother found him dead beside her in the morning. I had never seen or heard my mother cry, but that morning she let out a terrible wail that brought me running to my parents' bedroom. She told me in a strange, tough voice that Otto was dead, shooed me out of the room, and closed the door behind her. I stood outside the door and listened to her low guttural noises, to her muffled cries and hoarse gasps. It was never clear to me how long I stood there, but after some time she opened the door. Her face was calm then and her posture unusually erect. She told me to come in, and we sat beside my father's body for several minutes before she stood up and walked into the other room to use the telephone. My father wasn't terrible to look at, but the change from life to death scared me. The blinds on the windows were still drawn, and along their bottoms I noticed two brilliant lines of sun. I studied them as I sat there in the room alone with my father.

When Erica and Lucille were both about five months pregnant, I took a snapshot of the two of them in our loft. Erica is grinning at the camera, and she has her arm securely around Lucille's shoulders, who looks small and shy but contented at the same time. Her left hand is laid protectively on her belly and her chin is lowered as she looks up. One side of her mouth has twisted itself into an obliging smile. Pregnancy suited Lucille. It softened her, and the picture is a reminder to me of a gentleness in her personality that was more often hidden than not.

In her fourth month, Erica started humming, and she hummed until our son was born. She hummed at breakfast. She hummed on her way out the door in the morning. She hummed at her desk while she worked on her "Three Dialogues" paper—the one on Martin Buber, M. M. Bakhtin, and Jacques Lacan, which she delivered at a conference at NYU two and a half months before she gave birth. The humming drove me crazy, but I strove to be tolerant. When I asked her to stop, she would always look up at me with startled eyes and say, "Was I humming?"

During their pregnancies, Erica and Lucille became friends. They compared internal kicks and belly size. They went shopping for minuscule outfits and laughed like two conspirators about their squashed bladders, protruding navels, and large bra sizes. Erica laughed louder. Although Lucille never lost her reticence, she seemed to relax more with Erica than with other people. And yet, after the babies were born, there was a shift in Lucille toward Erica—a barely perceptible hint of coolness. I did not see it or feel it until Erica pointed it out, and even then I doubted the truth of it for a long time. Lucille was not socially graceful. Her manners had a blunt, uncivil edge and, on top of that, she was probably exhausted from the rigors of caring for an infant. My arguments usually convinced Erica until she felt it again: the tiny sting of possible rejection—always ambiguous, always subject to many interpretations.

When I saw Lucille, we talked about poetry. She continued to give me the little magazines that published her, and I took time with the poems and made comments on them. My comments were usually questions—about form, about choices she had made or not made, and she talked eagerly to me about her use of commas and periods and her preference for simple diction. Her ability to focus on these details was extraordinary, and I enjoyed our conversations. Erica didn't like Lucille's poems. She once confided in me that reading them was "like eating dust." Lucille may have divined Erica's distaste for her work and instinctively withdrawn from that disapproval, or she might not have liked the fact that Erica eagerly embraced Bill's literary opinions and sometimes called him for a reference or just to ask him a question. I don't know, but as time wore on, I understood that the two women were no longer close, and that the more Lucille withdrew from Erica, the more she seemed interested in me.

About two weeks after I took the photograph of Erica and Lucille, Sy Wechsler dropped dead of a heart attack. It happened early one evening after work while he was taking in the mail. Wechsler lived alone, and it was his brother Morris who found him the next morning, lying near the kitchen table with bills, a couple of business letters, and several catalogues on the floor beside him. No one had expected Wechsler to die. He did not smoke or drink, and he ran three miles a day. Bill and his Uncle Morris made the funeral arrangements, and Sy's youngest brother flew in from California with his wife and two children. After the funeral, Bill and Morris cleaned out the big house in South Orange, and when that task was over, Bill started drawing. He drew hundreds of pictures of his father, both from memory and from photographs. Bill had produced very little since his first show, not because he didn't want to work but because he needed to earn money. Two of the Violet paintings had sold to collectors, but the money they brought in had disappeared quickly. Once Bill knew he and Lucille were going to have a child, he had taken every plastering job he was offered, and after grinding days on a contracting site, he was often too tired to do anything but sleep. Sy Wechsler left $300,000 to each of his sons, and with his share of the money, Bill transformed his life.

The loft above us at 27 Greene Street was up for sale. Bill and Lucille bought it, and by early August of 1977 they had moved in. The rent on the Bowery was low, and Bill kept it as his studio. The money, Bill told me, "will buy us time to do our own work." But that summer, Bill had few hours to spare for painting. All day, every day, he sawed, hammered, drilled, and breathed in dust. He erected Sheetrock walls in the raw space to make rooms. He laid tile in the bathroom once the plumber had installed the fixtures. He built closets and put in lights and hung the kitchen cabinets, and at night he would return to the Bowery and his sleeping wife and draw his father. It was grief as energy. Bill understood that his father's death had given him a new beginning and that the gargantuan physical labors of that summer were finally spiritual. He worked in the name of his father for his unborn son.

In early August, only days before Matthew was born, Bernie Weeks and I walked to the Bowery in the late afternoon to take a look at Bill's early plans for a new series of paintings—which were developing out of the drawings of his father. While Bernie was flipping through the drawings of Sy Wechsler—sitting, standing, running, sleeping—he paused at one and said, "You know, I had a nice conversation with your father once."

"At the opening," Bill said flatly.

"No, it was a couple of weeks after. He came back to look at the paintings. I recognized him, and we chatted for two or three minutes."

In a startled voice, Bill said, "You met him in the gallery?"

"I thought you knew," Bernie said casually. "He was there for at least an hour. He took his time, going very slowly. He would look at one for quite a while and then move on to the next one."

"He went back," Bill said. "He went back and looked at them."

The story of his father's return visit to the Weeks Gallery never left Bill. It became the single concrete sign he had of his father's affection for him. Before that, Sy's long days at the box business, his appearances at the occasional Little League game, school play, or first art opening had had to suffice as markers of his father's paternal duty and goodwill. Bernie's story added a layer to Bill's internal portrait of his father. It also had the irrational effect of confirming his loyalty to the Weeks Gallery. Bill confused the messenger and the message, but it hardly mattered. As Bernie rocked back and forth on his heels in front of several mounted drawings of Sy Wechsler and ran his fingers through the keys and papers and debris that Bill said would be mounted onto the canvases, I sensed his excitement. Bernie was in for the long haul.

Birth is violent, bloody, and painful, and all the rhetoric to the contrary will not convince me that I am wrong. I have heard the stories of women squatting in the fields, snapping umbilical cords with their teeth, strapping their newborns onto their backs, and picking up the scythe, but I wasn't married to those women. I was married to Erica. We went to Lamaze classes together and listened attentively to Jean Romer's breathing advice. A stocky woman in bermuda shorts and thick-soled sneakers, Jean referred to birth as "the great adventure" and to the members of her class as "moms" and "coaches." Erica and I watched films of athletic, smiling women doing deep knee bends during their labors and breathing their babies out of them. We practiced panting and blowing as we silently corrected Jean's grammar every time she told us "to lay down on the floor." At forty-seven, I was the second-to-oldest father-to-be in the class. The oldest was a bullish man in his sixties named Harry who had been married before, had grown-up children, and was now working on his second child from his second wife, who looked like a teenager but was probably well into her twenties.

Matthew was born on August 12, 1977, at St. Vincent's Hospital. I stood beside Erica and watched her agonized face, squirming body, and clenched fists. Every once in a while I reached for her hand, but she batted me away and shook her head. Erica did not scream, but down the hallway in another labor room, a woman shrieked and wailed at the top of her lungs, pausing only to swear both in Spanish and in English. She too must have had a "coach" with her, because after a few seconds of surprising silence, we heard her yell, "Fuck you, Johnny! Fuck you and your fucking breathing! You fucking breathe! I'm dying!"

Near the end, Erica's eyes took on a bright, ecstatic gleam. She clenched her teeth and growled like a animal when she was told to push. I stood beside the doctor in my surgical gown and watched the wet, bloody, black head of my son emerge from between Erica's legs, followed immediately by his shoulders and the rest of his bodv. I saw his bloated little penis, saw blood and fluid gush from Erica's closing vagina, heard Dr. Figueira say, "It's a boy," and felt dizzy. A nurse pushed me into a chair, and then I had my son in my arms. I looked down at his wrinkled red face and soft lopsided head and said, "Matthew Stein Hertzberg," and he looked me in the eyes and grimaced.

It had come to me late. I was a graying, wrinkling father of an infant son, but I took to parenthood with the enthusiasm of the long deprived. Matt was an odd little creature with thin red limbs, a purplish umbilical stump, and downy black hair on only part of his head. Erica and I spent a lot of time studying his peculiarities—his greedy slurping noises when he fed, his mustard-colored bowel movements, his waving arms and legs, and his absorbed staring, which suggested brilliance or idiocy, depending on how you looked at it. For about a week, she called him "our naked stranger," but then he became Matthew or Matt or Matty boy. In those first few months after he was born, Erica showed a competence and ease I hadn't seen in her before. She had always been nervous and excitable, and when she was really heated her voice would take on a shrill, anxious timbre, a register that affected me physically—as if someone were running a fork over my skin. But Erica had few outbursts during Matt's early days. She was almost serene. It was rather like being married all over again to someone slightly different. She never slept enough, and the skin beneath her eyes was dark with lack of sleep, but her features were milder than I had ever seen them. When she nursed Matt, she would sometimes look at me with a tenderness that was nearly painful in its intensity. Often, I was still reading in bed while Erica and Matt slept together beside me, his head on her breast as she held him. Even while she slept, she was aware of him and would wake to his smallest squeak. Sometimes, I would put down my book and look at the two of them in the light of my reading lamp. I now think I was lucky that I wasn't young. I knew what I might not have known earlier—that my happiness had come. I even told myself to fix the image of my wife and son in my mind while I watched them sleep, and it is still there, a clear picture left by my conscious wish. I can see Erica's profile on the pillow, her dark hair falling over her cheek, and Matt's little head, about the size of a grapefruit, turned in toward his mother's body.

We tracked Matt's development with the precision and attentiveness of Enlightenment scientists, noting each phase of his growth as if nobody had ever smiled, laughed, or rolled over before him. Erica once called me loudly to his crib, and when I arrived beside her, she pointed at our son and said, "Leo, look! I think he knows it's his foot. Look at the way he's sucking on his toes. He knows they belong to him!" Whether Matt had actually discovered the perimeter of his own body by then or not remained a moot point, but he increasingly became someone with a personality we could identify. He was not a loud person, but I suppose that if every time you utter a barely audible noise, one of your parents comes running, you do not become loud. For a baby he seemed weirdly compassionate. One evening when Matt was about nine months old, Erica was getting him ready for bed. She was carrying him around with her and opened the refrigerator to retrieve his bottle. By accident two glass containers of mustard and jam came with it and smashed on the floor. Erica had gone back to work by then, and her exhaustion got the better of her. She looked at the broken glass and burst into tears. She stopped crying when she felt Matt's small hand gently patting her arm in sympathy. Our son also liked to feed us—half-chewed bits of banana or pureed spinach or mashed carrots. He would come at me with his sticky fist and push the unsavory contents into my mouth. We read this as a sign of his generosity. From the time he could sit, Matt showed great powers of concentration, and when I saw other children his age, I found I hadn't exaggerated this trait. He had a long attention span, but he did not speak. He gurgled and babbled and pointed, but the words were very slow in coming.

When Erica returned to work, we hired a nanny for Matt. Grace Thelwell was both tall and fat, a woman in her fifties who had grown up in Jamaica. She had four adult children and six grandchildren and the posture of a queen. She walked noiselessly around our house, spoke in a low musical voice, and exuded a Buddha-like calm in the face of all agitation. Her refrain consisted of two words: "Never mind." When Matt cried, she would hold him and sing the words, "Never mind." When Erica rushed in after a day at Rutgers and ran into the kitchen, looking wild-eyed and harried, Grace would place a hand on her shoulder and say, "Never mind" before she helped Erica put the groceries away. When Grace came to us, her practical philosophy arrived with her, and it soothed all three of us—like a warm Caribbean breeze blowing through the rooms of the loft. She would always be Matt's fairy godmother, and the longer she was with us the more I felt that she was not an ordinary person but someone of feeling and intelligence, whose ability to distinguish between the important and the trivial often put me and Erica to shame. When Erica and I went out in the evenings and Grace stayed home with Matt, we would return to find her sitting in his room while he slept. The lights were always out Grace did not read or knit or busy herself with anything. She sat in silence on a chair looking over him, content with the fullness of her own thoughts.

Mark Wechsler was born on August twenty-seventh. We were now two families, one on top of the other. Although the physical closeness made visiting easy, I saw Bill only a little more often than before. We loaned each other books, shared articles we had read, but our domestic lives were mostly contained within the walls of our separate apartments. All first babies shock their parents to one degree or another. Their demands are so urgent, their emotions run at such a high pitch that families close in on themselves to answer their calls. Bill would sometimes bring Mark with him to visit me when he returned home after a day at the studio. "Lucille's taking a nap," he would say. "She's exhausted," or, "I'm giving her a break. She needs silence." I accepted these comments without question, although I did hear the occasional note of worry in Bill's voice; but then he had always worried about Lucille. He was easy with his son, a small, blue-eyed version of himself who struck me as placid, well-fed, and slightly dopey. My obsessive interest in Matthew did not carry over to Mark, but the fact that Bill's affection for his own son was at least as passionate as mine for Matt solidified my sense that our lives were parallel—that in the hectic, grubby ordeal of caring for a baby, he and Lucille, like Erica and me, had discovered new strains of joy between them.

Only Lucille's weariness wasn't like Erica's. It had an existential cast— as though she suffered from more than being up at night. She didn't come to see me often, perhaps once every two months, and she always called days ahead of time to arrange the meeting. At the appointed time, I would open the door to find Lucille standing in the hallway with a sheaf of poems in her hand. She always looked pale and drawn and stiff. Her hair hung around her face uncombed, usually dirty. Mostly she wore jeans and old-fashioned blouses in dull colors, and yet her disheveled appearance didn't disguise her prettiness, and I admired her lack of vanity. I was always glad to see her, but Lucille's visits augmented Erica's feeling that Lucille had forgotten her. Lucille always greeted Erica politely. She would endure Erica's questions about Mark, answer them in curt, precise sentences, and then she would turn to me. Her economical but resonant poems were written in a voice of complete detachment. Inevitably they contained autobiographical references. In one poem a man and a woman lie beside each other in bed, unable to sleep, but neither one says a word to the other. They don't speak, out of deference to the other, but in the end, the woman feels the man's consideration as a presumption that he knows what she is thinking. Her annoyance with him keeps her awake long after he has gone to sleep. Lucille called the poem "Aware and Awake." A baby turned up in some works, a comic character referred to as "It." "It" wailed and clung and kicked and spat up, rather like a windup toy whose mechanism had gone haywire and couldn't be controlled. Lucille never acknowledged in any way that the poems were personal. She treated them as objects that might be remanipulated with my help. Her coolness fascinated me. Every once in a while she would smile to herself as she read a line, and I couldn't penetrate the source of her humor. While I sat next to her, I had the sense that she was always somewhere ahead of me, and that I was running after her. I would look down at the blond hairs on her slender arm and ask myself what it was about her I couldn't grasp.

One evening before she left: to go upstairs, I watched as she began to gather up her papers. I had learned to turn away, because I knew that if I looked at her, she would feel uncomfortable and might drop her pencil or eraser. When I shook her hand good-bye, she thanked me and opened the door. It was when she began to walk through it that I had an uncanny sensation of resemblance, followed by a sudden certainty that I was right. In that moment, Lucille reminded me of Sy Wechsler. The link between them was neither physical nor spiritual. Their personalities had little in common except what they both lacked—a quality of ordinary connectedness to other human beings. Lucille didn't elude only Bill, she eluded everyone who knew her. The old adage "He married his mother" had to be revised. Bill had married his father. Hadn't he said, "I chased her for years"? As I listened to the sound of her feet on the stairs, I wondered if he wasn't chasing her still.

In the spring before Matt turned two, I overheard a fight between Bill and Lucille. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was sitting in my chair by the window. I had a book in my hand, but I had stopped reading it because I was thinking about Matt. Erica had taken him out to buy new sneakers, and just before the two of them had left, he had spoken his first words. Matt had pointed at his mother, at himself, and at the shoes he was wearing. I had said I hoped his new shoes would be beautiful, and then Matthew had eked out two garbled sounds—"ooo neets," which Erica and I had joyfully translated as "new sneaks." The child was learning how to talk. I had opened the window to let in the warm breeze. The windows above must have been opened, too, because Bill's booming voice interrupted my reverie about Matt's verbal breakthrough.

"How could you say that?" Bill screamed.

"You weren't supposed to hear it. She shouldn't have told you!" Lucille's voice rose with each word. Her anger surprised me. She was always so controlled.

Bill growled back. "I don't believe that. She tells everybody everything. You told her because you knew she would tell me, and then you could refuse to take responsibility for your own words. Do you deny you said it? No! So—did you mean it?"

There was silence.

"What the hell am I doing here?" Bill yelled. "Tell me that!" I heard a loud crash. Bill must have hit or kicked something.

"You broke it!" I heard rage in Lucille's voice, trembling, hysterical rage, and it cut through me. Mark started crying. "Shut up!" she shrieked. "Shut up! Shut up!"

I went to close the window. The last thing I heard was Bill saying, "Mark, Mark. Come here."

The following day, Bill called me from his studio and told me he had moved out of Greene Street and was living on the Bowery again. His voice sounded dull with misery. "Do you want me to come over?" I asked. He didn't answer me for a few seconds. Then he said, "Yeah, I think I do."

Bill didn't mention the mysterious woman who had played a pivotal role in the argument I had overheard the day before, and I couldn't ask him about her without telling him that I had eavesdropped. I let him talk, even though most of what he said explained little. He told me that although Lucille had said over and over again how much she looked forward to being a mother before Mark was born, after the birth she had seemed disappointed. "She's been really low and irritable. Everything about me seems to annoy her—I swallow too loudly when I eat. I brush my teeth too vigorously. I pace when I'm thinking and it drives her nuts. My socks smell. I touch her too much. I work too hard. I'm gone too long. She likes me to take care of Mark, but she doesn't like the way I do it. I shouldn't sing Lou Reed songs to him. They're inappropriate. The games I play are too rowdy. I throw him off his schedule."

Lucille's complaints were banal—the familiar stuff of joyless intimacy. I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification. From where I sat opposite Bill, he looked to me like the Byronic ideal of male beauty. A black curl had fallen onto his forehead as he inhaled a cigarette and squinted in thought. Behind him were the seven unfinished paintings of his father he had decided to show. For two years he had been working on portraits of Sy Wechsler. There must have been fifty canvases of the man in various positions, but Bill had chosen to exhibit only seven—all of them of his father viewed from the back. He called the series "Missing Men." The afternoon light sank in the windows, the big room grew darker, and we didn't speak for minutes on end. For the first time, I pitied Bill, and a pain settled in my chest at the thought of his suffering. Around five o'clock I told him that I had promised Erica I would be home in ten minutes.

"You know, Leo," he said, "for years I've been thinking that Lucille was somebody else. I deceived myself. That's not her fault. It's mine. And now I have a son."

Instead of responding directly to this, I said, "It might not be much, but I'm here for you if you need me." As I said it, I remembered Violet running up the stairs toward me and what she had said to me about my being "there" for Bill. For a few moments, I wondered if she had known something I didn't about Bill and Lucille, and then I forgot about her and her comment for almost a year.

Lucille stayed on in the Greene Street loft, and Bill lived on the Bowery. Mark shuttled back and forth between his parents—-half the week with Lucille, the other half with Bill. They talked on the phone every day, and neither Bill nor Lucille ever mentioned divorce. Trucks and fire engines and baby wipes appeared in the Bowery loft, and sometime in July, Bill made his son a beautiful bed that looked like a boat. He constructed a stand that allowed it to rock back and forth like an oversized cradle, and he painted it a deep marine blue. Bill read to his son and fed him and encouraged him to at least try the plastic potty in the little room with the toilet. He worried about his appetite and fretted about him falling down the stairs, and he picked up most of his toys, even though he had no gift for housekeeping. The loft was filthier than it had ever been because Bill never bothered to clean it. The sink turned colors I had never seen before on porcelain—a palette that ranged from pale gray to orange to a deep, mucky brown. I didn't mention the dirt. The truth was that father and son seemed comfortable enough in the big crooked room. They didn't mind living among the towers of soiled laundry that rose up from a dusty, ash-covered floor.

j '

Bill didn't say much more to me about his failing marriage. He never complained about Lucille, and when he wasn't taking care of Mark, he worked long hours and slept little. But the truth was that when Erica and Matt and I visited Bill and Mark that summer, I often felt relieved when we left them and walked outside into the hot street. The studio had an oppressive, nearly smothering atmosphere, as if Bill's sadness had leaked into the chairs, the books, the toys, and the empty wine bottles that piled up under the sink. In the paintings of his father, Bill's sorrow took on a palpable beauty that was executed with a rigorous, unflinching hand, but in life his pain was merely depressing.

When the portraits of Bill's father were shown in September, Lucille did not come to the opening. I'd asked her if I would see her there, and she'd said that she was editing a manuscript and would have to work into the night. Her answer sounded like an evasion, and I must have looked dubious, but she'd insisted. "I have a deadline," she'd said. "There is nothing I can do about it."

Every painting in the show sold, but not to Americans. A Frenchman named Jacques Dupin bought three paintings; the others went to a German collector and a Dutchman in the pharmaceutical business. After that show, Bill was picked up by a gallery in Cologne, one in Paris, and another in Tokyo. American reviewers were befuddled—acclaim by one critic was neutralized by the savage attack of another. There was no consensus about Bill among those who wrote about art for a living, and yet I noticed large numbers of young people in the gallery, not just at the opening but every time I went to look at the paintings. Bernie told me that he had never had so many artists and poets and novelists in their twenties at any exhibition as at that one. "The kids are all talking about him," he said. "That's got to be good. The old fogies are going to die off, and they'll take over."

It took me several visits to the gallery to understand that the man whose back looked very much the same from one painting to another was aging. I noticed that wrinkles formed at the back of his neck and that his skin changed. Moles multiplied. In the last painting there was a small cyst beneath Sy's ear. By some miracle of art or nature, however, his hair remained black in every one. Bill's rendering of his father, always clad in a dark suit, reminded me of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, but without their illusion of depth. The smooth, clear image of the man's back was lit from the left side of the canvas, and every fold in the suit's material, every speck of dust on a padded shoulder, every crease in the black leather of a shoe had been painstakingly depicted. But what fascinated spectators was the material Bill had applied over this initial image, which partly obscured it—the letters, photographs, postcards, business memos, receipts, motel keys, movie ticket stubs, aspirins, condoms— until each work became a thick palimpsest of legible and illegible writing, as well as a medley of the various small objects that fill junk drawers in almost any household. There was nothing innovative about gluing foreign materials to a painting, but the effect was very different from Rauschenberg's dense layerings, for example, because the debris in Bill's canvases had been left behind by one man, and as I moved from one painting to another, I enjoyed reading the scraps. I especially liked a letter written in crayon: "Dear Unci Sy, Thank you for the relly neet racing car. It's relly neet. Love, Larry." I studied the invitation that read, "Please come and celebrate Regina and Sy's Fifteenth Wedding Anniversary. Yes, it's really been that long!" There was a hospital bill for Daniel Wechsler, a playbill from Hello, Dolly!, and a torn, wrinkled piece of paper with the name Anita Himmelblatz written on it, followed by a telephone number. Despite these momentary insights into a life, the canvases and their materials had an abstract quality to them, an ultimate blankness that conveyed the strangeness of mortality itself, a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.

Over each canvas, Bill had placed a thick piece of Plexiglas, which removed the viewer from the two layers underneath. The Plexiglas turned the works into memorials. Without it, the objects and papers would have been accessible, but sealed behind that transparent wall, the image of the man and the detritus of his life could not be reached.

I returned to the show on West Broadway seven or eight times. The last time I went, only days before it closed, I met Henry Hasseborg. I had seen him before lurking around other galleries and knew him by sight. Jack, who had spoken to him on a couple of occasions, had once called him "man as toad." Hasseborg was a novelist and art critic, known for his arch prose and scathing opinions. He was a tiny bald person, always dressed fashionably in black. He had small eyes, a flattened nose, and an enormous mouth. A rash that may have been eczema crawled up one side of his face and onto his head. He approached me and introduced himself. He said that he was familiar with my work and hoped that I was working on another book. He had read my "Piero" and loved it, as well as my book of essays. "Tremendous" was the word he used. Then he casually glanced over at a canvas and said, "You like it?"

I told him I did and began to say why when he interrupted me: "You don't think they're anachronistic?"

I began another sentence. "No, I think he puts historical references to another use—"

Hasseborg cut me off again. He was almost a foot shorter than I was. As he looked up at my face, he took a step closer to me, and his proximity made me suddenly uncomfortable. "They say he's landed galleries in Europe. Which ones?"

"I don't know," I said. "You should talk to Bernie if you're interested."

"Interest might be too strong a word," he said, and smiled. "Wechsler's a little too cerebral for me."

"Really," I said. "I feel a lot of emotion in the work." I paused, surprised that he had let me finish, and went on. "I seem to remember an article you wrote on Warhol. If anyone's work embodies ideas, it's Warhol. Surely that's cerebral."

Hasseborg leaned even closer to me, his chin lifted. "Andy's an icon," he said, as if this answered my question. "He had his finger on the cultural pulse, man. He knew what was coming, and it came. Your friend Wechsler's running down some side street..." He didn't finish the sentence. He looked at his watch and said, "Shit, I'm late. See you around, Leo."

As I watched him walk slowly toward the elevator, I asked myself what had just happened. The tone of his conversation had shifted from ingratiating flattery to insulting familiarity. I also realized that when he'd introduced himself, he hadn't mentioned my friendship with Bill, but as he'd continued to talk, he had insinuated our connection by asking about the European galleries and then directly referred to Bill as "your friend Wechsler." Finally, he had rounded off our aborted talk with the flippant use of my first name, as if we were old friends. I was not a naïf. For Hasseborg, manipulating other people was a sophisticated game that could reap him benefits: an inside scoop, a bit of art world gossip, a quote from someone who'd never intended his remark to be public. He was an unscrupulous man, but he was also an intelligent man, and in New York that combination could take you far. Henry Hasseborg had wanted something from me, but for the life of me I couldn't imagine what it was.

By then Erica and I had been together for over five years, and I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation. We talked a lot, and I liked listening to her, especially in the evenings, when she spoke about Matt or her work. Her voice was lovely when she was tired. It lost its shrillness, and her words were sometimes interrupted by yawns or little sighs of relief that the long day was over. One night, we were lying in bed together still talking hours after Matt had gone to sleep. Erica had her head on my chest and I was telling her about my essay on Mannerism, mostly Pontormo, which began with a long definition of "distortion"— and the context needed to understand what such a word meant. She moved her hand over my belly, and then I felt her fingers stray into my pubic hair. "You know, Leo," she said, "The smarter you are, the sexier you are." I never forgot Erica's equation. For her, the charms of my body were related to the swiftness of my mind, and in light of this, I thought it wise to keep that higher organ tight, lean, and well-exercised.

Matt had grown into a thin, thoughtful boy who spoke in monosyllables and wandered around the house with his stuffed lion, "La," singing to himself in a high, tuneless voice. He wasn't articulate, but he understood everything we said to him. Either Erica or I read to him at night, and while Matt listened, he lay very still in his new big bed, his hazel eyes open and concentrated, as if he could see the story unfold on the ceiling above him. Sometimes he would wake up at night, but he rarely called out to us. We would hear him in the next room, chattering to his animals and cars and blocks in a fluent but private language. Like most two-year-olds, Matt often ran himself to exhaustion, sobbed violently, ordered us around, and was frustrated when we refused to obey his imperial commands, but inside the toddler I felt a strange, tumultuous, and solitary core—an immense inner sanctum where a good part of his life took place.

Violet reappeared in June of 1981. I was near the Bowery, because I had bought some sausage at an Italian deli on Grand Street, and in the spirit of my summer freedom from student papers, students themselves, and the endless bickering of my colleagues in committee meetings, I decided to drop in on Bill. I was walking down Hester Street when I saw him standing with Violet outside the Chinese movie theater on the corner. I recognized Violet instantly, even though I saw her only from behind and she had cut her hair short. She was holding Bill tightly around the waist and her head was pressed against his chest. I watched him lift her face toward him with both hands and kiss her. Violet stood on tiptoe to reach him and lost her balance for a moment before Bill caught her, laughed, and kissed her forehead. Neither one of them saw me standing stock-still on the sidewalk across the street. Violet kissed Bill again, hugged him again, and then ran off down the street, away from me. I noticed that she ran well, like a boy, but she tired quickly, slowed, and began to skip down the block, turning once to blow Bill a kiss. He watched her until she turned the corner. I crossed the street, and when I approached Bill, he waved at me.

After I had reached him he said, "You saw us."

"Yes, I was up the street at the deli and ..."

"It's all right. Don't worry about it."

"She's back."

"She's been back for a while." Bill put his arm around my shoulder. "Come on," he said. "Let's go upstairs."

While Bill talked to me about Violet, his eyes had the steady concentrated gleam I remembered from the first year I met him. "It started before," he said, "when I was painting her. Nothing happened between us. I mean, we didn't have an affair, but the feeling was there. God, I was careful. I remember thinking that if I so much as brushed against her, I was finished. Well, then she left, and I couldn't stop thinking about her. I thought I'd get over it, that it was a sexual attraction that would pass if I ever saw her again. When she called me a month ago, a part of me hoped I'd take one look at her and say to myself, 'You spent years obsessing about this broad? Were you nuts?" But she walked through the door and —" Bill rubbed his chin and shook his head. "I fell apart the second I saw her. Her body ..." He didn't finish the sentence. "She's so responsive, Leo. I've never experienced anything like it. Not even close."

When I asked him if he had told Lucille about Violet, he shook his head. "I've put it off, not because she wants me back. She doesn't, but because Mark..." He hesitated. "It's much more complicated when you have a child. The poor kid's pretty confused already."

We talked about our sons for a while. Mark was articulate but easily distracted. Matt said little but could amuse himself alone for a long time. Bill asked about Pontormo, and I talked about elongation in The Deposition for a few minutes before I said I had to leave.

"Before you go, I want to show you something. It's a book Violet lent me."

The book had been written by a Frenchman, Georges Didi-Huberman, but what interested Bill were its photographs. They had all been taken at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had conducted experiments on women suffering from hysteria. Bill explained that a number of the patients had been hypnotized for the photographs. Some were twisted into positions that reminded me of contortionists in the circus. Others looked at the camera with blank eyes as they held out their arms, which had been pierced through with pins the size of knitting needles. Still others were kneeling and appeared to be praying or beseeching God for help.

The photograph on the book's cover is the one I remember best, however. A pretty dark-haired girl was lying in bed with the sheets over her. She had twisted her body to one side and was sticking out her tongue. The tongue seemed unusually thick and long, a fact that made the gesture more obscene than it might have been. I also thought I saw a glint of mischief in her eyes. The photograph was carefully lit to bring out the voluptuous roundness of the girl's shoulders and torso under the sheets. I stared at the picture for some time, not quite sure what I was seeing.

"Her name was Augustine," Bill said. "Violet's particularly interested in her. She was photographed obsessively in the ward and became a kind of pinup girl for hysteria. She was also color-blind. Apparently, many of the hysterics saw colors only when they were hypnotized. It's almost too perfect—the poster girl for an illness in the early days of photography sees the world in black and white."

Violet was only twenty-seven then, still writing furiously on her dissertation about long-dead women whose illness included violent seizures, paralyzed limbs, stigmata, obsessive scratching, lewd postures, and hallucinations. She called the hysterics "my lovely lunatics," and referred to them casually by name, as if she had met them not long ago in the ward and regarded them as friends or at least as interesting aquaintances. Unlike most intellectuals, Violet didn't distinguish between the cerebral and the physical. Her thoughts seemed to run through her whole being, as if thinking were a sensual experience. Her movements suggested warmth and languor, an unhurried pleasure in her own body. She was forever making herself more comfortable. She wriggled into chairs, adjusted her neck and arms and shoulders. She crossed her legs or let one dangle over the edge of a sofa. She had a tendency to sigh, take deep breaths, and bite her bottom lip when she was thinking. Sometimes she would gently stroke her arm while she talked or finger her lips while she listened. Often she would reach out and touch my hand very lightly when she spoke to me. With Erica she was openly affectionate. She would stroke Erica's hair or let her arm lie comfortably around her shoulders.

Beside Lucille, my wife had looked loose and open. Next to Violet, Erica's nerves and the relative tightness of her body seemed to redefine her as reserved and cautious. The two women liked each other immediately, however, and the friendship between them would last. Violet seduced Erica with her stories of feminine subversion—tales of women who made daring escapes from hospitals and husbands, fathers and employers. They chopped off their hair and disguised themselves as men. They climbed over walls, jumped out windows, and leapt from roof to roof. They boarded ships and sailed out to sea. But Erica especially loved the animal stories. Her eyes widened and she smiled as she listened to Violet tell about an outbreak of meowing among girls who attended a convent school in France. At exactly the same hour every afternoon, the girls went down on their hands and knees and meowed loudly for several hours until the whole neighborhood pulsed with the noise. Another incident involved canine behavior. Violet reported that in 1855 every single woman in the French town of Josselin succumbed to a fit of uncontrollable barking.

Violet captivated Erica with her own stories, too, most of them kept secret from me and only hinted at, but I gathered that Violet had been in and out of many beds in her young life, and that not every bed had had a man in it. For Erica, who had slept with exactly three men in the course of her thirty-nine years, Violet's erotic adventures were more than intriguing anecdotes. They were tales of enviable daring and freedom. For Violet, Erica embodied feminine reason, an idea that most of history has relegated to an oxymoron. Erica had a patience of mind that Violet lacked, a dogged willingness to tease a thought to fruition, and there were days when Violet would come to our door with a question for Erica, usually about German philosophy—Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger. Violet became Erica's student then. She would lie on our sofa, her eyes fixed on her teacher's face, and while she listened she squinted, frowned, and pulled at strands of her hair, as though these gestures could help her puzzle out the tortuous mysteries of being.

I doubt that either Erica or I would have taken to Violet so quickly had she not been with Bill. It wasn't only that we knew him and were well-disposed to the woman he had fallen for so hard, it was that we liked Bill and Violet together. They were beautiful, those two, and my mind is still crammed with memories of their bodies from the early days of their love affair: Violet with her hand in Bill's hair or on his thigh or Bill leaning over her, his mouth grazing her ear. Every time I saw them, I had the impression that they had just made love or were about to make love, that their eyes never left each other. Infatuated people often look ridiculous to others; their nonstop cooing, touching, and kissing can be intolerable to friends who have left that stage behind them. But Bill and Violet didn't embarrass me. Despite their obvious passion for each other, they played at restraint, holding back when Erica or I were in the room, and I think the tension they created together was what I liked best. I always felt that there was an invisible wire between them, stretched nearly to its breaking point.

Violet had grown up on a farm near Dundas, Minnesota, a town with a population of 623. I knew almost nothing about her corner of the Midwest, with its alfalfa fields, Holstein cows, and stolid characters with names like Harold Lundberg, Gladys Hrbek, and Lovey Munkemeyer, but I imagined it nevertheless, stealing images from movies and books of a flat landscape under a large sky. She had graduated from high school in the neighboring town of Northfield and attended St Olaf College in that same town before she fled east to graduate school at NYU. Her great-grandparents on both sides had emigrated from Norway and made their way across the country to start their farms and fight the earth and weather. Violet's rural childhood still clung to her. It appeared not only in her long midwestern vowels and in her references to milking machines and feedbags, but in the earnestness and weight of her spirit. Violet had charm, but it was not cultivated charm. When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.

One afternoon in July I found myself alone with Violet. Erica had taken Matt and Mark back to Greene Street, along with the first chapter of Violet's dissertation, which she had promised to read. Bill had gone off to Pearl Paint for supplies. The light shone on Violet's brown hair as she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of a window and told me the story of Augustine, which turned into a story about herself.

In Paris, Violet had rummaged through documents, files, and case studies called observations from the Salpêtrière hospital. From these accounts, she had cobbled together a few sketchy personal histories. "Both her parents were servants," Violet told me. "Not long after she was born, they sent her away to live with relatives. She stayed with them for six years but then was sent away again to a convent school. She was an angry girl—unruly and difficult The nuns thought she was possessed by the devil, and they threw holy water in her face to calm her. When she was thirteen, the nuns expelled her, and she went back to her mother, who was working in a house in Paris as a chambermaid. The case study doesn't mention what happened to her father. He must have disappeared. It does say that Augustine was hired 'on the pretext' that she teach the children of the house to sing and sew. For her efforts she was allowed to sleep in a little closet. It turned out that her mother was having an affair with the master of the house. In the records, they just call him 'Monsieur C.' Not long after Augustine moved in, Monsieur C. began making sexual advances toward her, but she refused him. Finally he threatened her with a razor and then raped her. She started having convulsive fits and bouts of paralysis. She hallucinated rats and dogs and big eyes staring at her. It got so bad that her mother took her to the Salpêtrière, where she was diagnosed as a hysteric. She was fifteen."

"A lot of people would go crazy after that kind of treatment," I said.

"She didn't have a chance. You'd be surprised how many of the girls and women I've been reading about came from similar backgrounds. Most of them were dirt-poor. A lot of them were shuttled back and forth between one parent or relative and another. They were always being uprooted as children. Several of them had been molested, too, by a relative or employer or somebody." Violet stopped talking for several seconds. "There are still psychoanalysts who talk about 'hysterical personality,' but most pyschiatrists don't even consider hysteria a mental illness anymore. The one thing that's left on the books is 'hysterical conversion' or 'conversion disorder.' That's when you wake up one day and can't move your arms or legs and there's no physical reason for it."

"You're saying that hysteria was a medical creation," I said.

"No," Violet said. "That's too simple. The medical establishment was certainly part of it, but the fact that so many women had hysterical attacks, not just women who were hospitalized for them, goes beyond doctors. Swooning, thrashing, and foaming at the mouth were a lot more common in the nineteenth century. It hardly happens anymore. Don't you find that strange? I mean, the only explanation is that hysteria really was a broad cultural phenomenon—a permissible way out."

"Out of what?"

"Out of Monsieur C.'s house, for one thing."

"You think that Augustine was pretending?"

"No. I think she was really suffering. If she had been admitted to a hospital today, they would have said she was schizophrenic or bipolar, but let's face it, those names are pretty vague, too. I think her illness took the form it did because it was in the air, floating around like a virus—the way anorexia nervosa floats around today."

While I thought about her comment, Violet continued. "Whin we were kids, my little sister, Alice, and I used to spend a lot of time in the barn. The summer after I turned nine and Alice turned six, we were playing with our dolls up in the hayloft. We were sitting across from each other making our dolls talk when suddenly Alice got this strange look on her face and pointed at the little window. 'Look Violet,' she said, 'there's an angel.' I didn't see anything except the little square of sunshine, but I was spooked, and then for a second I thought that there might be a figure there—a pale, weightless thing. Alice fell over and started kicking and choking. I grabbed her and tried to shake her. At first, I thought she was fooling, and then I saw her eyes roll up into her head and I knew she wasn't. I started screaming for my mother, and then I was gagging on my own spit. I was kicking and rolling around in the hay. My mother came running out of the house and climbed up the ladder to us. I was all crazy, Leo. I was yelling so loud I got hoarse. It took my mother a couple of minutes to figure out which one of us was in trouble. When she did, she had to push me out of the way, really hard, because I was holding on to Alice's knees and I wouldn't let go. My mother carried Alice out of there and down the ladder and drove her to the hospital." Violet took a big, shuddering breath and continued. "I stayed home with my father. I was sick with shame. I had panicked. I did everything wrong. I wasn't brave at all, but worse than that, a part of me knew that I had been acting flipped out, and that it was only partly real." Violet's eyes filled with tears. "I went into my room and started counting. I counted way up to four thousand and something, and then my father came into my room and told me Alice was going to be all right. He had talked to my mother at the hospital, and I cried all over him for a long time." Violet turned her head away from me. "Alice had had a grand mal seizure. She's an epileptic."

"You shouldn't blame yourself for being scared," I said.

Violet looked at me, her eves suddenly shrewd. "You know how Charcot began to understand hysteria? The hysterics just happened to be housed right next door to the epileptics at the hospital. After a little while, the hysterics started having seizures. They became what they were near."

In August Erica and I rented a house on Martha's Vineyard for two weeks. We celebrated Matt's fourth birthday in the small white house about a quarter mile from the beach. After he woke up that morning, Matt was unusually quiet. He seated himself at the breakfast table across from me and Erica and looked soberly at the presents that were piled in front of him. Behind his head through the kitchen window I could see the green expanse of the small lawn and the shine of dew on the grass. I waited for him to begin tearing off the wrapping paper, but he didn't move. He looked as if he were about to say something. Matt often paused before a speech, collecting himself for the sentence ahead. His verbal abilities had improved dramatically in the past year, but they still lagged behind most of his friends'.

"Don't you want to open your presents?" Erica said to him.

He nodded at the pile, looked over at us, and said in a clear loud voice, "How does the number get inside my body?"

"The number?" I said.

"Four." Matt's hazel eyes widened with the question.

Erica reached across the table and put her hand on his arm. "I'm sorry, Matty," she said, "but we don't understand what you mean."

"Turn four," he said. I could hear the insistence in his voice.

"Oh, I see," I said slowly. "The number doesn't go inside you, Matt. People say you're turning four, but nothing happens in your body." It took us a while to explain numbers to Matt, to make it clear that they didn't magically lodge themselves inside us on our birthdays, that they were abstract symbols, a way of counting years or cups or peanuts or anything else for that matter. I thought about Matthew's four again that night when I heard Erica's voice coming from the bedroom. She was reading "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and every time she read "Open sesame," Matt sang out the magic words with her. It wasn't strange that he had stumbled over the phrase "to turn four." His body had miraculous properties, after all. It had an invisible inside and a smooth surface with openings and passageways. Food went into it. Urine and feces came out of it. When he cried, a salty liquid streamed from his eyes. How could he possibly know that "turning four" didn't signify yet another physical transformation, a kind of corporeal "open sesame" that allowed a brand-new number four to take its place beside his heart or in his stomach or maybe find a home in his head?

That summer I had begun taking notes for the book I was planning to write about changing views in Western painting, an analysis of the conventions of seeing. It was a large, ambitious project and a dangerous one. Signs have often been confused with other signs, as well as with the things that lie beyond them in the world. But iconic signs function differently from words and numbers, and the problem of resemblance has to be addressed without falling into the trap of naturalism. As I worked on the book, Matt's four was often with me, a little reminder to avoid a very seductive form of philosophical error.

In Violet's first letter to Bill, dated October 15, she wrote, "Dear Bill, You left me an hour ago. I didn't expect you to vanish from my life so abruptly, to disappear without any warning at all. After I walked you to the subway and you kissed me good-bye, I came home, sat down on the bed, and looked at the pillow squashed by your head and the sheets wrinkled from your body. I lay down on the bed where you were lying just minutes before and realized that I wasn't angry and I didn't want to cry. I just felt amazed. When you said that you had to go back to your old life for Mark's sake, you said it so simply and sadly that I couldn't argue with you or ask you to change your mind. You were resolved. I could see that, and I doubt whether tears or words would have made any difference.

"Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it's been much longer than that. We've spent years living inside each other. I've loved you since the first second I saw you, standing at the top of the stairs in that ugly gray T-shirt with black paint on it. You stank of sweat that day, and you looked me over like I was some object you were about to buy in a store. For some reason that cold, strict look in your eyes made me crazy with love for you, but I didn't show you a thing. I was too proud."

"I think about your thighs," she wrote in the second letter, "and the warm, moist smell of your skin in the morning, and the tiny eyelash in each corner of your eye that I always notice when you first roll over to look at me. I don't know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else. I don't know why your body is something I can't stop thinking about, why those little flaws and ridges on your back are lovely to me or why the pale soft bottoms of your New Jersey feet that always wore shoes are more poignant than any other feet, but they are. I thought I would have more time to chart your body, to map its poles, its contours and terrain, its inner regions, both temperate and torrid—a whole topography of skin and muscle and bone. I didn't tell you, but I imagined a lifetime as your cartographer, years of exploration and discovery that would keep changing the look of my map. It would always need to be redrawn and reconfigured to keep up with you. I'm sure I've missed things, Bill, or forgotten them, because half the time I've been wandering around your body blind drunk with happiness. There are still places I haven't seen."

In the fifth and last letter, Violet wrote, "I want you to come back to me, but even if you don't, I'm in you now. It started with the paintings of me that you said were of you. We've written and drawn ourselves into each other. Hard. You know how hard. When I sleep alone, I can hear you breathing with me, and the funniest part of it is that I'm fine alone, happy alone, able to live alone. I'm not dying for you, Bill. I just want you, and if you stay with Lucille and Mark forever, I will never come and take back what I gave you the night when we heard the man singing about the moon behind the trash cans. Love, Violet."

Bill's separation from Violet lasted five days. On the fifteenth, he moved in upstairs and resumed his marriage. On the nineteenth, he left Lucille for good. Both Bill and Violet called on the first day to tell me and Erica what had happened, and neither one of them betrayed any emotion when delivering the message. I saw Violet only once during that time. On the morning of the sixteenth, I met her in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Erica had been trying in vain to reach Violet since she'd called with the news. "She sounded calm," Erica had said, "but she must be devastated." But Violet didn't look "devastated." She didn't even look sad. She was wearing a small navy blue dress that hugged her body. Her lips were shining with red lipstick and her hair had been artfully touseled. Her high-heeled shoes looked new, and she gave me a brilliant smile when she saw me. In her hand, she was holding a letter. When I asked her how she was, she responded to the sympathy in my voice with a cool, crisp tone that warned me I had better remove all traces of pity from mine. "I'm fine, Leo. I'm delivering a letter to Bill," she said. "It's faster than the post office."

"Speed is important?" I said to her.

Violet fixed her eyes on mine and said, "Speed and strategy. That's what matters now." With a single, emphatic gesture, she dropped the letter on top of the mailbox. Then she swiveled on her high heels and walked toward the door. I felt sure that Violet knew she was living one of her finest moments. Her straight posture, her slightly elevated chin, the sound of her heels as they clicked on the tile floor would have been wasted without an audience. Before she left, she turned around and winked at me.

Bill had never told me that he was reconsidering his marriage, but I knew that after he told Lucille about Violet, Lucille began to call him more often. I also knew that they had met several times to discuss Mark. I don't know what Lucille said to him, but her words must have reached both Bill's guilt and his sense of duty. I felt sure that if he had abandoned Violet, he had done it because he truly believed it was the only path he could take. Erica thought Bill had lost his mind, but then Erica had taken sides. Not only did she love Violet, she had turned against Lucille. I tried to articulate to Erica what I had long sensed in Bill—a rigid current in his personality that sometimes pushed him toward absolute positions. Bill had once told me that by the age of seven he had adopted a strict but private code of moral behavior. I think he recognized that it was somewhat arrogant to hold himself to higher standards than he did other people, but for as long as I knew him, he never let go of the idea that he lived with special restrictions. I guessed that it came from a belief in his own gifts. As a child Bill could run faster, hit harder, and play ball better than any other boy his age. He was handsome, good in school, drew like a wizard, and, unlike many other talented children, was acutely aware of his own superiority. But for Bill, heroism came with a price. He would never blame others for wobbling indecision, ethical weakness, or muddy thinking, but he wouldn't allow it himself. Faced with Lucille's willingness to try the marriage again and Mark's need for a full-time father, he obeyed his inner laws, even when they told him to act against his feelings for Violet.

Bill and Violet liked the story of their brief crack-up and reunion. They both told it in the same way, very simply, as if it were a fairy tale, without ever mentioning what was in the letters: One morning, Bill woke up and told Violet he was leaving her. She walked him to the subway and they kissed each other good-bye. Then, for five days in a row, Violet delivered a letter to 27 Greene Street, and every day Bill carried the letter upstairs and read it. On the nineteenth, after he had read the fifth letter, he told Lucille that the situation between them was hopeless, left our building, walked to Violet's apartment on East Seventh Street and declared his undying love for her, after which she burst into tears and sobbed for twenty minutes.

I've come to see the five days they were apart as a battle between two strong wills, and now that I've read the letters, it's clear to me why Violet won. She never questioned Bill's right to do whatever he felt he had to do. She argued persuasively that he should choose her over his wife without appearing to argue this at all and by mentioning Lucille's name only once. Violet knew that Lucille had time, a son, and legitimacy on her side, all reinforced by Bill's unflinching sense of responsibility, but she never tangled with Bill's moral code. She wore him down with the only truth she had to offer him, that she loved him fervently, and she knew that passion was exactly what Lucille lacked. Later, when Violet spoke about the letters, she made it clear that she had written them carefully. "They had to be sincere," she said, "but they couldn't be maudlin. They had to be well written, without a shred of self-pity, and they had to be sexy without being pornographic. I don't want to gloat, but they did the trick."

Lucille had asked Bill to come back. He told me this openly, but I think that as soon as he returned to her, the desire she had felt for him began to wane. He said that after only a couple of hours, she had criticized both his dishwashing and a story he was reading to Mark—Busy Day, Busy People. Lucille's coolness and unavailability had been her most alluring features for Bill, particularly because she seemed oblivious to the power they had over him. But nagging is a strategy of the powerless, and there is nothing mysterious about it. I suspect that Violet's cause, set forth with blazing awareness of purpose in the letters, was helped along by the dreary sound of Lucille's domestic complaints. I never heard Lucille talk about those days, so I can't be sure of what she felt, but I suspect that whether she knew it or not, a part of her pushed Bill away, a possibility that made Violet's victory a little less remarkable than she may have supposed.

Violet moved into 89 Bowery with Bill, and as soon as she arrived, she started cleaning. With a zeal that must have come from a long line of Scandinavian Protestants, she scrubbed and bleached and sprayed and polished until the loft took on a foreign, naked, almost squinting appearance. Lucille remained our upstairs neighbor, and the four-year-old Mark, whose divided life had been given a five-day reprieve, resumed his back-and-forth existence. Bill never spoke to me of his relief and joy. He didn't have to. I noticed that he started slapping my back again and affectionately grabbing my arm, and the odd thing was that not until he began touching me again did I realize that he had stopped doing it.

The days came and went with an almost liturgical dependability, incantations of the ordinary and intimate. Matt sang to himself in the mornings in his high, tuneless voice while he dressed himself very, very slowly. Four days a week Erica sailed out the door with her briefcase and an English muffin in her hand. I walked Matt to school and then took the IRT uptown. On the subway I composed paragraphs in my head for my chapter that focused on Pliny's Natural History, while I half-saw the faces and bodies of other riders. I felt their bodies pressed against mine, smelled their tobacco, sweat, and cloying perfumes, their medicinal creams and herbal remedies. I took the Columbia boys and a few Barnard girls through a survey course on Western art and hoped some of those images would stick with them forever—the gold-and-blue abstraction of a Cimabue or the estranging beauty of Giovanni Bellini's Madonna in a Meadow or the terror of Holbein's dead Christ. I listened to Jack moan about the docile students. "I never thought I'd find myself actually longing for those characters from SDS." After work Erica and I found Matt and Grace at home. He was often in her lap by then, a place he had named "the soft house." We fed him and bathed him and listened to his stories about Gunna, a wild redheaded boy from a country called "Lutit" that was somewhere in the "north." He fought us, too, especially when he metamorphosed into Superman or Batman and we had the gall to challenge his omnipotence with directives about teeth brushing and bedtime. Erica helped edit Violet's dissertation. Ideas flew between them and they excited each other, and sometimes at night I would rub Erica's back to ease the tension that made her head ache after long talks on the telephone with Violet about cultural contagions and the problem of the subject.

When he didn't have Mark with him, Bill worked far into the night on the hysteria constructions. Violet was often asleep by the time he finished. She told me that he rarely sat down to eat, and when he did, he would sit with the plate on his lap in front of the piece and say nothing.

Neither Bill nor I had much time for coffees or lunches that year, but I also knew that Violet had altered the outlines of our friendship. It wasn't that Bill actively neglected me. We spoke on the phone. He wanted me to write about the hysteria works, and whenever I saw him he brought me something to read—a Raw Comics or a book of medical photographs or an obscure novel. The truth was Violet had opened a passage in Bill that had taken him further into his own solitude. I could only guess at what had passed between them, but I sometimes felt that their intimacy had a courage and fierceness that I had never known, and the awareness of this lack in myself made me vaguely restless. The feeling lodged itself in my mouth as a dry taste, and I suffered from a longing that nothing could satisfy. It wasn't hunger or thirst or even sex that I wanted. It was a dim but irritating need for something nameless and unknown that I had felt from time to time since I was child. There were a few nights that year when I lay awake beside my sleeping wife with that emptiness in my mouth, and I would move into the living room and sit on the chair by the window to wait until morning.

For a long time I thought of Dan Wechsler as another missing man in a family of missing men. Moishe, the grandfather, had disappeared. Sy, the father, had stayed, but had sprinted away emotionally. Dan, the youngest of these three generations of men, had been hidden away in New Jersey, the phantom resident of either a halfway house or a hospital, depending on his state of mind. That year, Bill and Violet hosted a small Thanksgiving dinner on the Bowery, to which Dan was invited. For days Dan called Bill. One day he canceled. The next day he reinstated himself. The day after, he called again to say he wasn't coming. But at the last moment, Dan found the courage take the bus to the Port Authority bus terminal, where Bill picked him up. We were seven, altogether: Bill, Violet, Erica, Dan, Matthew, Mark, and I. Regina had gone to Al's family for the day, and the Bloms had felt it was too far and too expensive to travel to New York for the holiday. Dan's craziness wasn't hidden. His fingernails were heavily rimmed with dirt, and his neck was thickly covered with ash- colored flakes of drying skin. His shirt had been buttoned wrong, giving his whole upper body a lopsided appearance. At dinner I found myself seated beside him. While I was still unfolding my napkin and putting it on my lap, Dan had already picked up his dessert spoon and was pushing turkey and stuffing into his mouth at an astonishing speed. His ravenous eating lasted for about thirty seconds. Then he lit a cigarette, sucked on it deeply, turned abruptly to me, and said in a loud excited voice: "Leo, do you like food?"

"I do," I said. "I like most foods."

"That's good," he said, but he sounded disappointed. With, his free hand he began to scratch his forearm hard. His nails left red stripes on his skin. Then he fell silent. His large eyes, which looked very much like his brother's except that their irises were darker, suddenly withdrew from me.

"Do you like food?" I said to him.

"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.