What I Loved

TWO

EIGHT DAYS LATER MATT DIED. ON JULY FIFTH AT ABOUT THREE o'clock in the afternoon, he went canoeing on the Delaware River with three counselors and six other boys. His canoe hit a rock and capsized. Matt was hurled out, hit his head on another boulder, and was knocked unconscious. He drowned in the shallow water before anybody could get to him. For months, Erica and I went over the sequence of events, looking for the guilty party. At first we blamed Matt's counselor Jason, who had been in the stern, because it was all a matter of inches. Had Jason steered two or three inches to the right, there wouldn't have been an accident. An inch to the left, the collision would have occurred, but Matt wouldn't have hit the rock in the water. We also blamed a boy named Rusty. A few seconds before the crash, he had raised himself up and out of his seat in the middle of the canoe and wiggled his buttocks at Jason. In those seconds, the counselor lost sight of the shallow rapids in front of him. Inches and seconds. When Jim and a boy named Cyrus pulled Matthew out of the river, they didn't know that he was dead. Jim performed mouth-to-mouth, blowing air in and out of Matt's still body.

They flagged down a car on the road, and the driver, a Mr. Hodenfield, sped across the border to the nearest hospital, in Callicoon, New York— Grover M. Hermann Community Hospital. Jim never stopped breathing into Matt. He pressed on his chest and blew air into him over and over, but at the hospital Matthew was pronounced dead. It is a strange word, "pronounced." He had died already, but in the emergency room, they spoke the words and it was over. The pronouncement made it real.

Erica took the telephone call late that afternoon. I was standing only a few feet away from her in the kitchen. I saw her face change, watched her clutch the counter, and heard her gasp the word "No." It was a hot day, but we hadn't turned on the air conditioners. I was sweating. Looking at her, I began to sweat more. Erica scribbled words on a pad. Her hand shook. She gulped for air as she listened to the voice. I knew that the call was about Matthew. Erica had repeated the word "accident," then written down the name of the hospital. I was ready to leave. Adrenaline surged through my body. I ran for my wallet and the car keys. When I returned to the living room with the keys in my hand, Erica said, "Leo, that man on the telephone. That man said that Matthew is dead." I stopped breathing, shut my eyes, and said to myself what Erica had said aloud. I said no. Nausea welled up into my mouth. My knees buckled, and I grabbed the table to steady myself. I heard the keys jangle as my hand hit the wooden surface. Then I sat down. Erica had gripped the other side of the table. I looked at her white knuckles, then up at her contorted face. "We have to go to him," she said.

I drove. The white and yellow lines on the black road in front of me held my complete attention. I concentrated on the lines and watched them disappear under the wheels. The sun glared through the windshield, and I squinted now and then through my sunglasses. Beside me sat a woman I hardly recognized—pale, motionless, and dumb. I know that Erica and I saw him in the hospital and that he looked thin. His legs were brown from the sun, but his face had changed color. His lips were blue and his cheeks gray. He was Matthew and he wasn't Matthew. Erica and I walked down hallways and spoke to the medical examiner and we made arrangements in the hushed atmosphere of deference that surrounds people who have just stepped into grief, but the fact was that the world didn't seem to be the world anymore, and when I think back on that week, on the funeral and the cemetery and the people who came, there is a shallowness to all of it, as though my vision had changed and everything I saw had been robbed of its thickness.

I suppose that the loss of depth came from disbelief. Knowing the truth isn't enough. My whole being refuted Matt's death, and I was always expecting him to walk through the door. I heard him moving around in his room and coming up the stairs. Once I heard him say "Dad." The sound of his voice was as distinct as if he had been a foot away from me. Belief would come very slowly, and it would come sparingly, in moments that bored holes into the curious stage set that had replaced the world around me. Two days after the funeral, I was wandering around the apartment and heard noises from Matthew's room. When I looked through the door, I saw Erica lying in Matt's bed. She had curled up under his sheets and was rocking back and forth as she clutched his pillow and bit into it I walked over to her and sat down at the edge of the bed. She continued to rock. The pillow case was wet with ragged spots of saliva and tears. I put my hand on her shoulder, but she wrenched her torso toward the wall and began to scream. Her howls rose up from deep inside her throat—hoarse and guttural. "I want my baby! Get away! I want my baby!" I withdrew my hand. She punched the wall and beat the bed. She sobbed and bellowed out the words over and over. Her cries seemed to gouge my lungs, and I stopped breathing each time they came. As I sat there and listened to Erica, I felt afraid, not of her grief but of my own. I let her noises tear and scrape through me. Yes, I said to myself. This is true. These sounds are real. I looked at the floor and imagined myself lying on it. To stop, I thought, just to stop. I felt dry. That was the problem. I was dry as an old bone—and I envied Erica her flailing and her shouting. I couldn't find it in me, and I let her do it instead. She ended up with her head in my lap, and I looked down at her squashed face with its red nose and swollen eyes. I put four fingers on her cheek and let them run to her chin. "Matthew," I said to her. Then I said it again. "Matthew."

Erica looked up at me. Her lips were trembling. "Leo," she said. "How are we going to live?"

The days were long. I must have had thoughts but I don't remember them. Mostly I sat. I didn't read or cry or rock or move. I sat in the chair where I often sit now, and I looked out the window. I watched the traffic and the pedestrians with their shopping bags. I studied the yellow cabs, the tourists dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and then after I had been sitting for hours, I would go into Matt's room and touch his things. I never picked up anything. I let my fingers move over his rock collection. I touched his T-shirts in his drawer. I laid my hands on his backpack, still stuffed with dirty clothes from camp. I felt his unmade bed. We didn't make the bed all summer, and we didn't move a single object in his room. By the time morning came, Erica had often made her way to Matthew's bed. Sometimes she remembered climbing into it in the middle of the night. Other times she didn't.

She had started walking in her sleep again, not every night, but a couple of times a week. During these ambulatory trances, Erica was always searching for something. She yanked open drawers in the kitchen and dug into closets. She pulled books off the shelf in her study and peered at the bare wood where the volumes had been. One night I found her standing in the middle of the hallway. Her hand turned an invisible knob and she thrust open an invisible door and began to clutch and grab at the Mr. I let her look because I was afraid of disturbing her. Asleep, she had a determination she had lost in wakefulness, and when I felt her stirring beside me and sitting up in bed, I would rouse myself and dutifully stand up to follow her around the loft until the ritual searching was over. I became a nocturnal spectator, a vigilant second to Erica's unconscious roaming. There were nights when I stood in front of the door that led to the landing, worried that she might leave and take her search out into the streets, but whatever it was that she wanted to find, the thing was lost in the apartment. Sometimes she mumbled, "I know I put it somewhere. It was here." But she never named the object. After a while, she would give up, walk to Matthew's room, climb into his bed, and sleep until morning. During the early weeks of her wandering, I spoke to her about it, but after a while, I stopped. There was nothing left to tell her, and my descriptions of her unconscious rummaging only made her suffer more.

We didn't know how to give him up, how to be. We couldn't find the rhythms of ordinary life. The simple business of waking, retrieving the paper from outside the door, and sitting down to eat breakfast became a cruel pantomime of the everyday enacted in the gaping absence of our son. And although she sat at the table with her bowl of cereal in front of her, Erica couldn't eat. She had never been a big eater, had always been thin, but by the end of the summer she had lost fifteen pounds. Her cheeks sank into her face, and when I sat across from her I could see her skull. I nagged her about eating, but my prompting was halfhearted because I tasted nothing on my plate either and had to force the food into my mouth. Violet was the one who fed us. She started cooking dinner for me and Erica the day after Matt died and didn't stop until well into the fall. In the beginning, she knocked before she entered. After that, we left the door open for her. Every evening, I would hear her steps on the stairs and see her walk in, carrying pans with tinfoil over them. Violet never said much to us in the early days after Matt's death, and her silence was a relief. She would announce the names of the foods— "Lasagna, salad," or "Chicken cutlets with green beans and rice," and then she would plop the plates on the table, uncover them, and dish out the food. By August she was staying to encourage Erica to eat. She cut up her food for her, and while Erica took hesitant bites, Violet massaged her shoulders or stroked her back She touched me, too, but differently. She would grab my upper arm and squeeze it hard—to steady me or shake me, I don't know which.

We depended on her, and when I think back on it now, I'm aware of how hard she worked. If she and Bill were going out to dinner, she would cook for us anyway and drop off the food. When they vacationed for two weeks in August, she arrived with dinners for our freezer, labeled with the days of the week. She called us every day at ten in the morning from Connecticut to check on us and closed her conversation by saying, "Take out Wednesday right now, and it will be defrosted by dinner time."

Bill came to us alone. Neither Violet nor Bill ever mentioned it, but I think they did their duties separately rather than together so that Erica and I would have more hours of company. About two weeks after the funeral, Bill brought a watercolor with him that Matt had done during a visit to his studio. It was another cityscape. When Erica saw it, she said to Bill, "I think I'll look at it later, if you don't mind. I can't now. I just can't..." She left us, walked down the hallway, and I heard the sound of our bedroom door closing behind her. Bill pulled up a chair next to mine, placed the watercolor on the coffee table in front of us, and began to talk. "Do you see the wind?" he said.

I looked down at the scene.

"Look at these trees pulled hard by the wind and the buildings. The whole city is shaking with it. The picture is trembling. Eleven years old, Leo, and he did this." Bill moved his finger across the images. "Look at this woman collecting cans, and the little girl in the ballerina costume with her mother. Look at this man's body over here, the way he's walking, fighting the wind. And here's Dave feeding Durango ..."

Through a window I saw the old man. He was bent over toward the floor with a bowl in his hands. Because of his stooped posture, Dave's beard hung away from his body. "Yes," I said. "Dave is always there somewhere."

"He made this picture for you," Bill said. "It's for you." He picked up the watercolor and put it on my lap. I held it very carefully and studied the street with its people. A plastic bag and a newspaper were flying in the wind near the pavement and then, as I looked up, I noticed a tiny figure on the roof of Dave's building—the outline of a boy.

Bill pointed at the child. "There's no face on him. Matt told me he wanted it like that..."

I brought the paper closer to my eyes. "And his feet aren't on the ground," I said slowly. The featureless child had something in his hand—a knife with its many blades opened like the points on a star. "It's the Ghosty Boy," I said, "with Matt's lost knife."

"It's for you," Bill repeated. At the time, I accepted this explanation, but now I wonder if Bill didn't invent the story of the gift. He laid a hand on my shoulder. I had been afraid of this. I didn't want him to touch me and remained rigid. But when I turned to the man beside me, I saw that he was crying. Tears ran down his cheeks, and then he sobbed loudly.

After that, Bill came every day to sit with me by the window. He came home from his studio earlier than usual, always at the same time: five o'clock. Often Bill would put his hand on the arm of my chair and leave it there until he left, about an hour later. He told me stories from his childhood with Dan and stories from when he was a young artist roaming Italy. He described his first house-painting job in New York—in a brothel where most of the customers were Hasidic Jews. He read to me from Artforum. He talked to me about Philip Guston's conversion, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Paul Celan's poems. I rarely interrupted him, and he demanded no response. He didn't avoid Matthew as a subject Sometimes he reported on conversations they had had at the studio. "He wanted to know about line, Leo. I mean metaphysically, about the edges of things as you look at them, if blocks of color have lines, if painting is superior to drawing. He told me that he had dreamed several times that he was walking into the sun and that he couldn't see. The light blinded him."

Bill would always pause after he mentioned Matt. When Erica felt strong enough to be with us, she would lie on the sofa several feet away. I know she listened, because sometimes she would lift her head and say, "Go on, Bill." He would always continue his monologue then. I heard everything he said, but his words sounded muffled, as if he were speaking through a handkerchief. Before he left, he would move his hand off the armchair, squeeze my arm firmly, and say, "I'm here, Leo. We're here." Bill came every day he was in New York for a year. When he was traveling, he called me around the same time. Without Bill, I think I would have dried up completely and blown away.

Grace stayed with us through the first week of September. Matt's death had made her quiet, but whenever she mentioned him, she called him "my little boy." Her grief seemed to lodge itself in her chest and the way she breathed. Her full breasts rose and fell while she shook her head. "It can't be understood," she said to me. "It's outside our powers." She got a job with another family in the neighborhood, and on the day she left us, I found myself examining her body. Matt had always loved the plenitude of Grace. He had once told Erica that when he sat on Grace's lap there were no bones sticking out to interfere with his comfort. But the woman's fullness was spiritual as well as physical. Grace eventually moved to Sunrise, Florida, where she now lives with Mr. Thelwell in a condominium. She and Erica still write to each other after all these years, and Erica tells me that Grace keeps a photograph of Matt in the living room beside the pictures of her six grandchildren.

Just before Erica and I returned to work that fall, Lazlo came to visit us. We hadn't seen him since the funeral. He walked through the door with a grocery box, greeted us with a nod, and set it down on the floor. He proceeded to unwrap the object inside and then place it on the coffee table. The blue sticks of the small sculpture had nothing to do with the anatomical works I had seen before. Fragile open rectangles rose up from a flat dark blue board. The piece looked like a toothpick city. Taped to its base was a title: In Memory of Matthew Hertzberg. Lazlo was unable to look at us. "I'd better be going," he mumbled, but before he could take a step, Erica reached out for him. She grabbed him around his narrow waist and hugged him. Lazlo's arms swung up and out. For a moment he stood with his arms extended at his sides as if hesitant about whether he should take flight or not, but then he brought them around to Erica's back. His fingers rested lightly there for a couple of seconds and then he dropped his chin onto her head. There was a momentary spasm in his face, a wrinkling around his mouth, and then it was gone. I shook Lazlo's hand, and as his warm fingers pressed mine, I swallowed hard and swallowed again, the gulps resounding in my ears like distant gunfire.

After Lazlo left, Erica turned to me. "You don't cry, Leo. You haven't cried at all, not once."

I looked at Erica's red eyes, her wet nose and trembling mouth. She repulsed me. "No." I said. "I haven't." She heard the repressed rage in my voice and her mouth dropped open. I turned around and stalked down the hallway. I walked into Matthew's room and stood by his bed. Then I put my fist through the wall. The Sheetrock buckled under the blow and pain shot through my hand. The pain felt good—no, more than good. For an instant, I felt intense soaring relief, but it didn't last. I could feel Erica's eyes on my back as she stood in the doorway. When I turned around to look at her, she said, " What have you done? What have you done to Matt's wall?"

Erica and I both worked hard at our jobs, but the sameness and familiarity of our duties felt more like a reenactment than a continuation of our old lives. I recalled perfectly the Leo Hertzberg who had taught in the art history department before Matthew's death, and I found that I could impersonate him smoothly. After all, my students didn't need me. They needed him: the man who lectured, corrected papers, and held office hours. If anything, I performed my duties more scrupulously than before. As long as I didn't stop working, I couldn't be faulted, and I soon discovered that because my colleagues and students knew that my son had died, they protected me with their own walls of silent respect. I could see that Erica had adopted a similar posture. For about an hour after she came home from Rutgers, her gestures were brisk and mechanical. She insisted on staying up late to correct papers. When she spoke to her colleagues on the phone, her voice sounded like a movie parody of an efficient secretary. In her tight determined face, I saw myself, but I didn't like the reflection, and the more I looked at it, the uglier I found it. The difference between us was that Erica's pose collapsed daily. By the end of the summer, she stopped walking in her sleep. Instead, she would go to Matt's room and weep on his bed until she was too tired to cry anymore. Erica's misery was volatile. For months, I went to sit beside her on Matt's bed, not knowing what to expect. There were nights when she would grab me and kiss my hands and face and chest and nights when she beat my arms and pummeled my chest. There were nights when she begged me to hold her and then when I had her in my arms, she would push me away. After a while, I discovered that my responses to Erica were robotic. I performed my duties of holding her or, if she didn't want me near her, sitting silently in a chair a few feet away, but the gestures and words that passed between us seemed to evaporate immediately and leave nothing behind them. When Erica brought up Rusty or Jason, I wanted to go deaf. When she accused me of being "catatonic," I closed my eyes. We no longer slept in the same bed. There was no sex between us, and I didn't touch myself. I was tempted to masturbate, but the relief it promised me also seemed to threaten disintegration.

In December, Erica went to a doctor about her weight, and he directed her to another doctor who was also an analyst. Every Friday, she visited Dr. Trimble in her office on Central Park West. Dr. Trimble asked to see me, but I refused to go. The last thing I wanted was some stranger prodding my mind for childhood traumas and quizzing me about my parents. But I should have gone. I can see that now. I should have gone because Erica wanted me to go. My refusal became the sign of my withdrawal from her without hope of return. While Erica talked to Dr. Trimble, I sat at home and listened to Bill for an hour and then, after he left, I looked out the window. My body hurt all over. Pain had settled into my arms and legs, and I suffered from a chronic stiffness in my muscles. My right hand, the one that had gone through the wall, took a long time to heal. I had broken my middle finger and the collision had left a large bump near my knuckle. This small disfigurement and my aching body were my sole satisfactions, and I would often rub the lumpy finger while I sat in my chair.

Erica drank cans of liquid sustenance called Ensure. In the evening, she took a sleeping pill. As the months passed, she became much kinder to me than she had been, but her new solicitude had an impersonal quality, as if she were tending a homeless man on the street rather than her husband. She stopped sleeping in Matt's bed and returned to ours, but I rarely joined her, choosing instead to sleep in my chair. One night in February, I woke up to find Erica covering me with a blanket. Rather than opening my eyes, I pretended that I was still asleep. When she put her lips to my head, I imagined myself pulling her toward me and kissing her neck and shoulders, but I didn't do it. At the time, I was like a man encased in a heavy suit of armor, and inside that corporeal fortress I lived with a single-minded wish: I will not be comforted. As perverse as it was, this desire felt like a lifeline, the only shred of truth left to me. I feel quite sure that Erica knew what I felt, and in March she announced a change.

"I've decided to accept the position at Berkeley, Leo. They still want me."

We were eating Chinese food out of boxes. I looked up from the chicken and broccoli to study her face. "Is this your way of saying that you want a divorce?" The word "divorce" had a curious ring to it. I realized that it had never occurred to me.

Erica shook her head and looked down at the table. "No, I don't want a divorce. I don't know if I'll stay there. All I know is that I can't live anymore in the place where Matt was, and I can't be here with you anymore, because ..." She paused. "You've gone dead, too, Leo. I didn't help. I know that. I was so crazy for a long time and I was mean."

"No," I said. "You weren't mean." I couldn't bear to look at her, so I turned my head and spoke to the wall. "Are you sure that you want to go away? Moving is hard on people, too."

"I know," she said.

We were silent for a while and then she continued: "I remember what you said about your father—the way he was after he found out about his family. You said, 'He went still.' "

I didn't move. I kept my eyes on the wall. "He had a stroke."

"Before the stroke. You said it happened before the stroke."

I saw my father in his chair. His back was to me as he sat in front of the fireplace. I nodded before I looked at Erica. When our eyes met, I saw that she was half-smiling and half-crying. "I'm not saying it's over between us, Leo. I want to come visit you if you'll let me. I'd like to write to you and tell you what I'm doing."

"Yes." I began to nod over and over, like one of those dolls whose heads are on a spring. I felt my two-day beard with both my hands and rubbed my face as I continued to nod.

"Also," she said, "we have to go through Matthew's things. I thought that you could sort his drawings. We can frame some and put the others in portfolios. I'll take care of his clothes and the toys. Some of them can go to Mark..."

That job took over our evenings, and I discovered that I was able to do it. I bought folders and storage boxes and began to organize hundreds of drawings, school art projects, notebooks, and letters that had belonged to Matt. Erica folded his T-shirts and pants and shorts very carefully. She saved his ART NOW shirt and a pair of camouflage pants that he had loved. She put the rest into boxes for Mark or for Goodwill. She gathered up his toys and separated the good ones from the junk. While Erica sat on the floor of Matt's room with cardboard boxes around her, I filed drawings at his desk. We worked slowly. Erica lingered over Matthew's clothes, his shirts and underpants and socks. How strange they were—at once terrible and banal. One evening, I started tracing the lines of his drawings with my finger—his people and buildings and animals. I found the motion of his living hand that way, and once I had started it, I couldn't stop. On an evening in April, Erica came and stood behind me. She watched my hand moving over the page, and then she reached out and put her finger on Dave and made the rounds of the old man's body. She cried then, and I understood how much I had hated her tears, because for some reason I didn't hate them then.

Erica's imminent departure changed us. The knowledge that we would soon be separated made us both more indulgent, relieving us of a burden I still can't name. I didn't want her to go away, and yet the fact that she was going away loosened a bolt in the machinery of our marriage. It had become a machine by then, a churning repetitious engine of mourning.

That spring I was teaching a seminar on still life to twelve graduate students, and in April I taught one of my last classes. When I walked in that day, one of the students, Edward Paperno, was opening the windows in the classroom to let the warm air into the room. The sunshine, the breeze, the fact that the semester was almost over all contributed to an atmosphere of languor and fatigue. As I sat down to begin the discussion, I yawned and covered my mouth. On the table in front of me I had my notes and a reproduction of Chardin 's Glass of Water and a Coffee Pot. My students had read Diderot and Proust and the Goncourt brothers on Chardin. They had been to the Frick to study the still lifes in that collection. We had already discussed several paintings. I began by pointing out how simple the painting was, two objects, three heads of garlic, and the sprig of an herb. I mentioned the light on the pot's rim and handle, the whiteness of the garlic, and the silver hues of the water. And then I found myself staring down at the glass of water in the picture. I moved very close to it. The strokes were visible. I could see them plainly. A precise quiver of the brush had made light. I swallowed, breathed heavily, and choked.

I think it was Maria Livingston who said, "Are you all right, Professor Herzberg?"

I cleared my throat, removed my glasses, and wiped my eyes. "The water," I said in a low voice. "The glass of water is very moving to me." I looked up and saw the surprised faces of my students. "The water is a sign of..." I paused. "The water seems to be a sign of absence."

I remained silent, but I could feel warm tears running down my cheeks. My students continued to look at me. "I believe that's all for today," I told them in a tremulous voice. "Go outside and enjoy the weather."

I watched my twelve students leave the room in silence, and I noticed with some surprise that Letitia Reeves had beautiful legs, which must have been hidden under trousers until that day. I listened to the door close. In the hallway, I heard the students break into low conversations. The sun lit the empty classroom and a wind rose up and blew through the windows and across my face. I tried not to make any noise, but I know that I did. I gulped for air and I gagged and deep ugly sounds came from my throat as I sobbed for what seemed to be a very long time.

Weeks later, I came across my calendar from 1989, the little agenda in which I had marked down appointments and events. I paged through it, pausing at Matt's baseball games, his teacher conferences, an art show at his school. When I turned to April, I noticed that I had written METS GAME in large letters on the fourteenth. Exactly one year to the day, I had broken down in class over the Chardin painting. I remembered my conversation with Matt that night. I remembered exactly where I had been sitting on his bed. I remembered his face as he talked to me and how for part of the time he had addressed the ceiling. I remembered his room, his socks on the floor, the plaid cotton blanket he had pulled up to his chest, the Mets T-shirt he had been wearing instead of pajamas. I remembered his lamp with the base designed to look like a pencil, the light it shed on the night table, and the glass of water that stood underneath it—flanked on the left by his wristwatch. I had brought hundreds of glasses of water to Matt's bedside, and after his death I had drunk many more, since I always kept a glass beside me at night. A real glass of water had not once reminded me of my son, but the image of a glass of water rendered 230 years earlier had catapulted me suddenly and irrevocably into the painful awareness that I was still alive.

After that day in the classroom, my grief took a new turn. For months I had lived in a state of self-enforced rigor mortis, interrupted only by the playacting of my work, which didn't disturb the entombment I had chosen for myself, but a part of me had known that a crack was inevitable. Chardin became the instrument of the break, because the little painting took me by surprise. I hadn't girded myself for its attack on my senses, and I went to pieces. The truth is, I had avoided resurrection because I must have known that it would be excruciating. That summer, light, noise, color, smells, the slightest motion of the air rubbed me raw with their stimuli. I wore sunglasses all the time. Every shift in brightness hurt me. Car horns ripped at my eardrums. The conversations of pedestrians, their laughter, their hoots, even the lone person singing in the street felt like an assault. I couldn't bear shades of red. Crimson sweaters and shirts, the red mouth of a pretty girl hailing a cab forced me to turn my head. Ordinary jostling on the sidewalk—a person's arm or elbow brushing my body, the jab of a stranger's shoulder, sent a shudder up my spine. Wind blew through rather than over me, and I thought I could feel my skeleton rattle. Garbage baking in the streets gave me fits of nausea and dizziness, but so did the aromas of food from restaurants—smoking burgers and chicken and the pungent spices of Asian food. My nostrils took in every human odor, both artificial and real, colognes and oils and sweat and the rank, sour, and tart odors of people's breath. I was bombarded and couldn't escape.

But the worst was that during those months of hypersensitivity, I sometimes forgot Matthew. Minutes would pass when I didn't think of him. When he was alive, I had felt no need to think of him constantly. I knew that he was there. Forgetfulness was normal. After he died, I had turned my body into a memorial—an inert gravestone for him. To be awake meant that there were moments of amnesia, and those moments seemed to annihilate Matthew twice. When I forgot him, Matthew was nowhere—not in the world or in my mind. I think my collection was a way to answer those blanks. As Erica and I continued to sort through Matthew's things, I chose a few of them to put in my drawer with the photographs of my parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and the twins. My selection was purely a matter of instinct. I chose a green rock, the Roberto Clemente baseball card Bill had given him for his birthday one year in Vermont, the program he had designed for the fourth-grade production of Horton Hears a Who, and a small picture he had done of Dave with Durango. It had more humor than many of the pictures of Dave. The old man was sleeping on the sofa with a newspaper over his face while the cat licked his naked toes.

Erica moved away in early August, five days before Matt's birthday. She said she needed several weeks to settle into her apartment in Berkeley. I helped her pack up books, and we mailed them to her new address. She had to leave Dr. Trimble, and I sometimes felt that she dreaded leaving her more than Rutgers, more than Bill and Violet, more than me. But Erica had the name of another doctor in Berkeley, whom she began seeing only a few days after she arrived. That morning, I carried her suitcase and walked her down the stairs and outside the building to find a taxi. It was a cloudy day but with a strong glare from the sun, and although I was protected by sunglasses, I winced from the light. After I had hailed the cab, I told the driver to turn on the meter and wait for a couple of moments. When I turned to say good-bye, Erica began to tremble.

"We've been better, you know," I said. "Lately."

Erica looked down at her feet. I noticed that despite her weight gain, the skirt she was wearing hung too low around her waist. "It's because I shook things up, Leo. You started to hate me. Now you won't." Erica lifted her chin and smiled at me. "We ... we... we ..Her voice cracked and she laughed. "I don't know what I'm saying. I'll call you when I get there." She fell toward me and put her arms around my back. I felt her body against mine—her small breasts and her shoulders. Her damp face was crushed into my neck. When she withdrew from me, she smiled again. The lines around her eyes wrinkled and I looked at the mole over her lip. Then I leaned forward and kissed it. She knew I had targeted the mole and smiled, "I liked that," she said. "Do it again."

I kissed her again.

When she slid into the car, I looked down at her legs, which had stayed white all summer. I had an impulse to slide my hand between her thighs and feel their skin. The warm flood of sexual feeling made me shake inwardly. I listened to the car door slam shut and stood on the side-walk while it drove up Greene Street and turned right. Now you want her—after all these months, I said to myself, and as I turned to walk back into the building, I understood how well Erica knew me.

The apartment didn't look much different. There were a few empty places on the bookshelves. Our closet in the bedroom was roomier. When all was said and done, Erica had taken very little with her. Nevertheless, as I walked through the loft and surveyed the gaps in the shelves, the empty hangers, the bare floor where Erica's shoes had been lined up only the day before, I found myself gasping for breath. For months I had been prepared for the moment of her departure, but I hadn't guessed that I would feel what I felt—cold, pinching fear. I clutched at the rightness of it, my punishment come due. I stalked from one room to another, letting the cold anxiety squeeze my lungs. I turned on the television to hear voices. I turned it off to get rid of them. An hour passed and then another. By four o'clock I was exhausted from flying around the apartment like a terrified bird. I continued to walk from room to room, but I paced myself, going more slowly. In the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet and studied an old toothbrush of Erica's and a lipstick. I removed the lipstick from the shelf and opened it. I screwed it up from the bottom and examined the brownish-red shade. After lowering it and replacing its top, I walked to my desk, opened my drawer, and put the lipstick inside. I chose two other objects to keep there—a small pair of black socks and two barrettes that were lying on her night table. The absurdity of the hoarding was obvious to me, but I didn't care. The act of closing the drawer on these things that belonged to Erica soothed me. By the time Bill arrived, I was calm. He stayed longer than he usually did, however, and I'm sure he did it because he sensed that under my apparent equilibrium lay panic.

Erica called that night. Her voice sounded high and a little squeaky. "When I put the key in the door, I felt glad," she said, "but when I walked inside, sat down, and looked around, I thought I'd gone completely mad. I've been watching TV, Leo. I never watch TV."

"I miss you," I said.

"Yes."

That was her response. She didn't say that she missed me, too. "I'm going to write to you. I don't like the phone."

The first letter came at the end of the week. It was a long letter dense with domestic particulars—the spider plant she had bought for the apartment, the drizzly weather that day, her trip to Cody's bookstore, her course plans. She explained her preference for letters. "I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or on the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be waiting time—a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law—that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully. In letters I can only tell you about my wildness. It isn't the wildness itself, and I am wild and savage over Matt. Letters can't scream. Telephones can. When I got back from Cody's today, I put my books on the table and went to the bathroom, stuffed a washcloth in my mouth, and walked into the bedroom so that I could lie on the bed and scream without making too much noise. But I'm beginning to see him again, not dead but alive. For a whole year, I've only seen him dead on that gurney. Far away with only letters between us, we may begin to find our way back to each other. Love, Erica."

I wrote back the same evening, and Erica and I embarked on the epistolary chapter of our marriage. I stuck to the bargain and didn't call her, but I wrote long and hard. I kept her informed about my work and the apartment. I told her my colleague Ron Bellinger was trying a new drug for his narcolepsy that made him a little owl-eyed but less apt to drop off in committee meetings, and that Jack Newman was still going at it with Sara. I told her that Olga, the cleaning lady I had hired, had scrubbed the stove with such ferocity that the printed words FRONT and BACK to indicate the burners had vanished into her little ball of steel wool, and I told her that I had been distraught when I understood that she was gone, really gone. She answered me, and so it went. What neither one of us could know was what the other omitted. Every correspondence is skewered by invisible perforations, the small holes of the unwritten but not the unthought, and as time went on, I hoped fervently that it wasn't a man who was missing from those pages I received every week.

Over and over again during the months that followed, I found myself on the stairs walking up to Bill and Violet's loft for dinner. Violet would call me in the early evening and ask if she should set an extra place, and I would say yes. It was hard to say with any conviction that I preferred to eat scrambled eggs or corn flakes downstairs. I let Bill and Violet take care of me, and while they took care of me, I found myself looking at them all over again. Like a man who had crawled out of a dungeon after years in murk and shadow, I was a little shocked by their vividness. Violet kissed my cheeks and touched my arms and my hands and my shoulders. Her laugh had a raucous timbre, and sometimes she made little sounds of pleasure while she ate. But I also detected lapses in her that I hadn't seen before—five or six seconds here and there when she moved inward to reflect sadly on someone or something. If she was stirring a sauce, her hand would stop, a wrinkle would form between her brows, and she would look vacantly at the stove until she caught herself and began stirring again. Bill's voice seemed both hoarser and more musical than I remembered. Age and cigarettes perhaps, but I listened to it rise and fall and to its frequent pauses with new attentiveness. I felt an added gravity in him, the almost palpable heft of a life that had grown more dense. Violet and Bill seemed a little different, as if their life together had shifted from a major to a minor key. It could have been that Matt's death had changed them, too. It could have been that because Matt had died, I saw in them what I had never seen before, or it could have been that without Matt, my vision of things would never be the same.

The only person who appeared unchanged was Mark. He had never taken up much room in my life, except as Matt's amiable sidekick, and when Matt had died, Mark had vanished for me as well. But I began to look at him more closely during those meals we shared upstairs. He had grown a little taller, but not much. He had just turned thirteen, but he still had a soft, round, childish face, which I found remarkably sweet. Mark was a very good-looking boy, but his sweetness was separate from his beauty. It came from his facial expressions, which conveyed a perpetual, untouchable innocence, not unlike his hero of the moment—Harpo Marx. At the dinner table, Mark chuckled and clowned and made Harpo's "googly face." He read us passages from Harpo Speaks and sang "Hail Fredonia," from Duck Soup. But he also talked about his pity for New York's homeless people, the stupidities of racism, and the cruelty of chicken farmers. He never went deeply into any of these subjects, but whenever he spoke of injustice, his voice, still high and boyish, touched me with its inflections of sympathy. Airy, buoyant, and kind, Mark made me feel lighter. I began to look forward to seeing him, and when he left on the weekends to visit his mother, stepfather, and little brother, Oliver, in Cranbury, New Jersey, I discovered that I missed him.

Over winter break, a few days before they flew to Minnesota for Christmas with the Bloms, Bill and Violet threw a belated birthday party for Mark. He had turned thirteen months earlier, but for Bill the event served as a kind of secular bar mitzvah, a way to acknowledge tradition without ritual. Bill and Violet sent an invitation to Erica, but she chose not to come. In a letter, she informed me that she had decided to remain in Berkeley over the vacation. For weeks I stewed over a gift for Mark. In the end I settled on a chess set, a beautiful board with carved pieces that reminded me of my father, who had taught me the game. I knew that Mark had never learned to play, and I wanted to compose the note that accompanied the present very carefully. In the first draft, I mentioned Matthew. In the second, I didn't. I wrote a third, short and to the point: "Happy late thirteenth birthday. This gift includes lessons from the giver. Love, Uncle Leo."

I had planned to do well at Mark's party. I had wanted to do well, but I found I couldn't. I took several trips to the bathroom, not to relieve myself but to grab the sink and hyperventilate for a couple of minutes before returning to the crowd. There must have been sixty people at the party, but I knew only a few of them. Violet rushed from one person to another and then back to the kitchen, where she gave instructions to the three waiters. Bill wandered around with a glass of wine, which he refilled often, his eyes a little red and his voice a little strained. I said hello to Al and Regina, and I greeted Mark, who looked remarkably comfortable in his blue blazer, red tie, and gray flannel pants. He grinned at me and gave me a warm hug just before he shook the hand of Lise Bochart, a sculptor in her early sixties. "I think your piece at the Whitney is really cool," Mark told her. Lise cocked her head to one side and her face wrinkled into a big smile. Then she leaned over and gave him a kiss. Mark didn't blush or look away. He eyed her confidently, and after a couple of seconds moved on to another guest.

I had grown used to Mark and was becoming more and more fond of him, but several of Matt's old school friends were among the guests, and as I recognized them one by one, the permanent ache in my chest sharpened into pain. Lou Kleinman had grown at least six inches since I had last seen him. He stood in the corner with Jerry Loo, another buddy of Matt's, snickering over an ad for phone sex he must have picked up in the street, because it had a heel print on its upper-right-hand corner. Another boy, Tim Andersen, hadn't changed at all. I remembered that Matt had felt sorry for the stunted, pale kid who wheezed too much to play sports. I didn't talk to Tim or even look at him, but I seated myself in a chair near where he was standing. From that spot, I could hear him breathing. I had just wanted to take a look at the boy, but instead I sat with my back to him and listened to his asthmatic lungs with a sudden terrible fascination. I hung on to each noisy exhalation as proof that he was alive—frail, runty, ill, maybe—but alive. I listened to the hoarse, greedy life in him and let it torture me. There were so many other noises—one voice on top of another talking—laughing, the clink of silverware on plates, but all I wanted to hear was the noise of Tim's breathing. I yearned to get closer to him, to bend over and put my ear to his mouth. I didn't do it, but I realized that I was sitting in the chair with clenched fists, swallowing audibly to keep down a quaking misery and rage, and then Dan saved me.

Disheveled and dirty, Dan was heading toward me with long strides. He bumped a woman's elbow, spilled her wine, apologized loudly into her startled face, and then continued toward me. "Leo!" he yelled from a distance of no more than four feet. "They changed my meds, Leo! The Haldol was making me stiffen up like a board, and I couldn't bend." Dan held his arms out in front of him and finished his walk toward me like Frankenstein's monster. "Too much pacing, Leo. Too much talking to myself. So they hauled me into St. Luke's for an adjustment. I read my play to Sandy. She's a nurse. It's called Odd Boy and the Odd Body." He paused, leaned over, and said confidingly, "Leo, guess what? You're in it."

Dan was very close to me, grinning with his mouth open so that I looked directly at his badly stained teeth. I had never felt so moved by him or so grateful to be near him. For the first time, his madness felt curiously comforting and familiar.

"You put me in your play?" I said to him. "I'm honored."

Dan looked sheepish. "Your character doesn't have any lines."

"No lines?" I said. "Just a walk-on?"

"No, Leo's lying down through the whole play."

"Dead?" I said.

"No!" Dan boomed at me. He looked shocked. "Sleeping."

"Oh, I'm a sleeper." I smiled, but Dan didn't smile back.

"No, I mean it, Leo. I've got you in here." He tapped a finger to his temple.

"I'm glad," I said, and I was.

After everyone else had gone home, Dan and I were sitting on the sofa several feet apart. We weren't talking, but we had staked out a place for ourselves together. The insane brother and the broken-down "uncle" had formed a temporary alliance to survive the party. Bill seated himself between us, putting one arm around each of us, but his eyes were on Mark, who was in the kitchen picking frosting off what was left of the cake. It wasn't until that moment that I remembered Lucille. "Shouldn't Lucille and Philip and Oliver have been here?" I said to Bill.

"They wouldn't come," he said. "She gave me an odd explanation. She said that Philip doesn't want Oliver in the city."

"Why on earth not?" I said.

"I don't know," he said, and wrinkled his forehead. That was all that was said about Lucille. Even at a distance, I realized, she had a way of stopping conversation. Her peculiar responses to ordinary talk or, in this case, a simple invitation, often left others in bewildered silence.

I was standing over Mark when he ripped the paper off my gift and saw the chessboard. He leapt up from the floor and threw his arms around my waist. It had been a long, hard birthday party, and I wasn't prepared for his excitement. I clung to him and looked over at Bill, Violet, and Dan, who were all on the sofa. Dan was sound asleep, but Bill and Violet were both smiling with tears in their eyes, and their emotion made it much harder for me to check mine. I stared hard at Dan to keep control of myself. Mark must have felt the heaving in my chest, and when he withdrew from the hug, he must have seen the spasm I felt moving across my face, but he continued to look at me happily, and for reasons difficult to articulate, I felt hugely relieved that I hadn't mentioned Matthew in my note.

Mark learned chess fast. He was a nimble and intelligent player, and his ability excited me. I told him the truth: not only did he understand the moves, but he had the unruffled demeanor necessary to play well, that calculated indifference I had never mastered but which could unnerve even a superior opponent. As my enthusiasm waxed, however, Mark's waned. I told him he should join the chess team at school, and he said that he would look into it, but I don't believe he ever did. I sensed that he was humoring me rather than pleasing himself, and I tactfully withdrew. If he wants to play, I said to Bill, he can ask. He never asked.

I sank into another life. My writing that year was all for Erica. I wrote no articles, no essays, had no thoughts for another book, but I told Erica everything in long letters that I sent off weekly. I wrote that my teaching had become more passionate and that I spent more time with my students. I wrote that I allowed some of them to ramble on about their private lives during office hours and that I didn't always hear what they were saying, but I recognized their need to say whatever it was and discovered that my distant but benevolent presence was met with gratitude. I wrote about my dinners with Bill and Violet and Mark. I recorded for her the titles of the books I found for Mark on silent comedy and the movie stills from A Night at the Opera and Horse Feathers I bought for him at a shop on Eighth Street, and I described his happy face when he received my gifts. I also told her that since Matt had died, O's Journey had taken on an afterlife that inhabited my hours alone. Sometimes when I sat in my chair in the evenings, I would see parts of the narrative in my mind—the fat figure of B with wings sprouting from her back as she straddled O, her heavy arms outstretched in orgasm and her face a parodie imitation of Bernini's Saint Theresa. I saw the two M's, O's little brothers, clinging to each other behind a door while a burglar robs the house, stealing one of O's paintings—a portrait of the two young M's. But most often, I saw O's last canvas, the one he leaves behind after he disappears. That canvas has no image, only the letter B—the mark of O's creator and the fat woman who embodied him in the work.

I didn't tell Erica that there were evenings when I returned home after dinner and I smelled Violet on my shirt—her perfume and soap and something else, her skin maybe, an odor that deepened the others and made the floral scent corporeal, human. I didn't tell Erica that I liked to breathe in that faint smell, and I didn't tell her that I tried to resist it at the same time. On some nights, I would remove the shirt and throw it into the hamper.

In March, Bill and Violet asked me if I would stay with Mark for a long weekend. They were headed for Los Angeles, where a gallery was showing O's Journey. Lucille was also traveling and thought it best not to burden Philip with two children. I moved upstairs with Mark. We were easy together, and Mark was helpful. He did dishes, carried out the garbage, and tidied up after himself. On Saturday night, he put on a tape and lip- synched a pop song for me. He leapt around the living room with an imaginary guitar. Gyrating madly, he affected a tortured expression and finally collapsed to the floor as he imitated the agonies of a rock 'n' roll star whose name I can't remember anymore.

As we talked, however, I noticed that Mark had absorbed little of the subjects generally taught in school—geography, politics, history—and that his ignorance had a willed quality to it. Matthew had served as a scale upon which to weigh differences among boys of his age, but then who was to say that Matt was a barometer of normality? Before he died, his brain had been loaded with information, both trivial and important, from baseball statistics to the battles of the American Civil War. He knew the names of all sixty-four flavors of his favorite brand of ice cream and could identify dozens of contemporary painters, many of whom I didn't recognize. Except for his love of Harpo, Mark's interests were more ordinary—popular music, action and horror movies—and yet he brought to these subjects the same agility of mind, the same fleet brain that had made itself felt in chess. What he lacked in content, he seemed to make up for in quickness.

Mark resisted going to bed. Every night I was with him, he lingered in the doorway of Bill and Violet's bedroom, where I was reading, as if he was unwilling to tear himself away. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes would pass as he leaned in the doorway and chatted. All three nights, I had to tell him that I was turning in and that he should do the same.

The single hitch in our weekend together was over doughnuts. On Saturday afternoon, I looked for a box of doughnuts I had bought the day before. I searched the pantry but couldn't find them. "Did you eat the doughnuts?" I called out to Mark, who was in the next room. He walked into the kitchen and looked at me. "Doughnuts? No."

"I could have sworn I put them in this cupboard, and now they aren't here. It's strange."

"Too bad," he said. "I like doughnuts. I guess it's one of those household mysteries. Violet always says that the house eats things when you're not looking." He shook his head, smiled at me, and disappeared into his room. An instant later, I heard him whistling a pop song—high, sweet, and melodic.

At around three o'clock the following afternoon, I answered the telephone. A woman was screaming at me through the receiver in a piercing, angry voice. "Your son started a fire! I want you over here right now!" I forgot where I was, forgot everything. Too shocked to speak, I breathed into the receiver once and said, "I don't understand you. My son is dead."

Silence.

"Aren't you William Wechsler?"

I explained. She explained. Mark and her son had started a fire on the roof.

"That's not possible," I said. "He's in his room reading."

"Wanna bet?" she said loudly. "He's standing here right in front of me."

After confirming that Mark wasn't in his room, I walked downstairs and went to retrieve him from the building next door. When she let me into the apartment, the woman was still shaking. "Where did they get the matches?" she screeched at me when I walked through the door. "You're responsible for him, aren't you? Well, aren't you?" I mumbled yes, and then I said that boys could pick up matches almost anywhere. What kind of fire was it? I wanted to know. "A fire! A fire! What does it matter what kind?" When I turned to Mark, his face was vacant. There was no belligerence in it—there was nothing. The other boy, who looked to be no more than ten years old, had wet, red eyes. Snot leaked from his nose as he repeatedly pushed away his bangs, which instantly fell back into his face. I apologized weakly and led Mark home in silence.

We talked it over in Mark's room. He told me that he had met the kid, Dirk, on the roof, and that Dirk had already started the fire. "All I did was stand there and watch."

I asked him what they had burned.

"Just some paper and stuff. It was nothing."

I warned him that fires could quickly get out of control. I told him that he should have let me know that he was leaving. He listened, his eyes calmly taking in my comments. Then he said in a voice that was surprisingly hostile. "That kid's mother was crazy!"

Mark's eyes were illegible. They bore a striking resemblance to Bill's, but they had none of his father's energy. "I think she was scared, not crazy," I said. "She was really scared for her son."

"I guess so," he said.

"Mark, don't do anything like that again. It was your job to stop it. You're a lot older than that boy."

"You're right, Uncle Leo," he said. I heard conviction in his voice, and it relieved me.

In the morning, I made Mark French toast and sent him off to school. When we said good-bye, I gave him my hand, but he hugged me instead. When I put my arms around him, he felt small, and the way he pressed his cheek against me made me think of Matthew, not when my son was eleven but when he was four or five.

After Mark left, I climbed the stairs to the roof to look for remnants of the fire. I had thought that I might have to cross over to the next building, where Dirk lived, but I discovered a heap of ash and litter on the roof of our building, and I squatted down to examine it. Feeling both underhanded and a little ridiculous, I stirred the charred debris with a wire hanger that lay nearby. This had not been a bonfire, just a small conflagration that couldn't have lasted very long. I noticed a few partly burned rags and picked one up, part of an athletic sock. Green shards of a broken bottle were scattered among bits of paper, and then I saw a piece of the incompletely burned box—the empty doughnut box. I could still read a few letters on the label: ENTE.

Mark had lied to me. He had quoted Violet so smoothly. He had smiled so easily. It had never occurred to me to doubt him, but even more curious was the fact that if he had told me he had eaten the doughnuts, I wouldn't have cared. When I bought them, I had been thinking of him. I held the bit of cardboard in my hand and looked over the bleak landscape of lower Manhattan's roofs, with their rusted water towers and peeling tar. A wan sun was trying to break through the clouds and a wind had started to blow. I swept the ash and glass into an old grocery bag someone had abandoned on the roof, and as I watched my hands turn gray from the ashes, I had an unexpected feeling of guilt, as though I were somehow implicated in Mark's lie. When I left the roof, I didn't add the piece of burned box to the bag with the rest of the garbage. I walked downstairs and carefully deposited what was left of it in my drawer.

I said nothing to Bill and Violet about the fire. Mark must have been glad that I didn't mention it, must have felt he had an ally in Uncle Leo downstairs, and that's how I wanted it. The fire incident receded the way dreams often do, leaving behind it no more than a sensation of vague discomfort. I seldom thought about it, except when I opened my drawer to inspect my collection, and then I wondered why I had decided to keep that piece of cardboard.

I didn't move it, however, and I didn't throw it away. Some part of me must have felt that it belonged there.

In the fall of 1991, the University of Minnesota Press published Locked Bodies: An Exploration of Contemporary Body Images and Eating Disorders. As I read Violet's book, the missing doughnuts and the burned box floated back into my consciousness from time to time. The book began with simple questions: Why are thousands of girls in the West starving themselves now? Why are others gorging and vomiting? Why is obesity on the rise? Why did these once rare diseases become epidemics?

"Food," Violet wrote, "is our pleasure and our penance, our good and evil. Like hysteria a hundred years ago, it has become the focus of a cultural obsession that has infected huge numbers of people who never become seriously ill with eating disorders. Fanatical running, the rise of the health club and the health-food store, Rolfing, massage, vitamin therapy, colonics, diet centers, bodybuilding, plastic surgery, a moral horror of smoking and sugar, and a terror of pollutants all testify to an idea of the body as extremely vulnerable—one with failing thresholds, one that is under constant threat."

The argument continued for almost four hundred pages. The first chapter served as a historical introduction. It ran quickly through the Greeks and the ideal bodies of their gods, lingered for a while on medieval Christianity, its female saints and cult of physical suffering and the broader phenomena of plagues and famines. It touched on neoclassical Renaissance bodies and then the Reformation's suppression of the Virgin and her maternal body. It galloped through eighteenth-century medical drawings and the dissection obsessions born of the Enlightenment and eventually made its way to hunger artists and to the starving girls of Dr. Lasègue, the physician who had first used the word "anorexia" to describe their illness. In passing through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Violet noted Lord Byron's fasts and binges, J. M. Barrie's intractable self-denial, which may have stunted his growth, and Binswanger's case study of Ellen West, a tormented young altruist who died of starvation in 1930, when anorexia was still considered extremely rare.

Violet insisted that our bodies are made of ideas as much as of flesh, that the contemporary obsession with thinness can't be blamed on fashion—which is merely one expression of the wider culture. In an age that has absorbed the nuclear threat, biological warfare, and AIDS, the perfect body has become armor—hard, shiny, and impenetrable. She marshaled evidence from exercise tapes and advertisements for programs and machines, including the telling phrases "buns of steel" and "bulletproof abs." Saint Catherine starved against church authority for Jesus. Late-twentieth-century girls starve for themselves against their parents and a hostile, borderless world. Emaciation in the midst of plenty shows that you are above ordinary desire, obesity that you are protected by stuffing that can ward off all attacks. Violet quoted psychologists and analysts and doctors. She discussed the widely held view that anorexia in particular is a misguided bid for autonomy among girls whose bodies are sites of rebellion for what they can't say. But private histories don't explain epidemics, and Violet made strong arguments that social upheavals lie behind eating disorders, including the breakdown of courting rituals and sexual codes, which leaves young women formless and vulnerable, and she elaborated her idea of "mixing"—citing developmental research on "attachment" and studies of infants and young children for whom food becomes the tangible site of an emotional battle.

A large part of the book was taken up by stories, and as I read on, I found the individual cases most absorbing. Raymond, a hugely fat seven-year-old, told his therapist that he thought his body was made of jelly and that if his skin was punctured, his insides would run out. After months of reducing the amounts of food she ingested, Berenice made a meal of a single raisin. She cut it into four pieces with a knife, sucked on the quarters for a good hour and a half, and then, when the last one had dissolved in her mouth, she declared herself "stuffed." Naomi went to her mother's house to gorge. Sitting at the kitchen table, she wolfed down vast quantities of food and then vomited the contents of her stomach into plastic bags, which she tied up and hid in various rooms for her mother to find. Anita had a horror of lumps in her food. She solved the problem with a liquid diet. After a while, she turned against color, too. The liquid had to be both pure and clear. Living only on water and one-calorie Sprite, she died at fifteen.

While I didn't suspect Mark of excesses like the ones Violet recounted, I wondered if he hadn't lied about the doughnuts because he was guilty about eating them. Violet stressed that people who are rigorously honest in most ways often lie about food when their relationship to it has been tainted. I remembered the brown dish of beans and limp vegetables Lucille had cooked the evening I first met her, and in the same instant I recovered an image of her coffee table the night we were together. Lying on top of a pile of other magazines were several copies of one called Prevention.

Erica didn't answer my letters as promptly as she had in the beginning. Sometimes two weeks would pass before a letter arrived from her, and I sweated out the days. Her tone wasn't quite the same either. Although she wrote in a straightforward, honest way, I felt a lack of urgency in her telling. Much of what she wrote me, she must have told Dr. Richter, too—her psychiatrist, pyschoanalyst, psychotherapist, whom she saw twice a week. She had also become the close friend of a young woman in her department named Renata Doppler—who, among other things, wrote dense, scholarly articles on pornography. She must have talked often to Renata as well, and I know that she called Violet and Bill regularly. I tried not to think of those telephone conversations, tried not to imagine Bill and Violet hearing Erica's voice. My wife's world had expanded, and as it grew, I guessed that my place in it had shrunk. And yet, there were a few sentences here and there to which I clung as evidence of some lingering passion. "I think of you at night, Leo. I haven't forgotten."

In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New York for a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didn't mean a resumption of our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream. The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didn't excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangle that feeling of injury but couldn't do it—not fully. I knew, however, that Matt was suddenly everywhere.

The loft reverberated with his voice. The furniture seemed to hold the imprint of his body. Even the light from the window conjured Matthew. It won't work, I thought to myself. It's not going to work. As soon as Erica stepped through the door, she started crying.

We didn't fight. We talked in the intimate way of old lovers who haven't seen each other for a long time but hold no grudges. One night, we ate dinner with Bill and Violet in a restaurant and Erica laughed so hard at a Henny Youngman joke Bill told about a man hiding in a closet that she almost choked, and Violet had to beat her on the back. At least once a day Erica stood in the doorway of Matt's room for several minutes and looked in at what remained of it—the bed, his desk and chair, and the watercolor of the city Bill had given me and which I had framed. We made love twice. My physical loneliness had taken on shades of desperation, and when Erica leaned close to kiss me, I leapt at her. She trembled through my attack and had no orgasm. Her lack of pleasure soured my release, and afterward I felt empty. The night before she left, we tried again. I wanted to be careful with her, gentle. I touched her arm cautiously and then kissed it, but my hesitation seemed to irritate her. She lunged for me, grabbed my hips, and pinched my skin with her fingers. She kissed me hungrily and climbed on top of me. When she came, she made a small, sharp noise, and she sighed again and again, even after I had ejaculated. But under our lovemaking I felt a bleakness that couldn't be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed.

In the morning, Erica reassured me that she didn't want a divorce unless I wanted one. I said I didn't. "I love your letters," she said. "They're beautiful."

The comment annoyed me. "I think you're glad you're leaving," I said.

Erica moved her face close to mine and narrowed her eyes. "Aren't you glad I'm leaving?"

"I don't know," I said. "I really don't know."

She put her hand on my face and stroked it. "We're broken, Leo. It's not our fault. When Matt died it was like our story stopped. There was so much of you in him ..."

"You'd think we could at least have each other," I said to her.

"I know," she said, "I know."

After she was gone, I felt guilty because, turbulent as my feelings were, I detected in them the relief Erica had been brave enough to mention. At two o'clock in the afternoon, I drank a glass of Scotch in my chair like an old booze hound. As I told myself not to drink in the afternoon again, I felt the alcohol move into my head and then into my limbs. I leaned back into the fraying cushions of my chair and knew what had happened to me and Erica. We wanted other people. Not new people. Old ones. We wanted ourselves before Matthew died, and nothing we did for the rest of our days would ever bring those people back.

That summer I began to work on Goya's "black paintings." Studying his monsters and ghouls and witches kept me occupied for hours at a time during the day, and his demons helped to keep mine at a distance. But when night came, I walked through other imaginary spaces, subjunctive realms in which I saw Matt talking and drawing, and Erica near me— unchanged. These waking fantasies were pure exercises in self-torture, but around that same time Matthew started to come to me in my dreams, and when he came, he was as much there as he had been in life. His body was as real, as whole, as palpable as it had always been. I held him, spoke to him, touched his hair, his hands, and I had what I couldn't have when I was awake—the unshakable, joyous certainty that Matthew was alive.

While Goya didn't feed my gloom, his savage paintings gave new license to my thoughts—permission to open doors that in my former life I had left closed. Without Goya's ardent images, I'm not sure that Violet's piano lesson would have come surging back with such surprising force. The daydream began after I had seen Bill and Violet for dinner. Violet was wearing a pink sundress that showed her breasts. A long walk in the sun that afternoon had turned her cheeks and nose a little red, and while she talked to me about her next book, which had something to do with extreme narcissism, mass culture, pictures, instant communications, and a new illness of late capitalism, I found it hard to listen to her. My eyes kept wandering onto her flushed face and over her bare arms and onto her breasts and then to her fingers, with their pink polish. I left dinner early that evening, spent some time with the objects in my drawer, and then began leafing through a large book of Goya's drawings, starting with the ones for the Tauromaquia. While I admit that the artist's sketches of a bullfight have little in common with Violet's piano lesson and her encounter with Monsieur Renasse, the loose energy of his lines and his fierce rendering affected me like an aphrodisiac. I kept turning the pages, eager for more pictures of brutes and monsters. I knew every one of them by heart, but that night their carnal fury scorched my mind like a fire, and when I looked again at the drawing of a young, naked woman riding a goat on a witches' Sabbath, I felt that she was all speed and hunger, that her crazed ride, born of Goya's sure, swift hand, was ink bruising paper. His beast runs, but his rider is out of control. Her head has fallen back Her hair streams out behind her and her legs may not cling much longer to the animal's body. I touched the woman's shaded thigh and pale knee, and the gesture sent me to Paris.

I changed the fantasy as it suited me. There were nights when I was content to watch the lesson through a window across the street and other nights when I became Monsieur Renasse. There were nights when I was Jules peeking through a keyhole or floating magically above the scene, but Violet was always on the bench beside one of us, and one of us would always reach out and grab her finger in an abrupt, violent motion and whisper "Jules" into her ear in a hoarse, insistent voice, and at the sound of the name, Violet's body would always tighten with desire and her head would fall back, and one of us or the other would have her right there on the piano bench, would pull up her pink dress from behind and lower the small underpants of varying colors and descriptions and enter her as she made loud noises of pleasure, or one of' us would drag her under a potted palm and part her legs on the floor and make raucous love to her while she screamed her way to orgasm. I released untold amounts of semen into that fantasy and inevitably felt let down afterward. My pornography was no-more idiotic than most, and I knew I wasn't the only man who indulged himself in harmless mental romps with the wife of a friend, but the secret pained me nevertheless. I would often think of Erica afterward and then of Bill. Sometimes I tried to supplant Violet with another figure, a nameless stand-in who could take her place, but it never worked. It had to be Violet and it had to be that story, not of two people but of three.

Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large—about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He took a number between zero and nine and played with it in a single piece. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion—to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, to the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised—one, won; two, too, and Tuesday, four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometrical figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked together to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection—and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.

The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself—that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page.

In several pieces Bill alluded to the often tedious business of acquiring the signs we need for comprehension—a fragment of Mark's math homework, a chewed pencil eraser, and my favorite in cube nine: the figure of a boy fast asleep at a desk, his cheek only partly covering a page of algebra. It turned out that these pictures of boredom were more personal than I thought. Bill confided to me that Mark had been doing so badly in school that the headmaster had gently suggested to Bill that he consider looking elsewhere. It wasn't an expulsion, the man had emphasized, merely a bad match between student and school. Mark's high I.Q. didn't compensate for his lack of concentration and discipline. Perhaps a less rigorous curriculum would suit him better. Bill had been on the telephone with Lucille for hours about a new school, and in the end Lucille had found a place that would accept Mark, a "progressive" institution near Princeton. The school took him with a single condition: they wanted him to repeat the eighth grade. The fall after he turned fourteen, Mark moved to Cranbury with his mother and spent his weekends in New York.

That year he grew six inches. The little boy who had played chess with me was replaced by a lanky teenager, but his temperament stayed the same. I've never seen a boy more free of adolescent heaviness than Mark His body was as light as his spirit, his step weightless, his gestures graceful. But Bill never stopped worrying about his son's dilatory attitude in school. His school reports were erratic—A3s turned to D's. His teachers used adjectives like "irresponsible" and "underachieving." I eased Bill's mind with platitudes. He's a little immature, I would say, but time will change that. I listed great men who had been lousy students and star students who'd turned into mediocrities. My pep talks usually worked. "He'll turn it around," Bill would say. "Just wait. He'll find his way, even in school."

Mark began to visit me on the weekends, usually on Sunday afternoon, before he returned to his mother's house. I looked forward to the sound of his feet on the stairs, to his knock, and to his open, untroubled face when I let him into the apartment. Often he would bring a piece of artwork to show me. He had started making small collages from magazines, some of which were interesting. One afternoon in the spring, he appeared at my door with a large shopping bag. After I let him in, I noticed that he had grown since I'd last seen him. "I can look you straight in the eyes now. I think you're going to be even taller than your father."

Mark had been smiling at me, but as I spoke, he looked grumpy. "I don't want to grow anymore," he said. "I'm tall enough."

"What are you, five-ten now? That's not too tall for a man."

"I'm not a man," he said peevishly.

I must have looked surprised, because Mark shrugged and said, "Never mind. I don't really care." Lifting the bag toward me, he said, "Dad thought I should show you this."

After sitting down on the sofa with me, Mark pulled out a large piece of cardboard, which had been folded in half and opened like a book. The two halves were covered with pictures cut from magazine ads, all of young people. He had also cut out a few words and letters from more ads and pasted them over the images: CRAVE, DANCE, GLAM, YOUR FACE, and SLAP. I found the images a little dull, to be honest, a confusing hodgepodge of the chic and beautiful, and then I noticed the same little photograph of a baby in the middle of both pages. I looked down at the infant's fat, drooping cheeks. "Is that you?" I said, and laughed.

Mark didn't seem to share my humor. "There were two copies of that picture. Mom let me have them."

To the right of one photo and to the left of the other, I noticed two more photographs, both of which had been blurred by several layers of Scotch tape. I looked more closely. "What are these?" I said. "Two of the same picture again, right?"

Through the Scotch tape, I made out the vague outline of a head in a baseball cap and a long thin body. "Who is it?"

"Nobody."

"Why is he covered up in tape?"

"I don't know. I just did it. I didn't think about it I thought it looked good."

"But it's not from a magazine. You must have found it somewhere."

"I did, but I don't know who it is."

"This part of the picture is the same on both sides. The rest isn't. It takes a while to see it, though. There's so much going on around it, but the photos are eerie."

"You think that's bad?"

"No," I said. "I think that's good."

Mark closed up the cardboard and put it back into the bag. He leaned back on the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table in front of us. His sneakers were enormous—size eleven or twelve. I noticed that he was wearing the oversized, clownish pants favored by boys his age. We were silent for a while, and then I asked him the question that abruptly came to my mind: "Mark, do you miss Matthew?"

Mark turned to me. His eyes were wide and he pressed his lips together for a moment before he spoke. "All the time," he said. "Every day."

I fumbled for his hand on the sofa and breathed in loudly. I heard myself grunt with emotion, and my vision blurred. When I had gotten hold of his hand, I felt him squeeze mine firmly.

Mark Wechsler was a few months shy of fifteen. I was sixty-two. I had known him all his life, but until then, I hadn't considered him a friend. All at once, I understood that his future was also mine, that if I wanted a lasting rapport with this boy who would soon become a man, I could have it, and the thought became a promise to myself: Mark will have my attention and care. I've relived that moment many times since then, but in the last couple of years, as with other events of my own life, I've started to imagine it from a third point of view. I see myself reach for my handkerchief, remove my glasses, and wipe my eyes before I blow my nose loudly into the white fabric. Mark looks on at his father's old friend with sympathy. Any informed spectator would have understood that scene. He would know that the emptiness left in me by Matthew's death could never be filled by Mark. He would have understood clearly that it wasn't a matter of one boy replacing another but a bridge built between two people over an absence they both shared. And yet, that person would have been wrong, just as I was wrong. I misread both myself and Mark. The problem is that my scrutiny of the scene from every possible angle doesn't reveal a single clue. I haven't left out words or gestures or even those emotional intangibles that pass between people. I was wrong because, under the circumstances, I had to be wrong.

The idea came to me the following week. I said nothing to Mark, but I wrote to Erica and asked her what she thought. I proposed that we allow Mark to take Matthew's room as a studio where he could work on his collages. His room upstairs was small, and he could use the extra space. The change would mean that the room where Matt had lived would not remain a mausoleum, an uninhabited, unused space for nobody. Mark, Matthew's best friend, would bring life back to it. I argued strenuously for the cause, told Erica that Mark missed Matt every day, and then said it would mean a lot to me if she gave me her permission. I told her frankly that I was often lonely and that having Mark around lifted my spirits. Erica answered me promptly. She wrote that a part of her was reluctant to let the room go, but that after thinking it over, she agreed. In that same letter, she told me that Renata had given birth to a little girl named Daisy, and that she had been made the child's godmother.

The day before Mark took over the room, I opened the door, walked inside, and sat on the bed for a long time. My enthusiasm for the change was replaced by an aching awareness that it was too late to go back on my word. I studied Matt's watercolor. It would have to stay. I decided to mention it to Mark as my only stipulation. I didn't need a memorial space for Matt, I told myself; he lived in me. But as soon as I had thought of the words, the comforting cliché turned gruesome. I imagined Matt in his coffin, his small bones and his hair and his skull under the earth, and I started to shake. The old fantasy of substitution rose up inside me, and I cursed the fact that I hadn't been able to take his place.

Mark brought paper and magazines and scissors and glue and wire and a brand-new boom box to his "studio." Throughout the spring, he spent an hour or so in the room every Sunday, cutting and pasting pictures onto cardboard. He rarely worked for more than fifteen minutes at a time. He was constantly interrupting himself to come out and tell me a joke, make a telephone call, or run to the corner to get "some chips."

Not long after Mark had settled in, Bill came to see me and asked to take a look at the room. He nodded approvingly at the magazine clippings and cardboard, the pile of notebooks and cup full of pencils and pens.

"I'm glad he has this place," Bill said. "It's neutral. It's not his mother's house and it's not mine."

"He never talks about his life at Lucille's," I said, realizing suddenly that this was true.

"He doesn't tell us anything either." Bill paused for several seconds. "And when I talk to Lucille, all she does is complain."

"About what?"

"Money. I pay all of Mark's expenses, his clothes, his school, his medical bills—everything except food at her house—but just the other day, she told me that her grocery bills are sky-high because he eats so much. She actually labels the food in the refrigerator she doesn't want him to eat. She counts every penny."

"Maybe she has to. Are their salaries low?"

Bill gave me a hard, angry look. "Even when I didn't have two nickels to rub together, I didn't resent feeding my kid."

By June, Mark had stopped knocking. He had his own key. Matt's nearly empty room had been transformed into a cluttered teen pad. Records, CDs, T-shirts, and baggy pants filled the closet. Notebooks, flyers, and magazines were piled on the desk. Mark lived between rooms, coming and going as if the two lofts were all one house. Sometimes he arrived as Harpo and rushed around the living room with a horn he had bought at a yard sale near Princeton. He often kept the act going, and I would discover that he was standing beside me with his knee looped through my arm. If Mark made collages that summer, he kept them to himself. He relaxed, read a little, and listened to music I didn't understand, but then by the time it reached my ears in the living room, it was no more than a mechanical thumping that resembled the bass rhythm of a disco song— fast, steady, interminable. He came and went. For six weeks he attended a camp in Connecticut, and he spent another week with his mother on the Cape. Bill and Violet rented a house in Alaine for four of the weeks Mark was at camp, and the building seemed to die. Erica decided not to visit. "I don't want to open the wound," she wrote. I lived alone with Goya and missed them all.

In the fall, Mark fell back into his old rhythm of weekend visits. He usually took a train from Princeton on Friday evening and made an appearance at my loft on Saturday. Often he returned on Sunday as well for an hour or so. My meals with Bill and Violet dropped off to about twice a month, and I came to rely on Mark's faithful visits as a respite from myself. Sometime in October he mentioned "raves" for the first time— huge gatherings of young people that lasted through the night. According to Mark, finding a rave required connections with people in the know. Apparently, tens of thousands of other teenagers were also among the cognoscenti, but that didn't dampen Mark's enthusiasm. The word "rave" was enough to sharpen his features with expectation.

"It's a form of mass hysteria," Violet said to me, "a revival meeting without religion, a nineties love-in. The kids work themselves up into a frenzy of good feeling. I've heard there are drugs, but I've never noticed any signs that Mark is high when he gets home. They don't allow alcohol." Violet sighed and rubbed her neck with her hand. "He's fifteen. All that energy has to go somewhere." She sighed again. "Still, I worry. I feel that Lucille ..."

"Lucille?" I said to her.

"It's not important," she said. "I'm probably just paranoid."

In November, I noticed an ad in the Voice for a reading Lucille was giving only six blocks away, on Spring Street. I hadn't spoken to her since Matthew's funeral, and seeing her name in print prompted an urge to hear her read. Mark had become a part-time resident of my apartment and my intimacy with him drew me toward Lucille, but I also think that my decision to go was fueled by Violet's unfinished remark and Bill's earlier comment about Lucille's stinginess. It wasn't like him to be uncharitable, and I suppose I wanted to judge for myself.

The site of Lucille's reading was a woody bar with poor lighting. As soon as I walked through the door, I looked through the gloom and saw Lucille standing near the far wall with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Her hair was tied back and her pale face was lit by a small overhead lamp that deepened the shadows under her eyes. From that distance, I thought she looked lovely—waiflike and solitary. I walked toward her. She lifted her face to mine, and after a moment she smiled stiffly without opening her mouth. When she spoke, however, her voice was even and reassuring. "Leo, this is a surprise."

"I wanted to hear you read," I said.

"Thank you."

We were both silent.

Lucille looked uncomfortable. The "thank you" hung between us with an air of finality.

"That was the wrong response, wasn't it?" she said, and shook her head. "I'm not supposed to say 'Thank you.' I should have said 'It was nice of you to come' or 'Thank you for coming.' If you had spoken to me after the reading and said, 'I like your poems,' then I could have said a flat 'thank you,' and we would not be standing here wondering what had just happened."

"The land mines of social intercourse," I said. The word intercourse made me pause for a second. A bad choice, I thought.

She ignored the comment and looked down at her papers. Her hands were trembling. "Readings are hard for me," she said. "I'm going to prepare for a few minutes." Lucille walked away, sat down on a chair, and began to read to herself. Her lips moved and her hands continued to shake.

About thirty people came to listen to her. We sat at tables, and a number of the guests drank beer and smoked while she read. In a poem called "Kitchen," Lucille named objects, one after the other. As the list grew, it began to form a crowded verbal still life, and I closed my eyes from time to time to listen to every beat of the syllables as she read. In another poem, she dissected a sentence uttered by a nameless friend: "You don't really mean that." It was a witty, logical, and convoluted analysis of the intimidation inherent in such a statement. I think I smiled through every line of the poem. As she read on, I began to understand that the tone of the work never varied. Scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance, the poems allowed no object, person, or insight to take precedence over any other. The field of the poet's experience was democratized to a degree that leveled it to one enormous field of closely observed particulars—both physical and mental. I was amazed that I had never noticed this before. I remembered sitting beside her, my eyes on the words she had written, and I remembered her voice as she explained the reasoning behind a decision in her clean economical sentences, and I felt nostalgic for the lost camaraderie between us.

I bought her book, Category, after the reading and waited in line for her to sign it. I was the last person of seven. She wrote "for Leo" and looked up at me.

"I would like to write something amusing but my mind is blank."

I leaned over the table where she was sitting. "Just put 'from your friend Lucille.'"

As I watched her pen move across the page, I asked her if she wanted me to find her a cab or walk her to wherever she was going. She said she was headed for Penn Station, and we stepped outside into the cold November night. The wind blew past us, bringing with it the smell of gasoline and Asian food. As we walked down the street, I looked at her long beige raincoat and saw that the worn garment was missing a button. The sight of the loose thread dangling from her open coat sparked a feeling of sympathy for her that was immediately followed by a memory of her gray dress twisted around her waist and her hair falling across her face as I held her by the shoulders and pushed her down onto the sofa.

As we walked, I said, "I'm glad I came. The poems are good, very good. I think we should stay in touch, particularly now that I see so much of Mark"

She turned her head and looked up at me, her face puzzled. "You see him more than before?"

I stopped walking. "Because of the room, you know?"

Lucille paused on the sidewalk. Under the streetlamp I noticed the deep lines around her mouth as she gave me a puzzled look. "The room?"

I felt a growing pressure on my lungs. "I've given him Matthew's room as a studio. He began to use it last spring. He comes every weekend."

Lucille continued walking. "I didn't know that," she said evenly.

I began several questions in my mind, but I noticed that Lucille had quickened her step. She lifted her hand for a taxi and turned to me. "Thank you for coming," she said, speaking the line she had missed earlier, but only her eyes showed amusement.

"It was a pleasure," I said, and took her hand. For an instant, I contemplated kissing her cheek, but her set jaw and compressed lips stopped me, and I squeezed her hand instead.

We were on West Broadway by then, and as I watched the cab drive north, I noticed the moon in the sky over Washington Square Park. It was still early. The crescent shape of that moon with a wisp of cloud across it replicated almost exactly the painted moon I had been looking at that afternoon in one of Goya's early witchcraft paintings. Pan, in the form of a goat, is surrounded by a circle of witches. Despite the gruesome cabal around him, the pagan god looks rather innocent with his empty eyes and goofy expression. Two of the witches offer him infants. One is a gray and emaciated child, the other plump and rosy. From the position of his hoof, it's clear that Pan wants the fat baby. As I crossed the street, I thought of Bill's witch, Violet's comments on hexed maternity, and then I wondered what she had meant to say about Lucille. I also wondered about Mark's silence. What did it mean? I imagined asking him, but the question "Why didn't you tell your mother about Matthew's room?" had an absurd ring to it. When I turned the corner onto Greene and walked down the sidewalk toward my building, I realized that my mood had suddenly dropped and a growing sadness was following me home.

Mark's night life escalated in the following months. I heard his feet on the stairs as he leapt down them to rush out for the evening. The girls laughed and shrieked. The boys shouted and cursed in the deep voices of men. Mark's love for Harpo was supplanted by DJs and techno, and his pants grew ever wider, but his smooth young face never lost its expression of childish wonder, and he always seemed to have time for me. While we talked, he would lean against my kitchen wall and fiddle with a spatula or literally hang in my doorway with his hands on the lintel and his legs swinging. It's odd how little I've retained of what we actually said to each other. The content of Mark's conversation was usually dull and attenuated, but his delivery was superb and that's what I recall best—the earnest, plaintive tone of his voice, his bursts of laughter, and the languid movements of his long body.

On a Saturday morning in late January, my relationship with Mark took a small tum I hadn't expected. I was sitting in the kitchen reading the Times and drinking a cup of coffee when I heard a faint whistling noise from somewhere near the back of the apartment. I froze, listened, and heard it again. Following the sound to Matthew's room, I opened the door and discovered Mark sprawled on the bed whistling through his nose while he slept He was wearing a T-shirt that had been torn in half and then reattached with what looked like several hundred safety pins. A slice of bare skin showed through the gap. His huge beltless pants had slipped down to his thighs, revealing a pair of underpants with the maker's name written across the elastic band. His pubic hair curled out from between his legs, and for the first time, I recognized that Mark was a man—at least physically a man—and for some reason, this truth appalled me.

I had never said he could sleep in the room, and the idea that he had arrived in the middle of the night without my permission irritated me. I glanced around the room. Mark's backpack and coat lay in a pile on the floor beside one of his sneakers. When I turned toward Matt's picture, I saw that pasted onto the glass were pictures of five pale, thin girls in short skirts and platform shoes. Over their heads were the words THE GIRLS OF CLUB USA. My irritation turned to anger. I walked to the bed, grabbed Mark by the shoulders, and began to shake him. He moaned and then opened his eyes. He looked at me without recognition. "Go away," he said.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded.

He blinked. "Uncle Leo." He smiled weakly, pushed himself up on his elbows, and looked around. His mouth hung open. His face looked flaccid, moronic. "Wow,' he said. "I didn't think you'd be so upset."

"Mark, this is my apartment. You have a room here to do your artwork or listen to music, but you have to ask me if it's all right to sleep here. Bill and Violet must be worried sick."

Mark's eyes were slowly gaining focus. "Yeah," he said. "But I couldn't get in upstairs. I didn't know what to do, so I came here. I didn't want to wake you up, because it was late. Besides," he said, and cocked his head to one side, "I know you sometimes have trouble sleeping."

I lowered my voice. "Did you lose your key?"

"I don't know how it happened. It must have fallen off my ring somehow. I didn't want to wake up Dad and Violet either, and I still had your key, so I used it." Mark's eyes widened as he spoke to me. "I probably made the wrong decision." He sighed.

"You'd better go upstairs right now and tell your father and Violet that you're all right."

"I'm on my way," he said.

Before he left, Mark put his hand on my arm and looked me directly in the eyes. "I just want you to know that you're a real friend to me, Uncle Leo, a real friend."

After Mark left, I returned to my cold coffee. Within minutes, I regretted my anger. Mark's offense had been caused by poor judgment— nothing more. Had I ever actually said that he couldn't spend the night? The problem wasn't Mark but Matthew. The sight of Mark's mature body on my son's bed had shaken me. Was it that the six-foot boy-man had violated the invisible but sacred outlines of the eleven-year-old child whom I still imagined sleeping in that bed? Maybe, but I wasn't really angry until I saw the stickers. I had told him that the watercolor was the single object in the room that mustn't be touched. Mark had agreed with me: "That's cool. Matt was a great artist." Mark hadn't been thinking, I said to myself. He might be thoughtless, but he isn't malicious. Remorse shriveled my righteous anger to nothing, and I decided to walk upstairs and apologize to him immediately.

Violet opened the door. She was wearing only a long white T-shirt, probably Bill's, and I could see her nipples through the material. Her cheeks were flushed. Several sweaty strands of hair hung down in her forehead. She smiled and said my name. Bill was standing a few feet behind her, wearing a white bathrobe and smoking a cigarette. Not knowing where to look, I glanced down at the floor and said, "I actually came up to see Mark. I wanted to tell him something. "

Bill answered. "Sorry, Leo. He was going to come this weekend, but he decided at the last minute to stay with his mother. She's taking him and Oliver riding at some stables near there."

I looked at Bill and then at Violet, who smiled and said, "We're having a dissipated weekend." She let her head fall back and stretched. The T-shirt rose up her thighs.

I excused myself. I hadn't been prepared for Violet's breasts under her shirt. I hadn't been prepared to see the faint darkness of her pubic hair under the thin white cloth or her face looking a little soft and silly after sex. Without pausing, I walked downstairs, found a razor blade, and scraped off the stickers that were covering up Matt's painting.

When I confronted Mark about lying to me the following weekend, he looked surprised. "I didn't lie, Uncle Leo. I changed my plans with Mom. I called Dad, but they were out. I came up to New York anyway to see some friends, and then I had the key problem.''

"But why didn't you tell Bill and Violet that you were here?"

"I was going to, but it seemed kind of complicated, and I remembered that I had to get a bus back to Mom's, because I promised her that I'd take care of Ollie in the afternoon."

I accepted the story for two reasons. I recognized that the truth is often muddled, a tangle of mishaps and blunders that converge to appear unlikely, and when I looked at Mark as he stood before me with his large steady blue eyes, I was absolutely convinced that he was telling the truth.

"I know I mess up," he said. "But I really don't mean to."

"We all mess up," I said.

The image of Violet late that Saturday morning colored my memory like a deep stain I couldn't rub out, and when I remembered her, I always remembered Bill, too, standing behind her with a cigarette, his eyes fixed on mine and his large body heavy with spent pleasure. That picture of the two of them kept me awake at night. I would lie on my bed with speeding nerves and a body that hovered over the sheets rather than settled into them. Sometimes I would get up, go to my desk, and check my drawer, emptying its contents slowly and methodically. I touched Erica's socks and studied Matt's picture of Dave and Durango. I examined my aunt and uncle's wedding picture. One night I counted the roses among the other flowers in Marta's bouquet. There were seven roses. The number made me think of Bill's cube for seven and the thick layer of dirt that covered its bottom. If you held up the cube, you could see the white number from below, not whole but in pieces, like a disintegrating body. I fingered the waxy bit of cardboard that I had saved from the fire on the roof, and then I stared down at my hands and the blue veins that stood out from the bones below my knuckles. Lucille had once called them psychic's hands, and I wondered what it would be like to penetrate the minds of others. I knew little enough about myself. I continued to examine my hands, and the longer I looked at them the more foreign they seemed, as if they belonged to another person. I felt guilty. At least that was the name I gave to the lowering ache beneath my ribs. I was guilty of greed—a rapacious longing that I fought every day—but its object wasn't clear. Violet was only a single strand in the thick knot of my desires. My guilt was bound up in the whole story. I turned to look at my painting of Violet I walked over to it and stood in front of her image and reached out to touch the shadow of a man that Bill had painted into the canvas— his shadow. I remembered that when I first saw it, I had mistaken it for my own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We lifted our glasses.

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

Violet smiled at the slur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Really?"

"It was great, man."

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

"And the stentorian voice on the first floor?"

"Mr. Bob."

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

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

"Mad?" I said.

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rose from the chair and walked toward him.

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

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

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

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

"It might be a phase," I said.

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

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

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

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

"I didn't know that," he said.

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

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

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

"Happy birthday, Teenie," I said.

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

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

"February nineteenth," I said.

Mark nodded. "Nineteen thirty, right?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first Friday in May, I was awoken from a deep sleep by noises in the stairwell outside my apartment. I turned on the light and saw that the clock read four-fifteen. I stood up and walked into the living room, and as I neared the door I heard someone laugh from the landing and then the distinct sound of a key turning in my lock.

"Who's there?" I said in a loud voice.

Someone screeched. I opened the door and saw Mark dart away from the threshold. I stepped into the hallway. The light on the landing must have burned out, because it was dark, and the only illumination came from the floor above. I noticed that Mark had two companions with him. "What's going on, Mark?" I said, squinting at him. He had moved toward the wall and I couldn't see his face clearly.

"Hi," he said.

"It's four o'clock in the morning," I said. "What are you doing here?"

One of the others stepped forward—a ghostly figure of uncertain age. In the dim light his complexion looked very pale, but I couldn't tell if it was caused by ill health or an application of theater makeup. The man's step was tremulous, and when I looked down at his feet, I saw that he was wearing very high platform shoes. He waved a small hand in my direction. "Uncle Leo, I presume," he whined in a falsetto, and then giggled. His lips looked blue, and I noticed that his hands were shaking as he spoke. The man's eyes, however, were sharp, even vigilant, and they didn't leave mine. I forced myself to meet his gaze. After a couple of seconds, he looked down, and I turned my eyes to the third person, who was sitting on the steps. This boy looked very young. Had he not been with the other two, I would have guessed his age as not more than eleven or twelve. A delicate, feminine person with very long eyelashes and a small pink mouth, he was clutching a green purse on his knees. The clasp had come open, and inside I saw a jumble of tiny cubes—red, white, yellow, and blue. The boy was carrying around Lego blocks. He yawned loudly.

A girl's voice came from above me, "Poor guy, you're tired." I looked up and saw Teenie Gold at the top of the stairs.

She was wearing wings made of ostrich feathers that shook as she came down the stairs, one wobbly foot at a time. She held out her skinny arms like a high-wire walker, seemingly oblivious to the railing within inches of her hand. She stared down, her chin tucked onto her chest.

"Do you need help, Teenie?" I said, and stepped into the hallway.

The pale man backed away from me nervously, and I saw him finger something in his pants pocket. I turned to Mark again, who looked at me with wide eyes. "Everything's okay, Leo," he said. "Sorry we woke you." Mark's voice sounded different—lower, or perhaps it was just his inflection that had changed.

"I think we should talk, Mark."

"I can't. We're on our way out. Gotta go." He stepped away from the wall and I glimpsed his T-shirt for half a second before he turned away.

Something was written on it—ROHYP…

He started down the stairs.

The white man and the child loitered after him. Teenie was still making her way down the stairs toward me. I pulled the door shut, locked it, and hooked the chain, something I rarely bothered with. And then I did something I'd never done. I clicked off the light and moved my feet as if I were returning to bed. How authentic this ruse was I have no idea, but I put my ear to the door and heard the pale man say loudly, "No K tonight, huh, M&M?"

The irony wasn't lost on me. I had turned myself into a spy, had listened through a door only to discover that I was eavesdropping on a language I didn't understand. The name M&M turned me cold, however. I knew full well that it might have been a nickname for one of them, taken from the candy by the same name, but Bill's two childish figures from O's Journey had also been M's, and the possible reference made me uneasy. Then I heard a rumble, followed by a gasp from the stairs, and I rushed into the hallway to see what had happened.

Teenie was lying on the landing below me. I walked down the steps and helped her to her feet. She didn't look at me once while I took her by the arm and led her down the stairs. Ridiculous shoes seemed to be an adolescent requirement. Teenie was wearing black patent-leather Mary Janes with absurdly high heels, shoes that would have been a challenge to walk in stone-cold sober, and Teenie was three sheets to the wind. As I held her arm, she swayed from her hips, first in one direction, then the other. At the bottom of the steps I opened the door for her. I had no key and was wearing my pajamas, which prevented me from going any farther. When I looked up toward Grand Street, I saw Mark and his two cohorts standing at the end of the block.

"Are you going to be okay, Teenie?" I said, looking down at her.

She nodded at the sidewalk.

"You don't have to go with them," I said suddenly. "You can come back in with me, and I'll call you a car."

Without looking up, she shook her head no. Then she started to walk toward them. I remained standing in the doorway to watch her. She reeled first to the right and then to the left, zigzagging her way down the block toward her three friends—a small winged creature with buckling ankles who would never fly.

The following morning, I called Bill. I hesitated before I did it, but the incident had left me uneasy. For a sixteen-year-old, Mark seemed to have unbridled freedom, and I began to think that Bill and Violet were overly permissive. But it turned out that Bill hadn't known that Mark was in the city. He thought that he was arriving on the train from his mother's early that afternoon. Lucille was under the impression that he was spending the night with one of his classmates in Princeton. When Mark arrived that afternoon, Bill telephoned and asked me to come upstairs.

Mark stared at his knees while Bill and Violet questioned him about lying. He claimed it was all "a mix-up." He hadn't lied. He thought he was going over to Jake's house, but then Jake decided to go to New York to see a friend, and he went with him. Where was Jake last night, then? Bill wanted to know. Leo hadn't seen Jake in the hallway. Mark said that Jake had gone off with some other people. Bill told Mark that lying undermined trust and that he had to stop. Mark vehemently denied that he had lied. Everything he had said was true. Then Violet mentioned drugs.

"I'm not stupid," Mark said. "I know drugs screw you up. I saw a documentary on heroin once, and it really freaked me out. I'm just not into that."

"Teenie was high last night," I said, "and that pale fellow was shaking like a leaf."

"Just because Teenie's messed up doesn't mean I am." Mark looked directly at me. "Teddy shakes because it's part of his act. He's an artist."

"Teddy who?" Bill said.

"Teddy Giles, Dad. You must have heard of him. He does performances and sells these really cool sculptures. He's been written about in lots of magazines and everything."

When I looked at Bill, I thought I saw a flicker of recognition pass across his face, but he made no comment.

"How old is Giles?" I asked.

"Twentv-one," Mark said.

Violet said, "Why were you trying to get into Leo's apartment?"

"I wasn't!" Mark sounded desperate.

"I heard the lock turn, Mark," I said.

"No! That was Teddy. He didn't have a key. He turned the doorknob because he thought it was our apartment upstairs."

I looked Mark directly in the eyes and he looked back at me. "You didn't use my key last night?"

"No," he said. There was no hesitation in him.

"What did you want in our apartment, then?" Violet said. "You didn't come home until an hour ago."

"I wanted my camera to take pictures."

Bill rubbed his face. "For the rest of the month, you'll stay put while you're here."

Mark's jaw fell open in disbelief. "But what did I do?"

Bill sounded tired. "Listen, even if you hadn't lied to me and to your mother, you need to do your schoolwork. You'll never graduate if you don't start studying. Also," he said, "I want you to return Leo's key."

Mark stuck out his bottom lip and pouted. The expression on his soft young face reminded me of a disgruntled two-year-old who had just been told that another bowl of ice cream wasn't forthcoming. At that moment his head with its infantile features and his long, growing body seemed to be at odds with each other, as if the top of him hadn't caught up with the bottom.

I asked Mark about Teddy Giles the following Saturday afternoon when he came to see me. Despite the fact that he was grounded, I didn't notice any change in Mark's mood. I did notice that he had dyed his hair green, but I decided not to say anything about it.

"How's your friend Giles?" I said.

"He's fine."

"You said he was an artist?"

"He is. He's famous."

"Is he?"

"At least with kids. But he's got a gallery now and everything."

"What's the work like?"

Mark leaned against the wall in the hallway and yawned. "It's cool. He cuts things up."

"What things?"

"It's hard to explain." Mark smiled to himself.

"Last week you said that he was shaking because it was part of his act. I didn't understand that."

"He's into looking frail."

"And the little boy? Who was he?"

"Me?"

"No, not you. You're not a little boy, are you?"

Mark laughed. "No, that's his name, Me."

"Is it an Asian or Indian name?" I said.

"No, it's M-E, like 'me.' I'm 'me.' "

"His parents gave him a first-person pronoun for a name?"

"Nah," Mark said. "He changed it. Everybody just calls him Me."

"He looks about twelve," I said.

"He's nineteen."

"Nineteen?"

"Is he Giles's lover?" I asked pointedly.

"Wow," Mark said. "I didn't expect you to ask me something like that, but no, they're just friends. If you really want to know, Teddy's bi, not gay."

Mark studied me for a moment before he continued. "Teddy's brilliant. Everybody admires him. He grew up really poor in Virginia. His mother was a prostitute, and he didn't know who his dad was. When he was fourteen, he ran away from home and wandered around the country for a while. Then he came to New York and started working as a busboy at the Odeon. After that, he got into art—performances. For a guy who's only twenty-four, he's done a lot, you know." I remembered that Mark had said Giles was twenty-one, but I let it go. He paused for a couple of seconds and then looked me in the eyes. "I never met anybody more like me. We talk about it all the time, how we're the same."

Two weeks later, at one of Bernie Weeks's opening dinners, Teddy Giles came up again. It had been a long time since I had been out with Bill and Violet, and I had looked forward to that dinner, but I was seated between Bernie's date for the evening, a young actress named Lola Martini, and Jillian Downs, the artist whose show had just opened, and I didn't get much chance to speak to either Bill or Violet. Bill was on the other side of Jillian and they were deep in conversation. Jillian's husband, Fred Downs, was talking to Bernie. Before Giles came up, Lola had been telling me about her career on Italian television as a game-show hostess.

Her wardrobe for the job had consisted of bikinis that related to the game's fruit theme. "Lemon yellow," she said, "Strawberry red, lime green, you get the picture." She pointed to her head. "And I had to wear these fruit hats."

"Carmen Miranda style," I said.

Lola looked at me blankly. "The show was pretty stupid, but I learned Italian, and it got me a couple of film roles."

"Without fruit?"

She laughed and adjusted her bustier, which had been sinking slowly for about half an hour. "No fruit."

When I asked her how she knew Bernie, she said, "I met him last week in this gallery—the Teddy Giles show. Oh my God, it was so disgusting." Lola made a face to indicate her revulsion and lifted her bare shoulders. She was very young and very pretty, and when she talked, her earrings shook against her long neck. She pointed her fork at Bernie and said loudly, "We're talking about that show where we met. Wasn't it disgusting?"

Bernie turned toward Lola. "Well," he said. "I'm not going to disagree with you, but he's made quite a stir. He started out performing in clubs. Larry Finder saw him and brought the work into the gallery."

"But what's the work like? " I said.

"It's bodies all cut up—women and men and even kids," Lola said as she wrinkled her forehead and stretched her lips to telegraph her distaste. "Blood and guts all over the place, and then they had photographs from this show he did in some club—spurting an enema. I guess it was red water, but it looked like blood. Oh my God, I had to cover my eyes. It was soooo gross."

Jillian looked at Bill. She raised her eyebrows. "You know who's taken Giles under his critical wing?"

Bill shook his head.

"Hasseborg. He wrote this long article about him in Blast."

A brief look of pain crossed Bill's face.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"That Giles exposes the celebration of violence in American culture," Jillian said. "It's Hollywood horror deconstructed—something like that."

"Jillian and I went to the show," Fred said. "I thought it was pretty hokey, thin stuff. It's supposed to be shocking, but it's not really. It's tame when you think of the artists who've really gone the distance. That woman who has plastic surgery to change her face to look like a Picasso or a Manet or a Modigliani. I always forget her name. You remember when Tom Otterness shot that dog?"

"Puppy," Violet said.

Lola's face fell. "He shot a little puppy?"

"It's all on tape," Fred explained. "The little guy's bouncing all over the place and then bang." He paused. "But I guess it had cancer."

"You mean it was sick and going to die?"

Nobody answered Lola.

"Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm," Jillian volunteered.

"The shoulder," Bernie corrected. "It was his shoulder."

"Arm, shoulder." Jillian smiled. "Same area. Schwarzkogler, now there's radical art."

"What did he do?" Lola asked.

"Well, for one thing," I said to her, "he sliced his penis lengthwise and had the whole thing photographed. Pretty gruesome and bloody."

"Wasn't there another guy who did the same thing?" Violet said.

"Bob Flanagan," Bernie said. "But it was nails. He hammered nails into it."

Lola's mouth dropped open. "That's sick," she said. "I mean mentally sick. I don't think that's art. That's just sick."

I turned to look at Lola's face, with its perfectly plucked eyebrows, little nose, and gleaming mouth. "If I picked you up and put you in a gallery, you'd be art," I said to her. "Better art than a lot I've seen. Prescriptive definitions don't apply anymore."

Lola moved her shoulders. "You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?"

"Exactly. It's perspective—not content"

Violet leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. "I went to the show," she said. "Lola's right. If you take it seriously at all, it's horrible. At the same time it feels like a joke—a one-liner." She paused. "It's hard to tell whether it's purely cynical or whether there's something else in it—a sadistic pleasure behind hacking up those fake bodies ..."

The conversation drifted away from Giles again and onto other artists. Bill continued to talk to Jillian. He didn't participate in the lively dispute on the best bread in New York that followed or in the discourses on shoes and shoe stores that somehow came after that, which led to Lola lifting up her long leg to display a sandal with stiletto heels by a designer with a very curious name I forgot instantly. On the walk home, Bill was silent. Violet linked arms with both of us.

"I wish Erica were here," she said.

I didn't answer her for a moment. "She doesn't want to be here, Violet. I don't know how many times we've planned visits. Every six months she writes to say she's coming to New York, and then she backs down. Three times I had plane tickets to California, and each time she wrote to say she couldn't see me. She wasn't strong enough. She told me she's living a posthumous life in California and that's what she wants."

"For someone who isn't alive, she's written a lot of articles," Violet said.

"She likes paper," I said.

"She's still in love with you," Violet said. "I know."

"Or maybe she's in love with the idea of me on the other side of the country."

At that moment Bill stopped walking. He let go of Violet, looked up at the night sky, spread his arms, and said loudly, "We know nothing. We know absolutely nothing about anything." His loud voice carried down the street "Nothing!" He boomed the word again with obvious satisfaction.

Violet reached for Bill's hand and tugged at him. "Now that we've settled that, let's go home," she said. He didn't resist her. Violet held his hand as he shuffled down the block with his head lowered and his shoulders hunched. I thought he looked like a child being led home by his mother. Later, I wondered what had provoked Bill's outburst. It might have been the talk about Erica, but then again, it might have been rooted in what had been revealed earlier: Mark happened to have chosen a friend whose staunchest supporter was the man who had written the cruelest review of his father's work to date.

Bill found Mark a summer job through an acquaintance of his, another artist named Harry Freund. Freund needed a crew of workers for a large art project in Tribeca about New York's children, which was being funded by both private and public money. The enormous, impermanent work was to be part of a celebration in September for the "Month of the Child." The design included huge flags, some Christo-like wrappings of lampposts, and blown-up drawings by children from every borough. "Five days a week, nine to five, physical labor," Bill said to me. "It'll be good for him." The job started in the middle of June. While I sat with my coffee in the morning and began the day's work of puzzling out another couple of paragraphs on Goya, I would hear Mark running down the stairs on his way to work. After that, I would move to my desk to write, but for a couple of weeks I found myself distracted by thoughts of Teddy Giles and his work.

Before his show closed at the Finder Gallery at the end of May, I went to see it. Lola's description hadn't been off the mark. The show resembled the aftermath of a massacre. Nine bodies made of polyester resin and fiberglass layon the gallery floor, dismembered, ripped open, and decapitated. What appeared to be dried blood stained the floor. The instruments of the simulated torture were displayed on pedestals: a chain saw, several knives, and a gun. On the walls hung four huge photographs of Giles. In three he was performing. He wore a hockey mask in the first and held a machete. In the second he was in drag, dolled up in a blond Marilyn wig and evening gown. In the third, he sprayed his enema. The fourth photograph presumably showed Giles as "himself." He was sitting on a long blue sofa in ordinary clothes with a television remote control in his left hand. His right hand appeared to be massaging his crotch. He looked pale, calm, and not nearly as young as Mark had said he was. I would have guessed that Giles was at least thirty.

The show repulsed me, but I also found it bad. In the name of fairness, I had to ask myself why. Goya's painting of Saturn eating his son was just as violent. Giles used classic horror images presumably to comment on their role in the culture. The remote control was an obvious allusion to television and videos. Goya, too, borrowed from standard folk images of the supernatural that were immediately recognizable to anyone who saw his work, and they were also meant as social commentary. So why did Goya's work feel alive and Giles's dead? The medium was different. In Goya, I felt the physical presence of the painter's hand. Giles hired craftsmen to cast his bodies from live models and then fabricate them for him. And yet, I had admired other artists who had their work made for them. Goya was deep. Giles was shallow. But then sometimes shallowness is the point. Warhol had devoted himself to surfaces— to the empty veneers of culture. I didn't love Andy Warhol's work, but I could understand its interest.

The summer before my mother died, I'd traveled alone in Italy and made the journey in Piedmont to Varallo to see the sacro monte and the chapels above the town. In the Chapel of the Massacre of the Innocents I saw the figures of weeping mothers and murdered babies with real hair and clothes, and their effect on me was WRENCHING. When I walked through the Finder Gallery and looked at Giles's polyurethane victims, I shuddered but felt little connection to them. It may have been partly due to the fact that the figures were hollow. There were a number of artificial organs, hearts, stomachs, kidneys, and gall bladders lying among the mess of bodies, but when you peered into a severed arm, there was nothing inside it.

Nevertheless, explaining Giles's art wasn't easy. When I read Hasseborg's article in Blast, I saw that he had taken the simple route—arguing that the act of moving horror images from the flat screen into the three dimensions of a gallery forced the viewer to rethink their meaning. Hasseborg ran at the mouth for several pages, his prose roiling with hyperbolic adjectives: "brilliant," "riveting," "astounding." He quoted Baudrillard, panted over Giles's shifting identities, and then in one long and final grandiloquent sentence, pronounced him "the artist of the future."

Henry Hasseborg also reported that Giles had been born in Baytown, Texas, not Virginia, as Mark had told me, and in Hasseborg's version of Giles's life, the artist's mother wasn't a prostitute but a hardworking waitress devoted to her son. Giles was quoted as saying, "My mother is my inspiration." As the weeks passed, I came to believe that although Hasseborg was right about the fact that Giles reproduced the gruesome images of horror flicks and cheap violent porn, he was wrong about their effect on the viewer—at least in my case. They criticized nothing and they revealed nothing. The work was simulacra excreted from the culture's bowels—sterile, commercial feces meant purely for titillation. And although I was biased against Hasseborg, I began to feel that he had fallen for Giles because the man's work was the visual embodiment of his own voice—that smirking, cynical, joyless tone he usually adopted in his articles about art and artists. Of course, Hasseborg wasn't alone. He had many compatriots who wrote just like him—although with less intelligence—other cultural journalists who had adopted the slick palaver of the moment. It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known.

Although I didn't judge Giles's work hastily, I did judge it, and Mark's attraction to those vacuous scenes of slaughter and to the man who had created them worried me. Every time Giles gave his birthplace and age, he said something different. Hasseborg wrote that Giles was twenty-eight No doubt Giles wanted to obsfucate his background, perhaps to create a mystique about himself, but his prevarications couldn't be good for Mark, who, at the very least, was in the habit of bending the truth too often.

Late one morning in early July, I ran into Mark on West Broadway. He was crouched on the sidewalk petting a cocker spaniel and talking to the animal's owner. He put his face close to the dog's snout and spoke to it in a low, friendly voice. When I greeted him, he jumped up and said, "Hi, Uncle Leo." Turning to the dog, he said, "Bye, Talulah." I asked him why he wasn't at work.

"Harry doesn't need me until noon today," he said. "I'm on my way there now."

As Mark and I walked down the street together, a young woman stuck her head out of a clothing store and waved at Mark. "Hi, Marky. What's up, honey?"

"Darien," Mark called back. He smiled sweetly at her, lifted a hand, and wiggled his fingers. The wave struck me as out of character, but when I looked over at Mark, he grinned broadly at me and said, "She's really nice."

Before we reached the end of the block, Mark was accosted again, this time by a younger boy. He came running from across the street, yelling, "The Mark!"

"The Mark?" I muttered aloud.

Mark turned to me and lifted his eyebrows as if to say, People will call you anything.

The boy ignored me. Breathing heavily from his run, he looked up at Mark. "It's me, Freddy. Remember? From Club USA?"

"Sure," Mark said. He sounded bored.

"There's this really cool photo show opening tonight around the corner. I thought you might like to go."

"Sorry," Mark said in the same laconic voice. "Can't."

I watched Freddy press his lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his disappointment. Then he lifted his chin and smiled up at Mark "Another time, okay?"

"Sure, Freddy," Mark said.

Freddy ran back to the other side of the street, scooting within inches of a passing taxi. The driver pressed on the horn, and the noise blared in the street for two or three seconds.

As Mark watched Freddy's close call, he slouched on one hip and lowered his shoulders in a posture I supposed was meant to look nonchalant.

Then he turned to me, straightened his spine, and threw back his shoulders. When our eyes met, he must have seen a trace of confusion on my face, because he hesitated for half a second. "Gotta run, Uncle Leo. I don't want to be late for work."

I checked my watch. "You'd better hurry."

"I will." Mark sprinted down the block, his huge pants waving like two flags on either side of his ankles, the elastic and several inches of his underpants in full view. The pants were so long that the bottoms had frayed and torn along the inner seams. I stood for a few moments and watched him run. His figure grew smaller and smaller, and then he turned a corner.

As I made my way home, I realized that two narratives about Mark had unfolded inside me—one on top of the other. The superficial story went something like this: Like thousands of other teenagers, Mark had hidden parts of his life from his parents. No doubt he had experimented with drugs, slept with girls, and maybe, I had begun to think, a couple of boys. He was intelligent but a very poor student, which suggested an attitude of passive rebellion. He had lied to his parents. He had failed to tell his mother about his room in my apartment and had once slept there without my permission. Another time, he had hoped to sneak back into that room at four in the morning. He was attracted to the violent content of Teddy Giles's art, but then so were countless other young people. And finally, like so many children his age, he tried on various personas to discover which one suited him. He behaved one way with his peers and another way with adults. This version of Mark's story was ordinary, one tale like a million others of a normal, bumpy adolescence.

The other story was similar to the one that lay above it, and its content was identical: Mark had been caught lying. He had formed a friendship with an unsavory person I privately called "the ghost," and Mark's body and voice changed depending on whom he was speaking to at the moment. But this second narrative lacked the smoothness of the first. It had holes in it, and those gaps made the story difficult to tell. It didn't rely on a larger fiction about teenage life to fill in its ragged openings but left them gaping and unanswered. And unlike the reassuring tale above it, it didn't begin when Mark was thirteen, but at some unknown and earlier date that sent me hurtling into the past rather than the future, and it came in the fractured form of isolated pictures and sounds. I remembered little Mark walking through our door when Lucille lived upstairs, his head hidden under a rubber fright mask. I saw his father's portrait of him with a lamp shade on his head—a small body hovering in the nowhere of that canvas—and then I heard Violet hesitate, breathe, and leave her sentence unfinished.