What I Loved Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "And the mixture of styles?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Why?" I said.

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

  "An act of bravado," I said.

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

  "Where was Lucille?"

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

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

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

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

  "Who is she?" I said.

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

  "What's she studying?"

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

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

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

  "And the shadows?" I asked him.

  "They're mine, too."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "You were only eleven," Erica said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "What are you talking about?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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