What I Loved Page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "How could you say that?" Bill screamed.

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

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

  There was silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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