What I Loved (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Like Gogol's nose," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And the mixture of styles?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?" I said.

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

"An act of bravado," I said.

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

"Where was Lucille?"

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

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

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

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

"Who is she?" I said.

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

"What's she studying?"

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