What I Loved (3 page)

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

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

"And the shadows?" I asked him.

"They're mine, too."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You were only eleven," Erica said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you talking about?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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