What I Loved (38 page)

He left a lot of work behind him, including much that had never been shown. Violet, Bernie, and several gallery assistants began the task of organizing the canvases, boxes, sculptures, prints, drawings, notebooks, as well as the incomplete tapes that had been part of Bill's last project. In the early stages of the sorting, Violet asked me to come along, because she "needed someone to lean on." In a month, the cluttered storehouse of a man's life was transformed into a spare, eerie room with a desk and chair, mostly empty shelves, and crates illuminated by the changing sunlight nobody could take away. There were discoveries: delicate drawings of Mark as a baby, several paintings of Lucille that none of us had known existed. In one, she is writing in a notebook, and although part of her face is hidden, the intent focus she is giving to the words on the page is clear from her eyes and forehead. Written in longhand across the middle of the canvas are the large words "It cried and cried." The script cuts Lucille through the chest and shoulders and seems to exist on another plane from the one she occupies. The canvas was dated October 1977. There was also a drawing of me and Erica that Bill must have done from memory, because we hadn't posed for it and I had never seen it. We are sitting together on Adirondack chairs outside the Vermont house. Erica is leaning toward me and has placed her hand on the arm of my chair. As soon as she found the drawing, Violet gave it to me, and I took it to the framers the very next day. Erica had come and gone by then. The New York trip she had imagined—a trip she had hinted might result in a reconciliation between us—had become instead a miserable journey to bury a friend. We never did get around to talking about ourselves. I hung Bill's drawing on the wall near my desk and looked at it often. In the quick lines that were Erica's hand, Bill seemed to have caught my wife's tremulous fingers, and looking at the sketch, I would invariably remember how she had shaken at his funeral, how her whole body had vibrated with a slight but visible palsy. I would remember taking her cold hand and clasping it between both of mine, and I would remember that despite my firm hold on her, the quiver, generated from somewhere deep in her nerves, did not stop.

Whenever an artist dies, the work slowly begins to replace his body, becoming a corporeal substitute for him in the world. It can't be helped, I suppose. Useful objects, like chairs and dishes, passed down from one generation to another, may briefly feel haunted by their former owners, but that quality vanishes rather quickly into their pragmatic functions. Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it. Art historians don't like to speak of this, because it suggests the magical thinking attached to icons and fetishes, but I have experienced it time and time again, and I felt it in Bill's studio. When the art movers came and carried out the meticulously packed and carefully labeled crates and boxes as Violet, Bernie, and I watched, I was reminded of the two men from the funeral home who had put Bill's body into a vinyl bag and hauled it out of the same room two months earlier.

Although I knew better than most people that Bill himself and Bill's art were not identical, I understood the need to grant an aura to the work he had left behind him—a kind of spiritual halo that resists the harsh truths of burial and decay. When Bill's coffin was lowered into the ground, Dan rocked back and forth beside the grave. He folded his arms across his chest, bent forward from his waist, and then threw himself backward, over and over again. Like an Orthodox Jew at his prayers, he seemed to find comfort in the physical repetition, and I rather envied him his freedom. But when I walked over to him and looked into his face, it was ravaged and his eyes were wild and staring. Later that day on Greene Street, Violet gave Dan a tiny canvas that Bill had done of the letter W with a real key set into it. Dan put it under his shirt and hugged the little painting throughout the afternoon. It was warm, and I worried that he was sweating all over it, but I knew why he was holding the object next to his skin. He wanted no separation between himself and the little painting, because somewhere in the wood and canvas and metal he imagined that he was touching his older brother.

I brought Bill back to life in my dreams. He would come walking through my door or appear beside my desk, and I would always say to him, "But I thought you were dead," and he would say, "I am. I just came back for a talk," or "I'm here to check on you—to make sure you're all right." In one dream, however, when I asked him the same question, he said, "Yes, I'm dead. I'm with my son now." I began to argue with him. "No, I said, Matthew is my son. Mark is your son," but Bill wouldn't admit to it, and in the dream I was furious and woke up tormented by the misunderstanding.

Even after most of Bill's work had been taken from the studio, Violet continued to go to the Bowery every day. She told me she was taking care of odds and ends, sorting through Bill's personal things, mostly letters and books. I often saw her leaving the building in the morning with a heavy leather bag over her shoulder. She didn't return until six, sometimes seven o'clock at night, and when she did, she often had dinner with me. I cooked for her, and even though my culinary skills were inferior to hers, she always thanked me vociferously. I began to notice that for about half an hour after she arrived at my apartment, Violet looked strange. Her eyes had a glassy look, an oblique, shiny expression that alarmed me, especially in the first few minutes after she had stepped through the door. I didn't comment on it, because I could barely put what I was seeing into words. Instead I made small talk about the food or a book I was reading, and very slowly her face began to look more familiar and more present, as if she were returning to the here and now. Although I had heard Violet crying a couple of times since Bill died, had listened to her anguished sobs coming through the ceiling of my bedroom at night, she didn't grieve in front of me. Her strength was admirable, but it had a brittle, determined air about it that every once in a while made me uncomfortable. I guessed that her toughness was Blomian—a Scandinavian trait inherited from a long line of people who had believed in suffering alone.

It may have been that same pride that caused Violet to ask Mark to come and live with her. She told Lucille that starting in July he could stay with her and find work in the city. Mark had managed to graduate from high school, but he hadn't applied to college, and his future lay in front of him like a great unmapped wilderness. When I asked Violet whether she was in any shape to take care of Mark, she bristled at me, saying that Bill would have wanted her to do it. She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together to indicate that she had made her decision and no further discussion was wanted.

The night before Mark moved in with her, Violet didn't return from the studio. She had called me in the morning to say that she wanted to take me out to dinner in the neighborhood. "Don't buy food," she said. "I'll be home by seven." At eight o'clock, I called her. The line was busy.

Half an hour later, it was still busy. I walked to the Bowery.

The door to the street was wide open, and when I looked through it, I saw Mr. Bob's entire person for the first time. A man of uncertain age, he had a rounded spine and thin legs, which contrasted sharply with his muscular arms. He was sweeping the hallway and nudged a thick pile of dust past my feet onto the sidewalk. "Mr. Bob?" I said.

Without raising his head to look at me, he glowered at the floor.

"I got worried about Violet," I said. "We were supposed to have dinner."

The man didn't answer me and he didn't move. I stepped around him and began to climb the stairs.

"Watch your step," he boomed.

Just as I reached the top, he added, "Watch your step with Beauty!"

The door to the studio was also open, and I drew a breath before I walked through it. The only light in the room came from a lamp on Bill's desk that illuminated a stack of papers lying beneath it. Although I had seen the naked loft in daylight, the evening murk seemed to enlarge the barren space, because my eyes didn't take in its perimeter. At first, I saw- nobody, and then, as I looked toward the windows, I thought I saw Bill step into the blurry light that came from outside. As I looked at the apparition, I stopped breathing. Bill's withered ghost was standing in front of the pane smoking a cigarette. He had his back to me—baseball cap, blue work shirt, black jeans. I walked toward him, and at the sound of my steps, the deformed shrunken Bill turned around and he was Violet. I had never seen Violet smoke. She was holding the cigarette between her thumb and index finger the way Bill used to hold his butts when there was little left but the filter. She walked toward me.

"What time is it?" she said.

"It's after nine."

"Nine?" she said, as if she were trying to fix the number in her thoughts. "You shouldn't have come." She let the cigarette fall and stepped on it.

"We were going to have dinner."

Violet squinted at me. "Oh yes." She looked confused. "I forgot." After a few seconds, she said. "Well, you're here." She looked down at herself and stroked the sleeve of Bill's shirt with one hand. "You look worried. Don't worry. I'm all right. The day after Bill died, I came back here. I wanted to look around alone. His clothes were lying in the corner, and I found the carton of cigarettes on the desk. I put them away in the cupboard above the sink. I told Bernie that everything in there was personal, that he couldn't touch it. After Bernie was finished organizing the art, I started coming again. It's my work now—to come here and stay. One afternoon, I went to the cupboard and took out his pants and shirt and the cigarettes. At first, I just looked at them and touched them. His other clothes are still at home, but most of them are clean, and because they're clean, they're dead. These have paint on them. He worked in these clothes, and then after a while, I didn't want to just touch them anymore. It wasn't enough. I wanted his clothes on me, touching my body, and I wanted to smoke the Camels. I've been smoking one a day. It helps."

"Violet," I said.

She acted as if I hadn't spoken, and looked around the room. I noticed a single open box on the floor and tubes of paint lined up in rows. "I feel comforted here," she said.

Matt's drawing of Jackie Robinson was still hanging on the wall not far from Bill's desk. I thought of asking about it, but I didn't. Violet leaned toward me and put her hand on my arm. "I was afraid he would die," she said. "I never told you or anybody else, because we're all afraid that people we love are going to die. It doesn't mean much really. But I began to think he wasn't well. He breathed too hard. He couldn't sleep. Once, he told me that he didn't like to close his eyes, because he thought that he might die in the night. After Mark stole your money, he'd sit up late and drink whiskey instead of coming to bed. I'd find him dozing on the sofa at three o'clock in the morning with the television still on. I'd pull off his shoes and his pants and cover him up out there or I'd get him into our bed." She glanced at the floor for a moment. "He was in bad shape, gloomy all the time. He talked about his father a lot. He talked about Dan's illness and how he had tried to help him, but nothing had worked. He started thinking about the child we never had together. Sometimes he said we should adopt a baby, but then he said it was too risky. He'd tried to be a good father, but he must have done it all wrong. When it was really bad, he would quote every mean sentence anybody had ever written about him. He had never seemed to care much about that stuff before, but it added up, Leo. Reviewers roughed him up pretty bad. Their spite seemed to come from the fact that there were other people who were so fanatically devoted to his work, but he forgot all the good things that had happened to him." Violet stared across the room and stroked her arm again. "Except me. He never forgot me. I would whisper in his ear, 'Come to bed now,' and he would put his hands on my face and kiss me. He was usually still a little drunk, and he'd say, 'My darling. I love you so much,' and other mushy things. The last few months were better. He seemed happy with the kids and his videotapes. I really thought the filming would keep him alive." Violet turned her head to the wall. "Every day it gets a little harder for me to go home. I just want to stay here and be with him."

Violet took the pack of Camels out of Bill's shirt pocket. She lit a cigarette, and as she shook out the match, she said. "I'm going to have one more today." She blew a long stream of smoke out of her mouth. After that, we didn't speak to each other for at least a minute. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the room seemed brighter. I studied the tubes of oil paints on the floor.

Violet broke the silence. "There's something I want you to hear. It's on the answering machine. I listened to it the same day I found the clothes." Violet walked to the desk and pressed the button on the machine several times. A girl's voice said, "M&M knows they killed me." That was all.

For a second, I heard Bernie's voice begin another message, then Violet turned off the machine. "Bill heard it the day he died. The light wasn't blinking. He must have listened to the messages when he came in."

"But it's nonsense."

Violet nodded. "I know, but I think it's the same girl who called me that night about Giles. He couldn't have known that, because he didn't talk to her." She looked up at me and put her hand on mine. "They call Mark M&M, did you know that?"

"Yes."

Violet began to squeeze the top of my hand. She gripped it hard and I could feel her shaking.

"Oh, Violet," I said.

My voice seemed to break her. Her lips quivered, her knees buckled, and she fell into me. I put my arms around her as she grabbed me around my waist and pressed her cheek against my neck. I removed the baseball cap and kissed her head once, just once. While I held her shuddering body and listened to her sobs, I smelled Bill—cigarettes, turpentine, and sawdust.

In Mark, mourning looked like deflation. His body reminded me of a squashed, airless tire that needed pumping up. He seemed unable to raise his chin or lift his hand without tremendous effort. When he wasn't working at his job as a clerk in a local bookstore, he was lying on the sofa wired to his Walkman or wandering sluggishly from one room to another, eating crackers from the box or gnawing at a Twinkie. He nibbled, munched, and gobbled all day and throughout the evening, leaving a trail of cellophane, plastic, and cardboard behind him. Dinner held little interest for him. He would pick at the meal and then leave most of the food on his plate. Violet never said a word to Mark about his eating habits. I guess she had decided that if Mark wanted to chew his way through the loss of his father, she wasn't going to stop him.