What I Loved (53 page)

Lazlo works for me in the afternoons. He sees well what I see poorly, and together we make an efficient team. I pay him a good salary, and I think he mostly enjoys the work. Three evenings a week, he comes and reads to me purely for pleasure. When Pinky can get the baby-sitter to stay late, she comes along, too, but often falls asleep on the sofa before the reading is over. Will, also known as Willy, Wee Willy, Winky, and the Winker was two and a half last month. The Finkelman offspring is a devil for running, hopping, and climbing. When his parents bring him over for a visit, he leaps on me as if I were his personal jungle gym and leaves no part of my aging body untrampled. I'm fond of the redheaded little dervish, however, and sometimes when he crawls over me and puts his fingers on my face or touches my head, I feel a small vibration in his hands that makes me wonder if the Winker hasn't inherited his father's unusual sensitivities.

Will, however, isn't ready for an evening of
The Man Without Qualities
, which his father has been reading to me for the past two months. For such a laconic person, Lazlo reads pretty well. He is careful about punctuation and rarely stumbles over words. From time to time, he pauses after a passage and makes a sound—a kind of snort that moves from his throat and up through his nose. I look forward to the snorts, which I've dubbed "Finkelmanian laughter," because by matching snort to sentence, I've finally gained access to the comic depths in Lazlo I always suspected were there. His is a dry, restrained, often black humor, well suited to Musil. At thirty-five, Laz isn't young anymore. I have no impression that he's aged physically at all, but that may be because he's never modified his hair, glasses, or neon trousers, and my eyes are fuzzy. Lazlo has a dealer now, but he sells too little to make the dealer happy. Nevertheless, he plows on with his kinetic Tinkertoys, which now hold small objects and flags with quotations on them. I know he reads Musil with an eye for a sharp quote. Like his mentor, Bill, Lazlo is attracted to purity. He has an ascetic streak. But Laz belongs to another generation, and his observant eyes have been fixed too long on the vanities, corruptions, cruelties, foibles, fortunes, and foils of New York's art world to have remained untouched by it. A tone of cynicism sometimes creeps into his voice when he talks about shows.

Last spring, he and I started listening to Mets games on the radio. It's late August now and there's excited talk about a possible Subway Series. Neither Laz nor I has ever been a rabid fan. We listen for two fans who died, and we take their pleasure in soaring home runs, hard-hit doubles, beautiful slides into third and a scuffle on first about whether the guy was really out. I enjoy the language of baseball—sliders, fastballs, knuckle-balls, a can of corn—and I like listening to the games on the radio and to Bob Murphy inviting us to stay tuned for "the happy recap." The play-by-play has started to excite me more than I would have expected. Last week, I actually popped up from my chair and cheered.

Lazlo likes to take out the portfolios of Matt's drawings and look at them. When my eyes tire, he sometimes describes the scenes to me. I lie back in my chair and listen to him tell about the tiny people in Matthew's New York. Last week, he described a picture of Dave: "Dave's chilling out in his chair. He's looking kind of beat, but his eyes are open. I like the way Matt did the old guy's beard with those little squiggly lines and the white craypas over them. Good old Dave," Lazlo said. "He's dreaming about some old girlfriend probably. He's going over the whole sad mess in his mind. I can tell, because Matt stuck a little wrinkle between his eyebrows."

Lazlo's been my right-hand man when it comes to the book on Bill. For several years it's been growing and shrinking and then growing again. I want it to be finished before Bill's retrospective in 2002 at the Whitney. Early in the summer, I stopped the revisions I was dictating to Lazlo in order to write these pages. I told him I had a personal project that I had to take care of before we could continue. He suspects the truth. He knows that I dusted off my old manual typewriter for the occasion and have been typing in a trance every day for hours. I chose my old Olympia because my fingers don't lose their position on the keys as easily as on a computer. "You're straining your eyes, Leo," he tells me. "You should let me help you with whatever it is." But he can't help me with this story.

Before she left for Paris, Violet told me that she had left a box of Bill's books on the Bowery for me. She had saved volumes she knew I would like and that might help me with my work. "They're all marked," she said, "and some of them have long notes in the margins." I didn't pick up those books for over two months. When I finally went to get them, Mr. Bob trailed after me, sweeping while he delivered his harangue. I was robbing Bill's ghost, violating the sacred ground of the dead, cheating Beauty of her inheritance. When I pointed to my name written in Violet's hand on a cardboard box, Bob was tongue-tied for a moment but rebounded immediately with a long discourse on a possessed breakfront he had tracked down in Flushing twenty years earlier. When I walked out the front door carrying the small box in my arms, he punished me with a rather perfunctory blessing.

Violet hasn't given up the Bowery studio. She still pays the rent for herself and Mr. Bob. Eventually, Mr. Aiello or his heirs will want to do something with the building, but for now it's a sagging, forgotten structure inhabited by a mad but highly articulate old man. Bob gets most of his nourishment in soup kitchens these days. About once a month, I go and check on him or send Lazlo to do it when I feel I'm not up to the old man's monologues. Whenever I make the trip, I bring along a bag of groceries and am forced to endure Bob's whining about my choices. Once he accused me of having "no palate." Nevertheless, I've sensed a slight softening in his attitude toward me. His hostility is a little less vituperative, and his benedictions have become longer and more florid. It isn't altruism that prompts my visits to Mr. Bob but my eagerness to listen to his ornate farewells, to hear him invoke the radiance of the Godhead, the seraphim, the Holy Dove, and the Bloody Lamb. I look forward to his creative perversions of the psalms. His favorite is Psalm 38, which he alters freely for his purposes, calling on God to keep my loins free of loathsome disease and to maintain the soundness of my flesh. "O Lord, let him not be bowed down greatly," Bob bellowed after me the last time I was on the Bowery. "Let him not go mourning all the day long."

I didn't find Violet's letters until May. I had opened some of the other books, but never the volume of da Vinci drawings. I was saving it for when I began to research
Icarus.
I felt sure that Bill's unfinished work had been influenced by the drawings, not in any direct way but because the artist had made drawings for a flying bird-machine. I had been avoiding
Icarus.
It seemed impossible to write about it without mentioning Mark. As soon as I opened the volume, the five letters spilled out. After only seconds, I understood what I had found and started reading. I read and rested, read and rested, nearly panting from the strain, but hungry for the next word. It's good that no one saw me deciphering those love letters. Heaving, dizzy, blinking, and straining, I finally managed to get through all five during the course of a couple of hours, and then I closed my eyes and kept them shut for a long time.

"Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never liked my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees." The letters were full of little thoughts like that one, but she also wrote: "It's important now to tell you that I love you. I held back, because I was a coward. But I'm yelling it now. And even if I lose you, I'll always say to myself, 'I had that. I had him, and it was delirious and sacred and sweet.' If you let me, I'll always dote on your whole odd, savage, painting self."

Before I mailed the letters to Violet in Paris, I xeroxed them and put the copies in my drawer. I wish I had been nobler.
To
resist reading them was probably beyond me, but if my eyes had been better, I might not have made those copies. I don't keep them to study their contents. That's too difficult. I keep the letters as objects, charmed by their various metonymies. When I take out my things now, I rarely separate Violet's letters to Bill from the little photo of the two of them, but I keep the bit of cardboard and Matthew's knife far away from the other things. The doughnuts eaten in secret and the stolen gift are heavy with Mark and with my fear. The fear pre-dates the murder of Rafael Hernandez, and when I play my game of mobile objects, I'm often tempted to move the photographs of my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and the twins near the knife and the fragment of the box. Then the game flirts with terror. It moves me so close to the edge that I have a sensation of falling, as if I had hurled myself off the edge of a building. I plummet downward, and in the speed of the fall I lose myself in something formless but deafening. It's like entering a scream—being a scream.

And then I withdraw, backing away from the edge like a phobic. I make a different arrangement. Talismans, icons, incantations—these fragments are my frail shields of meaning. The game's moves must be rational. I force myself to make a coherent argument for every grouping, but at bottom the game is magic. I'm its necromancer calling on the spirits of the dead, the missing, and the imaginary. Like O painting a slab of beef because he's hungry, I invoke ghosts that can't satisfy me. But the invocation has a power all its own. The objects become muses of memory.

Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak. The trail behind us is sometimes marked by stones like the ones Hansel first left behind him. Other times, the path is gone, because the birds flew down and ate up all the crumbs at sunrise. The story flies over the blanks, filling them in with the hypotaxis of an "and" or an "and then." I've done it in these pages to stay on a path I know is interrupted by shallow pits and several deep holes. Writing is a way to trace my hunger, and hunger is nothing if not a void.

In one version of the story, the burnt piece of doughnut box might stand for hunger. I think Mark was always starved for something. But what? He wanted me to believe him, admire him. He wanted it badly for at least as long as he looked into my eyes. Maybe that need was the one thing that was whole and true in him, and it made him radiant. It didn't matter that he felt little or nothing for me or that he had to pretend to get my admiration. What mattered was that he felt my belief. But the pleasure he took in pleasing others never lasted. Insatiable, he gorged on crackers and doughnuts, on stolen things and money, on pharmaceuticals and on the chase itself.

I have no object for Lucille in my drawer. It would have been easy to save some scrap of her, but I never did. Bill pursued her for a long time, a creature in his mind whom he could never locate. Maybe Mark was looking for her, too. I don't know. Even I followed her for a while, until I came to a dead end. The idea of Lucille was strong, but I don't know what that idea was except maybe evasion itself, which is best expressed by nothing. Bill turned what eluded him into real things that would carry the weight of his needs and doubts and wishes—paintings, boxes, doors, and all those children on videotape. Father of thousands. Dirt and paint and wine and cigarettes and hope. Bill. Father of Mark. I can still see him rocking his little boy in the blue boat bed he built for him on the Bowery, and I can hear him singing in a voice that was low and hoarse, "Take a walk on the wild side." Bill loved his changeling child, his blank son, his Ghosty Boy. He loved the boy-man who is still roaming from city to city and is still reaching into his traveling bag to find a face to wear and a voice to use.

Violet is still looking for the sickness that moves in the air, the Zeitgeist that mumbles to its victims: scream, starve, eat, kill. She's looking for the idea-winds that gust through people's minds and then become scars on the landscape. But how the contagions move from outside to inside isn't clear. They move in language, pictures, feelings, and in something else I can't name, something between and among us. There are days when I find myself walking through the rooms of an apartment in Berlin— Mommsenstrasse 11. The furniture is a little blurry and all the people are gone, but I can feel the sweep of the empty rooms and the light that comes through the windows. A bitter nowhere. I turn away from the place as my father did, and I think about the day he stopped looking for their names on the lists, about the day he knew. It's hard to live with nonsense—gruesome, unspeakable nonsense. He couldn't do it. Before she died, my mother shrank. She looked very small in the hospital bed, and her freckled arm over the sheet was like a stick with pale loose skin. It was all Berlin and flight and Hampstead and German and confusion by then. Forty years had vanished from her head, and she called out for my father. Mutti in the dark.

Violet packed up Bill's work clothes and took them along to Paris. I imagine that she still puts them on from time to time, for comfort. When I think of Violet in Bill's ragged shirt and paint-smeared jeans, I give her a Camel to smoke, and I call the image in my mind
Self-Portrait.
I never imagine her at the piano anymore. The lesson finally ended with a real kiss that sent her far away from me. It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another. Matthew drew an old man many times, and he called him Dave. Years go by, and it turns out that he was drawing his own father. I am Dave now, Dave with patches on his eyes.

Another family has moved in upstairs. Two years ago, Violet sold the loft for a lot of money to the Wakefields. Every evening I hear their two children, Jacob and Chloe. They shake the light fixtures on my ceiling with their ritual war dances before they go to bed. Jacob is five and Chloe is three, and noise is their business. I suppose if they thumped for hours on end, I would be annoyed, but I've grown accustomed to their routine explosions around seven o'clock. Jacob sleeps in Mark's old room, and Chloe sleeps in what used to be Violet's study. In the living room, there's a plastic slide where the red sofa used to be. Every true story has several possible endings. This is mine: the children upstairs must be asleep, because the rooms above me are quiet. It's eight-thirty in the evening on August 30, 2000. I've had my supper, and I've put away the dishes. I'm going to stop typing now, move to my chair, and rest my eyes. In half an hour, Lazlo is coming to read to me.