What I Loved

of a large wounded animal whose powerful body was steadily shrinking. Violet's bouts of fury at Mark kept her vigorous. If Bill felt anger, it was turned against himself, and I watched as he slowly, steadily gnawed at his own flesh. It wasn't the content of Mark's crimes that hurt Bill—the fact that he ran off, mixed vodka with Valium, snitched his stepfather's car, or even that he lied and stole. All this could have been forgiven under other circumstances. Bill would have been far more accepting of open rebellion. Had Mark been an anarchist, he would have understood. Had he argued for his own hedonism or even run away from home to live his life according to his own daft ideas, Bill would have let him go. But Mark did none of these things. He embodied everything Bill had fought long and hard against: shallow compromise, hypocrisy, and cowardice. When he talked to me, Bill seemed more confused by his son than anything else. He told me in an amazed voice that when he had asked Mark what he most wanted from life, the boy had replied with apparent candor that he wanted people to like him.
    Bill went to his studio every day, but he didn't work "I walk over there," he said, "and I hope that something will come to me, but it doesn't. I read the box scores from spring training. Then I lie down on the floor and invent ball games in my head, the way I used to when I was a kid. The games go on and on. I do the play-by-play, and then I sleep. I sleep and dream for hours, and then I stand up and go home."
    I couldn't offer Bill much more than my presence, but I gave him that. There were days when I left work and went straight to the Bowery. There we would sit on the floor and talk until dinnertime. Mark wasn't our only subject. I complained about Erica, whose letters to me always managed to keep some small hope for us alive. We told stories from our childhoods and talked about paintings and books. Around five, he allowed himself to open a bottle of wine or pour himself a Scotch. In the woozy hours that followed, the light of the lengthening days shone through the window over our heads, and Bill, enlivened by the alcohol, quoted Samuel Beckett or his Uncle Mo with his finger pointed at the ceiling. He declared his love for Violet with wet, pink eyes and reaffirmed his hopes for Mark in spite of everything. He roared over bad jokes, dirty limericks, and silly puns. He railed against the art world as a paper tower of dollars and marks and yen and told me in solemn tones that he was dried up, finished as an artist. The doors had been a swan song "to all that" But a minute later, he would say that he had been thinking a lot about the color of wet cardboard. "It's beautiful on the streets after a rain, lying loose in a gutter or tied up in those neat bundles with string."
    They were afternoons of drama—the drama of Bill, who never bored me, because when I was near him I felt his weight. The man was heavy with life. So often it's lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that. He had always been a stone, massive and hulking, charged from within by magnetic power. I was pulled toward him, more than ever before. Because he was suffering, I gave up my defenses and my envy. I had never examined that feeling, had never admitted to it, but I did then. I had envied him—potent, stubborn, lustful Bill, who had made and made and made until he felt that the making was over. I had envied him Lucille. And Violet. And I had envied him Mark, if only because the boy had lived. The truth was bitter, but Bill's pain brought a new frailty to his character, and that infirmity had made us more equal.
    Violet joined us at the Bowery one evening in early March with a brown bag of Thai food that we ate on the floor. We gobbled down the dinner like three starved refugees and then stayed in the studio and talked and drank into the night Violet crawled onto the mattress and lay on her back and spoke to us from that position. After a while, we all found a spot on the bed—Violet in the middle, Bill and I on either side of her—three contented drunks who kept up a piecemeal conversation. At around one o'clock in the morning, I said I had to go home or I'd never get to work tomorrow. Violet grabbed Bill's arm and then mine. "Five more minutes," she said. "I'm happy tonight. I haven't been