What I Loved

believe that Bill wanted exactly that—the everyday in all its dense particularity. For this he turned to film, or rather video. I was conservative enough to feel that an artist of such technical brilliance betrayed his talent by turning to the video camera, but after I saw the tapes, I changed my mind. The camera liberated Bill from the debilitating weight of his own thoughts by sending him into the streets, where he found a thousand children and the visual fragments of their unfolding life stories. He needed those children for his own sanity, and through them he would begin to compose an elegy about what all of us who live long enough have lost—our childhoods. Bill's lament would be unsentimental. There was no room in his work for the Victorian haze that continues to obscure our notions of childhood. But most important, I think he found a way to address his anguish about Mark without Mark.
    We saw the woman early on a Sunday afternoon, after Mark had already been sent off on the train to Cranbury. Bill and I were standing near the window when Violet walked up behind Bill and put her arms around his waist. She pressed her cheek into his sweater, moved beside him, and pulled his arm over her shoulder. For a minute, the three of us watched the pedestrians below in silence. A cab pulled up, the door opened, and a woman in a long brown coat emerged with a child on her hip, several packages over both arms, and a stroller. We watched as she moved the child from one hip to the other, dug in her purse, extracted a bill, paid the driver, and then unfolded the stroller with her left hand and right foot. She lowered the heavily dressed baby into the contraption and fastened a belt around its middle. In the same instant, the child began to cry. The woman squatted on the sidewalk, removed her gloves, stuck them hastily into her pockets, and began to search a large quilted bag. She dug out a pacifier and popped it into the infant's mouth. Then she loosened the strings that tied the hood of the child's snowsuit, started jiggling the stroller with one hand, and leaned close to the baby's face. She smiled and began to talk. The baby leaned back in the stroller, sucking hard, and closed its eyes. The woman glanced at her watch, stood up, hung her four bags over the handlebars, and began pushing the stroller up the street.
    When I turned from the window, Bill was still watching the woman. He didn't say a word about her that afternoon, but while we ate Violet's frittata and talked about whether Mark would pass his last semester's classes and manage to graduate from high school, I sensed the deflection in Bill. He listened to what Violet and I were saying and he answered us, but at the same time he remained aloof, as if some part of himself had already left the apartment and was walking down the sidewalk.
    The following morning, he bought a video camera and started working. For the next three months, he left early in the morning and stayed out well into the afternoon. When he finished filming, he walked to the studio and sketched until dinner. After eating, he often returned to his notebooks, drawing far into the night. But he spent every minute of the weekends with Mark. According to Bill, the two of them talked, watched rented movies, and then talked again. Mark had become Bill's handicapped child, someone who had to be nursed like an infant, someone who could never leave his sight. In the middle of the night, Bill checked on his son to make sure he hadn't climbed out the window and disappeared. His paternal vigilance, once a form of punishment, became a means of preventing the inevitable rampage, one he feared would tear the boy to pieces.
    Although Bill had recovered his energy through the new project, his excitement had a manic edge. When I looked at him, I felt that his eyes hadn't regained their old focus so much as taken on a fervid gleam. He slept very little, lost several pounds, and shaved even less often than was usual for him. His clothes stank of smoke, and late in the day, his breath smelled of wine or Scotch. Despite his intense schedule, I saw him often that spring, sometimes every afternoon. He would call me at home or at my office. "Leo, it's Bill. How about a stop on the Bowery?" I said yes even on the days when it meant that I would be up late with papers or lecture preparations, because something in his voice on the telephone communicated his need for company. When I walked in on him at work, he always stopped