What I Loved

Bob chanting downstairs, and I heard the noise of the traffic outside and impatient drivers honking their horns on the Manhattan Bridge. There was very little light on the stairway, but the steel door below me that led to the street was illuminated by a dull shine that must have come from a lamp inside Bob's rooms. I put my head in my hands and I breathed in the familiar smell that came from the studio—paint, mildewed rags, and sawdust. Like his father, I thought, he dropped dead, fell to the ground and died, and I wondered if Bill knew when the pains or spasm hit that his death was coming. For some reason, I imagined that he did and that his placid face meant that he had accepted that his life had come to an end. But that might have been a lie I was telling myself to soften the picture of his corpse on the floor.
    I tried to re-create the conversation I'd had with him the day before about editing the videotapes. He had said that he planned to begin in a couple of months and was explaining the machine to me, the process of cutting. When it had become obvious that I understood very little, he had laughed and said, "I'm boring you to death, aren't I?" But it wasn't true. I hadn't been bored at all, and I had said as much. Nevertheless, while I was sitting there on the step, I worried that I hadn't been adamant enough, that perhaps when I had said good-bye to him the day before, there had been a small unspoken cleft between us, seen only as a hint of disappointment in Bill's eyes. Perhaps he'd sensed my reservations about his sudden enthusiasm for video and had felt a little hurt. I knew that it was silly to focus on this insignificant exchange at the very end of a friendship that had lasted for twenty years, but the memory stung me nevertheless, and with it came a keen awareness that I would never be able to speak to him again about the tapes or anything else.
    After a while, I realized that Violet had stopped talking. I didn't hear Mr. Bob either. Disturbed by the silence, I stood up and looked through the door into the room, Violet had lain down beside Bill and put her head on his chest. One of her arms had disappeared under his torso and the other arm was looped around his neck. She looked small next to him, and she looked alive, even though she wasn't moving. The light had changed during the minutes I had been gone, and although I could still see both of them, their bodies were now in shadow. I saw the outline of Bill's profile and the back of Violet's head, and then I saw her lift her arm from around his neck and move it to his shoulder. While I watched, she began to stroke his shoulder over and over again, and while she did it, she rocked herself against his large motionless body.
    In these last years, there have been times when I wished I hadn't witnessed that moment. Even then, while I was looking at the two of them lying together on the floor, the truth of my own solitary life closed over me like a large glass cage. I was the man in the hallway, the one who looked on at a final scene being played out inside a room where I had spent countless hours, but I wouldn't allow myself to step across the threshold. And yet, now I am glad that I saw Violet clinging to the minutes she had left with Bill's body, and I must have known that it was important for me to look at them, because I didn't turn my head away, and I didn't return to the step. I stood in the doorway and watched over them until I heard the buzzer and let in the two young officers who had come to perform their peculiar duty—hanging around until another official came and pronounced Bill dead of natural causes.
     
     

THREE
    MY FATHER ONCE TOLD ME A STORY ABOUT GETTING LOST. IT happened the summer after he had turned ten in the countryside near Potsdam, where his parents had a vacation house. He had spent every summer there since he was born and knew the woods and hills and meadows surrounding that house by heart My father made a point of telling me that just before he walked off into the woods he had been quarreling with his brother. David, who was then thirteen, had pushed his younger brother out of the room they shared and locked the door, shouting that he needed privacy. After the fight, my father ran off, hot with anger and resentment, but after a while his temper cooled, and he began to enjoy moving through the trees, stopping to examine the tracks left by animals, and listening to the sounds of the birds. He walked and walked, and then, all at