What I Loved

article that included, among more flattering statements, a quotation from an excoriating review in the same newspaper. It labeled Bill a "cult artist" who had mysteriously attracted large followings in Europe, South America, and Japan. Violet hated the article. She railed against the writer and the paper. She shook the page in my face and said that she recognized the photograph of Bill but couldn't find him anywhere in the seven paragraphs that had been devoted to him, that he was missing from his own obituary. It didn't help to remind her that most journalists are merely conduits of received opinion, and it's the rare obituary writer who can turn out something other than a dull summary pieced together from equally witless articles on the man or woman in question. But as the weeks went on, Violet was comforted by the letters that came to her from all over the world, written by people who had seen Bill's work and found something in it to take away for themselves. Many of them were young, and many of them weren't artists or collectors but ordinary people who had somehow stumbled onto the work, often only in reproduction.
    The incidents of blindness to art that is later pronounced "great" are so frequent in history that they have become clichés. Van Gogh is now worshiped as much for his martyrdom to the cause of "No Recognition in His Lifetime" as for his paintings. After hundreds of years in obscurity, Botticelli was reborn in the nineteenth century. The change in their reputations was simply a matter of reorientation, a new set of conventions that made understanding possible. Bill's work was complicated and cerebral enough to threaten art critics, but it also had a simple, often narrative power that engaged the untrained eye. I believe that O's Journey, for example, will last, that after the faddish jokes and winking absurdities that crowd the galleries have had their day in the sun, they'll wither like so much before them, and the glass boxes with their alphabetical characters will stand. It's impossible to know whether I'm right, but I hold fast to the belief, and so far, I haven't been proved wrong. In the five years since his death, Bill's reputation has grown stronger.
    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