What I Loved

outright. Lucille confirmed that she hadn't talked to Mark about his near death from drugs. "I didn't think it would be productive," she said. What had she talked about, then? Violet had wanted to know. Lucille said that she had given him news about Ollie's day camp and the two cats and what she was cooking for dinner and had wished him luck. Violet was incensed. When she told me the story she trembled with irritation. My feeling was that Lucille had made a conscious decision not to speak of what had happened, that she had weighed the decision carefully and had come to the conclusion that going over that territory would do neither Mark nor her any good. I think every word she uttered to him had been deliberate. I suspected, too, that after she hung up, she went over the talk in her mind and may even have chided herself about what she had said and revised the conversation after the fact. Violet believed that any mother who didn't hop the next train and come running to her son's bedside was "unnatural," but I knew that self-consciousness and uncertainty paralyzed Lucille. She was stuck in the mud of her own internal debates, the pros and cons and logical conundrums that made almost any action on her part impossible. Just making the telephone call to the hospital had probably taken a good deal of courage.
    The difference between Lucille and Violet was one of character, not knowledge. Violet's confusion about Mark was as great as Lucille's. What Violet didn't question, however, was the strength of her own feeling for him and her need to act on it. Lucille, on the other hand, felt powerless. Bill's two wives had become Mark's two mothers, and while the marriages had come one after the other, Lucille's motherhood and Violet's adopted motherhood had coexisted for years and now had outlived Bill's death. The two women were the surviving poles of a man's desire, bound together by the boy he had fathered with only one of them. I couldn't help but feel that Bill was still playing a crucial role in the story that was unfolding before me, that he had created a fierce geometry among us, and that it lived on. Again, I found hints in the painting that hung in my apartment: the woman who left and the one who fought and stayed; the strange little car in the plump Violet's lap—a thing that wasn't itself and wasn't a symbol either, but a vehicle of unspoken wishes. When Bill painted that canvas he had been hoping for a child with Lucille. He had told me that himself. I started to study the painting again, and the longer I looked at it, the more I began to feel that Mark was there in the canvas, too, hiding in the body of the wrong woman.
    Violet and Mark were gone for two months. During that time I took in their mail, watered the three plants upstairs, and listened to the answering machine for messages on which I could still hear Bill's voice telling the callers to wait for the beep. I also checked in on the Bowery loft once a week. Violet had made a special request that I look in on Mr. Bob. It turned out that not long after Bill died, Mr. Aiello, the landlord, had discovered the squatter, and after striking a deal with him, Violet was now paying extra rent for the dilapidated room downstairs. Mr. Bob's new status as official resident of 89 Bowery had made him both proprietary and officious. During my visits, he trailed behind me and sniffed loudly to express his disapproval. "I'm taking care of everything," he would say. "I've swept." Sweeping had become Mr. Bob's calling, and he swept obsessively, often brushing the backs of my feet with the broom as though I were leaving a trail of dust behind me. And while he swept, he declaimed, his grandiose words rising and falling for full dramatic effect.
    "It won't settle, I tell you. It has said a resounding no to eternal sleep, and all day and far into the night I am forced to listen to the doleful sound of its feet pacing up there under the roof, and last night when I had swept away the last tidbits, crumbs, and what-have-yous of my long day's work, I spied it on the stairs—the spitting image of Mr. W. himself, but bodiless of course—a mere astral puff of what he once was, and that discarnate, spiritized phantasma reached out its arms in a gesture of indescribable sorrow and then it covered its poor blind eyes, and I discerned that it was looking for her, for Beauty. Now that she's gone, the ghost is disconsolate. Mind my words, because I've seen it before and I'll see it again. My