What I Loved

large bra sizes. Erica laughed louder. Although Lucille never lost her reticence, she seemed to relax more with Erica than with other people. And yet, after the babies were born, there was a shift in Lucille toward Erica — a barely perceptible hint of coolness. I did not see it or feel it until Erica pointed it out, and even then I doubted the truth of it for a long time. Lucille was not socially graceful. Her manners had a blunt, uncivil edge and, on top of that, she was probably exhausted from the rigors of caring for an infant. My arguments usually convinced Erica until she felt it again: the tiny sting of possible rejection — always ambiguous, always subject to many interpretations.
    When I saw Lucille, we talked about poetry. She continued to give me the little magazines that published her, and I took time with the poems and made comments on them. My comments were usually questions — about form, about choices she had made or not made, and she talked eagerly to me about her use of commas and periods and her preference for simple diction. Her ability to focus on these details was extraordinary, and I enjoyed our conversations. Erica didn't like Lucille's poems. She once confided in me that reading them was "like eating dust." Lucille may have divined Erica's distaste for her work and instinctively withdrawn from that disapproval, or she might not have liked the fact that Erica eagerly embraced Bill's literary opinions and sometimes called him for a reference or just to ask him a question. I don't know, but as time wore on, I understood that the two women were no longer close, and that the more Lucille withdrew from Erica, the more she seemed interested in me.
    About two weeks after I took the photograph of Erica and Lucille, Sy Wechsler dropped dead of a heart attack. It happened early one evening after work while he was taking in the mail. Wechsler lived alone, and it was his brother Morris who found him the next morning, lying near the kitchen table with bills, a couple of business letters, and several catalogues on the floor beside him. No one had expected Wechsler to die. He did not smoke or drink, and he ran three miles a day. Bill and his Uncle Morris made the funeral arrangements, and Sy's youngest brother flew in from California with his wife and two children. After the funeral, Bill and Morris cleaned out the big house in South Orange, and when that task was over, Bill started drawing. He drew hundreds of pictures of his father, both from memory and from photographs. Bill had produced very little since his first show, not because he didn't want to work but because he needed to earn money. Two of the Violet paintings had sold to collectors, but the money they brought in had disappeared quickly. Once Bill knew he and Lucille were going to have a child, he had taken every plastering job he was offered, and after grinding days on a contracting site, he was often too tired to do anything but sleep. Sy Wechsler left $300,000 to each of his sons, and with his share of the money, Bill transformed his life.
    The loft above us at 27 Greene Street was up for sale. Bill and Lucille bought it, and by early August of 1977 they had moved in. The rent on the Bowery was low, and Bill kept it as his studio. The money, Bill told me, "will buy us time to do our own work." But that summer, Bill had few hours to spare for painting. All day, every day, he sawed, hammered, drilled, and breathed in dust. He erected Sheetrock walls in the raw space to make rooms. He laid tile in the bathroom once the plumber had installed the fixtures. He built closets and put in lights and hung the kitchen cabinets, and at night he would return to the Bowery and his sleeping wife and draw his father. It was grief as energy. Bill understood that his father's death had given him a new beginning and that the gargantuan physical labors of that summer were finally spiritual. He worked in the name of his father for his unborn son.
    In early August, only days before Matthew was born, Bernie Weeks and I walked to the Bowery in the late afternoon to take a look at Bill's early plans for a new series of paintings — which were developing out of the drawings of his father. While Bernie was flipping through the drawings of Sy Wechsler— sitting, standing, running, sleeping — he paused at one and said, "You know, I had a nice conversation with your father once."
    "At the opening," Bill said flatly.
    "No, it was a couple of weeks after. He came back