What I Loved

away.
    Violet was looking at me with startled eyes. She lifted her hands as if she were pleading for something and then she lowered them. When I looked at her standing there near the turquoise table with a piece of hair falling onto her forehead, I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was my hold on the world, what I suffered over and loved, and I knew in that instant that I was losing her, and the knowledge turned me cold. I sat down at the table, folded my hands, and stared at them without saying a word. I felt her eyes on me as she stood in the middle of the room. I heard her breathing, and a couple of seconds later, the sound of her footsteps coming toward me. When I felt her fingers touching my head, I didn't look up at her. She said "Leo" several times, and then her voice cracked. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I, I didn't mean to push you away, I..." She knelt on the floor beside me and said, "Please talk to me. Please look at me." Her voice was hoarse and choked. "I feel so bad."
    I spoke to the table. "I think it's better that we say nothing. It was ridiculous of me to think that you might return my feelings, when I know better than anybody what you and Bill were to each other."
    "Turn your chair around," she said, "so I can see you. You must talk to me. You must."
    I resisted her request, but after a couple of seconds my stubbornness seemed so childish that I obeyed. Without getting up, I shifted the position of the chair, and once I was facing her I saw that tears were running down her cheeks and she was pressing her fist against her mouth to steady herself. She swallowed, moved her hand away from her face, and said, "It's so complicated, Leo, much more complicated than you think. There's nobody like you. You're good, you're generous ..."
    I lowered my eyes and began to shake my head.
    "Please, I want you to understand that without you ..."
    "Don't, Violet," I said. "It's all right. You don't have to make excuses for me."
    "I'm not. I want you to understand that even before Bill died, I needed you." Violet's lips were trembling. "There was an obtuse side to Bill—a hidden, unknowing, unknowable core that he let out in his work. He was obsessed. There were times when I felt neglected, and it hurt."
    "He adored you. You should have heard the way he talked about you."
    "And I adored him back." She pressed her hands together so hard her arms began to shake, but her voice sounded a little more composed. "The fact is, my own husband was less accessible to me than many other people. There was always something I couldn't get to in him, something remote, and I wanted that thing I could never have. It kept me alive and it kept me in love, because whatever it was, I could never find it."
    "But you were such good friends," I said.
    "The best of friends," she said, and took hold of both my hands. I felt her squeeze them. "We talked about everything all the time. After he died, I kept saying to myself, 'We were each other.' But knowing and being are two different things."
    "Always the philosopher," I said. The comment had an edge to it, and Violet reacted to my hint of cruelty by withdrawing her hands.
    "You're right to be angry. I've taken advantage of you. You've cooked for me and taken care of me and stayed with me, and I've just taken and taken and taken ..." Her voice grew louder and her eyes filled with more tears.
    Her distress made me guilty. "That's not true,'' I said.
    She was nodding at me. "Oh, yes it is. I'm selfish, Leo, and I have something cold and hard in me. I'm full of hate. I hate Mark. I used to love him. Of course, I didn't love him right away, but I learned to love him slowly, and then later to hate him, and I ask myself, Would I hate him if I had given birth to him, if he were my son? But the really terrible question is this: What was it that I loved?"
    Violet was silent for a few seconds, and I studied my hands, which were resting on my knees. They looked old, veiny, and discolored. Like my mother's hands when she got old, I thought.
    "Remember when Lucille took Mark to Texas with her, and then she decided she couldn't handle having him and sent him back to us?"
    I nodded.
    "He was really difficult, always acting up, but after she came to visit at Christmas and left again, he really went nuts. He pushed me, hit me, screamed at me. He wouldn't go to sleep. Every night, he threw a fit. I was nice to him, but it's hard to like someone who's awful to you—even when it's just a