What I Loved

fog, and then into the thick clouds that block my vision now. I've always been able to see the periphery of things, which allows me to walk without a cane, and I can still negotiate my way on the subway. The daily effort of shaving became too hard, however, and I grew a beard. I have it trimmed every month by a man in the Village who insists on calling me Leon. I don't bother to correct him anymore.
    Erica remains a half presence in my life. We talk more often on the telephone and write fewer letters, and every July we spend two weeks together in Vermont This July was our third year, and I'm sure we will continue the tradition. Fourteen days out of 365 seems to be enough for us. We don't stay in the old farmhouse, but we aren't far away, and last year we drove up the hill, parked the car, walked around the lawn, and peeked through the windows of the empty house. Erica isn't strong. Headaches continue to interrupt her life, rendering her a semi-invalid for days, sometimes weeks, but she still teaches with fervor and writes a lot. In April 1998, Erica published Nanda's Tears: Repression and Release in the Work of Henry James. At home in Berkeley, she often spends the weekends with Daisy, now a pudgy eight-year-old girl enamoured of rap music.
    Next spring, I will finally retire. My world will shrink then, and I'll miss my students and Avery Library and my office and Jack. Because my colleagues and students know what I've lost—Matthew, Erica, and my eyes—they have turned me into a venerable figure. I suppose a near-blind art history professor gives off a whiff of the romantic. But nobody at Columbia knows that I lost Violet, too. As it turns out, she and Erica are about equidistant from me these days, one in Paris, one in Berkeley, and I, who never moved, occupy the middle ground in New York. Violet lives in a small apartment in the Marais not far from the Bastille. Every December, she returns to New York for a few days before she flies home to Minnesota for Christmas. She always spends a day with Dan in New Jersey, who, she says, is doing a little better. He still paces, chain-smokes, makes the O sign with his fingers, and speaks several decibels louder than most people, and he has yet to master the ordinary business of living day to day. It's all hard—cleaning, shopping, preparing meals—and yet Violet feels that everything about Dan is a little less Dan than before, as if his whole being has subsided a notch or turned one shade lighter. He is still writing poems and occasionally a scene for a play but is less prolific than he once was, and the scraps of paper and manuscript pages that lie scattered about his one-room apartment are covered with verse or bits of dialogue followed by ellipses. Age and thirty years of potent drugs have dulled Dan a bit, but that muting seems to have made his life a bit easier.
    Four years ago, Violet's sister, Alice, married Edward. A year later, at the age of forty, she gave birth to a daughter named Rose. Violet is crazy about Rose, and every year she arrives in New York with a suitcase stuffed with Parisian dolls and dresses to bring to the angel in Minneapolis. I hear from Violet every two or three months. She sends me an audiotape in lieu of a letter, and I listen to her news and her rambling thoughts about her work. Her book The Automatons of Late Capitalism includes chapters entitled "Manic Shopping," "Advertising and the Artificial Body," "Lies and the Internet," and "The Parasitic Pyschopath as Ideal Consumer." Her research has taken her from the eighteenth century into the present, from the French physician Pinel to a living psychiatrist named Kernberg. The terms and etiologies of the illness she is studying have changed with time, but Violet has tracked it in all its shifting incarnations: folie lucide , moral insanity, moral idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality—ASP for short. These days psychiatrists use checklists for the disorder, which they revise and update by committee, but among the features most often included are glibness and charm, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse, impulsivity, cunning and manipulativeness, early behavior problems, and a failure to learn from mistakes or respond to punishment. Every broad idea in the book will be illustrated by individual cases—the countless stories Violet has been collecting from people over the years.
    Neither Violet nor I ever mention the night I told her I loved her, but my