What I Loved

to look at the paintings. I recognized him, and we chatted for two or three minutes."
    In a startled voice, Bill said, "You met him in the gallery?"
    "I thought you knew," Bernie said casually. "He was there for at least an hour. He took his time, going very slowly. He would look at one for quite a while and then move on to the next one."
    "He went back," Bill said. "He went back and looked at them."
    The story of his father's return visit to the Weeks Gallery never left Bill. It became the single concrete sign he had of his father's affection for him. Before that, Sy's long days at the box business, his appearances at the occasional Little League game, school play, or first art opening had had to suffice as markers of his father's paternal duty and goodwill. Bernie's story added a layer to Bill's internal portrait of his father. It also had the irrational effect of confirming his loyalty to the Weeks Gallery. Bill confused the messenger and the message, but it hardly mattered. As Bernie rocked back and forth on his heels in front of several mounted drawings of Sy Wechsler and ran his fingers through the keys and papers and debris that Bill said would be mounted onto the canvases, I sensed his excitement. Bernie was in for the long haul.
    Birth is violent, bloody, and painful, and all the rhetoric to the contrary will not convince me that I am wrong. I have heard the stories of women squatting in the fields, snapping umbilical cords with their teeth, strapping their newborns onto their backs, and picking up the scythe, but I wasn't married to those women. I was married to Erica. We went to Lamaze classes together and listened attentively to Jean Romer's breathing advice. A stocky woman in bermuda shorts and thick-soled sneakers, Jean referred to birth as "the great adventure" and to the members of her class as "moms" and "coaches." Erica and I watched films of athletic, smiling women doing deep knee bends during their labors and breathing their babies out of them. We practiced panting and blowing as we silently corrected Jean's grammar every time she told us "to lay down on the floor." At forty-seven, I was the second-to-oldest father-to-be in the class. The oldest was a bullish man in his sixties named Harry who had been married before, had grown-up children, and was now working on his second child from his second wife, who looked like a teenager but was probably well into her twenties.
    Matthew was born on August 12, 1977, at St. Vincent's Hospital. I stood beside Erica and watched her agonized face, squirming body, and clenched fists. Every once in a while I reached for her hand, but she batted me away and shook her head. Erica did not scream, but down the hallway in another labor room, a woman shrieked and wailed at the top of her lungs, pausing only to swear both in Spanish and in English. She too must have had a "coach" with her, because after a few seconds of surprising silence, we heard her yell, "Fuck you, Johnny! Fuck you and your fucking breathing! You fucking breathe! I'm dying!"
    Near the end, Erica's eyes took on a bright, ecstatic gleam. She clenched her teeth and growled like a animal when she was told to push. I stood beside the doctor in my surgical gown and watched the wet, bloody, black head of my son emerge from between Erica's legs, followed immediately by his shoulders and the rest of his bodv. I saw his bloated little penis, saw blood and fluid gush from Erica's closing vagina, heard Dr. Figueira say, "It's a boy," and felt dizzy. A nurse pushed me into a chair, and then I had my son in my arms. I looked down at his wrinkled red face and soft lopsided head and said, "Matthew Stein Hertzberg," and he looked me in the eyes and grimaced.
    It had come to me late. I was a graying, wrinkling father of an infant son, but I took to parenthood with the enthusiasm of the long deprived. Matt was an odd little creature with thin red limbs, a purplish umbilical stump, and downy black hair on only part of his head. Erica and I spent a lot of time studying his peculiarities — his greedy slurping noises when he fed, his mustard-colored bowel movements, his waving arms and legs, and his absorbed staring, which suggested brilliance or idiocy, depending on how you looked at it. For about a week, she called him "our naked stranger," but then he became Matthew or Matt or Matty boy. In those first few months after he was born, Erica showed a competence and ease I hadn't seen in her before. She had always been