What I Loved

received ideas, would unsettle nobody. On one of the pages there was a photograph of Allan Johnson when he was seven—one of those badly taken grade-school portraits with a fake sky as the backdrop. He had once been a cute kid with blond hair and protruding ears.
    Lazlo works for me in the afternoons. He sees well what I see poorly, and together we make an efficient team. I pay him a good salary, and I think he mostly enjoys the work. Three evenings a week, he comes and reads to me purely for pleasure. When Pinky can get the baby-sitter to stay late, she comes along, too, but often falls asleep on the sofa before the reading is over. Will, also known as Willy, Wee Willy, Winky, and the Winker was two and a half last month. The Finkelman offspring is a devil for running, hopping, and climbing. When his parents bring him over for a visit, he leaps on me as if I were his personal jungle gym and leaves no part of my aging body untrampled. I'm fond of the redheaded little dervish, however, and sometimes when he crawls over me and puts his fingers on my face or touches my head, I feel a small vibration in his hands that makes me wonder if the Winker hasn't inherited his father's unusual sensitivities.
    Will, however, isn't ready for an evening of The Man Without Qualities , which his father has been reading to me for the past two months. For such a laconic person, Lazlo reads pretty well. He is careful about punctuation and rarely stumbles over words. From time to time, he pauses after a passage and makes a sound—a kind of snort that moves from his throat and up through his nose. I look forward to the snorts, which I've dubbed "Finkelmanian laughter," because by matching snort to sentence, I've finally gained access to the comic depths in Lazlo I always suspected were there. His is a dry, restrained, often black humor, well suited to Musil. At thirty-five, Laz isn't young anymore. I have no impression that he's aged physically at all, but that may be because he's never modified his hair, glasses, or neon trousers, and my eyes are fuzzy. Lazlo has a dealer now, but he sells too little to make the dealer happy. Nevertheless, he plows on with his kinetic Tinkertoys, which now hold small objects and flags with quotations on them. I know he reads Musil with an eye for a sharp quote. Like his mentor, Bill, Lazlo is attracted to purity. He has an ascetic streak. But Laz belongs to another generation, and his observant eyes have been fixed too long on the vanities, corruptions, cruelties, foibles, fortunes, and foils of New York's art world to have remained untouched by it. A tone of cynicism sometimes creeps into his voice when he talks about shows.
    Last spring, he and I started listening to Mets games on the radio. It's late August now and there's excited talk about a possible Subway Series. Neither Laz nor I has ever been a rabid fan. We listen for two fans who died, and we take their pleasure in soaring home runs, hard-hit doubles, beautiful slides into third and a scuffle on first about whether the guy was really out. I enjoy the language of baseball—sliders, fastballs, knuckle-balls, a can of corn—and I like listening to the games on the radio and to Bob Murphy inviting us to stay tuned for "the happy recap." The play-by-play has started to excite me more than I would have expected. Last week, I actually popped up from my chair and cheered.
    Lazlo likes to take out the portfolios of Matt's drawings and look at them. When my eyes tire, he sometimes describes the scenes to me. I lie back in my chair and listen to him tell about the tiny people in Matthew's New York. Last week, he described a picture of Dave: "Dave's chilling out in his chair. He's looking kind of beat, but his eyes are open. I like the way Matt did the old guy's beard with those little squiggly lines and the white craypas over them. Good old Dave," Lazlo said. "He's dreaming about some old girlfriend probably. He's going over the whole sad mess in his mind. I can tell, because Matt stuck a little wrinkle between his eyebrows."
    Lazlo's been my right-hand man when it comes to the book on Bill. For several years it's been growing and shrinking and then growing again. I want it to be finished before Bill's retrospective in 2002 at the Whitney. Early in the summer, I stopped the revisions I was dictating to Lazlo in order to write these pages. I told him I had a personal project that I had to take care of before we could continue. He suspects the truth. He