What I Loved

knows that I dusted off my old manual typewriter for the occasion and have been typing in a trance every day for hours. I chose my old Olympia because my fingers don't lose their position on the keys as easily as on a computer. "You're straining your eyes, Leo," he tells me. "You should let me help you with whatever it is." But he can't help me with this story.
    Before she left for Paris, Violet told me that she had left a box of Bill's books on the Bowery for me. She had saved volumes she knew I would like and that might help me with my work. "They're all marked," she said, "and some of them have long notes in the margins." I didn't pick up those books for over two months. When I finally went to get them, Mr. Bob trailed after me, sweeping while he delivered his harangue. I was robbing Bill's ghost, violating the sacred ground of the dead, cheating Beauty of her inheritance. When I pointed to my name written in Violet's hand on a cardboard box, Bob was tongue-tied for a moment but rebounded immediately with a long discourse on a possessed breakfront he had tracked down in Flushing twenty years earlier. When I walked out the front door carrying the small box in my arms, he punished me with a rather perfunctory blessing.
    Violet hasn't given up the Bowery studio. She still pays the rent for herself and Mr. Bob. Eventually, Mr. Aiello or his heirs will want to do something with the building, but for now it's a sagging, forgotten structure inhabited by a mad but highly articulate old man. Bob gets most of his nourishment in soup kitchens these days. About once a month, I go and check on him or send Lazlo to do it when I feel I'm not up to the old man's monologues. Whenever I make the trip, I bring along a bag of groceries and am forced to endure Bob's whining about my choices. Once he accused me of having "no palate." Nevertheless, I've sensed a slight softening in his attitude toward me. His hostility is a little less vituperative, and his benedictions have become longer and more florid. It isn't altruism that prompts my visits to Mr. Bob but my eagerness to listen to his ornate farewells, to hear him invoke the radiance of the Godhead, the seraphim, the Holy Dove, and the Bloody Lamb. I look forward to his creative perversions of the psalms. His favorite is Psalm 38, which he alters freely for his purposes, calling on God to keep my loins free of loathsome disease and to maintain the soundness of my flesh. "O Lord, let him not be bowed down greatly," Bob bellowed after me the last time I was on the Bowery. "Let him not go mourning all the day long."
    I didn't find Violet's letters until May. I had opened some of the other books, but never the volume of da Vinci drawings. I was saving it for when I began to research Icarus. I felt sure that Bill's unfinished work had been influenced by the drawings, not in any direct way but because the artist had made drawings for a flying bird-machine. I had been avoiding Icarus. It seemed impossible to write about it without mentioning Mark. As soon as I opened the volume, the five letters spilled out. After only seconds, I understood what I had found and started reading. I read and rested, read and rested, nearly panting from the strain, but hungry for the next word. It's good that no one saw me deciphering those love letters. Heaving, dizzy, blinking, and straining, I finally managed to get through all five during the course of a couple of hours, and then I closed my eyes and kept them shut for a long time.
    "Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never liked my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees." The letters were full of little thoughts like that one, but she also wrote: "It's important now to tell you that I love you. I held back, because I was a coward. But I'm yelling it now. And even if I lose you, I'll always say to myself, 'I had that. I had him, and it was delirious and sacred and sweet.' If you let me, I'll always dote on your whole odd, savage, painting self."
    Before I mailed the letters to Violet in Paris, I xeroxed them and put the copies in my drawer. I wish I had been nobler. To resist reading them was probably beyond me, but if my eyes had been better, I might not have made those copies. I don't keep them to study their contents. That's too difficult. I keep the letters as objects, charmed by their various