What I Loved

silence on a chair looking over him, content with the fullness of her own thoughts.
    Mark Wechsler was born on August twenty-seventh. We were now two families, one on top of the other. Although the physical closeness made visiting easy, I saw Bill only a little more often than before. We loaned each other books, shared articles we had read, but our domestic lives were mostly contained within the walls of our separate apartments. All first babies shock their parents to one degree or another. Their demands are so urgent, their emotions run at such a high pitch that families close in on themselves to answer their calls. Bill would sometimes bring Mark with him to visit me when he returned home after a day at the studio. "Lucille's taking a nap," he would say. "She's exhausted," or, "I'm giving her a break. She needs silence." I accepted these comments without question, although I did hear the occasional note of worry in Bill's voice; but then he had always worried about Lucille. He was easy with his son, a small, blue-eyed version of himself who struck me as placid, well-fed, and slightly dopey. My obsessive interest in Matthew did not carry over to Mark, but the fact that Bill's affection for his own son was at least as passionate as mine for Matt solidified my sense that our lives were parallel — that in the hectic, grubby ordeal of caring for a baby, he and Lucille, like Erica and me, had discovered new strains of joy between them.
    Only Lucille's weariness wasn't like Erica's. It had an existential cast — as though she suffered from more than being up at night. She didn't come to see me often, perhaps once every two months, and she always called days ahead of time to arrange the meeting. At the appointed time, I would open the door to find Lucille standing in the hallway with a sheaf of poems in her hand. She always looked pale and drawn and stiff. Her hair hung around her face uncombed, usually dirty. Mostly she wore jeans and old-fashioned blouses in dull colors, and yet her disheveled appearance didn't disguise her prettiness, and I admired her lack of vanity. I was always glad to see her, but Lucille's visits augmented Erica's feeling that Lucille had forgotten her. Lucille always greeted Erica politely. She would endure Erica's questions about Mark, answer them in curt, precise sentences, and then she would turn to me. Her economical but resonant poems were written in a voice of complete detachment. Inevitably they contained autobiographical references. In one poem a man and a woman lie beside each other in bed, unable to sleep, but neither one says a word to the other. They don't speak, out of deference to the other, but in the end, the woman feels the man's consideration as a presumption that he knows what she is thinking. Her annoyance with him keeps her awake long after he has gone to sleep. Lucille called the poem "Aware and Awake." A baby turned up in some works, a comic character referred to as "It." "It" wailed and clung and kicked and spat up, rather like a windup toy whose mechanism had gone haywire and couldn't be controlled. Lucille never acknowledged in any way that the poems were personal. She treated them as objects that might be remanipulated with my help. Her coolness fascinated me. Every once in a while she would smile to herself as she read a line, and I couldn't penetrate the source of her humor. While I sat next to her, I had the sense that she was always somewhere ahead of me, and that I was running after her. I would look down at the blond hairs on her slender arm and ask myself what it was about her I couldn't grasp.
    One evening before she left: to go upstairs, I watched as she began to gather up her papers. I had learned to turn away, because I knew that if I looked at her, she would feel uncomfortable and might drop her pencil or eraser. When I shook her hand good-bye, she thanked me and opened the door. It was when she began to walk through it that I had an uncanny sensation of resemblance, followed by a sudden certainty that I was right. In that moment, Lucille reminded me of Sy Wechsler. The link between them was neither physical nor spiritual. Their personalities had little in common except what they both lacked — a quality of ordinary connectedness to other human beings. Lucille didn't elude only Bill, she eluded everyone who knew her. The old adage "He married his mother" had to be revised. Bill had married his father. Hadn't he said, "I chased her for years"? As I