What I Loved

For a few moments, I wondered if she had known something I didn't about Bill and Lucille, and then I forgot about her and her comment for almost a year.
    Lucille stayed on in the Greene Street loft, and Bill lived on the Bowery. Mark shuttled back and forth between his parents — -half the week with Lucille, the other half with Bill. They talked on the phone every day, and neither Bill nor Lucille ever mentioned divorce. Trucks and fire engines and baby wipes appeared in the Bowery loft, and sometime in July, Bill made his son a beautiful bed that looked like a boat. He constructed a stand that allowed it to rock back and forth like an oversized cradle, and he painted it a deep marine blue. Bill read to his son and fed him and encouraged him to at least try the plastic potty in the little room with the toilet. He worried about his appetite and fretted about him falling down the stairs, and he picked up most of his toys, even though he had no gift for housekeeping. The loft was filthier than it had ever been because Bill never bothered to clean it. The sink turned colors I had never seen before on porcelain — a palette that ranged from pale gray to orange to a deep, mucky brown. I didn't mention the dirt. The truth was that father and son seemed comfortable enough in the big crooked room. They didn't mind living among the towers of soiled laundry that rose up from a dusty, ash-covered floor.
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    Bill didn't say much more to me about his failing marriage. He never complained about Lucille, and when he wasn't taking care of Mark, he worked long hours and slept little. But the truth was that when Erica and Matt and I visited Bill and Mark that summer, I often felt relieved when we left them and walked outside into the hot street. The studio had an oppressive, nearly smothering atmosphere, as if Bill's sadness had leaked into the chairs, the books, the toys, and the empty wine bottles that piled up under the sink. In the paintings of his father, Bill's sorrow took on a palpable beauty that was executed with a rigorous, unflinching hand, but in life his pain was merely depressing.
    When the portraits of Bill's father were shown in September, Lucille did not come to the opening. I'd asked her if I would see her there, and she'd said that she was editing a manuscript and would have to work into the night. Her answer sounded like an evasion, and I must have looked dubious, but she'd insisted. "I have a deadline," she'd said. "There is nothing I can do about it."
    Every painting in the show sold, but not to Americans. A Frenchman named Jacques Dupin bought three paintings; the others went to a German collector and a Dutchman in the pharmaceutical business. After that show, Bill was picked up by a gallery in Cologne, one in Paris, and another in Tokyo. American reviewers were befuddled — acclaim by one critic was neutralized by the savage attack of another. There was no consensus about Bill among those who wrote about art for a living, and yet I noticed large numbers of young people in the gallery, not just at the opening but every time I went to look at the paintings. Bernie told me that he had never had so many artists and poets and novelists in their twenties at any exhibition as at that one. "The kids are all talking about him," he said. "That's got to be good. The old fogies are going to die off, and they'll take over."
    It took me several visits to the gallery to understand that the man whose back looked very much the same from one painting to another was aging. I noticed that wrinkles formed at the back of his neck and that his skin changed. Moles multiplied. In the last painting there was a small cyst beneath Sy's ear. By some miracle of art or nature, however, his hair remained black in every one. Bill's rendering of his father, always clad in a dark suit, reminded me of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, but without their illusion of depth. The smooth, clear image of the man's back was li t from the left side of the canvas, and every fold in the suit's material, every speck of dust on a padded shoulder, every crease in the black leather of a shoe had been painstakingly depicted. But what fascinated spectators was the material Bill had applied over this initial image, which partly obscured it — the letters, photographs, postcards, business memos, receipts, motel keys, movie ticket stubs, aspirins, condoms — until each work became a thick palimpsest of legible and illegible writing, as well as a medley of