What I Loved

the various small objects that fill junk drawers in almost any household. There was nothing innovative about gluing foreign materials to a painting, but the effect was very different from Rauschenberg's dense layerings, for example, because the debris in Bill's canvases had been left behind by one man, and as I moved from one painting to another, I enjoyed reading the scraps. I especially liked a letter written in crayon: "Dear Unci Sy, Thank you for the relly neet racing car. It's relly neet. Love, Larry." I studied the invitation that read, "Please come and celebrate Regina and Sy's Fifteenth Wedding Anniversary. Yes, it's really been that long!" There was a hospital bill for Daniel Wechsler, a playbill from Hello , Dolly!, and a torn, wrinkled piece of paper with the name Anita Himmelblatz written on it, followed by a telephone number. Despite these momentary insights into a life, the canvases and their materials had an abstract quality to them, an ultimate blankness that conveyed the strangeness of mortality itself, a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.
    Over each canvas, Bill had placed a thick piece of Plexiglas, which removed the viewer from the two layers underneath. The Plexiglas turned the works into memorials. Without it, the objects and papers would have been accessible, but sealed behind that transparent wall, the image of the man and the detritus of his life could not be reached.
    I returned to the show on West Broadway seven or eight times. The last time I went, only days before it closed, I met Henry Hasseborg. I had seen him before lurking around other galleries and knew him by sight. Jack, who had spoken to him on a couple of occasions, had once called him "man as toad." Hasseborg was a novelist and art critic, known for his arch prose and scathing opinions. He was a tiny bald person, always dressed fashionably in black. He had small eyes, a flattened nose, and an enormous mouth. A rash that may have been eczema crawled up one side of his face and onto his head. He approached me and introduced himself. He said that he was familiar with my work and hoped that I was working on another book. He had read my "Piero" and loved it, as well as my book of essays. "Tremendous" was the word he used. Then he casually glanced over at a canvas and said, "You like it?"
    I told him I did and began to say why when he interrupted me: "You don't think they're anachronistic?"
    I began another sentence. "No, I think he puts historical references to another use —"
    Hasseborg cut me off again. He was almost a foot shorter than I was. As he looked up at my face, he took a step closer to me, and his proximity made me suddenly uncomfortable. "They say he's landed galleries in Europe. Which ones?"
    "I don't know," I said. "You should talk to Bernie if you're interested."
    "Interest might be too strong a word," he said, and smiled. "Wechsler's a little too cerebral for me."
    "Really," I said. "I feel a lot of emotion in the work." I paused, surprised that he had let me finish, and went on. "I seem to remember an article you wrote on Warhol. If anyone's work embodies ideas, it's Warhol. Surely that's cerebral."
    Hasseborg leaned even closer to me, his chin lifted. "Andy's an icon," he said, as if this answered my question. "He had his finger on the cultural pulse, man. He knew what was coming, and it came. Your friend Wechsler's running down some side street ..." He didn't finish the sentence. He looked at his watch and said, "Shit, I'm late. See you around, Leo."
    As I watched him walk slowly toward the elevator, I asked myself what had just happened. The tone of his conversation had shifted from ingratiating flattery to insulting familiarity. I also realized that when he'd introduced himself, he hadn't mentioned my friendship with Bill, but as he'd continued to talk, he had insinuated our connection by asking about the European galleries and then directly referred to Bill as "your friend Wechsler." Finally, he had rounded off our aborted talk with the flippant use of my first name, as if we were old friends. I was not a naïf. For Hasseborg, manipulating other people was a sophisticated game that could reap him benefits: an inside scoop, a bit of art world gossip, a quote from someone who'd never intended his remark to be public. He was an unscrupulous man, but he was also an intelligent man,