What I Loved

have to. I noticed that he started slapping my back again and affectionately grabbing my arm, and the odd thing was that not until he began touching me again did I realize that he had stopped doing it.
    The days came and went with an almost liturgical dependability, incantations of the ordinary and intimate. Matt sang to himself in the mornings in his high, tuneless voice while he dressed himself very, very slowly. Four days a week Erica sailed out the door with her briefcase and an English muffin in her hand. I walked Matt to school and then took the IRT uptown. On the subway I composed paragraphs in my head for my chapter that focused on Pliny's Natural History , while I half-saw the faces and bodies of other riders. I felt their bodies pressed against mine, smelled their tobacco, sweat, and cloying perfumes, their medicinal creams and herbal remedies. I took the Columbia boys and a few Barnard girls through a survey course on Western art and hoped some of those images would stick with them forever — the gold-and-blue abstraction of a Cimabue or the estranging beauty of Giovanni Bellini's Madonna in a Meadow or the terror of Holbein's dead Christ. I listened to Jack moan about the docile students. "I never thought I'd find myself actually longing for those characters from SDS." After work Erica and I found Matt and Grace at home. He was often in her lap by then, a place he had named "the soft house." We fed him and bathed him and listened to his stories about Gunna, a wild redheaded boy from a country called "Lutit" that was somewhere in the "north." He fought us, too, especially when he metamorphosed into Superman or Batman and we had the gall to challenge his omnipotence with directives about teeth brushing and bedtime. Erica helped edit Violet's dissertation. Ideas flew between them and they excited each other, and sometimes at night I would rub Erica's back to ease the tension that made her head ache after long talks on the telephone with Violet about cultural contagions and the problem of the subject.
    When he didn't have Mark with him, Bill worked far into the night on the hysteria constructions. Violet was often asleep by the time he finished. She told me that he rarely sat down to eat, and when he did, he would sit with the plate on his lap in front of the piece and say nothing.
    Neither Bill nor I had much time for coffees or lunches that year, but I also knew that Violet had altered the outlines of our friendship. It wasn't that Bill actively neglected me. We spoke on the phone. He wanted me to write about the hysteria works, and whenever I saw him he brought me something to read — a Raw Comics or a book of medical photographs or an obscure novel. The truth was Violet had opened a passage in Bill that had taken him further into his own solitude. I could only guess at what had passed between them, but I sometimes felt that their intimacy had a courage and fierceness that I had never known, and the awareness of this lack in myself made me vaguely restless. The feeling lodged itself in my mouth as a dry taste, and I suffered from a longing that nothing could satisfy. It wasn't hunger or thirst or even sex that I wanted. It was a dim but irritating need for something nameless and unknown that I had felt from time to time since I was child. There were a few nights that year when I lay awake beside my sleeping wife with that emptiness in my mouth, and I would move into the living room and sit on the chair by the window to wait until morning.
    For a long time I thought of Dan Wechsler as another missing man in a family of missing men. Moishe, the grandfather, had disappeared. Sy, the father, had stayed, but had sprinted away emotionally. Dan, the youngest of these three generations of men, had been hidden away in New Jersey, the phantom resident of either a halfway house or a hospital, depending on his state of mind. That year, Bill and Violet hosted a small Thanksgiving dinner on the Bowery, to which Dan was invited. For days Dan called Bill. One day he canceled. The next day he reinstated himself. The day after, he called again to say he wasn't coming. But at the last moment, Dan found the courage take the bus to the Port Authority bus terminal, where Bill picked him up. We were seven, altogether: Bill, Violet, Erica, Dan, Matthew, Mark, and I. Regina had gone to Al's family for the day, and the Bloms had felt it was too far and too expensive to travel to New York for the holiday. Dan's craziness wasn't