What I Loved

"It might have interacted with the lithium."
    Dan didn't come often to the Bowery, but I know that Bill spoke to him on the telephone regularly, sometimes every day. Poor Dan was all cracks. His life was a daily struggle to ward off a breakdown that would land him in the hospital again. Wracked by bursts of paranoia, he would call to ask Bill if he still liked him or, worse, if Bill was out to kill him. And yet despite his illness, Dan had traits that linked him to his brother. They both coursed with emotions that weren't easy to contain. In Bill that potent feeling found an exit in work. "I work to live," he once told me, and after meeting Dan I understood far better what he had meant by those words. Making art was necessary for Bill to maintain a minimal equilibrium, to keep himself going. Dan's plays and poems were mostly unfinished, the tattered products of a mind that ran in circles and could never leap out of itself. The older brother's brain and nerves and private history had given him the strength to withstand the strains of ordinary life. The younger brother's had not.
    I heard Lucille walking above us every day. She had a particular step, light with a little drag to it. When I met her on the stairs, she would always smile self-consciously before we began to talk. She never mentioned Bill or Violet, and although I always asked her about her work, she never asked me to read her poems again. At my urging, Erica invited Lucille and Mark for an early dinner that spring. She put on a dress for the occasion, an odd beige sack that was very unflattering. Although her body was hidden under it, the badly chosen dress touched me. I read it as yet another sign of her unworldiness, and rather than repelling me, I found its ugliness poignant. As she sat across the table from me that evening, I wondered at the strict composure of her pale oval face. Her restraint gave her an aura that was almost inanimate, as if by some supernatural fluke she were a painting of herself made centuries before she was born.
    That night Mark and Matt dug out their Halloween costumes and roared about the room. Mark wore a thin nylon skeleton suit, black with white bones printed on it, and Matt was a skinny midget Superman in blue pajamas with a red felt S sewed onto the chest and a cape in the same material. Matt began calling Mark "Skeley-man" and "Boney-head." After a couple of minutes, the nicknames turned into a loud chant: "Bones bones dead down." The two little boys tromped in a circle near the windows of our loft. Like two mad grave diggers, they repeated the chant over and over again: "Bones! Bones! Dead! Down!" Erica watched them, and I turned my head several times to make sure they were not working themselves up into a frenzy that would end in tears, but Lucille didn't seem to notice her son or hear the song Matt had made up for their game.
    She told us that she was considering taking a job she had been offered teaching creative writing at Rice University in Houston. "I have never been to Texas," she said. "I hope that if I take the job, I will meet a cowboy or two. I have never met one." Lucille often avoided contractions in her speech, a small tic I hadn't noticed until that dinner. She went on. "Cowboys have interested me since I was a child, not real ones, of course, but the ones I invented for myself. The real thing might disappoint me terribly."
    Lucille took that job and left for Texas with Mark in early August. By then she and Bill had been divorced for two months. Five days after the divorce was final, Bill and Violet were married. The wedding was held in the Bowery loft on June 16th, the same day Joyce's Jewish Ulysses had wandered around Dublin. A few minutes before the exchange of vows, I noted that Violet's last name, Blom, was only an o away from Bloom, and that meaningless link led me to reflect on Bill's name, Wechsler, which carries the German root for change, changing, and making change. Blooming and changing, I thought.
    Bill and Violet had wanted to be married in Paris away from family and friends. That is what they had told Regina and Violet's parents they were doing, but the romantic fancy was stymied by a tangle of French laws, and they married quickly before they left for France. The only people who actually witnessed the event were Matt and Dan and Erica and I. Mark and Lucille were on Cape Cod with her family. Regina and Al were on a cruise somewhere, and the Bloms planned a reception for the couple in