What I Loved

me of the Tinkertoys my mother had bought for me not long after we arrived in New York. As I studied the oddly shaped sculptures, it dawned on me that these sticks resembled genitalia, both male and female.
    "Does all your work have a sexual theme?" Erica said to him. She was smiling as she said it, but Lazlo seemed immune to her humor. He studied Erica from behind his glasses and nodded soberly. His blond broom nodded with him. "It's what I do," he said.
    Erica was the one who approached Bill on Lazlo's behalf. For some time, Bill had been talking about hiring an assistant, and Erica was convinced that Lazlo would "be perfect." I was more skeptical about the boy's qualifications, but Bill couldn't resist Erica, and Lazlo became a fixture in our lives. He started working for Bill on the Bowery every afternoon. Erica fed him about once a month, and Matt loved him. Lazlo did nothing to court Matthew. He didn't play with Matt or speak much more to him than he did to us. But the young man's apparent coolness didn't deter Matt in the least. He climbed onto Laz's lap and touched his fascinating hair and rattled on to him about his growing passion for baseball, and every once in a while, Matt would clasp his hands on either side of Lazlo's face and kiss him. During these onslaughts of Matt's passion, Lazlo would sit impassively in his chair, speaking as little as possible, his expression uniformly morose. And yet, one evening as I watched Matt throw his arms around the skinny Finkelman legs as they were about to stride through the door for dinner, I had the sudden thought that Lazlo's lack of resistance to Matt was in itself a form of affection. It was simply the best he could do at the time.
    That January, my colleague Jack Newman began his liason with Sara Wang, a graduate student whom he had taught in one of his courses. She was a pretty young woman with brown eyes and black hair that fell to the middle of her back. There had been others before her—Jane and Delia and the six-foot-one-inch Tina, whose sexual appetite had apparently been as large as she was. Jack was lonely. His book, Urinals and Campbell's Soup , which he had been working on for five years, wasn't enough to fill the evening hours spent in his large apartment on Riverside Drive. The affairs didn't last very long. Jack's love objects weren't necessarily pretty, but they were always bright. He once told me rather sadly that he had never managed to get a stupid girl into bed. But even the smart girls soon tired of Jack. I suppose they understood that he wasn't serious, that he loved the game more than he loved them. Perhaps they woke up in the morning and looked over at the balding character in bed next to them and wondered what had happened to last night's magic. I don't know, but Jack lost them all. Late one afternoon, I walked down the hall to Jack's office. I had stayed on to correct papers and had come across a remarkable little essay on Fra Angelico by a young man named Fred Ciccio that I wanted to show Jack. When I put my eye to the small window of his office, I saw him and Sara in a clinch. His right hand had disappeared inside Sara's blouse, and although her hands were hidden somewhere beneath the desk, the look on Jack's face suggested that they weren't idle. As soon as I understood what I was seeing, I turned around, leaned my head against the window to block the view, and fell victim to a sudden, explosive coughing fit before I knocked. Sara, rebuttoned but red in the face, fled as soon as I walked through the door.
    I didn't wait to speak to Jack. I sat down in the chair across from him and gave him my standard lecture. I warned him that his lack of discretion could ruin everything for him in the department. The climate was bad for seducing students. He would have to break it off or hide her.
    Jack sighed, looked at me grimly, and said, "I'm in love with her, Leo."
    "You were in love with all of them, Jack," I said.
    He shook his head. "No, Sara's different. Did I ever use that word before?"
    I couldn't remember whether Jack had said he loved Tina or Delia or Jane. I thought of Lucille then and the curious distinction she had made between "strong interest" and the state of being "in love."
    "I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything," I told him.
    On the IRT I pondered my own words. They had sprung from my lips without hesitation — a pithy comeback to Jack's confession — but what had I meant by them? Had I said it because I didn't