What I Loved

me."
    "How can you say that, Bill?"
    "She told me."
    "People say all kinds of things when they're angry. If she told you that, I'm sure it was just to hurt you. It's ridiculous."
    "She never told me directly. She told somebody else who told me."
    I remembered Lucille's and Bill's voices through the window on that spring afternoon long ago. "Nevertheless," I went on, "it can't have been true. I mean, why would she have married you? It certainly wasn't for your money. You had nothing then."
    "Lucille isn't a liar. I can say that for her. She told a mutual friend — a person who's known for calling people with vicious gossip and then commiserating with them. The irony was that this time the gossip had originated with my own wife."
    "Why didn't she talk to you herself?"
    "She couldn't, I suppose." Bill paused. "It wasn't until I was living with Violet that I saw how bizarre my life had been with Lucille. Violet's so present, so vital. She grabs me all the time and tells me she loves me. Lucille never said that." Bill stopped talking. "Not once." He looked up from the screwdriver. "For years, day in and day out, I lived with a fictional character, a person I'd invented."
    "That doesn't explain why she married you."
    "I pressed her, Leo. She was weak."
    "No, Bill. People are responsible for what they do. She chose to marry you."
    Bill returned his eyes to the screwdriver. "She's pregnant," he said. "She told me it was an accident, but he's going to marry her. She sounded happy about it. She's moving to Princeton."
    "Does she want Mark to move there with her?"
    "I'm not sure. I've learned that if I insist on having him, she insists that she wants him. When I don't, she's less interested. I think she's willing to let Mark make up his mind. Violet's worried that Lucille will take Mark away from us, that something will happen. She's ... she's almost superstitious when it comes to Lucille.''
    "Superstitious?"
    "Yes, I think that's the right word. She seems to think that Lucille has some vague power over us — not just when it comes to Mark, but in other ways .. "
    I didn't pursue this turn in the conversation. I told myself that Lucille deserved happiness, a new marriage, another child. She would finally escape that gloomy apartment on East Third Street. And yet beneath my good wishes lay a turbulent awareness that Lucille was someone I didn't understand.
    The very last night we stayed in the house in Vermont, I woke up and saw Erica sitting on the edge of the bed. I assumed she was going to the bathroom and turned over to go back to sleep, but as I lay in bed only half awake, I heard her footsteps in the hallway. She had passed the bathroom. I followed her into the hall and saw her standing outside Matt and Mark's bedroom door. Her eyes were open as she touched the doorknob lightly with her fingers. She didn't turn it. She withdrew her hands and then waved her fingers over it the way a magician might before performing a trick. When I approached her, she looked at me. The boys used a night-light that shone through the crack at the bottom of the door, and her face was barely lit from below. I knew then that she wasn't awake and, remembering the old advice about not waking sleepwalkers, I gently took her arm to lead her back to bed. But at the touch of my hand, she cried out in a loud emphatic voice, "Mutti!" The exclamation startled me. I dropped her arm, and she turned back to the doorknob, touching it once with her index finger and then withdrawing it instantly as if the metal were hot. I began to whisper to her. "It's me, Erica. It's Leo. I'm going to take you back to bed." She looked straight at me again and said, "Oh, it's you, Leo. Where were you?" With one arm around her shoulder, I walked her down the hallway and gently pressed her onto the bed. For at least an hour, I stayed awake with my hand on her back, watching her for signs of movement, but Erica didn't stir again.
    I had called my mother "Mutti," too, and the word opened up a chasm inside me. I thought of my mother, not when she was old but when she was young, and for a short while as I lay in bed I recovered the smell of her as she bent over me — powder and a little perfume — and I felt her breath on my cheek and her fingers in my hair as she stroked my head. Du musst schlafen, Liebling. Du musst schlafen. There was no window in my room in London. I picked at the peeling wallpaper of looping ivy near my bed until I had exposed a long narrow stretch of bare