What I Loved

yellow wall.
    When the Weeks Gallery showed Bill's fairy-tale boxes in September, the crash on Wall Street, less than a month away and only a few blocks south, seemed as unlikely as the end of the world. Two hundred or more people pushed their way into the gallery for the opening, and as I looked at them they seemed to merge into one large, giddy mass — a many-headed, many-limbed being driven by a will of its own. I was knocked about that night, jostled, spilled on, elbowed, and pushed into corners. Through the din of the party, I heard prices quoted — not only for Bill's boxes but for the works of other artists that had "gone through the roof" — an expression that made me think of dollars floating over the skyline. I knew for a fact that the woman who claimed to know what a fairy-tale box was selling for had raised its price by several thousand dollars. The cost was no secret; Bernie had a list of prices in his office for anybody who was interested. The woman's inflation probably wasn't intentional. Her sentence began with "I heard ..." Rumor was as good as the truth anyway. As with the stock market, buzz generated reality. And yet few people in the gallery would have connected the paintings, sculptures, installations, and conceptual somethings that were flourishing in lower Manhattan to junk bonds, swollen numbers, and clanging bells on Wall Street.
    The last to arrive were the first to go. Little galleries in the East Village vanished and were instantly replaced by boutiques that sold leather clothing and spiked belts. SoHo began to wilt. The established galleries withstood the shock, but they cut back on expenses. Bernie stayed open, but he had to drop the stipends he had been handing out to younger artists, and he quietly sold his private collection of master drawings from the back room. When an English collector cleaned house by dumping the works of several "hot eighties artists," their reputations cooled instantly, and within months their names receded into the nostalgic past and were often prefaced by the word "remember." Others were forgotten. The very famous survived, but sometimes without a house in Quogue or Bridgehampton.
    Bill's work dropped in value, but his collectors didn't abandon him. Most of the pieces were in Europe anyway, and there he had gained a singular status because his work attracted young people not normally interested in art. In France, his gallery did a brisk business in posters of the fairy-tale boxes, and a book of reproductions was in the works. During their flush period, Violet had bought some fashionable clothes and pieces of furniture for their loft, but Bill's nonconsumerism had never wavered. "He doesn't want anything," Violet said to me. "I bought a side table for the living room, and it took him a week to notice it. He would put down a book or leave a glass on it, but it was days before he suddenly said, 'Is this new?' " Bill weathered the slump because he had money in the bank, and he had money in the bank because he lived in fear of his past — the grim poverty that had meant plastering and wall painting. He had been married to Lucille then, and I noticed that as time went on Bill talked about that period in his life with increasing gloom, as if in hindsight it had grown darker and more painful than when he was actually living it. Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
    That fall I finished my book. Six hundred pages in manuscript, it was called A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting. When I'd started it, I had hoped that an epistemological rigor would carry me through, that the book would be a synthetic argument about artistic vision and its philosophical and ideological underpinnings, but as I worked, the thing grew longer, looser, more speculative, and, I believe, more honest. Ambiguities intruded that fit no schema, and I let them stand as questions. Erica, my first reader and editor, influenced both the prose and some of my clarifications, which I acknowleged, but I dedicated the book to Bill. It wasn't only an act of