What I Loved

sleeping in Matt's bed and returned to ours, but I rarely joined her, choosing instead to sleep in my chair. One night in February, I woke up to find Erica covering me with a blanket. Rather than opening my eyes, I pretended that I was still asleep. When she put her lips to my head, I imagined myself pulling her toward me and kissing her neck and shoulders, but I didn't do it. At the time, I was like a man encased in a heavy suit of armor, and inside that corporeal fortress I lived with a single-minded wish: I will not be comforted. As perverse as it was, this desire felt like a lifeline, the only shred of truth left to me. I feel quite sure that Erica knew what I felt, and in March she announced a change.
    "I've decided to accept the position at Berkeley, Leo. They still want me."
    We were eating Chinese food out of boxes. I looked up from the chicken and broccoli to study her face. "Is this your way of saying that you want a divorce?" The word "divorce" had a curious ring to it. I realized that it had never occurred to me.
    Erica shook her head and looked down at the table. "No, I don't want a divorce. I don't know if I'll stay there. All I know is that I can't live anymore in the place where Matt was, and I can't be here with you anymore, because ..." She paused. "You've gone dead, too, Leo. I didn't help. I know that. I was so crazy for a long time and I was mean."
    "No," I said. "You weren't mean." I couldn't bear to look at her, so I turned my head and spoke to the wall. "Are you sure that you want to go away? Moving is hard on people, too."
    "I know," she said.
    We were silent for a while and then she continued: "I remember what you said about your father—the way he was after he found out about his family. You said, 'He went still.' "
    I didn't move. I kept my eyes on the wall. "He had a stroke."
    "Before the stroke. You said it happened before the stroke."
    I saw my father in his chair. His back was to me as he sat in front of the fireplace. I nodded before I looked at Erica. When our eyes met, I saw that she was half-smiling and half-crying. "I'm not saying it's over between us, Leo. I want to come visit you if you'll let me. I'd like to write to you and tell you what I'm doing."
    "Yes." I began to nod over and over, like one of those dolls whose heads are on a spring. I felt my two-day beard with both my hands and rubbed my face as I continued to nod.
    "Also," she said, "we have to go through Matthew's things. I thought that you could sort his drawings. We can frame some and put the others in portfolios. I'll take care of his clothes and the toys. Some of them can go to Mark..."
    That job took over our evenings, and I discovered that I was able to do it. I bought folders and storage boxes and began to organize hundreds of drawings, school art projects, notebooks, and letters that had belonged to Matt. Erica folded his T-shirts and pants and shorts very carefully. She saved his ART NOW shirt and a pair of camouflage pants that he had loved. She put the rest into boxes for Mark or for Goodwill. She gathered up his toys and separated the good ones from the junk. While Erica sat on the floor of Matt's room with cardboard boxes around her, I filed drawings at his desk. We worked slowly. Erica lingered over Matthew's clothes, his shirts and underpants and socks. How strange they were—at once terrible and banal. One evening, I started tracing the lines of his drawings with my finger—his people and buildings and animals. I found the motion of his living hand that way, and once I had started it, I couldn't stop. On an evening in April, Erica came and stood behind me. She watched my hand moving over the page, and then she reached out and put her finger on Dave and made the rounds of the old man's body. She cried then, and I understood how much I had hated her tears, because for some reason I didn't hate them then.
    Erica's imminent departure changed us. The knowledge that we would soon be separated made us both more indulgent, relieving us of a burden I still can't name. I didn't want her to go away, and yet the fact that she was going away loosened a bolt in the machinery of our marriage. It had become a machine by then, a churning repetitious engine of mourning.
    That spring I was teaching a seminar on still life to twelve graduate students, and in April I taught one of my last classes. When I walked in that day, one of the students, Edward Paperno, was opening the windows in the classroom to let the warm air