What I Loved

dungeon after years in murk and shadow, I was a little shocked by their vividness. Violet kissed my cheeks and touched my arms and my hands and my shoulders. Her laugh had a raucous timbre, and sometimes she made little sounds of pleasure while she ate. But I also detected lapses in her that I hadn't seen before—five or six seconds here and there when she moved inward to reflect sadly on someone or something. If she was stirring a sauce, her hand would stop, a wrinkle would form between her brows, and she would look vacantly at the stove until she caught herself and began stirring again. Bill's voice seemed both hoarser and more musical than I remembered. Age and cigarettes perhaps, but I listened to it rise and fall and to its frequent pauses with new attentiveness. I felt an added gravity in him, the almost palpable heft of a life that had grown more dense. Violet and Bill seemed a little different, as if their life together had shifted from a major to a minor key. It could have been that Matt's death had changed them, too. It could have been that because Matt had died, I saw in them what I had never seen before, or it could have been that without Matt, my vision of things would never be the same.
    The only person who appeared unchanged was Mark. He had never taken up much room in my life, except as Matt's amiable sidekick, and when Matt had died, Mark had vanished for me as well. But I began to look at him more closely during those meals we shared upstairs. He had grown a little taller, but not much. He had just turned thirteen, but he still had a soft, round, childish face, which I found remarkably sweet. Mark was a very good-looking boy, but his sweetness was separate from his beauty. It came from his facial expressions, which conveyed a perpetual, untouchable innocence, not unlike his hero of the moment—Harpo Marx. At the dinner table, Mark chuckled and clowned and made Harpo's "googly face." He read us passages from Harpo Speaks and sang "Hail Fredonia," from Duck Soup. But he also talked about his pity for New York's homeless people, the stupidities of racism, and the cruelty of chicken farmers. He never went deeply into any of these subjects, but whenever he spoke of injustice, his voice, still high and boyish, touched me with its inflections of sympathy. Airy, buoyant, and kind, Mark made me feel lighter. I began to look forward to seeing him, and when he left on the weekends to visit his mother, stepfather, and little brother, Oliver, in Cranbury, New Jersey, I discovered that I missed him.
    Over winter break, a few days before they flew to Minnesota for Christmas with the Bloms, Bill and Violet threw a belated birthday party for Mark. He had turned thirteen months earlier, but for Bill the event served as a kind of secular bar mitzvah, a way to acknowledge tradition without ritual. Bill and Violet sent an invitation to Erica, but she chose not to come. In a letter, she informed me that she had decided to remain in Berkeley over the vacation. For weeks I stewed over a gift for Mark. In the end I settled on a chess set, a beautiful board with carved pieces that reminded me of my father, who had taught me the game. I knew that Mark had never learned to play, and I wanted to compose the note that accompanied the present very carefully. In the first draft, I mentioned Matthew. In the second, I didn't. I wrote a third, short and to the point: "Happy late thirteenth birthday. This gift includes lessons from the giver. Love, Uncle Leo."
    I had planned to do well at Mark's party. I had wanted to do well, but I found I couldn't. I took several trips to the bathroom, not to relieve myself but to grab the sink and hyperventilate for a couple of minutes before returning to the crowd. There must have been sixty people at the party, but I knew only a few of them. Violet rushed from one person to another and then back to the kitchen, where she gave instructions to the three waiters. Bill wandered around with a glass of wine, which he refilled often, his eyes a little red and his voice a little strained. I said hello to Al and Regina, and I greeted Mark, who looked remarkably comfortable in his blue blazer, red tie, and gray flannel pants. He grinned at me and gave me a warm hug just before he shook the hand of Lise Bochart, a sculptor in her early sixties. "I think your piece at the Whitney is really cool," Mark told her. Lise cocked her head to one side and her face wrinkled into a big smile. Then she leaned over