What I Loved

harder for me to check mine. I stared hard at Dan to keep control of myself. Mark must have felt the heaving in my chest, and when he withdrew from the hug, he must have seen the spasm I felt moving across my face, but he continued to look at me happily, and for reasons difficult to articulate, I felt hugely relieved that I hadn't mentioned Matthew in my note.
    Mark learned chess fast. He was a nimble and intelligent player, and his ability excited me. I told him the truth: not only did he understand the moves, but he had the unruffled demeanor necessary to play well, that calculated indifference I had never mastered but which could unnerve even a superior opponent. As my enthusiasm waxed, however, Mark's waned. I told him he should join the chess team at school, and he said that he would look into it, but I don't believe he ever did. I sensed that he was humoring me rather than pleasing himself, and I tactfully withdrew. If he wants to play, I said to Bill, he can ask. He never asked.
    I sank into another life. My writing that year was all for Erica. I wrote no articles, no essays, had no thoughts for another book, but I told Erica everything in long letters that I sent off weekly. I wrote that my teaching had become more passionate and that I spent more time with my students. I wrote that I allowed some of them to ramble on about their private lives during office hours and that I didn't always hear what they were saying, but I recognized their need to say whatever it was and discovered that my distant but benevolent presence was met with gratitude. I wrote about my dinners with Bill and Violet and Mark. I recorded for her the titles of the books I found for Mark on silent comedy and the movie stills from A Night at the Opera and Horse Feathers I bought for him at a shop on Eighth Street, and I described his happy face when he received my gifts. I also told her that since Matt had died, O's Journey had taken on an afterlife that inhabited my hours alone. Sometimes when I sat in my chair in the evenings, I would see parts of the narrative in my mind—the fat figure of B with wings sprouting from her back as she straddled O, her heavy arms outstretched in orgasm and her face a parodie imitation of Bernini's Saint Theresa. I saw the two M's, O's little brothers, clinging to each other behind a door while a burglar robs the house, stealing one of O's paintings—a portrait of the two young M's. But most often, I saw O's last canvas, the one he leaves behind after he disappears. That canvas has no image, only the letter B—the mark of O's creator and the fat woman who embodied him in the work.
    I didn't tell Erica that there were evenings when I returned home after dinner and I smelled Violet on my shirt—her perfume and soap and something else, her skin maybe, an odor that deepened the others and made the floral scent corporeal, human. I didn't tell Erica that I liked to breathe in that faint smell, and I didn't tell her that I tried to resist it at the same time. On some nights, I would remove the shirt and throw it into the hamper.
    In March, Bill and Violet asked me if I would stay with Mark for a long weekend. They were headed for Los Angeles, where a gallery was showing O's Journey. Lucille was also traveling and thought it best not to burden Philip with two children. I moved upstairs with Mark. We were easy together, and Mark was helpful. He did dishes, carried out the garbage, and tidied up after himself. On Saturday night, he put on a tape and lip- synched a pop song for me. He leapt around the living room with an imaginary guitar. Gyrating madly, he affected a tortured expression and finally collapsed to the floor as he imitated the agonies of a rock 'n' roll star whose name I can't remember anymore.
    As we talked, however, I noticed that Mark had absorbed little of the subjects generally taught in school—geography, politics, history—and that his ignorance had a willed quality to it. Matthew had served as a scale upon which to weigh differences among boys of his age, but then who was to say that Matt was a barometer of normality? Before he died, his brain had been loaded with information, both trivial and important, from baseball statistics to the battles of the American Civil War. He knew the names of all sixty-four flavors of his favorite brand of ice cream and could identify dozens of contemporary painters, many of whom I didn't recognize. Except for his love of Harpo, Mark's interests were more