What I Loved

It's not going to work. As soon as Erica stepped through the door, she started crying.
    We didn't fight. We talked in the intimate way of old lovers who haven't seen each other for a long time but hold no grudges. One night, we ate dinner with Bill and Violet in a restaurant and Erica laughed so hard at a Henny Youngman joke Bill told about a man hiding in a closet that she almost choked, and Violet had to beat her on the back. At least once a day Erica stood in the doorway of Matt's room for several minutes and looked in at what remained of it—the bed, his desk and chair, and the watercolor of the city Bill had given me and which I had framed. We made love twice. My physical loneliness had taken on shades of desperation, and when Erica leaned close to kiss me, I leapt at her. She trembled through my attack and had no orgasm. Her lack of pleasure soured my release, and afterward I felt empty. The night before she left, we tried again. I wanted to be careful with her, gentle. I touched her arm cautiously and then kissed it, but my hesitation seemed to irritate her. She lunged for me, grabbed my hips, and pinched my skin with her fingers. She kissed me hungrily and climbed on top of me. When she came, she made a small, sharp noise, and she sighed again and again, even after I had ejaculated. But under our lovemaking I felt a bleakness that couldn't be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed.
    In the morning, Erica reassured me that she didn't want a divorce unless I wanted one. I said I didn't. "I love your letters," she said. "They're beautiful."
    The comment annoyed me. "I think you're glad you're leaving," I said.
    Erica moved her face close to mine and narrowed her eyes. "Aren't you glad I'm leaving?"
    "I don't know," I said. "I really don't know."
    She put her hand on my face and stroked it. "We're broken, Leo. It's not our fault. When Matt died it was like our story stopped. There was so much of you in him ..."
    "You'd think we could at least have each other," I said to her.
    "I know," she said, "I know."
    After she was gone, I felt guilty because, turbulent as my feelings were, I detected in them the relief Erica had been brave enough to mention. At two o'clock in the afternoon, I drank a glass of Scotch in my chair like an old booze hound. As I told myself not to drink in the afternoon again, I felt the alcohol move into my head and then into my limbs. I leaned back into the fraying cushions of my chair and knew what had happened to me and Erica. We wanted other people. Not new people. Old ones. We wanted ourselves before Matthew died, and nothing we did for the rest of our days would ever bring those people back.
    That summer I began to work on Goya's "black paintings." Studying his monsters and ghouls and witches kept me occupied for hours at a time during the day, and his demons helped to keep mine at a distance. But when night came, I walked through other imaginary spaces, subjunctive realms in which I saw Matt talking and drawing, and Erica near me— unchanged. These waking fantasies were pure exercises in self-torture, but around that same time Matthew started to come to me in my dreams, and when he came, he was as much there as he had been in life. His body was as real, as whole, as palpable as it had always been. I held him, spoke to him, touched his hair, his hands, and I had what I couldn't have when I was awake—the unshakable, joyous certainty that Matthew was alive.
    While Goya didn't feed my gloom, his savage paintings gave new license to my thoughts—permission to open doors that in my former life I had left closed. Without Goya's ardent images, I'm not sure that Violet's piano lesson would have come surging back with such surprising force. The daydream began after I had seen Bill and Violet for dinner. Violet was wearing a pink sundress that showed her breasts. A long walk in the sun that afternoon had turned her cheeks and nose a little red, and while she talked to me about her next book, which had something to do with extreme narcissism, mass culture, pictures, instant communications, and a new illness of late capitalism, I found it hard to listen to her. My eyes kept wandering onto her flushed face and over her bare arms and onto her breasts and then to her fingers, with their pink polish. I left dinner early that evening, spent some time with the objects in my