What I Loved

drawer, and then began leafing through a large book of Goya's drawings, starting with the ones for the Tauromaquia. While I admit that the artist's sketches of a bullfight have little in common with Violet's piano lesson and her encounter with Monsieur Renasse, the loose energy of his lines and his fierce rendering affected me like an aphrodisiac. I kept turning the pages, eager for more pictures of brutes and monsters. I knew every one of them by heart, but that night their carnal fury scorched my mind like a fire, and when I looked again at the drawing of a young, naked woman riding a goat on a witches' Sabbath, I felt that she was all speed and hunger, that her crazed ride, born of Goya's sure, swift hand, was ink bruising paper. His beast runs, but his rider is out of control. Her head has fallen back Her hair streams out behind her and her legs may not cling much longer to the animal's body. I touched the woman's shaded thigh and pale knee, and the gesture sent me to Paris.
    I changed the fantasy as it suited me. There were nights when I was content to watch the lesson through a window across the street and other nights when I became Monsieur Renasse. There were nights when I was Jules peeking through a keyhole or floating magically above the scene, but Violet was always on the bench beside one of us, and one of us would always reach out and grab her finger in an abrupt, violent motion and whisper "Jules" into her ear in a hoarse, insistent voice, and at the sound of the name, Violet's body would always tighten with desire and her head would fall back, and one of us or the other would have her right there on the piano bench, would pull up her pink dress from behind and lower the small underpants of varying colors and descriptions and enter her as she made loud noises of pleasure, or one of' us would drag her under a potted palm and part her legs on the floor and make raucous love to her while she screamed her way to orgasm. I released untold amounts of semen into that fantasy and inevitably felt let down afterward. My pornography was no-more idiotic than most, and I knew I wasn't the only man who indulged himself in harmless mental romps with the wife of a friend, but the secret pained me nevertheless. I would often think of Erica afterward and then of Bill. Sometimes I tried to supplant Violet with another figure, a nameless stand-in who could take her place, but it never worked. It had to be Violet and it had to be that story, not of two people but of three.
    Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large—about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He took a number between zero and nine and played with it in a single piece. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion—to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, to the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised—one, won; two, too, and Tuesday, four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometrical figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations