What I Loved

worked together to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection—and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
    The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself—that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page.
    In several pieces Bill alluded to the often tedious business of acquiring the signs we need for comprehension—a fragment of Mark's math homework, a chewed pencil eraser, and my favorite in cube nine: the figure of a boy fast asleep at a desk, his cheek only partly covering a page of algebra. It turned out that these pictures of boredom were more personal than I thought. Bill confided to me that Mark had been doing so badly in school that the headmaster had gently suggested to Bill that he consider looking elsewhere. It wasn't an expulsion, the man had emphasized, merely a bad match between student and school. Mark's high I.Q. didn't compensate for his lack of concentration and discipline. Perhaps a less rigorous curriculum would suit him better. Bill had been on the telephone with Lucille for hours about a new school, and in the end Lucille had found a place that would accept Mark, a "progressive" institution near Princeton. The school took him with a single condition: they wanted him to repeat the eighth grade. The fall after he turned fourteen, Mark moved to Cranbury with his mother and spent his weekends in New York.
    That year he grew six inches. The little boy who had played chess with me was replaced by a lanky teenager, but his temperament stayed the same. I've never seen a boy more free of adolescent heaviness than Mark His body was as light as his spirit, his step weightless, his gestures graceful. But Bill never stopped worrying about his son's dilatory attitude in school. His school reports were erratic—A3s turned to D's. His teachers used adjectives like "irresponsible" and "underachieving." I eased Bill's mind with platitudes. He's a little immature, I would say, but time will change that. I listed great men who had been lousy students and star students who'd turned into mediocrities. My pep talks usually worked. "He'll turn it around," Bill would say. "Just wait. He'll find his way, even in school."
    Mark began to visit me on the weekends, usually on Sunday afternoon, before he returned to his mother's house. I looked forward to the sound of his feet on the stairs, to his knock, and to his open, untroubled face when I let him into the apartment. Often he would bring a piece of artwork to show me. He had started making small collages from magazines, some of which were interesting. One afternoon in the spring, he appeared at my door with a large shopping bag. After I let him in, I noticed that he had grown since I'd last seen him. "I can look you straight in the eyes now. I think you're going to be even taller than your father."
    Mark had been smiling at me, but as I spoke, he looked grumpy. "I don't want to grow anymore," he said. "I'm tall enough."
    "What are you, five-ten now? That's not too tall for a man."
    "I'm not a man," he said peevishly.
    I must have looked surprised, because Mark shrugged and said, "Never mind. I don't really care." Lifting the bag toward