What I Loved

raincoat and saw that the worn garment was missing a button. The sight of the loose thread dangling from her open coat sparked a feeling of sympathy for her that was immediately followed by a memory of her gray dress twisted around her waist and her hair falling across her face as I held her by the shoulders and pushed her down onto the sofa.
    As we walked, I said, "I'm glad I came. The poems are good, very good. I think we should stay in touch, particularly now that I see so much of Mark"
    She turned her head and looked up at me, her face puzzled. "You see him more than before?"
    I stopped walking. "Because of the room, you know?"
    Lucille paused on the sidewalk. Under the streetlamp I noticed the deep lines around her mouth as she gave me a puzzled look. "The room?"
    I felt a growing pressure on my lungs. "I've given him Matthew's room as a studio. He began to use it last spring. He comes every weekend."
    Lucille continued walking. "I didn't know that," she said evenly.
    I began several questions in my mind, but I noticed that Lucille had quickened her step. She lifted her hand for a taxi and turned to me. "Thank you for coming," she said, speaking the line she had missed earlier, but only her eyes showed amusement.
    "It was a pleasure," I said, and took her hand. For an instant, I contemplated kissing her cheek, but her set jaw and compressed lips stopped me, and I squeezed her hand instead.
    We were on West Broadway by then, and as I watched the cab drive north, I noticed the moon in the sky over Washington Square Park. It was still early. The crescent shape of that moon with a wisp of cloud across it replicated almost exactly the painted moon I had been looking at that afternoon in one of Goya's early witchcraft paintings. Pan, in the form of a goat, is surrounded by a circle of witches. Despite the gruesome cabal around him, the pagan god looks rather innocent with his empty eyes and goofy expression. Two of the witches offer him infants. One is a gray and emaciated child, the other plump and rosy. From the position of his hoof, it's clear that Pan wants the fat baby. As I crossed the street, I thought of Bill's witch, Violet's comments on hexed maternity, and then I wondered what she had meant to say about Lucille. I also wondered about Mark's silence. What did it mean? I imagined asking him, but the question "Why didn't you tell your mother about Matthew's room?" had an absurd ring to it. When I turned the corner onto Greene and walked down the sidewalk toward my building, I realized that my mood had suddenly dropped and a growing sadness was following me home.
    Mark's night life escalated in the following months. I heard his feet on the stairs as he leapt down them to rush out for the evening. The girls laughed and shrieked. The boys shouted and cursed in the deep voices of men. Mark's love for Harpo was supplanted by DJs and techno, and his pants grew ever wider, but his smooth young face never lost its expression of childish wonder, and he always seemed to have time for me. While we talked, he would lean against my kitchen wall and fiddle with a spatula or literally hang in my doorway with his hands on the lintel and his legs swinging. It's odd how little I've retained of what we actually said to each other. The content of Mark's conversation was usually dull and attenuated, but his delivery was superb and that's what I recall best—the earnest, plaintive tone of his voice, his bursts of laughter, and the languid movements of his long body.
    On a Saturday morning in late January, my relationship with Mark took a small tum I hadn't expected. I was sitting in the kitchen reading the Times and drinking a cup of coffee when I heard a faint whistling noise from somewhere near the back of the apartment. I froze, listened, and heard it again. Following the sound to Matthew's room, I opened the door and discovered Mark sprawled on the bed whistling through his nose while he slept He was wearing a T-shirt that had been torn in half and then reattached with what looked like several hundred safety pins. A slice of bare skin showed through the gap. His huge beltless pants had slipped down to his thighs, revealing a pair of underpants with the maker's name written across the elastic band. His pubic hair curled out from between his legs, and for the first time, I recognized that Mark was a man—at least physically a man—and for some reason, this truth appalled me.
    I had never said he could sleep in the room, and