What I Loved

because I had begun to understand that in that circle, looking unwell was considered attractive.
    I saw very little of Bill and Violet that spring. I still shared the occasional dinner with them upstairs, and Bill telephoned me from time to time, but the life they were living took them away from me. They went to Paris for a week in March for a show of the number pieces and from there they traveled to Barcelona, where Bill lectured to students at an art school. Even when they were at home, they often left for the evening to attend dinners and openings. Bill hired two more assistants, a whistling carpenter named Damion Dapino to help build the doors and a gloomy young woman named Mercy Banks to answer his mail. Bill regularly turned down invitations to teach, discuss, lecture, or sit on panels all over the world, and he needed Mercy to pen his "no thank yous."
    One afternoon while I was waiting in line at the Grand Union, I paged through a copy of New York magazine and found a small picture of Bill and Violet at an art opening. Bill had his arm around his wife and was looking down at her as Violet smiled into the camera. The photograph was evidence of Bill's changing status, a glimmer of fame even in his critical hometown. It had been under way for a long time—that slide into the third person that had turned his proper name into a salable commodity. I bought the magazine. At home, I cut out the picture and put it in my drawer. I wanted the picture there, because the photo's small dimensions imitated the proportions of distance—two figures standing very far away from me. I had never put anything to remind me of Bill and Violet in the drawer before that, and I understood why. It was a place to record what I missed.
    Despite its morbid qualities, I didn't use my drawer for grief or self-pity. I had begun to think of it as a ghostly anatomy in which each object articulated one piece of a larger body that was still unfinished. Each thing was a bone that signified absence, and I took pleasure in arranging these fragments according to different principles. Chronology provided one logic, but even this could change, depending on how I read each object. Were Erica's socks the sign of her leaving for California or were they really a token of the day Matt died and our marriage began to fail? For days I worked on possible time tables and then abandoned them for more secret, associative systems, playing with every possible connection. I put Erica's lipstick beside Matt's baseball card one day and moved it near the doughnut box on another. The link between the latter two objects was delightfully obscure but plain once I noticed it. The lipstick conjured Erica's colored mouth, the doughnut box Mark's hungry one. The connection was oral. I grouped the photograph of my twin cousins, Anna and Ruth, with the wedding picture of their parents for a while, but then I shifted it to sit beside Matt's play program on one side and the photo of Bill and Violet on another. Their meanings depended on their placement, what I thought of as a mobile syntax. I played this game only at night before I went to bed. After a couple of hours, the intense mental effort required to justify moving objects from one position to another made me tired. My drawer proved to be an effective sedative.
    The first Friday in May, I was awoken from a deep sleep by noises in the stairwell outside my apartment. I turned on the light and saw that the clock read four-fifteen. I stood up and walked into the living room, and as I neared the door I heard someone laugh from the landing and then the distinct sound of a key turning in my lock.
    "Who's there?" I said in a loud voice.
    Someone screeched. I opened the door and saw Mark dart away from the threshold. I stepped into the hallway. The light on the landing must have burned out, because it was dark, and the only illumination came from the floor above. I noticed that Mark had two companions with him. "What's going on, Mark?" I said, squinting at him. He had moved toward the wall and I couldn't see his face clearly.
    "Hi," he said.
    "It's four o'clock in the morning," I said. "What are you doing here?"
    One of the others stepped forward—a ghostly figure of uncertain age. In the dim light his complexion looked very pale, but I couldn't tell if it was caused by ill health or an application of theater makeup. The man's step was tremulous, and when I looked down at his feet, I saw that he was wearing very high platform shoes.