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What I Loved

What I Loved

Titel: What I Loved Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Siri Hustvedt
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images and stuck to the coherent story on the surface. It was both more comfortable and more rational. After all, I had become a creature of mourning. Matthew's absence had made me unusually alert to nuances in Mark's character that might turn out to be of little importance. I had lost faith in predictable stories. My son was dead, and my wife lived in self-imposed exile. But I told myself that just because my own life had been rocked by accident didn't mean that other people didn't have lives that plodded along a prescribed course, becoming over the years rather like what they had expected all along.
    That summer Bill came back to me. He called almost every day, and I followed the progress of the doors as they were made on the Bowery. Although Bill put in long hours at the studio, he had more time for me, and I sensed that his desire to see me was partly the result of a new optimism he felt about Mark. Worry always took the form of retreat in Bill, and over the years I had come to recognize the outward signs of his withdrawal. His expansive gestures vanished. His eyes focused on an object across the room but failed to register the thing he was seeing. He chainsmoked cigarettes and kept a bottle of Scotch under his desk. I was sensitive to Bill's internal weather, to the intense pressure that built up inside him and then stormed quietly. Those tempests usually began and ended with Mark, but while they were raging, Bill found it hard to talk to me or anyone else. Violet may have been an exception. I don't know. I felt that Bill's inner tumult wasn't fury against Mark for his lying and irresponsibility but rather a seething anger and doubt he turned on himself. At the same time, he was eager to believe that the winds were changing, and he seized on every nuance in his son's behavior as a sign of better days to come. "He's stuck with the job," Bill said to me, "and he really enjoys it. He's stopped seeing Giles and that club bunch and is hanging out with kids his own age. It's a big relief to me, Leo. I knew that he was going to find some direction in his life." Because Violet was out doing research for her book, I saw her much less than either Bill or Mark, and not seeing her helped me to repress her imaginary twin—the woman I took to bed in my mind. Erica talked to Violet regularly, however, and she wrote that Violet was better, less anxious, and that she, too, felt a new determination in Mark that was connected to his job for Freund. "She told me that Mark is genuinely moved by the fact that the project is about children. She thinks it struck a chord with him."
    Mr Bob was still in residence on the Bowery, and every time I went to visit Bill, he regarded me through his chained door with suspicion, and every time I left, he blessed me. I knew that Mr. Bob made full-bodied appearances for Bill and Violet, but I never saw more than a fraction of his brooding face. Although Bill didn't talk about it, I understood that the old man had become his dependent. Bill left groceries at the bottom of the stairs for Mr. Bob, and once I saw a note on Bill's desk written in a tiny neat hand: " Crunchy not smooth peanut butter!" But as far as I could tell, Bill had simply accepted his downstairs neighbor as an obligatory presence in his life. He shook his head and smiled when I mentioned the old squatter, but he never complained about what I suspected were Mr. Bob's growing demands.
    In the middle of August, Bill and Violet asked if I would let Mark stay with me for two weeks while they vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. Mark couldn't abandon his job, and they felt uncomfortable leaving him in the apartment alone. I agreed to take him in and gave Mark another key. "This," I said to him, "is a sign of trust between us, and I'd like you to hold on to it, even after these two weeks are over." He held out his hand and I lowered the key into his palm. "You understand me, don't you, Mark?"
    He looked at me steadily and nodded. "I do, Uncle Leo." His bottom lip trembled with emotion, and we embarked on our two weeks together.
    Mark spoke warmly about his work for Freund, about the large colored flags he had helped mount, about the other young men and women who worked alongside him—Rebecca and Laval and Shaneil and Jesus. Mark lifted and climbed and hammered and sawed, and by the time he quit for the day, he said, his arms ached and his legs felt wobbly. When he returned home at around five or six, he often needed a nap to recover. Around

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