Only Lucille's weariness wasn't like Erica's. It had an existential cast— as though she suffered from more than being up at night. She didn't come to see me often, perhaps once every two months, and she always called days ahead of time to arrange the meeting. At the appointed time, I would open the door to find Lucille standing in the hallway with a sheaf of poems in her hand. She always looked pale and drawn and stiff. Her hair hung around her face uncombed, usually dirty. Mostly she wore jeans and old-fashioned blouses in dull colors, and yet her disheveled appearance didn't disguise her prettiness, and I admired her lack of vanity. I was always glad to see her, but Lucille's visits augmented Erica's feeling that Lucille had forgotten her. Lucille always greeted Erica politely. She would endure Erica's questions about Mark, answer them in curt, precise sentences, and then she would turn to me. Her economical but resonant poems were written in a voice of complete detachment. Inevitably they contained autobiographical references. In one poem a man and a woman lie beside each other in bed, unable to sleep, but neither one says a word to the other. They don't speak, out of deference to the other, but in the end, the woman feels the man's consideration as a presumption that he knows what she is thinking. Her annoyance with him keeps her awake long after he has gone to sleep. Lucille called the poem "Aware and Awake." A baby turned up in some works, a comic character referred to as "It." "It" wailed and clung and kicked and spat up, rather like a windup toy whose mechanism had gone haywire and couldn't be controlled. Lucille never acknowledged in any way that the poems were personal. She treated them as objects that might be remanipulated with my help. Her coolness fascinated me. Every once in a while she would smile to herself as she read a line, and I couldn't penetrate the source of her humor. While I sat next to her, I had the sense that she was always somewhere ahead of me, and that I was running after her. I would look down at the blond hairs on her slender arm and ask myself what it was about her I couldn't grasp.
One evening before she left: to go upstairs, I watched as she began to gather up her papers. I had learned to turn away, because I knew that if I looked at her, she would feel uncomfortable and might drop her pencil or eraser. When I shook her hand good-bye, she thanked me and opened the door. It was when she began to walk through it that I had an uncanny sensation of resemblance, followed by a sudden certainty that I was right. In that moment, Lucille reminded me of Sy Wechsler. The link between them was neither physical nor spiritual. Their personalities had little in common except what they both lacked—a quality of ordinary connectedness to other human beings. Lucille didn't elude only Bill, she eluded everyone who knew her. The old adage "He married his mother" had to be revised. Bill had married his father. Hadn't he said, "I chased her for years"? As I listened to the sound of her feet on the stairs, I wondered if he wasn't chasing her still.
In the spring before Matt turned two, I overheard a fight between Bill and Lucille. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was sitting in my chair by the window. I had a book in my hand, but I had stopped reading it because I was thinking about Matt. Erica had taken him out to buy new sneakers, and just before the two of them had left, he had spoken his first words. Matt had pointed at his mother, at himself, and at the shoes he was wearing. I had said I hoped his new shoes would be beautiful, and then Matthew had eked out two garbled sounds—"ooo neets," which Erica and I had joyfully translated as "new sneaks." The child was learning how to talk. I had opened the window to let in the warm breeze. The windows above must have been opened, too, because Bill's booming voice interrupted my reverie about Matt's verbal breakthrough.
"How could you say that?" Bill screamed.
"You weren't supposed to hear it. She shouldn't have told you!" Lucille's voice rose with each word. Her anger surprised me. She was always so controlled.
Bill growled back. "I don't believe that. She tells everybody everything. You told her because you knew she would tell me, and then you could refuse to take responsibility for your own words. Do you deny you said it? No! So—did you mean it?"
There was silence.
"What the hell am I doing here?" Bill yelled. "Tell me that!" I heard a loud crash. Bill must have hit or kicked something.
"You broke it!" I heard rage in Lucille's voice, trembling, hysterical rage, and it cut through me. Mark started crying. "Shut up!" she shrieked. "Shut up! Shut up!"
I went to close the window. The last thing I heard was Bill saying, "Mark, Mark. Come here."
The following day, Bill called me from his studio and told me he had moved out of Greene Street and was living on the Bowery again. His voice sounded dull with misery. "Do you want me to come over?" I asked. He didn't answer me for a few seconds. Then he said, "Yeah, I think I do."
Bill didn't mention the mysterious woman who had played a pivotal role in the argument I had overheard the day before, and I couldn't ask him about her without telling him that I had eavesdropped. I let him talk, even though most of what he said explained little. He told me that although Lucille had said over and over again how much she looked forward to being a mother before Mark was born, after the birth she had seemed disappointed. "She's been really low and irritable. Everything about me seems to annoy her—I swallow too loudly when I eat. I brush my teeth too vigorously. I pace when I'm thinking and it drives her nuts. My socks smell. I touch her too much. I work too hard. I'm gone too long. She likes me to take care of Mark, but she doesn't like the way I do it. I shouldn't sing Lou Reed songs to him. They're inappropriate. The games I play are too rowdy. I throw him off his schedule."
Lucille's complaints were banal—the familiar stuff of joyless intimacy. I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification. From where I sat opposite Bill, he looked to me like the Byronic ideal of male beauty. A black curl had fallen onto his forehead as he inhaled a cigarette and squinted in thought. Behind him were the seven unfinished paintings of his father he had decided to show. For two years he had been working on portraits of Sy Wechsler. There must have been fifty canvases of the man in various positions, but Bill had chosen to exhibit only seven—all of them of his father viewed from the back. He called the series "Missing Men." The afternoon light sank in the windows, the big room grew darker, and we didn't speak for minutes on end. For the first time, I pitied Bill, and a pain settled in my chest at the thought of his suffering. Around five o'clock I told him that I had promised Erica I would be home in ten minutes.
"You know, Leo," he said, "for years I've been thinking that Lucille was somebody else. I deceived myself. That's not her fault. It's mine. And now I have a son."
Instead of responding directly to this, I said, "It might not be much, but I'm here for you if you need me." As I said it, I remembered Violet running up the stairs toward me and what she had said to me about my being "there" for Bill. For a few moments, I wondered if she had known something I didn't about Bill and Lucille, and then I forgot about her and her comment for almost a year.
Lucille stayed on in the Greene Street loft, and Bill lived on the Bowery. Mark shuttled back and forth between his parents—-half the week with Lucille, the other half with Bill. They talked on the phone every day, and neither Bill nor Lucille ever mentioned divorce. Trucks and fire engines and baby wipes appeared in the Bowery loft, and sometime in July, Bill made his son a beautiful bed that looked like a boat. He constructed a stand that allowed it to rock back and forth like an oversized cradle, and he painted it a deep marine blue. Bill read to his son and fed him and encouraged him to at least try the plastic potty in the little room with the toilet. He worried about his appetite and fretted about him falling down the stairs, and he picked up most of his toys, even though he had no gift for housekeeping. The loft was filthier than it had ever been because Bill never bothered to clean it. The sink turned colors I had never seen before on porcelain—a palette that ranged from pale gray to orange to a deep, mucky brown. I didn't mention the dirt. The truth was that father and son seemed comfortable enough in the big crooked room. They didn't mind living among the towers of soiled laundry that rose up from a dusty, ash-covered floor.