"He made this picture for you," Bill said. "It's for you." He picked up the watercolor and put it on my lap. I held it very carefully and studied the street with its people. A plastic bag and a newspaper were flying in the wind near the pavement and then, as I looked up, I noticed a tiny figure on the roof of Dave's building—the outline of a boy.
Bill pointed at the child. "There's no face on him. Matt told me he wanted it like that..."
I brought the paper closer to my eyes. "And his feet aren't on the ground," I said slowly. The featureless child had something in his hand—a knife with its many blades opened like the points on a star. "It's the Ghosty Boy," I said, "with Matt's lost knife."
"It's for you," Bill repeated. At the time, I accepted this explanation, but now I wonder if Bill didn't invent the story of the gift. He laid a hand on my shoulder. I had been afraid of this. I didn't want him to touch me and remained rigid. But when I turned to the man beside me, I saw that he was crying. Tears ran down his cheeks, and then he sobbed loudly.
After that, Bill came every day to sit with me by the window. He came home from his studio earlier than usual, always at the same time: five o'clock. Often Bill would put his hand on the arm of my chair and leave it there until he left, about an hour later. He told me stories from his childhood with Dan and stories from when he was a young artist roaming Italy. He described his first house-painting job in New York—in a brothel where most of the customers were Hasidic Jews. He read to me from Artforum. He talked to me about Philip Guston's conversion, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Paul Celan's poems. I rarely interrupted him, and he demanded no response. He didn't avoid Matthew as a subject Sometimes he reported on conversations they had had at the studio. "He wanted to know about line, Leo. I mean metaphysically, about the edges of things as you look at them, if blocks of color have lines, if painting is superior to drawing. He told me that he had dreamed several times that he was walking into the sun and that he couldn't see. The light blinded him."
Bill would always pause after he mentioned Matt. When Erica felt strong enough to be with us, she would lie on the sofa several feet away. I know she listened, because sometimes she would lift her head and say, "Go on, Bill." He would always continue his monologue then. I heard everything he said, but his words sounded muffled, as if he were speaking through a handkerchief. Before he left, he would move his hand off the armchair, squeeze my arm firmly, and say, "I'm here, Leo. We're here." Bill came every day he was in New York for a year. When he was traveling, he called me around the same time. Without Bill, I think I would have dried up completely and blown away.
Grace stayed with us through the first week of September. Matt's death had made her quiet, but whenever she mentioned him, she called him "my little boy." Her grief seemed to lodge itself in her chest and the way she breathed. Her full breasts rose and fell while she shook her head. "It can't be understood," she said to me. "It's outside our powers." She got a job with another family in the neighborhood, and on the day she left us, I found myself examining her body. Matt had always loved the plenitude of Grace. He had once told Erica that when he sat on Grace's lap there were no bones sticking out to interfere with his comfort. But the woman's fullness was spiritual as well as physical. Grace eventually moved to Sunrise, Florida, where she now lives with Mr. Thelwell in a condominium. She and Erica still write to each other after all these years, and Erica tells me that Grace keeps a photograph of Matt in the living room beside the pictures of her six grandchildren.
Just before Erica and I returned to work that fall, Lazlo came to visit us. We hadn't seen him since the funeral. He walked through the door with a grocery box, greeted us with a nod, and set it down on the floor. He proceeded to unwrap the object inside and then place it on the coffee table. The blue sticks of the small sculpture had nothing to do with the anatomical works I had seen before. Fragile open rectangles rose up from a flat dark blue board. The piece looked like a toothpick city. Taped to its base was a title: In Memory of Matthew Hertzberg. Lazlo was unable to look at us. "I'd better be going," he mumbled, but before he could take a step, Erica reached out for him. She grabbed him around his narrow waist and hugged him. Lazlo's arms swung up and out. For a moment he stood with his arms extended at his sides as if hesitant about whether he should take flight or not, but then he brought them around to Erica's back. His fingers rested lightly there for a couple of seconds and then he dropped his chin onto her head. There was a momentary spasm in his face, a wrinkling around his mouth, and then it was gone. I shook Lazlo's hand, and as his warm fingers pressed mine, I swallowed hard and swallowed again, the gulps resounding in my ears like distant gunfire.
After Lazlo left, Erica turned to me. "You don't cry, Leo. You haven't cried at all, not once."
I looked at Erica's red eyes, her wet nose and trembling mouth. She repulsed me. "No." I said. "I haven't." She heard the repressed rage in my voice and her mouth dropped open. I turned around and stalked down the hallway. I walked into Matthew's room and stood by his bed. Then I put my fist through the wall. The Sheetrock buckled under the blow and pain shot through my hand. The pain felt good—no, more than good. For an instant, I felt intense soaring relief, but it didn't last. I could feel Erica's eyes on my back as she stood in the doorway. When I turned around to look at her, she said, " What have you done? What have you done to Matt's wall?"
Erica and I both worked hard at our jobs, but the sameness and familiarity of our duties felt more like a reenactment than a continuation of our old lives. I recalled perfectly the Leo Hertzberg who had taught in the art history department before Matthew's death, and I found that I could impersonate him smoothly. After all, my students didn't need me. They needed him: the man who lectured, corrected papers, and held office hours. If anything, I performed my duties more scrupulously than before. As long as I didn't stop working, I couldn't be faulted, and I soon discovered that because my colleagues and students knew that my son had died, they protected me with their own walls of silent respect. I could see that Erica had adopted a similar posture. For about an hour after she came home from Rutgers, her gestures were brisk and mechanical. She insisted on staying up late to correct papers. When she spoke to her colleagues on the phone, her voice sounded like a movie parody of an efficient secretary. In her tight determined face, I saw myself, but I didn't like the reflection, and the more I looked at it, the uglier I found it. The difference between us was that Erica's pose collapsed daily. By the end of the summer, she stopped walking in her sleep. Instead, she would go to Matt's room and weep on his bed until she was too tired to cry anymore. Erica's misery was volatile. For months, I went to sit beside her on Matt's bed, not knowing what to expect. There were nights when she would grab me and kiss my hands and face and chest and nights when she beat my arms and pummeled my chest. There were nights when she begged me to hold her and then when I had her in my arms, she would push me away. After a while, I discovered that my responses to Erica were robotic. I performed my duties of holding her or, if she didn't want me near her, sitting silently in a chair a few feet away, but the gestures and words that passed between us seemed to evaporate immediately and leave nothing behind them. When Erica brought up Rusty or Jason, I wanted to go deaf. When she accused me of being "catatonic," I closed my eyes. We no longer slept in the same bed. There was no sex between us, and I didn't touch myself. I was tempted to masturbate, but the relief it promised me also seemed to threaten disintegration.