She stopped talking because I reached for her hands and pulled them gently away from my neck. I continued to hold them in mine while I looked at her face. I knew that I wanted her badly. I had forgotten what it was not to want her, but I didn't want her sacrifice—that sweet offering she held out to me, because I imagined my greed and lust accepted but not returned, and that picture of my desire made me quail. I shook my head at her while two large tears spilled onto her cheeks. She had been kneeling throughout our talk and she put her head down on one of my thighs for a second before she stood up, led me over to the sofa, sat down beside me, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and we sat together for a long time without saying anything.
I remembered Bill in Vermont then, walking out the door of Bowery Two just before dinner. I saw him through the kitchen window of the Vermont house, and although it was an uncommonly lucid memory, I felt no emotion or nostalgia. I was merely a voyeur of my own life, a cold spectator who looks on at other people going about their daily routines. Bill lifted his hand to greet Matthew and Mark from the top of the stairs, and then paused to light a cigarette. I saw him stride across the lawn toward the farmhouse while Matt tugged at his arm, my son looking up at Bill. Mark was grinning as he staggered behind them and feigned a spastic disorder—holding one arm akimbo and waving the other helplessly in front of him. I surveyed the large kitchen in my mind and saw Erica and Violet pitting olives at the table. I heard the screen door slam, and at the sound, the two women looked up at Bill. Smoke rose up from the butt between his fingers, which were stained with blue and green paint, and as he sucked on the cigarette, I could see that his thoughts were still in the studio, that he wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet. Behind him, the boys had crouched down to look for the garter snake who lived under the front step. No one spoke, and in the quiet, I could hear the ticking of the clock that hung to the right of the door—a big-faced old school clock with clear black numbers—and I found myself struggling to understand how time can be measured on a disc, a circle with hands that return to the same positions over and over again. That logical revolution looked like a mistake. Time isn't circular, I thought. That's wrong. But the memory didn't let go of me. It continued—vehement, acute, inescapable. Violet glanced at the clock and pointed at Bill. "You're a stinky mess, my love. Go wash. You've got exactly twenty minutes."
Violet left New York on December ninth in the late afternoon. The low sky was beginning to darken, and a few tiny flakes of snow had started to fall. I carried her heavy suitcase down the stairs and left it on the sidewalk while I hailed a cab for her. She was wearing her long navy blue coat, which tied around her waist, and a white fur hat that I had always liked.
The driver popped the trunk, and we lifted the suitcase into it together. While we said good-bye, I clutched at what was there—-Violet's face coming toward mine, the smell of her in the cold air, the hug, and then the quick kiss on my mouth, not my cheek, the sound of the car door opening, then slamming, her hand at the window and her eyes with a tender, sorry look in them under the fringe of her hat. I followed the yellow taxi up Greene Street as Violet craned her neck and waved again. At the end of block, I watched the cab turn onto Grand Street I didn't leave until it had traveled some distance from me—a shrunken yellow thing lost in the jumble of traffic. When I felt that it was just about the size of the taxi in my painting, I walked back up the block to my door.
My eyes started to go on me the following year. I thought that the haze in my vision was caused by strain from my work or maybe cataracts. When the ophthalmologist told me there was nothing to be done, because the form of macular degeneration I had was of the wet rather than the dry sort, I nodded, thanked him, and stood up to leave. He must have found my response perverse, because he frowned at me. I told him I had been lucky with my health so far, and I wasn't surprised by illnesses that had no cure. He said that was un-American, and I agreed. Over the years the haze turned into fog, and then into the thick clouds that block my vision now. I've always been able to see the periphery of things, which allows me to walk without a cane, and I can still negotiate my way on the subway. The daily effort of shaving became too hard, however, and I grew a beard. I have it trimmed every month by a man in the Village who insists on calling me Leon. I don't bother to correct him anymore.
Erica remains a half presence in my life. We talk more often on the telephone and write fewer letters, and every July we spend two weeks together in Vermont This July was our third year, and I'm sure we will continue the tradition. Fourteen days out of 365 seems to be enough for us. We don't stay in the old farmhouse, but we aren't far away, and last year we drove up the hill, parked the car, walked around the lawn, and peeked through the windows of the empty house. Erica isn't strong. Headaches continue to interrupt her life, rendering her a semi-invalid for days, sometimes weeks, but she still teaches with fervor and writes a lot. In April 1998, Erica published Nanda's Tears: Repression and Release in the Work of Henry James. At home in Berkeley, she often spends the weekends with Daisy, now a pudgy eight-year-old girl enamoured of rap music.
Next spring, I will finally retire. My world will shrink then, and I'll miss my students and Avery Library and my office and Jack. Because my colleagues and students know what I've lost—Matthew, Erica, and my eyes—they have turned me into a venerable figure. I suppose a near-blind art history professor gives off a whiff of the romantic. But nobody at Columbia knows that I lost Violet, too. As it turns out, she and Erica are about equidistant from me these days, one in Paris, one in Berkeley, and I, who never moved, occupy the middle ground in New York. Violet lives in a small apartment in the Marais not far from the Bastille. Every December, she returns to New York for a few days before she flies home to Minnesota for Christmas. She always spends a day with Dan in New Jersey, who, she says, is doing a little better. He still paces, chain-smokes, makes the O sign with his fingers, and speaks several decibels louder than most people, and he has yet to master the ordinary business of living day to day. It's all hard—cleaning, shopping, preparing meals—and yet Violet feels that everything about Dan is a little less Dan than before, as if his whole being has subsided a notch or turned one shade lighter. He is still writing poems and occasionally a scene for a play but is less prolific than he once was, and the scraps of paper and manuscript pages that lie scattered about his one-room apartment are covered with verse or bits of dialogue followed by ellipses. Age and thirty years of potent drugs have dulled Dan a bit, but that muting seems to have made his life a bit easier.
Four years ago, Violet's sister, Alice, married Edward. A year later, at the age of forty, she gave birth to a daughter named Rose. Violet is crazy about Rose, and every year she arrives in New York with a suitcase stuffed with Parisian dolls and dresses to bring to the angel in Minneapolis. I hear from Violet every two or three months. She sends me an audiotape in lieu of a letter, and I listen to her news and her rambling thoughts about her work. Her book The Automatons of Late Capitalism includes chapters entitled "Manic Shopping," "Advertising and the Artificial Body," "Lies and the Internet," and "The Parasitic Pyschopath as Ideal Consumer." Her research has taken her from the eighteenth century into the present, from the French physician Pinel to a living psychiatrist named Kernberg. The terms and etiologies of the illness she is studying have changed with time, but Violet has tracked it in all its shifting incarnations: folie lucide, moral insanity, moral idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality—ASP for short. These days psychiatrists use checklists for the disorder, which they revise and update by committee, but among the features most often included are glibness and charm, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse, impulsivity, cunning and manipulativeness, early behavior problems, and a failure to learn from mistakes or respond to punishment. Every broad idea in the book will be illustrated by individual cases—the countless stories Violet has been collecting from people over the years.