What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt Page B

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