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where his father spent the last year of his life.
    When Matthew Phillips left his wife, she was in no mood to make it easy for him to see either Paul or his sister, Annabelle. This was agreeable enough to Annabelle but not to Paul, even though he had been the main target of his father’s rages, the worst of which being the time he clamped his hand over Paul’s nose and mouth and kept it there until Paul lost consciousness. Despite this, and despite other acts of violence both petty and prosecutable, Paul had missed Matthew. He was afraid he would hurt his mother’s feelings if he asked her for help in seeing his father, and so he mowed lawns and shoveled snow to make money for train fare from Connecticut to New York. It was his only reprieve from what was otherwise a world of women—mother, sister, teachers, even his customers: all women.
    Matthew had rented a railroad apartment, a narrow, shadowy alley of faltering bachelorhood, with soft walls and scarred floorboards, a tub in the kitchen and accordion gates on all the windows. The bedroom was in the back—a mattress on the floor beneath a grimy window—and the front, marginally sunnier half of the apartment was given over to easel and paints. From one end to the other, the paintings were propped against the walls three and four deep in an almost defiant display of nobody’s wanting them. Matthew was interested in the color brown, which he said was the most soulful of all the colors, and each canvas was heavily painted in some shade of brown with one stripe of another color bisecting the field. Toward the end of his life, Matthew was placing the stripe on the upper third of the canvas, and in the very last painting he made there were two stripes, one pale green, the other black, and he called that one “Easter.” He was like a man possessed by an incommunicable vision, an apprehension of something vast and eternal, a compulsion of the soul’s deepest recesses, powerful enough to jolt a man from society but not quite powerful enough to transport him anywhere else.
    When Paul had come calling Matthew would be dressed in paint-spattered jeans, huaraches from Mexico, his pale green eyes wet and unfocused, like olives at the bottom of a martini glass. Away from the pressures of family life, Matthew was placid, distant, polite. He had become someone who didn’t want anything looked at too closely, someone whose peace of mind depended on things being glossed over. Matthew held forth, speaking in generalizations; in fact, he lived in generalizations. Soon , one day , and not quite yet were his measurements of time; some , a bit , and not quite enough were his customary monetary denominations. A guy I knew , this woman , a fella , a couple of girls , a neighbor , and a bunch of folks were the people in his life.
    One warm spring day, Paul had left Connecticut without telling his mother or sister, taking the commuter train to Grand Central, along with the businessmen, office workers, and the well-to-do shoppers. He thought he would surprise his father. He walked the couple of miles from Grand Central; the sun was a hot, oily smudge in a gray sky. Displayed on the buzzer board was one of the return address stickers UNICEF had sent Matthew. Paul pressed the button, waited, tried the door, found it open, and trudged up, feeling some nameless queasy dread, a sense of foreboding he would never again ignore.
    His father’s door was unlocked. The apartment was a diorama illustrating man left to his own devices. Socks drying on table lamps, curls of dust as dark as steel wool beneath the radiators, the walls thick and soft with paint, stacks of newspapers in the corners, empty bottles, unfinished meals turned into ashtrays, the imploring notes taped strategically to the door, between the locks and the peephole, admonishing himself to Turn Off Lights! Check Stove!
    Matthew was dead; alone and undressed in the bedroom. Later, Paul would learn that his father had had a massive heart