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philandering, kind Felix was gone. You’ve driven me to my wits’ end! (I had been a sometime screamer.) But that end had never been reached. My wits had stayed, and so had his, and we had repaired the damage to them regularly. There was no fixing anymore. No fixing. No Felix. I struggled to comprehend the void, and the fact that I had begun to register it as real took the form of that empty other being, a lacuna, a hole in the mind, but it was not the hole named Felix.
    And so I’d walk over to Sunny’s Bar, where I’d sit and look at the people and listen to them talk, a balm of voices. Sometimes there was music. Once I heard a poetry reading and afterward talked to the poet, who had big eyes and red lipstick, much younger even than Ethan, and, although I found her poems terrible, I rather liked her. She called herself April Rain, an idea I supposed had come to her while writing. The girl had a large duffel bag with a gaping zipper, and she had tied a couple of sweaters and a hat on to it, and when she picked up the load and began to walk, I told her she looked like an immigrant staggering off the pier in 1867, and she explained to me that she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa because she was “between places,” and I took her home.
    April Rain, little white girl with bird tattoos on her lower arms and quantities of shattered glass in her poems that occasionally caused bleeding, was my first artist in residence. She didn’t stay more than a week. One night she found a disheveled beau at Sunny’s and never returned, but while she lasted, I liked having her around, and her presence staved off the jostling pains of evening. While looking at Ms. Rain’s soft pale face and plump cheeks as we ate our lentils or roasted vegetables (she was vegetarian) and chatted about Hildegard of Bingen or Christopher Smart, I forgot what I looked like. I forgot that I had wrinkles, breasts that needed a mighty brassiere to hold them up, and a middle-aged gut that protruded like a melon. This amnesia is our phenomenology of the everyday—we don’t see ourselves—and what we see becomes us while we’re looking at it. One night after saying good night to my twenty-two-year-old bardess, I looked in the mirror before bed, surprised myself with my own face, and burst into tears. Felix loved this aging mug, I thought. He praised it and stroked it. There’s no one to love it now.
    It may have been self-pity—the sense that I had grown too ugly to warm up any man’s bed—that lay behind the idea that some of my constructed beings needed to have a bit of heat. My mother had had a penchant for electric mattress pads that toasted her through the night; the problem, as she explained it, was her circulation and ossified feet. My blood doesn’t run; it crawls, and it seems never to arrive at my toes. My parents’ pad had two settings, one for each side of the bed. She would set hers on six and make sure my father’s side was turned off so he didn’t cook in his sleep. After he died, she raised her level to ten, but she left his side cold, a memorial chill. No extra technology was required for my carcasses, although I fiddled with the wiring before I was truly happy with it. I began with a life-size effigy of Felix; it was an idea of him, not a likeness, his slender stuffed form covered with material I painted in blues and greens with a little yellow and dabs of red, man as canvas, but I added short white hair on the top of his head. When I plugged him in, his soft body ran a fever.
    The pleasure this gave me was ludicrous. I couldn’t say then why the hot creature filled me with joy, but it did. I touched his colored sides gingerly to feel his warmth. I put my arms around him. I sat him next to me on the sofa. I called him my transitional object. Aven adored him. Ethan hated him. Maisie tolerated him. Rachel was both amused by and serious about him and the others. She wanted me to try for a gallery again, to go out like Willie Loman and