King Lear's rage became a thunderstorm that whipped the sky and the ground together so the world became a seething cauldron. I don't have the capacity for that much fury but I love thunderstorms and I love the small chaos of my apartment. I love the primal soup of old receipts and unused chairs and laundry. Jay loved that too.
His flaw as a painter was that he could not chose what to leave off the canvas. His paintings hissed with life but he didn't have the heart to arrange the life or impose any order on it. His ambition was to cram the universe on every painting. He was indiscriminate. That's why he loved my apartment.
Balanced against this flaw was how funny he was. He was very funny because he was trapped in the panic that makes you map out the world. With his jokes he staked everything down the way a student steaks down a dissected rat or a sadist stakes down a kinky woman or the way God staked down Christ. His dreams were precisely coded. Love is an ocean; his mother's love is a voice; the sky is a lamp. The ocean is a table. When he loved me, my laughing was the rattling of branches and Christmas lights. When he didn't love, I couldn't move, staked out against his humor.
