What I Loved (31 page)

I checked my watch. "You'd better hurry."

"I will." Mark sprinted down the block, his huge pants waving like two flags on either side of his ankles, the elastic and several inches of his underpants in full view. The pants were so long that the bottoms had frayed and torn along the inner seams. I stood for a few moments and watched him run. His figure grew smaller and smaller, and then he turned a corner.

As I made my way home, I realized that two narratives about Mark had unfolded inside me—one on top of the other. The superficial story went something like this: Like thousands of other teenagers, Mark had hidden parts of his life from his parents. No doubt he had experimented with drugs, slept with girls, and maybe, I had begun to think, a couple of boys. He was intelligent but a very poor student, which suggested an attitude of passive rebellion. He had lied to his parents. He had failed to tell his mother about his room in my apartment and had once slept there without my permission. Another time, he had hoped to sneak back into that room at four in the morning. He was attracted to the violent content of Teddy Giles's art, but then so were countless other young people. And finally, like so many children his age, he tried on various personas to discover which one suited him. He behaved one way with his peers and another way with adults. This version of Mark's story was ordinary, one tale like a million others of a normal, bumpy adolescence.

The other story was similar to the one that lay above it, and its content was identical: Mark had been caught lying. He had formed a friendship with an unsavory person I privately called "the ghost," and Mark's body and voice changed depending on whom he was speaking to at the moment. But this second narrative lacked the smoothness of the first. It had holes in it, and those gaps made the story difficult to tell. It didn't rely on a larger fiction about teenage life to fill in its ragged openings but left them gaping and unanswered. And unlike the reassuring tale above it, it didn't begin when Mark was thirteen, but at some unknown and earlier date that sent me hurtling into the past rather than the future, and it came in the fractured form of isolated pictures and sounds. I remembered little Mark walking through our door when Lucille lived upstairs, his head hidden under a rubber fright mask. I saw his father's portrait of him with a lamp shade on his head—a small body hovering in the nowhere of that canvas—and then I heard Violet hesitate, breathe, and leave her sentence unfinished.

I repressed those underground images and stuck to the coherent story on the surface. It was both more comfortable and more rational. After all, I had become a creature of mourning. Matthew's absence had made me unusually alert to nuances in Mark's character that might turn out to be of little importance. I had lost faith in predictable stories. My son was dead, and my wife lived in self-imposed exile. But I told myself that just because my own life had been rocked by accident didn't mean that other people didn't have lives that plodded along a prescribed course, becoming over the years rather like what they had expected all along.

That summer Bill came back to me. He called almost every day, and I followed the progress of the doors as they were made on the Bowery. Although Bill put in long hours at the studio, he had more time for me, and I sensed that his desire to see me was partly the result of a new optimism he felt about Mark. Worry always took the form of retreat in Bill, and over the years I had come to recognize the outward signs of his withdrawal. His expansive gestures vanished. His eyes focused on an object across the room but failed to register the thing he was seeing. He chainsmoked cigarettes and kept a bottle of Scotch under his desk. I was sensitive to Bill's internal weather, to the intense pressure that built up inside him and then stormed quietly. Those tempests usually began and ended with Mark, but while they were raging, Bill found it hard to talk to me or anyone else. Violet may have been an exception. I don't know. I felt that Bill's inner tumult wasn't fury against Mark for his lying and irresponsibility but rather a seething anger and doubt he turned on himself. At the same time, he was eager to believe that the winds were changing, and he seized on every nuance in his son's behavior as a sign of better days to come. "He's stuck with the job," Bill said to me, "and he really enjoys it. He's stopped seeing Giles and that club bunch and is hanging out with kids his own age. It's a big relief to me, Leo. I knew that he was going to find some direction in his life." Because Violet was out doing research for her book, I saw her much less than either Bill or Mark, and not seeing her helped me to repress her imaginary twin—the woman I took to bed in my mind. Erica talked to Violet regularly, however, and she wrote that Violet was better, less anxious, and that she, too, felt a new determination in Mark that was connected to his job for Freund. "She told me that Mark is genuinely moved by the fact that the project is about children. She thinks it struck a chord with him."

Mr Bob was still in residence on the Bowery, and every time I went to visit Bill, he regarded me through his chained door with suspicion, and every time I left, he blessed me. I knew that Mr. Bob made full-bodied appearances for Bill and Violet, but I never saw more than a fraction of his brooding face. Although Bill didn't talk about it, I understood that the old man had become his dependent. Bill left groceries at the bottom of the stairs for Mr. Bob, and once I saw a note on Bill's desk written in a tiny neat hand: "
Crunchy
not smooth peanut butter!" But as far as I could tell, Bill had simply accepted his downstairs neighbor as an obligatory presence in his life. He shook his head and smiled when I mentioned the old squatter, but he never complained about what I suspected were Mr. Bob's growing demands.

In the middle of August, Bill and Violet asked if I would let Mark stay with me for two weeks while they vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. Mark couldn't abandon his job, and they felt uncomfortable leaving him in the apartment alone. I agreed to take him in and gave Mark another key. "This," I said to him, "is a sign of trust between us, and I'd like you to hold on to it, even after these two weeks are over." He held out his hand and I lowered the key into his palm. "You understand me, don't you, Mark?"

He looked at me steadily and nodded. "I do, Uncle Leo." His bottom lip trembled with emotion, and we embarked on our two weeks together.

Mark spoke warmly about his work for Freund, about the large colored flags he had helped mount, about the other young men and women who worked alongside him—Rebecca and Laval and Shaneil and Jesus. Mark lifted and climbed and hammered and sawed, and by the time he quit for the day, he said, his arms ached and his legs felt wobbly. When he returned home at around five or six, he often needed a nap to recover. Around eleven o'clock at night, he went out and usually didn't return until morning. "I'm staying with Jake," he would say, and leave a telephone number. "I'll be at Louisa's house. Her parents said I could sleep in the guest room." Another number. He wandered in at between six and eight in the morning and would sleep until work. His schedule changed daily. "I don't have to be in until noon," he would say, or "Harry doesn't need me today," and then he would drop into a coma until four in the afternoon.

Sometimes, his friends came to my door to retrieve Mark for a night out. Most of them were short white girls, dressed in baby clothes with pigtails in their hair and glitter on their cheeks. One evening, a brunette came to the door with a pacifier hanging on a pink ribbon around her neck. With voices to match their infantile clothing, Mark's girlfriends cooed and piped and twittered in high, thin tones suffused with misplaced emotion. When I offered them soft drinks, they breathed out their lilting thank-yous as if I had just offered them immortality. Although Mark had played tough for Freddy, he didn't swagger or act bored with the girls. With Marina, Sissy, Jessica, and Moonlight (the daughter of glassblowers in Brooklyn), his tone was invariably gentle and earnest. When he bent down to talk to them, his handsome face softened with feeling.

One night when Mark was out with friends, I had dinner with Lazlo and Pinky at Omen on Thompson Street. Pinky was the one who first brought up the story of the dead cats. Although I had met Pinky Navatsky several times, I had never spent much time with her until that evening. She was a tall girl in her early twenties, with red hair, gray eyes, a significant, slightly hooked nose, which gave her an air of substance, and a very long neck. Like many dancers, she had a permanent turnout that affected her walk, which was a little ducklike, but she held her head like a queen at her coronation, and I loved to watch her move her arms and hands while she talked. When she gestured, she often used the whole limb, moving her arm from her shoulder. At other times she would bend her elbow and open her hand toward me in a single sure sweep. Her movements weren't at all affected. She simply had a relation to her own musculature that for most of us is unthinkable. Just before she mentioned the cats, she leaned toward me, turned her palms over so they faced the ceiling, and said, "Last night I had a dream about the murdered cats. I think it was that picture in the
Post"

When I said that I knew nothing about murdered cats, Pinky explained that the flayed, skewered, and dismembered animals had been discovered around the city, nailed to walls, hanging from doorways, or simply lying in the middle of an alley, sidewalk, or subway platform.

Lazlo informed me that the animals were all partly dressed, wearing diapers, baby outfits, pajamas, or training bras, and they had all been signed with the letters S.M. Those letters may have started the rumors that Teddy Giles was responsible. Giles called his drag persona the "She-Monster," initials that coyly but not very subtly also referred to sadomasochism. Although Giles had denied all responsibility for the cats, Lazlo said that he had kept ambiguity and shock alive by calling the animal corpses "guerrilla art at its furious best." Giles had also said he envied the artist and hoped he had been an inspiration to the unnamed "perpetrator/creator." Finally, he had given his blessing to all future "copycats." These comments drove animal-rights organizations to screeching outrage, and Larry Finder had come to work one morning to find the words ACCESSORY TO MURDER scrawled in red paint on the gallery door. I had missed the furor in the papers and the clip that had made the local television news.

Lazlo chewed thoughtfully and took long breaths through his nose. "You're out of it, did you know that, Leo?"

I admitted that I was.

"Lazlo," Pinky said, "not everybody's like you, always checking out everything all the time. Leo has other things to think about."

"No offense," Lazlo said to me.

After I had made it clear to both of them that I wasn't the least bit upset by the comment, Lazlo continued, "Giles'll say anything if he thinks it'll be hyped."

"It's true," Pinky said. "He might not have a thing to do with those cats."

"Do Bill and Violet know about this?"

Lazlo nodded. "But they think Mark's not seeing Giles."

"And you know that he is."

"We saw them together," Pinky said.

"At the Limelight last Tuesday." After a vigorous inhalation through his nose, Lazlo said, "I hate to tell Bill, but I'll do it. The kid's in over his head."

"Even if Giles isn't murdering cats," Pinky said, leaning across the table, "he's creepy. I'd never seen him before, and it wasn't his makeup or clothes that got me, it was something in his eyes."

Before we said good-bye, Lazlo slipped me an envelope. I had gotten used to these parting gifts. He left them for Bill, too. Usually he typed up a quotation for me to think about. I had already been treated to Thomas Bernhard's spleen: "Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe ... Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities," and to a quote from Philip Guston I particularly liked: "To know and yet how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all." That night I opened the envelope and read: "
Kitsch
is always in the process of escaping into rationality. Hermann Broch."

I asked myself if the dead cats were meant to be a form of kitsch, a thought that led to ruminations on animal sacrifice, the chain of being, ordinary slaughterhouses, and finally to pets. I remembéred that as a little boy Mark had kept white mice, guinea pigs, and a parakeet named Peeper. One day the cage door had fallen on Peeper's neck and killed him. After the accident, Mark and Matt had paraded around our loft with a shoe box that held the stiff little corpse, singing the only song they knew that would function as a dirge: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

When Mark returned from work the next day, I couldn't bring myself to mention either Giles or the cats, and at dinner he had so much to tell me about his day, I never found a good opening for the subject. That morning he had helped mount his favorite blown-up drawing, by a six- year-old girl in the Bronx—a self-portrait with her turtle, which looked very much like a dinosaur. In the afternoon, his friend Jesus had fallen off a ladder but was saved by a huge pile of canvas flags that were piled beneath him on the ground. Before Mark left for the night, he retreated to the bathroom and I heard him whistling. He put a telephone number on the table with a name beside it. Allison Fredericks: 677-8451. "You can reach me at Allison's," he said.

After Mark was gone, a vague suspicion began to churn inside me. I listened to Janet Baker singing Berlioz, but the music didn't drive away the uneasiness that constricted my lungs. I studied the name and telephone number Mark had left on the table. After twenty minutes of hesitation, I picked up the telephone and called. A man answered. "I'd like to speak to Mark Wechsler," I said.

"Who?"

"He's a friend of Allison's."

"There's no Allison here."

I looked at the number. Maybe I had dialed wrong. Very carefully I punched in the numbers again. The same man answered and I hung up.

When I confronted Mark about the wrong number the following morning, he looked puzzled. He dug into his pocket, produced a number, and laid it beside the little piece of paper he had written on the night before. "I see what I did." He spoke in a bright, clear voice. "I reversed these two numbers. Look here. "It's four eight, not eight four. I'm sorry. I guess I was in a hurry."