What I Loved (41 page)

"What happened?" I said.

"It's over."

"But it's been over for quite some time, hasn't it?"

"We've been really tight on and off for two whole years."

I thought of Lisa. That was when Mark was seeing Lisa. "But we haven't seen you," I said.

"Mark said his parents wouldn't let me visit."

"That wasn't true. He was grounded, but friends could visit him."

Teenie shook her head back and forth, and I saw a big tear roll down her right cheek. Teenie must have shaken her head for twenty seconds while I encouraged her to speak. Finally, she said, "It started out like a game. I was going to get a tattoo on my stomach that said "The Mark." Teddy was joking around and he said he'd do it for me, but then..." Teenie lifted up her shirt and I saw two small scars that formed an
M
and a
W,
one on top of the other, so the bottom of the M met the top of the W to form a single character.

"Giles did that to you?"

She nodded.

"And Mark? Was Mark there?"

"He helped. I was screaming, but he held me down."

"My God," I said.

Tears ran down her face as she reached for a stuffed rabbit on her bed and began to stroke its ears. "He isn't what you think. He was so sweet to me in the beginning, but then he started to change. I gave him this book called
Psycholand.
It's about this rich guy who flies all over the world in his private plane, and in every city he kills somebody. Mark read it about twenty times."

"I saw some reviews of that book. I understood that it was a kind of parody, a social satire."

Teenie raised her eyes momentarily to give me a blank look. "Yeah, well," she continued, "it started to creep me out, you know, and sometimes when he spent the night here, he'd start talking to me in this really weird voice. It wasn't his regular voice, you know, but a put-on voice. He'd just go on and on, and I'd tell him to stop, but he wouldn't, and I'd put my hand over his mouth, and still he wouldn't stop. And then he got me into all this trouble with my parents 'cause he stole my dad's codeine pills, the ones he takes for his bad shoulder, and they thought it was me, and I didn't dare tell them it was Mark, 'cause by then I was afraid of him. He kept saying he didn't take them, but I know he did, and kids are saying that him and Teddy go out at night and rob people just for fun. Sometimes they take money, but other times they just take something stupid, like their tie or scarf or belt or something." Teenie shuddered through her tears. "I thought I was in love with him."

"Do you think the rumors about the robberies are true?"

Teenie shrugged. "I'd believe anything now. Are you going to Dallas to look for him?"

"I thought you said Houston."

"I think it's Dallas. I don't know. Maybe they're back already. What day is it?"

"Friday."

"They're probably back." Teenie started chewing on the nail of her little finger. She appeared to be thinking. She removed the finger from her mouth and said, "He might be at Giles's house, but he's probably at the
Split World
offices. Sometimes kids sleep there."

"I need the addresses, Teenie."

"Giles lives at 21 Franklin Street on the fifth floor.
Split World
is on East Fourth." She stood up and began to rummage in a drawer. She produced a magazine and handed it to me. "The street number's in there."

On the cover of the magazine there was a lurid picture of a young man, supposedly dead or dying, his head propped up against a toilet. His slashed wrists rested on his thighs as he sat in a brilliant pool of blood.

"Charming photo," I said.

"They're all like that," she said in a bored voice. Then she raised her chin and looked at me for at least three seconds. After she had looked down, she continued, "I'm telling you all this 'cause I don't want any more bad stuff to happen. That's what I said to Mark's dad when I called him."

For an instant I held my breath, then with deliberate calm I said, "You spoke to Mark's father? When was that?"

"It was a pretty long time ago. The next thing I heard was that he died. That was pretty sad. He seemed like a nice man."

"You called him at home?"

"No, at his office, I think."

"Where did you get that number?"

"Mark gave me all his numbers."

"Did you tell Mark's father about the cut on your stomach?"

"I think so."

"You think so?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice.

Teenie pushed the carpet hard with her toes. "I was pretty upset and I was high, too." She pushed harder. "Maybe you can find a hospital for him. Both Mark and Teddy should probably be in a hospital somewhere."

"Were you the one who left a message with Bill saying that Giles had killed you?"

"He didn't kill me. He hurt me. I told you."

I decided not to ask her anything more about the message. After talking to her, I felt sure that the voice I had heard on Bill's machine didn't belong to Teenie. "Where are your parents?" I asked her.

"My mom's at some charity meeting thing for cancer and my dad's in Chicago."

"I think you should talk to them. That was an assault, Teenie. You could go to the police."

She didn't move. She began to shake her platinum head back and forth and fixed her gaze on her desk as though she had forgotten I was there.

I took the magazine and walked out of the room. When I opened the front door to leave, I heard water running and the sound of a woman singing to herself. It must have been Susie.

On my way downtown in a taxi, the bathetic tones of Teenie's confession lingered in my ears, especially her refrain, "I thought I was in love with him." Her skinny little body, her lowered gaze, the jumble of makeup and feminine paraphernalia around her had depressed me. I pitied Teenie, pitied the small ruined figure in a vast pale blue apartment, and yet I wondered about the phone call. Had Bill's heart stopped after he heard the story about Mark holding her down? Had she even mentioned it? The truth was I found it hard to imagine Mark restraining her, because the scar had been too neat. Could she have been cut so cleanly if she were struggling? Teenie's stories about
Psycboland
and the stolen codeine pills were more believable, however, and I began to speculate on Mark's drug use and its possible role in lifting whatever inhibitions he may have had when it came to lying and stealing. Apparently, Teenie retained a few scruples, a dim moral code that condemned what she called "bad stuff," but the badness of that stuff seemed to be determined by its effect on her rather than its lack of adherence to broader ethical sanctions. She couldn't remember her conversation with Bill because she had been drugged, and by her own lights, this made her amnesia both natural and excusable. Teenie belonged to a subculture where the rules were lax and permission was broad, but as far as I could tell, it was also surprisingly bland. If Mark and Teenie were any indication, these kids had little fervor. They weren't Futurists glorifying the aesthetics of violence or anarchists advocating liberation from the reigns of law. They were hedonists, I suppose, but even the taking of pleasure seemed to bore them.

When I looked up at the narrow building on East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B, I knew that I could walk away, that I could choose not to know anything more about these overgrown children and their small, sad lives. I chose to press the buzzer, chose to yank open the door on the first floor of that old tenement building, and chose to walk down the hallway, and I well understood that I was moving in the direction of something ugly. I was also aware that the ugliness pulled me toward it. I wanted to see what it was, to get close to it and examine it. The tug was morbid, and by giving in to it, I felt that the loathsome thing I was looking for had already stained me.

I didn't plan to lie, but when the somnambulant young woman behind the desk raised her eyes to me, eyes that were shielded by red glasses with wings, and when I saw twenty
Split World
covers on the wall behind her, one of which featured Teddy Giles with blood dripping from his mouth and a spoon that held what looked like a human finger, I lied spontaneously. I told her I was a journalist for the
New Yorker
who was researching small alternative magazines for an article. I asked the young woman if she would explain
Split World
to me—its raison d'etre. I looked into the brown eyes behind the red wings. They were dull.

"I don't know what you mean."

"What the magazine is about, why it exists."

"Oh," she said, pondering the question. "Are you going to quote me? The name is Angie Roopnarine. R-O-O-P-N-A-R-I-N-E."

I took out my pen and notebook and inscribed Roopnarine in large letters on the paper. "For example," I continued. "Why the name? What's the split?"

"I don't know. I just work here. You should probably talk to somebody else, only nobody's here right now. They're out at lunch."

"It's five-thirty in the afternoon."

"We don't open until noon."

"I see." I pointed to the picture of Teddy Giles. "Do you like his art?"

She craned to look at the cover. "It's all right," she said.

I plunged into the heart of the matter. "They say he has an entourage, isn't that right? Mark Wechsler, Teenie Gold, a girl who calls herself Virgina, and a boy named Rafael who seems to be missing."

Angie Roopnarine's body grew suddenly tense. "That's part of your article?"

"I'm focusing on Giles."

She squinted at me. "I don't know what you want. You seem kinda wrong to be writing about this stuff."

"The
New Yorker
hires a lot of oldsters," I said. "You must know Mark Wechsler anyway," I said. "He worked here last summer."

"Well, I can tell you, you've got that wrong. He never
worked
here. He hung around, okay? But Larry never paid him."

"Larry?"

"Larry Finder. He owns the magazine and a lot of others."

"The gallery owner?"

"It's no secret." The telephone rang.
"Split World
, " Angie sang into the phone, her voice suddenly animated.

I nodded at her, mouthed a thank-you, and escaped. On the street, I took a deep breath to quiet the anxiety that had clamped itself around my lungs. Why lie? I said to myself. Had I lied out of some misguided impulse to protect myself? Maybe. Although I didn't construe my posing as a huge moral lapse, I felt both ridiculous and compromised as I walked westward away from the building. Discoveries about Mark had a tendency to fall into the negative category. He had not worked for Harry Freund last summer. He had not worked for Larry Finder at
Split World
either. Mark's life was an archaeology of fictions, one on top of the other, and I had only just started to dig.

Violet had left several urgent messages on my machine for me to come upstairs as soon as I returned home. When she opened the door, she looked pale, and I asked her if she was okay. Instead of answering me, she said, "I have something to show you."

She led me to Mark's room, and when I looked through the door, I saw that Violet had turned the place inside out. The closet door was open, and although clothes were still hanging inside, the shelves were bare. The floor was thick with papers, flyers, notebooks, and magazines. I also saw a box of toy cars, another with bent postcards, letters, and broken crayons. The drawers in Mark's desk had been removed and were lying in a row beside the boxes. Violet bent over one of them, picked up a red object, and handed it to me. "I found it inside a cigar box wrapped in masking tape."

It was Matthew's knife. I looked down at its silver initials, M.S.H.

"I'm sorry," Violet-said.

"After all these years," I said, and began to tug at its corkscrew. When I had pulled it out, I moved my finger down its spiral blade and remembered Matt's desperation. "I always put it on the night table, always!" I must have been very tired, because a part of me seemed to levitate then, and I had the most peculiar sensation of having floated to the ceiling. I felt as though I were looking down on the room, on Violet, on myself, and on the knife that I held in my hand. This curious division between earth and air, between the elevated me and the me on the ground didn't last very long, but even after it was over, I felt far away from everything in that room, as if I were looking at a mirage.

"I remember the day Matt lost it," Violet was saying in a deliberate voice. "And I remember how upset he was. It was Mark who told me, Leo, Mark who said how awful it was that the knife was missing. He was so sympathetic, so sad for Matt. He told me how he had looked for it everywhere." Violet's eyes were wide and her voice trembled. "Mark was eleven years old then. He was eleven." I felt her grab my arm and then the tight grip of her fingers. "You understand that it isn't the stealing that's so terrible or even the lying. It's the pretense of compassion, so perfectly modulated, so believable, so authentic."

I put the knife in my pocket then, and although I had heard what she said and had understood it, I didn't know how to respond, and instead of answering I stood very still, my eyes on the wall, and after a couple of seconds, I thought of the taxi in Bill's self-portrait—that toy he had given to Violet to hold when he painted her. The image of the taxi and Matt's knife had something in common, and I groped to articulate the similarity between them. The word "pawn" came to me, and yet it wasn't quite right. Some form of exchange linked the picture of a toy car with the real object that was hidden in my pocket. The connection had nothing to do with knives or automobiles. The knife was like the painted car because it too had become intangible—not a real thing anymore. It didn't matter that I could reach into my trousers and retrieve it. Through the machinations of a child's dark needs and secrets, a switch had been made. The present I had given Matt on his eleventh birthday no longer existed. In its place was something else, a sinister copy or facsimile, and as soon as I had thought this, my thinking came full circle. Matt had made his own double of the knife in the painting Bill had given to me. He had sent the Ghosty Boy up to the roof with his stolen prize, where the moon shone down on his empty face and lit the opened knife that he held in his hand.