What I Loved (43 page)

He opened his eyes, and I felt a rush of happiness. "Mark," I said. "I have to get you to a hospital. Don't sleep. Don't close your eyes." I put my arm under his head to cushion it and looked down at him. He closed his eyes. "No," I said emphatically. I began to tug him upward. He was heavy, and as I pulled on him, my pants leg slid in the vomit on the floor. "Listen to me," I said sternly. "Don't sleep."

Mark looked at me narrowly. "Fuck you," he said. I grabbed him under his arms and began to pull him out of the bathroom, but he resisted. With an abrupt motion he reached for my face, and I felt his nails dig into my cheek. The sudden pain shocked me, and I dropped him. His head thudded on the tiles and I heard him groan. A long glistening thread of saliva dripped from his open mouth down his chin, and then he threw up again, spewing ocher liquid onto his gray T-shirt.

The vomiting saved Mark's life. According to Dr. Sinha, who treated him in the emergency room at New York Hospital, Mark had overdosed on a combination of drugs that included an animal tranquilizer that went by the name Special K on the streets. By the time I spoke to Dr. Sinha, I had done my best to clean my pants in the men's room, and a nurse had given me a bandage for the three bloody stripes on my right cheek. As I stood in the hospital corridor, I could still smell vomit, and the large wet spot on my pants was turning cold in the air-conditioned hallway. When the doctor said "Special K," I remembered Giles's voice in the hallway: "No K tonight, huh, M&M?" Over two years had passed between the time I first heard those words and the moment they were decoded for me. I found it ironic that while I had lived in New York for almost sixty years, my translator must have arrived in this country far more recently. He was a very young man with intelligent eyes who spoke the musical English of Bombay.

Three days later, Violet and Mark boarded a plane for Minneapolis. I wasn't present when Violet gave Mark the ultimatum in the hospital, but she told me that after she threatened to cut him off without a cent, he had agreed to go to Hazelden—a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. Violet was able to place Mark at Hazelden quickly by calling an old friend of hers from high school who held an important position at the clinic. While Mark was in treatment, Violet planned to stay with her parents and visit him weekly. Addiction went far to explain Mark's behavior, and the simple act of giving his problem a name eased some of my fears. It was a little like shining a flashlight into a dark corner and identifying every speck and fluff of dust that fell inside the orb of light as a single entity. Lying, stealing, and absconding all became symptoms of Mark's "disease." From this point of view, Mark was only twelve steps away from freedom. Of course, I knew it wasn't that easy, but when Mark woke up in the hospital after his ordeal, he had become somebody new— a boy with a bona fide illness, who could be treated in a clinic where the experts knew all about people like him. He didn't want to go at first He said he wasn't a drug addict. He took drugs, but he wasn't addicted. He also said he hadn't stolen Violet's jewelry or my horse, but as anyone will tell you, denial is part of the "addiction profile." The diagnosis also opened the door to renewed sympathy for Mark. Beset by terrible cravings, he had had little control over his actions and deserved another chance. But every pat solution, every convenient name has its overflow, the acts or feelings that resist interpretation—Matt's stolen knife, for example. As Violet had said, "Mark was eleven." Drugs had not been part of his life when he was eleven.

But the child inevitably haunts the adult, even when that former self is no longer recognizable. Bill's portrait of his puckish two-year-old in a dirty diaper had wound up in the apartment where his eighteen-year-old came close to dying. No longer a mirror of anyone, the canvas had become a disturbing specter of the past—not only Mark's but its own. Lucille told Violet that she had sold the painting through Bernie five years earlier. A telephone call to Bernie revealed that he knew nothing about Giles. He had dealt with a woman named Susan Blanchard, who was a reputable adviser to several well-known collectors in the city. Bernie said the buyer was a man named Ringman, who had also bought one of the fairy-tale boxes. Violet was annoyed that Lucille and Bernie hadn't mentioned the sale to Bill. "He had the right to know," she said. "Morally." But Lucille hadn't wanted Bill to know and had asked Bernie not to mention it "I felt sorry for Lucille," Bernie said to Violet. "And it was her painting to sell."

Violet blamed Lucille for the roaming canvas. I didn't. It was a great relief to me that Lucille hadn't sold the painting directly to Giles, and I felt quite sure that she had needed the money from the sale. But for Violet, one story merged into another. Lucille had sold a portrait of her own son to the highest bidder and she hadn't bothered to come visit him in the hospital. Lucille had called him instead, and according to Mark, she'd never even mentioned the overdose. Violet thought Mark was lying, called Lucille, and asked her outright. Lucille confirmed that she hadn't talked to Mark about his near death from drugs. "I didn't think it would be productive," she said. What had she talked about, then? Violet had wanted to know. Lucille said that she had given him news about Ollie's day camp and the two cats and what she was cooking for dinner and had wished him luck. Violet was incensed. When she told me the story she trembled with irritation. My feeling was that Lucille had made a conscious decision not to speak of what had happened, that she had weighed the decision carefully and had come to the conclusion that going over that territory would do neither Mark nor her any good. I think every word she uttered to him had been deliberate. I suspected, too, that after she hung up, she went over the talk in her mind and may even have chided herself about what she had said and revised the conversation after the fact. Violet believed that any mother who didn't hop the next train and come running to her son's bedside was "unnatural," but I knew that self-consciousness and uncertainty paralyzed Lucille. She was stuck in the mud of her own internal debates, the pros and cons and logical conundrums that made almost any action on her part impossible. Just making the telephone call to the hospital had probably taken a good deal of courage.

The difference between Lucille and Violet was one of character, not knowledge. Violet's confusion about Mark was as great as Lucille's. What Violet didn't question, however, was the strength of her own feeling for him and her need to act on it. Lucille, on the other hand, felt powerless. Bill's two wives had become Mark's two mothers, and while the marriages had come one after the other, Lucille's motherhood and Violet's adopted motherhood had coexisted for years and now had outlived Bill's death. The two women were the surviving poles of a man's desire, bound together by the boy he had fathered with only one of them. I couldn't help but feel that Bill was still playing a crucial role in the story that was unfolding before me, that he had created a fierce geometry among us, and that it lived on. Again, I found hints in the painting that hung in my apartment: the woman who left and the one who fought and stayed; the strange little car in the plump Violet's lap—a thing that wasn't itself and wasn't a symbol either, but a vehicle of unspoken wishes. When Bill painted that canvas he had been hoping for a child with Lucille. He had told me that himself. I started to study the painting again, and the longer I looked at it, the more I began to feel that Mark was there in the canvas, too, hiding in the body of the wrong woman.

Violet and Mark were gone for two months. During that time I took in their mail, watered the three plants upstairs, and listened to the answering machine for messages on which I could still hear Bill's voice telling the callers to wait for the beep. I also checked in on the Bowery loft once a week. Violet had made a special request that I look in on Mr. Bob. It turned out that not long after Bill died, Mr. Aiello, the landlord, had discovered the squatter, and after striking a deal with him, Violet was now paying extra rent for the dilapidated room downstairs. Mr. Bob's new status as official resident of 89 Bowery had made him both proprietary and officious. During my visits, he trailed behind me and sniffed loudly to express his disapproval. "I'm taking care of everything," he would say. "I've swept." Sweeping had become Mr. Bob's calling, and he swept obsessively, often brushing the backs of my feet with the broom as though I were leaving a trail of dust behind me. And while he swept, he declaimed, his grandiose words rising and falling for full dramatic effect.

"It won't settle, I tell you. It has said a resounding no to eternal sleep, and all day and far into the night I am forced to listen to the doleful sound of its feet pacing up there under the roof, and last night when I had swept away the last tidbits, crumbs, and what-have-yous of my long day's work, I spied it on the stairs—the spitting image of Mr. W. himself, but bodiless of course—a mere astral puff of what he once was, and that discarnate, spiritized phantasma reached out its arms in a gesture of indescribable sorrow and then it covered its poor blind eyes, and I discerned that it was looking for her, for Beauty. Now that she's gone, the ghost is disconsolate. Mind my words, because I've seen it before and I'll see it again. My knowledge of spirit doings comes firsthand. When I had my business (I worked with fine antiques, you know), I had experience of several pieces that had been
penetrated.
You are aware of that expression and its meaning in this particular instance—
penetrated.
One Queen Anne dresser formerly owned by a petite, elderly lady in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Beautiful home, that was, with a turret, but Mrs. Deerborne's essence or, shall we say, her animus, the shadowy wraith of what she once had been, was still fleet, still quick. It fluttered like a bird inside that fine piece of furniture, a timorous presence within the drawers. Let us just say they rattled. Seven times I sold the Anne, reluctantly, ever so reluctantly, and seven times the buyers returned it to me. Seven times I took it back, no questions asked, because I had the knowledge of it. It was her son who tortured her. He was unmarried, unsettled, a bad sort who drifted, and I don't think the old lady could bear to leave him like that with no position in life. William Wechsler, a.k.a. Mr. W., has unfinished business, too, and Beauty knows it, and that's why she's been coming every day until now. I hear her singing to him and talking to him to help him sleep. She'll be back to him soon now. His ghost can't do without her. It's more restless, flighty, peevish than ever before, and she's the only one who can quiet him—or rather it. And I'll tell you why. She takes succor in her trials from the angels. You understand me! They drop down! They drop down! I am the witness. I have seen her coming out the door, and I have seen the fiery mark of the seraphim on her face. She is touched, touched by the burning fingers of the heavenly host."

Mr. Bob's monologues plagued me. They never stopped. It wasn't his mishmash of religion and the occult that irritated me as much as the tone of bourgeois superiority that inevitably crept into his narratives about possessed tables, highboys, and secretaries, which usually included a condemnation of "drifters," "losers," and "bums." Bob had added Bill and Violet to the cast of characters in his muddled lore, because he wanted them for himself. Legends can live and breathe only on verbal terrain, and so Bob talked and talked to keep his Mr. W. and his Beauty secure in a world of his own making. There they could climb his celestial heights or fall into his demonic ditches without any interference from me.

And yet, I would have liked to be alone as I walked up to the studio, unlocked the door, and looked into the big room and the little that remained there of Bill. I would have liked to study the chair with Bill's work clothes draped over it, the ones I had seen Violet wearing. I would have liked to let the light of the tall windows, brilliant with sun or darkening with the evening, fall over me in silence, would have liked to stand quietly and inhale the smell of the room, which hadn't changed at all. But it wasn't possible. Bob was the building's resident hobgoblin, its sniffing, sweeping, tirading, self-appointed mystical concierge, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Nevertheless, I continued to wait for his blessing when I walked through the front door: "O Lord, lift up the soul of thy tattered servant who walketh out into the pedestrian hubbub of thine city that he may not be sorely tempted by the demons of Gotham, but will make his way straight and true toward thy heavenly light. Bless him and keep him and let thy great beaming countenance shine down upon him and give him peace."

I didn't believe in the old man's ghosts or angels, but as the summer wound down, Bill haunted me more rather than less, and without mentioning it to anyone, I began taking notes and organizing material for an essay about his work when I should have been finishing the book on Goya. The essay was launched one afternoon when I was paging through the catalogue of
O's Journey
, and the hero's initial, which signified both the presence of the letter and the absence of the number, summoned other works by Bill that turned on appearance and disappearance. After that, I spent every morning with Bill's catalogues and slides and began to understand that it was a book I was writing, one organized not by chronology but by ideas. It wasn't simple. There were many works that fell into more than one of my original categories— into both Disappearance and Hunger, for example. But I discovered that Hunger was actually a subset of Disappearance. The distinction might seem academic, but the more I studied the images, the color, the brush strokes, sculptures, and inscriptions, the more I felt that their ambiguities were all part of the idea of vanishing. The body of work Bill had left behind him formed the anatomy of a true ghost, not because every work of art by a man now dead is his trace on the world but because Bill's work in particular was an investigation of the inadequacy of symbolic surfaces—the formulas of explanation that fall short of reality. At every turn, the desire to locate, stop, pinpoint through letters or numbers or the conventions of painting was foiled. You think you know, Bill seemed to be saying in every work, but you don't know. I subvert your truisms, your smug understanding and blind you with this metamorphosis. When does one thing cease and another begin? Your borders are inventions, jokes, absurdities. The same woman grows and shrinks, and at each extreme she defies recognition. A doll lies on her back with the sign of an outdated diagnosis over her mouth. Two boys become each other. Numbers in stock reports, numbers preceded by dollar signs, and numbers burned into an arm. I had never seen the work more clearly, and at the same time I floundered inside it, choked by doubt and something else—a smothering intimacy. There were days when my work took on the qualities of a tormenting mistress whose bouts of passion were followed by inscrutable coldness, who screamed for love and then slapped my face. And like a woman, the art led me on, and I suffered and enjoyed it. Sitting at my desk with a pen in my hand, I wrestled with the hidden man who had been my friend, a man who had painted himself as a woman and as B, a fat, lusty fairy godmother. But the struggle made me unusually vivid to myself, and as the summer days drew to an end, I felt very alive in my solitude.