What I Loved (26 page)

The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself—that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page.

In several pieces Bill alluded to the often tedious business of acquiring the signs we need for comprehension—a fragment of Mark's math homework, a chewed pencil eraser, and my favorite in cube nine: the figure of a boy fast asleep at a desk, his cheek only partly covering a page of algebra. It turned out that these pictures of boredom were more personal than I thought. Bill confided to me that Mark had been doing so badly in school that the headmaster had gently suggested to Bill that he consider looking elsewhere. It wasn't an expulsion, the man had emphasized, merely a bad match between student and school. Mark's high I.Q. didn't compensate for his lack of concentration and discipline. Perhaps a less rigorous curriculum would suit him better. Bill had been on the telephone with Lucille for hours about a new school, and in the end Lucille had found a place that would accept Mark, a "progressive" institution near Princeton. The school took him with a single condition: they wanted him to repeat the eighth grade. The fall after he turned fourteen, Mark moved to Cranbury with his mother and spent his weekends in New York.

That year he grew six inches. The little boy who had played chess with me was replaced by a lanky teenager, but his temperament stayed the same. I've never seen a boy more free of adolescent heaviness than Mark His body was as light as his spirit, his step weightless, his gestures graceful. But Bill never stopped worrying about his son's dilatory attitude in school. His school reports were erratic—A3s turned to D's. His teachers used adjectives like "irresponsible" and "underachieving." I eased Bill's mind with platitudes. He's a little immature, I would say, but time will change that. I listed great men who had been lousy students and star students who'd turned into mediocrities. My pep talks usually worked. "He'll turn it around," Bill would say. "Just wait. He'll find his way, even in school."

Mark began to visit me on the weekends, usually on Sunday afternoon, before he returned to his mother's house. I looked forward to the sound of his feet on the stairs, to his knock, and to his open, untroubled face when I let him into the apartment. Often he would bring a piece of artwork to show me. He had started making small collages from magazines, some of which were interesting. One afternoon in the spring, he appeared at my door with a large shopping bag. After I let him in, I noticed that he had grown since I'd last seen him. "I can look you straight in the eyes now. I think you're going to be even taller than your father."

Mark had been smiling at me, but as I spoke, he looked grumpy. "I don't want to grow anymore," he said. "I'm tall enough."

"What are you, five-ten now? That's not too tall for a man."

"I'm not a man," he said peevishly.

I must have looked surprised, because Mark shrugged and said, "Never mind. I don't really care." Lifting the bag toward me, he said, "Dad thought I should show you this."

After sitting down on the sofa with me, Mark pulled out a large piece of cardboard, which had been folded in half and opened like a book. The two halves were covered with pictures cut from magazine ads, all of young people. He had also cut out a few words and letters from more ads and pasted them over the images: CRAVE, DANCE, GLAM, YOUR FACE, and SLAP. I found the images a little dull, to be honest, a confusing hodgepodge of the chic and beautiful, and then I noticed the same little photograph of a baby in the middle of both pages. I looked down at the infant's fat, drooping cheeks. "Is that you?" I said, and laughed.

Mark didn't seem to share my humor. "There were two copies of that picture. Mom let me have them."

To
the right of one photo and to the left of the other, I noticed two more photographs, both of which had been blurred by several layers of Scotch tape. I looked more closely. "What are these?" I said. "Two of the same picture again, right?"

Through the Scotch tape, I made out the vague outline of a head in a baseball cap and a long thin body. "Who is it?"

"Nobody."

"Why is he covered up in tape?"

"I don't know. I just did it. I didn't think about it I thought it looked good."

"But it's not from a magazine. You must have found it somewhere."

"I did, but I don't know who it is."

"This part of the picture is the same on both sides. The rest isn't. It takes a while to see it, though. There's so much going on around it, but the photos are eerie."

"You think that's bad?"

"No," I said. "I think that's good."

Mark closed up the cardboard and put it back into the bag. He leaned back on the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table in front of us. His sneakers were enormous—size eleven or twelve. I noticed that he was wearing the oversized, clownish pants favored by boys his age. We were silent for a while, and then I asked him the question that abruptly came to my mind: "Mark, do you miss Matthew?"

Mark turned to me. His eyes were wide and he pressed his lips together for a moment before he spoke. "All the time," he said. "Every day."

I fumbled for his hand on the sofa and breathed in loudly. I heard myself grunt with emotion, and my vision blurred. When I had gotten hold of his hand, I felt him squeeze mine firmly.

Mark Wechsler was a few months shy of fifteen. I was sixty-two. I had known him all his life, but until then, I hadn't considered him a friend. All at once, I understood that his future was also mine, that if I wanted a lasting rapport with this boy who would soon become a man, I could have it, and the thought became a promise to myself: Mark will have my attention and care. I've relived that moment many times since then, but in the last couple of years, as with other events of my own life, I've started to imagine it from a third point of view. I see myself reach for my handkerchief, remove my glasses, and wipe my eyes before I blow my nose loudly into the white fabric. Mark looks on at his father's old friend with sympathy. Any informed spectator would have understood that scene. He would know that the emptiness left in me by Matthew's death could never be filled by Mark. He would have understood clearly that it wasn't a matter of one boy replacing another but a bridge built between two people over an absence they both shared. And yet, that person would have been wrong, just as I was wrong. I misread both myself and Mark. The problem is that my scrutiny of the scene from every possible angle doesn't reveal a single clue. I haven't left out words or gestures or even those emotional intangibles that pass between people. I was wrong because, under the circumstances, I had to be wrong.

The idea came to me the following week. I said nothing to Mark, but I wrote to Erica and asked her what she thought. I proposed that we allow Mark to take Matthew's room as a studio where he could work on his collages. His room upstairs was small, and he could use the extra space. The change would mean that the room where Matt had lived would not remain a mausoleum, an uninhabited, unused space for nobody. Mark, Matthew's best friend, would bring life back to it. I argued strenuously for the cause, told Erica that Mark missed Matt every day, and then said it would mean a lot to me if she gave me her permission. I told her frankly that I was often lonely and that having Mark around lifted my spirits. Erica answered me promptly. She wrote that a part of her was reluctant to let the room go, but that after thinking it over, she agreed. In that same letter, she told me that Renata had given birth to a little girl named Daisy, and that she had been made the child's godmother.

The day before Mark took over the room, I opened the door, walked inside, and sat on the bed for a long time. My enthusiasm for the change was replaced by an aching awareness that it was too late to go back on my word. I studied Matt's watercolor. It would have to stay. I decided to mention it to Mark as my only stipulation. I didn't need a memorial space for Matt, I told myself; he lived in me. But as soon as I had thought of the words, the comforting cliché turned gruesome. I imagined Matt in his coffin, his small bones and his hair and his skull under the earth, and I started to shake. The old fantasy of substitution rose up inside me, and I cursed the fact that I hadn't been able to take his place.

Mark brought paper and magazines and scissors and glue and wire and a brand-new boom box to his "studio." Throughout the spring, he spent an hour or so in the room every Sunday, cutting and pasting pictures onto cardboard. He rarely worked for more than fifteen minutes at a time. He was constantly interrupting himself to come out and tell me a joke, make a telephone call, or run to the corner to get "some chips."

Not long after Mark had settled in, Bill came to see me and asked to take a look at the room. He nodded approvingly at the magazine clippings and cardboard, the pile of notebooks and cup full of pencils and pens.

"I'm glad he has this place," Bill said. "It's neutral. It's not his mother's house and it's not mine."

"He never talks about his life at Lucille's," I said, realizing suddenly that this was true.

"He doesn't tell us anything either." Bill paused for several seconds. "And when I talk to Lucille, all she does is complain."

"About what?"

"Money. I pay all of Mark's expenses, his clothes, his school, his medical bills—everything except food at her house—but just the other day, she told me that her grocery bills are sky-high because he eats so much. She actually labels the food in the refrigerator she doesn't want him to eat. She counts every penny."

"Maybe she has to. Are their salaries low?"

Bill gave me a hard, angry look. "Even when I didn't have two nickels to rub together, I didn't resent feeding my kid."

By June, Mark had stopped knocking. He had his own key. Matt's nearly empty room had been transformed into a cluttered teen pad. Records, CDs, T-shirts, and baggy pants filled the closet. Notebooks, flyers, and magazines were piled on the desk. Mark lived between rooms, coming and going as if the two lofts were all one house. Sometimes he arrived as Harpo and rushed around the living room with a horn he had bought at a yard sale near Princeton. He often kept the act going, and I would discover that he was standing beside me with his knee looped through my arm. If Mark made collages that summer, he kept them to himself. He relaxed, read a little, and listened to music I didn't understand, but then by the time it reached my ears in the living room, it was no more than a mechanical thumping that resembled the bass rhythm of a disco song— fast, steady, interminable. He came and went. For six weeks he attended a camp in Connecticut, and he spent another week with his mother on the Cape. Bill and Violet rented a house in Alaine for four of the weeks Mark was at camp, and the building seemed to die. Erica decided not to visit. "I don't want to open the wound," she wrote. I lived alone with Goya and missed them all.

In the fall, Mark fell back into his old rhythm of weekend visits. He usually took a train from Princeton on Friday evening and made an appearance at my loft on Saturday. Often he returned on Sunday as well for an hour or so. My meals with Bill and Violet dropped off to about twice a month, and I came to rely on Mark's faithful visits as a respite from myself. Sometime in October he mentioned "raves" for the first time— huge gatherings of young people that lasted through the night. According to Mark, finding a rave required connections with people in the know. Apparently, tens of thousands of other teenagers were also among the cognoscenti, but that didn't dampen Mark's enthusiasm. The word "rave" was enough to sharpen his features with expectation.

"It's a form of mass hysteria," Violet said to me, "a revival meeting without religion, a nineties love-in. The kids work themselves up into a frenzy of good feeling. I've heard there are drugs, but I've never noticed any signs that Mark is high when he gets home. They don't allow alcohol." Violet sighed and rubbed her neck with her hand. "He's fifteen. All that energy has to go somewhere." She sighed again. "Still, I worry. I feel that Lucille ..."

"Lucille?" I said to her.

"It's not important," she said. "I'm probably just paranoid."

In November, I noticed an ad in the
Voice
for a reading Lucille was giving only six blocks away, on Spring Street. I hadn't spoken to her since Matthew's funeral, and seeing her name in print prompted an urge to hear her read. Mark had become a part-time resident of my apartment and my intimacy with him drew me toward Lucille, but I also think that my decision to go was fueled by Violet's unfinished remark and Bill's earlier comment about Lucille's stinginess. It wasn't like him to be uncharitable, and I suppose I wanted to judge for myself.

The site of Lucille's reading was a woody bar with poor lighting. As soon as I walked through the door, I looked through the gloom and saw Lucille standing near the far wall with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Her hair was tied back and her pale face was lit by a small overhead lamp that deepened the shadows under her eyes. From that distance, I thought she looked lovely—waiflike and solitary. I walked toward her. She lifted her face to mine, and after a moment she smiled stiffly without opening her mouth. When she spoke, however, her voice was even and reassuring. "Leo, this is a surprise."

"I wanted to hear you read," I said.

"Thank you."

We were both silent.

Lucille looked uncomfortable. The "thank you" hung between us with an air of finality.

"That was the wrong response, wasn't it?" she said, and shook her head. "I'm not supposed to say 'Thank you.' I should have said 'It was nice of you to come' or 'Thank you for coming.' If you had spoken to me after the reading and said, 'I like your poems,' then I could have said a flat 'thank you,' and we would not be standing here wondering what had just happened."