What I Loved (29 page)

I saw very little of Bill and Violet that spring. I still shared the occasional dinner with them upstairs, and Bill telephoned me from time to time, but the life they were living took them away from me. They went to Paris for a week in March for a show of the number pieces and from there they traveled to Barcelona, where Bill lectured to students at an art school. Even when they were at home, they often left for the evening to attend dinners and openings. Bill hired two more assistants, a whistling carpenter named Damion Dapino to help build the doors and a gloomy young woman named Mercy Banks to answer his mail. Bill regularly turned down invitations to teach, discuss, lecture, or sit on panels all over the world, and he needed Mercy to pen his "no thank yous."

One afternoon while I was waiting in line at the Grand Union, I paged through a copy of
New York
magazine and found a small picture of Bill and Violet at an art opening. Bill had his arm around his wife and was looking down at her as Violet smiled into the camera. The photograph was evidence of Bill's changing status, a glimmer of fame even in his critical hometown. It had been under way for a long time—that slide into the third person that had turned his proper name into a salable commodity. I bought the magazine. At home, I cut out the picture and put it in my drawer. I wanted the picture there, because the photo's small dimensions imitated the proportions of distance—two figures standing very far away from me. I had never put anything to remind me of Bill and Violet in the drawer before that, and I understood why. It was a place to record what I missed.

Despite its morbid qualities, I didn't use my drawer for grief or self-pity. I had begun to think of it as a ghostly anatomy in which each object articulated one piece of a larger body that was still unfinished. Each thing was a bone that signified absence, and I took pleasure in arranging these fragments according to different principles. Chronology provided one logic, but even this could change, depending on how I read each object. Were Erica's socks the sign of her leaving for California or were they really a token of the day Matt died and our marriage began to fail? For days I worked on possible time tables and then abandoned them for more secret, associative systems, playing with every possible connection. I put Erica's lipstick beside Matt's baseball card one day and moved it near the doughnut box on another. The link between the latter two objects was delightfully obscure but plain once I noticed it. The lipstick conjured Erica's colored mouth, the doughnut box Mark's hungry one. The connection was oral. I grouped the photograph of my twin cousins, Anna and Ruth, with the wedding picture of their parents for a while, but then I shifted it to sit beside Matt's play program on one side and the photo of Bill and Violet on another. Their meanings depended on their placement, what I thought of as a mobile syntax. I played this game only at night before I went to bed. After a couple of hours, the intense mental effort required to justify moving objects from one position to another made me tired. My drawer proved to be an effective sedative.

The first Friday in May, I was awoken from a deep sleep by noises in the stairwell outside my apartment. I turned on the light and saw that the clock read four-fifteen. I stood up and walked into the living room, and as I neared the door I heard someone laugh from the landing and then the distinct sound of a key turning in my lock.

"Who's there?" I said in a loud voice.

Someone screeched. I opened the door and saw Mark dart away from the threshold. I stepped into the hallway. The light on the landing must have burned out, because it was dark, and the only illumination came from the floor above. I noticed that Mark had two companions with him. "What's going on, Mark?" I said, squinting at him. He had moved toward the wall and I couldn't see his face clearly.

"Hi," he said.

"It's four o'clock in the morning," I said. "What are you doing here?"

One of the others stepped forward—a ghostly figure of uncertain age. In the dim light his complexion looked very pale, but I couldn't tell if it was caused by ill health or an application of theater makeup. The man's step was tremulous, and when I looked down at his feet, I saw that he was wearing very high platform shoes. He waved a small hand in my direction. "Uncle Leo, I presume," he whined in a falsetto, and then giggled. His lips looked blue, and I noticed that his hands were shaking as he spoke. The man's eyes, however, were sharp, even vigilant, and they didn't leave mine. I forced myself to meet his gaze. After a couple of seconds, he looked down, and I turned my eyes to the third person, who was sitting on the steps. This boy looked very young. Had he not been with the other two, I would have guessed his age as not more than eleven or twelve. A delicate, feminine person with very long eyelashes and a small pink mouth, he was clutching a green purse on his knees. The clasp had come open, and inside I saw a jumble of tiny cubes—red, white, yellow, and blue. The boy was carrying around Lego blocks. He yawned loudly.

A girl's voice came from above me, "Poor guy, you're tired." I looked up and saw Teenie Gold at the top of the stairs.

She was wearing wings made of ostrich feathers that shook as she came down the stairs, one wobbly foot at a time. She held out her skinny arms like a high-wire walker, seemingly oblivious to the railing within inches of her hand. She stared down, her chin tucked onto her chest.

"Do you need help, Teenie?" I said, and stepped into the hallway.

The pale man backed away from me nervously, and I saw him finger something in his pants pocket. I turned to Mark again, who looked at me with wide eyes. "Everything's okay, Leo," he said. "Sorry we woke you." Mark's voice sounded different—lower, or perhaps it was just his inflection that had changed.

"I think we should talk, Mark."

"I can't. We're on our way out. Gotta go." He stepped away from the wall and I glimpsed his T-shirt for half a second before he turned away.

Something was written on  it—ROHYP…      

He started down the stairs.

The white man and the child loitered after him. Teenie was still making her way down the stairs toward me. I pulled the door shut, locked it, and hooked the chain, something I rarely bothered with. And then I did something I'd never done. I clicked off the light and moved my feet as if I were returning to bed. How authentic this ruse was I have no idea, but I put my ear to the door and heard the pale man say loudly, "No K tonight, huh, M&M?"

The irony wasn't lost on me. I had turned myself into a spy, had listened through a door only to discover that I was eavesdropping on a language I didn't understand. The name M&M turned me cold, however. I knew full well that it might have been a nickname for one of them, taken from the candy by the same name, but Bill's two childish figures from
O's Journey
had also been M's, and the possible reference made me uneasy. Then I heard a rumble, followed by a gasp from the stairs, and I rushed into the hallway to see what had happened.

Teenie was lying on the landing below me. I walked down the steps and helped her to her feet. She didn't look at me once while I took her by the arm and led her down the stairs. Ridiculous shoes seemed to be an adolescent requirement. Teenie was wearing black patent-leather Mary Janes with absurdly high heels, shoes that would have been a challenge to walk in stone-cold sober, and Teenie was three sheets to the wind. As I held her arm, she swayed from her hips, first in one direction, then the other. At the bottom of the steps I opened the door for her. I had no key and was wearing my pajamas, which prevented me from going any farther. When I looked up toward Grand Street, I saw Mark and his two cohorts standing at the end of the block.

"Are you going to be okay, Teenie?" I said, looking down at her.

She nodded at the sidewalk.

"You don't have to go with them," I said suddenly. "You can come back in with me, and I'll call you a car."

Without looking up, she shook her head no. Then she started to walk toward them. I remained standing in the doorway to watch her. She reeled first to the right and then to the left, zigzagging her way down the block toward her three friends—a small winged creature with buckling ankles who would never fly.

The following morning, I called Bill. I hesitated before I did it, but the incident had left me uneasy. For a sixteen-year-old, Mark seemed to have unbridled freedom, and I began to think that Bill and Violet were overly permissive. But it turned out that Bill hadn't known that Mark was in the city. He thought that he was arriving on the train from his mother's early that afternoon. Lucille was under the impression that he was spending the night with one of his classmates in Princeton. When Mark arrived that afternoon, Bill telephoned and asked me to come upstairs.

Mark stared at his knees while Bill and Violet questioned him about lying. He claimed it was all "a mix-up." He hadn't lied. He thought he was going over to Jake's house, but then Jake decided to go to New York to see a friend, and he went with him. Where was Jake last night, then? Bill wanted to know. Leo hadn't seen Jake in the hallway. Mark said that Jake had gone off with some other people. Bill told Mark that lying undermined trust and that he had to stop. Mark vehemently denied that he had lied. Everything he had said was true. Then Violet mentioned drugs.

"I'm not stupid," Mark said. "I know drugs screw you up. I saw a documentary on heroin once, and it really freaked me out. I'm just not into that."

"Teenie was high last night," I said, "and that pale fellow was shaking like a leaf."

"Just because Teenie's messed up doesn't mean I am." Mark looked directly at me. "Teddy shakes because it's part of his act. He's an artist."

"Teddy who?" Bill said.

"Teddy Giles, Dad. You must have heard of him. He does performances and sells these really cool sculptures. He's been written about in lots of magazines and everything."

When I looked at Bill, I thought I saw a flicker of recognition pass across his face, but he made no comment.

"How old is Giles?" I asked.

"Twentv-one," Mark said.

Violet said, "Why were you trying to get into Leo's apartment?"

"I wasn't!" Mark sounded desperate.

"I heard the lock turn, Mark," I said.

"No! That was Teddy. He didn't have a key. He turned the doorknob because he thought it was our apartment upstairs."

I looked Mark directly in the eyes and he looked back at me. "You didn't use my key last night?"

"No," he said. There was no hesitation in him.

"What did you want in our apartment, then?" Violet said. "You didn't come home until an hour ago."

"I wanted my camera to take pictures."

Bill rubbed his face. "For the rest of the month, you'll stay put while you're here."

Mark's jaw fell open in disbelief. "But what did I do?"

Bill sounded tired. "Listen, even if you hadn't lied to me and to your mother, you need to do your schoolwork. You'll never graduate if you don't start studying. Also," he said, "I want you to return Leo's key."

Mark stuck out his bottom lip and pouted. The expression on his soft young face reminded me of a disgruntled two-year-old who had just been told that another bowl of ice cream wasn't forthcoming. At that moment his head with its infantile features and his long, growing body seemed to be at odds with each other, as if the top of him hadn't caught up with the bottom.

I asked Mark about Teddy Giles the following Saturday afternoon when he came to see me. Despite the fact that he was grounded, I didn't notice any change in Mark's mood. I did notice that he had dyed his hair green, but I decided not to say anything about it.

"How's your friend Giles?" I said.

"He's fine."

"You said he was an artist?"

"He is. He's famous."

"Is he?"

"At least with kids. But he's got a gallery now and everything."

"What's the work like?"

Mark leaned against the wall in the hallway and yawned. "It's cool. He cuts things up."

"What things?"

"It's hard to explain." Mark smiled to himself.

"Last week you said that he was shaking because it was part of his act. I didn't understand that."

"He's into looking frail."

"And the little boy? Who was he?"

"Me?"

"No, not you. You're not a little boy, are you?"

Mark laughed. "No, that's his name, Me."

"Is it an Asian or Indian name?" I said.

"No, it's M-E, like 'me.' I'm 'me.' "

"His parents gave him a first-person pronoun for a name?"

"Nah," Mark said. "He changed it. Everybody just calls him Me."

"He looks about twelve," I said.

"He's nineteen."

"Nineteen?"

"Is he Giles's lover?" I asked pointedly.

"Wow," Mark said. "I didn't expect you to ask me something like that, but no, they're just friends. If you really want to know, Teddy's bi, not gay."

Mark studied me for a moment before he continued. "Teddy's brilliant. Everybody admires him. He grew up really poor in Virginia. His mother was a prostitute, and he didn't know who his dad was. When he was fourteen, he ran away from home and wandered around the country for a while. Then he came to New York and started working as a busboy at the Odeon. After that, he got into art—performances. For a guy who's only twenty-four, he's done a lot, you know." I remembered that Mark had said Giles was twenty-one, but I let it go. He paused for a couple of seconds and then looked me in the eyes. "I never met anybody more like me. We talk about it all the time, how we're the same."

Two weeks later, at one of Bernie Weeks's opening dinners, Teddy Giles came up again. It had been a long time since I had been out with Bill and Violet, and I had looked forward to that dinner, but I was seated between Bernie's date for the evening, a young actress named Lola Martini, and Jillian Downs, the artist whose show had just opened, and I didn't get much chance to speak to either Bill or Violet. Bill was on the other side of Jillian and they were deep in conversation. Jillian's husband, Fred Downs, was talking to Bernie. Before Giles came up, Lola had been telling me about her career on Italian television as a game-show hostess.