What I Loved (35 page)

I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. I mentioned the fire and the doughnuts. Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots on its long branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.

"You know," I said to her, "I think that before his death, Matthew withdrew from Mark. When I remember it now, they were very quiet with each other in the car on the way to camp, and then in the middle of the ride, Matt said loudly, 'Stop pinching me.' It seemed so ordinary then—boys irritating each other." The pinch led to the bite, and when I finished the story, Dr. Monk raised her eyebrows and her eyes sharpened.

She didn't say anything about the bite, and I kept talking. "I told Mark about my father's family," I said. "I hardly remember them. I never even met my cousins. They died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. My Uncle David survived, the
lager
but died during the march out of the camp. I told him about my father's death from a stroke. When he listened to me, his face was so serious. I think there might have been tears in his eyes ..."

"It isn't something that you tell many people."

I shook my head and looked at the hydrangea tree. I felt lost to myself at that moment, as though another person were speaking. I kept my eyes on the tree, and there was something red in my mind, very red through a window.

"Do you know why you chose to tell Mark?"

I turned to her and shook my head.

"Did you tell Matthew?"

My voice shook. "I told Mark much more. Matt was only eleven when he died."

"Eleven is very young," she said gently.

I began to nod, and then I wept. I cried in front of a woman I didn't know at all. After I left her, I wiped my face in her small neat bathroom with its bountiful supply of Kleenex and imagined all the people who had been there before me, wiping away their tears and snot beside the toilet. When I walked outside the building on Central Park West, I looked across at the trees that had burst into full leaf and had a sensation of ineffable strangeness. Being alive is inexplicable, I thought Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

A week later, Mark signed a contract in front of me, Violet, and Bill. The document was Dr. Monk's idea. I think she hoped that by agreeing to conditions laid down in black-and-white, Mark would be drawn into an understanding that morality is finally a social contract, a consensus about basic human laws, and that without it, relations among people degenerate into chaos. The paper read like an abbreviated, individualized version of the Ten Commandments:

I will not lie.

I will not steal.

I will not leave the house without permission.

I will not talk on the telephone without permission.

I will repay in full the money I stole from Leo out of my allowance money, the money I will earn this summer, next year, and into the future.

I still have my copy among my papers. At the bottom is Mark's signature scrawled in a childish hand.

Every Saturday throughout the summer, Mark arrived at my door with his payment. I didn't want him in my apartment, so he remained in the hallway while he opened the envelope and counted the bills into my hand. After he was gone,
I
recorded the amount in a small notebook I kept on my desk. Mark paid me from the earnings he made as a cashier at a bakery in the Village. Bill walked him to work every morning, and at five o'clock Violet picked him up. Every day she asked his boss how Mark was doing, and the response was always the same. "He's doing fine. He's a good kid." Mr. Viscuso must have pitied Mark for having such an over-protective mother. Other than his family, me, and his coworkers, the only person Mark saw was Lisa. She came to visit him two or three times a week, often carrying a book under her arm for Mark to read. Violet told me that these volumes usually came from the pop-psychology shelves of local bookstores and were filled with prescriptions for "inner peace" that included exhortations to the reader such as "Learn to love yourself first" and "Fight the underground beliefs that keep you from being your best, happiest self." Lisa had signed on to the cause of Mark's reformation, and she spent many hours with him explaining the path to enlightenment. According to Violet, when Mark wasn't working, eating, or communing with Lisa about the tranquillity of his soul, he was sleeping. "That's all he does," she said, "sleep."

In late August, Bill flew to Tokyo to prepare for a show of the doors. Violet stayed home with Mark. At nine o'clock on the Thursday morning after Bill left, Violet came downstairs to my apartment wearing her bathrobe. "Mark's gone," she said as she walked into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with me.

"He left through the window, took the fire escape to the roof, and then walked down the stairs to the front door. I thought the roof door was locked, but when I checked this morning, I found it open.
I
think he's been doing it all along, but usually he comes back before morning. He sleeps and sleeps because he's exhausted from being out all night.
I
never would've known," she said quietly, "but the phone rang at around two o'clock last night. I don't know who it was. Some girl. She wouldn't tell me her name, but she asked me if I knew where Mark was, and I said he was sleeping and I wouldn't wake him. She said, 'The hell he is. I just saw him.' There was a lot of noise in the background, probably a club. Then she said that she wanted to help me out. 'You're his mother,' she said. 'You ought to know.' It's funny, I didn't say I wasn't his mother. I just listened. Then she said she had to tell me something." Violet took a big breath and sipped the coffee. "It might not be true, but the girl said that Mark is with Teddy Giles every night. She said, 'The She-Monster's out of its cave,' but I didn't know what she was talking about. I tried to interrupt her, but she just rushed on, saying that Giles had bought a boy in Mexico."

"Bought?" I said.

"That's what she said, that the boy's parents sold him to Giles for a few hundred dollars and that after that, the boy fell in love with Giles, that Giles dressed him up as a girl and took him everywhere for a while. Her story was pretty confused, but she said that one night they had a fight and Giles cut off the boy's little finger. Giles then took the boy to an emergency room and had the finger sewn back on, but not long after that, the kid, Rafael, disappeared. She said that there are rumors going around that Giles murdered him and threw his body into the East River. 'He's a maniac,' she said. 'And he's got his claws in your kid. I just thought you oughta know.' Those were her exact words. Then she hung up."

"Have you told Bill?"

"I've tried. I left messages at his hotel, but not urgent ones. What's the poor guy going to do from Tokyo?" Violet looked thoughtful. "The problem is, I'm afraid."

"Well, if any of this is remotely true, you have reason to be. Giles is a frightening person."

Violet opened her mouth as if to speak, but then she closed it. She nodded and turned her head away from me, and I admired her neck and profile. She's still beautiful, I thought, maybe more beautiful now that she's older. She and her face have a new harmony that didn't used to be there when she was young.

Mark showed up at his mother's house the following Sunday. According to Bill and Violet, he insisted that he had never left the house before, declared the story about Rafael "total B.S." and explained that he had run off to see some friends because he had been "bored." A week later, he was back at his mother's house, going to school. Every Friday, either Bill or Violet picked him up at the train, took him on the subway to Dr. Monk's for his therapy, waited for him, and then escorted him back to Greene Street. His imprisonment at home continued.

In the months that followed, Mark's behavior fell into a recognizable pattern I began to call "the rhythm of dread." For weeks at a time, he appeared to do well. He produced A and B work in school, was cooperative, helpful, and kind, and paid me weekly out of his allowance money. Bill and Violet reported that their long talks with him about trust, honesty, and abiding by the contract seemed to be helping him "stay on track." He unburdened himself to Dr. Monk, who was pleased with his "progress." And then, just at the moment when the people around him had been lulled into a feeling of cautious optimism, Mark would burst into flames. In October, Violet found his bed empty in the middle of the night and all the cash in her purse missing. He reappeared Sunday morning. In November, his stepfather, Philip, noticed a large dent in his car before he went to work. In December, Bill took Mark to lunch in the neighborhood. After they had ordered hamburgers, Mark excused himself to go to the bathroom; he showed up three days later at Lucille's. In February, Mark's history teacher found him vomiting in the boys' toilet, a liter of vodka in his backpack and Valium pills in his pocket.

Every incident played itself out according to the same master script. First, the unhappy discovery; second, the injured person's explosion; third, Mark's reappearance and fervent denials. Yes, he had absconded, but he hadn't really done anything wrong. He had walked around the city. That was all. He needed to be alone. He hadn't taken Philip's car out in the middle of the night. If there was a dent in the door, somebody else must have stolen the station wagon. Yes, he had run from the house that night, but he hadn't stolen money. Violet was mistaken. She must have spent it or miscounted. Mark's indignant assertions of his innocence were astoundingly irrational. Only when he was presented with positive proof did he admit guilt. In hindsight, Mark's actions were nauseatingly predictable, but not one of us was looking back then, and although his behavior ran in cycles, we weren't clairvoyant. The day of an uprising couldn't be foretold.

Mark had become an interpretive conundrum. It seemed to me that there were two ways to read his behavior, both of which involved a form of dualism. The first was Manichaean. Mark's double life resembled a pendulum that swung between light and dark. A part of him truly wanted to do well. He loved his parents and his friends, but at regular intervals he was overwhelmed by sudden urges and acted on them. Bill firmly believed in this version of the story. The other model for Mark's behavior might be compared to geological layers. The so-called good impulses were a highly developed surface that largely disguised what lay underneath. Every so often, the restless, quaking forces below would make a sudden volcanic push toward the surface and erupt. I began to think that this was Violet's theory, or more precisely that this was the theory she feared.

However one chose to read them, Mark's outbursts of delinquency exacted a cruel vengeance on Violet and Bill. At the same time, by stealing my money, Mark had brought his father and stepmother even closer to me. We were all victims, and the taboos that had existed before Mark's theft were now toppled. The anxieties Bill and Violet had once left: unspoken in the name of protecting Mark became part of our conversations. Violet raged against his betrayals and then she forgave him, only to rage and forgive again. "I'm on a love-hate roller-coaster," she said. "It's always the same ride, over and over again." And yet, despite her frustration, Mark became Violet's crusade. I noticed that lying on her desk along with several other volumes was a book called
Deprivation and Delinquency
by D. W. Winnicott. "We're not going to lose him," she told me. "We're going to fight." The problem was that Violet's frenzied battles were fought against an invisible enemy. She armed herself with passion and information, but when she rushed forward for the attack, she found nothing on the field of battle but an agreeable young man who offered no resistance.

Bill wasn't a soldier, and he didn't read a single book on teenage disturbances. He languished. Every day he looked older, grayer, more hunched, and more distracted. He reminded me of a large wounded animal whose powerful body was steadily shrinking. Violet's bouts of fury at Mark kept her vigorous. If Bill felt anger, it was turned against himself, and I watched as he slowly, steadily gnawed at his own flesh. It wasn't the content of Mark's crimes that hurt Bill—the fact that he ran off, mixed vodka with Valium, snitched his stepfather's car, or even that he lied and stole. All this could have been forgiven under other circumstances. Bill would have been far more accepting of open rebellion. Had Mark been an anarchist, he would have understood. Had he argued for his own hedonism or even run away from home to live his life according to his own daft ideas, Bill would have let him go. But Mark did none of these things. He embodied everything Bill had fought long and hard against: shallow compromise, hypocrisy, and cowardice. When he talked to me, Bill seemed more confused by his son than anything else. He told me in an amazed voice that when he had asked Mark what he most wanted from life, the boy had replied with apparent candor that he wanted people to like him.

Bill went to his studio every day, but he didn't work "I walk over there," he said, "and I hope that something will come to me, but it doesn't. I read the box scores from spring training. Then I lie down on the floor and invent ball games in my head, the way I used to when I was a kid. The games go on and on. I do the play-by-play, and then I sleep. I sleep and dream for hours, and then I stand up and go home."

I couldn't offer Bill much more than my presence, but I gave him that. There were days when I left work and went straight to the Bowery. There we would sit on the floor and talk until dinnertime. Mark wasn't our only subject. I complained about Erica, whose letters to me always managed to keep some small hope for us alive. We told stories from our childhoods and talked about paintings and books. Around five, he allowed himself to open a bottle of wine or pour himself a Scotch. In the woozy hours that followed, the light of the lengthening days shone through the window over our heads, and Bill, enlivened by the alcohol, quoted Samuel Beckett or his Uncle Mo with his finger pointed at the ceiling. He declared his love for Violet with wet, pink eyes and reaffirmed his hopes for Mark in spite of everything. He roared over bad jokes, dirty limericks, and silly puns. He railed against the art world as a paper tower of dollars and marks and yen and told me in solemn tones that he was dried up, finished as an artist. The doors had been a swan song "to all that" But a minute later, he would say that he had been thinking a lot about the color of wet cardboard. "It's beautiful on the streets after a rain, lying loose in a gutter or tied up in those neat bundles with string."