What I Loved (44 page)

Violet called regularly. She told me about Hazelden—a retreat I confused with the sanatoriums of my early childhood. My mother's parents, whom I had never known, had both died of tuberculosis in 1929 after long confinements at Nordrach, a sanatorium in the Black Forest. I imagined Mark lying on a chaise longue near a lake that sparkled in the sun. The fantasy was probably false—a mixed picture taken from my mother's stories and my memory of reading Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain.
The crucial thing, I realized, was that whenever I thought about Mark at the time, he wasn't moving. He was frozen like a person in a snapshot, and this stasis was all that mattered. I felt that Hazelden had put him on hold. Like a benevolent prison, it reined in his mobility, and I understood that what I feared most in Mark were his disappearances and subsequent roaming. Violet said she was encouraged by Mark's progress. Every Wednesday, she went to the family meetings, and she prepared herself by reading about the twelve steps. She said that Mark had had a bumpy start, but that he had slowly begun to reveal himself as the weeks went on. She talked about the other patients, or "peers," as the inmates were called at Hazelden, especially about a young woman named Debbie.

The summer ended. Classes started, and with them I lost my daily rhythm of writing the book on Bill. I continued to work on it, however, often in the evenings after reviewing my lecture notes. In late October, Violet called to say that she and Mark would be home the following week.

A couple of days after I spoke to Violet, Lazlo appeared at my door. One glance at him told me that he had bad news. I had learned to read Lazlo's body rather than his face for clues. His shoulders sloped, and when he stepped into the room, he walked slowly. When I asked him what had happened, he told me about the painting in Giles's upcoming show. The story was only a rumor then, one of those floating bits of gossip that Lazlo seemed to snatch from thin air, but a week later, the show opened and we knew it was true. Teddy Giles had used the painting of Mark in his new exhibition. The scandal revolved around the fact that the valuable canvas had been destroyed. A figure of a murdered woman, missing one arm and a leg, had been pushed through Bill's painting of his son. Her head protruded through one side of the canvas, choking her at the neck The rest of her maimed body stuck out on the other side. The force of the piece relied on the fact that an original work of art, owned by Giles, was now as mutilated as the mannequin.

The news excited the art world. If you owned a painting, it wasn't illegal to harm it. You could use it for target practice if you wanted to. I remembered Giles's warning: "I'm thinking of using it" It had made no sense to me. Use had nothing to do with art. It was by nature useless. Once the show opened, it was the only work in the show that anybody discussed. The others were similar to Giles's earlier pieces—the hacked hollow bodies of women, a couple of men, and several children; bloody clothes; severed heads; guns. Nobody seemed to care. What excited everyone—outraging some and pleasing others—was that here was an act of genuine violence. It wasn't simulated but real. The bodies were fake, but the painting was authentic. Even more titillating was the fact that Bill's work was expensive. There was considerable musing over whether the presence of the painting—in spite of the damage—raised the price of the piece as a whole. It was hard to know what Giles had actually paid for the portrait of Mark. Several high prices were quoted, but I suspect they came from Giles himself—a notoriously unreliable source.

Violet returned to an uproar. Several journalists called to get her statement. Wisely, she refused to speak to them. It wasn't long before the trail led to Mark and his association with Giles. A gossip columnist in a downtown free paper speculated on the connection between them, hinting that Giles and "Wechsler the Younger" were lovers, or had been lovers. One reviewer referred to the piece as "art rape." Hasseborg climbed on board, arguing that the desecration renewed the possibility of subversion in art. "With one shot, Theodore Giles has sent a bullet through all the pieties that surround art in our culture."

Neither Violet nor I visited the show. Lazlo went with Pinky and took a surreptitious Polaroid, which he brought back to me and Violet. Mark was staying with his mother for several days before returning to New York. Violet said that when she'd told Mark about the painting, he had been perplexed. "He seems to think that Giles is really a good guy and he can't understand why he would do this to his father's work." After Violet examined the little photo, she laid it on the table but said nothing.

"I hoped it was a copy," Lazlo said. "But it's not. I was very close to it. He used the real painting."

Pinky was sitting on the sofa. I noticed that even while sitting, her long feet were turned out in first position. "The question is," she said, "why Bill's work? He could have bought any painting for the same money and wrecked it. Why that portrait of Mark? Because he knows him?"

Lazlo opened his mouth, closed it and opened it again. "The word is Giles knows Mark because he was ..." He hesitated. "Fixed on Bill."

Violet leaned forward. "Do you have any reason to believe that?"

Through his glasses I saw Lazlo's eyes narrow slightly. "I heard he has a file on Bill that goes back to before he knew Mark—clippings, catalogues, photos."

None of us said a word. The idea that Giles had cultivated the son because of the father had dimly occurred to me in the hallway the day I found Mark in the bathroom, but what did Giles want? Had Bill still been alive, the ruined painting would have hurt him, but Bill was dead. Did Giles want to wound Mark? No, I thought to myself, I'm asking the wrong questions. I remembered Giles's face when we talked, his apparent sincerity about Mark, his comments about Teenie. "Poor Teenie. Teenie cuts herself." I remembered the sign on her skin—the connected M's, or the M attached to the W. M&M. Bill's M's—the boys, Matthew and Mark.
No K tonight
,
huh, M&M?
The changeling. I had been writing about this idea—copies, doubles, multiples of one. Confusions. I suddenly remembered the two identical male figures in Mark's collage with the two baby pictures. What was the story Bill had once told me about Dan? Yes. Dan was in the hospital after his first breakdown. Bill had had long hair then, but he'd cut it. When he went to visit Dan, Bill arrived in the ward with short hair. Dan took one look at him and said, "You cut my hair!" That happens with schizophrenics, Bill had told me. They make pronominal mistakes. And with aphasies. My thoughts weren't orderly. I saw Goya's Saturn eating his son, the photograph of Giles gnawing at his own arm, then Mark's head jerking backward from my arm as I woke up in bed. The telephone message:
M&M knows they killed me.
No.
M&M knows they killed Me.
The boy in the hallway with the green purse. Me. They called him "Me."

"Are you okay, Leo?" Violet said.

I looked at her and then I explained.

"Rafael and Me are the same person," Violet said.

"You mean the kid they say was killed by Giles?" Pinky said.

The conversation that followed quickly meandered into the outlandish. We made forays into Rafael's purported slavery, Mark's possible love affair with Giles, Teenie's exquisite mutilation, and the dead cats that had been strung around the city. Lazlo mentioned Special K and another drug called Ecstasy. The little pills were also sometimes called E's, another letter in the growing alphabet of pharmaceuticals. But the single hard fact we had was my fleeting glimpse of a boy in the hallway early one morning whom Mark had called "Me." Over the telephone an unknown girl had relayed a rumor to Violet about a possible murder and a boy named Rafael, but who was to say that the story wasn't pure fabrication? At the time, however, my imagination was running freely, and I proposed the possibility that Giles was behind the phone calls to both Violet and Bill. "He gives interviews in different voices," I said. "Maybe Giles is the girl on the telephone." Violet disagreed, saying the voice wasn't a falsetto. When Pinky mentioned voice-altering devices that could be attached to telephones, Violet started to laugh. Her laughter soon turned into high staccato shrieks, and then the tears began to run down her face. Pinky stood up, knelt in front of Violet, and put her arms around her neck. Lazlo and I sat and watched as the two women rocked each other in a long embrace. At least five minutes passed before Violet's tearful laughter subsided into small gasps for breath and convulsive sniffs. "You're worn out," Pinky said to Violet as she stroked her head. "You're all worn out."

By then, two months had gone by without a letter from Erica. On the day before Mark returned to New York, I broke our pact and called. I don't think I was expecting her to be there. I had planned a little speech for the answering machine instead, and when she picked up the telephone and said, "Hello," I gagged for a moment. After I identified myself, she didn't speak, and that interval of silence made me suddenly angry. I told her that our friendship, marriage, rapport—whatever the hell it was—had become a sham, a false, stupid, dead nothingness, and I was sick and tired of the whole business. If she had met somebody else, I deserved to know. If she had, I wanted to be free of her, wanted to leave her behind me for good.

"There's nobody else, Leo."

"Why haven't you answered my letters?"

"I've started fifty letters and thrown them away. I feel like I'm always explaining and analyzing myself, blah, blah, blah. Even with you. I'm sick of my own interminable need to put it all down and pick it apart. When I do, it looks like the worst kind of sophism, like clever lies, like excuses for myself." Erica sighed heavily, and with that familiar sound my anger disappeared. Once it was gone, I realized that I missed it. Spite has focus, a keenness that sympathy lacks, and I was sorry to find myself back in that diffuse emotional territory.

"I've been writing so much, Leo, it's been hard to write to you. It's Henry James again."

"Oh," I said.

"I love them, you know."

"Who?"

"His characters. I love them because they're so complicated, and while I'm working on them and their suffering, I forget myself. I've thought of calling—it was stupid of me not to call. I'm really sorry.''

By the end of the conversation, Erica and I had decided to call each other as well as write. I told her to send me the book whenever she felt she was ready, and I told her that I loved her. She said she loved me, too. There wasn't anybody else. There would never be anybody else. After I hung up the phone, I understood that we would never be free of each other. It gave me no joy. I didn't want to let go of Erica, and yet I rebelled against our stubborn connection. We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.

I had made the phone call at my desk, and after a couple of minutes I opened the drawer and examined my hoard of things. They looked odd to me—that curious collection of memorabilia that included thin black socks, burned cardboard, and a thin square cut from a magazine. I looked at Violet's face in the photograph, and then at Bill, whose eyes were on his wife. His wife. His widow. The dead. The living. I picked up Erica's lipstick. My wife and her beloved characters in a dead man's books. Only fictions. But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and then I picked up Matt's picture of Dave and Durango.

Mark looked better. His blue eyes had a new directness, and he had gained a few pounds during his months away. Even his voice seemed to have more resonance and conviction. His days consisted of job hunting in the morning, Narcotics Anonymous meetings in the afternoon, and appointments with a man who had become his sponsor. Alvin was a former heroin addict who couldn't have been more than thirty. He was a tidy, polite man with light brown skin, a close-cropped beard, and eyes that burned with feverish determination. Alvin was a resurrected man, a Dostoyevskian character who had crawled up from the underground to lend his support to a comrade in need. His body was a rigid block of purpose, and just looking at him made me feel languid, superfluous, and ignorant Like thousands of others, Mark's sponsor had "hit bottom" and then decided to change his life. I never learned Alvin's story, but Mark told me and Violet countless others he had gathered up at Hazelden, sordid tales of desperate need that led to lies, abandonments, betrayals and sometimes violence. Each story had a name attached to it—Maria, John, Angel, Hans, Mariko, Deborah. Mark was clearly interested in the stories, but he focused on their grim details rather than on the people who had made them happen. Perhaps he saw their actions as mirrors of his own degradation.

Violet was hopeful. Mark attended meetings every day, spoke to Alvin often, and was working as a busboy at a restaurant on Grand Street. Following the rules of the program, Violet had told him she was finished with punishments, but he couldn't live with her unless he was "clean." It was that simple. In the middle of the month, Mark knocked on my door one evening at around eleven o'clock at night. I was already in bed but still awake. When I opened the door, he was standing in the hallway. I told him to come in. He walked to the sofa but didn't sit down. He glanced at the painting of Violet, looked in my direction and then down at his shoes. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for hurting you."

I stared at him and tightened the sash of my bathrobe as if that tug would help keep in my emotions.

"I was on drugs," he continued. "They messed me up, but I'm responsible for all of it."

I didn't answer him.

"You don't have to forgive me, but it's important that I ask you. It's part of the steps."

I nodded.

Mark's face was quivering.

He's nineteen years old, I said to myself.

"I wish everything was different, that it was the way it was before." He looked at me for the first time. "You used to like me," he said. "We had good talks."

"I don't know what those talks really meant, Mark," I said. "You've lied so much ..."