What I Loved (48 page)

"I'm so sorry," he said. "Did I hurt you?"

Giles didn't let go of me. He continued to squeeze my head with his hands. I flailed, lifted my knee to jab him, but the motion caused new pain. I gasped and felt my knees buckle under me. I was sliding down the wall, and I panicked. Moving my eyes to Mark's face, I said his name, which came like a wail from my throat I called on him loudly and desperately, lifting my hands toward him, but he stood frozen in front of me. I couldn't read his face. In the same moment, a door opened beside me and a woman stepped out Giles pulled me upward and began to pat me tenderly. "You'll be all right," he said. "Should I call a doctor?" Then he backed quickly away from me and smiled at the woman in the doorway. As soon as he was out of the way, Mark moved toward me. He was talking fast under his breath. "Go back to your room now. I'll go home with you tomorrow. I'll meet you in the lobby at ten. I want to go home."

The woman was pretty and slender with puffy blond hair that fell into her eyes. Behind her I saw a little girl of about five years old with brown braids. She was holding her mother around the thighs.

"Is everything all right out here?" she asked.

Giles was pulling closed the door to the room, but I saw her eyes dart through, the crack for an instant. Her lips parted and then she examined Mark, who took a step backward. She looked at me. "That's not your room, is it?"

"No," I said.

"Are you sick?" she said.

"I've thrown out my back," I panted. "I need to rest, but I've had some difficulty finding my room."

"We took a wrong turn, ma'am," Giles said. He smiled warmly at her.

The woman examined Giles, her jaw locked. "Arnie!" she yelled without budging from the door.

I looked at Mark. His blue eyes met mine. He blinked. I read the blink as a yes. Yes, I will meet you tomorrow.

Arnie led me back to my room. He matched his wife, I thought, at least physically. He was young, with a strong build and an open face. As I walked and tried to control my shaking body, Arnie held my arm. I noticed that his touch was unlike either Mark's or Teddy's. In his tentative fingers, I felt his reserve toward me—that ordinary deference for another person's body that is usually taken for granted but that had been lost to me only minutes earlier. Several times he asked me if I wanted to stop and rest, but I insisted on continuing without a pause. It wasn't until he had helped me into my room and I saw my reflection in the large mirror beside the bathroom door, that I was able to interpret the extent of his kindness. My hair had been pushed to the wrong side of my head, and a piece of it was standing up like a stiff gray stalk. My hunched and twisted body had aged me terribly, turning me into a shriveled old man of at least eighty, but it was my face that shocked me. Although the features in the mirror resembled mine, I resisted claiming them. My cheeks appeared to have collapsed into my three-day beard, and my eyes, pink from exhaustion, had an expression that made made me think of the small terrified animals I had seen so often on Vermont roads in the headlights of my car. Appalled, I turned away and made an attempt to replace the inhuman stare I had seen in the mirror with a man's gaze and to thank Arnie for his kindness. He was standing near the door with his arms folded beneath the words HOLY CROSS LITTLE LEAGUE which ran across the front of his blue sweatshirt. "Are you sure you don't want a doctor or at least an ice pack or something?''

"No," I said. "I can't thank you enough."

Arnie lingered for a moment in front of the door. His eyes met mine. "Those punks were harassing you, weren't they?"

I could only nod. His pity was nearly beyond what I could bear at that moment.

"Well, good night," he said. "I hope your back's better in the morning." Then he shut the door.

I left the bathroom light on. Because I couldn't lie flat, I propped myself up with pillows and plied myself with Scotch from the minibar. That muted the worst of the pain, for a short time anyway. All night I had motion sickness. Even when the spasms in my back woke me and I remembered where I was, I felt that the bed was moving, moving against my will, and whenever I slept, I was still moving in a dream—on a plane or a boat or a train or an escalator. Waves of nausea coursed through me, and my intestines churned as though I had been poisoned. In the dreams, I boarded one vehicle after another and listened to the sound of my heart pounding like an old clock, and it wasn't until I woke that I understood that the muscle was silent. When I opened my eyes and tried to shake off that sickening illusion of movement, consciousness brought Giles's fingers to my hair and his hands tightening around my face. The humiliation burned me, and I wanted to expel the memory, to force it out of my chest and lungs, where it had lodged itself like a fire in my body. I wanted to think, to turn to what had happened and make sense of it. I began to ponder what I had seen in the room—the sheet, the rope, the gun, the leftover food. It had looked like a crime scene, but even while I was seeing it, even while I was staring into the room, I had intimated a hint of the fake. The gun might have been a toy. The blood, colored water—all of it a setup. But then Giles's touch came back to me. That had been real. A sore lump had formed at the back of my head where my skull had hit the wall.

And Mark? All night his face had come and gone before me, and I knew that his last words had given me hope. People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope. His words gave me hope, and crumpled up in that bed I heard them again and again in my mind. "I'll go home with you tomorrow.'' He had hidden that statement from Giles, and this fact opened another possible interpretation of his acts. Some part of his damaged person wanted to go home. Weak and vacillating, Mark had been infected by the stronger personality of Giles, who had an almost hypnotic power over him, but there was another place inside him, the place Bill had always insisted was there—a room where he held on to those who loved him and whom he loved. I had called out to him, and he had answered me. A tormented combination of hope and guilt carried me into the morning. I had said a terrible thing to Mark when I'd spoken to him about his father's painting. At the time, I had believed it, but I suffered from the conviction that my comparison had been monstrous. A thing should never be measured against a person. Never. I take it back, I said to him in my mind. I take it back. And then, as if it were a footnote to my thoughts, I remembered that I had read somewhere, perhaps it was in Gershom Scholem, that in Hebrew "to repent" and "to return" are the same word.

But Mark didn't come to meet me in the lobby at ten o'clock, and when I called his room, no one answered. I waited a full hour for him. The man who sat on a bench in that lobby had made Herculean efforts to look presentable. He had shaved, holding his head sideways to prevent further injury to his back. He had vigorously rubbed the stain on his pants leg with soap and water, despite the excruciating jerks the cleaning gave his spine. He had combed his hair, and when he sat down on that bench to wait, he had contorted his body into a position he imagined might look normal. He scanned the lobby. He hoped. He revised his earlier interpretation of preceding events, made another one, and then another. He deliberated on several possibilities until he lost hope and hauled his miserable body into a cab, which drove him to the airport. I felt sorry for him, because he had understood so little.

Three mornings after I returned to New York, I was moving easily around my apartment, thanks to Dr. Huyler and a drug called Relafen. At about the same time, two plainclothes detectives came to Violet's door asking for Mark. I didn't see them, but as soon as the policemen were gone, Violet came downstairs to tell me about their visit. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and Violet was wearing a long white cotton nightgown with a high neck. When I first saw her, I thought she looked a little like an old-fashioned doll. She began to talk to me, and I noticed that her voice fell into the half whisper she had used when she'd called me from the studio the day Bill had died.

"They said that they just wanted to ask him some questions. I said that Mark had been traveling with Teddy Giles and that the last place I knew he had been was Nashville. I said that he had had problems, that he might not call me at all, but if he was in touch, I would tell him they wanted to talk to him"—-Violet took a breath—"in connection with the murder of Rafael Hernandez. That was all. They didn't ask me any questions. They said 'Thank you,' and then they left They must have found his body. It's all true, Leo. Do you think I should call them and tell them what we know? I didn't say anything."

"What do we know, Violet?"

She looked confused for a moment. "We don't really know anything, do we? "

"Not about the murder." I listened to the word as I said it. So common. The word was everywhere all the time, but I didn't want it to come easily from me. I wanted it to be difficult to say, more difficult than it was.

"There's the message on Bill's machine that says Mark knows. I never erased it. Do you think he knows?"

"He said he did, but then he changed his story and said the boy was in California."

"If he knows and he stays with Giles, what does it mean?"

I shook my head.

"Is it a crime, Leo?"

"Just knowing, you mean?"

She nodded.

"I suppose it depends on how you know, if you have any real evidence. Mark might not believe the story at all. He might really think that the kid ran away..."

Violet was shaking her head back and forth. "No, Leo. Remember, Mark mentioned that two detectives were asking questions at the Finder Gallery That was when Giles left town. Isn't there some law about aiding a fugitive?"

"We don't know that there's a warrant for Giles's arrest. We don't know that the police have any evidence at all. To be honest, Violet, we don't even know that Giles killed that boy. It's unlikely but possible that he might be bragging about a murder he didn't commit—simply because he knew about it. That would make him culpable, but in a different way."

Violet looked past me and over at the painting of herself. "Detective Lightner and Detective Mills," she said. "A white man and a black man. They didn't look young, and they didn't look old. They weren't fat, and they weren't thin. They were both very nice, and they didn't seem to expect anything from me. They called me Mrs. Wechsler." Violet paused and turned back to me. "It's funny, since Bill died I like being called that by strangers. There's no Bill anymore. There's no marriage anymore, and I never changed my name. I've always been Violet Blom, but now his name is something I want to hear over and over again, and I like answering to it. It's like wearing his shirts. I want to cover myself in what's left of him, even if it's only his name." Violet's voice carried no emotion. She was just explaining the facts.

A few minutes later, she left me to go upstairs. An hour after that, she knocked on my door again and explained that she was on the way to the studio, but she wanted to give me copies of Bill's tapes to watch when I had the time. Bernie had been dragging his feet, she said, because he had so much to look after, but he had finally handed over copies of the videos. "Bill didn't know what the work was going to look like. He talked about building a big room for watching the tapes, but he kept changing his mind. He was going to call it
Icarus.
I know that, and that he made lots of drawings of a boy falling."

Violet looked down at her boots and chewed on her lip.

"Are you okay?" I said.

She lifted her eyes and said, "I have to be."

"What do you do in the studio all day, Violet? There's not much left there."

Violet's eyes narrowed. "I read," she said in a fierce voice. "First I put on Bill's work clothes and then I read. I read all day. I read from nine in the morning until six at night. I read and read and read until I can't see the page anymore."

The first images on the screen were of newborns—tiny beings with distorted heads and frail, squirming limbs. Bill's camera never left the infants. Adults were present as arms, chests, shoulders, knees, thighs, voices, and occasionally a large face that intruded into the lens and came close to the baby. The first child was asleep in a woman's arms. The little creature had a large head, thin blue-red arms and legs, and was dressed in a checkered suit and an absurd little white bonnet that tied under its chin. That infant was followed by another strapped to a man's chest. His dark hair stuck straight up like Lazlo's, and his black eyes turned toward the camera in dumbfounded amazement Bill followed along as the children rode in carriages, slept in Snuglis, lolled on a parental arm, or had seizures of desperate weeping on a shoulder. Sometimes the mostly unseen parents or nannies delivered monologues on sleeping habits, nursing, breast pumps, or spitting up as the traffic rumbled and screeched behind them, but the talk and noise were incidental to the moving pictures of the small strangers—the one who turned his bald head away from his mother's breast, leaking milk from the sides of his mouth; the dark-skinned beauty who sucked an invisible breast in her sleep and then appeared to smile; the alert baby whose blue eyes moved up toward its mother's face and gazed at her with what looked like profound concentration.

As far as I could tell, the only principle that guided Bill was age. Every day he must have gone out and looked for children a little older than the day before. Gradually his camera left infants and turned to older babies, who sat up, chirped, squealed, grunted, and put every loose object they could reach into their mouths. A big baby girl sucked on her bottle as she twined her mother's hair around her fingers in a swoon of contentment. A little boy howled as his father dislodged a rubber ball from between his gums. A baby sitting on a woman's lap reached toward an older girl sitting inches away from him and began swatting her knees. An adult hand appeared and smacked the baby's arms. It couldn't have been very hard, because the baby reached out and did it again, only to be smacked again. The camera moved back for a moment and showed the woman's tired, vacant face before it zoomed in on a third child sleeping in her stroller and held for a few seconds on her dirty cheeks and the two translucent ribbons of snot that ran from her nose to her mouth.