What I Loved

  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.

  Her wardrobe for the job had consisted of bikinis that related to the game's fruit theme. "Lemon yellow," she said, "Strawberry red, lime green, you get the picture." She pointed to her head. "And I had to wear these fruit hats."

  "Carmen Miranda style," I said.

  Lola looked at me blankly. "The show was pretty stupid, but I learned Italian, and it got me a couple of film roles."

  "Without fruit?"

  She laughed and adjusted her bustier, which had been sinking slowly for about half an hour. "No fruit."

  When I asked her how she knew Bernie, she said, "I met him last week in this gallery—the Teddy Giles show. Oh my God, it was so disgusting." Lola made a face to indicate her revulsion and lifted her bare shoulders. She was very young and very pretty, and when she talked, her earrings shook against her long neck. She pointed her fork at Bernie and said loudly, "We're talking about that show where we met. Wasn't it disgusting?"

  Bernie turned toward Lola. "Well," he said. "I'm not going to disagree with you, but he's made quite a stir. He started out performing in clubs. Larry Finder saw him and brought the work into the gallery."

  "But what's the work like? " I said.

  "It's bodies all cut up—women and men and even kids," Lola said as she wrinkled her forehead and stretched her lips to telegraph her distaste. "Blood and guts all over the place, and then they had photographs from this show he did in some club—spurting an enema. I guess it was red water, but it looked like blood. Oh my God, I had to cover my eyes. It was soooo gross."

  Jillian looked at Bill. She raised her eyebrows. "You know who's taken Giles under his critical wing?"

  Bill shook his head.

  "Hasseborg. He wrote this long article about him in Blast."

  A brief look of pain crossed Bill's face.

  "What did he say?" I asked.

  "That Giles exposes the celebration of violence in American culture," Jillian said. "It's Hollywood horror deconstructed—something like that."

  "Jillian and I went to the show," Fred said. "I thought it was pretty hokey, thin stuff. It's supposed to be shocking, but it's not really. It's tame when you think of the artists who've really gone the distance. That woman who has plastic surgery to change her face to look like a Picasso or a Manet or a Modigliani. I always forget her name. You remember when Tom Otterness shot that dog?"

  "Puppy," Violet said.

  Lola's face fell. "He shot a little puppy?"

  "It's all on tape," Fred explained. "The little guy's bouncing all over the place and then bang." He paused. "But I guess it had cancer."

  "You mean it was sick and going to die?"

  Nobody answered Lola.

  "Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm," Jillian volunteered.

  "The shoulder," Bernie corrected. "It was his shoulder."

  "Arm, shoulder." Jillian smiled. "Same area. Schwarzkogler, now there's radical art."

  "What did he do?" Lola asked.

  "Well, for one thing," I said to her, "he sliced his penis lengthwise and had the whole thing photographed. Pretty gruesome and bloody."

  "Wasn't there another guy who did the same thing?" Violet said.

  "Bob Flanagan," Bernie said. "But it was nails. He hammered nails into it."

  Lola's mouth dropped open. "That's sick," she said. "I mean mentally sick. I don't think that's art. That's just sick."

  I turned to look at Lola's face, with its perfectly plucked eyebrows, little nose, and gleaming mouth. "If I picked you up and put you in a gallery, you'd be art," I said to her. "Better art than a lot I've seen. Prescriptive definitions don't apply anymore."

  Lola moved her shoulders. "You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?"

  "Exactly. It's perspective—not content"

  Violet leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. "I went to the show," she said. "Lola's right. If you take it seriously at all, it's horrible. At the same time it feels like a joke—a one-liner." She paused. "It's hard to tell whether it's purely cynical or whether there's something else in it—a sadistic pleasure behind hacking up those fake bodies ..."

  The conversation drifted away from Giles again and onto other artists. Bill continued to talk to Jillian. He didn't participate in the lively dispute on the best bread in New York that followed or in the discourses on shoes and shoe stores that somehow came after that, which led to Lola lifting up her long leg to display a sandal with stiletto heels by a designer with a very curious name I forgot instantly. On the walk home, Bill was silent. Violet linked arms with both of us.

  "I wish Erica were here," she said.

  I didn't answer her for a moment. "She doesn't want to be here, Violet. I don't know how many times we've planned visits. Every six months she writes to say she's coming to New York, and then she backs down. Three times I had plane tickets to California, and each time she wrote to say she couldn't see me. She wasn't strong enough. She told me she's living a posthumous life in California and that's what sh
e wants."

  "For someone who isn't alive, she's written a lot of articles," Violet said.

  "She likes paper," I said.

  "She's still in love with you," Violet said. "I know."

  "Or maybe she's in love with the idea of me on the other side of the country."

  At that moment Bill stopped walking. He let go of Violet, looked up at the night sky, spread his arms, and said loudly, "We know nothing. We know absolutely nothing about anything." His loud voice carried down the street "Nothing!" He boomed the word again with obvious satisfaction.

  Violet reached for Bill's hand and tugged at him. "Now that we've settled that, let's go home," she said. He didn't resist her. Violet held his hand as he shuffled down the block with his head lowered and his shoulders hunched. I thought he looked like a child being led home by his mother. Later, I wondered what had provoked Bill's outburst. It might have been the talk about Erica, but then again, it might have been rooted in what had been revealed earlier: Mark happened to have chosen a friend whose staunchest supporter was the man who had written the cruelest review of his father's work to date.