What I Loved

  Bill found Mark a summer job through an acquaintance of his, another artist named Harry Freund. Freund needed a crew of workers for a large art project in Tribeca about New York's children, which was being funded by both private and public money. The enormous, impermanent work was to be part of a celebration in September for the "Month of the Child." The design included huge flags, some Christo-like wrappings of lampposts, and blown-up drawings by children from every borough. "Five days a week, nine to five, physical labor," Bill said to me. "It'll be good for him." The job started in the middle of June. While I sat with my coffee in the morning and began the day's work of puzzling out another couple of paragraphs on Goya, I would hear Mark running down the stairs on his way to work. After that, I would move to my desk to write, but for a couple of weeks I found myself distracted by thoughts of Teddy Giles and his work.

  Before his show closed at the Finder Gallery at the end of May, I went to see it. Lola's description hadn't been off the mark. The show resembled the aftermath of a massacre. Nine bodies made of polyester resin and fiberglass layon the gallery floor, dismembered, ripped open, and decapitated. What appeared to be dried blood stained the floor. The instruments of the simulated torture were displayed on pedestals: a chain saw, several knives, and a gun. On the walls hung four huge photographs of Giles. In three he was performing. He wore a hockey mask in the first and held a machete. In the second he was in drag, dolled up in a blond Marilyn wig and evening gown. In the third, he sprayed his enema. The fourth photograph presumably showed Giles as "himself." He was sitting on a long blue sofa in ordinary clothes with a television remote control in his left hand. His right hand appeared to be massaging his crotch. He looked pale, calm, and not nearly as young as Mark had said he was. I would have guessed that Giles was at least thirty.

  The show repulsed me, but I also found it bad. In the name of fairness, I had to ask myself why. Goya's painting of Saturn eating his son was just as violent. Giles used classic horror images presumably to comment on their role in the culture. The remote control was an obvious allusion to television and videos. Goya, too, borrowed from standard folk images of the supernatural that were immediately recognizable to anyone who saw his work, and they were also meant as social commentary. So why did Goya's work feel alive and Giles's dead? The medium was different. In Goya, I felt the physical presence of the painter's hand. Giles hired craftsmen to cast his bodies from live models and then fabricate them for him. And yet, I had admired other artists who had their work made for them. Goya was deep. Giles was shallow. But then sometimes shallowness is the point. Warhol had devoted himself to surfaces— to the empty veneers of culture. I didn't love Andy Warhol's work, but I could understand its interest.

  The summer before my mother died, I'd traveled alone in Italy and made the journey in Piedmont to Varallo to see the sacro monte and the chapels above the town. In the Chapel of the Massacre of the Innocents I saw the figures of weeping mothers and murdered babies with real hair and clothes, and their effect on me was WRENCHING. When I walked through the Finder Gallery and looked at Giles's polyurethane victims, I shuddered but felt little connection to them. It may have been partly due to the fact that the figures were hollow. There were a number of artificial organs, hearts, stomachs, kidneys, and gall bladders lying among the mess of bodies, but when you peered into a severed arm, there was nothing inside it.

  Nevertheless, explaining Giles's art wasn't easy. When I read Hasseborg's article in Blast, I saw that he had taken the simple route—arguing that the act of moving horror images from the flat screen into the three dimensions of a gallery forced the viewer to rethink their meaning. Hasseborg ran at the mouth for several pages, his prose roiling with hyperbolic adjectives: "brilliant," "riveting," "astounding." He quoted Baudrillard, panted over Giles's shifting identities, and then in one long and final grandiloquent sentence, pronounced him "the artist of the future."

  Henry Hasseborg also reported that Giles had been born in Baytown, Texas, not Virginia, as Mark had told me, and in Hasseborg's version of Giles's life, the artist's mother wasn't a prostitute but a hardworking waitress devoted to her son. Giles was quoted as saying, "My mother is my inspiration." As the weeks passed, I came to believe that although Hasseborg was right about the fact that Giles reproduced the gruesome images of horror flicks and cheap violent porn, he was wrong about their effect on the viewer—at least in my case. They criticized nothing and they revealed nothing. The work was simulacra excreted from the culture's bowels—sterile, commercial feces meant purely for titillation. And although I was biased against Hasseborg, I began to feel that he had fallen for Giles because the man's work was the visual embodiment of his own voice—that smirking, cynical, joyless tone he usually adopted in his articles about art and artists. Of course, Hasseborg wasn't alone. He had many compatriots who wrote just like him—although with less intelligence—other cultural journalists who had adopted the slick palaver of the moment. It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known.

  Although I didn't judge Giles's work hastily, I did judge it, and Mark's attraction to those vacuous scenes of slaughter and to the man who had created them worried me. Every time Giles gave his birthplace and age, he said something different. Hasseborg wrote that Giles was twenty-eight No doubt Giles wanted to obsfucate his background, perhaps to create a mystique about himself, but his prevarications couldn't be good for Mark, who, at the very least, was in the habit of bending the truth too often.

  Late one morning in early July, I ran into Mark on West Broadway. He was crouched on the sidewalk petting a cocker spaniel and talking to the animal's owner. He put his face close to the dog's snout and spoke to it in a low, friendly voice. When I greeted him, he jumped up and said, "Hi, Uncle Leo." Turning to the dog, he said, "Bye, Talulah." I asked him why he wasn't at work.

  "Harry doesn't need me until noon today," he said. "I'm on my way there now."

  As Mark and I walked down the street together, a young woman stuck her head out of a clothing store and waved at Mark. "Hi, Marky. What's up, honey?"

  "Darien," Mark called back. He smiled sweetly at her, lifted a hand, and wiggled his fingers. The wave struck me as out of character, but when I looked over at Mark, he grinned broadly at me and said, "She's really nice."

  Before we reached the end of the block, Mark was accosted again, this time by a younger boy. He came running from across the street, yelling, "The Mark!"

  "The Mark?" I muttered aloud.

  Mark turned to me and lifted his eyebrows as if to say, People will call you anything.

  The boy ignored me. Breathing heavily from his run, he looked up at Mark. "It's me, Freddy. Remember? From Club USA?"

  "Sure," Mark said. He sounded bored.

  "There's this really cool photo show opening tonight around the corner. I thought you might like to go."

  "Sorry," Mark said in the same laconic voice. "Can't."

  I watched Freddy press his lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his disappointment. Then he lifted his chin and smiled up at Mark "Another time, okay?"

  "Sure, Freddy," Mark said.

  Freddy ran back to the other side of the street, scooting within inches of a passing taxi. The driver pressed on the horn, and the noise blared in the street for two or three seconds.

  As Mark watched Freddy's close call, he slouched on one hip and lowered his shoulders in a posture I supposed was meant to look nonchalant.

  Then he turned to me, straightened his spine, and threw back his shoulders. When our eyes met, he must have seen a trace of confusion on my face, because he hesitated for half a second. "Gotta run, Uncle Leo. I don't want to be late for work."

  I checked my watch. "You'd better hurry."

  "I will." Mark sprinted down the block, his huge pants waving like two flags on either side of his ankles, the elastic and several inches of his underpants in full view. The pants were so
long that the bottoms had frayed and torn along the inner seams. I stood for a few moments and watched him run. His figure grew smaller and smaller, and then he turned a corner.

  As I made my way home, I realized that two narratives about Mark had unfolded inside me—one on top of the other. The superficial story went something like this: Like thousands of other teenagers, Mark had hidden parts of his life from his parents. No doubt he had experimented with drugs, slept with girls, and maybe, I had begun to think, a couple of boys. He was intelligent but a very poor student, which suggested an attitude of passive rebellion. He had lied to his parents. He had failed to tell his mother about his room in my apartment and had once slept there without my permission. Another time, he had hoped to sneak back into that room at four in the morning. He was attracted to the violent content of Teddy Giles's art, but then so were countless other young people. And finally, like so many children his age, he tried on various personas to discover which one suited him. He behaved one way with his peers and another way with adults. This version of Mark's story was ordinary, one tale like a million others of a normal, bumpy adolescence.

  The other story was similar to the one that lay above it, and its content was identical: Mark had been caught lying. He had formed a friendship with an unsavory person I privately called "the ghost," and Mark's body and voice changed depending on whom he was speaking to at the moment. But this second narrative lacked the smoothness of the first. It had holes in it, and those gaps made the story difficult to tell. It didn't rely on a larger fiction about teenage life to fill in its ragged openings but left them gaping and unanswered. And unlike the reassuring tale above it, it didn't begin when Mark was thirteen, but at some unknown and earlier date that sent me hurtling into the past rather than the future, and it came in the fractured form of isolated pictures and sounds. I remembered little Mark walking through our door when Lucille lived upstairs, his head hidden under a rubber fright mask. I saw his father's portrait of him with a lamp shade on his head—a small body hovering in the nowhere of that canvas—and then I heard Violet hesitate, breathe, and leave her sentence unfinished.

  I repressed those underground images and stuck to the coherent story on the surface. It was both more comfortable and more rational. After all, I had become a creature of mourning. Matthew's absence had made me unusually alert to nuances in Mark's character that might turn out to be of little importance. I had lost faith in predictable stories. My son was dead, and my wife lived in self-imposed exile. But I told myself that just because my own life had been rocked by accident didn't mean that other people didn't have lives that plodded along a prescribed course, becoming over the years rather like what they had expected all along.

  That summer Bill came back to me. He called almost every day, and I followed the progress of the doors as they were made on the Bowery. Although Bill put in long hours at the studio, he had more time for me, and I sensed that his desire to see me was partly the result of a new optimism he felt about Mark. Worry always took the form of retreat in Bill, and over the years I had come to recognize the outward signs of his withdrawal. His expansive gestures vanished. His eyes focused on an object across the room but failed to register the thing he was seeing. He chainsmoked cigarettes and kept a bottle of Scotch under his desk. I was sensitive to Bill's internal weather, to the intense pressure that built up inside him and then stormed quietly. Those tempests usually began and ended with Mark, but while they were raging, Bill found it hard to talk to me or anyone else. Violet may have been an exception. I don't know. I felt that Bill's inner tumult wasn't fury against Mark for his lying and irresponsibility but rather a seething anger and doubt he turned on himself. At the same time, he was eager to believe that the winds were changing, and he seized on every nuance in his son's behavior as a sign of better days to come. "He's stuck with the job," Bill said to me, "and he really enjoys it. He's stopped seeing Giles and that club bunch and is hanging out with kids his own age. It's a big relief to me, Leo. I knew that he was going to find some direction in his life." Because Violet was out doing research for her book, I saw her much less than either Bill or Mark, and not seeing her helped me to repress her imaginary twin—the woman I took to bed in my mind. Erica talked to Violet regularly, however, and she wrote that Violet was better, less anxious, and that she, too, felt a new determination in Mark that was connected to his job for Freund. "She told me that Mark is genuinely moved by the fact that the project is about children. She thinks it struck a chord with him."

  Mr Bob was still in residence on the Bowery, and every time I went to visit Bill, he regarded me through his chained door with suspicion, and every time I left, he blessed me. I knew that Mr. Bob made full-bodied appearances for Bill and Violet, but I never saw more than a fraction of his brooding face. Although Bill didn't talk about it, I understood that the old man had become his dependent. Bill left groceries at the bottom of the stairs for Mr. Bob, and once I saw a note on Bill's desk written in a tiny neat hand: "Crunchy not smooth peanut butter!" But as far as I could tell, Bill had simply accepted his downstairs neighbor as an obligatory presence in his life. He shook his head and smiled when I mentioned the old squatter, but he never complained about what I suspected were Mr. Bob's growing demands.

  In the middle of August, Bill and Violet asked if I would let Mark stay with me for two weeks while they vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. Mark couldn't abandon his job, and they felt uncomfortable leaving him in the apartment alone. I agreed to take him in and gave Mark another key. "This," I said to him, "is a sign of trust between us, and I'd like you to hold on to it, even after these two weeks are over." He held out his hand and I lowered the key into his palm. "You understand me, don't you, Mark?"

  He looked at me steadily and nodded. "I do, Uncle Leo." His bottom lip trembled with emotion, and we embarked on our two weeks together.

  Mark spoke warmly about his work for Freund, about the large colored flags he had helped mount, about the other young men and women who worked alongside him—Rebecca and Laval and Shaneil and Jesus. Mark lifted and climbed and hammered and sawed, and by the time he quit for the day, he said, his arms ached and his legs felt wobbly. When he returned home at around five or six, he often needed a nap to recover. Around eleven o'clock at night, he went out and usually didn't return until morning. "I'm staying with Jake," he would say, and leave a telephone number. "I'll be at Louisa's house. Her parents said I could sleep in the guest room." Another number. He wandered in at between six and eight in the morning and would sleep until work. His schedule changed daily. "I don't have to be in until noon," he would say, or "Harry doesn't need me today," and then he would drop into a coma until four in the afternoon.

  Sometimes, his friends came to my door to retrieve Mark for a night out. Most of them were short white girls, dressed in baby clothes with pigtails in their hair and glitter on their cheeks. One evening, a brunette came to the door with a pacifier hanging on a pink ribbon around her neck. With voices to match their infantile clothing, Mark's girlfriends cooed and piped and twittered in high, thin tones suffused with misplaced emotion. When I offered them soft drinks, they breathed out their lilting thank-yous as if I had just offered them immortality. Although Mark had played tough for Freddy, he didn't swagger or act bored with the girls. With Marina, Sissy, Jessica, and Moonlight (the daughter of glassblowers in Brooklyn), his tone was invariably gentle and earnest. When he bent down to talk to them, his handsome face softened with feeling.

  One night when Mark was out with friends, I had dinner with Lazlo and Pinky at Omen on Thompson Street. Pinky was the one who first brought up the story of the dead cats. Although I had met Pinky Navatsky several times, I had never spent much time with her until that evening. She was a tall girl in her early twenties, with red hair, gray eyes, a significant, slightly hooked nose, which gave her an air of substance, and a very long neck. Like many dancers, she had a permanent turnout that affected her walk, which was a little ducklike, but she held her head like a queen at her coro
nation, and I loved to watch her move her arms and hands while she talked. When she gestured, she often used the whole limb, moving her arm from her shoulder. At other times she would bend her elbow and open her hand toward me in a single sure sweep. Her movements weren't at all affected. She simply had a relation to her own musculature that for most of us is unthinkable. Just before she mentioned the cats, she leaned toward me, turned her palms over so they faced the ceiling, and said, "Last night I had a dream about the murdered cats. I think it was that picture in the Post"

  When I said that I knew nothing about murdered cats, Pinky explained that the flayed, skewered, and dismembered animals had been discovered around the city, nailed to walls, hanging from doorways, or simply lying in the middle of an alley, sidewalk, or subway platform.

  Lazlo informed me that the animals were all partly dressed, wearing diapers, baby outfits, pajamas, or training bras, and they had all been signed with the letters S.M. Those letters may have started the rumors that Teddy Giles was responsible. Giles called his drag persona the "She-Monster," initials that coyly but not very subtly also referred to sadomasochism. Although Giles had denied all responsibility for the cats, Lazlo said that he had kept ambiguity and shock alive by calling the animal corpses "guerrilla art at its furious best." Giles had also said he envied the artist and hoped he had been an inspiration to the unnamed "perpetrator/creator." Finally, he had given his blessing to all future "copycats." These comments drove animal-rights organizations to screeching outrage, and Larry Finder had come to work one morning to find the words ACCESSORY TO MURDER scrawled in red paint on the gallery door. I had missed the furor in the papers and the clip that had made the local television news.