What I Loved

  Lazlo chewed thoughtfully and took long breaths through his nose. "You're out of it, did you know that, Leo?"

  I admitted that I was.

  "Lazlo," Pinky said, "not everybody's like you, always checking out everything all the time. Leo has other things to think about."

  "No offense," Lazlo said to me.

  After I had made it clear to both of them that I wasn't the least bit upset by the comment, Lazlo continued, "Giles'll say anything if he thinks it'll be hyped."

  "It's true," Pinky said. "He might not have a thing to do with those cats."

  "Do Bill and Violet know about this?"

  Lazlo nodded. "But they think Mark's not seeing Giles."

  "And you know that he is."

  "We saw them together," Pinky said.

  "At the Limelight last Tuesday." After a vigorous inhalation through his nose, Lazlo said, "I hate to tell Bill, but I'll do it. The kid's in over his head."

  "Even if Giles isn't murdering cats," Pinky said, leaning across the table, "he's creepy. I'd never seen him before, and it wasn't his makeup or clothes that got me, it was something in his eyes."

  Before we said good-bye, Lazlo slipped me an envelope. I had gotten used to these parting gifts. He left them for Bill, too. Usually he typed up a quotation for me to think about. I had already been treated to Thomas Bernhard's spleen: "Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe ... Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities," and to a quote from Philip Guston I particularly liked: "To know and yet how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all." That night I opened the envelope and read: "Kitsch is always in the process of escaping into rationality. Hermann Broch."

  I asked myself if the dead cats were meant to be a form of kitsch, a thought that led to ruminations on animal sacrifice, the chain of being, ordinary slaughterhouses, and finally to pets. I remembéred that as a little boy Mark had kept white mice, guinea pigs, and a parakeet named Peeper. One day the cage door had fallen on Peeper's neck and killed him. After the accident, Mark and Matt had paraded around our loft with a shoe box that held the stiff little corpse, singing the only song they knew that would function as a dirge: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

  When Mark returned from work the next day, I couldn't bring myself to mention either Giles or the cats, and at dinner he had so much to tell me about his day, I never found a good opening for the subject. That morning he had helped mount his favorite blown-up drawing, by a six- year-old girl in the Bronx—a self-portrait with her turtle, which looked very much like a dinosaur. In the afternoon, his friend Jesus had fallen off a ladder but was saved by a huge pile of canvas flags that were piled beneath him on the ground. Before Mark left for the night, he retreated to the bathroom and I heard him whistling. He put a telephone number on the table with a name beside it. Allison Fredericks: 677-8451. "You can reach me at Allison's," he said.

  After Mark was gone, a vague suspicion began to churn inside me. I listened to Janet Baker singing Berlioz, but the music didn't drive away the uneasiness that constricted my lungs. I studied the name and telephone number Mark had left on the table. After twenty minutes of hesitation, I picked up the telephone and called. A man answered. "I'd like to speak to Mark Wechsler," I said.

  "Who?"

  "He's a friend of Allison's."

  "There's no Allison here."

  I looked at the number. Maybe I had dialed wrong. Very carefully I punched in the numbers again. The same man answered and I hung up.

  When I confronted Mark about the wrong number the following morning, he looked puzzled. He dug into his pocket, produced a number, and laid it beside the little piece of paper he had written on the night before. "I see what I did." He spoke in a bright, clear voice. "I reversed these two numbers. Look here. "It's four eight, not eight four. I'm sorry. I guess I was in a hurry."

  His innocent face made me feel foolish. Then I confessed that I had been feeling upset because of Lazlo's story about seeing him with Giles and because of the cat rumors.

  "Oh, Uncle Leo," he said. "You should've talked to me right away. I ran into Teddy when I was out with some other friends, but we're not really close anymore. I have to tell you something, though. Teddy likes to shock people. It's his thing, but he wouldn't hurt a fly. I mean that. I've seen him carry flies out of his apartment like this." Mark cupped his hands. "Those poor cats. It just makes me sick. You know, I've got two cats at Mom's, Mirabelle and Esmeralda. They're like my best friends."

  "The rumor probably got started because Giles's work is so violent," I said.

  "But that's all fake!" Mark said. "I thought Violet was the only person who didn't know the difference." Mark rolled his eyes.

  "Violet doesn't know the difference?"

  "Well, she acts like it's real or something. She never even lets me watch horror movies. What does she think? I'm going to go out and cut somebody because I saw it on TV?"

  Mark looked very pale during the second week of our time together, but then he must have been exhausted. Friends of his phoned all day and half the night, asking for Mark, Marky, and The Mark. In order to get any work done, I stopped answering the telephone and listened to the messages later in the day. On Tuesday, at around two o'clock in the morning, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the phone and heard a man's deep voice say, "M&M?" "No," I said, and then, "Do you mean Mark?" I heard a click and the line went dead. The steady calls, Mark's erratic comings and goings, his things scattered around the apartment had all started to confuse me. I wasn't used to living with another person anymore, and I found that I misplaced some things and lost others. My pen vanished for a couple of days and then I found it behind a sofa cushion. A kitchen knife disappeared. I couldn't find my silver letter opener, which had been a present from my mother. As I sat at my desk, I was often distracted by unfocused worry about Mark.

  One afternoon, I stood up from my desk and walked to Matt's room. Stacks of records and CDs rose from the floor. Flyers littered the shelves.

  Advertisements with names like Starlight Techno and Machine Paradise were plastered to the walls. Sneakers lay everywhere. He must have owned twenty pairs. Pants, sweaters, socks, and T-shirts had been strewn on the bed, over the chair, and in heaps on the floor. Some of them still had store tags clinging to their necks or waistlines. I walked into the room and picked up a videotape lying on the desk: Killers Unleashed. I had never seen the movie but had read about it. It was based on the true story of a boy and girl who first murder their parents and then cross the country on a rampage of theft and homicide. A respected director had filmed it, and the movie had caused some controversy. I put it down and noticed an unopened box of Legos lying only inches away. Its cover featured a merry little policeman, one stiff arm raised in a salute. On the desk I noticed gum wrappers, a green rabbit's foot, keys to somewhere, a curly straw, old Star Wars figures, stickers of a cartoon dog, and, oddly enough, several broken pieces of dollhouse furniture. I also found a xeroxed flyer, which I picked up and read. It had been typed entirely in capital letters:

  WHY ARE YOU AT THIS EVENT? THE RAVE SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNO. IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT DRUGS. THIS SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT FASHION. IT IS SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT UNITY AND HAPPINESS. IT IS ABOUT BEING YOURSELF AND BEING LOVED FOR IT. IT SHOULD BE A HARBOR FROM OUR SOCIETY. BUT OUR SCENE RIGHT NOW IS DISINTEGRATING. WE DON'T NEED FRONTS AND ATTITUDES IN OUR SCENE. THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS TOUGH ENOUGH. OPEN YOUR HEARTS AND LET THE GOOD FEELINGS FLOW. LOOK AROUND YOU, PICK A PERSON, ASK THEM THEIR NAME, AND MAKE A FRIEND. ELIMINATE BOUNDARIES. OPEN YOUR HEARTS AND MINDS. RAVERS UNITE AND KEEP OUR SCENE ALIVE!

  Around the edges of the paper in hand-drawn letters the nameless author had written little slogans by hand: "You gotta be real!" "Be yourself!" "Be happy!" "Group hugs!" and "You're beautiful!"

  There was something pitiful about the flyer's crudely written idealism, but the sentiments expressed were nothing if not pure. The text made me think of the flower children who long ago had become adults.


  Even in the sixties, I had been too old to believe that "eliminating boundaries" was of much use in the world. After carefully replacing the flyer, I looked up from the desk and studied Matt's watercolor. It should be dusted, I thought. Then I looked through the window of Dave's apartment and examined the figure of the old man for a couple of minutes and wondered what Matthew would have been like at sixteen. Would he too have gone to raves and dyed his hair green or pink or blue? Hours after I had left the room, I remembered that I had planned to dust the watercolor. but by then I had lost the will to return to the chaotic room, with its litter, garish signs, and pathetic little manifesto.

  The last days of my cohabitation with Mark were marred by a clutching distress that came over me as soon as he left the apartment but was then instantly dispelled as soon as I saw him again. I had begun to feel that Mark's physical presence had an almost magical quality. While I was looking at him, I always believed him. The frank sincerity in his face instantly banished all my doubts, but once he was out of view, the dull anxiety would rise up again. On Friday evening he emerged from the bathroom, and I noticed green glitter on his white face and neck.

  "I'm worried about you, Mark. You're exhausting yourself. I think a quiet night at home would do you good."

  "I'm okay. I'm just hanging out with my friends." Mark reached over and patted my arm. "Really, we just listen to music and watch movies and stuff. The thing is, I'm young now. I'm young and I want to have fun and experiences now when I'm young." He looked at me with sympathy, as if I were the living embodiment of the adage "too little, too late."

  "When I was your age," I said to him, "my mother gave me a piece of advice that I've never forgotten. She said, 'Don't do anything you don't really want to do.' "

  Mark's eyes widened.

  "She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don't do it."

  Mark nodded soberly and then continued to nod several times. "That's smart," he said. "I'm going to remember that."

  Saturday night, I went to bed knowing that Mark would be leaving the next day. The knowledge of Bill and Violet's imminent return affected me like a sleeping pill, and not long after Mark left the house, at around eleven, I fell asleep. Sometime during the course of the night, I had a long dream that began as an erotic adventure with Violet, who didn't look like herself, and then turned into a dream in which I was walking down long corridors in a hospital, where I found Erica in one of the beds and discovered that she had given birth to a baby girl. The child's paternity was in question, however, and just as I was kneeling by Erica's bed and telling her that I didn't care who the father was, that I would be the father, the baby disappeared from the hospital ward. Erica was strangely indifferent to the missing child, but I felt desperate, and suddenly I was the one lying in the hospital bed, and Erica was sitting beside me pinching my arm in a gesture that was supposed to comfort me but didn't. I woke up with the peculiar sensation that someone really was pinching my arm. I opened my eyes and jerked up in surprise. Mark was leaning over me, his head only inches from my face. He lurched backward and began to walk toward the door.

  "Good God," I said. "What are you doing?"

  "Nothing," he whispered. "Go back to sleep." He had reached the doorway to my bedroom, and the ceiling lamp in the hallway lit his profile. His lips looked very red as he turned away from me. My arm was still stinging. "Did you want to wake me?" Mark spoke without turning around. "I heard you yell in your sleep and I wanted to make sure you were okay." His voice sounded deliberate, mechanical. "Go back to sleep." He disappeared, closing the door softly behind him.

  I turned on the lamp beside my bed and looked down at my forearm. There was a haze of red on it. The color, which looked like the traces of a pastel crayon, had matted some of the hairs. I brought the arm closer to my face and noticed a circular pattern of tiny irregular indentations like pock marks gouged into my skin. The word that came to mind made me breathe faster: teeth. I looked at the clock. It was five o'clock in the morning. I put my finger to the red again and saw that it wasn't crayon but something less waxy and softer—lipstick. I got out of bed, walked to the door, and locked it. After I returned to bed, I listened to Mark shuffling around the room across the hall. I stared at my arm and scrutinized the marks. I went so far as to bite my own arm rather gently and then compare the ridges in my skin. Yes, I said to myself, he bit me. The inflamed circle notched into my arm faded very slowly, despite the fact that the pressure hadn't broken the skin or drawn blood. What could it possibly mean? I realized that it hadn't occurred to me to run after Mark and demand an explanation. For two weeks, I had been wobbling between trust and dread when it came to Mark, but my worries had never veered toward suspicions of madness. This sudden, inexplicable, thoroughly irrational act threw me completely off balance. What on earth would he have to say to me when I saw him later in the day?

  I woke and slept and slept and woke for hours. By the time I crawled out of bed and lumbered toward the coffee machine around ten, Mark was sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal.

  "Boy, you slept late," he said. "I got up early."

  I grabbed the bag of coffee from the refrigerator and began spooning its dark contents into the filter. An answer seemed impossible. While I waited for the coffee, I stared at Mark, who was shoveling a colored cereal with marshmallows into his mouth. He crunched happily on the repellent concoction and gave me a smile. All at once, I felt that I was the one who had gone insane overnight. I looked at my arm. There was no trace of the bite. It happened, I said to myself, but maybe Mark doesn't remember it. Perhaps he had been drugged or even asleep. Erica had held conversations with me while she walked in her sleep. I brought my cup of coffee over to the table.

  "Uncle Leo, you're shaking," Mark said. His limpid blue eyes looked concerned. "Are you okay?"

  I removed my trembling hand from the tabletop. The question in my throat—Do you remember coming into my room and biting my arm last night?—refused to form itself on my lips.

  He put down his spoon. "Guess what?" he said. "I met a girl last night. Her name is Lisa. She's really pretty, and I think she likes me. I'm going to introduce you to her."

  I picked up my coffee cup. "That's nice," I said. "I'd like to meet her."

  In the second week of September, Bill ran into Harry Freund on White Street. Bill asked Harry about the unveiling of the children's project, which was only a week away, and then asked how Mark had been as a worker. "Well," Freund said, "the week he worked for me, he was great, but then he disappeared. I haven't seen him since."

  Bill quoted and requoted Freund's words to me, as if to reassure himself that the man had actually said them. Then he said, "Mark must be crazy."

  I was stupefied. Every day for two weeks Mark had come home and described his days at work to me in elaborate detail. "It's so great that the project's about kids, especially poor kids who don't have anybody to speak for them." That's what he had said to me. "But how did Mark explain it?" I asked Bill.

  "He said the job for Harry was boring, that he didn't like it, so he left and got another one. He worked at some magazine called Split World as a gofer, and he made seven dollars an hour instead of minimum wage."

  "But why didn't he just tell you?"

  "He kept mumbling that he thought I wouldn't like it if he quit."

  "But all those lies," I said. "Doesn't he know that it's much worse to lie than it is to get another job?"

  "I kept telling him that," Bill said.

  "He needs help," I said.

  Bill fumbled with his cigarettes. Extracting one, he lit it and blew the smoke away from me. "I had a long talk with Lucille," he said. "Actually, I did most of the talking. She listened to me, and then after I had been ranting for a while, she volunteered a piece of information she had plucked from some article in a parenting magazine. The author had said that a lot of teenagers lie, that it's part of maturing. I told her that this wasn't just lyi
ng. This was an Academy Award-winning performance. This was completely nuts! She didn't answer me, and I stood there with the telephone in my hand, shaking with anger, and then I hung up on her. I shouldn't have done it, but it's like she doesn't understand the magnitude of this thing at all."

  "He needs help," I said again. "Psychiatric help."

  Bill pressed his lips together and nodded slowly. "We're looking for a doctor, a therapist, someone. It won't be the first one, Leo. He's been in therapy before."

  "I didn't know that."

  "He saw a man in Texas, a Dr. Mussel, and then he saw someone in New York for a year. The divorce, you know. We thought it would help..." Bill covered his face with his hands, and I saw his shoulders tremble for a moment. He was sitting in my chair by the window. I was seated beside him and had grabbed his forearm as a gesture of comfort. As I watched the smoke move upward from the cigarette that hung loosely between his two fingers, I remembered Mark's earnest face when he told me about Jesus taking a fall.

  Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn't say but might have said. When you stop lying, the gap between your words and inner belief closes, and you continue on a path of trying to match your spoken words to the language of your thoughts, at least those fit for other peoples' consumption. Mark's lie had departed from ordinary lying because it required the careful maintenance of a full-blown fiction. It got up in the morning, went to work, came home, and reported on its day for nine long weeks. Looking back on my fourteen days with Mark, I saw that the lie had been far from perfect. If Mark had been working outdoors all summer, he wouldn't have been white as an eggshell; he would have been tan. Also, his schedule had changed a little too often and a little too conveniently. But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wished that what he had told me had been true.