What I Loved

  However one chose to read them, Mark's outbursts of delinquency exacted a cruel vengeance on Violet and Bill. At the same time, by stealing my money, Mark had brought his father and stepmother even closer to me. We were all victims, and the taboos that had existed before Mark's theft were now toppled. The anxieties Bill and Violet had once left: unspoken in the name of protecting Mark became part of our conversations. Violet raged against his betrayals and then she forgave him, only to rage and forgive again. "I'm on a love-hate roller-coaster," she said. "It's always the same ride, over and over again." And yet, despite her frustration, Mark became Violet's crusade. I noticed that lying on her desk along with several other volumes was a book called Deprivation and Delinquency by D. W. Winnicott. "We're not going to lose him," she told me. "We're going to fight." The problem was that Violet's frenzied battles were fought against an invisible enemy. She armed herself with passion and information, but when she rushed forward for the attack, she found nothing on the field of battle but an agreeable young man who offered no resistance.

  Bill wasn't a soldier, and he didn't read a single book on teenage disturbances. He languished. Every day he looked older, grayer, more hunched, and more distracted. He reminded me of a large wounded animal whose powerful body was steadily shrinking. Violet's bouts of fury at Mark kept her vigorous. If Bill felt anger, it was turned against himself, and I watched as he slowly, steadily gnawed at his own flesh. It wasn't the content of Mark's crimes that hurt Bill—the fact that he ran off, mixed vodka with Valium, snitched his stepfather's car, or even that he lied and stole. All this could have been forgiven under other circumstances. Bill would have been far more accepting of open rebellion. Had Mark been an anarchist, he would have understood. Had he argued for his own hedonism or even run away from home to live his life according to his own daft ideas, Bill would have let him go. But Mark did none of these things. He embodied everything Bill had fought long and hard against: shallow compromise, hypocrisy, and cowardice. When he talked to me, Bill seemed more confused by his son than anything else. He told me in an amazed voice that when he had asked Mark what he most wanted from life, the boy had replied with apparent candor that he wanted people to like him.

  Bill went to his studio every day, but he didn't work "I walk over there," he said, "and I hope that something will come to me, but it doesn't. I read the box scores from spring training. Then I lie down on the floor and invent ball games in my head, the way I used to when I was a kid. The games go on and on. I do the play-by-play, and then I sleep. I sleep and dream for hours, and then I stand up and go home."

  I couldn't offer Bill much more than my presence, but I gave him that. There were days when I left work and went straight to the Bowery. There we would sit on the floor and talk until dinnertime. Mark wasn't our only subject. I complained about Erica, whose letters to me always managed to keep some small hope for us alive. We told stories from our childhoods and talked about paintings and books. Around five, he allowed himself to open a bottle of wine or pour himself a Scotch. In the woozy hours that followed, the light of the lengthening days shone through the window over our heads, and Bill, enlivened by the alcohol, quoted Samuel Beckett or his Uncle Mo with his finger pointed at the ceiling. He declared his love for Violet with wet, pink eyes and reaffirmed his hopes for Mark in spite of everything. He roared over bad jokes, dirty limericks, and silly puns. He railed against the art world as a paper tower of dollars and marks and yen and told me in solemn tones that he was dried up, finished as an artist. The doors had been a swan song "to all that" But a minute later, he would say that he had been thinking a lot about the color of wet cardboard. "It's beautiful on the streets after a rain, lying loose in a gutter or tied up in those neat bundles with string."

  They were afternoons of drama—the drama of Bill, who never bored me, because when I was near him I felt his weight. The man was heavy with life. So often it's lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that. He had always been a stone, massive and hulking, charged from within by magnetic power. I was pulled toward him, more than ever before. Because he was suffering, I gave up my defenses and my envy. I had never examined that feeling, had never admitted to it, but I did then. I had envied him—potent, stubborn, lustful Bill, who had made and made and made until he felt that the making was over. I had envied him Lucille. And Violet. And I had envied him Mark, if only because the boy had lived. The truth was bitter, but Bill's pain brought a new frailty to his character, and that infirmity had made us more equal.

  Violet joined us at the Bowery one evening in early March with a brown bag of Thai food that we ate on the floor. We gobbled down the dinner like three starved refugees and then stayed in the studio and talked and drank into the night Violet crawled onto the mattress and lay on her back and spoke to us from that position. After a while, we all found a spot on the bed—Violet in the middle, Bill and I on either side of her—three contented drunks who kept up a piecemeal conversation. At around one o'clock in the morning, I said I had to go home or I'd never get to work tomorrow. Violet grabbed Bill's arm and then mine. "Five more minutes," she said. "I'm happy tonight. I haven't been happy like this for a long, long time. It's so good to be forgetful and free and stupid."

  Half an hour later, we were walking on Canal Street toward Greene. Our arms were still linked, and Violet was still between me and Bill. She sang us a Norwegian folk song—something about a fiddler and his fiddle. Bill joined in the chorus, his voice deep and loud and flat. I sang, too, imitating the sounds of the meaningless words as we marched home. While she was singing, Violet lifted her chin and her face caught the light of the streetlamps above us. The air was cold but clear and dry, and as she hugged my arm tightly, I could feel the lift in her step. Before she launched into the second verse, she took a big breath and smiled at the sky, and then, as I continued to look down at her, I saw her close her eyes for a couple of seconds to blind herself to everything but the swelling happiness that sounded in our voices. We all felt it that night—the return of joy for no reason. When I closed my door after saying good night to Bill and Violet, I knew that by morning the feeling would be gone. Transience was part of its grace.

  For months, Lazlo kept his ears open. I don't know exactly where he picked up his information. He roamed the galleries, and he and Pinky were often out at night. All I know is that when the gossip and rumors flew, they seemed to fly in Lazlo's direction. The tall thin young man with the notable hair, garish clothes, and big black glasses took in far more than he let out. Ideal spies are supposed to be inconspicuous, and yet I came to regard Lazlo as the perfect sleuth. His brilliant exterior was like a beacon in New York's crowds of black-clad people, but that very brightness made him unsuspicious. He, too, had heard stories about a boy's disappearance and rumbles about a murder, but Lazlo believed that the talk was part of Teddy Giles's underground publicity machine, which manufactured the ghoulish tales to increase his status as the art world's latest enfant terrible. There was other talk that worried Lazlo more— that Giles "collected" young people, both boys and girls, and that Mark was a favored object. Giles was said to lead small groups of kids on forays into Brooklyn and Queens where the bands committed meaningless acts of vandalism or broke into basements and stole objects like teacups and sugar bowls. According to Lazlo's sources, the teenagers disguised themselves before these outings, changing the color of their skin and hair. Boys went as girls and girls as boys. There were stories of cruel harassments of homeless people in Tompkins Square Park, of overturning their shopping carts and stealing their blankets and food. Lazlo also heard peculiar reports about "branding"—some form of body marking unique to Giles's inner circle.

  Whether any of this actually happened was difficult to know. All that could be verified with any certainty was that Teddy Giles was rising as an art star. A recent sale to an English collector of a
work called Dead Blonde in a Bathtub for a huge sum gilded his reputation by making him not only controversial but expensive. Giles had coined a new phrase, "entertainment art," which he brandished in every interview. He made the old argument that the distinctions between high and low art had disappeared, but then he added that art was no more and no less than entertainment—and that entertainment value was measured in dollars. Critics embraced these comments either as the clever height of irony or as the dawn of truth in advertising—the ushering in of a new era that admitted that art, like everything else, ran on cash. Giles gave interviews in various personas. Sometimes he dressed as a woman, delivering his comments in an absurd falsetto. At other times, he wore a suit and tie and sounded like a broker discussing his deals. I understood why people were fascinated by Giles. His voracious desire for attention forced him to reinvent himself regularly. Change is news, and he delighted the press in spite of the fact that his art was constructed from images that had long established themselves as trite conventions in more popular genres.

  In late March, Bill started working again. The new project began with a woman and her baby on Greene Street. I saw her, too, from the window of Bill and Violet's loft, but I would never have guessed that she would be responsible for a whole new direction in Bill's work. There was nothing extraordinary about what we saw, but I've come to believe that Bill wanted exactly that—the everyday in all its dense particularity. For this he turned to film, or rather video. I was conservative enough to feel that an artist of such technical brilliance betrayed his talent by turning to the video camera, but after I saw the tapes, I changed my mind. The camera liberated Bill from the debilitating weight of his own thoughts by sending him into the streets, where he found a thousand children and the visual fragments of their unfolding life stories. He needed those children for his own sanity, and through them he would begin to compose an elegy about what all of us who live long enough have lost—our childhoods. Bill's lament would be unsentimental. There was no room in his work for the Victorian haze that continues to obscure our notions of childhood. But most important, I think he found a way to address his anguish about Mark without Mark.

  We saw the woman early on a Sunday afternoon, after Mark had already been sent off on the train to Cranbury. Bill and I were standing near the window when Violet walked up behind Bill and put her arms around his waist. She pressed her cheek into his sweater, moved beside him, and pulled his arm over her shoulder. For a minute, the three of us watched the pedestrians below in silence. A cab pulled up, the door opened, and a woman in a long brown coat emerged with a child on her hip, several packages over both arms, and a stroller. We watched as she moved the child from one hip to the other, dug in her purse, extracted a bill, paid the driver, and then unfolded the stroller with her left hand and right foot. She lowered the heavily dressed baby into the contraption and fastened a belt around its middle. In the same instant, the child began to cry. The woman squatted on the sidewalk, removed her gloves, stuck them hastily into her pockets, and began to search a large quilted bag. She dug out a pacifier and popped it into the infant's mouth. Then she loosened the strings that tied the hood of the child's snowsuit, started jiggling the stroller with one hand, and leaned close to the baby's face. She smiled and began to talk. The baby leaned back in the stroller, sucking hard, and closed its eyes. The woman glanced at her watch, stood up, hung her four bags over the handlebars, and began pushing the stroller up the street.

  When I turned from the window, Bill was still watching the woman. He didn't say a word about her that afternoon, but while we ate Violet's frittata and talked about whether Mark would pass his last semester's classes and manage to graduate from high school, I sensed the deflection in Bill. He listened to what Violet and I were saying and he answered us, but at the same time he remained aloof, as if some part of himself had already left the apartment and was walking down the sidewalk.

  The following morning, he bought a video camera and started working. For the next three months, he left early in the morning and stayed out well into the afternoon. When he finished filming, he walked to the studio and sketched until dinner. After eating, he often returned to his notebooks, drawing far into the night. But he spent every minute of the weekends with Mark. According to Bill, the two of them talked, watched rented movies, and then talked again. Mark had become Bill's handicapped child, someone who had to be nursed like an infant, someone who could never leave his sight. In the middle of the night, Bill checked on his son to make sure he hadn't climbed out the window and disappeared. His paternal vigilance, once a form of punishment, became a means of preventing the inevitable rampage, one he feared would tear the boy to pieces.

  Although Bill had recovered his energy through the new project, his excitement had a manic edge. When I looked at him, I felt that his eyes hadn't regained their old focus so much as taken on a fervid gleam. He slept very little, lost several pounds, and shaved even less often than was usual for him. His clothes stank of smoke, and late in the day, his breath smelled of wine or Scotch. Despite his intense schedule, I saw him often that spring, sometimes every afternoon. He would call me at home or at my office. "Leo, it's Bill. How about a stop on the Bowery?" I said yes even on the days when it meant that I would be up late with papers or lecture preparations, because something in his voice on the telephone communicated his need for company. When I walked in on him at work, he always stopped to pat my back or take me by the shoulders and shake them as he told me about the children on a playground he had seen that afternoon and captured on tape. "I'd forgotten how loony little kids are," he said. "They're completely dotty."

  One afternoon in the middle of April, Bill suddenly started talking about the day he'd returned to Lucille to give their marriage one more chance.

  "When I walked through the door, the first thing I did was crouch down and tell Mark that I was never going away again, that we were all going to live together." Bill turned his head and studied the bed he had made for his son years ago. It was still standing in a far corner of the room not far from the refrigerator. "And then I betrayed him. I told him the usual rot—that I loved him but couldn't live with his mother anymore. The day the fifth letter came and I walked out the door, he started to scream 'Dad!' I heard him from the landing. I heard him all the way down the stairs, and I heard him in the street when I was walking away. I'll never forget his voice. He sounded like he was being killed. It's the worst thing I've ever heard."

  "Little children can cry like that over a candy bar or bedtime—anything."

  Bill turned to me. His eyes were narrowed and when he spoke his voice was low but incisive. "No, Leo. That's just it. It wasn't that kind of crying. It was different. It was horrible. I can still hear it in my ears. No, I chose myself over him."

  "You don't regret it, do you?"

  "How can I? Violet's my life. I chose to live."

  On the afternoon of May seventh, I didn't go to visit Bill. He didn't call me, and I stayed at home. When the phone rang, I was rereading a letter I had received from Erica a few hours earlier in the mail. The sentences I had been pondering were: "Something has happened to me, Leo. I've taken a step, not in my mind that's always been racing ahead of me, but in my body, where the pain has made it impossible for me to move, to go anywhere except in circles around Matt. I realized that I want to see you. I want to get on a plane and come to New York and visit. I understand if you don't want to see me, if you're fed up. I don't blame you if you are, but I'm telling you what I want." I didn't doubt Erica's sincerity. I doubted that her conviction would hold. At the same time, after I had read the words again, I thought she might really make the trip. The thought made me nervous, and when I lifted the receiver, I was still distracted by thoughts of Erica's possible decision to visit.

  "Leo?"

  The person on the line was speaking in an odd half whisper, and I didn't recognize the voice. "Who's calling?"

  For a second, no one answered. "Violet," she said in a louder voice. "It's Violet.
"

  "What's the matter?" I said. "What's happened?"

  "Leo?" she said again.

  "Yes, I'm here," I said.

  "I'm at the studio."

  "What's the matter?"

  Again she didn't answer me. I heard her breathe into the receiver and then I repeated the question.

  "I found Bill on the floor..."

  "Is he hurt? Have you called an ambulance?"

  "Leo." Violet was whispering now, slowly, methodically. "He was dead when I found him. He's been dead for a while. He must have died soon after he came in, because he still had his jacket on and the camera was on the floor beside him."

  I knew she had to be right but I said, "Are you sure?"

  Violet took a long breath. "Yes," she said. "I'm sure. He's cold, Leo." She had stopped whispering, but as Violet continued to talk in that foreign, uninflected voice, her composure frightened me. "Mr. Bob's been here, but now he's gone. I think I hear him praying." She pronounced every word carefully, enunciating each syllable as if she were working hard to say her piece exactly right. "You see," she continued, "I went to the train to pick up Mark, but he gave me the slip. I called the studio and left a message. I thought Bill was still out but that he'd be back by the time I got there. I was so pissed off at Mark, so furious, I needed to see Bill. It's funny, my anger doesn't mean anything now. I don't care. Bill didn't answer the buzzer, so I let myself in. I think that I must have cried out when I saw him, and that's why Mr. Bob came up, but I don't remember that. I want you to come here, Leo, and help me call whoever it is you're supposed to call when somebody dies. I don't know why, but I can't do it. And then when you've done it, I want to be alone with him again. Do you understand what I'm saying?"