What I Loved

  "There's nobody else, Leo."

  "Why haven't you answered my letters?"

  "I've started fifty letters and thrown them away. I feel like I'm always explaining and analyzing myself, blah, blah, blah. Even with you. I'm sick of my own interminable need to put it all down and pick it apart. When I do, it looks like the worst kind of sophism, like clever lies, like excuses for myself." Erica sighed heavily, and with that familiar sound my anger disappeared. Once it was gone, I realized that I missed it. Spite has focus, a keenness that sympathy lacks, and I was sorry to find myself back in that diffuse emotional territory.

  "I've been writing so much, Leo, it's been hard to write to you. It's Henry James again."

  "Oh," I said.

  "I love them, you know."

  "Who?"

  "His characters. I love them because they're so complicated, and while I'm working on them and their suffering, I forget myself. I've thought of calling—it was stupid of me not to call. I'm really sorry.''

  By the end of the conversation, Erica and I had decided to call each other as well as write. I told her to send me the book whenever she felt she was ready, and I told her that I loved her. She said she loved me, too. There wasn't anybody else. There would never be anybody else. After I hung up the phone, I understood that we would never be free of each other. It gave me no joy. I didn't want to let go of Erica, and yet I rebelled against our stubborn connection. We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.

  I had made the phone call at my desk, and after a couple of minutes I opened the drawer and examined my hoard of things. They looked odd to me—that curious collection of memorabilia that included thin black socks, burned cardboard, and a thin square cut from a magazine. I looked at Violet's face in the photograph, and then at Bill, whose eyes were on his wife. His wife. His widow. The dead. The living. I picked up Erica's lipstick. My wife and her beloved characters in a dead man's books. Only fictions. But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and then I picked up Matt's picture of Dave and Durango.

  Mark looked better. His blue eyes had a new directness, and he had gained a few pounds during his months away. Even his voice seemed to have more resonance and conviction. His days consisted of job hunting in the morning, Narcotics Anonymous meetings in the afternoon, and appointments with a man who had become his sponsor. Alvin was a former heroin addict who couldn't have been more than thirty. He was a tidy, polite man with light brown skin, a close-cropped beard, and eyes that burned with feverish determination. Alvin was a resurrected man, a Dostoyevskian character who had crawled up from the underground to lend his support to a comrade in need. His body was a rigid block of purpose, and just looking at him made me feel languid, superfluous, and ignorant Like thousands of others, Mark's sponsor had "hit bottom" and then decided to change his life. I never learned Alvin's story, but Mark told me and Violet countless others he had gathered up at Hazelden, sordid tales of desperate need that led to lies, abandonments, betrayals and sometimes violence. Each story had a name attached to it—Maria, John, Angel, Hans, Mariko, Deborah. Mark was clearly interested in the stories, but he focused on their grim details rather than on the people who had made them happen. Perhaps he saw their actions as mirrors of his own degradation.

  Violet was hopeful. Mark attended meetings every day, spoke to Alvin often, and was working as a busboy at a restaurant on Grand Street. Following the rules of the program, Violet had told him she was finished with punishments, but he couldn't live with her unless he was "clean." It was that simple. In the middle of the month, Mark knocked on my door one evening at around eleven o'clock at night. I was already in bed but still awake. When I opened the door, he was standing in the hallway. I told him to come in. He walked to the sofa but didn't sit down. He glanced at the painting of Violet, looked in my direction and then down at his shoes. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for hurting you."

  I stared at him and tightened the sash of my bathrobe as if that tug would help keep in my emotions.

  "I was on drugs," he continued. "They messed me up, but I'm responsible for all of it."

  I didn't answer him.

  "You don't have to forgive me, but it's important that I ask you. It's part of the steps."

  I nodded.

  Mark's face was quivering.

  He's nineteen years old, I said to myself.

  "I wish everything was different, that it was the way it was before." He looked at me for the first time. "You used to like me," he said. "We had good talks."

  "I don't know what those talks really meant, Mark," I said. "You've lied so much ..."

  He interrupted me. "I know, but I've changed." There was a moan in his voice. "And I told you things I never told anybody else. I meant them. I really did."

  The desperation seemed to come from inside him, from deep within his chest. Was the sound new? Had I ever heard this tone before? I didn't think so. Very tentatively I put my hand on his shoulder. "Time will tell," I said. "You have a chance to turn things around, to live in a different way. I believe you can do it."

  He moved closer to me and looked down into my face. He seemed immensely relieved. He let out a long breath, and then he said, "Please." Mark spread his arms for a hug. I hesitated but then relented. He leaned toward me and lay his head on my shoulder and he embraced me with an intensity and warmth that reminded me of his father.

  Early in the morning on December 2, Mark disappeared. That same day Violet received a letter from Deborah—the girl Mark and Violet had befriended at Hazelden. It was almost midnight when Violet came downstairs with the letter in her hand, seated herself on the sofa and read it to me.

  Dear Violet,

  I wanted to write you and tell you that I'm doing all right. Every day is a big fight with the not drinking and everything but I'm getting along with my mom's help. She's trying not to yell at me so much after what we said in the family meetings. She knows it gets me down. When it's really bad I think about the singing I heard from the sky that night at Hazelden and those voices from heaven that told me I was a child of God and that he loves me just for that. I know that some of the others thought I was bonkers when I said I wasn't Debbie no more. But in the family meeting I could tell that you were understanding of me. I had to be Deborah after I heard them singing. You are a real good person and Mark is lucky to have you for a stepmom. He told me about how you helped him through withdrawal when he was shaking and barfing so bad before you came to Minnesota. I always wished I had somebody like that for me. I've been asking everybody to pray for me, so I hope that you can pray for me too. Merry, merry Xmas and a great new year! LUV, Deborah P.S. I get my cast off next week.

  When Violet was finished reading, she lay the paper on her lap and looked up at me.

  "You never told me that Mark had withdrawal symptoms," I said.

  "I didn't tell you because he didn't have them."

  "Why would Deborah write that, then?"

  "Because he told her that he did."

  "But why would he do that?"

  "I think he wanted to fit in, be more like the others. I mean, Mark has a drug problem, but he was never physically dependent on drugs. It probably made it easier to explain all the lying and stealing he did if he pretended he was a hard-core addict." She paused for several seconds. "By the end, they all loved him—the counselors, the other patients, everybody. They made him a group leader. Mark was a star. Nobody liked Debbie much. She dresses like a tart and has a bad complexion.

  She's twenty-four years old and has been in detox three times already. She almost drowned once. She got so drunk she fell into a lake. Another time she drove off the road and smashed into a tree and had her license revoked. Before she landed in Hazelden, she came home smashed, fell down the stairs in her mother's house, and broke her leg in five places. She's got a cast up to here." Violet pointed to her thigh. "Well, she stole from her mother and lied to her, just like Mark.
She turned tricks for a while. Her mother's had it. She just kept screaming at Debbie—'You're a big baby. It's just like I've had a crying, puking baby for twenty-four years. You're not a companion to me at all. My whole life is taking care of you.' Then the mother cried and Debbie cried, and I cried. I sat in that chair and sobbed my guts out for poor Debbie and her poor mother." Violet gave me an ironic smile. "I didn't know them from a hole in the wall. Well, sometime during the second month, Debbie had her vision and turned into Deborah."

  "The singing," I said.

  Violet nodded. "She came back to the next family meeting shining like a light bulb."

  "That can wear off, you know. It usually does."

  "Yes, but she believes in her story and in the words she uses to tell it."

  "And Mark doesn't. Is that what you're saying?"

  Violet stood up. She pressed her hands into her forehead and began to pace. I tried to remember if Violet had paced before Bill died. I watched her take several steps and turn. "Sometimes I think he doesn't understand what language is. It's like he never figured out symbols—the whole structure of things is missing. He can speak, but he just uses words as a way to manipulate other people." Violet took out a cigarette and lit it.

  "You're smoking a lot now," I told her.

  She inhaled the Camel and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. "It's more than that. Mark doesn't have a story."

  "Sure he does," I said. "We all do."

  "But he doesn't know what it is, Leo. At Hazelden they kept asking him to talk about himself. In the beginning he would mumble a few things about the divorce—his mother, his father. The counselor prodded him. What do you mean? Explain. And he said, Everybody keeps telling me that it has to be the divorce, so it must be.' That made them angry. They wanted him to feel—to tell his story. So he started to talk, but when I think about it, he never said much of any significance. But he did cry. That made them happy. He gave them what they wanted—feeling, or the appearance of it. But a story is about making connections in time, and Mark's stuck in a time warp, a sick repetition that just shuttles him back and forth, back and forth."

  "You mean the way he went from one parent to another?"

  Violet stopped pacing. "I don't know," she said. "Lots of kids go between their divorced parents, and they don't turn out like Mark. It can't be that." She turned her back to me and walked to the window. I looked at her body as she stood with the cigarette burning near her thigh. She was wearing old blue jeans that didn't fit her anymore. I studied the gap of bare skin between her short sweater and the waistband of her pants. After a moment, I stood up and walked toward the window. The cigarette had an acrid chemical smell, but behind the smoke I breathed in Violet's perfume. I wanted to touch her shoulder, but I didn't. We stood in silence and looked into the street. It had stopped raining, and I watched as fat drops of water broke and slid down the pane. To my right, I could see plumes of white smoke rising from a hole in the street on Canal.

  "All I know is that nothing he says can be believed. I don't mean just now. I mean nothing he's ever said. Some of it must have been true, but I don't know what." Violet was looking into the street with narrowed eyes. "Do you remember Mark's parakeet?"

  "I remember the funeral," I said.

  Only Violet's lips moved. The rest of her seemed to have frozen in place. "It broke its neck in the cage door." Several seconds passed before she spoke again in the same low voice. "All his little animals died—the two guinea pigs, the white mice, even the fish. Of course they often do, small pets like that. They're frail..."

  I didn't answer her. She hadn't asked me a question. The smoke from the manhole was beautiful in the light of the street lamps, and we watched as it billowed upward like some infernal cloud of our own blooming suspicion.

  The telephone call from Mark three days later became the catalyst for the strangest journey of my life. When Violet came downstairs to tell me about the call, she said, "Who knows if it's true, but he said he's in Minneapolis with Teddy Giles. He said that he saw a gun in Giles's bag and he's afraid that Giles is going to kill him. When I asked him why, he said that Teddy told him he had murdered that boy they called 'Me' and thrown his body into the Hudson River. Mark said he knows that it's true. I asked him how, but he said he couldn't tell me. I asked him why he lied when we confronted him with the rumors, why he didn't go to the police, and he said he was afraid. Then I asked him why he went off with Giles if he was afraid of him. Instead of answering the question, he started talking about two detectives who had been asking questions at the Finder Gallery and in the clubs about the night the boy disappeared. He thinks Giles might be running from the police. He wants money for a plane ticket home."

  "You can't send him money, Violet."

  "I know. I said I'd arrange to have a ticket waiting for him at the airport. He said he doesn't have enough money to get to the airport."

  "He could change the ticket," I said. "And use it to go somewhere else."

  "I've never been close to anything like this, Leo. It feels unreal."

  "Do you have a gut feeling about whether he's lying or not?"

  Violet shook her head slowly. "I don't know. For a long time I've been afraid there was something underneath ..." She took a breath. "If it's true, we have to get Mark to the police."

  "Call him back," I said. "Tell him I'll meet him and fly back with him to New York. It's the only way to make sure he gets here."

  Violet looked startled. "What about your classes, Leo?"

  "It's Thursday. I don't have another class until Tuesday. It won't take me four days."

  I insisted that it was my job to retrieve Mark, that I wanted to do it, and in the end Violet agreed to let me go. But even while I was speaking, I knew that my reasons for going were murky. The idea that I was behaving rashly excited me, and that thrilling picture of myself carried me through all the arrangements. I packed while Violet called Mark and told him to meet me in the lobby of the hotel at midnight—an hour after my plane arrived—and advised him to stay in public places until then. I threw a shirt, underwear, and a pair of socks into a small canvas bag as if I routinely flew off to midwestern cities to lasso wayward boys. I hugged Violet good-bye—more confidently than usual—and instantly found a cab on the street to take me to the airport.

  As soon as I took my seat on the airplane, the spell began to wear off. I felt like an actor who leaves the stage and suddenly loses the adrenaline that kept him sailing through his performance as someone else. While I studied the camouflage pants of the young man in the seat next to me, I felt more quixotic than heroic, older rather than younger, and I asked myself what I was flying toward. Mark's story was bizarre. A body dumped in the river. Detectives asking questions. A gun in a suitcase. Weren't these the familiar elements of crime fiction? Didn't Giles play with these conventions in his art? Wasn't it very likely that I had become a pawn in some conceptual "murder piece" Giles had dreamed up? Or was I giving Giles credit for more intelligence than he actually had? I remembered the round-faced boy in the hallway gripping a plastic purse filled with Lego blocks and had the sudden absurd thought that I had left home to face a possible murderer unarmed. I owned no weapons except kitchen knives anyway. Then I thought of Matt's Swiss Army knife lying in my drawer at home. As I continued to hold the image of the knife in my mind, I found it increasingly unpleasant. I remembered the young Mark down on his hands and knees in Matt's room. I saw him sliding underneath the bed, and then, after a couple of moments, reappearing, his wide blue eyes looking up at me. "Where could it have gone? It must be here somewhere."

  The lobby of the Minneapolis Holiday Inn was a vast room with a glass elevator, an enormous curved reception desk, and a distant ceiling ornamented with an undulating piece of thin metal in an ugly shade of maroon. I looked for Mark but didn't see him. The café to my right was dark. I sat down and waited until twelve-thirty. Then I used the house telephone to call room 1512, but no one answered. I didn't leave a message. What would I do if
Mark didn't show? I walked over to a clerk behind the desk and asked if I could leave a message for one of the guests, Mark Wechsler.

  I watched the man's fingers press the letters into the computer. He shook his head. "We don't have a guest by that name."

  "Try Giles," I said. "Teddy Giles."

  The man nodded. "Here it is. Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Giles in room 1512. If you'd like to leave a message, the house phone is over there." He moved his head to the left.

  I thanked him and returned to my seat. Mr. and Mrs.? Giles is in drag, I thought. Even if the entire business was a scam, wouldn't Mark have met me to keep it going? As I considered my next move, I saw a very tall young woman out of the corner of my eye. She was crossing the lobby and walking quickly toward the door. Although I couldn't see her face, I noticed that she had the confident, self-conscious gait of a beautiful girl. I turned around to look at her. She was wearing a long black coat with a fur collar and boots with low heels. When she entered the revolving door to the street, I glimpsed the side of her face for an instant and had the uncanny sensation that I knew her. Her long blond hair moved in the wind as the door turned. I stood up. I felt sure I knew that woman. I strode toward the door as fast as I could and noticed a green-and-white taxi waiting outside. The door to the backseat opened, and at the same moment the car's interior light illuminated a man's face in the backseat. It was Giles. The woman slid in beside him. The car door slammed, and with that sound I knew what I had seen—Mark. The young woman was Mark.

  I rushed into the cold night air, waved my arms at the moving taxi, and shouted "Stop!" It drove out of the entrance and turned onto the road. There were no other cabs, and I turned around and walked back inside.

  After getting a room for the night, I left a letter with the clerk "Dear Mark," I wrote. "You seem to have changed your mind about returning to New York I will be here until tomorrow morning. If you want a ticket home, call me in my room—7538. Leo."