What I Loved

  The room had green carpeting, two queen-sized beds with floral orange and green spreads, a window that couldn't be opened, and a gigantic television set. The colors depressed me. Because I had promised to call Violet even if it was very late, I picked up the phone and dialed her number. She answered after one ring and listened in silence as I told her what had happened.

  "You think it was all a lie?" she said.

  "I don't know. Why would he tell me to come all the way out here?"

  "Maybe he felt trapped and couldn't figure out how to get out of it. Will you call me in the morning?"

  "Of course.''

  "You know that I think you're a wonderful man, don't you? "

  "I'm glad to hear that."

  "I don't know what I'd do without you."

  "You'd do just fine," I said.

  "No, I wouldn't, Leo. You've held me together."

  After a pause of a couple of seconds, I said, "It goes both ways."

  "I'm glad you think that," she said softly. "Try to sleep."

  "Good-night, Violet."

  "Good-night."

  Violet's voice left me agitated. I raided the minibar, retrieved a tiny bottle of Scotch, and turned on the television. A man was lying dead in the street. I turned the channel. A woman with tall hair was advertising a chopping machine. A huge telephone number hung over her head. I waited for a call from Mark, drank another Scotch, and fell asleep near the end of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when Kevin McCarthy is running blindly on the highway at night as trucks loaded with the transforming pods screech past him. By the time the telephone rang, I had been asleep for hours and was dreaming about a blond man whose pockets were filled with tiny pills that moved in his palms like white worms when he held them out to show me.

  I looked at the clock It was after six.

  "Teddy here."

  "Put Mark on."

  "Mrs. Giles is asleep."

  "Wake him up," I said.

  "She asked me to give you this message. Are you ready? This is it: Iowa City. Got that? The Holiday Inn, Iowa City."

  "I'll come down to your room," I said. "I just want to see Mark for a couple of minutes."

  "She's not in the hotel. She's here. We're at the airport."

  "Mark is going with you to Iowa? What's in Iowa?"

  "My mother's grave." Giles hung up.

  The Iowa City airport was deserted. A dozen travelers in parkas rolled their suitcases through the halls, and I wondered where all the people had gone. It turned out that I had to call for a taxi and then wait in an icy wind for twenty minutes before it came. The woman at the check-in counter in Minneapolis had refused to tell me whether Theodore Giles and Mark Wechsler had been among the passengers who'd left on the seven o'clock plane that morning, but the departure time matched Giles' call. When I'd telephoned Violet from the airport, she had told me to come home, but I had said no, I wanted to go on. I looked out the cab window and wondered why. Iowa was flat and brown and bleak. Its drab, mostly treeless expanse was varied only by dirty patches of unmelted snow that lay beneath a huge overcast sky. In the distance I saw a farm, its gray silo jutting up from the plain, and I thought of Alice and her seizure in the hayloft. What did I hope to find here? What would I say to Mark? My legs and arms ached. My neck had a crick in it that made it painful to turn. In order to look out the window, I had to shift my whole body, which put pressure on my lower back. I hadn't shaved, and that morning I had noticed a stain on my pants leg. You're an old wreck, I said to myself, and yet there's something you want from all this—some idea of yourself—some redemption. The word "redemption" had come to me for a reason, but I didn't understand it. Why did I feel that a corpse was always lying under my thoughts? A boy I didn't know, a boy I had seen only once. Could I even describe him accurately? Had I come to Iowa for Rafael, whose name was also "Me"? I couldn't answer my own questions. It wasn't a new experience. The longer I ponder something, the more it seems to evaporate, rising like steam from a cave in my mind.

  The Iowa City Holiday Inn smelled dank and moist, exactly like the swimming pool at the YMHA where I had taken swimming lessons not long after I came to live in New York. As I examined the obese woman with crinkly yellow hair behind the desk, I remembered the resounding echoes of the diving board when I bounced on it and the feel of my bathing suit sliding down my legs in the dim light of the locker room. The odor of chlorine saturated the lobby, as if the unseen pool had leaked into every wall and carpet and upholstered chair. The woman was wearing a turquoise sweater with large pink and orange flowers knit into it. I wondered how to frame my question. Did I ask for two young men or a pale, thin man and a tall blond woman? I decided to use their names.

  "I've got Wechsler," she said. "William and Mark."

  I looked at the floor. The names hurt me. Father and son.

  "Are they in their room?" I asked her. My eyes settled on a pin she was wearing above her enormous right breast It said MAY LARSEN.

  "They went out an hour ago."

  As she leaned toward me, I could see that May Larsen was curious.

  Her watery blue eyes had an alert, shrewd glint I pretended not to see. I asked for a room.

  She examined my credit card. "They left you a message." She handed me my room key and an envelope. I moved away from her to read it, but I felt her eyes on me as I opened the paper.

  Dear Uncle Leo,

  Now we're all here. Me 1, Me 2, Me 3. Off to the cemetery.

  Lots of Luv,

  The She-Monster & Co.

  It was May Larsen who told me that she had overheard Mark and Giles say they were going shopping, and she was the one who gave me directions to the mall only blocks away. I should never have left the hotel, but the prospect of sitting in the lobby, perhaps for hours, under Mrs. Larsen's vigilant eyes seemed impossible. I wandered out into a small walking street, an area that had been renovated according to new American standards of quaintness. I looked at its attractive benches, small naked trees, and a shop that advertised cappuccinos and lattes and espressos. At the end of that street I took a left and soon found the mall. When I walked through the door, I was greeted by a mechanical Santa Claus sitting on top of a display case. He bent forward and gave me a stiff wave.

  I'm not sure how long I was in that place, strolling among the racks of limp dresses and colored shirts and plump down jackets that looked much warmer than my own wool coat. The tinsel and fluorescent lights seemed to shudder above me as I peeked into one store after another. Every one was a familiar franchise with outlets in every other city and town in America. New York City has these shops, too, and yet as I moved from the Gap to Talbots to Eddie Bauer, expecting to spot Mark and Teddy behind every towering pile of merchandise, I felt like a foreigner again. The chain stores that shine in the empty plains of middle America are swallowed whole in New York City. In Manhattan their clean logos must compete with the fading ads of a thousand dead businesses that never took down their signs, with the noise and smoke and litter in the streets, and with the conversations and shouts of people who speak in a hundred different languages. In New York only the obviously violent person stands out—the bum smashing bottles against a wall, the screaming woman with an umbrella. But that afternoon as I saw myself reflected in one mirror after another, my features looked suddenly alien. Surrounded by the inhabitants of Iowa, I looked like a gaunt Jew wandering through a mob of overfed Gentiles. And during this bout of an incipient persecution complex, I had other thoughts of graves and their stones, of Giles's dead mother, of the pronominal pun—Me too/Me 2—and of Mark parading as a woman in a blond wig. All at once, I felt exhausted. My lower back ached, and I looked for the exit to the street. I hobbled past a plastic bin overflowing with bras, felt nauseated, and had to stop. For an instant I tasted vomit in my mouth.

  After I had eaten a tough steak and a basket of french fries, I returned to the hotel, and May Larsen handed me another note:

  Hey Leo!

  New locale: the Opryland Hotel.
Nashville. If you don't come, I'm going to send Mark to my mother's. Your friend and admirer, T.G.

  There are nights when I'm still wandering the hallways of the Opryland Hotel, still taking elevators to a new level and walking through jungles that grow under an arching glass roof. I pass through miniature villages that are meant to resemble New Orleans or Savannah or Charleston. I cross bridges with water running underneath them, and I ride escalators up and down and then up again, and I am always on the lookout for Room 149872 in a wing called the Bayou. I cannot find it. I have a map and I study the lines the young woman at the desk drew to help me find my way, but I can't understand them, and my bag with next to nothing in it grows heavier and heavier on my shoulder. The pain in my back moves up my spine, and everywhere I walk I hear country music. It's piped in from mysterious crevices and corners, and it never stops. The phantasmagoric interior of that hotel can never be separated from what happened to me there because its nonsensical architecture echoed my state of mind. I lost my bearings and, with them, the landmarks of an internal geography I had counted on to guide me.

  I had missed the last plane out of Iowa City and ended up spending the night. In the morning I flew back to Minneapolis and boarded another plane for Nashville that afternoon. I told myself and I told Violet over the telephone that it was the threat to Mark implied in Giles's note that forced me to continue the chase. And yet I knew that my methods had been ridiculous. I could have seated myself outside Mark and Giles's hotel room in Minneapolis and waited for them to return. In Iowa City I could have done the same. Instead, I had left a note in one place and idly toured a mall in another. I had behaved as if I hadn't wanted to find them. Moreover, at every turn Giles had seemed delighted by my pursuit. Both his telephone conversation and his note had artfully combined the sinister with the flirtatious. Giles didn't seem to be worried about the police. If he was, why would he announce his every move? And Mark seemed to be in no danger from Giles. He had willingly jumped on one plane after another with his friend, or lover.

  By the time the young woman behind the long desk at the Opryland Hotel was tracing the map of its myriad wings with a green pen and welcoming me for the third time to "the biggest hotel in the world," I had already thought myself into a hole. Another hour and a half passed before I finally located my room with the help of an older man in a green uniform whose name tag designated him only as "Bill." William is a common name, and yet the four letters on his chest jarred me when I saw them.

  I left a written message for Mark at the desk and another on his voice mail. After that, I decided to walk however many miles necessary to his room and wait for him and Giles to return. But the very thought of journeying once again through that interminable landscape of restaurants and boutiques sickened me. I didn't feel well. It wasn't just my back that hurt me. I hadn't slept very much, and a dull but persistent headache hung like a weight in my temples.

  As I walked past the endless rows of shops, with their overdressed dolls and plush bears, I lost hope. It hardly seemed to matter anymore whether I found Mark, and I wondered if Giles had known that his message would catapult me into a maze of artifice beyond anything I had ever experienced. As I trudged on, I looked into a store at masks of Laurel and Hardy, a rubber replica of Elvis Presley, and several mugs embossed with Marilyn Monroe, her skirt flying.

  Only a minute later, I spotted Mark and Giles on an escalator coming up from the floor below me. Instead of calling out to them, I retreated behind the pillar of a small Georgia mansion to watch them. I felt both cowardly and silly, but I wanted to observe them together. Both of them were wearing men's clothes. They were smiling at each other and looked relaxed, like two normal young men out on a lark. Mark's hip jutted out as he stood on the moving step, and I heard him talking to Giles. "Those dogs were pretty wild, and did you check out the ass on the salesman? It was a mile wide, man."

  It wasn't what Mark said that made me catch my breath. It was that the register, the cadence, the tone of his voice were all unfamiliar to me. For years I had seen in Mark the shifting colors of a chameleon, had known that he changed according to the circumstances in which he found himself, but at the sound of that unknown voice, the disquiet that had been lurking in me for so long seemed to find its horrible confirmation, and while I shrank from it, I also felt a tremor of victory. I had proof that he was really somebody else. I stepped out from behind the pillar and said, "Mark."

  The two turned around and stared at me. They looked genuinely surprised. Giles recovered first, strode toward me, and stopped only inches from where I was standing. He brought his face close to mine, and without thinking I moved my head away from the intimate gesture. But as soon as I had done it, I felt I had made a mistake. Giles grinned. "Professor Hertzberg," he said. "What brings you to Nashville?" He put out his right hand, but I didn't take it. He kept his pale face very close to me as I searched for an adequate reply, but nothing came. Giles had asked the question I had been asking myself. I didn't know why I had come to Nashville. I looked at Mark, who was standing three or four feet behind Giles.

  Giles continued to examine me. He tilted his head to the side, waiting for an answer, and I noticed that he kept his left hand in his pocket as he fingered something inside it. "I have to talk to Mark," I said. "Alone."

  Mark's head drooped. I noticed that he was standing with his toes turned inward, like an unhappy child. His knees sagged for an instant before he caught himself and straightened up. I guessed that he was drugged.

  "I'll let the two of you talk, then," Giles said cheerfully. "As you may well imagine, this hotel is a rich source of inspiration for my work. So many artists forget the fertile landscape that is commerce in America. I still have a lot to peruse." He smiled, waved, and began to walk down the hallway.

  It has been four years since I talked to Mark at the Opryland Hotel. We seated ourselves at a small red metal table with a large white heart on it in a café called the Love Corner. I've had years to digest what he told me, but I'm still not sure what to make of it Mark lifted his chin and looked at me with an expression I recognized. His eyes were wide with innocent sorrow, and his lip protruded in the pout he had been using since early childhood. I wondered if his repertoire of facial expressions had narrowed. Either he was losing his gift for variation or drugs were interfering with his performance. I stared at the mask of regret and shook my head.

  "I don't think you understand, Mark," I said. "It's too late for that face. I heard you on the escalator. I heard your voice. It's not the one I know, and even if I hadn't heard it, I've seen that expression a thousand times before. It's the one you put on for the grown-ups you've hurt, but you're not three years old anymore. You're a man. That puppy-dog face is inappropriate. No, it's worse than that. It's pathetic."

  Mark looked surprised for a half a second. Then, as if on command, his expression changed. He withdrew his lip, and suddenly his face looked more mature. Altering his expression so quickly was a blunder on his part, and I felt a sudden advantage.

  "It must be hard," I said, "to juggle so many feces, so many lies. I'm sorry for you—concocting that story about the gun and a murder just so Violet would send you money. How stupid do you think she is? Did you really imagine that she would wire you money after all you've done?"

  Mark lowered his eyes and looked at the table. "It's not a story." He spoke to me in the voice I knew.

  "I don't believe you."

  Mark raised his eyes but not his chin. The blue irises were liquid with feeling. I recognized that look, too. I had fallen for it again and again. "Teddy told me he did it—that he killed him."

  "But this was all long before you were at Hazelden. Why did you run off with Teddy now?"

  "He asked me to come, and I was afraid to say no."

  "You're lying," I said.

  Mark shook his head vigorously. "No!" There was a little shout in his voice. Three tables away from us, a woman turned her head toward the sound.

  "Mark," I said, keeping my voi
ce very low, "do you understand how berserk you sound? You could have come back with me from Minneapolis. I was there to take you home." I paused. "I saw you in the wig, saw you get into the taxi with him..." I stopped when Mark smirked and shrugged his shoulders.

  "What are you smiling about?"

  "I don't know. You're acting like I'm a queen or something."

  "Well, what's it all about? Are you telling me that you and Teddy aren't lovers?"

  "It's just for kicks. It's nothing serious. I'm not gay—only with him…"

  I studied Mark's face. He looked a little embarrassed, nothing more. I leaned toward him. "What kind of a person goes off with someone he thinks is a murderer, claiming to be afraid of him, and then has a few kicks on the side?"

  Mark didn't answer me.

  "That man destroyed one of your father's paintings. Doesn't that bother you? A portrait of you, Mark."

  "It wasn't me," he said in a sulky voice. His eyes had gone blank.

  "Yes, it was," I said. "What are you talking about?"

  "It didn't look like me," he said. "It was ugly."

  I was silent. Mark's antipathy to the portrait blew like a breeze through me. It changed things. I wondered if it had affected Giles's motives. He must have known how Mark felt.

  "Mom kept it in the barn all wrapped up. She didn't like it either."

  "I see," I said.

  "I don't get why it's such a big deal. Dad made lots of paintings. That was just one—"

  "Just imagine how he would have felt," I said.

  Mark shook his head. "He wasn't even around."

  The word "around" set me off. Looking into Mark's shallow, dead eyes and hearing that moronic euphemism for his father's death made me furious. "That painting was better than you are, Mark. It was more real, more alive, more powerful than you have ever been or will ever be. You are the thing that's ugly, not that painting. You're ugly and empty and cold. You're something your father would hate." I was breathing loudly through my nose. My rage overwhelmed me. I made an effort to gain control of it.