What I Loved

  "Uncle Leo," Mark simpered, "that's mean."

  I swallowed. My face was shaking. "It's nevertheless true. As far as I can tell, it's the only thing that is true. I have no idea if anything you've said is true, but I know your father would be ashamed of you. Your lies don't even make sense. They're not rational. They're stupid. The truth is easier. Why not tell the truth for once?"

  Mark was calm. He seemed fascinated by my anger. Then he said, "Because I don't think people will like it"

  I grabbed Mark's right wrist and began to squeeze. I put all my strength into that grip, and as I looked into his startled eyes, I felt glad. "Why don't you try the truth now?" I said.

  "That hurts," he said.

  His passivity amazed me. Why didn't he shake me off? Keeping up the pressure, I grunted at him, "Tell me now. You've been faking it for years, haven't you? I've never really seen you, have I? You stole Matt's knife and then pretended to search for it, pretended to be sorry he lost it." I grabbed Mark's other wrist and gripped it so hard a pain flashed through my neck. I stared at his Adam's apple, at his soft, red lips and slightly flattened nose that I realized was identical to Lucille's. "You betrayed Matt, too."

  "You're hurting me," he moaned.

  I gripped him harder. I hadn't known I had it in me. I realized that I was panting for breath, but only because I heard myself gasp out the words, "I want to hurt you." I felt a lifting sensation inside my head, an intense pleasure of emptiness and freedom. I remembered the phrase "blind with rage" and thought to myself, that's wrong. I saw. every nuance of pain in his face and each one made me feel drunk.

  "Let go of him, now." The man's voice startled me. I dropped Mark's wrists and looked up.

  "I don't know what's going on here, but I'm going to call security and have you thrown out if you don't stop right now." The man had a bulbous nose and pink skin and was wearing an apron. "It's all right," Mark said. He had chosen his innocent look for the occasion. I saw his mouth tremble. "I'm okay now, really."

  The man looked at Mark's face and then put his hand on Mark's shoulder. "Are you sure?" he said. After that, he turned to me. "If you lay a hand on that kid again, I'll come over here and knock your head off. Do you understand?"

  I didn't speak. My eyes felt as if they had sand in them, and I stared down at the tabletop. My arms hurt. When I tried to sit up straight, a searing pain moved up my spine. I had somehow managed to throw my back out clutching Mark's wrists. I could hardly move. Mark, on the other hand, looked fine. He started to talk.

  "Sometimes I think there's something wrong with me, that maybe I am crazy. I don't know. I want people to like me, I guess. I can't help it. Sometimes I get confused, like when I've met two different people in two different places and then I meet them at the same party or something, and I don't know how to act. It's pretty confusing. I know you think I didn't like Matt, but you're wrong about that. I liked him a lot. He was my best friend. I just wanted the knife. It wasn't personal or anything. I just took it. I don't know why, but I like stealing. Sometimes when we were little and we'd have a fight about something, Matt would get all sad and he'd start crying and say, 'I'm so sorry, Mark. Forgive me! Forgive me!' He talked like that. It was kind of funny. But I remember that I wondered why I wasn't like that I didn't feel sorry."

  I tried to adjust myself so that I could look at him. I was hunched over but managed to lift my eyes toward his face. He continued to talk in a tone as vacant as his expression. "There's a voice inside my head. I hear it, but nobody else does. People wouldn't like it, so I use other voices for them. Teddy knows about me, because we're the same. He's the only one, but even with him it's not that voice, not the one in my head."

  I pulled my hands back from the table. "What about Dr. Monk?" I said.

  Mark shook his head. "She thinks she's smart, but she's not."

  "Everything between us," I said, "has been a sham."

  Mark squinted at me. "No, you just don't understand. I've always liked you, always, since I was a little kid."

  I couldn't really nod. I wondered how I would stand up. "I don't know if anything happened to that boy or not, but if you think something did, if you really believe he's dead, you have to go to the police."

  "I can't," he said.

  "You have to, Mark."

  "Me's in California," Mark blurted out. "He ran off with another guy. Teddy wanted to fool you and he got me to go along with it. There's no murder. It was all a big joke."

  Well before he had finished speaking, I believed him. It was the only thing that made sense. The boy wasn't dead. He was alive in California. The cruelty of the story combined with my own gullibility shamed me, and my whole body felt hot. I moved my arms onto the table and tried to heave myself up and out of the chair. A shooting pain burned through my neck and down the middle of my back. There would be little dignity in my exit. "Are you coming back to New York?" I said to Mark. "Or are you staying here? Violet is finished with you if you don't come back. She wanted you to know that. You're nineteen. You can fend for yourself."

  Mark looked at me. "Are you okay, Uncle Leo?"

  I couldn't stand up. My body was wrenched to one side and my neck stuck out at an angle that must have made me look like a large injured bird.

  Giles was suddenly in front of me, and I had the eerie sensation that he had been near us all along. "Let me give you a hand," he said. He sounded genuinely concerned and that frightened me. A second later, he took hold of my elbow. In order to prevent him from touching me, I would have had to shake my arm and realign my whole body. I couldn't do it. "You should see a doctor," he went on. "If we were in New York, I'd call my chiropractor. He's great. Once I screwed up my back dancing, if you can believe it."

  "We'll take you to your room, Uncle Leo. Won't we, Teddy?"

  "No problem."

  It was a long, painful walk. Every step I took sent a jab of pain from my thigh to my neck, and because I couldn't lift my head, I saw very little of what was around me. With Teddy on one side and Mark on the other, I felt vaguely threatened. They led me forward with a display of courtesy and solicitude that made me think of actors who had been asked to improvise a scene with a crippled mute. Giles did most of the talking, carrying on a monologue about chiropractors and acupuncturists. He recommended Chinese herbs and Pilâtes, then moved from alternative medicine to art, mentioning his collectors, recent sales, and a feature article on him somewhere. I knew that his chatter wasn't really idle, that he was moving toward a turn, and then he took it. He brought up Bill's canvas.

  I closed my eyes, hoping to block out his words, but he was saying that he hadn't meant to hurt anyone, that he wouldn't "dream" of it, that it had come to him as an inspiration, as an avenue of subversion as yet unexplored in art. He sounded just like Hasseborg. I think his choice of words might have been nearly the same as the critic's. As he talked, I thought he gripped my arm a little more tightly. "William Wechsler," he said, "was a remarkable artist, but the canvas I bought was a minor work." I was glad I couldn't look at him. "In my piece, I really think it transcended itself."

  "That's rot," I said. I was nearly whispering. We had turned down the long corridor that led to my room, and its emptiness unsettled me more. A soda machine glowed in the dim hallway. I didn't remember passing it earlier and wondered how I had managed to miss that large incandescent object so close to my door.

  "What you fail to understand," Giles continued, "is that my work, too, has a personal side to it. William Wechsler's portrait of his son, my own M&M, Me 2, Mark the Shark, is now part of a very special tribute to my own late mother."

  I decided not to speak. All I wanted was to get away from them. I wanted to throw my wracked body into my room and slam the door behind me.

  "Mark and I share the same regard for our mothers. Did you know that?"

  "Teddy," Mark said, "forget it" His tone was gruff.

  I was looking down at the carpet. They had stopped walking and I heard a soft click. Teddy was putting a card
in a door.

  "This isn't my room," I said.

  "No, it's ours. Ours is closer. You can stay here. We've got two beds."

  I took a breath. "No, thank you," I said as Giles began to push on the door. As the door moved, I anticipated seeing a room like mine, but instead I looked through the opening and saw that something was terribly wrong. The room smelled of smoke—not cigarette smoke but of something that had been burned. From the hallway I saw only part of the room, but the carpeted floor in front of me was strewn with refuse—a room-service tray littered with cigarette butts, a half-eaten hamburger that had drooled ketchup onto the carpet. Lying beside the tray were a woman's bikini underpants and a badly burned sheet that had been crumpled into a ball. I could see the ragged brown and ocher marks left by the fire, but there were also what looked like blood spots all over it, deep red stains that closed my throat when I saw them. Lying across the crumpled sheet were the coils of a pale nylon rope and, not far from the rope, a black revolver. I'm quite sure of what I saw, although my glimpse of that bizarre still life had the quality of a hallucination even while I was looking at it.

  Giles tugged on my arm. "Come on in and have a drink."

  "No," I said. "I'll find my room." I dug my heels into the carpet.

  "Come on, Uncle Leo," Mark whined at me.

  I straightened up, moving my spine through ratcheting pain and then shook my arm loose from Mark's hand. My lips were quivering. I moved back from the door, shuffled to the other side of the hallway, and leaned against the wall for a moment before I started to lope away, but Giles leapt toward me and flung out his arm. "Just working through a few new ideas," he said, pointing into the room. I had hunched over again. I simply couldn't endure standing erect. He leaned over me and whispered, "But Professor, aren't you curious about me?" Then Giles put his fingers on my head. I could feel his hand on my scalp, felt him playing with strands of my hair, and when I looked him in the eyes, he smiled. "Have you ever thought of using a little color?" he said. I tried to shake my head, but he grabbed me on either side of my face, pressing the sides of my glasses into my skin, and then he slammed my head against the wall. I grunted with pain.

  "I'm so sorry," he said. "Did I hurt you?"

  Giles didn't let go of me. He continued to squeeze my head with his hands. I flailed, lifted my knee to jab him, but the motion caused new pain. I gasped and felt my knees buckle under me. I was sliding down the wall, and I panicked. Moving my eyes to Mark's face, I said his name, which came like a wail from my throat I called on him loudly and desperately, lifting my hands toward him, but he stood frozen in front of me. I couldn't read his face. In the same moment, a door opened beside me and a woman stepped out Giles pulled me upward and began to pat me tenderly. "You'll be all right," he said. "Should I call a doctor?" Then he backed quickly away from me and smiled at the woman in the doorway. As soon as he was out of the way, Mark moved toward me. He was talking fast under his breath. "Go back to your room now. I'll go home with you tomorrow. I'll meet you in the lobby at ten. I want to go home."

  The woman was pretty and slender with puffy blond hair that fell into her eyes. Behind her I saw a little girl of about five years old with brown braids. She was holding her mother around the thighs.

  "Is everything all right out here?" she asked.

  Giles was pulling closed the door to the room, but I saw her eyes dart through, the crack for an instant. Her lips parted and then she examined Mark, who took a step backward. She looked at me. "That's not your room, is it?"

  "No," I said.

  "Are you sick?" she said.

  "I've thrown out my back," I panted. "I need to rest, but I've had some difficulty finding my room."

  "We took a wrong turn, ma'am," Giles said. He smiled warmly at her.

  The woman examined Giles, her jaw locked. "Arnie!" she yelled without budging from the door.

  I looked at Mark. His blue eyes met mine. He blinked. I read the blink as a yes. Yes, I will meet you tomorrow.

  Arnie led me back to my room. He matched his wife, I thought, at least physically. He was young, with a strong build and an open face. As I walked and tried to control my shaking body, Arnie held my arm. I noticed that his touch was unlike either Mark's or Teddy's. In his tentative fingers, I felt his reserve toward me—that ordinary deference for another person's body that is usually taken for granted but that had been lost to me only minutes earlier. Several times he asked me if I wanted to stop and rest, but I insisted on continuing without a pause. It wasn't until he had helped me into my room and I saw my reflection in the large mirror beside the bathroom door, that I was able to interpret the extent of his kindness. My hair had been pushed to the wrong side of my head, and a piece of it was standing up like a stiff gray stalk. My hunched and twisted body had aged me terribly, turning me into a shriveled old man of at least eighty, but it was my face that shocked me. Although the features in the mirror resembled mine, I resisted claiming them. My cheeks appeared to have collapsed into my three-day beard, and my eyes, pink from exhaustion, had an expression that made made me think of the small terrified animals I had seen so often on Vermont roads in the headlights of my car. Appalled, I turned away and made an attempt to replace the inhuman stare I had seen in the mirror with a man's gaze and to thank Arnie for his kindness. He was standing near the door with his arms folded beneath the words HOLY CROSS LITTLE LEAGUE which ran across the front of his blue sweatshirt. "Are you sure you don't want a doctor or at least an ice pack or something?''

  "No," I said. "I can't thank you enough."

  Arnie lingered for a moment in front of the door. His eyes met mine. "Those punks were harassing you, weren't they?"

  I could only nod. His pity was nearly beyond what I could bear at that moment.

  "Well, good night," he said. "I hope your back's better in the morning." Then he shut the door.

  I left the bathroom light on. Because I couldn't lie flat, I propped myself up with pillows and plied myself with Scotch from the minibar. That muted the worst of the pain, for a short time anyway. All night I had motion sickness. Even when the spasms in my back woke me and I remembered where I was, I felt that the bed was moving, moving against my will, and whenever I slept, I was still moving in a dream—on a plane or a boat or a train or an escalator. Waves of nausea coursed through me, and my intestines churned as though I had been poisoned. In the dreams, I boarded one vehicle after another and listened to the sound of my heart pounding like an old clock, and it wasn't until I woke that I understood that the muscle was silent. When I opened my eyes and tried to shake off that sickening illusion of movement, consciousness brought Giles's fingers to my hair and his hands tightening around my face. The humiliation burned me, and I wanted to expel the memory, to force it out of my chest and lungs, where it had lodged itself like a fire in my body. I wanted to think, to turn to what had happened and make sense of it. I began to ponder what I had seen in the room—the sheet, the rope, the gun, the leftover food. It had looked like a crime scene, but even while I was seeing it, even while I was staring into the room, I had intimated a hint of the fake. The gun might have been a toy. The blood, colored water—all of it a setup. But then Giles's touch came back to me. That had been real. A sore lump had formed at the back of my head where my skull had hit the wall.

  And Mark? All night his face had come and gone before me, and I knew that his last words had given me hope. People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope. His words gave me hope, and crumpled up in that bed I heard them again and again in my mind. "I'll go home with you tomorrow.'' He had hidden that statement from Giles, and this fact opened another possible interpretation of his acts. Some part of his damaged person wanted to go home. Weak and vacillating, Mark had been infected by the stronger personality of Giles, who had an almost hypnotic power over him, but there was another place inside him, the place Bill had always insisted was there—a room where he held on to those who loved him and whom he loved. I had ca
lled out to him, and he had answered me. A tormented combination of hope and guilt carried me into the morning. I had said a terrible thing to Mark when I'd spoken to him about his father's painting. At the time, I had believed it, but I suffered from the conviction that my comparison had been monstrous. A thing should never be measured against a person. Never. I take it back, I said to him in my mind. I take it back. And then, as if it were a footnote to my thoughts, I remembered that I had read somewhere, perhaps it was in Gershom Scholem, that in Hebrew "to repent" and "to return" are the same word.

  But Mark didn't come to meet me in the lobby at ten o'clock, and when I called his room, no one answered. I waited a full hour for him. The man who sat on a bench in that lobby had made Herculean efforts to look presentable. He had shaved, holding his head sideways to prevent further injury to his back. He had vigorously rubbed the stain on his pants leg with soap and water, despite the excruciating jerks the cleaning gave his spine. He had combed his hair, and when he sat down on that bench to wait, he had contorted his body into a position he imagined might look normal. He scanned the lobby. He hoped. He revised his earlier interpretation of preceding events, made another one, and then another. He deliberated on several possibilities until he lost hope and hauled his miserable body into a cab, which drove him to the airport. I felt sorry for him, because he had understood so little.

  Three mornings after I returned to New York, I was moving easily around my apartment, thanks to Dr. Huyler and a drug called Relafen. At about the same time, two plainclothes detectives came to Violet's door asking for Mark. I didn't see them, but as soon as the policemen were gone, Violet came downstairs to tell me about their visit. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and Violet was wearing a long white cotton nightgown with a high neck. When I first saw her, I thought she looked a little like an old-fashioned doll. She began to talk to me, and I noticed that her voice fell into the half whisper she had used when she'd called me from the studio the day Bill had died.