What I Loved

  "They said that they just wanted to ask him some questions. I said that Mark had been traveling with Teddy Giles and that the last place I knew he had been was Nashville. I said that he had had problems, that he might not call me at all, but if he was in touch, I would tell him they wanted to talk to him"—-Violet took a breath—"in connection with the murder of Rafael Hernandez. That was all. They didn't ask me any questions. They said 'Thank you,' and then they left They must have found his body. It's all true, Leo. Do you think I should call them and tell them what we know? I didn't say anything."

  "What do we know, Violet?"

  She looked confused for a moment. "We don't really know anything, do we? "

  "Not about the murder." I listened to the word as I said it. So common. The word was everywhere all the time, but I didn't want it to come easily from me. I wanted it to be difficult to say, more difficult than it was.

  "There's the message on Bill's machine that says Mark knows. I never erased it. Do you think he knows?"

  "He said he did, but then he changed his story and said the boy was in California."

  "If he knows and he stays with Giles, what does it mean?"

  I shook my head.

  "Is it a crime, Leo?"

  "Just knowing, you mean?"

  She nodded.

  "I suppose it depends on how you know, if you have any real evidence. Mark might not believe the story at all. He might really think that the kid ran away..."

  Violet was shaking her head back and forth. "No, Leo. Remember, Mark mentioned that two detectives were asking questions at the Finder Gallery That was when Giles left town. Isn't there some law about aiding a fugitive?"

  "We don't know that there's a warrant for Giles's arrest. We don't know that the police have any evidence at all. To be honest, Violet, we don't even know that Giles killed that boy. It's unlikely but possible that he might be bragging about a murder he didn't commit—simply because he knew about it. That would make him culpable, but in a different way."

  Violet looked past me and over at the painting of herself. "Detective Lightner and Detective Mills," she said. "A white man and a black man. They didn't look young, and they didn't look old. They weren't fat, and they weren't thin. They were both very nice, and they didn't seem to expect anything from me. They called me Mrs. Wechsler." Violet paused and turned back to me. "It's funny, since Bill died I like being called that by strangers. There's no Bill anymore. There's no marriage anymore, and I never changed my name. I've always been Violet Blom, but now his name is something I want to hear over and over again, and I like answering to it. It's like wearing his shirts. I want to cover myself in what's left of him, even if it's only his name." Violet's voice carried no emotion. She was just explaining the facts.

  A few minutes later, she left me to go upstairs. An hour after that, she knocked on my door again and explained that she was on the way to the studio, but she wanted to give me copies of Bill's tapes to watch when I had the time. Bernie had been dragging his feet, she said, because he had so much to look after, but he had finally handed over copies of the videos. "Bill didn't know what the work was going to look like. He talked about building a big room for watching the tapes, but he kept changing his mind. He was going to call it Icarus. I know that, and that he made lots of drawings of a boy falling."

  Violet looked down at her boots and chewed on her lip.

  "Are you okay?" I said.

  She lifted her eyes and said, "I have to be."

  "What do you do in the studio all day, Violet? There's not much left there."

  Violet's eyes narrowed. "I read," she said in a fierce voice. "First I put on Bill's work clothes and then I read. I read all day. I read from nine in the morning until six at night. I read and read and read until I can't see the page anymore."

  The first images on the screen were of newborns—tiny beings with distorted heads and frail, squirming limbs. Bill's camera never left the infants. Adults were present as arms, chests, shoulders, knees, thighs, voices, and occasionally a large face that intruded into the lens and came close to the baby. The first child was asleep in a woman's arms. The little creature had a large head, thin blue-red arms and legs, and was dressed in a checkered suit and an absurd little white bonnet that tied under its chin. That infant was followed by another strapped to a man's chest. His dark hair stuck straight up like Lazlo's, and his black eyes turned toward the camera in dumbfounded amazement Bill followed along as the children rode in carriages, slept in Snuglis, lolled on a parental arm, or had seizures of desperate weeping on a shoulder. Sometimes the mostly unseen parents or nannies delivered monologues on sleeping habits, nursing, breast pumps, or spitting up as the traffic rumbled and screeched behind them, but the talk and noise were incidental to the moving pictures of the small strangers—the one who turned his bald head away from his mother's breast, leaking milk from the sides of his mouth; the dark-skinned beauty who sucked an invisible breast in her sleep and then appeared to smile; the alert baby whose blue eyes moved up toward its mother's face and gazed at her with what looked like profound concentration.

  As far as I could tell, the only principle that guided Bill was age. Every day he must have gone out and looked for children a little older than the day before. Gradually his camera left infants and turned to older babies, who sat up, chirped, squealed, grunted, and put every loose object they could reach into their mouths. A big baby girl sucked on her bottle as she twined her mother's hair around her fingers in a swoon of contentment. A little boy howled as his father dislodged a rubber ball from between his gums. A baby sitting on a woman's lap reached toward an older girl sitting inches away from him and began swatting her knees. An adult hand appeared and smacked the baby's arms. It couldn't have been very hard, because the baby reached out and did it again, only to be smacked again. The camera moved back for a moment and showed the woman's tired, vacant face before it zoomed in on a third child sleeping in her stroller and held for a few seconds on her dirty cheeks and the two translucent ribbons of snot that ran from her nose to her mouth.

  Bill filmed children crawling at high speed in the park and other children walking and falling and then pulling themselves up to walk again, tottering forward like old drunks in a bar. He recorded a little boy standing somewhat unsteadily beside a large, panting terrier. The child's whole body shuddered with excitement as he held his hand near the dog's snout and let out small joyous ejaculations—Eh! Eh! Eh! Another child, with fat knees and a protruding belly, was seen standing in a bakery. She looked upward and uttered a few incomprehensible syllables, which were then answered by an invisible woman, "It's a fan, sweetheart." With her neck craned and her lips moving, the child stared fixedly at the ceiling and began to chant the word "fan," repeating it over and over in a high, awestruck voice. An apoplectic two-year-old kicked and screamed on the sidewalk beside her squatting mother, who was holding an orange. "But darling," the woman said over the howls, "this orange is exactly like the one Julie got. There's no difference."

  When the children he was filming reached the ages of three and four, I heard Bill's voice for the first time. Speaking over the image of an unsmiling little boy, he said, "Do you know what your heart does?" The child looked straight into the camera, put his hand on his chest, and said gravely, "It puts blood inside. It can bleed and live." Another boy held up a juice box, shook it, and turned to the woman sitting beside him on a park bench. "Mommy," he said, "my drink lost its gravity." A blond child with nearly white pigtails ran in circles, jumped up and down, stopped suddenly, turned her flushed face to the camera, and said in a clear, precocious voice, "Happy tears is sweating." A little girl in a filthy tutu and crooked tiara bent close to a friend who was wearing a pink skirt on her head. "Don't worry," she whispered in a conspiratorial voice. "It checked out. I called the man and we can be wedding girls." "What's your doll's name?" Bill asked a neatly dressed little girl with cornrows in her hair. "Go ahead," said a woman's voice. "You can tell him." The little girl scratched her
arm and held the doll toward the camera by one leg. "Shower," she said.

  The anonymous children came and went, aging by increments as Bill watched them, his camera lingering on their faces as they explained to him how things worked and what they were made of. One girl told Bill that caterpillars turned into raccoons, another that her brain was made of metal with eyedrops in it, a third that the world started with a "big, big egg." After a while, some of his subjects seemed to forget he was there. One boy stuck his finger into his nose and dug happily, retrieving a couple of crusts, which he promptly ate. Another, his hand deep in his pants, scratched his balls and sighed with pleasure. A small girl was seen bending down beside a stroller. She began to make cooing noises and then she grabbed the cheeks of the baby who was strapped into the seat. "I love you, you little dumpling," she said, pinching and shaking the cheeks. "You honeybun," she added fiercely as the baby began to sob from the pressure of her fingers. "Stop that, Sarah," said a woman. "Be nice." "I was nice," Sarah replied, her eyes narrowed and her jaw locked.

  Another girl, slightly older, about five, stood beside her mother on a sidewalk somewhere in mid town. The two were seen from behind as they looked into a store window. After a few seconds, it was clear that Bill was most interested in the girl's hand. The camera followed it as it roved her mother's back, moving north toward the shoulder blades, then south toward the buttocks. Up and down, up and down, that small hand idly caressed the maternal back. He also filmed a boy stopped on the sidewalk, his small face screwed up in tight belligerence, a sparkle of tears showing in the corners of his eyes. A woman seen from the neck down stood beside him, her body tensed with rage. "I'm fed up!" she bellowed at him. "I've had it with you. You're acting like a little shit and I want you to stop!" She leaned over, grabbed the boy by the shoulders, and began to shake him. "Stop! Stop!" The tears fell down his cheeks, but the boy's expression remained stiff and unyielding.

  There was a resolute, pitiless quality to the tapes, a dogged desire to look and look hard. The camera's focus remained close and tight as the children grew taller and more articulate. A boy named Ramon, who told Bill that he was seven, explained that his uncle collected chickens— "Anything with a chicken on it, he buys it. His whole basement is chickens." A plump boy, probably eight or nine, in wide jean shorts glowered at a taller boy in a baseball cap who was holding a box of candy. In a sudden fit of anger, the shorter boy said, "Shit on you," and pushed his adversary violently to the ground. Pieces of candy flew as the boy on the ground started crowing in triumph, "He said the S word! He said the S word!" A pair of adult legs ran into the frame. Two little girls in plaid uniforms sat on cement steps and whispered to each other. A foot away, a third girl in the same uniform turned her head to look at them. Bill caught the child's profile. As she watched the others, she swallowed hard several times. The camera moved through the crowd of schoolchildren and recorded a boy, with a mouthful of gleaming braces, as he removed his backpack and slammed it against the shoulder of the kid next to him.

  The longer I watched, the more mysterious I found the pictures in front of me. What had started as ordinary images of children in the city became over time a remarkable document of human particularity and sameness. There were so many different children—fat, thin, light, dark, beautiful children and plain children, healthy children and children who were crippled or deformed. Bill had filmed a group of kids in wheelchairs who were lowered from a bus that had been designed with a lift to bring the chairs to street level. As she rolled her chair off the mechanism, a chubby girl of about eight straightened herself up and gave Bill a mocking royal wave. He filmed a boy with a scar on his upper lip who first smiled crookedly and then made a farting noise with his mouth. He followed another boy whose indeterminable illness or birth defect had left him with ballooning cheeks and a missing chin. He wore a respirator of some kind as he chugged along on his short legs beside his mother. The differences among the children were startling, and yet, in the end, their faces mingled. Above all, the tapes revealed the furious animation of children, the fact that when conscious they rarely stop moving. A simple walk down the block included waving, hopping, skipping, twirling, and multiple pauses to examine a piece of litter, pet a dog, or jump up and walk along a cement barrier or low fence. In a schoolyard or playground, they jostled, punched, elbowed, kicked, poked, patted, hugged, pinched, tugged, yelled, laughed, chanted, and sang, and while I watched them, I said to myself that growing up really means slowing down.

  Bill died before the children reached puberty. A few girls showed signs of breasts coming beneath their T-shirts or the blouses of their school uniforms, but most of the kids hadn't even started to change. I suspect that he had meant to go on, that he wanted to film more and more children until a moment came when the figures on the screen could no longer be distinguished from adults. After the last video ended and I had turned off the television, I felt exhausted and a little raw from the parade of bodies and faces, the sheer volume of young lives that had passed in front of me. I imagined Bill on his peripatetic adventure as he sought out kids and more kids to answer some craving in himself. What I had seen was unedited and crude, but when strung together the fragments had formed a syntax that might be read for possible meaning. It was as if Bill intended the many lives he documented to merge into a single entity, to show the one in the many or the many in the one. Everyone begins and ends. Throughout the tapes I had thought of Matthew, first as a baby, then as a toddler, and finally as a boy who had been left in childhood forever.

  Icarus. The connection between the children on the tapes and the myth remained oblique. But Bill had chosen the tide for a reason. I remembered Brueghel's painting, with its two figures—the father and the falling boy, whose wings are melting in the sun. Daedalus, the great architect and magician, had made those wings for himself and his son to escape from their tower prison. He warned Icarus about flying too close to the sun, but the boy refused to listen and plummeted into the sea. Nevertheless, Daedalus isn't an innocent figure in the story. He had risked too much for his freedom and, because of it, he had lost his son.

  Neither Violet nor I nor Erica in California, who now knew the whole story, doubted that the police would find Mark and question him. It was just a matter of time. After the visit from Detectives Lightner and Mills, I had lost all sense of what was possible for Mark and what was impossible, and without that barrier I lived in dread. The incident in the hallway in the Nashville hotel didn't recede. Every night my helplessness came back to me. Giles's hands. His voice. The shock of my head hitting the wall. And Mark's eyes, which had nothing behind them. I heard myself call out for him, saw my arms reach toward him, and then I was waiting on the bench in the lobby for no one. I had related most of the facts to Violet and Erica, but I had kept my voice even, my description cold, and I hadn't told them about Giles touching my hair. Over time, that gesture had become unspeakable. It was much easier just to say that he had slammed my head into the wall. For some reason the violence was preferable to what had come before it. I found it hard to sleep, and sometimes after lying awake for hours I would go to check the locks on my door, even though I knew that I had bolted them shut and secured the chain.

  The only fact that could be determined absolutely from the newspapers was that the broken and decayed body of a boy named Rafael Hernandez had been found in a suitcase that had washed up somewhere near a Hudson River pier, and that identification had been made through dental records. The rest was printed gossip. Blast ran a long article with pictures of Teddy Giles and the headline JUST KIDDING? According to the journalist, Delford Links, people in both the art world and the club scene had known of Rafael's disappearance for some time. The day after the boy disappeared, Giles had made several telephone calls to friends and acquaintances, claiming that he had just done "a real one." That same evening, he had gone out to Club USA wearing clothes that appeared to have dried blood all over them and had careened around the club announcing that the She-Monster had "committed the ult
imate work of art." Not a single person had taken Giles seriously. Even after the body had been found, most people associated with Giles refused to accept the possibility that he had actually murdered someone. A seventeen-year-old boy named Junior was quoted: "He was always saying stuff like that. He must have told me fifteen different times that he had just killed somebody."

  Hasseborg was also quoted: "The danger inherent in Giles's work is that it attacks every one of our sacred cows. His work isn't limited to sculptures or photographs or even performances. His personas are also his art—a spectacle of shifting identities that includes the psychopathic killer, who is, after all, a celebrated, mythical character. Turn on your TV Go to the movies. He's everywhere. But to suggest that this persona is anything more than that is an outrage. The fact that Giles knew Rafael Hernandez hardly makes him guilty of his murder."

  On the Sunday evening after I returned from Nashville, Violet and I were having dinner upstairs when Lazlo buzzed the front door. Lazlo's expression was usually sober, but when we opened the door for him, I thought his face looked almost sad. "I found this," he said, and handed it to Violet. The article came from the gossip column in the downtown paper Bleep. Violet read it aloud: "Rumors are flying about a certain Bad Boy on the art scene and the body of his thirteen-year-old ex-toy and part-time E dealer that bobbed up in the Hudson. One of B.B.'s ex- girlfriends claims that there's a witness—yet another one of B.B.'s many AC./D.C. exes. Could the plot get any thicker? Stay tuned ..."

  Violet looked at Lazlo. "What does this mean?" she said.

  Lazlo was silent. Instèad of responding to Violet's question, he handed her a business card. "He's married to my cousin," Lazlo said. "Arthur's a real good guy—a criminal attorney. He used to work in the D.A's office." Lazlo paused. "Could be you won't need him." Lazlo didn't move. I couldn't even see him breathe. Then he said, "Pinky's waiting for me."