What I Loved

  Violet nodded, and we watched Lazlo walk to the door and close it very gently behind him.

  We didn't talk for several minutes. It was dark outside, and it had started to snow. I watched the white motion through the window. Lazlo knew things, and Violet and I both understood that he had left the card for a reason. When I turned from the window and looked at Violet, she was so pale that her skin looked transparent, and I noticed a rash on her neck. Beneath her lowered eyes were faint purple shadows. I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. It enters your bones and lives there, because it has no use for flesh, and after a while you feel that you're all bone, hard and dessicated, like a skeleton in a classroom. She fingered the little card and looked up at me.

  "I'm afraid of him," she said.

  "Of Giles?" I said in a dull voice.

  "No," she said, "I'm talking about Mark. I'm afraid of Mark."

  Violet and I were sitting together on the sofa upstairs when his key turned in the lock. Before we heard the sound, Violet had been laughing at something I'd said, something I've forgotten now, but I remember that her laugh was still in my ears when Mark stepped through the door. He looked sad, a little sheepish, and very mild, but the sight of him turned me cold.

  "I have to talk to you," he said. "It's important."

  Violet's body had gone rigid. "Then talk," she said. Her eyes never left his face.

  He walked toward us, moved around the table, and leaned down to embrace Violet.

  She pulled away from him. "No, don't. I can't," she said.

  Mark looked startled and then hurt.

  In a low, steady voice, Violet said, "You lie to me, you rob and betray me, and now you want a hug? I told you I didn't want you back."

  He stared at her in disbelief. "What am I supposed to do? The police want to talk to me." He took a breath, then stepped backward. His arms hung limply at his sides. "I know Teddy did it," he said. He narrowed his eyes. "I saw him that night." Mark sat down at the other end of the table. He let his head fall forward. "He was all bloody."

  "You saw him?" Violet said loudly. "Who? What do you mean?"

  "I went to see Teddy. We were going out. He opened the door and he was all covered in blood. At first I thought it was a joke, you know, a trick." Mark blinked, then looked at us steadily. "But then I saw him— Me—on the floor."

  I felt as if my brain were rising inside my head. "You knew that he was dead?"

  Mark nodded.

  Violet's voice was steady. "What happened then?"

  "He said he'd kill me if I said anything, and I left. I was scared, so I took the train to Mom's."

  "Why didn't you go to the police?"

  "I told you. I was too scared."

  "You didn't seem scared in Minneapolis," I said. "Or Nashville. You seemed to enjoy Giles's company. I waited for you, Mark, but you never came."

  Mark's voice rose. "I had to go along. I couldn't get away. Don't you see? I had to do it. It wasn't my fault. I was afraid."

  "You have to talk to the police now," Violet said.

  "I can't. Teddy will kill me."

  Violet stood up. She disappeared and returned a few moments later.

  "You have to talk to the police now," she said. "Or they'll come and get you. Call this number. The detectives left it for you."

  "He needs a lawyer, Violet," I said. "He can't go without a lawyer."

  I was the one who called Lazlo's cousin's husband, Arthur Geller, and it turned out that he was expecting the call. When Mark went in to the police station to speak to the police the next day, he would have an attorney by his side. Violet told Mark that she would pay his legal bills. Then she corrected herself, "No. Bill will pay. It's his money."

  Violet let Mark sleep in his room that night, but she told him that after that he would have to find somewhere else to live. Then she turned to me and asked if I would sleep on the sofa. She said, "I don't want to be alone with Mark."

  Mark looked aghast. "That's stupid," he said. "Leo can sleep at home."

  Violet turned to him. She lifted her palms toward his face as though she were warding off a blow. "No," she said sharply. "No. I'm not going to stay alone with you. I don't trust you."

  By posting me as night sentry on the sofa, Violet wanted to make it clear that life was not going on as usual, but my presence wasn't enough to break the spell of the everyday. The hours that followed Mark's arrival were disquieting, not because anything happened—but because nothing did. I listened to the sound of him brushing his teeth and to his voice wishing me and Violet good night in a curiously cheerful tone and then to his shufflings in his room before he settled down to sleep. The sounds were ordinary, and because they were ordinary I found them terrible. The simple fact that Mark was in the apartment seemed to alter everything in it, to transform the table and chairs, the night-light in the hallway, and the red sofa where I had made a temporary bed. Most unsettling was the fact that the change could be felt but not seen. It was as though a veneer had settled over everything, a banal mask that clung so tightly to the hideous form beneath it that it couldn't be pried off.

  Long after the whole building was quiet with sleep, I lay awake listening to the noises from outside. "He has a good heart, my son." Bill had been standing at the window looking down onto the Bowery when he said those words, and I know that he had believed them, but years before, in the fairy tale he called The Changeling, he had told a story of substitution. I remembered the stolen child lying in his glass coffin. Bill knew, I thought. Somewhere inside him, he knew.

  In the morning, Mark went off with Arthur Geller and spoke to the police. The following day, Teddy Giles was arrested for the murder of Rafael Hernandez and held without bail on Rikers Island while he waited to go to trial. You would think that the dramatic entrance of a witness would have ended the case. But Mark hadn't seen the murder. He had seen a bloody Giles and the dead body of Rafael. It was important, but the D.A. wanted more. The law has to muddle along with facts, and there were few facts. The case was mostly talk—gossip, rumors, and Mark's story. There was little evidence to be gotten from the corpse, because the police hadn't found a whole body in the suitcase. The boy had been cut into pieces, and after months of decaying under water, those fragments of bone, sodden tissue, and teeth had revealed his identity—nothing more. We did find out from the newspapers that Rafael Hernandez wasn't Mexican, and he hadn't been bought by Giles. When he was four, his parents, who were both addicts, had deserted him and an infant sister. The little girl had died of AIDS when she was two years old. Rafael had run away from his third foster family, somewhere in the Bronx, and found his way into the clubs, where he met Giles. He had turned tricks. He had sold Ecstasy to willing buyers and at thirteen had made a pretty good living. Otherwise the boy was a cipher.

  Giles's arrest turned the perception of his work inside out. What had been seen as a clever commentary on the horror genre began to look like the sadistic fantasies of a murderer. The peculiar insularity of the New York art scene had often made obvious work seem subtle, stupid work intelligent, and sensational work subversive. It was all a matter of how the art was "pitched." Because Giles had become a sort of minor celebrity, embraced by critics and collectors, his new designation as possible felon was both embarrassing and intriguing to the world he had left so abruptly. During the first month after his arrest, art magazines, newspapers, and even the television news picked up the story of the "art murder." Larry Finder issued a statement in which he said that in America a person is innocent until proven guilty, but that if Giles was found guilty of the crime, he would vociferously condemn the act and would no longer represent him.

  In the meantime, however, prices for the work went up, and Finder did a brisk business selling Teddy Giles. Buyers wanted the work because it now seemed that it mimicked reality, but Giles, who freely gave interviews from Rikers, mounted a defense that was just the opposite. In an interview for DASH, he argued that it was all a hoax. He had staged a murder in his
apartment for the benefit of his friends, using artificial blood and a realistic replica of Rafael to do it. He had known that Rafael was leaving, going to visit an aunt in California, and he had used the trip to perpetrate an elaborate "art joke." Rafael Hernandez had been murdered, but Giles insisted that he hadn't done it. He cited the fact that his "fabricators" had known about his plan. Maybe one of them had committed the murder to frame him. Giles seemed to know that the police case rested on the shoulders of a nameless friend, a friend who had arrived that day and looked through the doorway into his apartment. Could the friend swear that the blood he had seen was real blood, that the body on the floor wasn't a fake? Perhaps the most curious aspect of the case was that Giles was able to produce an artificial corpse. Pierre Lange told the journalist that he had cast a simulation of Rafael's body on the Tuesday before he disappeared. Giles had instructed him about the injuries to the body, as he always did, and then he had worked with police and morgue photos to give the damage the appearance of believability. Of course, he added, the bodies were always hollow. Blood and sometimes crushed internal organs were added for effect, but he did not reproduce tissue or muscle or bone. According to the article, the police had impounded the faux corpse.

  The case lasted for eight long months. Mark camped out in the apartment of "a friend"—a girl named Anya, whom we never met. Violet spoke regularly to Arthur Geller on the telephone, and he sounded reasonably confident that Mark's testimony at the trial would result in a conviction. She spoke to Mark once a week, but she said their conversations were forced and mechanical. "I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth," she said. "I often wonder why I talk to him at all." On some evenings, Violet would speak to me while she looked out the window. Then she would stop talking and her lips would part in an expression of disbelief. She never cried anymore. Her dread seemed to have frozen her. She would stop moving for seconds at a time and become as inert as a statue. But at other times she was jumpy. The smallest noise would make her start or gasp. After she recovered from the momentary shock, she would rub her arms repeatedly as though she were cold. On the nights when she felt nervous, she would ask me to stay on the sofa, and I would bed down in the living room with Bill's pillows and the comforter from Mark's bed.

  I can't say whether Violet's anxiety was the same as mine. Like most emotions, that vague form of fear is a crude lump of feeling that relies on words for definition. But that inner state quickly infects what is supposedly outside us, and I felt that the rooms of my apartment and Violet's, the streets of the city, even the air I breathed stank of a diffuse, all-encompassing threat. Several times I thought I spotted Mark on Greene Street, and each time my heart raced until I discovered that it was some other tall, dark-haired boy in baggy pants. I didn't believe that I was in any danger from Mark. My trepidation seemed to come from something much larger than either him or Teddy Giles. No single person could contain it. The danger was invisible, mutable, and it spread. To be frightened of something so opaque makes me sound mad, as unbalanced as Dan, whose bouts of paranoia could turn an innocent pat on his arm into an attempt on his life, but insanity is a matter of degree. Most of us partake of it in one way or the other from time to time, feel its insidious tug and the lure of collapse. But I wasn't flirting with craziness then. I recognized that the anxiety tightening at my throat wasn't rational, but I also knew that what I feared lay beyond reason, and that nonsense can also be real.

  In April, Arthur told Violet the story of the lamp. For a while the case turned on that lamp, and yet its significance for me has little to do with police work or how the charges were resolved in the end. After combing the area around Giles's apartment, the police had spoken to a woman who owned a design store on Franklin Street. Arthur couldn't explain why it had taken them so long to find her, but Roberta Alexander had identified both Giles and Mark as the two young men who had been in her store in the early evening on the day of the murder. The problem was timing. According to Ms. Alexander, they had come into the store after Mark said he had fled Giles's apartment and gone to the train station, where he sat on a bench in stunned distress for several hours before he finally took the train to Princeton. Mark and Teddy had bought a table lamp. Ms. Alexander had the bill of sale with the date, and she was sure of the time, because she had been preparing to close her shop at seven. She had noticed nothing unusual about either Giles or Mark. In fact, she had found them both unusually polite and affable, and they hadn't haggled over the price. They had handed over $1,200 in cash.

  According to Arthur, the DA. had started to doubt Mark's story even before he knew about the lamp purchase. As he talked to more people in Giles's circle, he discovered that Mark had lied to most of them about one thing or another. A defense attorney would have little trouble proving that Mark was a habitual liar. Arthur knew that if one fact wobbled, others were likely to follow, and that one by one his facts might turn into fictions and his eyewitness into a suspect. Mark swore that his story had been perfect, with the sole omission of the lamp. Teddy had left the apartment with him, and he had gone along out of fear. He knew that it didn't look good, and that's why he hadn't mentioned it. Yes, he had waited for Teddy to change his clothes, and yes, they had returned to the apartment to drop off the lamp, but everything else was true. Lucille had already vouched for the fact that Mark had arrived at her house that same evening—around midnight.

  Mark understood that fear and cowardice in a person who discovers a murder might be met with sympathy. Casually buying a lamp with the perpetrator after seeing the body of his victim would not. Nobody could vouch for Mark's time of arrival at the loft on Franklin Street, and just as Arthur had feared, the D.A. began to suspect that he might have been interviewing an accomplice rather than a witness after the feet. We all did. Arthur began to prepare Violet for Mark's possible arrest, but I think it was unnecessary. Violet had long suspected that Mark hadn't told the full truth about the murder, and instead of showing signs of shock, she told me that she pitied Arthur. Mark had fooled him, the way he had fooled us all. "I warned him," she said, "but he believed Mark anyway." Whether Mark had helped Giles kill Rafael or had merely arrived on the scene once the murder was over, his presence in the store on Franklin Street and the purchase of that expensive lamp put an end to whatever feeling I had left for him. I knew that by some definition both Teddy Giles and Mark Wechsler were insane, examples of an indifference many regard as monstrous and unnatural; but in fact they weren't unique and their actions were recognizably human. Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren't a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for Mark vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.

  Violet and I both waited for something to happen, and while we waited, we worked. I wrote about Bill and then rewrote what I had written. Nothing I came up with was any good, but the quality of my thought and prose was secondary to the fact that I was able to continue doing it. Violet read at the studio. She often returned with headaches and sore eyes, and she coughed from all the cigarettes she had smoked. I started making sandwiches for her to take to the Bowery and asked her to promise that she would eat them. I believe that she did, because she didn't lose any more weight.

  Months passed, and Arthur had nothing new to report except that the D.A was still looking for something or someone to tighten his case. Violet and I spent most of that hot summer together. A little restaurant opened on Church Street, below Canal, and we would meet there for dinner two or three times a week. One night, a couple of minutes after she arrived, Violet left the table to go to the toilet and the waiter asked me if I'd like to order a drink for my wife. When Violet spent two weeks in Minnesota in July, I called her
every day. At night I worried that she would fall fatally ill or that she might decide to stay in the Midwest and never come back. But when Violet returned, we went on living in a state of suspense, wondering if the case would ever come to an end. The newspapers had dropped the story. Mark had left Anya and was living with another girl, named Rita. He informed Violet that he was working in a flower shop and gave her the name of the place, but Violet never bothered to call and check on whether it was true or not. It didn't seem all that important.

  And then, in late August, a boy named Indigo West came forward. Like a deus ex machina, he dropped from heaven and freed Mark from suspicion. He claimed to have witnessed the murder through the hallway door in Giles's apartment. Apparently, Indigo was only one of many people who had keys to Giles's apartment He had arrived at about five o'clock in the morning and wandered into one of the bedrooms. He slept most of the next day and woke to the sound of glass breaking in the front room. When he went to see what was happening, he said that he saw Giles with an axe in one hand and a broken vase in the other, standing over Rafael, who had already lost an arm. A large plastic dropcloth lay on the floor and was covered with blood. According to Indigo, Rafael was tied up and his mouth was taped. If he wasn't dead, he was almost dead. Unseen and unheard by Giles, Indigo ran back to the bedroom and hid under the bed, where he threw up. He lay absolutely still for at least an hour. He said he heard Giles walking around, and once he heard him just outside the bedroom door. When the telephone rang, Giles answered it, and not long after that, he heard Giles talking to someone in the hallway and recognized the voice as Mark's. He distinctly overheard Mark say that he was hungry, but the rest of the conversation was too low for him to hear. When the door slammed and all noises stopped, he waited for several minutes, crawled out from under the bed, and ran out of the building. He said he went to Puffy's and ordered a coffee from a waitress with blue hair.