What I Loved

I repressed those underground images and stuck to the coherent story on the surface. It was both more comfortable and more rational. After all, I had become a creature of mourning. Matthew's absence had made me unusually alert to nuances in Mark's character that might turn out to be of little importance. I had lost faith in predictable stories. My son was dead, and my wife lived in self-imposed exile. But I told myself that just because my own life had been rocked by accident didn't mean that other people didn't have lives that plodded along a prescribed course, becoming over the years rather like what they had expected all along.

That summer Bill came back to me. He called almost every day, and I followed the progress of the doors as they were made on the Bowery. Although Bill put in long hours at the studio, he had more time for me, and I sensed that his desire to see me was partly the result of a new optimism he felt about Mark. Worry always took the form of retreat in Bill, and over the years I had come to recognize the outward signs of his withdrawal. His expansive gestures vanished. His eyes focused on an object across the room but failed to register the thing he was seeing. He chainsmoked cigarettes and kept a bottle of Scotch under his desk. I was sensitive to Bill's internal weather, to the intense pressure that built up inside him and then stormed quietly. Those tempests usually began and ended with Mark, but while they were raging, Bill found it hard to talk to me or anyone else. Violet may have been an exception. I don't know. I felt that Bill's inner tumult wasn't fury against Mark for his lying and irresponsibility but rather a seething anger and doubt he turned on himself. At the same time, he was eager to believe that the winds were changing, and he seized on every nuance in his son's behavior as a sign of better days to come. "He's stuck with the job," Bill said to me, "and he really enjoys it. He's stopped seeing Giles and that club bunch and is hanging out with kids his own age. It's a big relief to me, Leo. I knew that he was going to find some direction in his life." Because Violet was out doing research for her book, I saw her much less than either Bill or Mark, and not seeing her helped me to repress her imaginary twin—the woman I took to bed in my mind. Erica talked to Violet regularly, however, and she wrote that Violet was better, less anxious, and that she, too, felt a new determination in Mark that was connected to his job for Freund. "She told me that Mark is genuinely moved by the fact that the project is about children. She thinks it struck a chord with him."

Mr Bob was still in residence on the Bowery, and every time I went to visit Bill, he regarded me through his chained door with suspicion, and every time I left, he blessed me. I knew that Mr. Bob made full-bodied appearances for Bill and Violet, but I never saw more than a fraction of his brooding face. Although Bill didn't talk about it, I understood that the old man had become his dependent. Bill left groceries at the bottom of the stairs for Mr. Bob, and once I saw a note on Bill's desk written in a tiny neat hand: "Crunchy not smooth peanut butter!" But as far as I could tell, Bill had simply accepted his downstairs neighbor as an obligatory presence in his life. He shook his head and smiled when I mentioned the old squatter, but he never complained about what I suspected were Mr. Bob's growing demands.

In the middle of August, Bill and Violet asked if I would let Mark stay with me for two weeks while they vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. Mark couldn't abandon his job, and they felt uncomfortable leaving him in the apartment alone. I agreed to take him in and gave Mark another key. "This," I said to him, "is a sign of trust between us, and I'd like you to hold on to it, even after these two weeks are over." He held out his hand and I lowered the key into his palm. "You understand me, don't you, Mark?"

He looked at me steadily and nodded. "I do, Uncle Leo." His bottom lip trembled with emotion, and we embarked on our two weeks together.

Mark spoke warmly about his work for Freund, about the large colored flags he had helped mount, about the other young men and women who worked alongside him—Rebecca and Laval and Shaneil and Jesus. Mark lifted and climbed and hammered and sawed, and by the time he quit for the day, he said, his arms ached and his legs felt wobbly. When he returned home at around five or six, he often needed a nap to recover. Around eleven o'clock at night, he went out and usually didn't return until morning. "I'm staying with Jake," he would say, and leave a telephone number. "I'll be at Louisa's house. Her parents said I could sleep in the guest room." Another number. He wandered in at between six and eight in the morning and would sleep until work. His schedule changed daily. "I don't have to be in until noon," he would say, or "Harry doesn't need me today," and then he would drop into a coma until four in the afternoon.

Sometimes, his friends came to my door to retrieve Mark for a night out. Most of them were short white girls, dressed in baby clothes with pigtails in their hair and glitter on their cheeks. One evening, a brunette came to the door with a pacifier hanging on a pink ribbon around her neck. With voices to match their infantile clothing, Mark's girlfriends cooed and piped and twittered in high, thin tones suffused with misplaced emotion. When I offered them soft drinks, they breathed out their lilting thank-yous as if I had just offered them immortality. Although Mark had played tough for Freddy, he didn't swagger or act bored with the girls. With Marina, Sissy, Jessica, and Moonlight (the daughter of glassblowers in Brooklyn), his tone was invariably gentle and earnest. When he bent down to talk to them, his handsome face softened with feeling.

One night when Mark was out with friends, I had dinner with Lazlo and Pinky at Omen on Thompson Street. Pinky was the one who first brought up the story of the dead cats. Although I had met Pinky Navatsky several times, I had never spent much time with her until that evening. She was a tall girl in her early twenties, with red hair, gray eyes, a significant, slightly hooked nose, which gave her an air of substance, and a very long neck. Like many dancers, she had a permanent turnout that affected her walk, which was a little ducklike, but she held her head like a queen at her coronation, and I loved to watch her move her arms and hands while she talked. When she gestured, she often used the whole limb, moving her arm from her shoulder. At other times she would bend her elbow and open her hand toward me in a single sure sweep. Her movements weren't at all affected. She simply had a relation to her own musculature that for most of us is unthinkable. Just before she mentioned the cats, she leaned toward me, turned her palms over so they faced the ceiling, and said, "Last night I had a dream about the murdered cats. I think it was that picture in the Post"

When I said that I knew nothing about murdered cats, Pinky explained that the flayed, skewered, and dismembered animals had been discovered around the city, nailed to walls, hanging from doorways, or simply lying in the middle of an alley, sidewalk, or subway platform.

Lazlo informed me that the animals were all partly dressed, wearing diapers, baby outfits, pajamas, or training bras, and they had all been signed with the letters S.M. Those letters may have started the rumors that Teddy Giles was responsible. Giles called his drag persona the "She-Monster," initials that coyly but not very subtly also referred to sadomasochism. Although Giles had denied all responsibility for the cats, Lazlo said that he had kept ambiguity and shock alive by calling the animal corpses "guerrilla art at its furious best." Giles had also said he envied the artist and hoped he had been an inspiration to the unnamed "perpetrator/creator." Finally, he had given his blessing to all future "copycats." These comments drove animal-rights organizations to screeching outrage, and Larry Finder had come to work one morning to find the words ACCESSORY TO MURDER scrawled in red paint on the gallery door. I had missed the furor in the papers and the clip that had made the local television news.

Lazlo chewed thoughtfully and took long breaths through his nose. "You're out of it, did you know that, Leo?"

I admitted that I was.

"Lazlo," Pinky said, "not everybody's like you, always checking out everything all the time. Leo has other things to think about."

"No offense," Lazlo said to me.

After I had made it clear to both of them that I wasn't the least bit upset by the comment, Lazlo continued, "Giles'll say anything if he thinks it'll be hyped."

"It's true," Pinky said. "He might not have a thing to do with those cats."

"Do Bill and Violet know about this?"

Lazlo nodded. "But they think Mark's not seeing Giles."

"And you know that he is."

"We saw them together," Pinky said.

"At the Limelight last Tuesday." After a vigorous inhalation through his nose, Lazlo said, "I hate to tell Bill, but I'll do it. The kid's in over his head."

"Even if Giles isn't murdering cats," Pinky said, leaning across the table, "he's creepy. I'd never seen him before, and it wasn't his makeup or clothes that got me, it was something in his eyes."

Before we said good-bye, Lazlo slipped me an envelope. I had gotten used to these parting gifts. He left them for Bill, too. Usually he typed up a quotation for me to think about. I had already been treated to Thomas Bernhard's spleen: "Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe ... Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities," and to a quote from Philip Guston I particularly liked: "To know and yet how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all." That night I opened the envelope and read: "Kitsch is always in the process of escaping into rationality. Hermann Broch."

I asked myself if the dead cats were meant to be a form of kitsch, a thought that led to ruminations on animal sacrifice, the chain of being, ordinary slaughterhouses, and finally to pets. I remembéred that as a little boy Mark had kept white mice, guinea pigs, and a parakeet named Peeper. One day the cage door had fallen on Peeper's neck and killed him. After the accident, Mark and Matt had paraded around our loft with a shoe box that held the stiff little corpse, singing the only song they knew that would function as a dirge: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

When Mark returned from work the next day, I couldn't bring myself to mention either Giles or the cats, and at dinner he had so much to tell me about his day, I never found a good opening for the subject. That morning he had helped mount his favorite blown-up drawing, by a six- year-old girl in the Bronx—a self-portrait with her turtle, which looked very much like a dinosaur. In the afternoon, his friend Jesus had fallen off a ladder but was saved by a huge pile of canvas flags that were piled beneath him on the ground. Before Mark left for the night, he retreated to the bathroom and I heard him whistling. He put a telephone number on the table with a name beside it. Allison Fredericks: 677-8451. "You can reach me at Allison's," he said.

After Mark was gone, a vague suspicion began to churn inside me. I listened to Janet Baker singing Berlioz, but the music didn't drive away the uneasiness that constricted my lungs. I studied the name and telephone number Mark had left on the table. After twenty minutes of hesitation, I picked up the telephone and called. A man answered. "I'd like to speak to Mark Wechsler," I said.

"Who?"

"He's a friend of Allison's."

"There's no Allison here."

I looked at the number. Maybe I had dialed wrong. Very carefully I punched in the numbers again. The same man answered and I hung up.

When I confronted Mark about the wrong number the following morning, he looked puzzled. He dug into his pocket, produced a number, and laid it beside the little piece of paper he had written on the night before. "I see what I did." He spoke in a bright, clear voice. "I reversed these two numbers. Look here. "It's four eight, not eight four. I'm sorry. I guess I was in a hurry."

His innocent face made me feel foolish. Then I confessed that I had been feeling upset because of Lazlo's story about seeing him with Giles and because of the cat rumors.

"Oh, Uncle Leo," he said. "You should've talked to me right away. I ran into Teddy when I was out with some other friends, but we're not really close anymore. I have to tell you something, though. Teddy likes to shock people. It's his thing, but he wouldn't hurt a fly. I mean that. I've seen him carry flies out of his apartment like this." Mark cupped his hands. "Those poor cats. It just makes me sick. You know, I've got two cats at Mom's, Mirabelle and Esmeralda. They're like my best friends."

"The rumor probably got started because Giles's work is so violent," I said.

"But that's all fake!" Mark said. "I thought Violet was the only person who didn't know the difference." Mark rolled his eyes.

"Violet doesn't know the difference?"

"Well, she acts like it's real or something. She never even lets me watch horror movies. What does she think? I'm going to go out and cut somebody because I saw it on TV?"

Mark looked very pale during the second week of our time together, but then he must have been exhausted. Friends of his phoned all day and half the night, asking for Mark, Marky, and The Mark. In order to get any work done, I stopped answering the telephone and listened to the messages later in the day. On Tuesday, at around two o'clock in the morning, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the phone and heard a man's deep voice say, "M&M?" "No," I said, and then, "Do you mean Mark?" I heard a click and the line went dead. The steady calls, Mark's erratic comings and goings, his things scattered around the apartment had all started to confuse me. I wasn't used to living with another person anymore, and I found that I misplaced some things and lost others. My pen vanished for a couple of days and then I found it behind a sofa cushion. A kitchen knife disappeared. I couldn't find my silver letter opener, which had been a present from my mother. As I sat at my desk, I was often distracted by unfocused worry about Mark.

One afternoon, I stood up from my desk and walked to Matt's room. Stacks of records and CDs rose from the floor. Flyers littered the shelves.

Advertisements with names like Starlight Techno and Machine Paradise were plastered to the walls. Sneakers lay everywhere. He must have owned twenty pairs. Pants, sweaters, socks, and T-shirts had been strewn on the bed, over the chair, and in heaps on the floor. Some of them still had store tags clinging to their necks or waistlines. I walked into the room and picked up a videotape lying on the desk: Killers Unleashed. I had never seen the movie but had read about it. It was based on the true story of a boy and girl who first murder their parents and then cross the country on a rampage of theft and homicide. A respected director had filmed it, and the movie had caused some controversy. I put it down and noticed an unopened box of Legos lying only inches away. Its cover featured a merry little policeman, one stiff arm raised in a salute. On the desk I noticed gum wrappers, a green rabbit's foot, keys to somewhere, a curly straw, old Star Wars figures, stickers of a cartoon dog, and, oddly enough, several broken pieces of dollhouse furniture. I also found a xeroxed flyer, which I picked up and read. It had been typed entirely in capital letters:

WHY ARE YOU AT THIS EVENT? THE RAVE SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNO. IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT DRUGS. THIS SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT FASHION. IT IS SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT UNITY AND HAPPINESS. IT IS ABOUT BEING YOURSELF AND BEING LOVED FOR IT. IT SHOULD BE A HARBOR FROM OUR SOCIETY. BUT OUR SCENE RIGHT NOW IS DISINTEGRATING. WE DON'T NEED FRONTS AND ATTITUDES IN OUR SCENE. THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS TOUGH ENOUGH. OPEN YOUR HEARTS AND LET THE GOOD FEELINGS FLOW. LOOK AROUND YOU, PICK A PERSON, ASK THEM THEIR NAME, AND MAKE A FRIEND. ELIMINATE BOUNDARIES. OPEN YOUR HEARTS AND MINDS. RAVERS UNITE AND KEEP OUR SCENE ALIVE!

Around the edges of the paper in hand-drawn letters the nameless author had written little slogans by hand: "You gotta be real!" "Be yourself!" "Be happy!" "Group hugs!" and "You're beautiful!"

There was something pitiful about the flyer's crudely written idealism, but the sentiments expressed were nothing if not pure. The text made me think of the flower children who long ago had become adults.

Even in the sixties, I had been too old to believe that "eliminating boundaries" was of much use in the world. After carefully replacing the flyer, I looked up from the desk and studied Matt's watercolor. It should be dusted, I thought. Then I looked through the window of Dave's apartment and examined the figure of the old man for a couple of minutes and wondered what Matthew would have been like at sixteen. Would he too have gone to raves and dyed his hair green or pink or blue? Hours after I had left the room, I remembered that I had planned to dust the watercolor. but by then I had lost the will to return to the chaotic room, with its litter, garish signs, and pathetic little manifesto.

The last days of my cohabitation with Mark were marred by a clutching distress that came over me as soon as he left the apartment but was then instantly dispelled as soon as I saw him again. I had begun to feel that Mark's physical presence had an almost magical quality. While I was looking at him, I always believed him. The frank sincerity in his face instantly banished all my doubts, but once he was out of view, the dull anxiety would rise up again. On Friday evening he emerged from the bathroom, and I noticed green glitter on his white face and neck.

"I'm worried about you, Mark. You're exhausting yourself. I think a quiet night at home would do you good."

"I'm okay. I'm just hanging out with my friends." Mark reached over and patted my arm. "Really, we just listen to music and watch movies and stuff. The thing is, I'm young now. I'm young and I want to have fun and experiences now when I'm young." He looked at me with sympathy, as if I were the living embodiment of the adage "too little, too late."

"When I was your age," I said to him, "my mother gave me a piece of advice that I've never forgotten. She said, 'Don't do anything you don't really want to do.' "

Mark's eyes widened.

"She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don't do it."

Mark nodded soberly and then continued to nod several times. "That's smart," he said. "I'm going to remember that."

Saturday night, I went to bed knowing that Mark would be leaving the next day. The knowledge of Bill and Violet's imminent return affected me like a sleeping pill, and not long after Mark left the house, at around eleven, I fell asleep. Sometime during the course of the night, I had a long dream that began as an erotic adventure with Violet, who didn't look like herself, and then turned into a dream in which I was walking down long corridors in a hospital, where I found Erica in one of the beds and discovered that she had given birth to a baby girl. The child's paternity was in question, however, and just as I was kneeling by Erica's bed and telling her that I didn't care who the father was, that I would be the father, the baby disappeared from the hospital ward. Erica was strangely indifferent to the missing child, but I felt desperate, and suddenly I was the one lying in the hospital bed, and Erica was sitting beside me pinching my arm in a gesture that was supposed to comfort me but didn't. I woke up with the peculiar sensation that someone really was pinching my arm. I opened my eyes and jerked up in surprise. Mark was leaning over me, his head only inches from my face. He lurched backward and began to walk toward the door.

"Good God," I said. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing," he whispered. "Go back to sleep." He had reached the doorway to my bedroom, and the ceiling lamp in the hallway lit his profile. His lips looked very red as he turned away from me. My arm was still stinging. "Did you want to wake me?" Mark spoke without turning around. "I heard you yell in your sleep and I wanted to make sure you were okay." His voice sounded deliberate, mechanical. "Go back to sleep." He disappeared, closing the door softly behind him.

I turned on the lamp beside my bed and looked down at my forearm. There was a haze of red on it. The color, which looked like the traces of a pastel crayon, had matted some of the hairs. I brought the arm closer to my face and noticed a circular pattern of tiny irregular indentations like pock marks gouged into my skin. The word that came to mind made me breathe faster: teeth. I looked at the clock. It was five o'clock in the morning. I put my finger to the red again and saw that it wasn't crayon but something less waxy and softer—lipstick. I got out of bed, walked to the door, and locked it. After I returned to bed, I listened to Mark shuffling around the room across the hall. I stared at my arm and scrutinized the marks. I went so far as to bite my own arm rather gently and then compare the ridges in my skin. Yes, I said to myself, he bit me. The inflamed circle notched into my arm faded very slowly, despite the fact that the pressure hadn't broken the skin or drawn blood. What could it possibly mean? I realized that it hadn't occurred to me to run after Mark and demand an explanation. For two weeks, I had been wobbling between trust and dread when it came to Mark, but my worries had never veered toward suspicions of madness. This sudden, inexplicable, thoroughly irrational act threw me completely off balance. What on earth would he have to say to me when I saw him later in the day?

I woke and slept and slept and woke for hours. By the time I crawled out of bed and lumbered toward the coffee machine around ten, Mark was sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal.

"Boy, you slept late," he said. "I got up early."

I grabbed the bag of coffee from the refrigerator and began spooning its dark contents into the filter. An answer seemed impossible. While I waited for the coffee, I stared at Mark, who was shoveling a colored cereal with marshmallows into his mouth. He crunched happily on the repellent concoction and gave me a smile. All at once, I felt that I was the one who had gone insane overnight. I looked at my arm. There was no trace of the bite. It happened, I said to myself, but maybe Mark doesn't remember it. Perhaps he had been drugged or even asleep. Erica had held conversations with me while she walked in her sleep. I brought my cup of coffee over to the table.

"Uncle Leo, you're shaking," Mark said. His limpid blue eyes looked concerned. "Are you okay?"

I removed my trembling hand from the tabletop. The question in my throat—Do you remember coming into my room and biting my arm last night?—refused to form itself on my lips.

He put down his spoon. "Guess what?" he said. "I met a girl last night. Her name is Lisa. She's really pretty, and I think she likes me. I'm going to introduce you to her."

I picked up my coffee cup. "That's nice," I said. "I'd like to meet her."

In the second week of September, Bill ran into Harry Freund on White Street. Bill asked Harry about the unveiling of the children's project, which was only a week away, and then asked how Mark had been as a worker. "Well," Freund said, "the week he worked for me, he was great, but then he disappeared. I haven't seen him since."

Bill quoted and requoted Freund's words to me, as if to reassure himself that the man had actually said them. Then he said, "Mark must be crazy."

I was stupefied. Every day for two weeks Mark had come home and described his days at work to me in elaborate detail. "It's so great that the project's about kids, especially poor kids who don't have anybody to speak for them." That's what he had said to me. "But how did Mark explain it?" I asked Bill.

"He said the job for Harry was boring, that he didn't like it, so he left and got another one. He worked at some magazine called Split World as a gofer, and he made seven dollars an hour instead of minimum wage."

"But why didn't he just tell you?"

"He kept mumbling that he thought I wouldn't like it if he quit."

"But all those lies," I said. "Doesn't he know that it's much worse to lie than it is to get another job?"

"I kept telling him that," Bill said.

"He needs help," I said.

Bill fumbled with his cigarettes. Extracting one, he lit it and blew the smoke away from me. "I had a long talk with Lucille," he said. "Actually, I did most of the talking. She listened to me, and then after I had been ranting for a while, she volunteered a piece of information she had plucked from some article in a parenting magazine. The author had said that a lot of teenagers lie, that it's part of maturing. I told her that this wasn't just lying. This was an Academy Award-winning performance. This was completely nuts! She didn't answer me, and I stood there with the telephone in my hand, shaking with anger, and then I hung up on her. I shouldn't have done it, but it's like she doesn't understand the magnitude of this thing at all."

"He needs help," I said again. "Psychiatric help."

Bill pressed his lips together and nodded slowly. "We're looking for a doctor, a therapist, someone. It won't be the first one, Leo. He's been in therapy before."

"I didn't know that."

"He saw a man in Texas, a Dr. Mussel, and then he saw someone in New York for a year. The divorce, you know. We thought it would help..." Bill covered his face with his hands, and I saw his shoulders tremble for a moment. He was sitting in my chair by the window. I was seated beside him and had grabbed his forearm as a gesture of comfort. As I watched the smoke move upward from the cigarette that hung loosely between his two fingers, I remembered Mark's earnest face when he told me about Jesus taking a fall.

Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn't say but might have said. When you stop lying, the gap between your words and inner belief closes, and you continue on a path of trying to match your spoken words to the language of your thoughts, at least those fit for other peoples' consumption. Mark's lie had departed from ordinary lying because it required the careful maintenance of a full-blown fiction. It got up in the morning, went to work, came home, and reported on its day for nine long weeks. Looking back on my fourteen days with Mark, I saw that the lie had been far from perfect. If Mark had been working outdoors all summer, he wouldn't have been white as an eggshell; he would have been tan. Also, his schedule had changed a little too often and a little too conveniently. But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wished that what he had told me had been true.

After his lies were exposed, Mark looked like a slightly compressed version of his former self. He gave off an attitude of generalized sorrow—head down, shoulders slumped, and wide hurt eyes—but when asked directly why he had manufactured the deception, he could only answer in a dull voice that he thought his father would be disappointed if he quit the job. He agreed that lying had been "dumb" and said he was "embarrassed" about it. When I said that the stories he had fed me about the job effectively annihilated all our conversations, he vehemently insisted that he had lied only about the job but not about anything else. "I care about you, Uncle Leo. I really do. I was just stupid."

Bill and Violet grounded him for three months. When I asked Mark if Lucille was also punishing him, he gave me a surprised look and said, "I didn't do anything to her." He added that Princeton was "boring" anyway. Nothing "good" ever happened there, so whether he was grounded or not mattered little when it came to the pursuit of fun. He was sitting on my sofa when he said this, resting his elbows on his knees while he cupped his chin in his hands. He jiggled his knees idly and stared straight ahead. All at once, I found him repugnant, shallow, alien. But then he turned his face to me, his eyes large with pain, and I pitied him.

I didn't see Mark again until well into October, when he was given a one-night reprieve to attend his father's opening of the one hundred and one doors at the Weeks Gallery. The smallest door was a mere six inches tall, which meant that the viewer had to lie on the floor to open it and look inside. The largest door rose to twelve feet, nearly touching the gallery's ceiling. The crowded opening was noisy, not only with conversation but with the sound of doors shutting. People stood in line to enter the large ones and took turns peering into the smaller ones.

Each space was different. Some were figurative, others abstract, and some had three-dimensional figures and objects behind them, like the one I had first seen of the boy who floated in a mirror under a mound of plaster. Behind one door the viewer found that three side walls and the floor were all paintings of the same Victorian room, each rendered in a radically different style. Behind another, the walls and floor were painted to look like more doors, each one bearing a DO NOT ENTER sign. One little room had been painted entirely in red. A tiny sculpture of a woman was seated on the floor, her chin raised in laughter. She was holding her stomach in an effort to control her hilarity, and when you looked closely, you could see glistening polyurethane tears on her cheeks. A life-sized figure of a baby, wearing a diaper, wept on the floor behind one of the tall doors. Another door, only a foot and half high, opened onto a green man whose head grazed the ceiling of the little room. He was holding a wrapped gift in his outstretched hands with a large tag on it that said FOR YOU. Some of the figures behind the doors were flat, like color photographs. Others were canvas cutouts, still others cartoons. In one, a two-dimensional black-and-white cartoon man made love to a three-dimensional woman who seemed to have walked out of a Boucher painting. Her frilly skirts were lifted and her supernaturally pale and flawless thighs were parted to allow entrance for the man's absurdly large paper penis. One interior resembled an aquarium with acrylic fish that swam behind thick plastic. Numbers and letters appeared on other walls, sometimes in human positions. A number 5 sat on a small chair at a table with a teacup. A huge letter B lay on a bed on top of the covers. Behind other doors, the viewer discovered only one part of a person—the latex head of an old man with thinning hair who grinned up at you after you opened the door, or a little woman with no arms and legs clenching a paintbrush between her teeth. Behind one door there were four television screens, all black. Except for their size, the doors were identical from the outside. They were made of stained oak with brass knobs, and the outer walls of all the rooms were white.

When I looked at Bill that evening, I felt relieved that he had nearly finished the project before Freund's revelation. The attention he was given at the opening appeared to hurt him, as if every warm congratulation were another dagger in his gut. He had always been shy of publicity and crowds, but on other occasions I had seen him deflect pointed questions with a joke or avoid small talk by conducting a long conversation with someone he liked. That evening, he looked poised for another abrupt exit to Fanelli's. But Bill stayed. Violet, Lazlo, and I all checked on him regularly. Once, I heard Violet whispering to him that he should slow down on the wine. "Sweetheart," she said, "you'll be completely sloshed before dinner."

Mark, on the other hand, looked well. His confinement had probably increased his eagerness for any form of social life, and I watched him as he chatted with one person after another. While he was talking to someone, he was all attention. He leaned forward or bent his head as if to hear better, and sometimes he narrowed his eyes as he listened. When he smiled, his eyes never strayed from the other person's face. The technique was simple, its effect powerful. A woman in an expensive black suit patted his arm. An older man I recognized as one of Bill's French collectors laughed at something Mark said, and then a few seconds later, he gave Mark a hug.

At around seven o'clock, I saw Teddy Giles enter the gallery with Henry Hasseborg. Giles was thoroughly transformed from the last time I had seen him. He wore a pair of jeans and a leather jacket and had no makeup on his face. I watched him smile at a woman and then turn to Hasseborg and begin to talk, his face sober and intent I started to worry that Bill would see them, and just as I was entertaining the ridiculous idea of standing in front of them to block Bill's view, I heard a child yell, "No! No! I want to stay in here with the moon! No, Mommy, no!" I turned toward the sound of the voice and saw a woman on all fours outside one of the doors, conducting a conversation with the small person inside. The child was happily ensconced behind a door with a space just large enough to hold him or her. "People are waiting, darling. They want to see the moon, too."

Behind that door were many moons—a map of the moon, a photograph of the moon, Neil Armstrong lifting a foot on the moon, van Gogh's moon in Starry Night, discs and slivers in white and red and orange and yellow, and fifty other renditions of the moon, including one made of cheese and another as a crescent with eyes, a nose, and a mouth. As I watched the mother reach inside for what turned out to be a kicking, wailing little girl, I turned to look for Giles and Hasseborg and couldn't find them. I walked quickly around the gallery. When I passed the child, who was now tearfully muttering the word "moon" in her mother's arms, I guessed that she was no more than two and a half. "We'll come back," the mother said as she stroked her daughter's dark head. "We'll come back and visit the moon."

I turned toward Bernie's office door and saw Giles and Mark leaning against it. Mark was much taller than Giles and had to bend over to listen to him. A big woman wearing a shawl was standing in front of me and blocked part of my view, but I leaned to one side and caught what appeared to be an exchange of a small object between them. Mark slipped his hand into his pocket and grinned happily. Drugs, I thought. I marched toward them, and Mark raised his chin to look at me. He smiled, pulled his hand out of his pocket, and said brightly, "Look what Teddy gave me? It belonged to his mom."

Mark opened his palm and showed me a small round locket. He opened it, and inside were two tiny photos.

"That's me when I was six months old, and that's me when I was five," Giles said as he pointed from one picture to the other. He held out his hand. "You may not remember me. Theodore Giles."

I shook his hand. He had a firm grip.

"I actually have another party tonight," he said briskly. "It was very nice to see you again, Professor Hertzberg. I'm sure we'll meet again."

As he strode off toward the door with long confident steps, I turned back to Mark. The change in Giles's demeanor, the saccharine gift of a locket with baby pictures of himself, the return of the mysterious mother, prostitute, waitress, or God-knows-what mingled to create such confusion in my mind that I gaped at Mark.

He smiled at me. "What's the matter, Uncle Leo?"

"He's completely different."

"I told you it was an act. You know, part of his art. That's the real Teddy."

Mark looked down at the locket. "I think this is the nicest present I ever got. What a sweet guy." He paused for several seconds as he stared at the floor. "I wanted to talk to you about something," he said. "I've been thinking. I'm grounded, but I was hoping I could still come and visit you on Saturdays and Sundays like I used to." He hung his head. "I miss you. I wouldn't be leaving the building, and I don't think Dad and Violet would mind if we ask them." He bit his lip and his forehead wrinkled. "What do you think?"

"I think it can be arranged," I said.

That fall was quiet. Paragraph by paragraph the Goya book inched ahead. I looked forward to a trip to Madrid that summer and to the long hours I would spend at the Prado. I worked closely with Suzanna Fields, who was writing her thesis on David's portraits and their relation to revolution, counterrevolution and the role women had played in both. Suzanna was a grave, shuffling girl with wire-rimmed glasses and a severe haircut, but over time I came to find her plain round face with its thick eyebrows rather attractive. Of course, deprivation had made many women attractive to me. On the streets, in the subway, in coffee shops and restaurants, I studied women of all ages and all shapes. As they sat and sipped their coffee or read their newspapers and books or hurried on their way to an appointment, I stripped them slowly in my mind and imagined them naked. At night, Violet still played the piano in my dreams.

The real Violet was listening to her collection of tapes—hundreds of hours of people answering the same questions: "How do you see yourself?" and "What do you want?" When I was at home during the day, their voices came through the ceiling from Violet's study. I could rarely hear what they were saying, but I heard mumbles and whispers, laughter, coughs, stammers, and every once in a while the throaty noise of sobs. I also heard the sound of the tape rewinding and understood that Violet was playing the same sentence or phrase over and over again. She had stopped talking to me about her book, and Erica reported that Violet had become a little mysterious about its content with her, too. All Erica knew for certain was that Violet had rethought her project completely. "She doesn't want to talk about it yet," Erica wrote to me. "But I have a feeling the change in the book has something to do with Mark and his lies."

Mark remained under house arrest every weekend until the first week in December. Bill and Violet allowed him to visit me when he was in New York, and he came faithfully every Saturday for a couple of hours. On Sunday he would turn up again for a short talk before he returned to Cranbury. In the beginning, I was wary of Mark and a little severe with him, but as the weeks passed I found it hard to stay angry. When I openly doubted his word, he looked so hurt, I stopped asking whether I could believe him. Every Friday he saw Dr. Monk, an M.D. and psychotherapist, and I felt those weekly talks steadied and sobered him. I also met Mark's girlfriend, Lisa, and the simple fact that Lisa cared about Mark softened me toward him. Although all of Mark's friends were welcome to visit him, Teenie, Giles, and the strange boy called Me never came to Greene Street, and Mark never mentioned them—nor did he wear the locket Giles had given him. Lisa came. Seventeen, pretty and blond, Lisa was an enthusiast. She flapped her hands at the sides of her face when she talked about her vegetarianism, global warming, or a species of tiger that was nearly extinct. When the two of them visited me, I noticed that Lisa would often reach out and touch Mark's arm or take his hand in hers. These gestures reminded me of Violet, and I wondered if Mark had felt their likeness. Lisa was obviously in love with Mark, and when I thought of the injured Teenie, I rejoiced at his improved taste. Lisa's "life goal," as she called it, was to become a teacher for autistic children. "My younger brother's autistic," she said, "and Charlie's been doing much better since he started this music-therapy program. The music kind of unblocks him."

"She's very moral," Mark said to me on the Saturday in December that marked the last day of his punishment. "When she was fourteen, she got involved with drugs for a while, but then she went into a program and has been clean ever since. She doesn't even have a beer. She doesn't believe in it."

As I nodded at the nobility of her abstinence, Mark volunteered information about their sex life, which I could have done without. "We haven't had intercourse yet," he said. "We both think it should be planned, you know, talked about before. It's a big thing, and you can't just rush into it"

I didn't know what to say. "Rush" is a word that pretty much covered every initial sexual encounter I had ever had in my life, and the fact that these two young people felt it necessary to deliberate over sex made me feel a little sad. I have known women who withdrew from me at the last moment and women who regretted their passion the next morning, but a precoital committee meeting had never been a part of my experience.

Mark continued to visit every Saturday and Sunday into the spring. He arrived punctually at eleven on Saturday and often accompanied me on my ritual errands, to the bank, to the grocery store and the wine shop. On Sundays he always returned for a good-bye. I was touched by Mark's loyalty and heartened by his news about school. He told me proudly about the 98s he was receiving on his vocabulary quizzes, a paper on The Scarlet Letter he had "aced," and more about Lisa, the ideal girl.

In March, Violet called me late one afternoon and asked if she could come down and talk to me alone. Her request was so unusual that when she arrived, I said, "Are you all right? Has anything happened?"

"I'm fine, Leo." Violet sat down at my table, motioned for me to sit opposite her, and said, "What do you think of Lisa?"

"I like her very much," I said.

"So do I." Violet looked down at the table. "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something wrong with it?"

"With it? Lisa, you mean?"

"No, with Mark and Lisa. With the whole thing."

"I think she's really in love with Mark."

"I do, too," she said.

"Well?"

Violet put her elbows on the table and leaned toward me. "Did you ever play that game when you were a kid: 'What's wrong with this picture?' You would look at a drawing of a room or a street scene or a house, and when you started to look at it closely, you would see that a lamp shade was upside down or a bird had fur instead of feathers or a candy cane was sticking out of an Easter display? Well, that's how I'm feeling about Mark and Lisa. They're the picture, and the longer I look at them, the more I feel like there's something out of whack, but I don't know what it is."

"What does Bill think?"

"I haven't said anything to him. He's had such a terrible time. He couldn't work after Mark's lie about the job, and now he's just coming back to himself. He's impressed with Mark's improvement, with Lisa, the therapy with Dr. Monk. I don't have the heart to mention something that's just a gut feeling."

"It's very hard to trust someone who lied in such a spectacular way," I said. "But I haven't noticed any obvious lies, have you?"

"No."

"Then I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt."

"I hoped you would say that. I've been so afraid that something's happening." Violet's eyes filled with tears. "At night I lie awake worrying about who he is. I think he hides so much of himself that it scares me. For a long time, Leo. I mean, since Mark was a kid ..." She didn't finish.

"Tell me, Violet," I said. "Don't stop."

"Every once in a while, not, not always, just now and then, I talk to him, and I get this weird feeling that..."

"That..." I prompted.

"That I'm talking to somebody else."

I narrowed my eyes. Violet was hunched over the table. "It's made me awfully shaky, and Bill, well, Bill's had to fight his way out of a depression. He has great hopes for Mark, great hopes, and I don't want him to be disappointed." She let the tears fall, and she started to shake. I stood up, walked around the table, and put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered once and stopped crying very suddenly. She thanked me in a whisper, and after that, she hugged me. For hours afterward, I felt her warm body against me and her wet face on my neck.

On the third Saturday in May, I walked to the bank much earlier than usual. The end of the semester and the sunny weather lured me outside. The morning sun and the still-empty streets buoyed my spirits as I headed north toward the Citibank above Houston Street. There was no line at the bank, and I walked directly to the cash machine to take out my money for the week. When I removed my wallet from my pocket and opened it, I couldn't find my bank card. Befuddled, I tried to think when I had last used it. The Saturday before. I always replaced my card. Turning to the machine's screen with its sign that said, "May I help you?" I started thinking about the word "I" in that sentence. Did the automated teller deserve that pronoun? The thing sent messages and performed operations. Was that all that was needed to claim the privilege of the first person? And then, as if the answer had been given to me by the text on the screen, I knew. The clear wounding truth hit me suddenly, and it hit me hard. I always left my wallet and keys by the telephone in the hallway when I was at home. This habit prevented me from having to search through various jackets and coats before I left for work. I remembered Mark asking, "When's your birthday, Uncle Leo?" 21930. My pin number. Mark had never observed my birthday. How many times had he accompanied me to the bank? Many times. Didn't he always leave me to go to the bathroom or visit Matt's room, passing my billfold, which was laid out in full view? Several people had entered the bank, and a line had formed behind me. A woman gave me a questioning look as I stood ogling my open wallet. I rushed past her and half-ran, half-walked home.

Once inside my apartment, I yanked out my bank records and removed my checks. I rarely bothered to look closely at either of them.

When statements arrived in the mail, I filed the papers and forgot about them until tax time. My checking account was untouched, but a Day-to-Day Savings Account where I had kept $7,000 in fees from articles and the small advance I had received for my Goya book had all but disappeared. It was the money I had saved for Spain. I had told Mark about my trip, had even mentioned the account. All that remained of it was $6.31. Withdrawals had been made from all over the city since December, some from banks I had never heard of, often during the wee hours of the morning, and all of the recorded dates were Saturdays.

I called Bill and Violet but heard only Bill's soft voice telling me to leave a message. I asked them to call me immediately when they came in. Then I called Lucille, whom I hadn't spoken to since her reading. As soon as she answered the phone, I launched into the story. When I finished talking, she was silent for at least five seconds. Then, in a small, toneless voice, she said, "How can you be sure it was Mark?"

I raised my voice. "The pin number. He asked about my birthday! Most people use their birthdays! And the dates! The dates all correspond to his visits. He's been robbing me blind for months! I can go to the police! Mark's committed a crime. Don't you understand?"

Lucille was silent.

"He's stolen nearly seven thousand dollars from me!"

"Leo," Lucille said firmly. "Calm down."

I was not calm, I told her, and I didn't want to be calm, and if for some reason Mark arrived at her house without paying his regular visit to mine first, she was to seize the card immediately.

"But what if he didn't take it?" she said in the same unruffled voice.

"You know he did!" I howled, and I slammed the receiver into its cradle. I regretted my anger at Lucille almost immediately. She hadn't stolen money from me. She didn't want to condemn Mark without real proof. What seemed clear to me wasn't obvious to her, and yet when Lucille's cool, detached voice met my anger, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire. Had she expressed shock, pity, even dismay, I wouldn't have yelled.

Less than an hour later, Mark knocked at my door. When I opened it, he smiled at me and said, "Hi. How's it going?" Then he paused and said, "What's the matter, Uncle Leo?"

"Give me my card," I said to him. "Give me my card right now."

Mark squinted at me with a puzzled expression. "What are you talking about? What card?"

"Give me my ATM card right this minute," I said, "or I'll get it myself." I waved my fist in his face, and he took two steps backward.

He looked very surprised. "You're crazy, Uncle Leo. I don't have your card. Even if I did, what would I do with it? Calm down."

Mark's handsome face and startled eyes, his dark curls and relaxed, unresponsive body seemed to invite violence. I grabbed him by his silver Lurex sweater and pushed him against the wall. Four inches taller, forty years younger, and certainly stronger than I was, Mark let me push him up against the wall and pin him there. He said nothing. His body was as limp as a rag doll's.

"Take out the card right now," I grunted at him through clenched teeth, "and hand it over. I swear if you don't, I'll beat you bloody."

Mark continued to look at me with an expression of blank amazement. "I don't have it."

I shook my fist in his face. "This is your last chance."

Mark reached for his back pocket, and I let go of him. He pulled out a wallet, opened it, and slipped out my blue card. "I was tempted to take your money, Uncle Leo, but I swear I didn't use it. I didn't take a penny."

I backed away from him. The boy is mad, I thought. A sensation of awe passed through me, old awe, the awe of childhood fears, of monsters and witches and ogres in the dark. "You've been stealing from me for months, Mark. You've taken almost seven thousand dollars of my money."

Mark blinked. He looked uncomfortable.

"It's all recorded. Every withdrawal is on paper. You stole my card on Saturday after I had gone to the bank and then returned it Sunday morning. Sit down!" I yelled.

"I can't sit. I told Mom I would come home early today."

"No," I said. "You're not going anywhere. You've committed a crime. I can call the police and have you arrested."

Mark sat down. "The police?" he said in a small puzzled voice.

"You must have known that, stupid and absentminded as I am, eventually I would find out. I mean, this isn't a few quarters."

Mark turned to stone before my eyes. Only his mouth moved. "No," he said. "I didn't think you'd find out."

"You knew that money was for my trip to Madrid. What did you think would happen when I went to take it out to pay for my airline tickets and the hotel?"

"I didn't think about that."

I couldn't believe it. I refused to believe it. I badgered, pushed, and interrogated him, but he only gave me the same dead answers. He was "embarrassed" that I had discovered the theft. When I asked him if he had used the money for drugs, he told me with apparent candor that he could get drugs for free. He bought things, he said. He went to restaurants. Money goes fast, he explained to me. His answers struck me as outlandish, but I now believe that the frozen person sitting on that chair was telling me the truth. Mark knew that he had stolen money from me, and he knew that it had been wrong to do it, but I am also convinced that he felt no guilt and no shame. He could offer no rational explanation for the stealing. He was not a drug addict. He wasn't in debt to anyone. After an hour, he looked at me and said flatly, "I took the money because I like having money."

"I like having money, too," I screamed at him. "But I don't rob my friends' bank accounts to get it."

Mark had nothing more to say on the subject. He didn't stop looking at me, however. He kept his eyes on mine, and I looked into them. Their clear blue irises and shining black pupils made me suddenly think of glass, as if there were nothing behind those eyes and Mark were blind. For the second time that afternoon, my anger changed to awe. What is he? I asked myself—not who, but what? I looked at him and he looked at me until I turned away from those dead eyes, walked to the telephone, and called Bill.

The next morning Bill offered me a check for seven thousand dollars, but I refused it. I told him it wasn't his debt. I said that Mark could pay me back over the years. Bill tried to push the check into my hand. "Leo," he said, "please." His skin looked gray in the light from my window, and he smelled strongly of cigarettes and sweat. He was wearing the same clothes he had had on the night before when he came downstairs with Violet and they listened to the story. I shook my head. Bill started to pace. "What have I done, Leo? I talk to him and talk to him, but it's like he doesn't get it." Bill paced. "We've called Dr. Monk. We're all going to see her again. She wants Lucille there, too. She also asked to see you alone, if you wouldn't mind. We're cracking down on him. He can't go out. No telephone calls. We're going to escort him everywhere—pick him up at the train, walk him home, take him to the doctor. When school's over, he'll live here, get a job, and start paying you back." Bill stopped walking. "We think he's been stealing from Violet, too, from her purse. She doesn't keep track of her money. It took her a long time to catch on, but..." He stopped. "Leo, I'm so sorry." He shook his head and held out his hands. "Your trip to Spain." He closed his eyes.

I stood up and put my hands on both his shoulders. "You didn't do it, Bill. It wasn't you. Mark stole from me."

Bill dropped his chin to his chest. "You'd think that if you really love your child, these things couldn't happen." He looked up at me, his eyes fierce. "How did this happen?"

I couldn't answer him.

Dr. Monk was a short plump woman with frizzy gray hair, a soft voice, and economical gestures. She began the interview with a simple statement. "I'm going to tell you what I told Mr. and Mrs. Wechsler. Children like Mark are difficult to cure. It's very hard to get through to them. After a while, their parents usually give up on them, and they go out into the world alone, where they either pull themselves together, land in prison, or die."

Her bluntness shocked me. Prison. Death. I muttered something about trying to help him. He was still young, still young.

"It's possible," she said, "that his personality isn't fixed yet. You understand that Mark's problems are characterological."

Yes, I thought. It's a question of character. Such an old word—character.

I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. I mentioned the fire and the doughnuts. Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots on its long branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.

"You know," I said to her, "I think that before his death, Matthew withdrew from Mark. When I remember it now, they were very quiet with each other in the car on the way to camp, and then in the middle of the ride, Matt said loudly, 'Stop pinching me.' It seemed so ordinary then—boys irritating each other." The pinch led to the bite, and when I finished the story, Dr. Monk raised her eyebrows and her eyes sharpened.

She didn't say anything about the bite, and I kept talking. "I told Mark about my father's family," I said. "I hardly remember them. I never even met my cousins. They died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. My Uncle David survived, the lager but died during the march out of the camp. I told him about my father's death from a stroke. When he listened to me, his face was so serious. I think there might have been tears in his eyes ..."

"It isn't something that you tell many people."

I shook my head and looked at the hydrangea tree. I felt lost to myself at that moment, as though another person were speaking. I kept my eyes on the tree, and there was something red in my mind, very red through a window.

"Do you know why you chose to tell Mark?"

I turned to her and shook my head.

"Did you tell Matthew?"

My voice shook. "I told Mark much more. Matt was only eleven when he died."

"Eleven is very young," she said gently.

I began to nod, and then I wept. I cried in front of a woman I didn't know at all. After I left her, I wiped my face in her small neat bathroom with its bountiful supply of Kleenex and imagined all the people who had been there before me, wiping away their tears and snot beside the toilet. When I walked outside the building on Central Park West, I looked across at the trees that had burst into full leaf and had a sensation of ineffable strangeness. Being alive is inexplicable, I thought Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

A week later, Mark signed a contract in front of me, Violet, and Bill. The document was Dr. Monk's idea. I think she hoped that by agreeing to conditions laid down in black-and-white, Mark would be drawn into an understanding that morality is finally a social contract, a consensus about basic human laws, and that without it, relations among people degenerate into chaos. The paper read like an abbreviated, individualized version of the Ten Commandments:

I will not lie.

I will not steal.

I will not leave the house without permission.

I will not talk on the telephone without permission.

I will repay in full the money I stole from Leo out of my allowance money, the money I will earn this summer, next year, and into the future.

I still have my copy among my papers. At the bottom is Mark's signature scrawled in a childish hand.

Every Saturday throughout the summer, Mark arrived at my door with his payment. I didn't want him in my apartment, so he remained in the hallway while he opened the envelope and counted the bills into my hand. After he was gone, I recorded the amount in a small notebook I kept on my desk. Mark paid me from the earnings he made as a cashier at a bakery in the Village. Bill walked him to work every morning, and at five o'clock Violet picked him up. Every day she asked his boss how Mark was doing, and the response was always the same. "He's doing fine. He's a good kid." Mr. Viscuso must have pitied Mark for having such an over-protective mother. Other than his family, me, and his coworkers, the only person Mark saw was Lisa. She came to visit him two or three times a week, often carrying a book under her arm for Mark to read. Violet told me that these volumes usually came from the pop-psychology shelves of local bookstores and were filled with prescriptions for "inner peace" that included exhortations to the reader such as "Learn to love yourself first" and "Fight the underground beliefs that keep you from being your best, happiest self." Lisa had signed on to the cause of Mark's reformation, and she spent many hours with him explaining the path to enlightenment. According to Violet, when Mark wasn't working, eating, or communing with Lisa about the tranquillity of his soul, he was sleeping. "That's all he does," she said, "sleep."

In late August, Bill flew to Tokyo to prepare for a show of the doors. Violet stayed home with Mark. At nine o'clock on the Thursday morning after Bill left, Violet came downstairs to my apartment wearing her bathrobe. "Mark's gone," she said as she walked into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with me.

"He left through the window, took the fire escape to the roof, and then walked down the stairs to the front door. I thought the roof door was locked, but when I checked this morning, I found it open. I think he's been doing it all along, but usually he comes back before morning. He sleeps and sleeps because he's exhausted from being out all night. I never would've known," she said quietly, "but the phone rang at around two o'clock last night. I don't know who it was. Some girl. She wouldn't tell me her name, but she asked me if I knew where Mark was, and I said he was sleeping and I wouldn't wake him. She said, 'The hell he is. I just saw him.' There was a lot of noise in the background, probably a club. Then she said that she wanted to help me out. 'You're his mother,' she said. 'You ought to know.' It's funny, I didn't say I wasn't his mother. I just listened. Then she said she had to tell me something." Violet took a big breath and sipped the coffee. "It might not be true, but the girl said that Mark is with Teddy Giles every night. She said, 'The She-Monster's out of its cave,' but I didn't know what she was talking about. I tried to interrupt her, but she just rushed on, saying that Giles had bought a boy in Mexico."

"Bought?" I said.

"That's what she said, that the boy's parents sold him to Giles for a few hundred dollars and that after that, the boy fell in love with Giles, that Giles dressed him up as a girl and took him everywhere for a while. Her story was pretty confused, but she said that one night they had a fight and Giles cut off the boy's little finger. Giles then took the boy to an emergency room and had the finger sewn back on, but not long after that, the kid, Rafael, disappeared. She said that there are rumors going around that Giles murdered him and threw his body into the East River. 'He's a maniac,' she said. 'And he's got his claws in your kid. I just thought you oughta know.' Those were her exact words. Then she hung up."

"Have you told Bill?"

"I've tried. I left messages at his hotel, but not urgent ones. What's the poor guy going to do from Tokyo?" Violet looked thoughtful. "The problem is, I'm afraid."

"Well, if any of this is remotely true, you have reason to be. Giles is a frightening person."

Violet opened her mouth as if to speak, but then she closed it. She nodded and turned her head away from me, and I admired her neck and profile. She's still beautiful, I thought, maybe more beautiful now that she's older. She and her face have a new harmony that didn't used to be there when she was young.

Mark showed up at his mother's house the following Sunday. According to Bill and Violet, he insisted that he had never left the house before, declared the story about Rafael "total B.S." and explained that he had run off to see some friends because he had been "bored." A week later, he was back at his mother's house, going to school. Every Friday, either Bill or Violet picked him up at the train, took him on the subway to Dr. Monk's for his therapy, waited for him, and then escorted him back to Greene Street. His imprisonment at home continued.

In the months that followed, Mark's behavior fell into a recognizable pattern I began to call "the rhythm of dread." For weeks at a time, he appeared to do well. He produced A and B work in school, was cooperative, helpful, and kind, and paid me weekly out of his allowance money. Bill and Violet reported that their long talks with him about trust, honesty, and abiding by the contract seemed to be helping him "stay on track." He unburdened himself to Dr. Monk, who was pleased with his "progress." And then, just at the moment when the people around him had been lulled into a feeling of cautious optimism, Mark would burst into flames. In October, Violet found his bed empty in the middle of the night and all the cash in her purse missing. He reappeared Sunday morning. In November, his stepfather, Philip, noticed a large dent in his car before he went to work. In December, Bill took Mark to lunch in the neighborhood. After they had ordered hamburgers, Mark excused himself to go to the bathroom; he showed up three days later at Lucille's. In February, Mark's history teacher found him vomiting in the boys' toilet, a liter of vodka in his backpack and Valium pills in his pocket.

Every incident played itself out according to the same master script. First, the unhappy discovery; second, the injured person's explosion; third, Mark's reappearance and fervent denials. Yes, he had absconded, but he hadn't really done anything wrong. He had walked around the city. That was all. He needed to be alone. He hadn't taken Philip's car out in the middle of the night. If there was a dent in the door, somebody else must have stolen the station wagon. Yes, he had run from the house that night, but he hadn't stolen money. Violet was mistaken. She must have spent it or miscounted. Mark's indignant assertions of his innocence were astoundingly irrational. Only when he was presented with positive proof did he admit guilt. In hindsight, Mark's actions were nauseatingly predictable, but not one of us was looking back then, and although his behavior ran in cycles, we weren't clairvoyant. The day of an uprising couldn't be foretold.

Mark had become an interpretive conundrum. It seemed to me that there were two ways to read his behavior, both of which involved a form of dualism. The first was Manichaean. Mark's double life resembled a pendulum that swung between light and dark. A part of him truly wanted to do well. He loved his parents and his friends, but at regular intervals he was overwhelmed by sudden urges and acted on them. Bill firmly believed in this version of the story. The other model for Mark's behavior might be compared to geological layers. The so-called good impulses were a highly developed surface that largely disguised what lay underneath. Every so often, the restless, quaking forces below would make a sudden volcanic push toward the surface and erupt. I began to think that this was Violet's theory, or more precisely that this was the theory she feared.

However one chose to read them, Mark's outbursts of delinquency exacted a cruel vengeance on Violet and Bill. At the same time, by stealing my money, Mark had brought his father and stepmother even closer to me. We were all victims, and the taboos that had existed before Mark's theft were now toppled. The anxieties Bill and Violet had once left: unspoken in the name of protecting Mark became part of our conversations. Violet raged against his betrayals and then she forgave him, only to rage and forgive again. "I'm on a love-hate roller-coaster," she said. "It's always the same ride, over and over again." And yet, despite her frustration, Mark became Violet's crusade. I noticed that lying on her desk along with several other volumes was a book called Deprivation and Delinquency by D. W. Winnicott. "We're not going to lose him," she told me. "We're going to fight." The problem was that Violet's frenzied battles were fought against an invisible enemy. She armed herself with passion and information, but when she rushed forward for the attack, she found nothing on the field of battle but an agreeable young man who offered no resistance.

Bill wasn't a soldier, and he didn't read a single book on teenage disturbances. He languished. Every day he looked older, grayer, more hunched, and more distracted. He reminded me of a large wounded animal whose powerful body was steadily shrinking. Violet's bouts of fury at Mark kept her vigorous. If Bill felt anger, it was turned against himself, and I watched as he slowly, steadily gnawed at his own flesh. It wasn't the content of Mark's crimes that hurt Bill—the fact that he ran off, mixed vodka with Valium, snitched his stepfather's car, or even that he lied and stole. All this could have been forgiven under other circumstances. Bill would have been far more accepting of open rebellion. Had Mark been an anarchist, he would have understood. Had he argued for his own hedonism or even run away from home to live his life according to his own daft ideas, Bill would have let him go. But Mark did none of these things. He embodied everything Bill had fought long and hard against: shallow compromise, hypocrisy, and cowardice. When he talked to me, Bill seemed more confused by his son than anything else. He told me in an amazed voice that when he had asked Mark what he most wanted from life, the boy had replied with apparent candor that he wanted people to like him.

Bill went to his studio every day, but he didn't work "I walk over there," he said, "and I hope that something will come to me, but it doesn't. I read the box scores from spring training. Then I lie down on the floor and invent ball games in my head, the way I used to when I was a kid. The games go on and on. I do the play-by-play, and then I sleep. I sleep and dream for hours, and then I stand up and go home."

I couldn't offer Bill much more than my presence, but I gave him that. There were days when I left work and went straight to the Bowery. There we would sit on the floor and talk until dinnertime. Mark wasn't our only subject. I complained about Erica, whose letters to me always managed to keep some small hope for us alive. We told stories from our childhoods and talked about paintings and books. Around five, he allowed himself to open a bottle of wine or pour himself a Scotch. In the woozy hours that followed, the light of the lengthening days shone through the window over our heads, and Bill, enlivened by the alcohol, quoted Samuel Beckett or his Uncle Mo with his finger pointed at the ceiling. He declared his love for Violet with wet, pink eyes and reaffirmed his hopes for Mark in spite of everything. He roared over bad jokes, dirty limericks, and silly puns. He railed against the art world as a paper tower of dollars and marks and yen and told me in solemn tones that he was dried up, finished as an artist. The doors had been a swan song "to all that" But a minute later, he would say that he had been thinking a lot about the color of wet cardboard. "It's beautiful on the streets after a rain, lying loose in a gutter or tied up in those neat bundles with string."

They were afternoons of drama—the drama of Bill, who never bored me, because when I was near him I felt his weight. The man was heavy with life. So often it's lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that. He had always been a stone, massive and hulking, charged from within by magnetic power. I was pulled toward him, more than ever before. Because he was suffering, I gave up my defenses and my envy. I had never examined that feeling, had never admitted to it, but I did then. I had envied him—potent, stubborn, lustful Bill, who had made and made and made until he felt that the making was over. I had envied him Lucille. And Violet. And I had envied him Mark, if only because the boy had lived. The truth was bitter, but Bill's pain brought a new frailty to his character, and that infirmity had made us more equal.

Violet joined us at the Bowery one evening in early March with a brown bag of Thai food that we ate on the floor. We gobbled down the dinner like three starved refugees and then stayed in the studio and talked and drank into the night Violet crawled onto the mattress and lay on her back and spoke to us from that position. After a while, we all found a spot on the bed—Violet in the middle, Bill and I on either side of her—three contented drunks who kept up a piecemeal conversation. At around one o'clock in the morning, I said I had to go home or I'd never get to work tomorrow. Violet grabbed Bill's arm and then mine. "Five more minutes," she said. "I'm happy tonight. I haven't been happy like this for a long, long time. It's so good to be forgetful and free and stupid."

Half an hour later, we were walking on Canal Street toward Greene. Our arms were still linked, and Violet was still between me and Bill. She sang us a Norwegian folk song—something about a fiddler and his fiddle. Bill joined in the chorus, his voice deep and loud and flat. I sang, too, imitating the sounds of the meaningless words as we marched home. While she was singing, Violet lifted her chin and her face caught the light of the streetlamps above us. The air was cold but clear and dry, and as she hugged my arm tightly, I could feel the lift in her step. Before she launched into the second verse, she took a big breath and smiled at the sky, and then, as I continued to look down at her, I saw her close her eyes for a couple of seconds to blind herself to everything but the swelling happiness that sounded in our voices. We all felt it that night—the return of joy for no reason. When I closed my door after saying good night to Bill and Violet, I knew that by morning the feeling would be gone. Transience was part of its grace.

For months, Lazlo kept his ears open. I don't know exactly where he picked up his information. He roamed the galleries, and he and Pinky were often out at night. All I know is that when the gossip and rumors flew, they seemed to fly in Lazlo's direction. The tall thin young man with the notable hair, garish clothes, and big black glasses took in far more than he let out. Ideal spies are supposed to be inconspicuous, and yet I came to regard Lazlo as the perfect sleuth. His brilliant exterior was like a beacon in New York's crowds of black-clad people, but that very brightness made him unsuspicious. He, too, had heard stories about a boy's disappearance and rumbles about a murder, but Lazlo believed that the talk was part of Teddy Giles's underground publicity machine, which manufactured the ghoulish tales to increase his status as the art world's latest enfant terrible. There was other talk that worried Lazlo more— that Giles "collected" young people, both boys and girls, and that Mark was a favored object. Giles was said to lead small groups of kids on forays into Brooklyn and Queens where the bands committed meaningless acts of vandalism or broke into basements and stole objects like teacups and sugar bowls. According to Lazlo's sources, the teenagers disguised themselves before these outings, changing the color of their skin and hair. Boys went as girls and girls as boys. There were stories of cruel harassments of homeless people in Tompkins Square Park, of overturning their shopping carts and stealing their blankets and food. Lazlo also heard peculiar reports about "branding"—some form of body marking unique to Giles's inner circle.

Whether any of this actually happened was difficult to know. All that could be verified with any certainty was that Teddy Giles was rising as an art star. A recent sale to an English collector of a work called Dead Blonde in a Bathtub for a huge sum gilded his reputation by making him not only controversial but expensive. Giles had coined a new phrase, "entertainment art," which he brandished in every interview. He made the old argument that the distinctions between high and low art had disappeared, but then he added that art was no more and no less than entertainment—and that entertainment value was measured in dollars. Critics embraced these comments either as the clever height of irony or as the dawn of truth in advertising—the ushering in of a new era that admitted that art, like everything else, ran on cash. Giles gave interviews in various personas. Sometimes he dressed as a woman, delivering his comments in an absurd falsetto. At other times, he wore a suit and tie and sounded like a broker discussing his deals. I understood why people were fascinated by Giles. His voracious desire for attention forced him to reinvent himself regularly. Change is news, and he delighted the press in spite of the fact that his art was constructed from images that had long established themselves as trite conventions in more popular genres.

In late March, Bill started working again. The new project began with a woman and her baby on Greene Street. I saw her, too, from the window of Bill and Violet's loft, but I would never have guessed that she would be responsible for a whole new direction in Bill's work. There was nothing extraordinary about what we saw, but I've come to believe that Bill wanted exactly that—the everyday in all its dense particularity. For this he turned to film, or rather video. I was conservative enough to feel that an artist of such technical brilliance betrayed his talent by turning to the video camera, but after I saw the tapes, I changed my mind. The camera liberated Bill from the debilitating weight of his own thoughts by sending him into the streets, where he found a thousand children and the visual fragments of their unfolding life stories. He needed those children for his own sanity, and through them he would begin to compose an elegy about what all of us who live long enough have lost—our childhoods. Bill's lament would be unsentimental. There was no room in his work for the Victorian haze that continues to obscure our notions of childhood. But most important, I think he found a way to address his anguish about Mark without Mark.

We saw the woman early on a Sunday afternoon, after Mark had already been sent off on the train to Cranbury. Bill and I were standing near the window when Violet walked up behind Bill and put her arms around his waist. She pressed her cheek into his sweater, moved beside him, and pulled his arm over her shoulder. For a minute, the three of us watched the pedestrians below in silence. A cab pulled up, the door opened, and a woman in a long brown coat emerged with a child on her hip, several packages over both arms, and a stroller. We watched as she moved the child from one hip to the other, dug in her purse, extracted a bill, paid the driver, and then unfolded the stroller with her left hand and right foot. She lowered the heavily dressed baby into the contraption and fastened a belt around its middle. In the same instant, the child began to cry. The woman squatted on the sidewalk, removed her gloves, stuck them hastily into her pockets, and began to search a large quilted bag. She dug out a pacifier and popped it into the infant's mouth. Then she loosened the strings that tied the hood of the child's snowsuit, started jiggling the stroller with one hand, and leaned close to the baby's face. She smiled and began to talk. The baby leaned back in the stroller, sucking hard, and closed its eyes. The woman glanced at her watch, stood up, hung her four bags over the handlebars, and began pushing the stroller up the street.

When I turned from the window, Bill was still watching the woman. He didn't say a word about her that afternoon, but while we ate Violet's frittata and talked about whether Mark would pass his last semester's classes and manage to graduate from high school, I sensed the deflection in Bill. He listened to what Violet and I were saying and he answered us, but at the same time he remained aloof, as if some part of himself had already left the apartment and was walking down the sidewalk.

The following morning, he bought a video camera and started working. For the next three months, he left early in the morning and stayed out well into the afternoon. When he finished filming, he walked to the studio and sketched until dinner. After eating, he often returned to his notebooks, drawing far into the night. But he spent every minute of the weekends with Mark. According to Bill, the two of them talked, watched rented movies, and then talked again. Mark had become Bill's handicapped child, someone who had to be nursed like an infant, someone who could never leave his sight. In the middle of the night, Bill checked on his son to make sure he hadn't climbed out the window and disappeared. His paternal vigilance, once a form of punishment, became a means of preventing the inevitable rampage, one he feared would tear the boy to pieces.

Although Bill had recovered his energy through the new project, his excitement had a manic edge. When I looked at him, I felt that his eyes hadn't regained their old focus so much as taken on a fervid gleam. He slept very little, lost several pounds, and shaved even less often than was usual for him. His clothes stank of smoke, and late in the day, his breath smelled of wine or Scotch. Despite his intense schedule, I saw him often that spring, sometimes every afternoon. He would call me at home or at my office. "Leo, it's Bill. How about a stop on the Bowery?" I said yes even on the days when it meant that I would be up late with papers or lecture preparations, because something in his voice on the telephone communicated his need for company. When I walked in on him at work, he always stopped to pat my back or take me by the shoulders and shake them as he told me about the children on a playground he had seen that afternoon and captured on tape. "I'd forgotten how loony little kids are," he said. "They're completely dotty."

One afternoon in the middle of April, Bill suddenly started talking about the day he'd returned to Lucille to give their marriage one more chance.

"When I walked through the door, the first thing I did was crouch down and tell Mark that I was never going away again, that we were all going to live together." Bill turned his head and studied the bed he had made for his son years ago. It was still standing in a far corner of the room not far from the refrigerator. "And then I betrayed him. I told him the usual rot—that I loved him but couldn't live with his mother anymore. The day the fifth letter came and I walked out the door, he started to scream 'Dad!' I heard him from the landing. I heard him all the way down the stairs, and I heard him in the street when I was walking away. I'll never forget his voice. He sounded like he was being killed. It's the worst thing I've ever heard."

"Little children can cry like that over a candy bar or bedtime—anything."

Bill turned to me. His eyes were narrowed and when he spoke his voice was low but incisive. "No, Leo. That's just it. It wasn't that kind of crying. It was different. It was horrible. I can still hear it in my ears. No, I chose myself over him."

"You don't regret it, do you?"

"How can I? Violet's my life. I chose to live."

On the afternoon of May seventh, I didn't go to visit Bill. He didn't call me, and I stayed at home. When the phone rang, I was rereading a letter I had received from Erica a few hours earlier in the mail. The sentences I had been pondering were: "Something has happened to me, Leo. I've taken a step, not in my mind that's always been racing ahead of me, but in my body, where the pain has made it impossible for me to move, to go anywhere except in circles around Matt. I realized that I want to see you. I want to get on a plane and come to New York and visit. I understand if you don't want to see me, if you're fed up. I don't blame you if you are, but I'm telling you what I want." I didn't doubt Erica's sincerity. I doubted that her conviction would hold. At the same time, after I had read the words again, I thought she might really make the trip. The thought made me nervous, and when I lifted the receiver, I was still distracted by thoughts of Erica's possible decision to visit.

"Leo?"

The person on the line was speaking in an odd half whisper, and I didn't recognize the voice. "Who's calling?"

For a second, no one answered. "Violet," she said in a louder voice. "It's Violet."

"What's the matter?" I said. "What's happened?"

"Leo?" she said again.

"Yes, I'm here," I said.

"I'm at the studio."

"What's the matter?"

Again she didn't answer me. I heard her breathe into the receiver and then I repeated the question.

"I found Bill on the floor..."

"Is he hurt? Have you called an ambulance?"

"Leo." Violet was whispering now, slowly, methodically. "He was dead when I found him. He's been dead for a while. He must have died soon after he came in, because he still had his jacket on and the camera was on the floor beside him."

I knew she had to be right but I said, "Are you sure?"

Violet took a long breath. "Yes," she said. "I'm sure. He's cold, Leo." She had stopped whispering, but as Violet continued to talk in that foreign, uninflected voice, her composure frightened me. "Mr. Bob's been here, but now he's gone. I think I hear him praying." She pronounced every word carefully, enunciating each syllable as if she were working hard to say her piece exactly right. "You see," she continued, "I went to the train to pick up Mark, but he gave me the slip. I called the studio and left a message. I thought Bill was still out but that he'd be back by the time I got there. I was so pissed off at Mark, so furious, I needed to see Bill. It's funny, my anger doesn't mean anything now. I don't care. Bill didn't answer the buzzer, so I let myself in. I think that I must have cried out when I saw him, and that's why Mr. Bob came up, but I don't remember that. I want you to come here, Leo, and help me call whoever it is you're supposed to call when somebody dies. I don't know why, but I can't do it. And then when you've done it, I want to be alone with him again. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I'm coming right now."

Through the window of the taxi, I saw the familiar streets and signs and crowds on Canal Street, and while I saw everything with uncommon clarity, I felt that these sights didn't belong to me anymore, that they weren't tangible and that if the cab stopped and I stepped out, I wouldn't be able to grasp any of it. I knew the feeling. I had had it before, and I continued to feel it as I walked into the building and heard Mr. Bob praying behind the door of the old locksmith shop. His voice didn't boom with the same Shakespearean resonance I had grown used to. He droned indistinctly in a chant that rose and fell and grew fainter as I neared the top floor and began to hear another voice—Violet's half whisper coming from inside the room a few steps above me. The door to the studio was standing ajar, but not fully open. Violet's low voice continued speaking, but I couldn't make out her words. I stopped behind the door, and for an instant I hesitated, because I knew that I would see Bill in the room. It wasn't fear I felt as much as an unwillingness to cross over into the inviolate strangeness of the dead, but the sensation was brief, and I pulled the door wide open. The lights were off and the late-afternoon sun filled the windows and cast a hazy light on Violet's hair. She was sitting cross- legged on the floor at the far end of the room, near the desk She had Bill's head in her lap and was bent over him, talking in the same barely audible voice she had first used with me on the telephone. Even from that distance, I could see that Bill was dead. The stillness of his body couldn't be mistaken for repose or sleep. I had seen that inexorable quiet in my parents and in my son, and when I looked across the room at Bill, I knew right away that Violet was holding a corpse.

She didn't hear me enter, and for a few seconds I didn't move. I stood in the doorway of the large familiar room and looked at the many rows of canvases against the wall, the boxes stored on shelves above it, the portfolios filled with thousands of drawings that were piled high below the windows, the familiar sagging bookshelves, the wooden crates of tools. I took it all in, and I noticed the specks of dust hovering in the dimming sunlight that fell in three long rectangular blocks to the floor. I began walking toward Violet, and at the sound of my footsteps, she lifted her chin and her eyes met mine. For a fraction of a second, her face contorted, but she covered her hand with her mouth and when she removed it, her features were once again calm.

I stopped beside Violet and looked down at Bill. His eyes were open and empty. There was nothing behind them, and their vacancy hurt me. She should close them, I thought to myself. She should close his eyes. I lifted my hands in a meaningless gesture.

"You see," she said, "I don't want them to take him away, but I know they have to. I've been here for a while." She narrowed her eyes. "What time is it?"

I looked at my watch. "It's five-ten."

Bill's expression was serene. It showed no sign of struggle or pain, and his skin looked younger and smoother than I remembered, as though death had stolen years from his face. He was wearing a blue work shirt stained with spots of what may have been grease, and seeing those dark flecks on his breast pocket made me shake. I felt my mouth move suddenly, and a small involuntary noise came from me—a grunt that I quickly suppressed.

"I came at about four," Violet was saying. "Mark got out of school early today." She nodded. "Yes, I was here at four." Then she looked up at me and said fiercely, "Do it! Go call!"

I walked to the telephone, looked down at it, and dialed 911. I didn't know any other number. I gave them the address. I think he had a heart attack, I said, but I don't know. The woman said they would send police officers. When I protested, she said that it was procedure. They would stay until the medical examiner arrived and determined the cause of death. When I hung up the phone, Violet looked at me harshly and said, "Now I want you to go, so I can be with him. Wait downstairs for the people to come."

I didn't wait downstairs. I seated myself on the step just outside the room, and I left the door ajar. As I sat there, I noticed a large crack in the wall I had never seen before. I put my fingers to it and let them run down the fissure as I waited and listened to the sound of Violet whispering to Bill, telling him things I didn't try to understand. I also heard Bob chanting downstairs, and I heard the noise of the traffic outside and impatient drivers honking their horns on the Manhattan Bridge. There was very little light on the stairway, but the steel door below me that led to the street was illuminated by a dull shine that must have come from a lamp inside Bob's rooms. I put my head in my hands and I breathed in the familiar smell that came from the studio—paint, mildewed rags, and sawdust. Like his father, I thought, he dropped dead, fell to the ground and died, and I wondered if Bill knew when the pains or spasm hit that his death was coming. For some reason, I imagined that he did and that his placid face meant that he had accepted that his life had come to an end. But that might have been a lie I was telling myself to soften the picture of his corpse on the floor.

I tried to re-create the conversation I'd had with him the day before about editing the videotapes. He had said that he planned to begin in a couple of months and was explaining the machine to me, the process of cutting. When it had become obvious that I understood very little, he had laughed and said, "I'm boring you to death, aren't I?" But it wasn't true. I hadn't been bored at all, and I had said as much. Nevertheless, while I was sitting there on the step, I worried that I hadn't been adamant enough, that perhaps when I had said good-bye to him the day before, there had been a small unspoken cleft between us, seen only as a hint of disappointment in Bill's eyes. Perhaps he'd sensed my reservations about his sudden enthusiasm for video and had felt a little hurt. I knew that it was silly to focus on this insignificant exchange at the very end of a friendship that had lasted for twenty years, but the memory stung me nevertheless, and with it came a keen awareness that I would never be able to speak to him again about the tapes or anything else.

After a while, I realized that Violet had stopped talking. I didn't hear Mr. Bob either. Disturbed by the silence, I stood up and looked through the door into the room, Violet had lain down beside Bill and put her head on his chest. One of her arms had disappeared under his torso and the other arm was looped around his neck. She looked small next to him, and she looked alive, even though she wasn't moving. The light had changed during the minutes I had been gone, and although I could still see both of them, their bodies were now in shadow. I saw the outline of Bill's profile and the back of Violet's head, and then I saw her lift her arm from around his neck and move it to his shoulder. While I watched, she began to stroke his shoulder over and over again, and while she did it, she rocked herself against his large motionless body.

In these last years, there have been times when I wished I hadn't witnessed that moment. Even then, while I was looking at the two of them lying together on the floor, the truth of my own solitary life closed over me like a large glass cage. I was the man in the hallway, the one who looked on at a final scene being played out inside a room where I had spent countless hours, but I wouldn't allow myself to step across the threshold. And yet, now I am glad that I saw Violet clinging to the minutes she had left with Bill's body, and I must have known that it was important for me to look at them, because I didn't turn my head away, and I didn't return to the step. I stood in the doorway and watched over them until I heard the buzzer and let in the two young officers who had come to perform their peculiar duty—hanging around until another official came and pronounced Bill dead of natural causes.