What I Loved

THREE

MY FATHER ONCE TOLD ME A STORY ABOUT GETTING LOST. IT happened the summer after he had turned ten in the countryside near Potsdam, where his parents had a vacation house. He had spent every summer there since he was born and knew the woods and hills and meadows surrounding that house by heart My father made a point of telling me that just before he walked off into the woods he had been quarreling with his brother. David, who was then thirteen, had pushed his younger brother out of the room they shared and locked the door, shouting that he needed privacy. After the fight, my father ran off, hot with anger and resentment, but after a while his temper cooled, and he began to enjoy moving through the trees, stopping to examine the tracks left by animals, and listening to the sounds of the birds. He walked and walked, and then, all at once, he no longer knew where he was. He turned around and tried to retrace his steps, but not a single clearing, rock, or tree seemed familiar to him anymore. Finally, he made his way out of the woods and found himself on a hill looking down at a house and a meadow. He saw a car and a garden, but he recognized nothing. Several seconds passed before he understood that the view was of his own house and garden and his family's dark blue automobile. When he told me the story, he shook his head and said that he had never forgotten the moment, that for him it illustrated the mysteries of cognition and the brain. He called it uncharted territory and followed up the story with a lecture on neurological devastations that leave their victims unable to recognize anything or anyone.

Years after my father died, I had a similar experience in New York. I was meeting a colleague who teaches in Paris for a drink in the bar of his hotel, and after asking a clerk for directions, I found myself walking down a long shining corridor with a marble floor. A man in an overcoat was striding toward me. Several seconds passed before I realized that the man I had taken for a stranger was my own reflection in a mirror at the end of the hall. Such brief intervals of disorientation aren't uncommon, but they interest me more and more, because they suggest that recognition is far more feeble than we suppose. Only a week ago, I poured myself what I imagined was a glass of orange juice, but it was milk. For several seconds, I couldn't say that it was milk I had tasted, only that the juice was disgusting. I like milk very much, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is that I expected one thing and got another.

The bewildering estrangement of such moments, when the familiar turns radically foreign, isn't merely a trick of the brain but a loss of the external signposts that structure vision. Had my father not lost his way, he would have recognized his family's house. Had I known there was a mirror in front of me, I would have seen myself immediately, and had I identified the milk as milk, it would have tasted like itself. During the year that followed Bill's death, I continually found myself at a loss—either I didn't know what I was seeing or I didn't know how to read what I saw. Those experiences have left their traces in me as a nearly perpetual disquiet. Although there are times when it vanishes altogether, usually I can feel it, lurking beneath the ordinary activities of my day—an inner shadow cast by the memory of having been completely lost.

It is ironic that after spending years thinking through the historical conventions of painting and how they influenced perception, I found myself in the position of Dürer drawing a rhinoceros from hearsay. The artist's famous creature bears a strong resemblance to the real animal, but he got a number of crucial bits wrong, as did I when it came to reconstructing the people and the events that were a part of my life that year. My subjects were human, of course, and therefore notoriously difficult to get right, perhaps impossible, but I made a number of errors that were grave enough to qualify as a false picture.

The difficulty of seeing clearly haunted me long before my eyes went bad, in life as well as in art. It's a problem of the viewer's perspective— as Matt pointed out that night in his room when he noted that when we look at people and things, we're missing from our own picture. The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero. I'm only whole to myself in mirrors and photographs and the rare home movie, and I've often longed to escape that confinement and take a far view of myself from the top of a hill—a small "he" rather than an "I" traveling in the valley below from one point to another. And yet, remove doesn't guarantee accuracy either, although sometimes it helps. Over the years, Bill had become a moving reference for me, a person I had always kept in view. At the same time, he had often eluded me. Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

But most people aren't comfortable with ambiguity. The job of piecing together a picture of Bill's life and work began almost immediately after his death with an obituary in the New York Times. It was a rather long and muddled article that included, among more flattering statements, a quotation from an excoriating review in the same newspaper. It labeled Bill a "cult artist" who had mysteriously attracted large followings in Europe, South America, and Japan. Violet hated the article. She railed against the writer and the paper. She shook the page in my face and said that she recognized the photograph of Bill but couldn't find him anywhere in the seven paragraphs that had been devoted to him, that he was missing from his own obituary. It didn't help to remind her that most journalists are merely conduits of received opinion, and it's the rare obituary writer who can turn out something other than a dull summary pieced together from equally witless articles on the man or woman in question. But as the weeks went on, Violet was comforted by the letters that came to her from all over the world, written by people who had seen Bill's work and found something in it to take away for themselves. Many of them were young, and many of them weren't artists or collectors but ordinary people who had somehow stumbled onto the work, often only in reproduction.

The incidents of blindness to art that is later pronounced "great" are so frequent in history that they have become clichés. Van Gogh is now worshiped as much for his martyrdom to the cause of "No Recognition in His Lifetime" as for his paintings. After hundreds of years in obscurity, Botticelli was reborn in the nineteenth century. The change in their reputations was simply a matter of reorientation, a new set of conventions that made understanding possible. Bill's work was complicated and cerebral enough to threaten art critics, but it also had a simple, often narrative power that engaged the untrained eye. I believe that O's Journey, for example, will last, that after the faddish jokes and winking absurdities that crowd the galleries have had their day in the sun, they'll wither like so much before them, and the glass boxes with their alphabetical characters will stand. It's impossible to know whether I'm right, but I hold fast to the belief, and so far, I haven't been proved wrong. In the five years since his death, Bill's reputation has grown stronger.

He left a lot of work behind him, including much that had never been shown. Violet, Bernie, and several gallery assistants began the task of organizing the canvases, boxes, sculptures, prints, drawings, notebooks, as well as the incomplete tapes that had been part of Bill's last project. In the early stages of the sorting, Violet asked me to come along, because she "needed someone to lean on." In a month, the cluttered storehouse of a man's life was transformed into a spare, eerie room with a desk and chair, mostly empty shelves, and crates illuminated by the changing sunlight nobody could take away. There were discoveries: delicate drawings of Mark as a baby, several paintings of Lucille that none of us had known existed. In one, she is writing in a notebook, and although part of her face is hidden, the intent focus she is giving to the words on the page is clear from her eyes and forehead. Written in longhand across the middle of the canvas are the large words "It cried and cried." The script cuts Lucille through the chest and shoulders and seems to exist on another plane from the one she occupies. The canvas was dated October 1977. There was also a drawing of me and Erica that Bill must have done from memory, because we hadn't posed for it and I had never seen it. We are sitting together on Adirondack chairs outside the Vermont house. Erica is leaning toward me and has placed her hand on the arm of my chair. As soon as she found the drawing, Violet gave it to me, and I took it to the framers the very next day. Erica had come and gone by then. The New York trip she had imagined—a trip she had hinted might result in a reconciliation between us—had become instead a miserable journey to bury a friend. We never did get around to talking about ourselves. I hung Bill's drawing on the wall near my desk and looked at it often. In the quick lines that were Erica's hand, Bill seemed to have caught my wife's tremulous fingers, and looking at the sketch, I would invariably remember how she had shaken at his funeral, how her whole body had vibrated with a slight but visible palsy. I would remember taking her cold hand and clasping it between both of mine, and I would remember that despite my firm hold on her, the quiver, generated from somewhere deep in her nerves, did not stop.

Whenever an artist dies, the work slowly begins to replace his body, becoming a corporeal substitute for him in the world. It can't be helped, I suppose. Useful objects, like chairs and dishes, passed down from one generation to another, may briefly feel haunted by their former owners, but that quality vanishes rather quickly into their pragmatic functions. Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it. Art historians don't like to speak of this, because it suggests the magical thinking attached to icons and fetishes, but I have experienced it time and time again, and I felt it in Bill's studio. When the art movers came and carried out the meticulously packed and carefully labeled crates and boxes as Violet, Bernie, and I watched, I was reminded of the two men from the funeral home who had put Bill's body into a vinyl bag and hauled it out of the same room two months earlier.

Although I knew better than most people that Bill himself and Bill's art were not identical, I understood the need to grant an aura to the work he had left behind him—a kind of spiritual halo that resists the harsh truths of burial and decay. When Bill's coffin was lowered into the ground, Dan rocked back and forth beside the grave. He folded his arms across his chest, bent forward from his waist, and then threw himself backward, over and over again. Like an Orthodox Jew at his prayers, he seemed to find comfort in the physical repetition, and I rather envied him his freedom. But when I walked over to him and looked into his face, it was ravaged and his eyes were wild and staring. Later that day on Greene Street, Violet gave Dan a tiny canvas that Bill had done of the letter W with a real key set into it. Dan put it under his shirt and hugged the little painting throughout the afternoon. It was warm, and I worried that he was sweating all over it, but I knew why he was holding the object next to his skin. He wanted no separation between himself and the little painting, because somewhere in the wood and canvas and metal he imagined that he was touching his older brother.

I brought Bill back to life in my dreams. He would come walking through my door or appear beside my desk, and I would always say to him, "But I thought you were dead," and he would say, "I am. I just came back for a talk," or "I'm here to check on you—to make sure you're all right." In one dream, however, when I asked him the same question, he said, "Yes, I'm dead. I'm with my son now." I began to argue with him. "No, I said, Matthew is my son. Mark is your son," but Bill wouldn't admit to it, and in the dream I was furious and woke up tormented by the misunderstanding.

Even after most of Bill's work had been taken from the studio, Violet continued to go to the Bowery every day. She told me she was taking care of odds and ends, sorting through Bill's personal things, mostly letters and books. I often saw her leaving the building in the morning with a heavy leather bag over her shoulder. She didn't return until six, sometimes seven o'clock at night, and when she did, she often had dinner with me. I cooked for her, and even though my culinary skills were inferior to hers, she always thanked me vociferously. I began to notice that for about half an hour after she arrived at my apartment, Violet looked strange. Her eyes had a glassy look, an oblique, shiny expression that alarmed me, especially in the first few minutes after she had stepped through the door. I didn't comment on it, because I could barely put what I was seeing into words. Instead I made small talk about the food or a book I was reading, and very slowly her face began to look more familiar and more present, as if she were returning to the here and now. Although I had heard Violet crying a couple of times since Bill died, had listened to her anguished sobs coming through the ceiling of my bedroom at night, she didn't grieve in front of me. Her strength was admirable, but it had a brittle, determined air about it that every once in a while made me uncomfortable. I guessed that her toughness was Blomian—a Scandinavian trait inherited from a long line of people who had believed in suffering alone.

It may have been that same pride that caused Violet to ask Mark to come and live with her. She told Lucille that starting in July he could stay with her and find work in the city. Mark had managed to graduate from high school, but he hadn't applied to college, and his future lay in front of him like a great unmapped wilderness. When I asked Violet whether she was in any shape to take care of Mark, she bristled at me, saying that Bill would have wanted her to do it. She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together to indicate that she had made her decision and no further discussion was wanted.

The night before Mark moved in with her, Violet didn't return from the studio. She had called me in the morning to say that she wanted to take me out to dinner in the neighborhood. "Don't buy food," she said. "I'll be home by seven." At eight o'clock, I called her. The line was busy.

Half an hour later, it was still busy. I walked to the Bowery.

The door to the street was wide open, and when I looked through it, I saw Mr. Bob's entire person for the first time. A man of uncertain age, he had a rounded spine and thin legs, which contrasted sharply with his muscular arms. He was sweeping the hallway and nudged a thick pile of dust past my feet onto the sidewalk. "Mr. Bob?" I said.

Without raising his head to look at me, he glowered at the floor.

"I got worried about Violet," I said. "We were supposed to have dinner."

The man didn't answer me and he didn't move. I stepped around him and began to climb the stairs.

"Watch your step," he boomed.

Just as I reached the top, he added, "Watch your step with Beauty!"

The door to the studio was also open, and I drew a breath before I walked through it. The only light in the room came from a lamp on Bill's desk that illuminated a stack of papers lying beneath it. Although I had seen the naked loft in daylight, the evening murk seemed to enlarge the barren space, because my eyes didn't take in its perimeter. At first, I saw- nobody, and then, as I looked toward the windows, I thought I saw Bill step into the blurry light that came from outside. As I looked at the apparition, I stopped breathing. Bill's withered ghost was standing in front of the pane smoking a cigarette. He had his back to me—baseball cap, blue work shirt, black jeans. I walked toward him, and at the sound of my steps, the deformed shrunken Bill turned around and he was Violet. I had never seen Violet smoke. She was holding the cigarette between her thumb and index finger the way Bill used to hold his butts when there was little left but the filter. She walked toward me.

"What time is it?" she said.

"It's after nine."

"Nine?" she said, as if she were trying to fix the number in her thoughts. "You shouldn't have come." She let the cigarette fall and stepped on it.

"We were going to have dinner."

Violet squinted at me. "Oh yes." She looked confused. "I forgot." After a few seconds, she said. "Well, you're here." She looked down at herself and stroked the sleeve of Bill's shirt with one hand. "You look worried. Don't worry. I'm all right. The day after Bill died, I came back here. I wanted to look around alone. His clothes were lying in the corner, and I found the carton of cigarettes on the desk. I put them away in the cupboard above the sink. I told Bernie that everything in there was personal, that he couldn't touch it. After Bernie was finished organizing the art, I started coming again. It's my work now—to come here and stay. One afternoon, I went to the cupboard and took out his pants and shirt and the cigarettes. At first, I just looked at them and touched them. His other clothes are still at home, but most of them are clean, and because they're clean, they're dead. These have paint on them. He worked in these clothes, and then after a while, I didn't want to just touch them anymore. It wasn't enough. I wanted his clothes on me, touching my body, and I wanted to smoke the Camels. I've been smoking one a day. It helps."

"Violet," I said.

She acted as if I hadn't spoken, and looked around the room. I noticed a single open box on the floor and tubes of paint lined up in rows. "I feel comforted here," she said.

Matt's drawing of Jackie Robinson was still hanging on the wall not far from Bill's desk. I thought of asking about it, but I didn't. Violet leaned toward me and put her hand on my arm. "I was afraid he would die," she said. "I never told you or anybody else, because we're all afraid that people we love are going to die. It doesn't mean much really. But I began to think he wasn't well. He breathed too hard. He couldn't sleep. Once, he told me that he didn't like to close his eyes, because he thought that he might die in the night. After Mark stole your money, he'd sit up late and drink whiskey instead of coming to bed. I'd find him dozing on the sofa at three o'clock in the morning with the television still on. I'd pull off his shoes and his pants and cover him up out there or I'd get him into our bed." She glanced at the floor for a moment. "He was in bad shape, gloomy all the time. He talked about his father a lot. He talked about Dan's illness and how he had tried to help him, but nothing had worked. He started thinking about the child we never had together. Sometimes he said we should adopt a baby, but then he said it was too risky. He'd tried to be a good father, but he must have done it all wrong. When it was really bad, he would quote every mean sentence anybody had ever written about him. He had never seemed to care much about that stuff before, but it added up, Leo. Reviewers roughed him up pretty bad. Their spite seemed to come from the fact that there were other people who were so fanatically devoted to his work, but he forgot all the good things that had happened to him." Violet stared across the room and stroked her arm again. "Except me. He never forgot me. I would whisper in his ear, 'Come to bed now,' and he would put his hands on my face and kiss me. He was usually still a little drunk, and he'd say, 'My darling. I love you so much,' and other mushy things. The last few months were better. He seemed happy with the kids and his videotapes. I really thought the filming would keep him alive." Violet turned her head to the wall. "Every day it gets a little harder for me to go home. I just want to stay here and be with him."

Violet took the pack of Camels out of Bill's shirt pocket. She lit a cigarette, and as she shook out the match, she said. "I'm going to have one more today." She blew a long stream of smoke out of her mouth. After that, we didn't speak to each other for at least a minute. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the room seemed brighter. I studied the tubes of oil paints on the floor.

Violet broke the silence. "There's something I want you to hear. It's on the answering machine. I listened to it the same day I found the clothes." Violet walked to the desk and pressed the button on the machine several times. A girl's voice said, "M&M knows they killed me." That was all.

For a second, I heard Bernie's voice begin another message, then Violet turned off the machine. "Bill heard it the day he died. The light wasn't blinking. He must have listened to the messages when he came in."

"But it's nonsense."

Violet nodded. "I know, but I think it's the same girl who called me that night about Giles. He couldn't have known that, because he didn't talk to her." She looked up at me and put her hand on mine. "They call Mark M&M, did you know that?"

"Yes."

Violet began to squeeze the top of my hand. She gripped it hard and I could feel her shaking.

"Oh, Violet," I said.

My voice seemed to break her. Her lips quivered, her knees buckled, and she fell into me. I put my arms around her as she grabbed me around my waist and pressed her cheek against my neck. I removed the baseball cap and kissed her head once, just once. While I held her shuddering body and listened to her sobs, I smelled Bill—cigarettes, turpentine, and sawdust.

In Mark, mourning looked like deflation. His body reminded me of a squashed, airless tire that needed pumping up. He seemed unable to raise his chin or lift his hand without tremendous effort. When he wasn't working at his job as a clerk in a local bookstore, he was lying on the sofa wired to his Walkman or wandering sluggishly from one room to another, eating crackers from the box or gnawing at a Twinkie. He nibbled, munched, and gobbled all day and throughout the evening, leaving a trail of cellophane, plastic, and cardboard behind him. Dinner held little interest for him. He would pick at the meal and then leave most of the food on his plate. Violet never said a word to Mark about his eating habits. I guess she had decided that if Mark wanted to chew his way through the loss of his father, she wasn't going to stop him.

Despite the fact that Violet didn't eat much dinner either, sharing the evening meal became a habit that lasted well into the following year. Preparing food was an important ritual that defined the day for all three of us. I bought the food and did most of the cooking. Violet chopped the vegetables, and Mark managed to keep himself upright long enough to stack the dishes in the dishwasher. After that chore was over, he would often lie on the sofa and watch television. Violet and I would sometimes join him, but after a couple of weeks the moronic sitcoms and garish dramas, which featured rapists and serial killers, began to annoy me, and I either excused myself and went downstairs or read quietly in a corner of the big room.

From my chair I made a study of the two of them. Mark held Violet's hand or rested his head on her chest. He draped his legs over hers or curled up on the sofa close to her. If his gestures hadn't been so infantile, I might have found them unseemly, but when Mark snuggled into his stepmother, he looked like a gigantic toddler exhausted from a long day at nursery school. I interpreted his clinging to Violet as another response to Bill's death, even though I had seen him lean on both his father and Violet in much the same way earlier. When my father died, I worked hard to play the man with my mother, and after a while the performance began to seem real, and then it was real. About a year after his death, I came home from school and found my mother sitting in the living room of our apartment. She was slumped over in the chair with her hands on her face. When I walked over to her, I could see that she had been crying. Except for the day my father died, I had never heard or seen my mother weep, and when she lifted her red swollen face toward me, she looked like a stranger, as if she weren't my mother at all. Then I saw the photo album sitting beside her on a table. I asked her if she was all right. She took my hands and answered me first in German, then in English. "Sie sind alle tot. They are all dead." She reached out for me and laid her cheek just above my belt and I remember that the pressure of her head pushed the buckle into my skin and pinched me. It was an awkward embrace, but I remained standing and was relieved that she didn't cry. She hugged me very tightly for a minute or so, but during that time I felt unusually lucid, as though I had suddenly gained a commanding focus of everything in the room and everything beyond it I squeezed my mother's shoulders to make her understand that I would protect her, and when she withdrew from me, she was smiling.

I was eighteen then, an authority on nothing and no one, a boy who could study hard but who floundered from one day to the next. Nevertheless, my mother had read my intention to be worthy of more and better, and it was all in her face—pride, sorrow, and a touch of amusement at my fit of manliness. I wondered if Mark would be able to shake off his torpor and console Violet, but the truth was, I didn't understand what lay beneath his lethargy. He was needy but not demanding, and his constant fatigue looked more like boredom than the paralysis of someone who has suffered a trauma. I sometimes wondered whether he really understood that his father wasn't coming back. It seemed possible that he had hidden that truth somewhere inside him where it wasn't available to his conscious thoughts. His face was so untouched by grief, it made me think that perhaps he had developed an immunity to very idea of mortality.

In the weeks following the night Violet broke down in the studio, she spoke more openly about her sadness, and her body began to look less rigid. She continued to walk to the Bowery every morning, and although she didn't talk about what she did there, she told me, "I'm doing what I have to do." I felt quite sure that when she arrived at the studio, she dressed herself in Bill's clothes and smoked her daily cigarette and did whatever else it was that she did in that room to observe her husband's death. I believe that while she was away Violet mourned intensely and deliberately, but once she came home to Mark, she did her best to take care of him. She picked up after him, washed his clothes, and cleaned the apartment. In the evenings when I looked at her as she sat beside him in front of the television, I could tell she wasn't watching the show. She simply wanted to be near him. While she stroked Mark's head or arm, Violet would often turn away from the TV altogether and look off into a corner, but she rarely stopped touching him, and I began to think that despite his childish dependency, she needed him as much as he needed her, perhaps more. On a couple of occasions, they fell asleep on the sofa together. Because I knew that Violet sometimes couldn't sleep at all, I didn't wake them. I stood up quietly and left the room.

I didn't forget that Mark had stolen my money, but after Bill died the theft seemed to belong to another era, to a time when Mark's criminal behavior took up more room inside me. The truth was that my rage had already been dissipated by Bill's suffering. He had done penance instead of Mark, had taken on the guilt as if it were his own. Through his self-flagellating atonements, Bill had managed to turn my missing $7,000 into his paternal failure. I hadn't wanted his contrition. I had wanted an apology from Mark, but he had never come to me and asked for forgiveness. He had made his weekly payments, delivered in increments of ten, twenty, or thirty dollars, but when Bill was no longer there to supervise the transaction, the money stopped coming, and I couldn't bring myself to ask for it. So when Mark showed up at my door one Friday in early August and handed me a hundred dollars, I was surprised.

Mark didn't sit down after he gave me the bills; he leaned against my table and looked at the floor. I waited for him to say something, and after a long pause he looked up at me and said, "I'm going to pay you back every penny. I've been thinking about it a lot."

Again he was silent, and I decided not to help him out by responding.

"I want to do what Dad would want," he said finally. "I can't believe I'm never going to see him again. I didn't think he'd die before I changed."

"Changed?" I said. "What are you talking about?"

"I've always known that I would change. You know, do the right thing and go to college and get married and everything, that Dad would be proud of me and we could forget all the bad stuff that happened and go back to the way we used to be. I know I hurt him, and it bothers me now. I can't sleep sometimes."

"You're always sleeping," I said.

"Not at night. I lie in bed and think about Dad and it gets to me. He was the best thing in my life. Violet's really nice to me, but she's not like Dad. He believed in me and he knew that deep down I have a lot of good in me and it made all the difference. I thought I was going to have time to prove myself."

Mark's eyes began to leak tears. They ran down his cheeks in two continuous clear streams. He didn't make any noise and his expression didn't change. I realized that I'd never seen anyone cry quite like that. He didn't sniffle or sob, but he produced a lot of liquid. "Dad loved me a lot," he said.

I nodded at Mark then. Up until that moment, I had kept my distance, maintaining the hard, suspicious attitude I had learned to adopt with him, but I could feel myself beginning to weaken.

"I'm going to show you," he said in a loud determined voice. "I'm going to show you because I can't show Dad, and you're going to see ..." He dropped his head to his chest and squinted through his tears at the floor. "Please believe me," he said, his voice shaking with emotion. "Please believe me."

I stood up from my chair and walked over to him. When he lifted his head to look at me, I saw Bill. The resemblance came suddenly, a flare of recognition that called up the father in the son. The likeness caught me off guard, and during the seconds that followed it, I felt the loss of Bill in my body, as a pain in my gut that rose into my chest and lungs and seemed to choke off my breath. Both Mark and Violet had greater claims on Bill, and I had hidden my own pain out of deference to them, had suppressed the depths of my unhappiness even from myself, and then, like a revenant, Bill had appeared in Mark for an instant and vanished. Suddenly, I wanted him back and I was enraged that I couldn't have him. I wanted to pummel Mark with my fists and shout at him to return Bill. I felt that the kid had the power to do it, that he was the one who had worn his father to death, killed him with worry and anguish and fear, and now it was time to reverse the story and bring Bill to life again. These were insane thoughts, and I knew just how unhinged they were as I stood in front of Mark and realized that he had been telling me that he was guilty and wanted everything to be different from now on. I had a hundred dollars in my hand. He shook his head back and forth, repeating the refrain, "Please believe me." When I looked down, I saw that his sneakers had small pools of tears between the laces and the toes. "I believe you," I said in a voice that sounded peculiar, not because it was filled with emotion but because its tone was flat and normal and didn't begin to represent what I was feeling. "Your father," I said to him, "was more to me than you can possibly know. He meant the world to me." It was a stupid, banal phrase, but when I uttered it, the words seemed invigorated by a truth I had been keeping to myself for some time.

Mark's disappearance the following weekend had the quality of reenactment. He told us that he was going to visit his mother. Violet gave him money for the train and sent him off alone. The following morning, she discovered that $200 was missing from her purse and called Lucille, but Lucille knew nothing about the weekend visit. Three days later, Mark reappeared on Greene Street and heatedly denied that he had taken the money. While Violet cried, I stood beside her and played the role of disappointed father in Bill's absence, which didn't take any acting on my part, because only a week earlier I had believed that Mark meant what he said. I began to wonder if it wasn't exactly such moments that set him off, that in order to enact a betrayal, he had to first convince whomever it was of his unwavering sincerity. Like a machine of perfect repetition, Mark was driven to do what he had done before: lie, steal, vanish, reappear, and finally, after recriminations, fury, and tears, reconcile with his stepmother.

Proximity and belief are closely connected. I lived close to Mark. That immediacy and contact flooded my senses and played on my emotions. When I was only inches away from him, I inevitably believed at least a part of what he was saying. To believe nothing would have meant complete withdrawal, exile not only from Mark but from Violet, and I organized my days around the two of them. While I read and worked and shopped for dinner, I anticipated the aura of the evening—the food, Violet's strange, ecstatic face when she returned from the studio, Mark's chatter about DJs and techno, Violet's hand on my arm or shoulder, her lips on my cheek when I said good night, and the smell of her—that mixture of Bill's scents with her own skin and perfume.

For me and maybe for Violet, too, Mark's lapse into his old pattern and the punishment Violet imposed—another grounding—had the remote quality of bad theater. We saw what was happening, but the story and the dialogue were so stilted and familiar, it made our emotions seem a little absurd. I suppose that was the problem. It wasn't that we stopped feeling pained by Mark's crimes but that we recognized that our pain had come from the lowest kind of manipulation. Yet again, we had been duped by the same old dreary plot. Violet tolerated Mark's treachery because she loved him, but also because she didn't have the strength to confront the meaning of his fresh betrayals.

Three weeks later, Mark disappeared again. This time he took a Han horse from my bookshelf and Violet's jewelry box. In it were pearls from her mother and a pair of sapphire and diamond earrings Bill had given her on their last anniversary. The earrings alone were worth almost five thousand dollars. I don't know how he managed to squirrel the horse out of my apartment. It wasn't very large, and he could have done it on a number of occasions when I wasn't watching him, but I didn't notice that it was missing until the morning after he left. This time Mark didn't show up after a couple of days. When Violet called the bookstore to ask if they had seen him, the manager told her he hadn't been there in weeks. "One day he didn't come in. I tried calling, but the telephone number he gave us didn't work, and when I looked up William Wechsler, the number was unlisted. I hired somebody else."

Violet waited for Mark to return. Three days passed, then four, and with each passing day Violet seemed to diminish. Early on, I thought her shrinking was an illusion, a visual metaphor that expressed our shared anxiety about Mark's absence, but on the fifth day, I noticed that Violet's pants were hanging loosely around her middle and that the familiar roundness of her neck and shoulders and arms was gone. That evening at dinner, I insisted that she try to get some food into her, but she shook her head at me and her eyes filled with tears. "I've called Lucille and all his school friends. Nobody knows where he is. I'm afraid he's dead." She stood up, opened a kitchen cabinet, and began to remove every cup and dish from it. For two nights after that, I watched Violet clean cupboards, wash floors, scrape dirt from under the stove with a knife, and bleach the loft's bathrooms. On the third evening, I walked upstairs with a bag of groceries for our dinner, and when she answered the door, Violet was wearing rubber gloves and had a pail of soapy water in her hand. I didn't say hello. I said "Stop. Stop cleaning. It's over, Violet." After giving me a surprised glance, she put down the pail. Then I walked over to the phone and called Lazlo in Williamsburg.

Within half an hour, he buzzed from the front door. When Violet pressed the intercom and heard Lazlo's voice, she made a noise of astonishment. The clogged bridges, traffic jams, and lazy subway lines that slowed travel for every other inhabitant of New York didn't seem to hinder Lazlo Finkelman. "Did you fly?" Violet asked him when she opened the door. Lazlo smiled faintly, strode into the room, and sat down. Just looking at Lazlo had a soothing effect on me. His familiar hairdo, big black glasses, and long poker face inspired me even before he said he would look into Mark's disappearance. "Keep track of your hours," Violet said to him. "And I'll add on the extra money when I pay you at the end of the week."

Lazlo shrugged.

"I mean it," she said.

"I get around anyway," he said. He followed this vague statement by saying to Violet, "Dan said I should tell you he's writing you a play."

"He told me he calls you," Violet said. "I hope he's not bothering you too much."

Lazlo shook his head. "I've got it down to one poem a day."

"He reads you poems over the telephone?" I said.

"Yup, but I told him I could only deal with one a day. I had to ward off inspiration overload."

"You're very kind, Lazlo," Violet said.

Lazlo squinted behind his glasses. "No." He lifted a finger toward the ceiling and I recognized Bill's gesture. "Sing loudly," Lazlo said, "Into the dead face. Bang hard on the deaf ears. Jump up and down on the corpse and wake it up."

"Poor Dan," Violet said. "Bill won't wake up."

Lazlo leaned forward. "Dan told me that it was a poem about Mark."

Violet looked at him steadily for a couple of seconds and then lowered her eyes.

After Lazlo left, I made dinner. While I prepared the food, Violet sat quietly at the table. Every now and then, she would smooth back her hair or touch her arm, but when I put the plates of food on the table, she said, "Tomorrow morning I'm going to call the police. He's always come back before."

"Worry about that tomorrow," I said. "Right now you have to eat."

Violet looked down at her food. "Isn't it funny? All my life I've worked hard not to get too fat. I used to eat when I was sad, but now it just won't go down anymore. I look at it, and it's gray."

"It's not gray," I said. "Look at that nice pork chop—a lovely Castilian brown—beside those attractive green beans—the color of dark jade. Now, ponder the brown and green in relation to the pallor of the mashed potatoes. They aren't quite white, but tinged by the faintest of yellows, and I put the tomato slice near the beans for color—a clear red to brighten the plate and give pleasure to your eyes." I moved into the chair beside her. "But the visual satisfaction, my dear, is only the beginning of the feast."

Violet continued to look glumly at her plate. "And after writing a whole book on eating disorders," she said.

"You're not listening to me," I said.

"Yes, I am."

"Then relax. We're here to have dinner. Have some wine."

"But you're not eating, Leo. Your food is getting cold."

"I can eat later." I reached for her glass and brought it to her mouth. She took a small sip. "Look here," I said, "your napkin's still on the table." With the pretentious flourish of a waiter, I grabbed the napkin by one corner, waved it open, and let it fall to her lap.

Violet smiled.

I leaned across her plate, picked up her knife and fork, cut a small piece off the pork chop, and then added a bit of mashed potatoes to the bite.

"What are you doing, Leo?" she said.

As I lifted the fork off the plate, she turned to me and I saw two wrinkles form between her eyebrows. When her mouth quivered for an instant, I thought she might cry, but she didn't. I brought the food to her lips, nodded at her as she hesitated, and then she opened her mouth like a small child and I gave her the meat and potatoes.

Violet let me feed her. I worked very slowly, making sure that she had plenty of time to chew and swallow, that she was allowed a pause between forkfuls and took drinks of the wine. I think my scrutiny made her eat more decorously than usual, because she chewed slowly with her mouth closed, revealing her small overbite only when her lips parted to take in the morsel. We were both silent for the first few minutes, and I pretended that I didn't see her glistening eyes or hear the noise she made every time she swallowed. Her throat must have been small and tight from anxiety, because she gulped rather loudly and then blushed at the sound. I started talking to distract her—mostly nonsense, a chain of culinary free associations. I talked about a lemon pasta I had eaten in Siena under a sky full of stars and the twenty different kinds of herring Jack had ingested in Stockholm. I talked about squids and their indigo ink in a Venetian risotto, the underground business of sneaking unpasteurized cheese into New York, and a pig I had once seen in the south of France snuffling while truffling. Violet didn't say a word, but her eyes cleared and the corners of her mouth showed signs of amusement when I began telling her about a maître d' in a local restaurant who tripped and fell over a small elderly woman as he ran to greet a movie actor who had just walked through the door.

In the end, only the tomato was left on the plate. I pierced it and brought it to Violet's mouth, but as I slid the gelatinous red slice between her teeth, a few seeds and their juice escaped and ran down her chin. I grabbed her napkin and began gently dabbing her face with it. Violet closed her eyes, leaned her head back a little, and smiled. When she opened her eyes she was still smiling. "Thank you," she said. "The meal was delicious."

The next day, Violet filed a missing-persons report with the police department, and although she didn't mention the theft to the person on the telephone, she did say that Mark had disappeared before. She tried calling Lazlo, but he wasn't home, and then late that same afternoon after spending only a couple of hours at the studio, Violet invited me upstairs to listen to the sections of her tapes that were connected to Teddy Giles. "I have this feeling that Mark is with Giles," she said, "but his number is unlisted and the gallery won't give it to me." As we sat in her study and listened, I noticed that Violet's drawn face tightened with interest and her gestures had a quickness I hadn't seen in weeks.

"This is a girl who calls herself Virgina," Violet said. "With a long second i, like 'virgin' and Vagina.' "

A young female voice began to speak in midsentence. "... a family. That's how we think of it. Teddy's like the head of the family, you know, 'cause he's older than us."

Violet's voice interrupted her. "How old is he exactly?"

"Twenty-seven. "

"Do you know anything about his life before he came to New York?"

"He told me the whole story. He was born in Florida. His mom died, and he never knew his dad. He was raised by his uncle, who beat him up all the time, so he ran away to Canada, where he worked as a mailman, and after that he came here and got into clubs and art."

"I've heard several versions of his life story," Violet's voice said.

"I know this is the real one on account of the way he told me. He was like really sad about his childhood."

Violet mentioned the rumor about Rafael and the chopped finger.

"I heard that, too. I don't believe it, though. This kid we call Toad— he's got acne real bad—was spreading that around. You know what else he said? He said that Teddy killed his own mother, pushed her down the stairs, but nobody found out, because it looked like an accident. That's the kind of stuff Teddy says to keep up his She-Monster act, but he's a super-gentle guy, really. Toad's pretty stupid, and how's Teddy going to kill somebody who died before he was even born?"

"His mother couldn't have died before he was born."

Silence. "No, I guess I mean right when he was born, but the point is, Teddy's sweet. He showed me his collection of salt and pepper shakers— soooo cute. Oh my God, little animals and flowers and these two teeny-weeny guys playing guitars with holes in their heads for the salt and pepper ..."

Violet stopped the tape and moved it forward. "Now I want you to listen to this boy named Lee. I don't know much about him, except that he's on his own. He might be a runaway." She pressed PLAY, and Lee started talking. "Teddy's for freedom, man. That's what I appreciate about him—he's for self-expression, for the higher consciousness. He's going against all that normalcy shit and telling it like it is. Our society is bullshit and he knows it. His art gives me a rush. It's real, man."

"What do you mean by real?" Violet asked him.

"I mean real, honest."

Silence.

"I'll tell you something," Lee continued. "When I had nowhere to go, Ted took me in. Without him, I would've been pissing in the streets."

Violet moved the tape forward. "This is Jackie." I heard a man's voice. "Giles is a pig, honey, a liar and a fake. And I tell you this from firsthand knowledge. Artifice is my life. This gorgeous body didn't come cheap. I've made myself into myself, but when I say he's fake, I mean fake on the inside. I mean that little creep has got a falsie where his soul ought to be. She-Monster—what a load of B.S." Jackie's voice rose into a dynamic falsetto. "That She-Monster act is ugly and it's cruel and it's stupid, and I tell you, Violet, I'm shocked, really shocked that that fact isn't crystal clear to anybody with a single brain cell in his or her head."

Violet stopped the machine. "That's all there is about Teddy Giles. It doesn't get us very far."

"Did you ever ask Mark about that weird message on the tape?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I knew if there was anything in it, he wouldn't tell me, and I didn't want him to feel that the tape was connected to Bill's heart attack."

"You think it was?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think Bill knew something that we don't?"

"If he did, he found out that same day. He wouldn't have kept it from me. I'm sure of that."

I didn't have to feed Violet that night. We cooked together in my apartment for a change, and she finished all her pasta. After I poured her a second glass of wine, she said, "Did I ever tell you about Blanche Wittmann? I think her real name was Marie Wittmann, but she's usually called Blanche."

"I don't think so, but it rings a bell."

"They called her 'the Queen of the Hysterics.' She was featured in Charcot's demonstrations of hysteria and hypnosis. They were very popular, you know. All of fashionable Paris came to watch the ladies chirp like birds, hop around on one leg, and get lanced by pins. But after Charcot died, Blanche Wittmann never had another hysterical attack."

"You're saying that she had them for him?"

"She adored Charcot and wanted to please him, so she gave him what he wanted. In the newspapers she was often compared to Sarah Bernhardt. After the master died, she didn't want to leave the Salpêtrière. She stayed on and became a radiology technician. Those were the early days of X-rays. She died of the poisoning. One by one she lost her limbs."

"Is there some reason for this story?" I said.

"Yes. Trickery, deception, lying, and susceptibility to hypnosis were supposedly symptoms of hysteria. That's like Mark, isn't it?"

"Yes, but Mark isn't paralyzed or having fits, is he?"

"No, but that's not how we want him to behave, is it? Charcot wanted the women to perform, and they did. We want Mark to seem to care for other people, and when he's with us, that's how he appears. He gives us the performance he thinks we want."

"But Mark isn't hypnotized, and I really don't think we can call him a hysteric."

"I'm not saying that Mark is hysterical. Medical language keeps changing. Illnesses overlap. One thing mutates into another. Hypnosis merely lowers a person's resistance to suggestion. I'm not sure Mark has all that much resistance to begin with. What I'm saying is something very simple. It's not always easy to separate the actor from his act."

The following morning, Lazlo called Violet. He had spent two long nights in clubs, going from the Limelight to Club USA to the Tunnel, where he had picked up bits of contradictory information. The consensus was, however, that Mark was traveling with Teddy Giles, who was in either Los Angeles or Las Vegas. Nobody was really sure. At three in the morning, Lazlo had bumped into Teenie Gold. Teenie had implied that she had a lot to say but refused to say it to Laz. She told him that the only person she would talk to now that Bill wasn't around was "Mark's Uncle Leo." She was prepared to tell me "the whole story" if I arrived at her house tomorrow at four P.M. By the time I heard about it, "tomorrow" had become today, and at three-fifteen, armed with an address on East Seventy-sixth Street and Park Avenue, I set off on my peculiar mission.

After I was announced, a doorman led me through the posh lobby toward an elevator, which opened automatically at the seventh floor. A woman, who I guessed was Filipino, opened the door for me, and I looked through the foyer into a vast apartment that seemed to have been decorated almost entirely in powder blue with gold accents. Teenie appeared from behind a door that led to a hallway, took a few steps in my direction, stopped, and looked down at the floor. The expensive ugliness seemed to swallow her up, as if she were too small for the space.

"Susie," Teenie said, turning to the woman who had opened the door. "This is Mark's uncle."

"Nice boy," Susie said. "Very sweet boy."

Without looking up, Teenie said, "Come on. We'll talk in my room."

Teenie's room was small and messy. Except for the yellow silk curtains on the window, her sanctuary had little in common with the rest of the apartment. Shirts, dresses, T-shirts, and underwear were strewn over an upholstered chair, and behind it I saw her wings partially crushed by a pile of magazines that had been thrown on top of them. Jars, bottles, and small cases of makeup littered her desk, along with lotions, creams, and a few schoolbooks. When I looked at a shelf, I noticed a small new box of Legos, still in its plastic covering, exactly like the one I had come across in Mark's room.

Teenie sat down on the edge of her bed and examined her knees as she pushed her bare feet into the carpeting.

"I'm not sure why you wanted to talk to me, Teenie," I said.

In a small, high voice, she said, "It's because you were nice to me that time when I fell."

"I see. We're worried about Mark, you know. Lazlo found out he might be in Los Angeles."

"I heard it was Houston."

"Houston?" I said.

Teenie continued to examine her knees. "I was in love with him," she said.

"Mark?"

She nodded vigorously and sniffed. "I thought so, anyway. He told me all kinds of things that made me feel all wild and free and crazy-like. It was good for a while. I really thought he loved me, you know?" She eyed me for half a second and then looked down again.

"What happened?" I said.

"It's over."

"But it's been over for quite some time, hasn't it?"

"We've been really tight on and off for two whole years."

I thought of Lisa. That was when Mark was seeing Lisa. "But we haven't seen you," I said.

"Mark said his parents wouldn't let me visit."

"That wasn't true. He was grounded, but friends could visit him."

Teenie shook her head back and forth, and I saw a big tear roll down her right cheek. Teenie must have shaken her head for twenty seconds while I encouraged her to speak. Finally, she said, "It started out like a game. I was going to get a tattoo on my stomach that said "The Mark." Teddy was joking around and he said he'd do it for me, but then..." Teenie lifted up her shirt and I saw two small scars that formed an M and a W, one on top of the other, so the bottom of the M met the top of the W to form a single character.

"Giles did that to you?"

She nodded.

"And Mark? Was Mark there?"

"He helped. I was screaming, but he held me down."

"My God," I said.

Tears ran down her face as she reached for a stuffed rabbit on her bed and began to stroke its ears. "He isn't what you think. He was so sweet to me in the beginning, but then he started to change. I gave him this book called Psycholand. It's about this rich guy who flies all over the world in his private plane, and in every city he kills somebody. Mark read it about twenty times."

"I saw some reviews of that book. I understood that it was a kind of parody, a social satire."

Teenie raised her eyes momentarily to give me a blank look. "Yeah, well," she continued, "it started to creep me out, you know, and sometimes when he spent the night here, he'd start talking to me in this really weird voice. It wasn't his regular voice, you know, but a put-on voice. He'd just go on and on, and I'd tell him to stop, but he wouldn't, and I'd put my hand over his mouth, and still he wouldn't stop. And then he got me into all this trouble with my parents 'cause he stole my dad's codeine pills, the ones he takes for his bad shoulder, and they thought it was me, and I didn't dare tell them it was Mark, 'cause by then I was afraid of him. He kept saying he didn't take them, but I know he did, and kids are saying that him and Teddy go out at night and rob people just for fun. Sometimes they take money, but other times they just take something stupid, like their tie or scarf or belt or something." Teenie shuddered through her tears. "I thought I was in love with him."

"Do you think the rumors about the robberies are true?"

Teenie shrugged. "I'd believe anything now. Are you going to Dallas to look for him?"

"I thought you said Houston."

"I think it's Dallas. I don't know. Maybe they're back already. What day is it?"

"Friday."

"They're probably back." Teenie started chewing on the nail of her little finger. She appeared to be thinking. She removed the finger from her mouth and said, "He might be at Giles's house, but he's probably at the Split World offices. Sometimes kids sleep there."

"I need the addresses, Teenie."

"Giles lives at 21 Franklin Street on the fifth floor. Split World is on East Fourth." She stood up and began to rummage in a drawer. She produced a magazine and handed it to me. "The street number's in there."

On the cover of the magazine there was a lurid picture of a young man, supposedly dead or dying, his head propped up against a toilet. His slashed wrists rested on his thighs as he sat in a brilliant pool of blood.

"Charming photo," I said.

"They're all like that," she said in a bored voice. Then she raised her chin and looked at me for at least three seconds. After she had looked down, she continued, "I'm telling you all this 'cause I don't want any more bad stuff to happen. That's what I said to Mark's dad when I called him."

For an instant I held my breath, then with deliberate calm I said, "You spoke to Mark's father? When was that?"

"It was a pretty long time ago. The next thing I heard was that he died. That was pretty sad. He seemed like a nice man."

"You called him at home?"

"No, at his office, I think."

"Where did you get that number?"

"Mark gave me all his numbers."

"Did you tell Mark's father about the cut on your stomach?"

"I think so."

"You think so?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice.

Teenie pushed the carpet hard with her toes. "I was pretty upset and I was high, too." She pushed harder. "Maybe you can find a hospital for him. Both Mark and Teddy should probably be in a hospital somewhere."

"Were you the one who left a message with Bill saying that Giles had killed you?"

"He didn't kill me. He hurt me. I told you."

I decided not to ask her anything more about the message. After talking to her, I felt sure that the voice I had heard on Bill's machine didn't belong to Teenie. "Where are your parents?" I asked her.

"My mom's at some charity meeting thing for cancer and my dad's in Chicago."

"I think you should talk to them. That was an assault, Teenie. You could go to the police."

She didn't move. She began to shake her platinum head back and forth and fixed her gaze on her desk as though she had forgotten I was there.

I took the magazine and walked out of the room. When I opened the front door to leave, I heard water running and the sound of a woman singing to herself. It must have been Susie.

On my way downtown in a taxi, the bathetic tones of Teenie's confession lingered in my ears, especially her refrain, "I thought I was in love with him." Her skinny little body, her lowered gaze, the jumble of makeup and feminine paraphernalia around her had depressed me. I pitied Teenie, pitied the small ruined figure in a vast pale blue apartment, and yet I wondered about the phone call. Had Bill's heart stopped after he heard the story about Mark holding her down? Had she even mentioned it? The truth was I found it hard to imagine Mark restraining her, because the scar had been too neat. Could she have been cut so cleanly if she were struggling? Teenie's stories about Psycboland and the stolen codeine pills were more believable, however, and I began to speculate on Mark's drug use and its possible role in lifting whatever inhibitions he may have had when it came to lying and stealing. Apparently, Teenie retained a few scruples, a dim moral code that condemned what she called "bad stuff," but the badness of that stuff seemed to be determined by its effect on her rather than its lack of adherence to broader ethical sanctions. She couldn't remember her conversation with Bill because she had been drugged, and by her own lights, this made her amnesia both natural and excusable. Teenie belonged to a subculture where the rules were lax and permission was broad, but as far as I could tell, it was also surprisingly bland. If Mark and Teenie were any indication, these kids had little fervor. They weren't Futurists glorifying the aesthetics of violence or anarchists advocating liberation from the reigns of law. They were hedonists, I suppose, but even the taking of pleasure seemed to bore them.

When I looked up at the narrow building on East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B, I knew that I could walk away, that I could choose not to know anything more about these overgrown children and their small, sad lives. I chose to press the buzzer, chose to yank open the door on the first floor of that old tenement building, and chose to walk down the hallway, and I well understood that I was moving in the direction of something ugly. I was also aware that the ugliness pulled me toward it. I wanted to see what it was, to get close to it and examine it. The tug was morbid, and by giving in to it, I felt that the loathsome thing I was looking for had already stained me.

I didn't plan to lie, but when the somnambulant young woman behind the desk raised her eyes to me, eyes that were shielded by red glasses with wings, and when I saw twenty Split World covers on the wall behind her, one of which featured Teddy Giles with blood dripping from his mouth and a spoon that held what looked like a human finger, I lied spontaneously. I told her I was a journalist for the New Yorker who was researching small alternative magazines for an article. I asked the young woman if she would explain Split World to me—its raison d'etre. I looked into the brown eyes behind the red wings. They were dull.

"I don't know what you mean."

"What the magazine is about, why it exists."

"Oh," she said, pondering the question. "Are you going to quote me? The name is Angie Roopnarine. R-O-O-P-N-A-R-I-N-E."

I took out my pen and notebook and inscribed Roopnarine in large letters on the paper. "For example," I continued. "Why the name? What's the split?"

"I don't know. I just work here. You should probably talk to somebody else, only nobody's here right now. They're out at lunch."

"It's five-thirty in the afternoon."

"We don't open until noon."

"I see." I pointed to the picture of Teddy Giles. "Do you like his art?"

She craned to look at the cover. "It's all right," she said.

I plunged into the heart of the matter. "They say he has an entourage, isn't that right? Mark Wechsler, Teenie Gold, a girl who calls herself Virgina, and a boy named Rafael who seems to be missing."

Angie Roopnarine's body grew suddenly tense. "That's part of your article?"

"I'm focusing on Giles."

She squinted at me. "I don't know what you want. You seem kinda wrong to be writing about this stuff."

"The New Yorker hires a lot of oldsters," I said. "You must know Mark Wechsler anyway," I said. "He worked here last summer."

"Well, I can tell you, you've got that wrong. He never worked here. He hung around, okay? But Larry never paid him."

"Larry?"

"Larry Finder. He owns the magazine and a lot of others."

"The gallery owner?"

"It's no secret." The telephone rang. "Split World, " Angie sang into the phone, her voice suddenly animated.

I nodded at her, mouthed a thank-you, and escaped. On the street, I took a deep breath to quiet the anxiety that had clamped itself around my lungs. Why lie? I said to myself. Had I lied out of some misguided impulse to protect myself? Maybe. Although I didn't construe my posing as a huge moral lapse, I felt both ridiculous and compromised as I walked westward away from the building. Discoveries about Mark had a tendency to fall into the negative category. He had not worked for Harry Freund last summer. He had not worked for Larry Finder at Split World either. Mark's life was an archaeology of fictions, one on top of the other, and I had only just started to dig.

Violet had left several urgent messages on my machine for me to come upstairs as soon as I returned home. When she opened the door, she looked pale, and I asked her if she was okay. Instead of answering me, she said, "I have something to show you."

She led me to Mark's room, and when I looked through the door, I saw that Violet had turned the place inside out. The closet door was open, and although clothes were still hanging inside, the shelves were bare. The floor was thick with papers, flyers, notebooks, and magazines. I also saw a box of toy cars, another with bent postcards, letters, and broken crayons. The drawers in Mark's desk had been removed and were lying in a row beside the boxes. Violet bent over one of them, picked up a red object, and handed it to me. "I found it inside a cigar box wrapped in masking tape."

It was Matthew's knife. I looked down at its silver initials, M.S.H.

"I'm sorry," Violet-said.

"After all these years," I said, and began to tug at its corkscrew. When I had pulled it out, I moved my finger down its spiral blade and remembered Matt's desperation. "I always put it on the night table, always!" I must have been very tired, because a part of me seemed to levitate then, and I had the most peculiar sensation of having floated to the ceiling. I felt as though I were looking down on the room, on Violet, on myself, and on the knife that I held in my hand. This curious division between earth and air, between the elevated me and the me on the ground didn't last very long, but even after it was over, I felt far away from everything in that room, as if I were looking at a mirage.

"I remember the day Matt lost it," Violet was saying in a deliberate voice. "And I remember how upset he was. It was Mark who told me, Leo, Mark who said how awful it was that the knife was missing. He was so sympathetic, so sad for Matt. He told me how he had looked for it everywhere." Violet's eyes were wide and her voice trembled. "Mark was eleven years old then. He was eleven." I felt her grab my arm and then the tight grip of her fingers. "You understand that it isn't the stealing that's so terrible or even the lying. It's the pretense of compassion, so perfectly modulated, so believable, so authentic."

I put the knife in my pocket then, and although I had heard what she said and had understood it, I didn't know how to respond, and instead of answering I stood very still, my eyes on the wall, and after a couple of seconds, I thought of the taxi in Bill's self-portrait—that toy he had given to Violet to hold when he painted her. The image of the taxi and Matt's knife had something in common, and I groped to articulate the similarity between them. The word "pawn" came to me, and yet it wasn't quite right. Some form of exchange linked the picture of a toy car with the real object that was hidden in my pocket. The connection had nothing to do with knives or automobiles. The knife was like the painted car because it too had become intangible—not a real thing anymore. It didn't matter that I could reach into my trousers and retrieve it. Through the machinations of a child's dark needs and secrets, a switch had been made. The present I had given Matt on his eleventh birthday no longer existed. In its place was something else, a sinister copy or facsimile, and as soon as I had thought this, my thinking came full circle. Matt had made his own double of the knife in the painting Bill had given to me. He had sent the Ghosty Boy up to the roof with his stolen prize, where the moon shone down on his empty face and lit the opened knife that he held in his hand.

After I told Violet about Teenie and Split World, I walked downstairs and spent the evening alone. It took me a while to find a place for the knife in the drawer, but in the end I decided to push it far to the back, away from the other objects. When I closed the drawer, I realized that the thing had helped to harden me to my task. I was no longer just looking for Mark. I wanted something more—exposure. I wanted to fill in the features of that missing face.

A couple of hours after Violet left home for Bill's studio, I was pressing a buzzer that read T.G./S.M. at 21 Franklin Street. To my surprise, I was immediately let in. A short, muscular boy wearing only a pair of shorts opened the steel door to Teddy Giles's fifth-floor loft. When the door was fully opened, I saw the boy's tanned body from every angle, and I saw myself, because all four walls of the entryway were mirrors.

"I'm here to see Teddy Giles," I said.

"I think he's asleep."

"It's very important," I said.

The boy turned around, opened a mirror that turned out to be also a door, and vanished. To my right was a large room with an immense orange sofa and two voluminous chairs—one turquoise, the other purple. Everything in the room looked new: the floors, the walls, the light fixtures. As I studied the room, I realized that the phrase "new money" didn't begin to cover what I was looking at. These furnishings were the product of instant money—a few big sales converted into real estate so fast that the agents, lawyers, architect, and contractor must have found themselves breathless. The apartment smelled of cigarette smoke and, more vaguely, of garbage. A pink sweater and several pairs of women's shoes lay on the floor. There were no books in that room, but there were hundreds of magazines. Glossy art and fashion periodicals were stacked in tall piles on the single coffee table. More were spread out on the floor, and I noticed that some of their pages had been marked with yellow and pink Post-its. On the far wall were three enormous photographs of Giles. In the first, he was dressed as a man and was dancing with a woman who reminded me of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. In the second, he was in female persona, wearing a garish blond wig and a silver evening gown that hugged his artificial breasts and padded hips. In the third picture, Giles appeared to have gone to pieces by some visual trick and was eating the flesh of his own severed right arm. While I was studying the now familiar images, Giles appeared from behind the mirrored door. He was wearing a red silk Japanese kimono that looked authentic. The heavy silk made a noise as he walked toward me. He smiled. "Professor Hertzberg," he said. "To what do I owe this pleasure?"

Before I could answer, he continued. "Sit down." He made a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the living room. I took the large turquoise chair and lowered myself into it. I tried leaning back, but the chair's proportions put me into a nearly reclining position, so I perched on its edge.

Giles seated himself in its purple twin, which was a little too far away for comfortable conversation. In order to compensate for the awkward distance, he leaned toward me, and the material of his robe parted to reveal the white skin of his hairless chest. He eyed a pack of Marlboros on the round table between us and said, "Do you mind if I smoke?"

"Go ahead," I said.

His hand trembled as he lit the cigarette, and I felt suddenly glad that he wasn't closer to me. From my position about five feet away from him, I was able to examine the overall effect of Teddy Giles. His features were bland and regular. He had light green eyes with pale lashes, a small nose that was a little flat, and colorless lips. It was the robe that gave his nondescript face its character. The stiff and elaborate kimono turned Giles into the very picture of a depraved fin de siècle fop. Against the red material his skin took on an almost corpselike pallor. Its large sleeves emphasized his thin arms, and its likeness to a dress enhanced his sexual ambiguity. It was hard to say whether he was consciously cultivating this image of himself for my benefit or whether he had settled into it as one of his several personas. Nodding at me, he said, "Now, what can I do for you?"

"I thought you might know where Mark is. He's been gone for ten days, and his stepmother and I are worried."

He answered without any hesitation. "I've seen Mark several times in the last week He was here last night, as a matter of fact. I had a little gathering, but he left with some people. Are you telling me he hasn't been in touch with"—he paused—"with Violet? Isn't that his stepmother's name?"

I recounted Mark's thefts and his disappearance while Giles listened. His light green eyes never left my face except when he turned his head to avoid blowing the cigarette smoke in my direction.

Then I said, "I heard he was traveling with you, somewhere out West—for a show,"

Giles shook his head very slowly, his eyes still fixed on mine. "I was in L.A. for a couple of days, but Mark wasn't with me." He appeared to be thinking. "Mark was devastated by his father's death. Of course, you know that We had several long talks about it, and I honestly believed that I helped him ..After a pause, he added, "When he lost his father, I think he lost part of himself."

It was hard to say what I had been expecting from Giles, but it wasn't compassion for Mark. As I sat there, I began to wonder if I hadn't shifted a portion of my anger and frustration at Mark onto this artist whom I didn't know at all. My Teddy Giles was a figment, a man constructed from rumor and hearsay and a couple of articles in newspapers and magazines. I looked across the room at the photograph of Giles as a woman.

He noticed my glance. "I'm aware that you disapprove of my work," he said flatly. "Mark has said as much, not only about you but about his stepmother. I'm aware that his father didn't have much use for it either. It's the content that upsets people, but I use violent material because it's ubiquitous. I'm not my work. As an art historian, you should be able to make that distinction.''

I tried to answer carefully. "I suppose that part of the problem is that you yourself have confused the issue, have promoted the idea that you can't be cut off from what you do—that you yourself are, well, dangerous."

He laughed. There was contentment, pleasure, and charm in that laugh. I also noticed how small his teeth were—like two rows of baby teeth. "You're right," he said. "I use myself as an object. I recognize that it's not new, but nobody's quite done what I do either."

"With horror clichés, you mean?"

"Exactly. Horror is extreme, and extremes are purging. That's why people watch the films or come to see my work."

I had a strong feeling of repetition. Giles had said this before. He had probably said it a thousand times.

"But clichés are deadening, aren't they?" I said. "By their very nature they kill meaning."

He smiled at me, a little indulgently. "I'm not interested in meaning. I have to tell you, I don't think it's very important anymore. People don't care about it, really. Speed is important. And pictures. The quick take for short attention spans. Ads, Hollywood movies, the six o'clock news, yes, even art—it all comes down to shopping. And what is shopping? It's walking around until a desirable something pops up and you buy it. Why do you buy it? Because it catches your eye. If it doesn't, you click to another channel. And why does it catch your eye? Because something about it gives you a little rush. It might be a sparkle or a glow or a bit of gore or a bare ass. It doesn't matter. It's the rush that counts—not the something. It's circular. You want the rush again, so you go looking for it. You plunk down your dollars and buy again."

"But very few people buy art," I said.

"True, but sensational art sells magazines and newspapers, and the buzz brings collectors, and collectors bring money, and round and round it goes. Does my honesty shock you?"

"No. I'm just not sure that people are quite as shallow as you pretend."

"But you see, I don't think there's anything wrong with shallow." He lit another cigarette. "I'm far more offended by all the pious pretensions people have about how deep they are. It's a Freudian lie, isn't it—that there's this big unconscious blob in everybody."

"I think notions of human depth probably pre-date Freud," I said. I could hear the dry academic take hold in my voice. Giles was boring me, not because he was stupid but because there was something detached in his tone, a remote and practiced cadence that made me tired. He was looking at me, and I thought I sensed disappointment from him. He had wanted to entertain me. He was used to journalists who rose to the bait, who found him clever. I changed the subject. "I spoke to Teenie Gold yesterday," I said.

Giles nodded. "I haven't seen her in months. How is Teenie?"

I decided not to mince words. "She showed me a scar on her stomach—Mark's initials—which she said ..." I stopped and looked at Giles.

He was listening attentively. "Yes?"

"She said you cut the letters into her skin while Mark held her down."

Giles looked more than surprised. "Oh my God," he said. "Poor Teenie." He shook his head sadly and blew smoke upward. "Teenie cuts herself. She has scars all over her arms. She's tried to stop, but she can't. It makes her feel good. She once told me it makes her feel real." He paused, tapped the ash off his cigarette, and said, "We all like to feel real." He crossed his legs, and a naked knee appeared from between the folds of the elaborate robe. I glanced down at his calf and noticed razor stubble. Giles had confirmed my own doubts about Teenie's story, and yet I wondered why she would manufacture such an elaborate tale. Teenie was far from clever. "I'm sure Mark will call me," Giles continued. "Maybe even today. What if I have a talk with him and ask him to get in touch with you and let you know where he is? I think he'll listen to me."

I stood up. "Thank you," I said. "If you do that, we'd be very grateful."

Giles stood up too. He smiled at me, but his lips looked strained. "We-e?" he said, turning the word into two chanted syllables.

His tone unnerved me, but I answered him steadily. "Yes," I said. "He can call either me or Violet." I began to walk in the direction of the door. In the entryway, I was met with myriad reflections again from all sides— my own in blue oxford shirt and khaki pants, Giles's in the brilliant red kimono and the garish colors of the furniture in the vast room behind us, all of it fractured by the mirrored panels. With the unctuous "We?" reverberating in my ears, I grabbed a knob, turned it, and opened the door, but instead of the elevator, I found myself looking down a narrow hallway. Hanging on the wall at its dead end, I saw a painting I recognized, one Bill had painted of Mark when he was two years old. The little boy was laughing madly as he held a lamp shade on top of his head like a hat, and he was naked except for a paper diaper so heavy with urine or feces that it had sunk low on his hips. I didn't move. The image of the little boy seemed to float toward me. I made a surprised noise. Behind me Giles said, "Wrong door, Professor."

"That's Bill's," I said.

"Yes, it is," Giles said.

"What's it doing here?"

"I bought it"

"From whom?" I said.

"From the owner."

I turned to him suddenly. "From Lucille? You bought it from Lucille?" I knew as well as anyone that paintings circulate—move from owner to owner, languish in dark rooms, reappear, are sold and resold, stolen, destroyed, restored for better or for worse. A painting may resurface anywhere, and yet the sight of that canvas in this place appalled me.

"I'm thinking of using it," Giles said. He was standing very close to me. I could feel his breath on my ear. Instinctively, I pulled my head away.

"Using it?" I echoed. I began to walk toward the painting.

"I thought you were leaving," Giles said from behind me. There was a note of amusement in his voice, and as soon as I heard it, I fumbled inwardly, dropped further into confusion. Giles's lilting "We?" had started it. Whatever advantage I had had during our conversation disappeared in that hallway. My own feeble repetition "Using it?" sounded like a scoff aimed at myself, a self-inflicted jeer I couldn't repair with a witty retort All I could see was the painted child in front of me with his wild expression of glee and manic pleasure.

I am still muddling over what happened to me then and the exact sequence of events, but I know I had a sensation of enclosure and then of dread. Teddy Giles was hardly imposing, but he had managed to intimidate me with a couple of cryptic comments that suggested worlds, whole worlds, and it seemed to me that Bill was somehow at the center of all of them, that it didn't matter that he was dead. The mostly unarticulated combat between me and Giles was over Bill, and my sudden awareness of this turned into near panic. Then, just as I reached the painting, I heard a toilet flush. The sound of the toilet brought with it a belief that I had heard other sounds earlier and that my reaction to the painting had only partly blotted them out. I stopped to listen. Gagging noises came from behind a door, then a low hoarse cry for help. I yanked open the door directly in front of me and saw Mark lying on the floor of a bathroom, its walls covered with tiny green glass tiles. He was slumped on the floor near the bathtub with his mouth open and his eyes closed. His lips had turned blue. The sight of Mark's blue mouth made me suddenly calm. I moved forward and felt my shoe slip for a second. After I caught my balance, I noticed a pool of vomit at my feet. I knelt beside Mark and grabbed his wrist as I looked down at his white face. My fingers moved upward on his clammy skin, searching for his pulse. Without turning around, I said to Giles, "Call an ambulance." When he didn't answer me, I looked back at him.

"He'll be all right," he said.

"Go to the phone," I said, "and dial 911 right now before he dies here in your apartment."

Giles disappeared down the hallway. My fingers kept searching. He had a weak pulse, and when I looked down at his face, I saw that it was dead white. "You're going to live, Mark," I whispered to him, and then again, "You're going to live." I put my ear to his mouth. He was breathing.

He opened his eyes, and I felt a rush of happiness. "Mark," I said. "I have to get you to a hospital. Don't sleep. Don't close your eyes." I put my arm under his head to cushion it and looked down at him. He closed his eyes. "No," I said emphatically. I began to tug him upward. He was heavy, and as I pulled on him, my pants leg slid in the vomit on the floor. "Listen to me," I said sternly. "Don't sleep."

Mark looked at me narrowly. "Fuck you," he said. I grabbed him under his arms and began to pull him out of the bathroom, but he resisted. With an abrupt motion he reached for my face, and I felt his nails dig into my cheek. The sudden pain shocked me, and I dropped him. His head thudded on the tiles and I heard him groan. A long glistening thread of saliva dripped from his open mouth down his chin, and then he threw up again, spewing ocher liquid onto his gray T-shirt.

The vomiting saved Mark's life. According to Dr. Sinha, who treated him in the emergency room at New York Hospital, Mark had overdosed on a combination of drugs that included an animal tranquilizer that went by the name Special K on the streets. By the time I spoke to Dr. Sinha, I had done my best to clean my pants in the men's room, and a nurse had given me a bandage for the three bloody stripes on my right cheek. As I stood in the hospital corridor, I could still smell vomit, and the large wet spot on my pants was turning cold in the air-conditioned hallway. When the doctor said "Special K," I remembered Giles's voice in the hallway: "No K tonight, huh, M&M?" Over two years had passed between the time I first heard those words and the moment they were decoded for me. I found it ironic that while I had lived in New York for almost sixty years, my translator must have arrived in this country far more recently. He was a very young man with intelligent eyes who spoke the musical English of Bombay.

Three days later, Violet and Mark boarded a plane for Minneapolis. I wasn't present when Violet gave Mark the ultimatum in the hospital, but she told me that after she threatened to cut him off without a cent, he had agreed to go to Hazelden—a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. Violet was able to place Mark at Hazelden quickly by calling an old friend of hers from high school who held an important position at the clinic. While Mark was in treatment, Violet planned to stay with her parents and visit him weekly. Addiction went far to explain Mark's behavior, and the simple act of giving his problem a name eased some of my fears. It was a little like shining a flashlight into a dark corner and identifying every speck and fluff of dust that fell inside the orb of light as a single entity. Lying, stealing, and absconding all became symptoms of Mark's "disease." From this point of view, Mark was only twelve steps away from freedom. Of course, I knew it wasn't that easy, but when Mark woke up in the hospital after his ordeal, he had become somebody new— a boy with a bona fide illness, who could be treated in a clinic where the experts knew all about people like him. He didn't want to go at first He said he wasn't a drug addict. He took drugs, but he wasn't addicted. He also said he hadn't stolen Violet's jewelry or my horse, but as anyone will tell you, denial is part of the "addiction profile." The diagnosis also opened the door to renewed sympathy for Mark. Beset by terrible cravings, he had had little control over his actions and deserved another chance. But every pat solution, every convenient name has its overflow, the acts or feelings that resist interpretation—Matt's stolen knife, for example. As Violet had said, "Mark was eleven." Drugs had not been part of his life when he was eleven.

But the child inevitably haunts the adult, even when that former self is no longer recognizable. Bill's portrait of his puckish two-year-old in a dirty diaper had wound up in the apartment where his eighteen-year-old came close to dying. No longer a mirror of anyone, the canvas had become a disturbing specter of the past—not only Mark's but its own. Lucille told Violet that she had sold the painting through Bernie five years earlier. A telephone call to Bernie revealed that he knew nothing about Giles. He had dealt with a woman named Susan Blanchard, who was a reputable adviser to several well-known collectors in the city. Bernie said the buyer was a man named Ringman, who had also bought one of the fairy-tale boxes. Violet was annoyed that Lucille and Bernie hadn't mentioned the sale to Bill. "He had the right to know," she said. "Morally." But Lucille hadn't wanted Bill to know and had asked Bernie not to mention it "I felt sorry for Lucille," Bernie said to Violet. "And it was her painting to sell."

Violet blamed Lucille for the roaming canvas. I didn't. It was a great relief to me that Lucille hadn't sold the painting directly to Giles, and I felt quite sure that she had needed the money from the sale. But for Violet, one story merged into another. Lucille had sold a portrait of her own son to the highest bidder and she hadn't bothered to come visit him in the hospital. Lucille had called him instead, and according to Mark, she'd never even mentioned the overdose. Violet thought Mark was lying, called Lucille, and asked her outright. Lucille confirmed that she hadn't talked to Mark about his near death from drugs. "I didn't think it would be productive," she said. What had she talked about, then? Violet had wanted to know. Lucille said that she had given him news about Ollie's day camp and the two cats and what she was cooking for dinner and had wished him luck. Violet was incensed. When she told me the story she trembled with irritation. My feeling was that Lucille had made a conscious decision not to speak of what had happened, that she had weighed the decision carefully and had come to the conclusion that going over that territory would do neither Mark nor her any good. I think every word she uttered to him had been deliberate. I suspected, too, that after she hung up, she went over the talk in her mind and may even have chided herself about what she had said and revised the conversation after the fact. Violet believed that any mother who didn't hop the next train and come running to her son's bedside was "unnatural," but I knew that self-consciousness and uncertainty paralyzed Lucille. She was stuck in the mud of her own internal debates, the pros and cons and logical conundrums that made almost any action on her part impossible. Just making the telephone call to the hospital had probably taken a good deal of courage.

The difference between Lucille and Violet was one of character, not knowledge. Violet's confusion about Mark was as great as Lucille's. What Violet didn't question, however, was the strength of her own feeling for him and her need to act on it. Lucille, on the other hand, felt powerless. Bill's two wives had become Mark's two mothers, and while the marriages had come one after the other, Lucille's motherhood and Violet's adopted motherhood had coexisted for years and now had outlived Bill's death. The two women were the surviving poles of a man's desire, bound together by the boy he had fathered with only one of them. I couldn't help but feel that Bill was still playing a crucial role in the story that was unfolding before me, that he had created a fierce geometry among us, and that it lived on. Again, I found hints in the painting that hung in my apartment: the woman who left and the one who fought and stayed; the strange little car in the plump Violet's lap—a thing that wasn't itself and wasn't a symbol either, but a vehicle of unspoken wishes. When Bill painted that canvas he had been hoping for a child with Lucille. He had told me that himself. I started to study the painting again, and the longer I looked at it, the more I began to feel that Mark was there in the canvas, too, hiding in the body of the wrong woman.

Violet and Mark were gone for two months. During that time I took in their mail, watered the three plants upstairs, and listened to the answering machine for messages on which I could still hear Bill's voice telling the callers to wait for the beep. I also checked in on the Bowery loft once a week. Violet had made a special request that I look in on Mr. Bob. It turned out that not long after Bill died, Mr. Aiello, the landlord, had discovered the squatter, and after striking a deal with him, Violet was now paying extra rent for the dilapidated room downstairs. Mr. Bob's new status as official resident of 89 Bowery had made him both proprietary and officious. During my visits, he trailed behind me and sniffed loudly to express his disapproval. "I'm taking care of everything," he would say. "I've swept." Sweeping had become Mr. Bob's calling, and he swept obsessively, often brushing the backs of my feet with the broom as though I were leaving a trail of dust behind me. And while he swept, he declaimed, his grandiose words rising and falling for full dramatic effect.

"It won't settle, I tell you. It has said a resounding no to eternal sleep, and all day and far into the night I am forced to listen to the doleful sound of its feet pacing up there under the roof, and last night when I had swept away the last tidbits, crumbs, and what-have-yous of my long day's work, I spied it on the stairs—the spitting image of Mr. W. himself, but bodiless of course—a mere astral puff of what he once was, and that discarnate, spiritized phantasma reached out its arms in a gesture of indescribable sorrow and then it covered its poor blind eyes, and I discerned that it was looking for her, for Beauty. Now that she's gone, the ghost is disconsolate. Mind my words, because I've seen it before and I'll see it again. My knowledge of spirit doings comes firsthand. When I had my business (I worked with fine antiques, you know), I had experience of several pieces that had been penetrated. You are aware of that expression and its meaning in this particular instance—penetrated. One Queen Anne dresser formerly owned by a petite, elderly lady in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Beautiful home, that was, with a turret, but Mrs. Deerborne's essence or, shall we say, her animus, the shadowy wraith of what she once had been, was still fleet, still quick. It fluttered like a bird inside that fine piece of furniture, a timorous presence within the drawers. Let us just say they rattled. Seven times I sold the Anne, reluctantly, ever so reluctantly, and seven times the buyers returned it to me. Seven times I took it back, no questions asked, because I had the knowledge of it. It was her son who tortured her. He was unmarried, unsettled, a bad sort who drifted, and I don't think the old lady could bear to leave him like that with no position in life. William Wechsler, a.k.a. Mr. W., has unfinished business, too, and Beauty knows it, and that's why she's been coming every day until now. I hear her singing to him and talking to him to help him sleep. She'll be back to him soon now. His ghost can't do without her. It's more restless, flighty, peevish than ever before, and she's the only one who can quiet him—or rather it. And I'll tell you why. She takes succor in her trials from the angels. You understand me! They drop down! They drop down! I am the witness. I have seen her coming out the door, and I have seen the fiery mark of the seraphim on her face. She is touched, touched by the burning fingers of the heavenly host."

Mr. Bob's monologues plagued me. They never stopped. It wasn't his mishmash of religion and the occult that irritated me as much as the tone of bourgeois superiority that inevitably crept into his narratives about possessed tables, highboys, and secretaries, which usually included a condemnation of "drifters," "losers," and "bums." Bob had added Bill and Violet to the cast of characters in his muddled lore, because he wanted them for himself. Legends can live and breathe only on verbal terrain, and so Bob talked and talked to keep his Mr. W. and his Beauty secure in a world of his own making. There they could climb his celestial heights or fall into his demonic ditches without any interference from me.

And yet, I would have liked to be alone as I walked up to the studio, unlocked the door, and looked into the big room and the little that remained there of Bill. I would have liked to study the chair with Bill's work clothes draped over it, the ones I had seen Violet wearing. I would have liked to let the light of the tall windows, brilliant with sun or darkening with the evening, fall over me in silence, would have liked to stand quietly and inhale the smell of the room, which hadn't changed at all. But it wasn't possible. Bob was the building's resident hobgoblin, its sniffing, sweeping, tirading, self-appointed mystical concierge, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Nevertheless, I continued to wait for his blessing when I walked through the front door: "O Lord, lift up the soul of thy tattered servant who walketh out into the pedestrian hubbub of thine city that he may not be sorely tempted by the demons of Gotham, but will make his way straight and true toward thy heavenly light. Bless him and keep him and let thy great beaming countenance shine down upon him and give him peace."

I didn't believe in the old man's ghosts or angels, but as the summer wound down, Bill haunted me more rather than less, and without mentioning it to anyone, I began taking notes and organizing material for an essay about his work when I should have been finishing the book on Goya. The essay was launched one afternoon when I was paging through the catalogue of O's Journey, and the hero's initial, which signified both the presence of the letter and the absence of the number, summoned other works by Bill that turned on appearance and disappearance. After that, I spent every morning with Bill's catalogues and slides and began to understand that it was a book I was writing, one organized not by chronology but by ideas. It wasn't simple. There were many works that fell into more than one of my original categories— into both Disappearance and Hunger, for example. But I discovered that Hunger was actually a subset of Disappearance. The distinction might seem academic, but the more I studied the images, the color, the brush strokes, sculptures, and inscriptions, the more I felt that their ambiguities were all part of the idea of vanishing. The body of work Bill had left behind him formed the anatomy of a true ghost, not because every work of art by a man now dead is his trace on the world but because Bill's work in particular was an investigation of the inadequacy of symbolic surfaces—the formulas of explanation that fall short of reality. At every turn, the desire to locate, stop, pinpoint through letters or numbers or the conventions of painting was foiled. You think you know, Bill seemed to be saying in every work, but you don't know. I subvert your truisms, your smug understanding and blind you with this metamorphosis. When does one thing cease and another begin? Your borders are inventions, jokes, absurdities. The same woman grows and shrinks, and at each extreme she defies recognition. A doll lies on her back with the sign of an outdated diagnosis over her mouth. Two boys become each other. Numbers in stock reports, numbers preceded by dollar signs, and numbers burned into an arm. I had never seen the work more clearly, and at the same time I floundered inside it, choked by doubt and something else—a smothering intimacy. There were days when my work took on the qualities of a tormenting mistress whose bouts of passion were followed by inscrutable coldness, who screamed for love and then slapped my face. And like a woman, the art led me on, and I suffered and enjoyed it. Sitting at my desk with a pen in my hand, I wrestled with the hidden man who had been my friend, a man who had painted himself as a woman and as B, a fat, lusty fairy godmother. But the struggle made me unusually vivid to myself, and as the summer days drew to an end, I felt very alive in my solitude.

Violet called regularly. She told me about Hazelden—a retreat I confused with the sanatoriums of my early childhood. My mother's parents, whom I had never known, had both died of tuberculosis in 1929 after long confinements at Nordrach, a sanatorium in the Black Forest. I imagined Mark lying on a chaise longue near a lake that sparkled in the sun. The fantasy was probably false—a mixed picture taken from my mother's stories and my memory of reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The crucial thing, I realized, was that whenever I thought about Mark at the time, he wasn't moving. He was frozen like a person in a snapshot, and this stasis was all that mattered. I felt that Hazelden had put him on hold. Like a benevolent prison, it reined in his mobility, and I understood that what I feared most in Mark were his disappearances and subsequent roaming. Violet said she was encouraged by Mark's progress. Every Wednesday, she went to the family meetings, and she prepared herself by reading about the twelve steps. She said that Mark had had a bumpy start, but that he had slowly begun to reveal himself as the weeks went on. She talked about the other patients, or "peers," as the inmates were called at Hazelden, especially about a young woman named Debbie.

The summer ended. Classes started, and with them I lost my daily rhythm of writing the book on Bill. I continued to work on it, however, often in the evenings after reviewing my lecture notes. In late October, Violet called to say that she and Mark would be home the following week.

A couple of days after I spoke to Violet, Lazlo appeared at my door. One glance at him told me that he had bad news. I had learned to read Lazlo's body rather than his face for clues. His shoulders sloped, and when he stepped into the room, he walked slowly. When I asked him what had happened, he told me about the painting in Giles's upcoming show. The story was only a rumor then, one of those floating bits of gossip that Lazlo seemed to snatch from thin air, but a week later, the show opened and we knew it was true. Teddy Giles had used the painting of Mark in his new exhibition. The scandal revolved around the fact that the valuable canvas had been destroyed. A figure of a murdered woman, missing one arm and a leg, had been pushed through Bill's painting of his son. Her head protruded through one side of the canvas, choking her at the neck The rest of her maimed body stuck out on the other side. The force of the piece relied on the fact that an original work of art, owned by Giles, was now as mutilated as the mannequin.

The news excited the art world. If you owned a painting, it wasn't illegal to harm it. You could use it for target practice if you wanted to. I remembered Giles's warning: "I'm thinking of using it" It had made no sense to me. Use had nothing to do with art. It was by nature useless. Once the show opened, it was the only work in the show that anybody discussed. The others were similar to Giles's earlier pieces—the hacked hollow bodies of women, a couple of men, and several children; bloody clothes; severed heads; guns. Nobody seemed to care. What excited everyone—outraging some and pleasing others—was that here was an act of genuine violence. It wasn't simulated but real. The bodies were fake, but the painting was authentic. Even more titillating was the fact that Bill's work was expensive. There was considerable musing over whether the presence of the painting—in spite of the damage—raised the price of the piece as a whole. It was hard to know what Giles had actually paid for the portrait of Mark. Several high prices were quoted, but I suspect they came from Giles himself—a notoriously unreliable source.

Violet returned to an uproar. Several journalists called to get her statement. Wisely, she refused to speak to them. It wasn't long before the trail led to Mark and his association with Giles. A gossip columnist in a downtown free paper speculated on the connection between them, hinting that Giles and "Wechsler the Younger" were lovers, or had been lovers. One reviewer referred to the piece as "art rape." Hasseborg climbed on board, arguing that the desecration renewed the possibility of subversion in art. "With one shot, Theodore Giles has sent a bullet through all the pieties that surround art in our culture."

Neither Violet nor I visited the show. Lazlo went with Pinky and took a surreptitious Polaroid, which he brought back to me and Violet. Mark was staying with his mother for several days before returning to New York. Violet said that when she'd told Mark about the painting, he had been perplexed. "He seems to think that Giles is really a good guy and he can't understand why he would do this to his father's work." After Violet examined the little photo, she laid it on the table but said nothing.

"I hoped it was a copy," Lazlo said. "But it's not. I was very close to it. He used the real painting."

Pinky was sitting on the sofa. I noticed that even while sitting, her long feet were turned out in first position. "The question is," she said, "why Bill's work? He could have bought any painting for the same money and wrecked it. Why that portrait of Mark? Because he knows him?"

Lazlo opened his mouth, closed it and opened it again. "The word is Giles knows Mark because he was ..." He hesitated. "Fixed on Bill."

Violet leaned forward. "Do you have any reason to believe that?"

Through his glasses I saw Lazlo's eyes narrow slightly. "I heard he has a file on Bill that goes back to before he knew Mark—clippings, catalogues, photos."

None of us said a word. The idea that Giles had cultivated the son because of the father had dimly occurred to me in the hallway the day I found Mark in the bathroom, but what did Giles want? Had Bill still been alive, the ruined painting would have hurt him, but Bill was dead. Did Giles want to wound Mark? No, I thought to myself, I'm asking the wrong questions. I remembered Giles's face when we talked, his apparent sincerity about Mark, his comments about Teenie. "Poor Teenie. Teenie cuts herself." I remembered the sign on her skin—the connected M's, or the M attached to the W. M&M. Bill's M's—the boys, Matthew and Mark. No K tonight, huh, M&M? The changeling. I had been writing about this idea—copies, doubles, multiples of one. Confusions. I suddenly remembered the two identical male figures in Mark's collage with the two baby pictures. What was the story Bill had once told me about Dan? Yes. Dan was in the hospital after his first breakdown. Bill had had long hair then, but he'd cut it. When he went to visit Dan, Bill arrived in the ward with short hair. Dan took one look at him and said, "You cut my hair!" That happens with schizophrenics, Bill had told me. They make pronominal mistakes. And with aphasies. My thoughts weren't orderly. I saw Goya's Saturn eating his son, the photograph of Giles gnawing at his own arm, then Mark's head jerking backward from my arm as I woke up in bed. The telephone message: M&M knows they killed me. No. M&M knows they killed Me. The boy in the hallway with the green purse. Me. They called him "Me."

"Are you okay, Leo?" Violet said.

I looked at her and then I explained.

"Rafael and Me are the same person," Violet said.

"You mean the kid they say was killed by Giles?" Pinky said.

The conversation that followed quickly meandered into the outlandish. We made forays into Rafael's purported slavery, Mark's possible love affair with Giles, Teenie's exquisite mutilation, and the dead cats that had been strung around the city. Lazlo mentioned Special K and another drug called Ecstasy. The little pills were also sometimes called E's, another letter in the growing alphabet of pharmaceuticals. But the single hard fact we had was my fleeting glimpse of a boy in the hallway early one morning whom Mark had called "Me." Over the telephone an unknown girl had relayed a rumor to Violet about a possible murder and a boy named Rafael, but who was to say that the story wasn't pure fabrication? At the time, however, my imagination was running freely, and I proposed the possibility that Giles was behind the phone calls to both Violet and Bill. "He gives interviews in different voices," I said. "Maybe Giles is the girl on the telephone." Violet disagreed, saying the voice wasn't a falsetto. When Pinky mentioned voice-altering devices that could be attached to telephones, Violet started to laugh. Her laughter soon turned into high staccato shrieks, and then the tears began to run down her face. Pinky stood up, knelt in front of Violet, and put her arms around her neck. Lazlo and I sat and watched as the two women rocked each other in a long embrace. At least five minutes passed before Violet's tearful laughter subsided into small gasps for breath and convulsive sniffs. "You're worn out," Pinky said to Violet as she stroked her head. "You're all worn out."

By then, two months had gone by without a letter from Erica. On the day before Mark returned to New York, I broke our pact and called. I don't think I was expecting her to be there. I had planned a little speech for the answering machine instead, and when she picked up the telephone and said, "Hello," I gagged for a moment. After I identified myself, she didn't speak, and that interval of silence made me suddenly angry. I told her that our friendship, marriage, rapport—whatever the hell it was—had become a sham, a false, stupid, dead nothingness, and I was sick and tired of the whole business. If she had met somebody else, I deserved to know. If she had, I wanted to be free of her, wanted to leave her behind me for good.

"There's nobody else, Leo."

"Why haven't you answered my letters?"

"I've started fifty letters and thrown them away. I feel like I'm always explaining and analyzing myself, blah, blah, blah. Even with you. I'm sick of my own interminable need to put it all down and pick it apart. When I do, it looks like the worst kind of sophism, like clever lies, like excuses for myself." Erica sighed heavily, and with that familiar sound my anger disappeared. Once it was gone, I realized that I missed it. Spite has focus, a keenness that sympathy lacks, and I was sorry to find myself back in that diffuse emotional territory.

"I've been writing so much, Leo, it's been hard to write to you. It's Henry James again."

"Oh," I said.

"I love them, you know."

"Who?"

"His characters. I love them because they're so complicated, and while I'm working on them and their suffering, I forget myself. I've thought of calling—it was stupid of me not to call. I'm really sorry.''

By the end of the conversation, Erica and I had decided to call each other as well as write. I told her to send me the book whenever she felt she was ready, and I told her that I loved her. She said she loved me, too. There wasn't anybody else. There would never be anybody else. After I hung up the phone, I understood that we would never be free of each other. It gave me no joy. I didn't want to let go of Erica, and yet I rebelled against our stubborn connection. We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.

I had made the phone call at my desk, and after a couple of minutes I opened the drawer and examined my hoard of things. They looked odd to me—that curious collection of memorabilia that included thin black socks, burned cardboard, and a thin square cut from a magazine. I looked at Violet's face in the photograph, and then at Bill, whose eyes were on his wife. His wife. His widow. The dead. The living. I picked up Erica's lipstick. My wife and her beloved characters in a dead man's books. Only fictions. But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and then I picked up Matt's picture of Dave and Durango.

Mark looked better. His blue eyes had a new directness, and he had gained a few pounds during his months away. Even his voice seemed to have more resonance and conviction. His days consisted of job hunting in the morning, Narcotics Anonymous meetings in the afternoon, and appointments with a man who had become his sponsor. Alvin was a former heroin addict who couldn't have been more than thirty. He was a tidy, polite man with light brown skin, a close-cropped beard, and eyes that burned with feverish determination. Alvin was a resurrected man, a Dostoyevskian character who had crawled up from the underground to lend his support to a comrade in need. His body was a rigid block of purpose, and just looking at him made me feel languid, superfluous, and ignorant Like thousands of others, Mark's sponsor had "hit bottom" and then decided to change his life. I never learned Alvin's story, but Mark told me and Violet countless others he had gathered up at Hazelden, sordid tales of desperate need that led to lies, abandonments, betrayals and sometimes violence. Each story had a name attached to it—Maria, John, Angel, Hans, Mariko, Deborah. Mark was clearly interested in the stories, but he focused on their grim details rather than on the people who had made them happen. Perhaps he saw their actions as mirrors of his own degradation.

Violet was hopeful. Mark attended meetings every day, spoke to Alvin often, and was working as a busboy at a restaurant on Grand Street. Following the rules of the program, Violet had told him she was finished with punishments, but he couldn't live with her unless he was "clean." It was that simple. In the middle of the month, Mark knocked on my door one evening at around eleven o'clock at night. I was already in bed but still awake. When I opened the door, he was standing in the hallway. I told him to come in. He walked to the sofa but didn't sit down. He glanced at the painting of Violet, looked in my direction and then down at his shoes. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for hurting you."

I stared at him and tightened the sash of my bathrobe as if that tug would help keep in my emotions.

"I was on drugs," he continued. "They messed me up, but I'm responsible for all of it."

I didn't answer him.

"You don't have to forgive me, but it's important that I ask you. It's part of the steps."

I nodded.

Mark's face was quivering.

He's nineteen years old, I said to myself.

"I wish everything was different, that it was the way it was before." He looked at me for the first time. "You used to like me," he said. "We had good talks."

"I don't know what those talks really meant, Mark," I said. "You've lied so much ..."

He interrupted me. "I know, but I've changed." There was a moan in his voice. "And I told you things I never told anybody else. I meant them. I really did."

The desperation seemed to come from inside him, from deep within his chest. Was the sound new? Had I ever heard this tone before? I didn't think so. Very tentatively I put my hand on his shoulder. "Time will tell," I said. "You have a chance to turn things around, to live in a different way. I believe you can do it."

He moved closer to me and looked down into my face. He seemed immensely relieved. He let out a long breath, and then he said, "Please." Mark spread his arms for a hug. I hesitated but then relented. He leaned toward me and lay his head on my shoulder and he embraced me with an intensity and warmth that reminded me of his father.

Early in the morning on December 2, Mark disappeared. That same day Violet received a letter from Deborah—the girl Mark and Violet had befriended at Hazelden. It was almost midnight when Violet came downstairs with the letter in her hand, seated herself on the sofa and read it to me.

Dear Violet,

I wanted to write you and tell you that I'm doing all right. Every day is a big fight with the not drinking and everything but I'm getting along with my mom's help. She's trying not to yell at me so much after what we said in the family meetings. She knows it gets me down. When it's really bad I think about the singing I heard from the sky that night at Hazelden and those voices from heaven that told me I was a child of God and that he loves me just for that. I know that some of the others thought I was bonkers when I said I wasn't Debbie no more. But in the family meeting I could tell that you were understanding of me. I had to be Deborah after I heard them singing. You are a real good person and Mark is lucky to have you for a stepmom. He told me about how you helped him through withdrawal when he was shaking and barfing so bad before you came to Minnesota. I always wished I had somebody like that for me. I've been asking everybody to pray for me, so I hope that you can pray for me too. Merry, merry Xmas and a great new year! LUV, Deborah P.S. I get my cast off next week.

When Violet was finished reading, she lay the paper on her lap and looked up at me.

"You never told me that Mark had withdrawal symptoms," I said.

"I didn't tell you because he didn't have them."

"Why would Deborah write that, then?"

"Because he told her that he did."

"But why would he do that?"

"I think he wanted to fit in, be more like the others. I mean, Mark has a drug problem, but he was never physically dependent on drugs. It probably made it easier to explain all the lying and stealing he did if he pretended he was a hard-core addict." She paused for several seconds. "By the end, they all loved him—the counselors, the other patients, everybody. They made him a group leader. Mark was a star. Nobody liked Debbie much. She dresses like a tart and has a bad complexion.

She's twenty-four years old and has been in detox three times already. She almost drowned once. She got so drunk she fell into a lake. Another time she drove off the road and smashed into a tree and had her license revoked. Before she landed in Hazelden, she came home smashed, fell down the stairs in her mother's house, and broke her leg in five places. She's got a cast up to here." Violet pointed to her thigh. "Well, she stole from her mother and lied to her, just like Mark. She turned tricks for a while. Her mother's had it. She just kept screaming at Debbie—'You're a big baby. It's just like I've had a crying, puking baby for twenty-four years. You're not a companion to me at all. My whole life is taking care of you.' Then the mother cried and Debbie cried, and I cried. I sat in that chair and sobbed my guts out for poor Debbie and her poor mother." Violet gave me an ironic smile. "I didn't know them from a hole in the wall. Well, sometime during the second month, Debbie had her vision and turned into Deborah."

"The singing," I said.

Violet nodded. "She came back to the next family meeting shining like a light bulb."

"That can wear off, you know. It usually does."

"Yes, but she believes in her story and in the words she uses to tell it."

"And Mark doesn't. Is that what you're saying?"

Violet stood up. She pressed her hands into her forehead and began to pace. I tried to remember if Violet had paced before Bill died. I watched her take several steps and turn. "Sometimes I think he doesn't understand what language is. It's like he never figured out symbols—the whole structure of things is missing. He can speak, but he just uses words as a way to manipulate other people." Violet took out a cigarette and lit it.

"You're smoking a lot now," I told her.

She inhaled the Camel and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. "It's more than that. Mark doesn't have a story."

"Sure he does," I said. "We all do."

"But he doesn't know what it is, Leo. At Hazelden they kept asking him to talk about himself. In the beginning he would mumble a few things about the divorce—his mother, his father. The counselor prodded him. What do you mean? Explain. And he said, Everybody keeps telling me that it has to be the divorce, so it must be.' That made them angry. They wanted him to feel—to tell his story. So he started to talk, but when I think about it, he never said much of any significance. But he did cry. That made them happy. He gave them what they wanted—feeling, or the appearance of it. But a story is about making connections in time, and Mark's stuck in a time warp, a sick repetition that just shuttles him back and forth, back and forth."

"You mean the way he went from one parent to another?"

Violet stopped pacing. "I don't know," she said. "Lots of kids go between their divorced parents, and they don't turn out like Mark. It can't be that." She turned her back to me and walked to the window. I looked at her body as she stood with the cigarette burning near her thigh. She was wearing old blue jeans that didn't fit her anymore. I studied the gap of bare skin between her short sweater and the waistband of her pants. After a moment, I stood up and walked toward the window. The cigarette had an acrid chemical smell, but behind the smoke I breathed in Violet's perfume. I wanted to touch her shoulder, but I didn't. We stood in silence and looked into the street. It had stopped raining, and I watched as fat drops of water broke and slid down the pane. To my right, I could see plumes of white smoke rising from a hole in the street on Canal.

"All I know is that nothing he says can be believed. I don't mean just now. I mean nothing he's ever said. Some of it must have been true, but I don't know what." Violet was looking into the street with narrowed eyes. "Do you remember Mark's parakeet?"

"I remember the funeral," I said.

Only Violet's lips moved. The rest of her seemed to have frozen in place. "It broke its neck in the cage door." Several seconds passed before she spoke again in the same low voice. "All his little animals died—the two guinea pigs, the white mice, even the fish. Of course they often do, small pets like that. They're frail..."

I didn't answer her. She hadn't asked me a question. The smoke from the manhole was beautiful in the light of the street lamps, and we watched as it billowed upward like some infernal cloud of our own blooming suspicion.

The telephone call from Mark three days later became the catalyst for the strangest journey of my life. When Violet came downstairs to tell me about the call, she said, "Who knows if it's true, but he said he's in Minneapolis with Teddy Giles. He said that he saw a gun in Giles's bag and he's afraid that Giles is going to kill him. When I asked him why, he said that Teddy told him he had murdered that boy they called 'Me' and thrown his body into the Hudson River. Mark said he knows that it's true. I asked him how, but he said he couldn't tell me. I asked him why he lied when we confronted him with the rumors, why he didn't go to the police, and he said he was afraid. Then I asked him why he went off with Giles if he was afraid of him. Instead of answering the question, he started talking about two detectives who had been asking questions at the Finder Gallery and in the clubs about the night the boy disappeared. He thinks Giles might be running from the police. He wants money for a plane ticket home."

"You can't send him money, Violet."

"I know. I said I'd arrange to have a ticket waiting for him at the airport. He said he doesn't have enough money to get to the airport."

"He could change the ticket," I said. "And use it to go somewhere else."

"I've never been close to anything like this, Leo. It feels unreal."

"Do you have a gut feeling about whether he's lying or not?"

Violet shook her head slowly. "I don't know. For a long time I've been afraid there was something underneath ..." She took a breath. "If it's true, we have to get Mark to the police."

"Call him back," I said. "Tell him I'll meet him and fly back with him to New York. It's the only way to make sure he gets here."

Violet looked startled. "What about your classes, Leo?"

"It's Thursday. I don't have another class until Tuesday. It won't take me four days."

I insisted that it was my job to retrieve Mark, that I wanted to do it, and in the end Violet agreed to let me go. But even while I was speaking, I knew that my reasons for going were murky. The idea that I was behaving rashly excited me, and that thrilling picture of myself carried me through all the arrangements. I packed while Violet called Mark and told him to meet me in the lobby of the hotel at midnight—an hour after my plane arrived—and advised him to stay in public places until then. I threw a shirt, underwear, and a pair of socks into a small canvas bag as if I routinely flew off to midwestern cities to lasso wayward boys. I hugged Violet good-bye—more confidently than usual—and instantly found a cab on the street to take me to the airport.

As soon as I took my seat on the airplane, the spell began to wear off. I felt like an actor who leaves the stage and suddenly loses the adrenaline that kept him sailing through his performance as someone else. While I studied the camouflage pants of the young man in the seat next to me, I felt more quixotic than heroic, older rather than younger, and I asked myself what I was flying toward. Mark's story was bizarre. A body dumped in the river. Detectives asking questions. A gun in a suitcase. Weren't these the familiar elements of crime fiction? Didn't Giles play with these conventions in his art? Wasn't it very likely that I had become a pawn in some conceptual "murder piece" Giles had dreamed up? Or was I giving Giles credit for more intelligence than he actually had? I remembered the round-faced boy in the hallway gripping a plastic purse filled with Lego blocks and had the sudden absurd thought that I had left home to face a possible murderer unarmed. I owned no weapons except kitchen knives anyway. Then I thought of Matt's Swiss Army knife lying in my drawer at home. As I continued to hold the image of the knife in my mind, I found it increasingly unpleasant. I remembered the young Mark down on his hands and knees in Matt's room. I saw him sliding underneath the bed, and then, after a couple of moments, reappearing, his wide blue eyes looking up at me. "Where could it have gone? It must be here somewhere."

The lobby of the Minneapolis Holiday Inn was a vast room with a glass elevator, an enormous curved reception desk, and a distant ceiling ornamented with an undulating piece of thin metal in an ugly shade of maroon. I looked for Mark but didn't see him. The café to my right was dark. I sat down and waited until twelve-thirty. Then I used the house telephone to call room 1512, but no one answered. I didn't leave a message. What would I do if Mark didn't show? I walked over to a clerk behind the desk and asked if I could leave a message for one of the guests, Mark Wechsler.

I watched the man's fingers press the letters into the computer. He shook his head. "We don't have a guest by that name."

"Try Giles," I said. "Teddy Giles."

The man nodded. "Here it is. Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Giles in room 1512. If you'd like to leave a message, the house phone is over there." He moved his head to the left.

I thanked him and returned to my seat. Mr. and Mrs.? Giles is in drag, I thought. Even if the entire business was a scam, wouldn't Mark have met me to keep it going? As I considered my next move, I saw a very tall young woman out of the corner of my eye. She was crossing the lobby and walking quickly toward the door. Although I couldn't see her face, I noticed that she had the confident, self-conscious gait of a beautiful girl. I turned around to look at her. She was wearing a long black coat with a fur collar and boots with low heels. When she entered the revolving door to the street, I glimpsed the side of her face for an instant and had the uncanny sensation that I knew her. Her long blond hair moved in the wind as the door turned. I stood up. I felt sure I knew that woman. I strode toward the door as fast as I could and noticed a green-and-white taxi waiting outside. The door to the backseat opened, and at the same moment the car's interior light illuminated a man's face in the backseat. It was Giles. The woman slid in beside him. The car door slammed, and with that sound I knew what I had seen—Mark. The young woman was Mark.

I rushed into the cold night air, waved my arms at the moving taxi, and shouted "Stop!" It drove out of the entrance and turned onto the road. There were no other cabs, and I turned around and walked back inside.

After getting a room for the night, I left a letter with the clerk "Dear Mark," I wrote. "You seem to have changed your mind about returning to New York I will be here until tomorrow morning. If you want a ticket home, call me in my room—7538. Leo."

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

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

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

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

"Of course.''

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

"I'm glad to hear that."

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

"You'd do just fine," I said.

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

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

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

"Good-night, Violet."

"Good-night."

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

I looked at the clock It was after six.

"Teddy here."

"Put Mark on."

"Mrs. Giles is asleep."

"Wake him up," I said.

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

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

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

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

"My mother's grave." Giles hung up.

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

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

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

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

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

"They went out an hour ago."

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

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

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

Dear Uncle Leo,

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

Lots of Luv,

The She-Monster & Co.

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

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

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

Hey Leo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe you."

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

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

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

"You're lying," I said.

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

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

"What are you smiling about?"

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

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

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

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

Mark didn't answer me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I see," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That hurts," he said.

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

"You're hurting me," he moaned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I can't," he said.

"You have to, Mark."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No problem."

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

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