What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

  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 uri
ne 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 out
right. 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.