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 t
ime 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.
What I Loved Page 33
