What I Loved (33 page)

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

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

"I didn't know that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shook his hand. He had a firm grip.

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

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

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

"He's completely different."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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