What I Loved (39 page)

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."