What I Loved (42 page)

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.