What I Loved

together," Pinky said.
    "At the Limelight last Tuesday." After a vigorous inhalation through his nose, Lazlo said, "I hate to tell Bill, but I'll do it. The kid's in over his head."
    "Even if Giles isn't murdering cats," Pinky said, leaning across the table, "he's creepy. I'd never seen him before, and it wasn't his makeup or clothes that got me, it was something in his eyes."
    Before we said good-bye, Lazlo slipped me an envelope. I had gotten used to these parting gifts. He left them for Bill, too. Usually he typed up a quotation for me to think about. I had already been treated to Thomas Bernhard's spleen: "Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe ... Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities," and to a quote from Philip Guston I particularly liked: "To know and yet how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all." That night I opened the envelope and read: " Kitsch is always in the process of escaping into rationality. Hermann Broch."
    I asked myself if the dead cats were meant to be a form of kitsch, a thought that led to ruminations on animal sacrifice, the chain of being, ordinary slaughterhouses, and finally to pets. I remembéred that as a little boy Mark had kept white mice, guinea pigs, and a parakeet named Peeper. One day the cage door had fallen on Peeper's neck and killed him. After the accident, Mark and Matt had paraded around our loft with a shoe box that held the stiff little corpse, singing the only song they knew that would function as a dirge: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
    When Mark returned from work the next day, I couldn't bring myself to mention either Giles or the cats, and at dinner he had so much to tell me about his day, I never found a good opening for the subject. That morning he had helped mount his favorite blown-up drawing, by a six- year-old girl in the Bronx—a self-portrait with her turtle, which looked very much like a dinosaur. In the afternoon, his friend Jesus had fallen off a ladder but was saved by a huge pile of canvas flags that were piled beneath him on the ground. Before Mark left for the night, he retreated to the bathroom and I heard him whistling. He put a telephone number on the table with a name beside it. Allison Fredericks: 677-8451. "You can reach me at Allison's," he said.
    After Mark was gone, a vague suspicion began to churn inside me. I listened to Janet Baker singing Berlioz, but the music didn't drive away the uneasiness that constricted my lungs. I studied the name and telephone number Mark had left on the table. After twenty minutes of hesitation, I picked up the telephone and called. A man answered. "I'd like to speak to Mark Wechsler," I said.
    "Who?"
    "He's a friend of Allison's."
    "There's no Allison here."
    I looked at the number. Maybe I had dialed wrong. Very carefully I punched in the numbers again. The same man answered and I hung up.
    When I confronted Mark about the wrong number the following morning, he looked puzzled. He dug into his pocket, produced a number, and laid it beside the little piece of paper he had written on the night before. "I see what I did." He spoke in a bright, clear voice. "I reversed these two numbers. Look here. "It's four eight, not eight four. I'm sorry. I guess I was in a hurry."
    His innocent face made me feel foolish. Then I confessed that I had been feeling upset because of Lazlo's story about seeing him with Giles and because of the cat rumors.
    "Oh, Uncle Leo," he said. "You should've talked to me right away. I ran into Teddy when I was out with some other friends, but we're not really close anymore. I have to tell you something, though. Teddy likes to shock people. It's his thing, but he wouldn't hurt a fly. I mean that. I've seen him carry flies out of his apartment like this." Mark cupped his hands. "Those poor cats. It just makes me sick. You know, I've got two cats at Mom's, Mirabelle and Esmeralda. They're like my best friends."
    "The rumor probably got started because Giles's work is so violent," I said.
    "But that's all fake!" Mark said. "I thought Violet was the only person who didn't know the difference." Mark rolled his eyes.
    "Violet doesn't know the difference?"
    "Well, she acts like it's real or something. She never even lets me watch horror movies. What does she think? I'm going to go out and cut somebody because I saw it on TV?"
     
    Mark looked very pale during the second week of our time together, but then he must have been exhausted. Friends of his phoned all