What I Loved

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