What I Loved

happy like this for a long, long time. It's so good to be forgetful and free and stupid."
    Half an hour later, we were walking on Canal Street toward Greene. Our arms were still linked, and Violet was still between me and Bill. She sang us a Norwegian folk song—something about a fiddler and his fiddle. Bill joined in the chorus, his voice deep and loud and flat. I sang, too, imitating the sounds of the meaningless words as we marched home. While she was singing, Violet lifted her chin and her face caught the light of the streetlamps above us. The air was cold but clear and dry, and as she hugged my arm tightly, I could feel the lift in her step. Before she launched into the second verse, she took a big breath and smiled at the sky, and then, as I continued to look down at her, I saw her close her eyes for a couple of seconds to blind herself to everything but the swelling happiness that sounded in our voices. We all felt it that night—the return of joy for no reason. When I closed my door after saying good night to Bill and Violet, I knew that by morning the feeling would be gone. Transience was part of its grace.
    For months, Lazlo kept his ears open. I don't know exactly where he picked up his information. He roamed the galleries, and he and Pinky were often out at night. All I know is that when the gossip and rumors flew, they seemed to fly in Lazlo's direction. The tall thin young man with the notable hair, garish clothes, and big black glasses took in far more than he let out. Ideal spies are supposed to be inconspicuous, and yet I came to regard Lazlo as the perfect sleuth. His brilliant exterior was like a beacon in New York's crowds of black-clad people, but that very brightness made him unsuspicious. He, too, had heard stories about a boy's disappearance and rumbles about a murder, but Lazlo believed that the talk was part of Teddy Giles's underground publicity machine, which manufactured the ghoulish tales to increase his status as the art world's latest enfant terrible. There was other talk that worried Lazlo more— that Giles "collected" young people, both boys and girls, and that Mark was a favored object. Giles was said to lead small groups of kids on forays into Brooklyn and Queens where the bands committed meaningless acts of vandalism or broke into basements and stole objects like teacups and sugar bowls. According to Lazlo's sources, the teenagers disguised themselves before these outings, changing the color of their skin and hair. Boys went as girls and girls as boys. There were stories of cruel harassments of homeless people in Tompkins Square Park, of overturning their shopping carts and stealing their blankets and food. Lazlo also heard peculiar reports about "branding"—some form of body marking unique to Giles's inner circle.
    Whether any of this actually happened was difficult to know. All that could be verified with any certainty was that Teddy Giles was rising as an art star. A recent sale to an English collector of a work called Dead Blonde in a Bathtub for a huge sum gilded his reputation by making him not only controversial but expensive. Giles had coined a new phrase, "entertainment art," which he brandished in every interview. He made the old argument that the distinctions between high and low art had disappeared, but then he added that art was no more and no less than entertainment—and that entertainment value was measured in dollars. Critics embraced these comments either as the clever height of irony or as the dawn of truth in advertising—the ushering in of a new era that admitted that art, like everything else, ran on cash. Giles gave interviews in various personas. Sometimes he dressed as a woman, delivering his comments in an absurd falsetto. At other times, he wore a suit and tie and sounded like a broker discussing his deals. I understood why people were fascinated by Giles. His voracious desire for attention forced him to reinvent himself regularly. Change is news, and he delighted the press in spite of the fact that his art was constructed from images that had long established themselves as trite conventions in more popular genres.
    In late March, Bill started working again. The new project began with a woman and her baby on Greene Street. I saw her, too, from the window of Bill and Violet's loft, but I would never have guessed that she would be responsible for a whole new direction in Bill's work. There was nothing extraordinary about what we saw, but I've come to