What I Loved

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