What I Loved

Our society is bullshit and he knows it. His art gives me a rush. It's real, man."
    "What do you mean by real?" Violet asked him.
    "I mean real, honest."
    Silence.
    "I'll tell you something," Lee continued. "When I had nowhere to go, Ted took me in. Without him, I would've been pissing in the streets."
    Violet moved the tape forward. "This is Jackie." I heard a man's voice. "Giles is a pig, honey, a liar and a fake. And I tell you this from firsthand knowledge. Artifice is my life. This gorgeous body didn't come cheap. I've made myself into myself, but when I say he's fake, I mean fake on the inside. I mean that little creep has got a falsie where his soul ought to be. She-Monster —what a load of B.S." Jackie's voice rose into a dynamic falsetto. "That She-Monster act is ugly and it's cruel and it's stupid, and I tell you, Violet, I'm shocked, really shocked that that fact isn't crystal clear to anybody with a single brain cell in his or her head."
    Violet stopped the machine. "That's all there is about Teddy Giles. It doesn't get us very far."
    "Did you ever ask Mark about that weird message on the tape?"
    "No."
    "Why not?"
    "Because I knew if there was anything in it, he wouldn't tell me, and I didn't want him to feel that the tape was connected to Bill's heart attack."
    "You think it was?"
    "I don't know."
    "Do you think Bill knew something that we don't?"
    "If he did, he found out that same day. He wouldn't have kept it from me. I'm sure of that."
    I didn't have to feed Violet that night. We cooked together in my apartment for a change, and she finished all her pasta. After I poured her a second glass of wine, she said, "Did I ever tell you about Blanche Wittmann? I think her real name was Marie Wittmann, but she's usually called Blanche."
    "I don't think so, but it rings a bell."
    "They called her 'the Queen of the Hysterics.' She was featured in Charcot's demonstrations of hysteria and hypnosis. They were very popular, you know. All of fashionable Paris came to watch the ladies chirp like birds, hop around on one leg, and get lanced by pins. But after Charcot died, Blanche Wittmann never had another hysterical attack."
    "You're saying that she had them for him?"
    "She adored Charcot and wanted to please him, so she gave him what he wanted. In the newspapers she was often compared to Sarah Bernhardt. After the master died, she didn't want to leave the Salpêtrière. She stayed on and became a radiology technician. Those were the early days of X-rays. She died of the poisoning. One by one she lost her limbs."
    "Is there some reason for this story?" I said.
    "Yes. Trickery, deception, lying, and susceptibility to hypnosis were supposedly symptoms of hysteria. That's like Mark, isn't it?"
    "Yes, but Mark isn't paralyzed or having fits, is he?"
    "No, but that's not how we want him to behave, is it? Charcot wanted the women to perform, and they did. We want Mark to seem to care for other people, and when he's with us, that's how he appears. He gives us the performance he thinks we want."
    "But Mark isn't hypnotized, and I really don't think we can call him a hysteric."
    "I'm not saying that Mark is hysterical. Medical language keeps changing. Illnesses overlap. One thing mutates into another. Hypnosis merely lowers a person's resistance to suggestion. I'm not sure Mark has all that much resistance to begin with. What I'm saying is something very simple. It's not always easy to separate the actor from his act."
    The following morning, Lazlo called Violet. He had spent two long nights in clubs, going from the Limelight to Club USA to the Tunnel, where he had picked up bits of contradictory information. The consensus was, however, that Mark was traveling with Teddy Giles, who was in either Los Angeles or Las Vegas. Nobody was really sure. At three in the morning, Lazlo had bumped into Teenie Gold. Teenie had implied that she had a lot to say but refused to say it to Laz. She told him that the only person she would talk to now that Bill wasn't around was "Mark's Uncle Leo." She was prepared to tell me "the whole story" if I arrived at her house tomorrow at four P.M. By the time I heard about it, "tomorrow" had become today, and at three-fifteen, armed with an address on East Seventy-sixth Street and Park Avenue, I set off on my peculiar mission.
    After I was announced, a doorman led me through the posh lobby toward an elevator, which opened automatically at the seventh floor. A woman, who I guessed was Filipino, opened