What I Loved

to tug at its corkscrew. When I had pulled it out, I moved my finger down its spiral blade and remembered Matt's desperation. "I always put it on the night table, always!" I must have been very tired, because a part of me seemed to levitate then, and I had the most peculiar sensation of having floated to the ceiling. I felt as though I were looking down on the room, on Violet, on myself, and on the knife that I held in my hand. This curious division between earth and air, between the elevated me and the me on the ground didn't last very long, but even after it was over, I felt far away from everything in that room, as if I were looking at a mirage.
    "I remember the day Matt lost it," Violet was saying in a deliberate voice. "And I remember how upset he was. It was Mark who told me, Leo, Mark who said how awful it was that the knife was missing. He was so sympathetic, so sad for Matt. He told me how he had looked for it everywhere." Violet's eyes were wide and her voice trembled. "Mark was eleven years old then. He was eleven." I felt her grab my arm and then the tight grip of her fingers. "You understand that it isn't the stealing that's so terrible or even the lying. It's the pretense of compassion, so perfectly modulated, so believable, so authentic."
    I put the knife in my pocket then, and although I had heard what she said and had understood it, I didn't know how to respond, and instead of answering I stood very still, my eyes on the wall, and after a couple of seconds, I thought of the taxi in Bill's self-portrait—that toy he had given to Violet to hold when he painted her. The image of the taxi and Matt's knife had something in common, and I groped to articulate the similarity between them. The word "pawn" came to me, and yet it wasn't quite right. Some form of exchange linked the picture of a toy car with the real object that was hidden in my pocket. The connection had nothing to do with knives or automobiles. The knife was like the painted car because it too had become intangible—not a real thing anymore. It didn't matter that I could reach into my trousers and retrieve it. Through the machinations of a child's dark needs and secrets, a switch had been made. The present I had given Matt on his eleventh birthday no longer existed. In its place was something else, a sinister copy or facsimile, and as soon as I had thought this, my thinking came full circle. Matt had made his own double of the knife in the painting Bill had given to me. He had sent the Ghosty Boy up to the roof with his stolen prize, where the moon shone down on his empty face and lit the opened knife that he held in his hand.
    After I told Violet about Teenie and Split World , I walked downstairs and spent the evening alone. It took me a while to find a place for the knife in the drawer, but in the end I decided to push it far to the back, away from the other objects. When I closed the drawer, I realized that the thing had helped to harden me to my task. I was no longer just looking for Mark. I wanted something more—exposure. I wanted to fill in the features of that missing face.
    A couple of hours after Violet left home for Bill's studio, I was pressing a buzzer that read T.G./S.M. at 21 Franklin Street. To my surprise, I was immediately let in. A short, muscular boy wearing only a pair of shorts opened the steel door to Teddy Giles's fifth-floor loft. When the door was fully opened, I saw the boy's tanned body from every angle, and I saw myself, because all four walls of the entryway were mirrors.
    "I'm here to see Teddy Giles," I said.
    "I think he's asleep."
    "It's very important," I said.
    The boy turned around, opened a mirror that turned out to be also a door, and vanished. To my right was a large room with an immense orange sofa and two voluminous chairs—one turquoise, the other purple. Everything in the room looked new: the floors, the walls, the light fixtures. As I studied the room, I realized that the phrase "new money" didn't begin to cover what I was looking at. These furnishings were the product of instant money—a few big sales converted into real estate so fast that the agents, lawyers, architect, and contractor must have found themselves breathless. The apartment smelled of cigarette smoke and, more vaguely, of garbage. A pink sweater and several pairs of women's shoes lay on the floor. There were no books in that room, but there were hundreds of magazines. Glossy art and fashion periodicals were stacked in tall piles