What I Loved

owned a painting, it wasn't illegal to harm it. You could use it for target practice if you wanted to. I remembered Giles's warning: "I'm thinking of using it" It had made no sense to me. Use had nothing to do with art. It was by nature useless. Once the show opened, it was the only work in the show that anybody discussed. The others were similar to Giles's earlier pieces—the hacked hollow bodies of women, a couple of men, and several children; bloody clothes; severed heads; guns. Nobody seemed to care. What excited everyone—outraging some and pleasing others—was that here was an act of genuine violence. It wasn't simulated but real. The bodies were fake, but the painting was authentic. Even more titillating was the fact that Bill's work was expensive. There was considerable musing over whether the presence of the painting—in spite of the damage—raised the price of the piece as a whole. It was hard to know what Giles had actually paid for the portrait of Mark. Several high prices were quoted, but I suspect they came from Giles himself—a notoriously unreliable source.
    Violet returned to an uproar. Several journalists called to get her statement. Wisely, she refused to speak to them. It wasn't long before the trail led to Mark and his association with Giles. A gossip columnist in a downtown free paper speculated on the connection between them, hinting that Giles and "Wechsler the Younger" were lovers, or had been lovers. One reviewer referred to the piece as "art rape." Hasseborg climbed on board, arguing that the desecration renewed the possibility of subversion in art. "With one shot, Theodore Giles has sent a bullet through all the pieties that surround art in our culture."
    Neither Violet nor I visited the show. Lazlo went with Pinky and took a surreptitious Polaroid, which he brought back to me and Violet. Mark was staying with his mother for several days before returning to New York. Violet said that when she'd told Mark about the painting, he had been perplexed. "He seems to think that Giles is really a good guy and he can't understand why he would do this to his father's work." After Violet examined the little photo, she laid it on the table but said nothing.
    "I hoped it was a copy," Lazlo said. "But it's not. I was very close to it. He used the real painting."
    Pinky was sitting on the sofa. I noticed that even while sitting, her long feet were turned out in first position. "The question is," she said, "why Bill's work? He could have bought any painting for the same money and wrecked it. Why that portrait of Mark? Because he knows him?"
    Lazlo opened his mouth, closed it and opened it again. "The word is Giles knows Mark because he was ..." He hesitated. "Fixed on Bill."
    Violet leaned forward. "Do you have any reason to believe that?"
    Through his glasses I saw Lazlo's eyes narrow slightly. "I heard he has a file on Bill that goes back to before he knew Mark—clippings, catalogues, photos."
    None of us said a word. The idea that Giles had cultivated the son because of the father had dimly occurred to me in the hallway the day I found Mark in the bathroom, but what did Giles want? Had Bill still been alive, the ruined painting would have hurt him, but Bill was dead. Did Giles want to wound Mark? No, I thought to myself, I'm asking the wrong questions. I remembered Giles's face when we talked, his apparent sincerity about Mark, his comments about Teenie. "Poor Teenie. Teenie cuts herself." I remembered the sign on her skin—the connected M's, or the M attached to the W. M&M. Bill's M's—the boys, Matthew and Mark. No K tonight , huh, M&M? The changeling. I had been writing about this idea—copies, doubles, multiples of one. Confusions. I suddenly remembered the two identical male figures in Mark's collage with the two baby pictures. What was the story Bill had once told me about Dan? Yes. Dan was in the hospital after his first breakdown. Bill had had long hair then, but he'd cut it. When he went to visit Dan, Bill arrived in the ward with short hair. Dan took one look at him and said, "You cut my hair!" That happens with schizophrenics, Bill had told me. They make pronominal mistakes. And with aphasies. My thoughts weren't orderly. I saw Goya's Saturn eating his son, the photograph of Giles gnawing at his own arm, then Mark's head jerking backward from my arm as I woke up in bed. The telephone message: M&M knows they killed me. No. M&M knows they killed Me. The boy in the hallway with the