What I Loved

him. It was the only thing that made sense. The boy wasn't dead. He was alive in California. The cruelty of the story combined with my own gullibility shamed me, and my whole body felt hot. I moved my arms onto the table and tried to heave myself up and out of the chair. A shooting pain burned through my neck and down the middle of my back. There would be little dignity in my exit. "Are you coming back to New York?" I said to Mark. "Or are you staying here? Violet is finished with you if you don't come back. She wanted you to know that. You're nineteen. You can fend for yourself."
    Mark looked at me. "Are you okay, Uncle Leo?"
    I couldn't stand up. My body was wrenched to one side and my neck stuck out at an angle that must have made me look like a large injured bird.
    Giles was suddenly in front of me, and I had the eerie sensation that he had been near us all along. "Let me give you a hand," he said. He sounded genuinely concerned and that frightened me. A second later, he took hold of my elbow. In order to prevent him from touching me, I would have had to shake my arm and realign my whole body. I couldn't do it. "You should see a doctor," he went on. "If we were in New York, I'd call my chiropractor. He's great. Once I screwed up my back dancing, if you can believe it."
    "We'll take you to your room, Uncle Leo. Won't we, Teddy?"
    "No problem."
    It was a long, painful walk. Every step I took sent a jab of pain from my thigh to my neck, and because I couldn't lift my head, I saw very little of what was around me. With Teddy on one side and Mark on the other, I felt vaguely threatened. They led me forward with a display of courtesy and solicitude that made me think of actors who had been asked to improvise a scene with a crippled mute. Giles did most of the talking, carrying on a monologue about chiropractors and acupuncturists. He recommended Chinese herbs and Pilâtes, then moved from alternative medicine to art, mentioning his collectors, recent sales, and a feature article on him somewhere. I knew that his chatter wasn't really idle, that he was moving toward a turn, and then he took it. He brought up Bill's canvas.
    I closed my eyes, hoping to block out his words, but he was saying that he hadn't meant to hurt anyone, that he wouldn't "dream" of it, that it had come to him as an inspiration, as an avenue of subversion as yet unexplored in art. He sounded just like Hasseborg. I think his choice of words might have been nearly the same as the critic's. As he talked, I thought he gripped my arm a little more tightly. "William Wechsler," he said, "was a remarkable artist, but the canvas I bought was a minor work." I was glad I couldn't look at him. "In my piece, I really think it transcended itself."

"That's rot," I said. I was nearly whispering. We had turned down the long corridor that led to my room, and its emptiness unsettled me more. A soda machine glowed in the dim hallway. I didn't remember passing it earlier and wondered how I had managed to miss that large incandescent object so close to my door.
    "What you fail to understand," Giles continued, "is that my work, too, has a personal side to it. William Wechsler's portrait of his son, my own M&M, Me 2, Mark the Shark, is now part of a very special tribute to my own late mother."
    I decided not to speak. All I wanted was to get away from them. I wanted to throw my wracked body into my room and slam the door behind me.
    "Mark and I share the same regard for our mothers. Did you know that?"
    "Teddy," Mark said, "forget it" His tone was gruff.
    I was looking down at the carpet. They had stopped walking and I heard a soft click. Teddy was putting a card in a door.
    "This isn't my room," I said.
    "No, it's ours. Ours is closer. You can stay here. We've got two beds."
    I took a breath. "No, thank you," I said as Giles began to push on the door. As the door moved, I anticipated seeing a room like mine, but instead I looked through the opening and saw that something was terribly wrong. The room smelled of smoke—not cigarette smoke but of something that had been burned. From the hallway I saw only part of the room, but the carpeted floor in front of me was strewn with refuse—a room-service tray littered with cigarette butts, a half-eaten hamburger that had drooled ketchup onto the carpet. Lying beside the tray were a woman's bikini underpants and a badly burned sheet that had been crumpled into a ball. I could see the ragged brown and ocher marks left by the