What I Loved

confession still lies between us like a shared bruise. It has created a new delicacy and inhibition in us that I regret, but no real discomfort. She always spends an evening with me when she comes for her yearly visit, and while I'm making her dinner, I notice that I try to suppress the most obvious signs of my joy, but after an hour or so I lose that self-consciousness, and we lapse into a familiar intimacy that is almost, but not quite, what it was before. Erica tells me that there is a man called Yves in Violet's life and that they have an "arrangement"—a circumscribed liason that involves hotels—but Violet doesn't speak to me of him. We talk about the people we have in common: Erica, Lazlo, Pinky, Bernie, Bill, Matthew, and Mark.
    Mark turns up every once in a while, and then he vanishes again. With money Bill had set aside for him, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and impressed his mother and even Violet (who followed his school career from Paris) with his first-semester grades, which arrived in the mail—all As and B's. But when Lucille called the registrar's office for some information during Mark's second semester, she discovered that Mark wasn't a student. The grades were clever forgeries done on a computer. After a week and a half of school in the fall, he had collected his tuition money, which was refunded directly to him, and had run off with a girl named Mickey. In the spring, he had enrolled again, taken the money again, and disappeared. He calls his mother from time to time, saying that he's in New Orleans or California or Michigan, but nobody knows for sure. Teenie Gold, who is now twenty-two and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, sends me a Christmas card every year. Two years ago, she wrote that a friend of hers thought he had spotted Mark in New York leaving a music store with a pile of CDs, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure.
    I don't want to see Mark again or speak to him again, but that doesn't mean that I'm free of him. At night, when every sound is amplified by the relative quiet of the building, my nerves race, and I feel blind in the darkness. I hear him in the hallway outside my door or on the fire escape. I hear him in Matt's room, even though I know he isn't there. I see him, too, in visions that are half memory, half invention. I see him in Bill's arms, his small head nestled against his father's shoulder. I see Violet throwing a towel around him after his bath and kissing his neck. I see him with Matt outside the house in Vermont, walking toward the woods with their arms over each other's shoulders. I see him wrapping a cigar box in masking tape. I see him as Harpo Marx honking madly on his horn, and I see him outside the hotel room in Nashville, looking on while Teddy Giles slams my head into the wall.
    Lazlo tells me that Teddy Giles is a model prisoner. In the beginning there were those who speculated that Giles might be killed in prison for a crime unpopular even among criminals, but it seems that he is well liked by everyone, especially the guards. Not long after his arrest, the New Yorker carried an article on Giles. The journalist had done his homework, and some mysteries were solved. I discovered that Giles's mother had never been a prostitute or a waitress. She wasn't dead, but alive in Tucson, Arizona, refusing to speak to the press. Teddy Giles (who was christened Allan Johnson) grew up in a middle-class suburb outside Cleveland. His father, who worked as an accountant, left his wife when Teddy was one and a half and moved to Florida, but he continued to support his wife and son. According to one of Giles's aunts, Mrs. Johnson suffered a severe depression and was hospitalized a month after her husband's departure. Giles was farmed out to a grandmother and spent most of his early years between his mother and various other family members. At fourteen, he was expelled from school and began to travel. After that, the journalist lost Allan Johnson's trail and didn't pick it up again until he surfaced in New York as Teddy Giles. The writer made the usual comments about violence, pornography, and American culture. He pondered the ugly content of Giles's work, its brief, sensational rise in the art world, the dangers of censorship, and the bleakness of it all. The man wrote well and soberly, but as I read the article I was overcome by a feeling that he was saying what he knew his readers expected him to say, that the article, with its smooth language and