What I Loved

her was reluctant to let the room go, but that after thinking it over, she agreed. In that same letter, she told me that Renata had given birth to a little girl named Daisy, and that she had been made the child's godmother.
    The day before Mark took over the room, I opened the door, walked inside, and sat on the bed for a long time. My enthusiasm for the change was replaced by an aching awareness that it was too late to go back on my word. I studied Matt's watercolor. It would have to stay. I decided to mention it to Mark as my only stipulation. I didn't need a memorial space for Matt, I told myself; he lived in me. But as soon as I had thought of the words, the comforting cliché turned gruesome. I imagined Matt in his coffin, his small bones and his hair and his skull under the earth, and I started to shake. The old fantasy of substitution rose up inside me, and I cursed the fact that I hadn't been able to take his place.
    Mark brought paper and magazines and scissors and glue and wire and a brand-new boom box to his "studio." Throughout the spring, he spent an hour or so in the room every Sunday, cutting and pasting pictures onto cardboard. He rarely worked for more than fifteen minutes at a time. He was constantly interrupting himself to come out and tell me a joke, make a telephone call, or run to the corner to get "some chips."
    Not long after Mark had settled in, Bill came to see me and asked to take a look at the room. He nodded approvingly at the magazine clippings and cardboard, the pile of notebooks and cup full of pencils and pens.
    "I'm glad he has this place," Bill said. "It's neutral. It's not his mother's house and it's not mine."
    "He never talks about his life at Lucille's," I said, realizing suddenly that this was true.
    "He doesn't tell us anything either." Bill paused for several seconds. "And when I talk to Lucille, all she does is complain."
    "About what?"
    "Money. I pay all of Mark's expenses, his clothes, his school, his medical bills—everything except food at her house—but just the other day, she told me that her grocery bills are sky-high because he eats so much. She actually labels the food in the refrigerator she doesn't want him to eat. She counts every penny."
    "Maybe she has to. Are their salaries low?"
    Bill gave me a hard, angry look. "Even when I didn't have two nickels to rub together, I didn't resent feeding my kid."
    By June, Mark had stopped knocking. He had his own key. Matt's nearly empty room had been transformed into a cluttered teen pad. Records, CDs, T-shirts, and baggy pants filled the closet. Notebooks, flyers, and magazines were piled on the desk. Mark lived between rooms, coming and going as if the two lofts were all one house. Sometimes he arrived as Harpo and rushed around the living room with a horn he had bought at a yard sale near Princeton. He often kept the act going, and I would discover that he was standing beside me with his knee looped through my arm. If Mark made collages that summer, he kept them to himself. He relaxed, read a little, and listened to music I didn't understand, but then by the time it reached my ears in the living room, it was no more than a mechanical thumping that resembled the bass rhythm of a disco song— fast, steady, interminable. He came and went. For six weeks he attended a camp in Connecticut, and he spent another week with his mother on the Cape. Bill and Violet rented a house in Alaine for four of the weeks Mark was at camp, and the building seemed to die. Erica decided not to visit. "I don't want to open the wound," she wrote. I lived alone with Goya and missed them all.
    In the fall, Mark fell back into his old rhythm of weekend visits. He usually took a train from Princeton on Friday evening and made an appearance at my loft on Saturday. Often he returned on Sunday as well for an hour or so. My meals with Bill and Violet dropped off to about twice a month, and I came to rely on Mark's faithful visits as a respite from myself. Sometime in October he mentioned "raves" for the first time— huge gatherings of young people that lasted through the night. According to Mark, finding a rave required connections with people in the know. Apparently, tens of thousands of other teenagers were also among the cognoscenti, but that didn't dampen Mark's enthusiasm. The word "rave" was enough to sharpen his features with expectation.
    "It's a form of mass hysteria," Violet said to me, "a revival meeting without religion, a nineties