What I Loved

I turned toward the street. "He's listened to my stories. I've listened to his. You know, he told me that when he was living in Texas, he used to pretend that Matt was there with him. He called him 'Imaginary Matt.' He said he used to have conversations with 'Imaginary Matt' in the bathroom before he went to school." I looked out at the roofs across the Bowery and then down at a man lying on the sidewalk, his feet in two brown paper bags.
    "I didn't know that," he said.
    I stood beside him until he finished the cigarette. His eyes were distant. "Imaginary Matt," he said once and then fell silent for a while. He stubbed out the cigarette beneath his foot and turned back to the window. "Of course," he said, "my father thought I was crazy, thought I'd never make a living."
    I left Bill soon after that. At the bottom of the stairs, I opened the door to the street and heard the voice of Mr. Bob again, this time from behind me. Resonant and beautiful, its round bass tones forced me to listen, and I stopped on the threshold. "May God shine down upon you. May God shine down upon your head and your shoulders and your arms and legs and upon your whole body with radiant beneficence. May he save you and keep you in his mercy and goodness from the shattering ways of Satan. God go with you, my son." I didn't turn around, but I felt quite sure that Mr. Bob had delivered his benediction through a tiny crack in the door. Outside I squinted in the glare of the sun as it pushed its way through the clouds, and by the time I turned onto Canal Street, I realized that the squatter's strange blessing had lightened my step.
    The following January, Mark introduced me to Teenie Gold. About five feet tall and seriously underweight, Teenie had white skin that was tinged with gray beneath her eyes and on her lips. A shock of blue colored her otherwise platinum hair, and a gold ring glittered in her nose. She was wearing a shirt with pink teddy bears on it that looked as if it might once have belonged to a two-year-old. When I offered her my hand, she took it with an air of surprise, like a stranger performing a bizarre greeting ritual on a remote island. Once she had retrieved her limp hand from me, she stared at the floor. While Mark ran to find something he had left in Matt's room, I asked Teenie polite questions, which she answered in short, anxious fragments, without once raising her eyes. Her school was Nightingale. She lived on Park Avenue. She wanted to be a fashion designer. When Mark returned, he said, "I'll get Teenie to show you some of her drawings. She's amazingly talented. Guess what, it's Teenie's birthday today."
    "Happy birthday, Teenie," I said.
    She stared at the floor and moved her head back and forth as her face turned red, but she didn't answer.
    "Hey," Mark said. "That reminds me. When's your birthday, Uncle Leo?"
    "February nineteenth," I said.
    Mark nodded. "Nineteen thirty, right?"
    "Right," I said, a little baffled, but before I could say anything, they disappeared out the door.
    Teenie Gold left an odd impression on me—something wistful and eerie, akin to the feeling I'd once had in London after strolling past hundreds of dolls in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. Part baby, part clown, part woman with a broken heart, Teenie looked damaged, as if her neuroses had written themselves onto her body. Although Mark had begun to look a little absurd in his teen getup—the big pants, the little gold stud that gleamed from under his bottom lip, the platform sneakers he had taken to wearing that elevated him to a massive six foot five—his poise and open, friendly manner contrasted sharply with Teenie's lowered gaze and thin, tense body.
    In themselves, clothes are unimportant, but I observed that Mark's new friends cultivated a wan, undernourished aesthetic that reminded me of the way the Romantics had glorified tuberculosis. Mark and his friends had an idea of themselves, and illness played a role in that idea, but I couldn't name the sickness. Drawn faces, thin, pierced bodies, colored hair, and platform shoes seemed innocuous enough. After all, stranger fads had come and gone. I remembered the stories of young men who threw themselves out windows in yellow jackets after reading Werther. A rage for suicide. Goethe came to detest the novel, but in its day the book stormed the ranks of the young and vulnerable. Teenie inspired thoughts of faddish deaths not only because she looked sicker than Mark's other friends, but