What I Loved

Turning to the dog, he said, "Bye, Talulah." I asked him why he wasn't at work.
    "Harry doesn't need me until noon today," he said. "I'm on my way there now."
    As Mark and I walked down the street together, a young woman stuck her head out of a clothing store and waved at Mark. "Hi, Marky. What's up, honey?"
    "Darien," Mark called back. He smiled sweetly at her, lifted a hand, and wiggled his fingers. The wave struck me as out of character, but when I looked over at Mark, he grinned broadly at me and said, "She's really nice."
    Before we reached the end of the block, Mark was accosted again, this time by a younger boy. He came running from across the street, yelling, "The Mark!"
    "The Mark?" I muttered aloud.
    Mark turned to me and lifted his eyebrows as if to say, People will call you anything.
    The boy ignored me. Breathing heavily from his run, he looked up at Mark. "It's me, Freddy. Remember? From Club USA?"
    "Sure," Mark said. He sounded bored.
    "There's this really cool photo show opening tonight around the corner. I thought you might like to go."
    "Sorry," Mark said in the same laconic voice. "Can't."
    I watched Freddy press his lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his disappointment. Then he lifted his chin and smiled up at Mark "Another time, okay?"
    "Sure, Freddy," Mark said.
    Freddy ran back to the other side of the street, scooting within inches of a passing taxi. The driver pressed on the horn, and the noise blared in the street for two or three seconds.
    As Mark watched Freddy's close call, he slouched on one hip and lowered his shoulders in a posture I supposed was meant to look nonchalant.
    Then he turned to me, straightened his spine, and threw back his shoulders. When our eyes met, he must have seen a trace of confusion on my face, because he hesitated for half a second. "Gotta run, Uncle Leo. I don't want to be late for work."
    I checked my watch. "You'd better hurry."
    "I will." Mark sprinted down the block, his huge pants waving like two flags on either side of his ankles, the elastic and several inches of his underpants in full view. The pants were so long that the bottoms had frayed and torn along the inner seams. I stood for a few moments and watched him run. His figure grew smaller and smaller, and then he turned a corner.
    As I made my way home, I realized that two narratives about Mark had unfolded inside me—one on top of the other. The superficial story went something like this: Like thousands of other teenagers, Mark had hidden parts of his life from his parents. No doubt he had experimented with drugs, slept with girls, and maybe, I had begun to think, a couple of boys. He was intelligent but a very poor student, which suggested an attitude of passive rebellion. He had lied to his parents. He had failed to tell his mother about his room in my apartment and had once slept there without my permission. Another time, he had hoped to sneak back into that room at four in the morning. He was attracted to the violent content of Teddy Giles's art, but then so were countless other young people. And finally, like so many children his age, he tried on various personas to discover which one suited him. He behaved one way with his peers and another way with adults. This version of Mark's story was ordinary, one tale like a million others of a normal, bumpy adolescence.
    The other story was similar to the one that lay above it, and its content was identical: Mark had been caught lying. He had formed a friendship with an unsavory person I privately called "the ghost," and Mark's body and voice changed depending on whom he was speaking to at the moment. But this second narrative lacked the smoothness of the first. It had holes in it, and those gaps made the story difficult to tell. It didn't rely on a larger fiction about teenage life to fill in its ragged openings but left them gaping and unanswered. And unlike the reassuring tale above it, it didn't begin when Mark was thirteen, but at some unknown and earlier date that sent me hurtling into the past rather than the future, and it came in the fractured form of isolated pictures and sounds. I remembered little Mark walking through our door when Lucille lived upstairs, his head hidden under a rubber fright mask. I saw his father's portrait of him with a lamp shade on his head—a small body hovering in the nowhere of that canvas—and then I heard Violet hesitate, breathe, and leave her sentence unfinished.

I repressed those underground