What I Loved

eleven o'clock at night, he went out and usually didn't return until morning. "I'm staying with Jake," he would say, and leave a telephone number. "I'll be at Louisa's house. Her parents said I could sleep in the guest room." Another number. He wandered in at between six and eight in the morning and would sleep until work. His schedule changed daily. "I don't have to be in until noon," he would say, or "Harry doesn't need me today," and then he would drop into a coma until four in the afternoon.
    Sometimes, his friends came to my door to retrieve Mark for a night out. Most of them were short white girls, dressed in baby clothes with pigtails in their hair and glitter on their cheeks. One evening, a brunette came to the door with a pacifier hanging on a pink ribbon around her neck. With voices to match their infantile clothing, Mark's girlfriends cooed and piped and twittered in high, thin tones suffused with misplaced emotion. When I offered them soft drinks, they breathed out their lilting thank-yous as if I had just offered them immortality. Although Mark had played tough for Freddy, he didn't swagger or act bored with the girls. With Marina, Sissy, Jessica, and Moonlight (the daughter of glassblowers in Brooklyn), his tone was invariably gentle and earnest. When he bent down to talk to them, his handsome face softened with feeling.
    One night when Mark was out with friends, I had dinner with Lazlo and Pinky at Omen on Thompson Street. Pinky was the one who first brought up the story of the dead cats. Although I had met Pinky Navatsky several times, I had never spent much time with her until that evening. She was a tall girl in her early twenties, with red hair, gray eyes, a significant, slightly hooked nose, which gave her an air of substance, and a very long neck. Like many dancers, she had a permanent turnout that affected her walk, which was a little ducklike, but she held her head like a queen at her coronation, and I loved to watch her move her arms and hands while she talked. When she gestured, she often used the whole limb, moving her arm from her shoulder. At other times she would bend her elbow and open her hand toward me in a single sure sweep. Her movements weren't at all affected. She simply had a relation to her own musculature that for most of us is unthinkable. Just before she mentioned the cats, she leaned toward me, turned her palms over so they faced the ceiling, and said, "Last night I had a dream about the murdered cats. I think it was that picture in the Post"
    When I said that I knew nothing about murdered cats, Pinky explained that the flayed, skewered, and dismembered animals had been discovered around the city, nailed to walls, hanging from doorways, or simply lying in the middle of an alley, sidewalk, or subway platform.
    Lazlo informed me that the animals were all partly dressed, wearing diapers, baby outfits, pajamas, or training bras, and they had all been signed with the letters S.M. Those letters may have started the rumors that Teddy Giles was responsible. Giles called his drag persona the "She-Monster," initials that coyly but not very subtly also referred to sadomasochism. Although Giles had denied all responsibility for the cats, Lazlo said that he had kept ambiguity and shock alive by calling the animal corpses "guerrilla art at its furious best." Giles had also said he envied the artist and hoped he had been an inspiration to the unnamed "perpetrator/creator." Finally, he had given his blessing to all future "copycats." These comments drove animal-rights organizations to screeching outrage, and Larry Finder had come to work one morning to find the words ACCESSORY TO MURDER scrawled in red paint on the gallery door. I had missed the furor in the papers and the clip that had made the local television news.
    Lazlo chewed thoughtfully and took long breaths through his nose. "You're out of it, did you know that, Leo?"
    I admitted that I was.
    "Lazlo," Pinky said, "not everybody's like you, always checking out everything all the time. Leo has other things to think about."
    "No offense," Lazlo said to me.
    After I had made it clear to both of them that I wasn't the least bit upset by the comment, Lazlo continued, "Giles'll say anything if he thinks it'll be hyped."
    "It's true," Pinky said. "He might not have a thing to do with those cats."
    "Do Bill and Violet know about this?"
    Lazlo nodded. "But they think Mark's not seeing Giles."
    "And you know that he is."
    "We saw them