The case lasted for eight long months. Mark camped out in the apartment of "a friend"—a girl named Anya, whom we never met. Violet spoke regularly to Arthur Geller on the telephone, and he sounded reasonably confident that Mark's testimony at the trial would result in a conviction. She spoke to Mark once a week, but she said their conversations were forced and mechanical. "I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth," she said. "I often wonder why I talk to him at all." On some evenings, Violet would speak to me while she looked out the window. Then she would stop talking and her lips would part in an expression of disbelief. She never cried anymore. Her dread seemed to have frozen her. She would stop moving for seconds at a time and become as inert as a statue. But at other times she was jumpy. The smallest noise would make her start or gasp. After she recovered from the momentary shock, she would rub her arms repeatedly as though she were cold. On the nights when she felt nervous, she would ask me to stay on the sofa, and I would bed down in the living room with Bill's pillows and the comforter from Mark's bed.
I can't say whether Violet's anxiety was the same as mine. Like most emotions, that vague form of fear is a crude lump of feeling that relies on words for definition. But that inner state quickly infects what is supposedly outside us, and I felt that the rooms of my apartment and Violet's, the streets of the city, even the air I breathed stank of a diffuse, all-encompassing threat. Several times I thought I spotted Mark on Greene Street, and each time my heart raced until I discovered that it was some other tall, dark-haired boy in baggy pants. I didn't believe that I was in any danger from Mark. My trepidation seemed to come from something much larger than either him or Teddy Giles. No single person could contain it. The danger was invisible, mutable, and it spread. To be frightened of something so opaque makes me sound mad, as unbalanced as Dan, whose bouts of paranoia could turn an innocent pat on his arm into an attempt on his life, but insanity is a matter of degree. Most of us partake of it in one way or the other from time to time, feel its insidious tug and the lure of collapse. But I wasn't flirting with craziness then. I recognized that the anxiety tightening at my throat wasn't rational, but I also knew that what I feared lay beyond reason, and that nonsense can also be real.
In April, Arthur told Violet the story of the lamp. For a while the case turned on that lamp, and yet its significance for me has little to do with police work or how the charges were resolved in the end. After combing the area around Giles's apartment, the police had spoken to a woman who owned a design store on Franklin Street. Arthur couldn't explain why it had taken them so long to find her, but Roberta Alexander had identified both Giles and Mark as the two young men who had been in her store in the early evening on the day of the murder. The problem was timing. According to Ms. Alexander, they had come into the store after Mark said he had fled Giles's apartment and gone to the train station, where he sat on a bench in stunned distress for several hours before he finally took the train to Princeton. Mark and Teddy had bought a table lamp. Ms. Alexander had the bill of sale with the date, and she was sure of the time, because she had been preparing to close her shop at seven. She had noticed nothing unusual about either Giles or Mark. In fact, she had found them both unusually polite and affable, and they hadn't haggled over the price. They had handed over $1,200 in cash.
According to Arthur, the DA. had started to doubt Mark's story even before he knew about the lamp purchase. As he talked to more people in Giles's circle, he discovered that Mark had lied to most of them about one thing or another. A defense attorney would have little trouble proving that Mark was a habitual liar. Arthur knew that if one fact wobbled, others were likely to follow, and that one by one his facts might turn into fictions and his eyewitness into a suspect. Mark swore that his story had been perfect, with the sole omission of the lamp. Teddy had left the apartment with him, and he had gone along out of fear. He knew that it didn't look good, and that's why he hadn't mentioned it. Yes, he had waited for Teddy to change his clothes, and yes, they had returned to the apartment to drop off the lamp, but everything else was true. Lucille had already vouched for the fact that Mark had arrived at her house that same evening—around midnight.
Mark understood that fear and cowardice in a person who discovers a murder might be met with sympathy. Casually buying a lamp with the perpetrator after seeing the body of his victim would not. Nobody could vouch for Mark's time of arrival at the loft on Franklin Street, and just as Arthur had feared, the D.A. began to suspect that he might have been interviewing an accomplice rather than a witness after the feet. We all did. Arthur began to prepare Violet for Mark's possible arrest, but I think it was unnecessary. Violet had long suspected that Mark hadn't told the full truth about the murder, and instead of showing signs of shock, she told me that she pitied Arthur. Mark had fooled him, the way he had fooled us all. "I warned him," she said, "but he believed Mark anyway." Whether Mark had helped Giles kill Rafael or had merely arrived on the scene once the murder was over, his presence in the store on Franklin Street and the purchase of that expensive lamp put an end to whatever feeling I had left for him. I knew that by some definition both Teddy Giles and Mark Wechsler were insane, examples of an indifference many regard as monstrous and unnatural; but in fact they weren't unique and their actions were recognizably human. Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren't a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for Mark vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.
Violet and I both waited for something to happen, and while we waited, we worked. I wrote about Bill and then rewrote what I had written. Nothing I came up with was any good, but the quality of my thought and prose was secondary to the fact that I was able to continue doing it. Violet read at the studio. She often returned with headaches and sore eyes, and she coughed from all the cigarettes she had smoked. I started making sandwiches for her to take to the Bowery and asked her to promise that she would eat them. I believe that she did, because she didn't lose any more weight.
Months passed, and Arthur had nothing new to report except that the D.A was still looking for something or someone to tighten his case. Violet and I spent most of that hot summer together. A little restaurant opened on Church Street, below Canal, and we would meet there for dinner two or three times a week. One night, a couple of minutes after she arrived, Violet left the table to go to the toilet and the waiter asked me if I'd like to order a drink for my wife. When Violet spent two weeks in Minnesota in July, I called her every day. At night I worried that she would fall fatally ill or that she might decide to stay in the Midwest and never come back. But when Violet returned, we went on living in a state of suspense, wondering if the case would ever come to an end. The newspapers had dropped the story. Mark had left Anya and was living with another girl, named Rita. He informed Violet that he was working in a flower shop and gave her the name of the place, but Violet never bothered to call and check on whether it was true or not. It didn't seem all that important.