Michael Chabon (22 page)

“You live,” he said.

Women passed us on either side, carrying sandwiches and ice cream cones, talking with their mouths full. The weather, after yesterday’s rain, was unusually dry and fine, and dazzling Forbes avenue filled with nurses and secretaries who had freed themselves from air-conditioning and fluorescent light. I laughed because the air was full of these women’s talk.

“Have you eaten yet?” he said. “Let’s go sit over by the law school.”

Yes, I remembered my resolution. With a pang.

“Okay, sure,” I said. I blew a puff of air at his face, which lifted the lock of hair and bared for an instant the familiar yellow arch of his eyebrow.

That afternoon I telephoned Phlox at work and lied to her. I told her that I would be dining with my father, that tonight was the night the reviews would come in. Of course I had not said a thing to her about my most recent audience with my father. As I lied, I saw that this lie would tomorrow entail another whole set of lies, and that this set might on Wednesday entail another set, after my father told me what he really thought of her, as he was sure to do if indeed I decided to meet with him. But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart. She sounded neither disappointed nor jealous.

“The flowers arrived not five minutes ago,” she said. “You’re such a wonderful boy.”

After work, we headed toward the steps where we had eaten lunch almost two months before, behind the Fine Arts Building, wanting to walk but undecided yet about where we would spend the evening and what we were going to do. I had suggested the Lost Neighborhood. We leaned against the rail and looked down. Arthur stood as though calm, but I caught from him a whiff of nervousness or excitement; his fingers on the rail tap-tapped. Down in the Lost Neighborhood they were grilling food; smoke rose in ragged fountains, and crickets talked in the dry brush that surrounded our perch. Arthur laughed. The sky was rosy red and orange with chemicals.

“Cleveland and I drove down there once,” he said. “Right after he told me about this job of his. We took his motorcycle down along the junkyard, past the two Devil Dogs, and tried to pull into the neighborhood. But we couldn’t get in; it was funny. That is, we really
could
have gotten in, but Cleveland didn’t want to. There were all these little kids, and bicycles lying in the street, and Big Wheels, and toy trucks. He cut the engine. We sat there. Cleveland wanted to watch, I guess. I’m hungry. Where should we eat?”

“My choice this time.”

“No, I believe it’s
my
choice this time,” he said. “In fact, you always choose.”

“So choose.”

“Chinese.”

“Very good.”

We went. The food was brown and wriggly and spicy as hell. We cursed the fiery soup and ate it up. The cashews in the chicken dish were quiet little bland islands in an ocean of pepper. My lips swelled and burned. We swallowed glass after glass of ice water and emptied three pots of tea. I plucked small naked tangles of rice from the bowl with chopsticks; Arthur used his fork and swirled the rice into the sauces that pooled on his plate. It was a meal that held one’s attention. Arthur and I hardly spoke.

After we had finished cigarettes and read our fortunes twice—“It is the loosest string that sings the longest,” mine said—we came outside. It was seven o’clock. I headed to the left, heard Arthur say the word “No,” turned to the right, and there was Phlox, standing at the corner of Atwood and Louise with her hands at her sides. She whirled and walked off, and I ran after her, calling her name. I caught her at the avenue and took her elbow in my hand.

“Hey,” I said, and then that was all I could think of. We looked at each other for a long time, and she did not cry.

“I’m a fool,” she said. “I’m a complete fool. I’m an idiot. Don’t say anything. Shut up. Go back. I’m a fool.”

We turned toward Arthur, who walked our way. He looked serious, but it was false; I could tell by his smirking eyes.

“I hate both of you,” she whispered.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

Rather than answer me, she looked up at Arthur as he came to stand beside us. They stared, Phlox angrily, Arthur furtively, shifting his gaze away from her to something that lay at his feet and then back.

“I was thinking of getting some lime sherbet,” he said at last.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Let’s all go get some lime sherbet.”

“No!” said Phlox. “I’m not going anywhere with you, Arthur.” She drew herself erect and threw back her shoulders, and her eyes glazed over with a kind of Vivien Leigh haughtiness; she enunciated. “Please come with me, Art. I’m only going to ask you this one time.”

I looked at Arthur, who gave me a cool shrug.

“Okay, okay,” I said. People on the sidewalk turned their heads our way. “That’s enough. Stop. Okay? Can we cut it out? Can we just stop it? Okay? Okay, look, we have to get rid of this thing once and for all.” I was surprised that I could speak. I turned to Arthur and said, “Arthur, I love Phlox.” I turned to Phlox. “Phlox,” I said, “I love Arthur. We have to learn to be together. We can do it.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Phlox. Her teeth flashed.

“She’s right,” said Arthur.

“I hate you, Arthur Lecomte.” She whirled. She was atavistic and gorgeous in her anger, with her splayed fingers, her cheeks. “I’ll never forgive you for doing this.”

“You’ll thank me.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Come with me, Art.”

“Go on,” said Arthur.

“I’ll call you.”

“That’s all right,” said Arthur, “really. Don’t bother.”

Phlox and I started off, at first without discussion or destination. It was twilight, and the Cathedral of Learning, pile and battlements, threw great beams of light into the air, and looked like the 20th Century-Fox emblem. I took Phlox’s hand, but she let her fingers slip and we walked with a breeze between us.

“Did he
tell
you we were having dinner tonight?”

“Why did you lie to me?”

She put her fingers around my hand, lifted it, and then threw it from her like an empty bottle.

“Why?”

“How did you know?”

“I
knew,”
she said. “That’s all. I knew.”

“Arthur told you.”

“How stupid do you think I am?” She ran ahead a few steps and then turned on me, her hair sweeping out around her head. We had come to the Schenley Park bridge, which hummed with the cars that crossed it. The two stacks of the Cloud Factory were ink against the inky sky. “I didn’t need Arthur to tell me. I knew when I got those roses.”

“I bought the roses—”

“Forget it,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it. You’ll just lie. You poor dumb liar.” She turned.

“—before I knew I was having dinner with Arthur tonight.” Each time I mentioned Arthur’s name I heard him saying, “Don’t bother,” and felt dizzy; it was like peering over a cliff, and now, as Phlox walked off, the ground on the other side of me split and began to give way. I thought, I fancied, that in a moment I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has. When Phlox, who had vanished into the darkness along the bridge, reached the other side, she reappeared briefly in the streetlight, skirt and scarf and two white legs, and then the park closed around her.

“B
ECHSTEIN.” BLACKNESS. “BECHESTEIN.” LIGHT.
“Bechstein.”

“Hey. What. Oh.”

Filling my front doorway, in a welter of bloody twilight, was the huge silhouette of a man, hands on his hips. He raised one black arm and the red rays shifted around it like the blades of a fan.

“Jesus.” I blinked and sat up on one elbow. “Good thing this isn’t a Sergio Leone movie.”

“Bang.”

“I guess I fell asleep. Time is it?”

“Night is falling,” said Cleveland. He came and sat on the arm of the couch, down by my feet; the top of a paperback protruded from his jacket pocket, and he held a white envelope. “Look at you—you’re all sweaty,” he said. With a vast, rattling sigh, he leaned back, against the wall, and patted his fat gut. “What do you have to eat?”

I twisted around, sat full up. Arthur’s laugh pealed in my ear for an instant, and I realized I’d been dreaming of him.

“I can probably manage some form of cheese sandwich,” I said. I tried to stand, tottered slightly, caught myself; I was sore all over. “I may have a few olives.”

“Great. Olives.” He lit a cigarette. “You sick?”

“I don’t think so. No.” Hannah, the little girl next door, was practicing “Fur Elise” again. There had been piano music in my lustful dream. “I’ll get you a sandwich. Um, what have you been up to?”

I went into the kitchen and took out the necessary jars and packages. It felt nice inside the refrigerator.

“Oh, just a million and one things. Poon things, I’m afraid. This was on the doorstep, Bechstein,” Cleveland said, clunking into the kitchen behind me. He handed me the envelope I’d noted, on which was printed only my name, in Phlox’s schoolish handwriting, without stamp or address. It was a business envelope. My heart made a sudden violent motion—leapt, sank. It’s the same feeling.

“Oh, it’s from Phlox,” I said. “Well. Hmm.”

“Hmm.”

“Well.”

“Hmm.” He grinned. “Jesus, Bechstein, are you going to read it?”

“Sure, yes—I mean, why not? Would you mind…?” I said, gesturing toward the unassembled sandwich.

“Of course. Let’s see. Ah, bread, fine, perfect. Just the heels? Fine, that’s fine. Love the heels. Bread and cheese, cadmium-orange American cheese—perfect, exactly. You’re a minimalist. Go, go read.” He turned from me and gave his attention to the food.

I stepped out of the kitchen with the envelope, trying not to guess at its contents, then broke it open and unfolded the two-page letter, also handwritten, in dark-purple ink on pale-purple stationery with her monogram—“PLU.”

“The past tense of
plaire,”
she liked to say; her middle name was Ursula. My eyes skipped across the paper for a moment, before I could restrain them, and the words “sex,” “mother,” and “horrible” peered out at me like miserable inmates through the barbed tangle of her paragraphs. I forced myself to begin at the beginning.

ART
,

I have never written to you before and it feels strange. I think it is going to be hard for me to write you a letter, and I am trying to decide why this is. Maybe it is because I know how intelligent you are, and I do not want you reading what I write, because you might look at my letter in a too critical fashion. Maybe it is also because I feel stilted when I express myself in a letter, confined. I am afraid to write long sentences or to use words wrongly. And then there’s just the fact that before, everything I ever wanted to say to you I could just say, right into your ear. Isn’t that how it should be? Writing is so unnatural. Nevertheless there are some things I must tell you, and since I cannot see you ever again, I must write.

You are probably afraid that I am mad at you, and I am. I’m furious. No one has ever done anything like this to me before. Not like this. Not so weirdly and horribly. Art, I have touched your throat and your sex, we have slept with each other as fierce and spoken to each other as close as a man and a woman possibly can. You must know that what you are now doing disgusts me utterly.

I keep hearing (and don’t think this is stupid) a million Supremes songs in my head. Stop in the Name of Love, etc. Art, how can you have sex with a man? I know you and Arthur have slept together because I know Arthur. He has to have sex. He once said he always has to feel a man’s hands on his body or he will die. I distinctly recall him saying this.

Oh, how can you? It is so unnatural, so obviously wrong, when you really think about it. I mean, think about it, really consider it. Isn’t it ludicrous? There is only one place in the world where you are supposed to put your penis—inside of me. Anyway, all of this is beside the point now. It has been obvious to me for a long time that you have some kind of hang-up about your mother, but I did not think it was this grave. Believe me Art, because I do care about you—you need help, soon, and badly (from a qualified psychiatrist).

I still love you, but I will not be able to see you anymore. You say that you love me, but as long as you are seeing Arthur that just cannot be true. You don’t understand how much this upsets me. You must know (I believe I told you) that this is not the first time I have fallen in love with a weak man who turned out to be homosexual. It’s horrible. After you spend so much time looking out—not being jealous, just keeping an eye on the women who come around the boy you love—which is normal, after all, is it not?—they come and get you from behind. That’s the worst.

Don’t call me anymore, darling. I love you. I hope you’re happy. I’m sorry for the letter. I never could have said any of this to you. It’s easier this way. Call me sometime, maybe a long time from now, years, perhaps, when you have seen.

PHLOX

“Let’s go sit on the steps,” said Cleveland, pointing, a hollow olive stuck on the tip of his index finger. The cheese in his sandwich stood an inch thick. “You look like you could use some fresh air, Bechstein. You really look sick.”

“Hmm? Oh, no, no, it’s just, um, something.”

“Oh, well,
something.
That’s a relief.”

“I had a bad night.”

We sat down on the cracked steps and I wondered if I really might be sick. It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening. I had a very dim memory of having woken up that morning, come out to the living room, and lain down again on the sofa; I’d slept for around seventeen hours. Cleveland slipped the paperback from his pocket and chucked it into my lap. It was a cheap old assortment of Poe, secondhand, a skull and a bat on the cover.

“
Ten Tales of Tension and Terror,”
I read.

“I’m rereading the Big P,” he said, talking around the cheese in his mouth. “I used to be crazy about him. I used to think I might be Poe reincarnated.” He lifted his lank bangs to show me his pale Poe brow. “Whew. I’ll tell you something, Bechstein.” He poked his thumb into another olive and then flicked the olive, like a shooter, into his mouth. “The evil Carl Punicki is an okay fellow. He laughs a little too hard, and he throws his money around a little too much, and he slaps me on the back a little too often, but I can work with him.”