Michael Chabon (16 page)

“So,” he said finally, and it came out in a wobbling ring of smoke. “Do you want to walk? We can walk through Chatham.”

“Sure.” I rose, or rather fell, from my chair thing. “What’s this kind of furniture called, anyway?” I said. I drained the tepid sour tail of my coffee.

“That’s called science furniture, son,” he said. “For the spine of tomorrow.”

He locked the door behind us; we stepped out into the stinking, lovely day and headed for Chatham College, a destination that made me think of the party the night we’d met, of our short face-off in the doorway at Riri’s, of all the possibilities for brown women, in that already distant June, which I’d surrendered with the advent of Phlox. I thought for a quiet second or two; Arthur’s antennae operated inexorably.

“We could drop by Riri’s,” he said. “Every time I see her she asks after you. She said she thought you were a very sweet boy.”

His tone, this faint air of the panderer that he sometimes wore, brought to mind another picture from that evening, which until now I’d forgotten: the change that had come over his face in the Fiat, the aha! in his eyes, when first I asked him about Phlox.

“Arthur, did you…? Why did you…?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Okay. God, what a stink in the air, huh?” We watched his feet take steps along the slow, hot pavement. “What about Phlox?”

“I just—I love Phlox, Arthur—”

“Ooh, stop.”

“Stop. There you go, see; I can’t understand it. We have to talk about this, right? I love her, and I love her because I
want
to love her, of course, but I always feel that somehow Phlox and I are together because of you. Except I can never figure out exactly why I feel that. It’s like doing algebra. I can’t keep the whole thing in my mind long enough to grasp it. But then every so often everything lines up just right, and I can see for, like, a second, that you made it happen. You’re behind it. Somehow. And if that’s the truth, then I can’t understand why you say the kind of thing you just said. Or why you do the kind of thing you did last night.”

There was another long silence, which took us across Fifth Avenue and up the steep drive of the college. Nearby I could hear lawn mowers, and the voices of women at play.

“I never thought you would like her,” he said at last.

We came to the pond, and now we sat down in the grass, under some maples. The ducks chattered and splashed.

“Are you angry? Do you hate me? I hope you don’t hate me, Art Bechstein. I’m glad you think Phlox is wonderful. Of course, I’m also shocked—no, that’s a joke, honestly. I’m very, very sorry. Really. I’m sure she’s very good for you.”

He put an apologetic hand on my knee, then pulled it away, and I felt filled with forgiveness, with the warm catch in his voice, and, having just exposed him at his manipulative worst—had he conceived of Phlox as some kind of punishment?—with a strange, airy manhood, as though we had just boxed. I tore off handfuls of grass and tossed them into the air.

“Arthur,” I said, “why are you such a little Machiavelli?”

He crushed the end of his cigarette into the grass, flicked it away, and seemed carefully to weigh the label, and to be amused by it.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he finally said. “My mother made me this way.”

Horns honked, a cranked-up radio passed, the ducks, beat water and quacked. We looked at each other.

“Let’s go swimming,” he said.

The rich young couple, I was mildly surprised to discover, belonged to the same country club as Uncle Lenny Stern, at which they had been kind enough to inscribe Arthur as their guest. Years before, in the club dining room, during the reception that followed Davy Stern’s bar mitzvah, I had vomited vanilla mousse across my mother’s lavender dress. The pool was Olympic-size and filled with boisterous children. Women with scarves and rigid hair sat under red umbrellas that threw shadows across the women and across the thermoses, kids’ sunglasses, and stacks of fresh towels that lay on the white wire tops of the poolside tables; once an hour a whistle blew, children groaned, and the waters would grow calm, as the pool suffered a fifteen-minute invasion by pregnant women and small white infants. Families were all around us, without their men, and we lay beside each other on chaises longues, exchanging lazy sentences in the strong sunlight.

From time to time I would glance over at him, stretched out with his eyes shut, his lashes glinting, his body almost bare. I had never before given a man’s body the regard I now gave his—but furtively, and through the flutter of a squint. I felt, I feel, almost as if I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. For one thing, each of the above-named parts was covered with thick blond hair, running to red-brown along the top of his bathing suit and on his chest. I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. I looked at him. He was in a sweat; his stomach was flat; there was hair on the back of his long, damp hand. And I looked also at his crotch, at that strange—that shaven—fist wrapped in slick blue Lycra. But his skin was the most strange, and the most difficult to keep my eyes from; it was dappled all over with tiny shadows, which gave it a look both soft and rough, as of suede or fine sand; and it seemed, stretched so tightly across his bones and muscle, as though it would never give, like a woman’s, to the pressure of my hand. He sat up suddenly, leaning on his elbows, face red, eyes like the water in the brilliant pool, and caught me looking at his skin. I was startled into thinking the sentence that I had all summer forbidden myself to think: I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him.

“Yes?” he said, with half a smile.

“Ha. Nothing. Um, I’ve—I’ve been here before,” I said. “A long time ago. I threw up on my mom at a bar mitzvah.” My mom. I had not said this in years. It just slipped out, in my confusion, and I bit my lip. Arthur twisted onto his side and propped himself up with one arm, looking eager.

“And?”

I rolled over onto my stomach, as much to conceal the swelling in the bathing suit I’d borrowed from him—he’d already glanced that way—as to avoid the current discussion. I spoke through the slats in my lounge chair, staring at the damp concrete of the deck.

“And that’s all. Just another cheesy story about a nauseated Jew.”

“I’ve heard them all,” he said, and after a long moment, he fell back into the path of the sunlight. I breathed out.

In the pool he swam laps, with a polished, rather old-fashioned Australian crawl; I watched the little waves he made catch sunlight and shatter his submerged body into blue and white smithereens. Then I jumped in and thrust all the air from my lungs, so that I settled onto the cold bottom of the pool. I lay on my back and looked up, through the shifting window of water.

We took the bus back to Shadyside and, at separate ends of the huge Weatherwoman House, changed into fresh clothes. We wore the fine shirts of the Weatherwoman’s husband. Arthur said he would walk me home. When we got to the Terrace, my phone was ringing again. I threw the door open and ran into the house, but when I put the receiver to my ear there was only the sound of an empty tunnel. I hung up.

“Phlox,” we said.

While Arthur went to the toilet, I took one of those giant canisters of Coke from the refrigerator and carried it out to the front steps. I swallowed a couple of blebby mouthfuls and watched a few little things happen: an ant, a faraway jet. When Arthur reappeared, he held in his fingers a marijuana cigarette.

“Look what I found in my pack of cigarettes,” he said.

We smoked it with damp fingers and talked blandly, looking mostly at the sky, which was blue as baby clothes. I felt as if I were talking to a friend from the fourth grade, when talking with a friend and sitting in the sun had felt different, had felt like this, more full of possibility than of any real matter. This made me wish to the point of tears that I were wearing sneakers. I had on leather young-man shoes, which were impossible. I stood up and could see the arches and battlements atop the Cathedral of Learning, away off in Oakland. Oh, I thought, the Emerald City in the twelfth century. The sun was so bright. I distinctly heard the click of a woman’s heels on the far sidewalk. Nowhere around me was there anything to remind me of the year—no new cars, no rock-and-roll music; only sky, red brick, cracked pavement, a breeze—and I underwent one of those time slips during which one can say to himself, “This is the summer of 1941,” and nothing, within him or without, can prove him wrong. The sunlight was the sunlight of forty years before. I looked at Arthur, shirtless, his hair still damp at the ends, the corners of his eyes pink with chlorine and grass, and the moment held. I touched his face. He tilted his cheek toward me, almost warily, one skeptical eyebrow raised. The telephone rang.

“You’ve got to do something about that girl.” “Quiet. No, I’ll bet it’s my dad.” I ran, very clumsily, into the house. “He’s probably been calling every five minutes since nine o’clock this morning.” When I reached the phone I stood and watched it ring a couple of times more.

“I don’t know if I can handle this.”

“Let me do the talking.”

“Hello? Pops. Hi. Oh, I’m swell. I’m dandy.” I heard Arthur say, “Uh oh.” “How’s Bethesda?”

“Bethesda? Bethesda is a sweltering hell. Very muggy,” said my father, through the squeaks and clicks of the ionosphere. “Very humid. We’re all wearing Aqua-lungs here. And through her breathing apparatus your grandmother says you should write to her.”

I started to laugh—a bit too hard, I told myself. He would know, he could tell.

“You really should write. Listen, I won’t keep you, obviously you’re in the middle of something—”

“Dad, no, not at all—”

“Ha!” said Arthur.

“I only wanted to tell you that I just found out I’ll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. Probably for a whole week. I should have several free meals. Maybe a movie.”

I said I would look forward to it. After I’d hung up and come outside again, Arthur said. “What is this, high school? So what if he knows you’re stoned?”

“I don’t know.” I sat heavily on the step.

“You’re just afraid. You can’t do anything to upset him, or you’re cashless.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Look at it. You’re an economics major when obviously you should be making movies, or traveling, or reviewing restaurants, or something frivolous.”

“Okay.”

“You live in Pittsburgh when you should be living in New York or L.A. or Tokyo, or someplace frivolous.”

“Okay.”

“You dumped your crazy girlfriend and got yourself another one, who’s also frivolous but who at least wears lipstick and perfume and has a job. Your whole life is just one big ‘Thanks for the check, Dad.’ ”

“Okay,
okay.”
For a few seconds I clenched my jaw and shook, wanted to punch his face, break his straight nose, but then I felt confused, and I laughed. “Okay.”

All at once, I was insanely hungry.

P
HLOX, AS IT TURNED
out, was the first one over the Wall.

I fretted all afternoon, after saying good-bye to Arthur, over how to describe my day to her, concocting and rehearsing various half-truths, but when she called that evening from her place, I didn’t even get the opportunity to say I’d been at work, because she told me she’d dropped by Boardwalk at lunchtime and seen the crayoned closed-due-to-fire sign Scotch-taped to the glass door.

“So what did you do today?”

“Oh, just hung around.”

“Did you see Arthur?” She ticked a pencil or pen or her fingernails against the receiver. It was a nervous habit of hers.

“Yes, I hung around with Arthur. For a little while.”

“Ah.” There was a long silence. “Well, come over, Art, please,” she said at last. “Come quick.”

“You sound so sultry when you say that.”

“In the church of my heart the choir is on fire.”

“Jesus, I’ll be right over.”

“Good.”

“Who was that, anyway?” I tried to keep track of her thousand quotes and citations, as though assembling a Bartlett’s of Phlox. My love of her (I say this despite Cleveland’s caveat) was like scholarship (not falconry)—an effort to master the loved one’s corpus, which, in Phlox’s case, was patchwork and vast as Africa.

“Oh, some Russian said it. For me. Come.” With that, she hung up, just like in the movies.

I walked the quiet dinnertime streets, thinking of a cold, simple meal and whispered sex, thinking, more guiltily, that I would have to even out my day with Arthur by speaking softly into Phlox’s ear all evening, but when I got to her apartment it was full of noise, and there was a heavy smell of beef and herbs in the air. The phonograph played Vivaldi full-blast, or some other twittering music, a kitchen appliance ground gravel in the kitchen, and Annette and two of her nurse friends had commandeered the living room and were splashing enormous daiquiries across the carpet, laughing. I yelled hello to them and then went into the kitchen, where Phlox squatted before the open oven, poking at something with a long fork.

She wore a backless heliotrope minidress that threw an auspicious triangle of shadow across the tops of her thighs. She’d tied back her hair, and a few damp wisps that had come free clung to her cheeks. Before she saw me she drew a forearm across her slick brow, and blew an upward and largely ornamental jet of air that stirred her bangs. She was like a sweaty, smiling stoker in the hot engine room of an apartment in uproar. When we embraced, my hands slipped down her back and tumbled into her dress at the waist, and she squealed.

“It’s crazy here,” I said. “You smell terrific.”

“I smell like an athlete. I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that Annette was going to be entertaining this evening. Let me at least cut the stereo.”

She went out and I opened every simmering pot and poked at the potatoes in the oven, tearing their crisp jackets with the tines of the fork. The meal was four or five months too early, perhaps—some kind of pot roast, a thick sheaf of asparagus, and baked potatoes the size of shoes—but I knew better than to suggest that perhaps a chef’s salad or stir-fried vegetables would have been more appropriate. Anyway, it was such a
beguiling
menu for the end of July, and even though I’d eaten lox and bagels not three hours before, I had this appetite. When Phlox cut the stereo, the white noise that filled the apartment dropped abruptly to the giggling blue-green of the waitresses’ conversation.