Michael Chabon (17 page)

I bounced around the kitchen, chattering, while she pulled everything together. I steered clear of the subject of Arthur, by embellishing, with a great deal of energy, the story of all the smoke at Boardwalk, and Phlox, deep in food thought, pretty well ignored me. My tale of fire carried us through until just after we sat down to eat in the breeze that came through the windows along the dinner table.

“Oh, yeah, I talked to my father today,” I said without a thought. “He’s coming into town tomorrow. For a whole week.”

“Oh, Art, how exciting! I want to meet him!”

Why, that summer, was I so often the victim of astonishment?

“Sure, maybe. Sure,” I said, unable to chew.

“Well, I can, of course, can’t I?”

“Well, it’s business, you know; he’ll be busy almost all the time. I just don’t know. It’s hard to say.” I began to recover myself.

“Well, he doesn’t work at night, does he? We can have dinner.” She laid down her fork and stared at me.

“We’ll have to see.”

“I think you’re ashamed of me, Art Bechstein.”

“Oh, Phlox, come on, I’m not ashamed of you.”

“Then why don’t you want your father to meet me?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s just that—”

“Why are you ashamed of me? What don’t you like about me?”

“There’s nothing. I love you, you’re splendid.”

“Then why can’t I meet your father?”

Because nobody gets to meet my father!

“I don’t want to fight about this.”

“This isn’t a fight, Art; this is you being impossibly weird again.” One tear pooled and then spilled.

“Phlox.” I reached across the table and ran my finger down the shining path. “Don’t cry. Please.”

“I’ve stopped. Okay.” She picked up her fork, sniffed once. “Forget it.”

“Can you just understand that it has nothing—”

“It’s
all right
. Forget it.”

We worked our jaws in silence.

Tuesday night, the downtown bus was full of kids headed to the Warner for the opening of a new science fiction movie, a mutational romance that later went on to become a sensation. (I saw it twice: once with Phlox and once not with Phlox.) The bus’s air-conditioning had failed, and I was uncomfortable in my sport coat and tie; grit and exhaust blew in through the rattling open window.

“The bloom on my cheek has withered and faded,” said Phlox.

I looked at her face, and saw, through her makeup, traces of unmistakable bloom. I said so, and she smiled, pensively.

“Art, is your father one of those silly fathers?”

“Pardon me?”

“Does he drink a lot, talk about money, get angry, tell dirty jokes, and laugh loud?”

She has just described my Uncle Lenny and his close friends Eddie “Bubba” Martino and Jules “Gloves” Goldman (a distant relative). “No, my father is a serious guy,” I said. “He drinks only at weddings. He isn’t vulgar. He hardly ever laughs. He jokes a lot, though. He’s funnier than I am.”

“Then how can he be a serious guy?”

“All Jewish comedians are serious guys.”

“What about the Marx Brothers?”

“The Marx Brothers were very serious guys.”

“You’re not a serious guy.”

“Well, I’m not funny,” I said. I swallowed. “I’m nervous.”

She laid her fingers against my sleeve. We were to meet at my father’s favorite Italian restaurant. I’d listened for a hint of wariness in his voice when I asked if I might bring Phlox along, but he said “Of course,” very gamely. Phlox would be the first acquaintance of mine since Claire actually to meet my father—and Claire had met him just twice, the first time bravely and miserably, and the second time miserably. I could hardly recall what eating in a restaurant with my father and a third person was like, but I had vague, sweet memories, from years before, of my father being hugely entertaining at birthday parties in pizza parlors and on miniature golf courses. I might have been even more nervous than I was (I certainly had the capacity), but we ate in this restaurant together so often, my father and I, that I knew it would be a comfort at least to be there, in the old red darkness. An unfamiliar restaurant can be a very disorienting thing.

Phlox and I arrived only two minutes late, and came with a sigh into the cool and the garlic. I spotted my father at the table—halfway back, toward the toilets and the cigarette machine—that we had come, over the years, to think of as our table. The first thing I noticed was that his heavy face was even more pink than usual, almost red, and I remembered his saying that he’d lately begun to reclaim the garden gone wild in my grandmother’s backyard. He had on a beautiful beige summer suit, with a salmon tie. I knew that Phlox would find him good-looking. “Tsk,” I said; he looked so handsome and large.

My father stood for her and took her hand, the gleam in his eye growing more distinct as he pronounced her floral name, which amused him, I could see, as much as it once had me; he admired her dress (the blue-and-white flowered one she’d worn on our first night together) and smiled a delighted, paternal smile; he said something that made her laugh, right off. All this civility meant nothing, of course. He was an extremely civil man. I wouldn’t know what he thought of her until tomorrow. We lifted our menus and complained over their gilt tops about the hot weather. My eyes flitted blindly across the cirrate names of pastas; I have never been able to read a menu and talk at the same time. I managed to maneuver my father and Phlox into a conversation about the library, and took advantage of these thirty seconds to select ravioli filled with sausage. My father ordered the same.

He turned to Phlox and made a grave face. “Is Art polite with you?”

“Hmm. Oh, yes, unfailingly.”

My father lifted his eyebrows, smiled, and turned bright red. “Ah,” he said.

We ordered, and the waiter expertly spilled a little red wine into each of our glasses, and my father talked, and the food came, and my father talked some more. Over the minestrone and salads, he put me through one long moment of heartbreak, by telling Phlox about a memorable Sunday at Forbes Field with my mother and my infant self—a very old, very pretty story that raised goose bumps along my arms. Phlox didn’t take her eyes off him. She asked short, tactful, and very basic questions about my mother. What was her hair color? Did I look like her? What were her virtues and rewards? Didn’t she just love her boy? After each question my father would look at me, puzzled, and I would watch my food. You idiot, I thought, you should have known this would happen.

“She was a very beautiful woman,” said my father. “She looked like Jennifer Jones. I don’t suppose you know who she is?”

“Jennifer Jones!” said Phlox. “Of course I know who she is!
Portrait of Jenny
is my favorite movie in the whole world!” She tossed her head, pretending to have been insulted.

“Indeed? My apologies,” said my father, and he pursed his lips and lifted one eyebrow, pretending to have gained new respect for her, or perhaps her admiration for Jennifer Jones really did impress him.

“I can see it in Art,” she said, turning to run a slender finger along the ridge over my left eye, and I thought: Oh, no. “He has Jennifer Jones eyebrows.”

“And you,” said my father, mocking and flirtatious, “have the eyebrows and the nose of the young Joan Crawford. In, say,
Grand Hotel
.”

“That’s my ninth-favorite movie in the whole world,” said Phlox.

“She ranks everything,” I said. “She has it all figured out.”

“I can see that,” said my father, and from his tone one knew that he thought her either delightful or the most frivolous young woman he had ever met. Then he glared at me again, for one instant.

Over the main course he explained the Diaspora and carbon 14 dating (which Phlox just as easily could have explained to him) and gave a short history of Swiss banking. Cannoli were accompanied by coffee and an embarrassing account of my first visit, as a small child, to the ocean, which I had mistaken for a vast expanse of fruit juice. My father was wonderful. We laughed and laughed. Everything was exactly as it had not been when I first presented Claire. Phlox kept administering gentle squeezes of delight to my thigh, under the table.

At last she rose and excused herself, with a downward look of modesty which seemed to suggest that we shouldn’t hesitate to discuss her while she was away. And although I was in terrible doubt about my father’s feelings just then, and although I knew better than to expect him, even under the best circumstances, to comment on her before he’d passed a night of careful and jovian consideration, her blush, her murmured farewell-for-now, her lowered eyelids, all seemed so confident that nothing ill would be said about her in her absence that I risked it.

“Isn’t she nice?” I said.

“Mm.” My father stared at me, his big eyebrows knotted over the pink top of his nose, and I saw the muscles gathering along his jaw. I began to recoil even before he spoke.

“What’s wrong with you? I don’t understand you.” He pitched his voice high and spoke quickly, but not very loud. I knew that it wasn’t Phlox who had upset him. My father was hurt, and extremely hurt, or this, too, would have waited until the next day.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Don’t you remember your mother? You were almost thirteen years old when she passed away.” He wiped his fingers angrily on his napkin and threw it down.

“Of course I remember her, Dad, Of course I do. Dad, can we please not talk about this now? I don’t care if you make me cry again, but I’d rather not do it in front of Phlox.”

“Don’t you tell her anything about your mother? Obviously she must have asked you; she practically interviewed me.” I hoped this wasn’t some kind of insult. “What did you say when she asked you all those things she just asked me?”

“I—” My chin shook. I watched the red light of the restaurant wink across my water glass. “I don’t know. I told her…I didn’t feel like…going into it. She understood. And…you and I never…talk about it, do we? So why…Tomorrow, Dad, please.”

I felt as though I were attempting to hold down all the blind pale things that lived in the black waters of my gut, and that if he asked me one more plaintive question in that wounded tone of voice it would all be over. I studied as deeply as I could the drops of condensation on the glittering sides of my glass. Then I heard feet along the thick carpet behind me, and my father made an odd sound, a short cluck. I let go my breath and turned to face Phlox and comfort. Instead there was a fat stomach.

“Art!” said Uncle Lenny Stern. “Joe! Art and Joe, father and son, man to man, hey? Heehee. Man to man!”

“Uncle Lenny,” I said, managing to remember to take his hand, which was sweaty as ever. It didn’t occur to me that perhaps I was still expected to kiss his scratchy cheek. He wasn’t really my uncle, after all. “I must be dreaming.”

He laughed again; however, I was, for a moment, half-serious. I thought I must be dreaming a horrible transformation dream in which my blue-and-white-flowered Phlox had become a short, giggling, egg-shaped Jewish gangster. What my father had said to me, indeed, was what he often said in my dreams. But then, behind Lenny, I saw a section of Elaine Stern—her shoulder, I thought—and, behind her, part of Phlox, who stood, eyebrows raised, mouth open, watching as this tremendous woman and her attendant miasma of White Shoulders engulfed me. Aunt Elaine’s kisses always hurt one’s face; I used to call her the Pincher.

“Actually,” said my father, “it isn’t quite man to man. Introduce your friend, Art.”

He pointed to Phlox, and there was a general whirling around.

“Uncle Lenny Stern, Aunt Elaine, this is Miss Phlox Lombardi. Phlox.”

“Oh, isn’t she gorgeous!” said Aunt Elaine. She crushed the back of my neck in her fingers. “And how do you like this handsome young man, eh? A prince!” She shook my head like a pompon.

“They aren’t really my uncle and aunt,” I said.

“I like him very well,” said Phlox, and she held out a limp, pretty hand to one of the most notorious lieutenants in Pittsburgh organized crime. We made space for them at our table, which was wrecked, strewn with napkins and spots of red sauce, and two menus were brought, and more coffee. I leaned over to Phlox and whispered that we weren’t going to be free for a while yet.

“That’s all right,” she said. “They’re fun.”

“Please,” I said. I sat back and watched my Uncle Lenny; I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He drew my father into a discussion of mutual funds and waved his arms around. His skin was Florida brown; as he got older he spent less and less time in the city of his birth, and the FBI listened in on more and more long-distance calls from West Palm Beach. I knew I was not the only one in the restaurant who watched him. I turned around and saw a couple of dark-haired men at a far table, probably brothers; they nodded to me, and without even thinking I sought out the bulges under their jackets, an ancient reflex of mine, and in the next moment I underwent the equally ancient fantasy of running around to the other side of the table to strangle Lenny Stern. I didn’t want to kill him, really. It was a just a ten-year-old’s desire to see a little shooting.

Elaine asked Phlox a bunch of questions about her “people,” then recited an impressive list of Pittsburgh Italians with whom she was “like that,” laying one finger over the other. It developed that Phlox’s maternal grandmother was the aunt of a woman whose home and card table Elaine had graced with her giant presence many times in the 1950s. At this revelation, my feelings, interrupted at a crisis moment by the new arrivals and held in dazed suspense for the past ten minutes, began to wriggle and stretch and prickle, like frozen toes under a stream of warm water. They were very mixed. I found it strangely pleasing that, beyond all the new and crucial connections between me and Phlox, there could also be this old and silly connection of families; I felt the lover’s shocked but unsurprised love of anything that appears to suggest the whimsical engines of destiny.

And yet this link also confirmed that Phlox was now hopelessly mixed up with my family. She’d met not only my father, which I hadn’t wanted, but Lenny Stern, and if she just turned around she would also see Them, the two ugly men with guns, who were the lion and the unicorn of my family’s coat of arms. I gripped the edge of the table. All of the people I spent time with and loved, rather than helping to take me out of the world into which I’d been born, were being pulled into it: Phlox, the cousin of some dead Mafia wife, was eating a dinner paid for by the Washington Family; the fat, powerful man slapping my father’s sleeve and eyeing her across the table was, though distantly, Cleveland’s boss; and now—I remembered with alarm—Cleveland, too, was threatening to come into contact with my father. I might have doubted that he would do it, had he not been Cleveland. The more I thought on these things, the more I felt the heavy food sliding slowly and murderously, like pack ice, through my stomach. There are head people, who suffer from sudden migraines, and there are stomach people, like me.