Michael Chabon (21 page)

“All right, fellows. I’m busy. Good-bye.”

“Aw, Joe, let them stay a minute,” said one man, an older, balding once-blond man with friendly water-blue eyes and a nose destroyed by boxing. He picked up the newspaper and laid it beside him. This was Carl “Poon” Punicki, although I didn’t know it at the time. Three other things I did not know then about him were, first, that he was a big-time jewel fence; second, that he and Frankie Breezy had been feuding all year over a small piece of the Monongahela Valley; and third, that he had a son, whom he prized and ate dinner with every Sunday afternoon, who was a biker. “I never met your boy, Joe.”

My father had been required to do business with this man; he turned and put his arm around me.

“Arthur, this is Mr. Punicki.”

He went all around the room. I shook a bunch of hands; so did Cleveland. I saw Mr. Punicki eyeing with paternal amusement Cleveland’s snakeskin tie.

“So?” said my father at last. “You just wanted to drop by?”

“Yes,” said Cleveland. “That’s it.”

“No,” I said. “There’s a reason, actually.”

Cleveland and I must have exchanged a pair of real Hayley Mills now-what-do-we-do looks, because everyone laughed.

“This guy doesn’t belong in here. He’s a squeeze,” Frankie said. “He’s an employee.”

“Pops, Cleveland wants a job,” I said.

Frankie Breezy stood up and made two partial but probably automatic fists. “Cleveland
needs
a job,” he said.

“This is very foolish,” my father said.

“I’ll give Cleveland a job,” Mr. Punicki said. He took a pen out of his pocket and wrote on the colored paper folder of my father’s airplane ticket. He tore off a neat corner and handed it to Cleveland.

“I’ll see you at five,” my father said to me, in a near whisper. His forehead was so furrowed with anger that it was as though he had only one long eyebrow, running all the way across. He was very red. “Alone.”

I felt, momentarily but acutely, that I had gone too far, this time, even to bother with another goddamn dinner.

“I can’t, Dad,” I said. “I have things to do. I’m sorry.” I started to cry, then stopped; it was like a yawn. “Come on, Cleveland.”

“And I’ll bet it’ll be a much more fun job too,” said Cleveland softly as we went out through the pretty vestibule. “More suited to my zany tastes and idiosyncrasies.”

We waited a long time for the elevator. It was very quiet in that chill hallway. At last the brass doors slid open. On the way down, Cleveland, directly under the
NO SMOKING $500 FINE
sign, lit a cigarette, which struck me, for once, as an unnecessarily theatrical thing to do.

I swallowed half a beer without noticing. Cleveland and I were both dazed, though his daze was a kind of nervous reverie, whereas mine was more akin to torpor. When I finally remarked the pale bread flavor of the beer in my mouth, I looked around the bar and did not remember having come in. I was on the last stool by a window and could see out into the bright day and sunny red bricks of Market Square, and I allowed myself to be relaxed momentarily by the warm air that blew down from the lazy fans, and by the tranquil, salt exhalations of dead shellfish that filled the air. Carl Punicki went past the bar, without looking in the window. As he vanished, he ran a hand through his thinning yellow hair and shook his shoulders once. An inch of ash fell from the tip of my trembling cigarette.

“Oh,” said Cleveland. “Art. It just hit me. I’m sorry.”

“Ha,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Really. This is going to damage things with your old man?”

“Yes. I don’t know. No. Things were already damaged.”

“Are you mad at me, Bechstein? Don’t be.” The white eyeglasses gave him an impish look, and he said, flatly, “I’ve got a glorious feeling.” He finished his beer. “Everything’s going my way. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.”

I laughed and, at last, looked at him. Sometime during that day at the boiling end of July, which broke the all-time record set in 1926 or something like that, my friendship with Cleveland began to take on some of the characteristics of a détente, that uneasy willingness to laugh things off.

“I have to call Phlox,” I said, thinking: I have to call Arthur. I slid from my barstool and went through the old photographs and men to the back of the bar, fingering the coins in my pocket.

“Hello?” said, my God, Phlox.

“Oh, hello!”

Operator, Operator, there’s been some kind of mistake!

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Hello, Phlox. I feel really terrible and I don’t want to talk about this. How are you?”

“Angry.” She tapped. “Where are you?”

“I’m downtown. With Cleveland.”

“Fine. Stay there.”

“How about if I come see you right now?”

“No,” she said, more quietly. “I don’t think so.” Her voice was cold. “Why don’t you call Arthur?”

“Phlox! Fine. I will.”

“No, Art, come over!”

“No, I’ll call Arthur, like you said.” There was a pause. The computer inside the pinball machine to my left simulated the sound of a woman in orgasm. I felt how stupid was the thing I’d just said to her.

“Fine.”

“Oh, Phlox, let me just come over, right now.”

“No,” she said. “I’m too angry to see you right now. I might say things I don’t mean. Come over later.”

Things were happening too quickly for there to be a later.

“I’ll leave right now.”

“Don’t,” she said, and hungup the phone. When I called back, I got a busy signal. So I called Arthur, woke him up from a nap. He said to come right over. I went to tell Cleveland, but he had gone, leaving a note and a couple of crumpled dollar bills. I read the note, stuffed it in my pocket, and went to catch a bus to Shadyside.

Arthur chuckled in sympathy when he saw me, held out his hand generously. I threw my arms around him and clasped him to me. We parted. His face was sunburned and newly wide awake, a tiny flake of sleep in the corner of his blue left eye. He had bought himself a bottle of citron Christian Dior. I was so glad to see him.

“Poor guy,” he said. “You look miserable.”

“I am,” I said. “Hug me again.”

“You must have had an especially disturbing day.”

“I’m disturbed. Arthur, can I…?”

“Please do.”

It wasn’t all that different. He has just eaten a plum, I thought.

He pushed me lightly away, then held on.

“Are you in full possession of your faculties?”

“I can’t be certain; no.”

“Well, it’s about time,” he said. He pinched my earlobe. “Let’s go exhaust all the possibilities.”

“Could we please do it slowly?”

“No,” he said, and he was right. We did it very rapidly, in the Weatherwoman’s bed, passing from toothed kisses through each backward and alien, but familiar, station on the old road to intercourse, which loomed there always before me, black and brutal and smiling, more alien, more backward, and more familiar than anything else. Then, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after my arrival at the house, with a hard, spongy fistful of him in my right hand, and my left hand flat against his stomach, I was overcome with a feeling that made our black destination cease to seem looming. My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to feel myself for once the weaker.

“Here,” I said. “Right here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Please. This is okay. Now or I’ll never do it.”

“We need some slippery stuff.”

“Hurry.”

He scrambled out of bed and ran around the bedroom, tossing newspapers everywhere, rummaging through drawers, then disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the medicine chest squeak open, then slam. He flashed naked out the bedroom door and I heard him thump down the steps, stumbling with haste at the bottom. I lay on the uprooted sheets and blanket of the bed, looking without a thought of time at the hands of the alarm clock. My sides ached with rapid respiration and this feeling of a heedless desire to be fucked. The clock moved, the loose old screen on the window billowed; I heard Arthur’s footsteps again on the stair. He came back into the bedroom, gasping for breath, but grinning and carrying a bottle of corn oil.

“Slippery stuff,” I said, and my laugh was like an iridescent bubble rising to the surface of a pool of molten tar. “Come on.”

“Relax, I’m all out of breath, give me a minute, give me a kiss,” he said.

It hurt a great deal, and the oil was cold and strange, but when he said that he had finished, I did not want him to stop; I asked him not to stop, and he did his best, but then I started to cry. He held me, I stopped crying, and we were laughing again about a sound he said I had uttered, our faces inches apart, when his eyes grew round and he sat up abruptly, then came back in for a closer look.

“Your nose is bleeding,” he said.

He stood up and went to the tall, wide bedroom windows, parted the drapes, and threw open the panes. A breeze and the late sunlight came through the wrought-iron rail into the room, and a row of thin shadows fell across the floor. There was blood on my pillowcase. When I got up to find Kleenex for my nose, Arthur purposefully stripped the stained linen from the pillow and went to the window with it. When I came back, he stood by the sill, grinning with the wondrous news he had just published to the neighborhood.

“E
VERY WOMAN HAS THE
heart of a policeman.” Later, much later, long after the summer had blown up and fallen to the earth in little black scraps of ash and Japanese paper, I sat in a cafe in a deserted Breton resort town, talking to a kid from Paris who gave me this aphorism. He drank Pernod, sweet and cloudy, bitter and calm, and to illustrate his maxim told me a story about the detective powers of an old fiancée of his. Throughout their engagement, he had lived on the third floor of an old building in the Fifth Arrondissement, and on the sixth floor of this building lived a young woman, who tempted him. She would stand waiting for him by his door, wearing only a thin robe, when he came home from work in the evening, would leave flowers and colored ribbon in his mailbox, would call him late at night and have nothing to say. But this woman was poor, and crazy, he said, and he was engaged to be married to the brilliant daughter of a prominent Jewish family, members of the Socialist elite.

He said that although his neighbor was pretty, for over a year he managed to avoid her embrace, and he never, of course, mentioned her to the rich fiancée. Then, one Sunday afternoon, and for no particular reason, he finally surrendered. Afterward, the neighbor woman rose from his bed and pulled on her dress and sandals, to go down to the corner for a bottle of wine. On the stair she passed the fiancée, who was coming to surprise the young man with an expensive gift. The two women exchanged a very brief glance. The young rich girl came upstairs, knocked on the door, and, when he opened it, slapped the man’s face. She threw the gift, a gold-plated man’s toilet set, through his television screen, then departed, and he never saw her again.

The aphorism may be false (it sounds good, which is all an aphorism need do), but I had not been in Phlox’s apartment for forty-five seconds before she gathered up whatever clues there were to gather in my face, voice, and caress—perhaps even in my smell—and accused me of doing what I had done once again at two o’clock that morning, after which Arthur had fallen asleep, though I could not and so had crossed empty Fifth Avenue and walked home through the trafficless streets.

“Who was it?” she said, pushing me away, taking hold of the back of a chair.

“Someone you don’t know.” I didn’t have strength enough to lie convincingly. I’d been taken by surprise. All I could do was sink deep into her old sofa and dread hearing whatever she might next divine. She had woken me with a phone call that morning, and already, I realized, the knowledge had been in her voice, the urgency that had drawn me over to her apartment all unready, on three hours’ sleep and a single cup of coffee. She stood in the center of the plain little living room, in a torn gray sweatshirt and gym shorts, arms angrily folded, but she didn’t say anything. She began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I talked into my shirt. “It wasn’t anything. It was a mistake. I felt lonely and horrible and I ran into…this girl I knew a long time ago.”

“Claire?” cried Phlox.

I looked up. I couldn’t help smiling at this thought, or half-smiling, anyway. “No. God, no. What a notion. Look, Phlox.”

She came over. I pulled her down into my lap and rubbed my cheek against the torn, nubby, soft cloth she wore. Solace is in the fabric of sweatshirts. “Please, Phlox, you have to forgive me, you have to. I don’t have any feelings for this woman. It’s nothing.”

She whirled around, angry and curious, eyes red.

“What does she look like?”

“She’s blond. Very blond and cold.”

“As blond and cold as Arthur?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

She wrapped her arms around my neck and said she didn’t know. Phlox said that I could tell her anything; she would believe anything I told her. She cried, on and off, for the rest of the day. It was a wounded, slow, delicate Sunday; our feelings and the things we said to each other were cautious and tender. It rained in the late afternoon. We half-undressed, climbed out onto her roof, and stood barefoot in the puddles, and under the cool water the tar of the roof was still warm against the feet. Across the neighborhood, drainpipes chuckled and rang, and we could hear cars tossing up curtains of water in the street. I smoked a cigarette in the rain, which is the best way to smoke a cigarette. I looked at Phlox’s beautiful sad lunar face and wet lashes. When we came inside, we dried each other’s hair and ate with plastic forks out of cold Tupperware bowls. The day before, Phlox had bought a little bottle of bubble soap and a plastic pipe, and we filled the air of her bedroom with bubbles and damp little pops; in the evening I took her picture. I resolved that I would not see Arthur for a whole week.

When I walked into work the next day, Ed Lavella was manning the cash register, ringing up the fifty-seven-dollar purchase, an eight-inch tower of books and magazines, of my father, who held out a hundred-dollar bill. My father was dressed for business, in a blue suit and sober tie, and he had the closed, unreadable face he always adopted at ten o’clock in the morning of what he hoped would be a full day’s work. I knew that he despised Boardwalk Books, so he was obviously here because he wanted to speak to me, but we both realized as soon as we saw one another that now was not the time. He had work to do and wouldn’t want the wild words of his son ringing in his ears all day, and I would be frustrated, by his professionally blank look and by our being there for all to see, in any attempt to obtain his forgiveness or solicitude. So we stood in the aisle by the best-sellers, unable to speak. He smelled of aftershave. Finally he asked me to dinner and a movie on Wednesday night, slipped me a twenty-dollar bill, and went out. At lunchtime I noticed that the money, rolled into a little green ball, was still in my hand. I had a dozen roses delivered to Phlox at the library. As I came out of the florist’s, I ran into Arthur. That morning he had had his hair cut short, but a long, fashionable, forward-falling lock hid his left eyebrow. He looked odd, boyish, and gay.