The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  “What does your father do?” said Jane.

  He manipulates Swiss bank accounts with money that comes from numbers, whores, protection, loan sharks, and cigarette smuggling.

  “He’s in finance,” I said.

  “Jane’s going to New Mexico,” said Arthur.

  “Really? When?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jane said.

  “Jesus! Tomorrow. Gee, that’s too bad.”

  Arthur laughed, rapidly reading, I suppose, the thrust of my head and the proximity of my denim thigh to her shaven one.

  “Too bad?” Jane had a southern accent, and “Too bad” fell out in three droll syllables. “It isn’t bad! I can’t wait—my mother and father and I have wanted to go forever! My mother has been taking Spanish lessons for fourteen years! And I want to go because—”

  “Jane wants to go,” Arthur said, “because she wants to have carnal knowledge of a Zuni.”

  She blushed, or rather flushed; her next words were only slightly angry, as though he often pestered her about Zuni love.

  “I don’t want to have ‘carnal knowledge’ with any old Zuni, asshole.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Asshole.” From the way she seemed to relish the word as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, a sign of her intimacy with Arthur, and I was momentarily very jealous of him. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.

  “But I’m intrigued by the Native Americans, you know? That’s all. And by Georgia O’Keeffe. I want to see that church in Taos that she painted.”

  Someone began to play the piano in the other room, a Chopin mazurka that mixed very uncomfortably for a few measures with the thump music that came from the half-dozen speakers scattered around the house, until someone else attacked the pianist with a squeal and a silk cushion. We laughed.

  “Some people really know how to have a good time,” Jane said, confirming that it was indeed a motto of theirs, and I was suddenly mad for the opportunity to employ it myself.

  “Yes,” said Arthur, and he told her about the scene at which we had stopped, and met, so many hours before.

  “But I saw you in the library,” I said. “What was that Spanish potboiler you were reading, anyway?”

  “La muerte de un maricón,” he said, with a humorous flourish.

  “Oh. What’s that mean?” I said.

  “Ask Jane’s mother, the hispanophone.”

  “You can just stop right now about my mother,” she said. “You can just shut your trap.” Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon. “My mother didn’t get to spend a year cutting up in Mexico and getting hepatitis like you did, Arthur.”

  “Well, and thank goodness,” said Arthur.

  “Oh, no! You didn’t really…cut up, did you?” I said.

  “Like the big time,” he said.

  “And what will you do this summer, Arthur?”

  “I’m going to live at Jane’s and watch the dog. You’ll have to come visit me. It’s going to be a fun place after the Bellwethers leave.”

  Arthur and Jane had just gotten to the part where the blind truck-stop waitress, feeling with her spotted, overjoyed hands Cleveland’s nose and forehead, accuses him of being Octavian, the shining man from another planet who had loved her many years ago, but had then returned to his own world, leaving her sightless, and with a brilliant, freakishly formed child—“the kind of thing,” Arthur said, “that is always happening to Cleveland”—when Mohammad fell into the dark room, shouting: “The Count! The Count!”

  “The Count,” Arthur said, frowning slightly.

  “My friend,” Momo said, almost as though he meant it, “my friend, my tremendous friend Arthur the Count! Tell me, what may I do for you? What would there be that I would not do it for you, my friend?”

  He teetered, wore a bib of spilled whiskey, and the wide things he said, I felt, would be discounted as the typical CinemaScope friendliness of a sot. But Lecomte looked at him without answering, looked into his fat eyes while an obviously well-considered reply fought to free itself from his shut mouth.

  “Arthur? Only to say it. Only! Anything in the world.”

  “You could,” said Lecomte, “keep the fuck away from Richard.”

  There was only the din of the party, and it was as nothing. The obscenity flared and then collapsed into itself in the dazzling white half of a second. It was like the echo of an ax blow filling the air between him and Momo. He immediately blushed and looked ashamed at having said too much.

  Mohammad’s hand, which he had intended to give to Arthur to be shaken, hung from his wrist as though un-muscled. He fought down his astonishment, with the aid of his alcoholic heart, and smiled at me, and then at Jane.

  “Jane,” he said, “you will tell him I am quite okay for Richard and everything is okay and he has not the claim to everyone like he think he has and you will now tell him this.”

  “Let’s go outside,” Jane said to me. “I know how to get the neighborhood dogs to bark all at once.”

  “Hey, yes, fine,” said Mohammad, “then it is enough for now. I will be back later.” He headed for the large, dark parlor and disappeared into the large, dark music there.

  “Arthur, was Richard—” I said.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” he said.

  Jane put her moist pout just by my ear and whispered, raising the hairs all down me.

  “Richard is Cleveland’s cousin,” she said.

  “Ah, Cleveland!” I said. I wondered at the Eiffel mesh of liaisons rising up and up around me. Were all of them related? Were Arthur and Richard an item? I looked at him. He stared down into his cool, yellow-foaming plastic cup of regret. His hair fell over his rather flat profile and hid the eye.

  “The subject,” Jane murmured into my ear again, undoing a giant zipper within me.

  I grabbed her hard hand. “What subject?”

  “Change it.” Three syllables.

  “So, Arthur, you didn’t tell me,” I said, “about the waitress’s baby. Was it his? Did it have Cleveland’s good looks and fabulous sense of humor?”

  And the thought of Cleveland lifted him, and threw him, and within a few minutes I listened as a hitchhiking Cleveland made his way headlong through the Black Hills toward Mount Rushmore, with an AWOL army demolition man in a pickup full of trinitrotoluene and plastique, and tears appeared at the corners of Arthur’s eyes, he laughed so.

  Later, long into the ever dimmer and louder evening, I looked around me, as though for the first time in hours.

  “Cleveland,” I said.

  My vision and hence recent memory had smeared completely at the edges, and the edges had contracted with each drink, until two faces, Jane’s and Arthur’s, bewilderingly alike, filled the unbearably focused, narrow center of everything, and babbled. I wanted Jane, I wanted quiet, I wanted just to stop; so I stood up, a feat, and went out of doors to slap my face three times.

  Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland! They had spoken of nearly nothing but his exploits. Cleveland riding a horse into a swimming pool; coauthoring a book on baseball at the age of thirteen; picking up a prostitute, only to take her to the church wedding of a cousin; living in a Philadelphia garret and returning to Pittsburgh six months later, after having hardly communicated with any of his friends, with a pair of dirty tattoos and a scholarly, hilarious, twenty-thousand-word essay on the cockroaches with which he’d shared his room.

  I had the impression that as far as Arthur and Jane were concerned, Cleveland flew, or had flown, as far above their twin blond heads as I saw them flying above me—but he had fallen, or was falling, or they were all on their way down. They hadn’t said it, but I saw that in their fancies, the great epoch, the time when Cleveland and Arthur had been two and angelic and fast, was long gone. Here I am, I thought, for I felt shitty and sour and wry, at the start of the first summer of my new life, and they tell me I’ve come in late and
missed everything.

  Though I’d intended to step out into the yellow comfort of the back porch again, my condition, and my unfamiliarity with the house, led me through the wrong series of rooms, and I found myself verging on another part of the immense lawn, a part completely illuminated, in green shock. A pair of swimmers was talking quietly in the water, a boy still softly trying to convince a girl to do that thing whose moment had probably come and gone much earlier in the evening. I couldn’t hear the words, but the urgency in the refusal of the young woman was clear and familiar. There would be denial, then silence, and then the rapid beat of water.

  Someone touched my elbow, and I turned.

  “Hi,” said Arthur.

  “I’m just getting a little air,” I said. “I guess I’ve been sitting too long. Drinking too long.”

  “Do you like to dance? Would you like to go dancing?”

  I wondered what he meant. I didn’t really want to go dancing, mostly because I never had “gone dancing” (Claire did not dance), but also because something in his tone, and the whole idea of a discotheque, frightened me.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure I like to dance.”

  “Well. There’s a club in East Liberty. Not far.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well. It’s a gay club.”

  “Oh.”

  There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and coolly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I knew, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust.

  This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Home and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Schaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibly, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.

  I looked at Arthur. There was a faint golden stubble on his cheek and a flush at the pink skin of his throat. His eyes were clear and pale, as though he had not been drinking. I felt something. It flew around my chest like a black bat that has got into the house, terrified me for an alien moment, and then vanished.

  “I don’t think so. I’m straight, Arthur. I like girls.”

  He smiled his politic smile.

  “That’s what they all say.” He reached up and almost touched my hair. I shrank from his hand. “Okay, you’re straight.” It was as though I had passed or failed some test.

  “But we can be friends, can’t we?”

  “You’ll see,” he said, and he turned on his heel and went back into the house.

  Objects changed during the long run of Riri’s party: A girl’s frail satin handbag became the spoils, torn in half, of a battle between two briefly furious boys; a lamp became a pile of shards to be cursed, swept up, and hastily thrown away; and the swimming pool, which had probably started the evening as everyone’s notion of beautiful wealthy blue fun, was now garish and green and almost empty. I’d spent my whole evening, however, in sweet, subtle darkness, in the company of fun, and I had my shirt half off by the time I reached poolside.

  4

  THE CLOUD FACTORY

  MY WORST NIGHTMARE WAS a boring nightmare, the dream of visiting an empty place where nothing happened, with awful slowness. I would awake tired, with a few unremarkable traces that never seemed to do justice to the dull fear I had felt while still asleep: the memory of the low hum of an electric clock, of an aimless albino hound, of a voice incessantly announcing departure times over a public address system; and that summer, my job was a dream of this sort. I’d wanted to work in a true, old-fashioned bookshop, crammed with the mingled smells of literature and Pittsburgh blowing in through the open door. Instead I’d got myself hired by Boardwalk Books.

  Boardwalk, a chain, sold books at low prices, in huge, fluorescent, supermarket style, a style pervaded by glumness and by an uncomprehending distaste for its low-profit merchandise. The store, with its long white aisles and megalithic piles of discount thrillers and exercise guides, was organized as though the management had hoped to sell luncheon meat or lawn-care products but had somehow been tricked by an unscrupulous wholesaler—I imagined the disappointed “What the hell are we going to do with all these damn books?” of the owners, who had started in postcards and seaside souvenirs on the Jersey shore. As far as they were concerned, a good book was still a plump little paperback that knew how to sit in a beach bag and keep its dirty mouth shut.

  Literature was squeezed into a miniature and otherwise useless alcove between War and Home Improvement, and of all the employees, several of whom were fat and wanted to be paramedics, I was the only one who found irregularity in the fact that Boardwalk sold the Monarch notes to works, such as Tristram Shandy, that it did not actually stock. I was to spend the daytime summer stunned by air-conditioning, almost without a thought in my head, waiting for the engagement of evening. Summer would happen after dinner. The job had no claim upon me.

  Early one evening at the beginning of June, a few days after the party at Riri’s, my lease on the “Claire apartment” had at last come up. I locked the glass door of Boardwalk behind me, said good-bye to Gil Frick, flinched at the slam of sudden heat outside, and, with the very last of the furnishings from the old place in a grocery bag on my lap, rode the bus to my new house, on the Terrace.

  The Terrace had been, many years ago, a fashionable place to live. A horseshoe of large, identical brick houses enclosing a long incline of grass, it still retained some of the genteel quality of an enclave that had once attracted families with servants and livery. I knew this last from the fact that I was moving into what had been a kind of coach house or chauffeur’s quarters, small rooms over the garages behind the Terrace proper. None of my new neighbors seemed to bear any resemblance to me: an old man, babies, parents.

  After setting the brown bag down among the scattered cartons of my life from the old place, I went outside to rest and smoke at the top of the twenty-six fissured concrete steps that drew up to my door. To the left, the Terrace, the kids and happy schnauzers running there; to the right and all before me, the maze of tumbling stables and garages, some doorless, most sheltering skis or autos. Along the tops of all the garages ran apartments like mine, spindly creepers in their windows, various musics from radios coming through their wire screens. The late sun was still the major fact of the day, setting the parked cars around me to creak, heating the metal banister against my bare neck. A warm breeze carried dinner smells and birdsong across the neighborhood, ran lightly over my sweaty face, and stirred the hair on my arms. I had an erection, laughed at it, and patiently pushed it down. Four years of familiarity and unconcern with Pittsburgh turned suddenly to arousal and love, and I hugged myself.

  The next day was my day off, and I had plans. I walked into Hillman Library, sleeveless and sunglassy and ready for lunch with Arthur. The summer term had started (but not for me!), and the library was relatively crowded with students in shorts, struggling to remain seated and docile and scholarly. Arthur typed book acquisition forms in a room off the same hallway as the Girl Behind Bars, and to get to him I had to pass those bars, behind which she sat again today. I approached slowly, glad to be wearing sneakers and not my noisy shoes, because she was intent on fooling with her piles of books and did
not glance up, and I got a good look at her.

  She wore, today, several layers of red and white, T-shirts mostly, with a skirt here or there, and many different kerchiefs and bracelets. Her red-brown hair, cut in a neat, heavy-banged, lopsided forties style, left her bowed profile only partly visible, but she seemed to have a look of deep concentration on her face and did not hear me as I slipped past and headed down the hallway to Arthur’s section. I remembered he’d said that she was punk, but her demeanor and her neatness were not, and she clearly placed an un-punklike emphasis on looking somewhat traditionally feminine, pink fingernails and ribbons. I wondered what she was, if not a punk.

  Arthur had his lunch bag ready and quickly slipped a bookmark into what he was copying, as I came in.

  “Hi,” he said. “Are you ready? Did you see Phlox?”

  “Hi. Yes, I saw her. Phlox, ha ha. What a great name.”

  “Well, she certainly likes you, boy. You’d better watch it.”

  “What do you mean? How do you know? What did she say?”

  “Come on, let’s eat. I’ll tell you on the way out. Goodbye, Evelyn—oh, I’m terribly sorry, Evelyn. This is my friend Art Bechstein. Art, this is Evelyn Masciarelli.”

  Evelyn was one of his co-workers, his superior, nominally. She was a tiny old thing who had trembled away her life in Hillman Library, and, as Arthur later told me, was “in a therm” over him. I walked over and shook hands with her, very conscious of, and somehow more comfortable with, the formality with which Arthur had made the introductions. It allowed me to choose to be for her whoever I wanted to be, and I chose to be bright and young, fresh from the sun of the outer world and free to return to it, as she was not. After I had briefly held her small, wet hand, showing Evelyn all my charming teeth, we made a courteous farewell and left.

  On the way out, of course, we came upon Phlox, drinking from the fountain in the hall. She had to place a protective hand above her breast to keep all the gear she wore around her neck from getting into the stream of water when she bent over.