The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  After work I stepped outside, weakened by air-conditioning, and tugged out the last cigarette in the pack. Arthur and Phlox, side by side, approached from the direction of the library. Phlox wore pearls, a strapless white dress patterned with blue flowers, and a pair of high-heeled white sandals; Arthur, light-gray trousers and a powder-blue blazer, with a tie, and oxfords without socks, like Prince Philip. They were still far from me, and I watched as those they passed turned admiring heads; they drew near like an advertisement for summer and beauty and healthy American sex. The sun was in their faces, but they neither squinted nor averted their eyes; the light fell across Phlox’s necklace and Arthur’s hair and the hint of silver wristwatch at his cuff. I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings.

  “Hi, Art Bechstein,” said Arthur, when they’d reached me. I had about half a cigarette left.

  “Hi, Art Bechstein,” said Phlox.

  “Hello, Phlox; hello, Arthur. Wow.”

  The two of them panted after their brisk walk through sunlight, admiring stares, and the posh resorts and spas of my imagination. Thin strands of perspiration hung across their foreheads.

  “Did you go to work like this?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said Arthur. “It seemed like a good day to do it.”

  “Arthur and I had the same idea today. Telepathically. Come into the old library all dressed up. We created a sensation. Telepathically. For your pleasure.” She was plainly excited, by my undisguised astonishment at her lovely big face and by the handsome man standing beside her, his fingertips nearly—bewilderingly—brushing her wrist.

  “Well, I’m very pleased,” I said.

  “I could care less,” said Arthur, “about your pleasure.”

  “Thank heavens,” I said.

  We looked at each other oddly, as though we neither of us knew what exactly we were talking about.

  “Ha,” I said.

  “Let’s drink something cool and refreshing,” Phlox said, bobbing her head, widening then narrowing her eyes like some lustful and wily biblical queen.

  “Beer,” said Arthur and I.

  “Jane is dead,” Arthur was saying. “And everything is fine. That’s all.” He was drunk.

  “But what did you do?” Phlox asked. She’d already asked him five or six times, and each time he’d blushed, looked down, and refused to explain.

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Ah,” she said, perhaps imprudently, “you’re finally drunk enough to confess.”

  “No!” he said, lurching slightly into Phlox, who sat beside him in the booth, and spilling his fine hair across her bare shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Watch it,” she said, not taking her eyes from me as she delicately shoved Arthur back over to his corner. Each cool and refreshing sip she took seemed to increase the pressure of her unsandaled silken foot against my sockless ankle. In my drunkenness I’d lost any trace of the caution that had propelled me only the day before into the brambles along the Schenley Park bridge. I wondered suddenly (as suddenly as my eyes falling for the hundredth time upon her blue-flowered breasts) whether or not she wore a bra.

  “Phlox,” I said, before I could reconsider, “are you wearing a brassiere?”

  “Never,” she said. “Never in high June.” She spoke without coyness, without shock or outrage at my impertinence.

  “Hey, Blanche DuBois!” said Arthur. “ ‘Never in high June.’ ”

  She continued to look at me levelly and nearly without blinking. I began to get an unmistakable impression that this girl wanted me in a matter-of-fact, practical, and serious way. Arthur, I think, got the same impression. He stood up and excused himself, blushing again, but with a slightly businesslike tone, as though he had a job to do and were doing it.

  “No, no,” I called after him. “Don’t leave me alone with this woman.”

  I have a photograph of Phlox here before me; the only one in which she wears no makeup. Her forehead appears, quite frankly, tremendous. She has adopted a disheveled, Thursday-night-at-home-with-my-boyfriend pose, ripped sweatshirt collar dipped over one round olive shoulder, face uncharacteristically Levantine (her father was related to the great Pittsburgh Tambellinis), saintly. A faint something, a hint of redness in the eyes, suggests that she’s been crying; the lower lids seem slightly puffy. Of course she’s been crying. Her nose, as ever, looks big and straight and radiant. A few limp curls drape the vaulting eyebrows and silver screen of a forehead. And the eyes, the legendary blue eyes of Death Itself. Yes.

  Arthur returned from the rest room, looking pale but considerably more rational. He watched with great interest as I hastily undid my fingertips from Phlox’s own, lavender-nailed.

  “Arthur Bechstein likes you, Phlox Lombardi,” he said.

  “Oh, do you really think so, Arthur LeComte?” said Phlox. Her bosom heaved measurably.

  Arthur slid in beside me, without stirring the foam on the beers. His face had changed; he was feeling, clearly if unusually, a strong feeling about something or other. He spoke into his collar, his beer, the beery tabletop, his lap, eyes downcast and invisible.

  “I hate you, Phlox Lombardi,” he said.

  I laughed. Arthur looked up and smiled, radium white, an elegant, old-fashioned, moneyed, sad kind of smile, like a relic of that remote age when radium was still our friend. He unleashed this smile on Phlox, right in front of me; I was sitting there, confronted, I imagined, by the unimaginable, dizzying nastiness of homosexuality thwarted.

  “Excuse me,” I said. Arthur rose to let me out.

  This bar was esteemed for the quality or at least the profusion of the graffiti in both its gentlemen’s and ladies’ rooms, which were rarely washed or repainted. I read this exchange: WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY?

  And, lower:

  HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES

  Then:

  PLUS THERE’S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD

  A fourth man had concluded:

  AND OF EVERYTHING THAT’S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES

  When I returned to our table, Arthur was in the middle of his story, now apparently master of his earlier and revelatory outburst.

  “Every so often, Cleveland yelled, ‘Teddeeee,’ and inside the house someone next door said, ‘What?’ and we would laugh.”

  “Just tell me what you did,” said Phlox. “Enough.”

  “No, let him keep you in suspense, why don’t you?” I said. “This is good.”

  “Oh, but I hate suspense, Arthur. Arthurs. Arthurs, ha ha. No, but really, what did you guys do?”

  “We drank,” said Arthur.

  “Well, that can hardly have shocked the Bellwethers.”

  I sat down across from Phlox and slipped off my shoes. Arthur told her that Teddy’s control over the dogs was amazing, and at this point in Arthur’s confession, just at the word “amazing,” Phlox and I began in earnest a delicate, grueling, almost motionless game of footsie, a classic in excruciation, both of us playing to win, employing every one of the considerable mudras for lust or for a pledge of which the foot is capable. At no point did we take our eyes off Arthur; I was only marginally aware of the rapt attention Phlox expertly appeared to pay to him. She’d withdrawn both feet from her limp sandals. In similar circumstances, that is, drunk as I was, I would probably have done this with any attractive woman who happened to be sitting across from me with her feet bared and her cheeks flushed, but not with the same overwhelming awareness of technique, the same impulse toward skill, that Phlox inspired in me. Neither of us heard much of Arthur’s account, delivered as it was by a drunken man in a jukebox-dominated bar to two people whose already beer-impaired attention was largely directed to the slow, feathery wrestling match taking place benea
th the wet surface of the table. I later had to run through the whole story with her all over again.

  “I’m ashamed of myself,” Arthur finished. “I haven’t felt so chastised in ages.”

  “Ah, that’s why you got all dressed up today,” I said.

  Phlox snorted.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. Abruptly she took her feet from mine, leaving them cold and interrupted, and I was momentarily seized by intense loneliness. “What won’t you guys do when you’re drunk? It’s no wonder her parents were furious—a fifteen-year-old boy, my God.”

  “It wasn’t that, Phlox. They don’t give a damn about Teddy. Two facts: the fact that I let the Evil Cleveland in the house, and the fact that I let three Stanley Kowalski dogs take advantage of their delicate darling; that’s it.”

  “Well, they have every right to be angry.”

  “You women always stick together,” I said, which wasn’t a particularly funny thing to say, but I was having difficulty thinking, and I wanted back the nylon feel of her toes.

  “So what are you going to do, Arthur?”

  “I think there’s another couple who want me to house-sit for them. And they haven’t a dog.”

  That summer’s Stevie Wonder song came on the jukebox. I gathered that it was about a kiss like a watermelon or a chocolate chip.

  “Will you dance with me, Art?” said Phlox.

  “No,” I said, and I ran the nail of my big toe down the length of the top of her foot, hard; but I didn’t mean it.

  The bar was built around a small central courtyard. When the management turned up the volume on the jukebox, people danced among the white iron tables and tame trees strung with lights, under the open sky. There were too many couples dancing; Phlox and I found ourselves backed into a corner, surrounded by people neither of us knew, who paid us no attention, and our strange but unsurprising conversation had all the exciting flavor of complete isolation. Unseen, unattended, we grew intimate, talkative, drunk, aroused. I kept my feet bare and tickled them against the Astroturf surface of the courtyard.

  Phlox had covered herself in pearls that day, at the ear-lobes, the throat, the wrist. As she moved her hands and head in the still-light evening, talking about herself, the pearls seemed to string and restring themselves on the invisible thread of her gestures. This shifting nebula about her head and bust, like a sudden attack of phosphenes, first fascinated, then distracted, and ended by annoying the hell out of me. I had the constant sensation of having stood up too quickly, of seeing stars, which should at the very least have led me to drink fewer gin and tonics, two of which I had had the dubious foresight to carry out into the court and to set down on a little table beside us. A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime, I said, elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation.

  We danced; Phlox was trying to speak to me in French. She said amorous things. I answered promptly in English, mentioning also that I’d read that it was nowadays considered in poor taste to talk of love in French. “Don’t be mean to me,” she said, laughing. I laughed. She wriggled, minutely, in her strapless dress. I looked more closely at her makeup, and could see, as she glanced suddenly over her shoulder, that she had indeed been a punk sometime in the recent past; her eye shadow and blush defied her looks, rather than enhancing them, her ears had been pierced many times, and there was even, I thought, a dimpled trace of the piercing of her nose.

  “Look,” she said, “look up there. There’s some kind of gallery up there. You can see things hanging on the walls. Look, Art, you can see art on the walls. There are African masks.”

  “Speaking of Africa, Phlox,” I said. She’d been expecting this, I suppose, or something like it, and was instantly outraged, stopped moving. “No. No, no way. If you ever call me Mau Mau, it will be the last thing you say to me.”

  “But why?” I said. “Why do they call you that?”

  “Nobody calls me that. Don’t you call me that.”

  “Never,” I said. “Never will I call you that name.”

  “Merci.” She reached up and pulled tentatively on a lock of my hair. “Que tu es beau, Arthur,” she said.

  “Don’t call me that. Never call me ‘Artoor,’ ” I mimicked. “And ‘que tu es beau’—come on.”

  She ranged her fingertips along my arm. I couldn’t stop looking at her oversophisticated, tricolor eye shadow.

  “That’s what Daniel says to me. Que tu es belle, Phlox. Tries to say. His accent’s terrible.”

  “I see. And just who is this Daniel fellow, anyway?” The name had cropped up in Arthur’s conversation, at odd intervals, without any specific virtue or stigma being attached to it, but often enough that knowing some vague person named Daniel had come to seem one of Arthur’s minor traits; and it was jarring somehow to hear Phlox say the name.

  “A friend. He works in the library. The three of us go drinking sometimes.”

  This little statement left two unmistakable impressions: that I had a rival for Phlox’s affections, and that I had somehow been deceived by Arthur, who obviously knew Phlox much better than he’d led me to believe. I thought: Well, it’s okay, I am a rivalrous guy, this is going to be fun. But I also felt I had, or certainly ought to have, one or two important questions for Arthur.

  “Daniel says I’m beautiful in a post-Godardian way.”

  “That Daniel. What a charmer.”

  “But there’s something I dislike about him. I like you much more. He’s moody, he’s cruel. He suffers from spleen; do you know what spleen is? He’s, well, he’s an artist. You know. But you’re a happy person, I can tell. Smiley. Sunny. I’m going to call you Sunny,” she said.

  “Next!” I called, lightly shooing her away, snapping my fingers impatiently, as though she’d just blown the audition.

  “Stop. All right. But I’ll find something else to call you, I swear. Are you going to kiss me, Arthur Bechstein?” she said.

  “Eventually, I’m sure.”

  “Now,” she said.

  “You look very beautiful, Phlox,” I said, and with my ridiculous heart beating as though I were that first German laborer, ignorant of engineering and about to remove that first wooden support from that first lacy thousand-ton dome of poured concrete, I made a fractional movement toward her lips with mine; then I drew her slightly into the shadow of a little tree and kissed her; somebody coughed. I heard the scrape of her dress against the thin branches, and the faint noise of her lips, fleshy, wet, tasting of lime and gin. I opened my eyes.

  “There,” she said, “that’s over.”

  We went at it.

  When we got back to the booth, a tall, skinny boy dressed for basketball, with an Italian face and filterless cigarettes, was sitting with Arthur. The tall boy was lighting Arthur’s cigarette and I saw that the evening’s arrangements had shifted. Now we were two couples who would go our separate ways.

  “Phlox, Arthur, this is Bobby.”

  We said hello. Phlox and I were standing very close to each other, and I couldn’t tell whether Bobby’s careful top-to-bottom scrutiny was of Phlox or of me. I slid into the booth, next to Arthur, but Phlox remained on her feet, eyeing her purse.

  “Oh,” I said, “I guess we’re going.”

  “Yes, I guess you are,” said Arthur. “Good-bye.” He looked away from us, Bobby handed Phlox her little bag. I left a few dollars on the table, and we went out.

  “How strange,” I said.

  She took my arm, a bit brusquely.

  “I think it’s disgusting,” she said. “I think it’s terrible that poor Arthur is gay.”

  “Why?” I said. “It doesn’t—”

  “I’m sorry, I just think it’s disgusting and a shame. Men who sleep with men are just big cowards.” She shivered once, then redoubled her grip on my arm and turned smiling to me. “Art, let’s go to my house.”

  I kissed her behind the ear, came away with a mouthful of hair.

  “Ooh,” she said. “Do you want to take the bus or walk?”<
br />
  “Let’s walk,” I said. “It’ll give me a chance to burn off some of this rampaging heterosexual energy.”

  “I’ll bet you’re just a big battery, aren’t you?”

  “Um, Phlox, could we do something about these endearments of yours? ‘Ooh.’ ‘A big battery.’ You sound like a starlet, like Mamie Van Doren or someone.”

  “I love Mamie Van Doren,” Phlox said, slapping me lightly across the face. “I am a starlet.”

  9

  THE HEARTBREAK THING

  I ADMIT I HAVE an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public relations. She has been betrayed into the study of French, heedless of the terrible consequences, by her enchantment with this language, which has ruined more young American women than any other foreign tongue.

  Second, if her studies were confined simply to grammar and vocabulary, then perhaps the French major would develop no differently from those who study Spanish or German, but the unlucky girl who pursues her studies past the second year comes inevitably and headlong into contact with French Literature, potentially one of the most destructive forces known to mankind; and she begins to relish such previously unglamorous elements of her vocabulary as langueur and funeste, and, speaking English, inverts her adjectives, to let one know that she sometimes even thinks in French. The writers she comes to appreciate—Breton, Baudelaire, Sartre, de Sade, Cocteau—have an alienating effect, especially on her attitude toward love, and her manner of expressing her emotions becomes difficult and theatrical; while those French writers whose influence might be healthy, such as Stendhal or Flaubert, she dislikes and takes to reading in translation, where their effect on her thought and speech is negligible; or she willfully misreads Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse, making dark romances of them. I gathered that Phlox, in particular, considered herself “linked by destiny” (liée par le destin) both to Nadja and to O. That is how a female French major thinks.