The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  She lived in an apartment on the second floor of an old house, in a vague, quiet area between Squirrel Hill and Shadyside. As we climbed her bright stairway, I counted steps and watched the play of flowers on her broad, rather flat derriere. I knew what was about to happen, but I did not stop to think, except to think that I knew what was about to happen.

  “We can talk loudly,” she said, stepping into her apartment and turning on the light. “It’s only ten o’clock, and my roommate is never home, anyway.”

  “Good!” I shouted.

  The living room was small and plain, an ordinary student’s living room, with secondhand furniture that had, probably looked old the day it was made, a Renoir poster on one of the long walls, and a terrible, homemade painting of a cat on the other. On the coffee table there was a porcelain statuette of a white Persian cat like a huge scoop of whipped cream, with two lifelike and grotesque blue eyes. The table was strewn with issues of Paris-Match and Vogue.

  “Whose cat idol is that?” I said.

  “That’s my Chloe,” said Phlox. She stepped over to the ugly thing and began to tickle its porcelain chin. “Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe,” she said in a doll voice. “He lives at my mother’s. I’m not allowed to keep a cat here. This is my little substitute Chloe. I made him in art in high school.”

  “It is beautiful. Isn’t Chloe a girl’s name?”

  “Come and see my bedroom,” she said, clasping my fingers and pulling me gently into the dark of the corridor.

  I found her room apt and exciting: salmon-colored, neat, draped with white lace, in one corner a partially dismembered mannequin wearing a wedding dress and a nose ring. Huge posters covered the walls, of Diana Ross and the Supremes, of Arthur Rimbaud, and of the immense gibbous face of Garbo. Across the mirror of her dressing table hung a rosary; along the dressing table’s surface was a vast collection of flacons and little bottles of womanly liquids. I sat on the edge of her bed, inhaling the remnants of her cologne, while she went to the toilet. Among the few books that she kept on her slender night table, her favorites, I supposed, were The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, and The Story of O and Mailer’s Marilyn.

  When she came back into the room, she wore nothing but a peach teddy, wide-hipped, her face coppery and new-washed, her hair pulled up by a white ribbon. She looked 1940ish, the wife of some soldier off fighting the Germans, and briefly I felt the thrill of being an intruder in the house.

  “You wear Opium,” I said.

  She sat beside me and put her face against my neck.

  “Aren’t you smooth. Even know your perfumes,” she said, and she bit me.

  “Here we go,” I said. I brought her down on the chenille spread and breathed in the soap and the Opium at the base of her jaw, where her pulse was making itself known.

  While Phlox, naked, broke eggs into a white bowl for French toast, I called the Duquesne and asked for my father’s room. I stood in a corner of her lovely white kitchen, lazily cradling the phone with my shoulder, looking down at the sunny backyard and smelling my fingers.

  “Bechstein,” said my father, sounding chipper.

  “Bechstein,” I said. “This is your son.”

  “Ah, yes. My son. How are you, son? How’s your summer thus far?”

  Fine, Dad. I’m calling you from this girl’s kitchen and she’s standing here naked, and you know, Dad, I can see that some women do indeed look a little like guitars.

  “Fine.”

  “Am I going to buy you yet another expensive lunch downtown?”

  “I have to work, Pops.”

  “Then I propose an extremely expensive dinner on Mount Washington.”

  “Great. We can ride the Incline.”

  “Yes, the funicular,” said my father. It was one of his favorite words.

  “I’ll come to the hotel around six,” I said, and we hung up.

  “That was quick,” said Phlox.

  “We always have that conversation when I call him at his hotel. It’s my favorite conversation in the whole world.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table and watched her cook. She professed to love to cook; she did a lot of authoritative drawer opening, and laid the strips of bacon in the pan as though there were some science involved, but she didn’t really seem to be enjoying herself. She tormented the French toast with her spatula, peering under each slice every five seconds, and she cursed irritably when the bacon fat spat. She left the kitchen to put on a robe and a Vivaldi record, and when she came back things were burning. I said that I rarely ate breakfast anyway and only needed a cup of coffee, which annoyed her. So I ate like a pig.

  “Tell me about yourself,” I said, chewing.

  “I was born, grew tall and fair, knew both joy and tears, grew old, and died an abbess.” Phlox, recognizing early that she lacked a strong sense of humor, or rather that she lacked the ability to make up jokes, had memorized thousands of bizarre passages from books and from here and there, and had developed, in place of humor, an ability to drop these bombs, into a conversation, sometimes with incongruous, killer accuracy. She had, in fact, a number of unlikely conversational skills, or rather stunts. She knew and could explain with admirable clarity the secrets of machinery, how elevators tell the third floor from the fourth, why a spot is born and quickly burns away when a television is turned off; she could mentally alphabetize a fairly long and random list of words; and; most impressively, she remembered everything anyone had ever told her about himself, trivial things—the name of a childhood pet goldfish or of a distant cousin: This last ability made her the bane of a casual liar. Deceiving her demanded a great deal of care and attention.

  “I understand that you’ve been born again?” I said.

  She banged her juice down on the table and rolled her eyes, as though she had recently run out of patience with regard to Jesus. “No, that was just a thing. I’m not saying that I don’t believe in God, because I do believe in God, even though it’s more branché not to. But do you know what those Christians told me? They told me I would have to learn to live without sex. I can’t live without sex, Art. It’s ridiculous. If Jesus really loves me, then He wants me to sleep with boys.”

  “Amen,” I said. “So what other things have there been?”

  “Well, let’s see. I’ve done the punk thing, the biker’s girl thing, the seamstress thing, the prep school thing, and sort of the housewife thing, although I wasn’t married. I’ve never done the marriage thing.”

  “You were a seamstress?”

  “I sew like an angel.”

  “What’s next?” I said, thinking that this was a glaring straight line.

  “I don’t know,” she said, lightly. “Probably a broken heart.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver’s head.

  “Hey, bus driver,” I said. “Can I smoke?”

  “May I,” said the bus driver.

  “I love you,” I said.

  In the big, posh, and stale lobby of the Duquesne Hotel—in a city where some of the men, like my father, still wear felt hats—one can still get one’s hair cut, one’s shoes shined, and buy a racing form or a Tootsie Roll. When I was a kid, and we would come into Pittsburgh to visit with my mother’s relatives, I used to think that my father, who was perhaps born forty years too late, had had the Duquesne built for him. My father believed in the sports page brought up to his room on a tray with the Java in the morning, and in the cigarette girl who prowled the bar with her Luckies and Philip Morris Commanders. Although he was in many ways a man of modern tastes, for music, hats, and hotels he looked to the Depression, and loved nothing but Goodman, snap brims, and the Duquesne.

  The door to his room was unlatched; I pushed against it and found him sitting in a chair by the window, talking on the telephone. I made a noise as I came in, so that he could end the call if it was something I
ought not to hear, but he half-waved, puckered his lips at me, and kept on talking. From his muttered replies I tried to guess to whom he was talking.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “Listen, Artie just walked in. Yeah, yeah, he looks great. I’ll tell him hello, sure. Right. Thirty-seven five. Right. See you tomorrow. Good-bye.”

  “Uncle Lenny,” I said.

  “He says you should come for dinner.”

  “I can’t stand Aunt Elaine.”

  “Neither can he. My God, Art, your hair—you look terrible. Do you want me to give you the money to buy a comb?”

  “No, thanks, Dad. I’m going to make one at home. Out of common household items. You look great.”

  “Business is good.”

  “Oh.”

  We both frowned. I never knew what to say upon hearing that business was good; it was always as though my father had just gleefully told me that he’d taken out a huge life insurance policy on himself, with me as beneficiary.

  Then we said we were hungry and went out, down the laborious old elevator and into the street. A thunderstorm was imminent; big dusty rings of newspapers and the straw-pierced plastic lids of paper cups blew along Smithfield Street. We walked across the Smithfield Street Bridge to the South Side, and my father reminded me of the day fifteen years before when we’d driven across this bridge and I had astonished him by spelling Monongahela, unbidden.

  “You were a smart boy,” he said.

  “What happened?” I said, and laughed, and he laughed, and said, What indeed.

  I had decided to ask him about Cleveland, though I knew that if Cleveland had not met my father, a fairly important man, it was unlikely that my father would even know of Cleveland, whom I supposed to be an errand boy for the Stern family. Rarely did I ask my father about his work, and I didn’t like to do it.

  “Pops,” I said, trying to imply my nonchalance by dipping a morsel of French bread into my enormous bowl of lobster bisque, “do you know any of the guys who work for Uncle Lenny?”

  “Know them?” he said. “I went to the weddings of half of them. Danced with their wives.”

  “Yes, well. I mean some of the guys in the lower echelons.”

  “Why, do you know one? One of the kids?” He looked annoyed. “Where are you hanging around that you’re meeting that kind of kid?”

  “Well, gee, at the Symphony, the Carnegie Institute, the opera, the economics department, you know. Around.”

  “Look,” he said, the blood flowing into his ever-pink face. “You always profess such a disdain for the business of your family. And those are men who, yes, don’t have the education that you and I do, but who’ve been working hard all their lives, who have children and wives, and who make money to give it to their children and wives. And now you, Mr. Academic, you’re hanging around with punks. Greedy little morons who give their money to other greedy little morons.”

  “Okay, Dad, okay. I’m not hanging around with any of Uncle Lenny’s apes. I just asked if you knew them.”

  “Happily, no,” he said, in his best dry voice.

  We fell silent. I looked down from our perch in the highest and most expensive restaurant in Pittsburgh onto the lights of downtown, and the black wishbone of rivers and the stadium on the other shore, illuminated for a night game, and thought about old ball games for a minute or two.

  My father was the moneyman for the Maggio family (the Bechsteins, like the Sterns and all the Jewish crime families, having long since dwindled and been absorbed), but he also served as a kind of liaison between the people in the capital and those in Pittsburgh. Coming to Pittsburgh was pleasure as much as business for my father; he had met my mother at a wedding in Squirrel Hill, and so had a lot of family here; he knew its streets and crazed beltway system and suburbs and golf courses, and was a long-standing Pirates fan. I had been to Forbes Field as a tiny boy, and to Three Rivers Stadium a thousand times. The day I kept track of an entire nine innings in my scorebook, without making a single mistake, he bought me two hundred dollars’ worth of toys at Kaufmann’s, far more toys than I had ever wanted.

  “Pops, I met this new girl.”

  He drained his glass of tonic water.

  “Why do you make a face?” I said.

  “After Claire, why shouldn’t I? I’m sorry, Art.”

  “Sorry what?”

  “Well, I have to confess that I don’t—I don’t trust you anymore. Art, you’ve become a very strange young man.”

  “Dad.”

  “Last time we met, you spoke like an insane person. What was all that nonsense? It was upsetting to hear you talk that way. I felt terrible. I was very shaken.”

  My father had a way of looking as though he were about to weep but was making a superhuman effort to contain his tears, and it never failed to destroy me. I started to cry quietly as I chewed a wet and interminable piece of bread.

  “Dad.”

  “I don’t know what to think of you. I love you, of course, but—look what you’re doing this summer. What are you doing this summer? Working at that ridiculous bookstore. I can’t believe you’re satisfied by that kind of job.”

  “Dad.”

  Now that he really had me going, hiccuping and sniffling, so people turned around from their tables to look at this distinguished father speaking calmly to his wild-haired son in tears; now that he had reduced me to my childhood role and demonstrated to me just how far I had fallen in his esteem, he relented, tenderly, speaking as though I had just wrecked my bike or got beat up at school and he was softly applying the fragrant Band-Aid.

  “Now, what about this new girl?”

  “Oh, Dad,” I said.

  The waiter came with our dinners, and I cried a little bit longer, and we hardly said a word until he asked if I wanted to leave. Then we rode down in the rattling funicular, and I watched the lights in the office buildings downtown grow less and less spectacular as we descended, and my father put his hand briefly on my shoulder and then took it away.

  “You’d probably hate her, Pops; you’d probably hate everyone I know and everything I’m doing this summer”

  “Yes, I probably would,” said my father.

  “After I leave you I’m going to go to her house to sleep with her,” I said, and then we hit bottom and the sudden cessation of motion made me feel sick; my father said that he was not impressed.

  10

  SEX AND VIOLENCE

  JUNE WANED; STILL JANE Bellwether remained in New Mexico, calling Cleveland only once, to tell him they were through (“Does that make nine times or ten?” Cleveland asked her); by the twenty-ninth of June, Phlox and I were firmly ensconced in a “thing” that she was—prematurely, I felt—calling love, although I was beginning to wonder, and listened one night to “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” thinking: Oh, Smokey.

  Phlox had taken to coming over to the Terrace every night after I got off work, and we would sit on the steps smoking cigarettes, and sometimes marijuana, or would drink tequila, and just eat the limes and lick the salt from the tiny pouches of each other’s hands. One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering.

  “Why are you afraid?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Because vampires are so beautiful,” she said.

  Another time she wept bitterly for an hour because Arthur had been cruel to her at work that day and told her she looked fat in her plaid dress.

  “I know he’s just jealous of me,” she said. “Art, I know he wants you.”

  “Nah,” I said. “He likes you.”

  “Art!” she shouted. “Listen to me, and don’t baby me. I know he wants you, he wants to have sex with you, homosexual sex, disgusting homosexu
al sex with my Artichoke,” which was what she called me.

  “Phlox, what do you have against gays? I like all the gay guys I’ve met, Arthur especially, but all of his friends too. They’re nice guys.”

  “Sure they’re nice guys, they’re beautiful, and it’s a goddamn shame they’re a bunch of hideous fags. Some of them are more beautiful than I am.”

  I denied this.

  On the twenty-ninth of June, the night Phlox told me that she loved me, that Daniel was a fool and had an ugly purple penis and I need never worry about him again, she read to me from The Story of O, in the yellow light of my stoop. (I had read this book years before, before my mother died, finding it among her books, and I had failed to understand it. Only the scenes of more conventional sex had excited me, and the whips and owl masks and labial piercing I had found confusing, exotic, and disagreeable.) When Phlox read to me from the book, sitting up against the bricks with her knees to her chest, in a green leather miniskirt with no panties, I was shocked to discover what an evil book it was, although nicely written, and the thought that it was her favorite disturbed me. Nevertheless I felt the thrill of her voice and got an erection, which I could not disguise, and which, reaching over, she freed and relieved me of, and then without stopping her reading, she relieved herself.

  “That was wonderful,” she said when she had tired of reading.

  “I want to walk you home,” I said, and handed her sweater to her.

  “Art, I want to stay with you.”

  “I’d rather walk you home.”

  “Arthur, I love you,” she said.

  “I refuse to flog you,” I said.

  She burst out laughing, and told me what a silly boy I was. And, as my father might have put it, indeed I was.

  The next night Cleveland and Arthur and I got drunk and decided to go off to Cleveland’s family’s summer house in upstate New York. It would be just the three of us. At a still-sober point in the evening, Arthur began to berate Phlox, just barely. He looked terrific that evening, had been lying out in the sun, and he wore a turquoise cotton sweater that did alarming things to his blue eyes. He said that Phlox was nuts, and smiled, and that she would mess me up, and smiled again.