The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  “You introduced me to her,” I said.

  “This is true,” he said.

  He had been reading, in Spanish, the as-yet-untranslated new book by García Márquez, and he translated for me its rather terrible epigraph, which had impressed him.

  “‘Love is like falconry,’” he said. “Don’t you think that’s true, Cleveland?”

  “Never say love is like anything,” said Cleveland. “It isn’t.”

  I’d long ago noticed that it was Arthur’s habit to consult his wristwatch every five minutes. There was always some plan in the back of his mind, some itinerary extending far into the evening, which he would reveal to us only one step at a time. This evening he was particularly attentive to his wrist, and Cleveland, as usual, called him on it, in a way that I supposed had been part of their game for a long time. Arthur would glance quickly at his watch, and Cleveland would say, “What time is it, Arthur?” Five minutes later, when Arthur glanced again, Cleveland again asked what time it was, making Arthur look ridiculous, and again, and again, and each time Arthur blushed more deeply, until finally he laughed and said he had to leave.

  “And where are you going, Artie?” said Cleveland.

  “To Mass,” said Arthur.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “When was the last time you went to Mass?”

  “Last Sunday,” said Arthur. He left some money on the table, shook our hands, and went out.

  Cleveland and I drank until the bar closed. It was a hot night, and the ceiling fans ruffled our hair and tore the cigarette smoke into little scraps. Each bottle of Rolling Rock came to us pearled with condensation and trailing a streamer of cold steam. He told me stories of past years at the summer house, of the horse he’d ridden into a neighbor’s swimming pool, the Good Humor lady who’d taken his virginity. Then we talked about Frank O’Hara, and how he died, struck by a dune buggy, on Fire Island; Cleveland sat back in the booth, rolled his eyes upward, and recited.

  “‘Oh to be an angel (if there were any!),’” he said, “‘and go straight up into the sky and look around and then come down.’”

  He fell silent and his eyes grew kindly and drunken.

  “I like you, Bechstein,” he said, which made me blush, and I felt tears come to my eyes. “For Christ’s sake, don’t cry, Bechstein. I don’t like you that much. Let’s get some pickled eggs.” He ordered and proceeded to dispatch about twelve of the little beet-colored nodules, one by one. “As long as bars continue to serve pickled eggs,” he said, licking his fingers, “there is reason to hope.”

  When the waitress called Last Call, Cleveland said that the bar was very close to his father’s house, and that he would just go there to sleep tonight, instead of going all the way back to his own house.

  “There are no more buses,” he said, “and it’ll take you almost an hour to walk home. Why don’t you just sleep over. You can sleep downstairs. You’ll like it; it’s spooky.”

  Before she committed suicide, when he was seventeen, Cleveland Arning’s mother, a laughing woman, taught her son to joke and to ridicule. His father, tall, thin, cut his beard in a goatee and wore great red sideburns that ran up his otherwise bald temples. His name was also Cleveland, and although he did indeed have his own grim notions of what made a joke, he laughed only rarely, generally in the privacy of his own study. In the kitchen, Cleveland and his mother would listen to the inexplicable sound of his father’s laughter coming through the oaken door, and whatever story Cleveland had been telling to make her laugh would die on his lips. They would chew in silence, clatter the dishes into the sink, and go to their rooms. Cleveland senior was a psychiatrist.

  Cleveland told me, I now find, very little about his childhood. He once spoke of having lived in the countryside to the northwest of Pittsburgh, saying only, naturally, that he’d very often gotten into trouble. There was a bartender in one of his usual haunts who had been a neighbor in the country years before. “This is Charlie,” he said, introducing me one night. “His parents forbade me to set foot in their house ever again.” Yet despite the fact that I have few details, I have a clear sense of the strangeness of the Arning household—the taciturn, warped father, who took male lovers; the nervous mother, underweight, musical, struggling with her husband’s secret for as long as she could manage; Cleveland, bright, violent, already considering himself “doomed and wild” by age twelve; and his sister, Anna, the baby, her brother’s target and first fan.

  I visited the house only that one time, sleeping downstairs on the couch, and yet in the ten minutes I spent exploring the dim first floor at three o’clock that morning, alone, with only the sound of the toilet Cleveland had flushed somewhere in the enormous house, I felt the trouble, the tension of the place.

  The furnishings were rich, antique, and cold to the touch, even in late June: huge clocks, chairs with fabulously carved arms, old, evil-looking medical paraphernalia, and rugs that would not give under my stocking feet. I entered all the rooms I could find, wincing at every creak of the floor as though I were a burglar, and as I crossed each threshold I would ask myself, Is this the room? Which room would it have been? People usually do it in the bathroom. Or the garage. Cleveland, in fact, had never told me of his mother’s suicide, which happened eight, nine years before. I heard of it from Arthur, who hadn’t really wanted to tell me.

  In Dr. Arning’s study—how my chest tightened as I fingered the heavy light switch on his paneled wall!—there was one photograph, of Cleveland’s sister Anna, dressed in black, a diamond pendant, no smile. The room smelled of perfume, a man’s cologne perhaps, but terribly floral and green. Dr. Arning’s golden pens and marble desk implements lay in rows and columns across his enormous desk, which, in its size and in the weak lamplight, looked bare and malignant, the desk of Dr. Moreau.

  I wanted to stop to examine the titles of the million books on the shelves, but something pressed me, made me feel as though I had to hurry on before I was discovered, although I knew that the house was asleep and I had, if I desired, all night to satisfy my curiosity. I shivered in my light Hawaiian shirt and flipped off the light.

  After I had circled the immense domain of the ground floor, I came once again to the long lemon sofa onto which Cleveland had thrown a fuzzy blanket and a striped silk pillow for my head. I sat down. I pulled my socks off and lay backward, leaving on the lamp, staring up into the shade at the burning bulb until it blinded me. I turned away and watched the optical blobs of color float across the immaculate walls of the living room. I felt far from falling asleep, but drunk, drunk enough to stand and to walk down the dark wooden hallway barefoot.

  At the end of the hallway sat a mass of black iron grill-work with silver fittings, a cage worked with leaves and tendrils. Arthur had told me that Cleveland’s father had an elevator in the house. I experienced a brief but overwhelming urge to step in and ride to the upper level, where Cleveland slept, and Dr. Arning and his “friend.” The upper level! I turned around. A staircase rose on either side; I chose the left-hand set of steps and climbed, quietly, digging the joints of my toes into the soft red carpeting that led to the weird sleep of the Arning family.

  There were seven brown doors, three down the corridor to my left, four down the corridor to my right, all of them closed. Cleveland’s, the doctor’s, a bathroom, a closet, his mother’s? Anna’s, two closets? two bathrooms? I went left and stopped before the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. I put my ear to the gap and listened for the breathing of a sleeper, heard nothing, put my eye to the gap and looked for the glow of a clock face or radio dial, saw nothing. I leaned a little against the door and it swung open, noiselessly.

  I’d been looking into a part of the room where there was nothing to see, a blank wall. At the other side of the room, a large, milky window threw light across an empty white bed, a girl’s bed, a girl’s room, soft pale draperies and cushions, girlish posters on the walls. I stepped into Anna’s abandoned room and closed the door behind me. My heart pounded, and I di
d nothing but draw heavy breath for several moments. I felt safer and protected and yet still at risk, alone in a forbidden place. I felt ridiculous, also, as I panted and swallowed like a fugitive in a room lined with satin and photographs of infant cats, and unicorns. I laughed softly at her taste, and relaxed a little.

  Anna’s bed gave enormously under my weight. I leaned over to smell her pillows. I’d been expecting some kind of a girl smell, but the pillows merely smelled laundered, even faintly dusty, very cool to the tip of my nose.

  When Anna was twelve and Cleveland fifteen, the family, at the brink of disaster, took their yearly trip to the summer house that Cleveland’s father would buy a few months after Mrs. Arning’s death.

  The brother and sister pulled on their striped swimsuits and ran out into the lake, Cleveland yards ahead of Anna and heedless of her. The three years that separated them made a greater difference than they ever had before, and the quiet, angry boy wanted nothing to do with his rope-skipping sister, who adored him. He plunged into the green water and swam as fast as he could, leaving Anna to scream “Cleveland!” at the gravelly hem of the lake and to wipe the tears and snot from her face with her small hand. He surfaced some twenty yards away and trod water, the sun heating his shoulders and drops of water from his long hair cooling them. He watched his sister dance in disappointment and rage for a moment, feeling terrible guilt, before the feeling became too much and he grew angry instead, furious with her for not allowing him to be alone, for being a pest and a girl and the only person in the world who really liked him.

  In his anger he swam back to the shore and, without surfacing, grabbed Anna by her skinny knees and with a leap lifted her out of the water. At first Anna laughed and began to say “Whee,” but she caught sight of the look in his eye. The next moment she was underwater, his hand pressing down on her head hard. He had dunked her in the past and it always frightened her, but this time it was real and she panicked, thinking she was about to die. When he finally withdrew his murderous pushing hand she surfaced in a fury, screaming, crying, confused. She called him “fucker,” took up two small handfuls of silt, and threw them. They splattered across his chest in thin gray streaks. “Shit,” he said, and filled his own bigger fists with dirt and pebbles and hurled them at her outraged little face, where the smallest of small stones entered her eyes and blinded her. She fell over shrieking into the water, slapping wildly at her face and the air around her, while Cleveland, shouting, “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” stood in water up to his knees and in three seconds thought about the awfulness of his betrayal of his sister, and how much he hated her for having been there to accept his rage.

  Fortunately—so much more fortunately than I had any right to expect—I woke up on Anna’s bed at six-thirty the next morning and crept downstairs, taking an early inventory of my already full-blown hangover, and back onto the yellow sofa. At ten-thirty, Cleveland placed an icy Pepsi against my cheek and I woke up for the second time that day. As we walked shakily and in great thirst down to Oakland, where I had to start work at one o’clock, I asked a few innocent questions about the sister whose bed I’d slept in the night before, and he recounted the above story, albeit differently. Arthur later embellished it for me. Since Anna had recovered her sight completely after emergency surgery, Cleveland could now concentrate on the small details of being a lonely fifteen-year-old, and he made it, by dint of his genius for telling a story, a very funny story, and I laughed despite the pain in my head.

  That night I took Phlox to dinner at the Elbow Room, but my stomach still felt frail and I ate only spinach leaves while I watched her put away a bowl of chowder, a heap of tortellini, and a pretty little dish of ice cream.

  “We’ll only be gone a few days,” I said. “Absence makes the heart grow fronds, as my father says.”

  “But why can’t I come?” said Phlox. “It’s because Arthur hates me. Right?”

  “No, it’s because I hate you.” This did not go over well. “Come on, Phlox, no one hates you.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Like the big time,” I said. “Look, it’s just me and Cleveland and Arthur. Crude jokes, poker games, sports talk, boozy sentimentality—you know, boys’ stuff.”

  She frowned. I knew I was being too flip, but I felt lousy, and more than that, I think, I wanted to get away from her; to pause for a moment. I’d heard, somewhere in the past couple of days, the stealthy entrance of creepiness into my unsecured summer, a faint creaking of the woodwork, and I felt as though I ought to lie very still, not draw a breath, and listen for the something that might be there, for the next telltale footfall.

  11

  SEARCHLIGHTS AND GIANT WOMEN

  NEXT MORNING BEFORE SUNRISE, I sat in the backseat of the old Arning Barracuda, wiping flakes of doughnut glaze from my lips and struggling to appreciate the negligible effects of a single cup of coffee. Cleveland and Arthur sang along with an old John and Yoko cassette and pointed out the windmill-shaped restaurants, the car dealerships surmounted by giant plaster statues of bears and fat men, the gunshops and gospel billboards, that were the beloved landmarks on the way to Fredonia. I sang “Hail, Freedonia,” from the Marx Brothers movie. I hadn’t driven a long distance since coming, with all my belongings, from Washington to Pittsburgh to start school four years before, and had forgotten how much I enjoyed lying across the backseat of a car with my hair hanging out one window and my feet out the other, watching the phone poles pass, listening to music, the engine, the wind passing over the car.

  After we’d been twice through the Lennon and I’d slept, apparently, through Cleveland’s other cassette, there were only the sounds of the Barracuda and of Patsy Cline on the radio, coming in faintly from somewhere, and it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I watched happily the backs of my friends’ heads. We pulled into a Stop & Shop for more coffee, and then I felt like talking; I asked how long, exactly, had they been friends?

  “Nine years. We met in our first year at Central Catholic,” said Cleveland. “We found ourselves what you might call together apart.”

  “He means that everyone else hated us,” said Arthur.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Cleveland. “I simply noticed that we weren’t like any of the other boys in that excellent school.”

  “Central always looks to me like Santa’s Castle,” I said.

  “We weren’t like any of the other elves,” said Arthur.

  “Arthur, here, already had, I believe, some vague notion of the perverse and sinful sexual longings that would shortly make him as un-Catholic as one might conceivably be—”

  “And Cleveland was already drinking a six-pack of beer a day, and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. And reading every book on the Index librorum prohibitorum. And Cleveland,” said Arthur, turning to look sadly at his friend, but speaking with the same sarcastic tone, “wrote in those days.”

  “Yeah. Say, isn’t it too early for this discussion? Couldn’t we save it for such time as I am drunk enough to ignore it and fall asleep mid-reply? That reminds me,” he said, and without slowing he swerved the car off the small state highway and we stopped in the deserted parking lot of a grocery store, where Cleveland got out and went around to the trunk.

  “What’s in the trunk?” I asked Arthur, who yawned, stretched, and turned to face me, looking pink and unshaven.

  “Oblivion,” he said. “Oblivion is in the trunk.”

  Cleveland climbed back in with a six-pack from the cooler, and by the time we reached the house on the lake, he was well into his second green aluminum fist of Rolling Rock, and though his driving hadn’t really fallen apart yet, I was glad we weren’t going any farther. The road grew narrow and crooked, the trees grew denser, and to our left I began to make out, through rare gaps in the pine and sycamore, strips of silver lake, and the striped awnings of distant houses; soon we came to a gravel drive, to a cluster of rusted mailboxes like a row of tumbledown tenements, their red metal flags hoisted and falling at all angles. As we p
ulled, gravel popping, into the driveway, Cleveland stopped the car, threw it into park, and got out.

  “I’m going to walk,” he said. He slammed the door and set off, carrying a can of beer. Arthur and I sat a moment, watching him shamble toward the empty house, something determined yet wary in his tread. The engine began laboriously to idle. Three or four minutes passed. Arthur put his feet up on the dashboard.

  “Well?” I said.

  “He always does this,” said Arthur. “He’ll be back.”

  “You mean we just sit here and wait?”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Can’t you?” I scrambled over the seatback and settled in behind the steering wheel, which was warm in just two places, as though from the heat of Cleveland’s hands. “You really are a relic,” I said.

  “There have always been people willing to do my driving for me,” he said, shrugging, as I put the car in gear. “People like you.”

  Although Cleveland had said that his father visited it every other weekend, the summer house looked long abandoned. It was white wood, trimmed in blue, with a veranda that ran all the way around and a white rowboat rotting on its wild front lawn; this lawn, weedy and filled with gnats, began at the edge of the lakefront beach, surrounded the house, and then ended abruptly in a sagging, vine-covered slat fence at the treeline, as though it could barely withstand the encroachments of the forest around it—indeed, here and there amid the weeds, packs of saplings and even young trees were closing in. One of the front steps had come unnailed, the paint peeled from the white columns of the veranda, the bench of a broken porch glider dangled by a single chain under the wide front window, and standing on the threshold, I felt keenly aware of all the vacations that had been passed here over the last half century, all the ghostly cries of “A hummingbird!” “A meteor!” all the bitter sighs and campfires of a dozen vanished families.