The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  “Wait till I get some money. Then we can go anywhere. We can buy a trailer.”

  “You’ll never get any money,” said Jane. She shook the dressing, then dumped it onto the salad. “Or will you?”

  I watched Cleveland’s face, which revealed nothing, but when I turned back to Jane, she was staring directly at me, and I realized that I was blushing.

  “That’s a beautiful salad,” I said.

  “Well, let’s eat it, Art,” she said. “Come on, Cleveland, Arthur. Come eat some vegetables.”

  After lunch, to my surprise, Jane asked me to walk into town with her. Cleveland smiled, woodenly, and raised his can of beer to me; evidently she had warned him that she planned to do this.

  “I can give you only glowing reports of his behavior, Jane,” I said.

  I put on my tennis shoes, trying to get up the nerve to decline her invitation. I had seen it coming at lunch—she knew something, she had heard something, she was worried about Cleveland. Arthur came into the living room, carrying a book by Manuel Puig, with a long Spanish title. He was always in love with some new Latin American writer or other.

  “Where are you guys going?” he said, looking at Cleveland.

  “Town,” said Jane. “Need anything?”

  “Can I come?”

  “You have to keep Cleveland company.”

  “You can come,” I said.

  Arthur looked at Cleveland again.

  “No, that’s okay,” he said. “I wanted to read.”

  Jane went to the door; I stood for a few seconds, embarrassed at having been singled out by Jane, and suddenly afraid to talk to her. But when I got outside, the Sunday was in full bloom, you could smell the lake, clouds blew quickly across the sun. I jumped up and down a few times, feeling the give of the dirt beneath my feet.

  “Isn’t this a nice place?” said Jane. “Next time you should bring Phlox.”

  “If I’d known you were coming, I would have.”

  “I’m not scolding you. I know why you guys came here.”

  “Good,” I said. “I know why you came here too.”

  “Good. Look. Way up there, a vulture! I saw a lot of vultures down in New Mexico. Aren’t they beautiful!”

  “I don’t think they have vultures in New York,” I said.

  “They have vultures everywhere they have food chains,” she said. “This way.” We walked down the gravel drive, to the mailboxes, but, instead of taking the cracked old blacktop road, she pointed to a dirt path that led up the roadbank and away in the opposite direction from the house. “It’s shorter,” she said. We walked through skunk cabbage, Queen Anne’s lace, cataracts of honeysuckle; she picked up a tree branch and hacked lazily at the ivy and brambles that overgrew the path. Stopping for a moment, she uprooted a frail stalk of Queen Anne’s lace and turned it upside down, holding its thick brown root up to my face.

  “Smell that,” she said. “It’s a wild carrot.”

  “Mmm,” I said, inhaling an odor of dirt and soup broth.

  I felt as though I were a vacationing child again, walking with some older cousin. When we came alongside a tiny rill, she pulled me to it and knelt down beside the sparkling water. I found a twig and broke it in two, feeling a little self-conscious but willing to try to relax.

  “Let’s race,” I said. We tossed our little boats and watched them bob until they disappeared from view. Then she recovered her alpenstock and we set off again, until we came to a place where the creek was wider, and a plain wooden bridge took you across. We leaned over the low rail for a minute.

  “Let’s spit,” I said. We spat. It was amusing, and we spat again. I was still laughing when she took hold of my wrist, tears in her eyes, and we were no longer two kids on a nature walk. I was trapped.

  “Art,” she said. “I know you know. Tell me what Cleveland is doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I ran into this sleazy friend of Cleveland’s, Dave Stern.”

  “He’s my cousin,” I said.

  “I’m sorry; he isn’t really all that sleazy.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “He isn’t my real cousin. What did he say?”

  She kept herself from crying; she wiped a hand across her forehead, blew the hair from her eyes, and then started off again. Her pink plaid shift lifted as she ran a few steps, then she stopped and waited for me.

  “He didn’t say anything, really. Just hinted. I could tell he was trying to bug me. He said Cleveland was working for his father. So I asked him what his father did.”

  “And he said?”

  “He said, ‘My father makes deals.’”

  “And then he laughed like a big donkey.”

  “Tell me,” she said. Three syllables.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It sounded so much like a lie that I bit my lip. “Did you ask Cleveland?”

  “He said to ask you.” She stopped and brought her chin up to mine, fixing me with her eyes, and I could feel her next words on my face. “So tell me.”

  “He said to ask me?” Was he testing me? Did he actually think that I might tell her the truth? “He’s jerking you around. I have no idea what Lenny Stern does.”

  “Lenny Stern?” she said.

  “He’s kind of my uncle.”

  “Is he a drug dealer? Is Cleveland dealing drugs?”

  I was glad for the opportunity to tell the truth.

  “No,” I said. “I know that, anyway.”

  She looked relieved despite herself, despite the fact that she knew she should still worry.

  “Well, as long as you know that,” she said, and she stepped away from me and looked at me very carefully. She knew that I had lied to her, and although she chose to believe me, she never entirely trusted me again.

  When we got back, Jane and Cleveland started drinking, and Arthur and I watched them fight for the rest of the afternoon. For a while I tried, without saying anything, to let Cleveland know that I had not ratted. He ignored me and seemed to be feeling fine. He stood up, inhaled deeply, and cried, “Ah, the sweet piss odor of cedar!” Eventually we just tried to stay out of their way. Still we kept coming upon them kissing within the narrow triangle made by two open doors, in the hall, or in the shadow of the chestnut that overhung the front yard. At sundown we laughed at their unlikely silhouettes moving side by side along the beach. We stood by the open door, leaning against opposite jambs and smoking. Then we stopped laughing. I envied them the hands in the back pockets of each other’s jeans, and I envied them their history, the plain and the frantic days, the simple length of years behind them.

  “No matter how long I know you guys, I’ll never be able to catch up.”

  The cigarette hung slack from Arthur’s peeling lower lip, and I saw that he’d had his own reasons for suddenly growing quiet.

  “Catch up on what?” His Kool jiggled as he spoke.

  “The time. All the days and evenings like this one.”

  “Ah.” He smiled very faintly.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Actually, I was just thinking that seeing Cleveland and Jane together again makes me feel tired. You know, all the days and evenings like this one. But it can’t last much longer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—nothing. Here they come.” He flicked the end of his cigarette in their direction with an exaggeratedly formal upswing of his arm, as though firing off a salute, or sending up a flare.

  12

  THE EVIL LOVE NURSE

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the city, I was glad, alarmingly glad, to see Phlox again. At dinnertime that Monday, she met me on the hot pavement in front of Boardwalk Books, and without pausing to think, I lifted her and swung her and kissed her, through all three hundred and sixty degrees, like a soldier and his girl. We got some applause. I gathered in my fists the thin, rough cotton at the waist of her sundress, and squeezed, pressing her hips to mine. We talked a lot of nonsense and headed for the Wok Inn, heads together, feet apart, leaning i
nto each other like the summit of a house of cards. I asked about the new auburn streaks in her hair.

  “Sun and lemons,” she said. “You wear a loose-weave straw hat and draw some strands of hair through the holes. Then you juice the strands. I spent a lonely weekend juicing myself.”

  “Same here. That’s from Cosmo, that thing with the lemons,” I said. “I read about it in your bathroom the other morning.”

  “You read my Cosmo?”

  “I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions.”

  “How did I do?”

  “You cheated,” I said.

  We passed a thrift shop, its window full of battered no-head mannequins wearing sequined gowns, of old toasters, and of lamps whose bases were little Spanish galleons. In one corner of the window was a flat, multicolored box.

  “Twister!” said Phlox. “Oh, Art, let’s buy it. Just imagine.”

  She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the store. The saleswoman retrieved the game from the window for us, and showed us that it was intact; the spinner still spun and the game mat was fairly clean. At dinner it lay under the table, tilted against my foot and hers, and, first as we continued our happy, empty conversation, then as I summarized the weekend at the summer house, the Twister box stirred and tickled me with each kick of her restless ankle.

  In the living room of her apartment, we shoved aside chairs and the coffee table and spread the plastic mat across her rug. Its primary-colored spots, and the off-kilter, go-go red letters that spelled out the word “Twister!” at its ends, brought back a flood of memories of 1960s birthday parties on rainy Saturdays in finished basements. Phlox hopped off to her bedroom, to “peel away the confining raiment of civilization,” as she put it, and I sat down on the floor and unlaced my sneakers. An odd contentment came over me. Although the used Sears furniture, the fake Renoir, the cat statue, et cetera, still seemed kind of ugly and in bad taste, I discovered I had made one of those common aesthetic efforts that consists of just swallowing an entire system of bad taste—Las Vegas, or a bowling alley, or Jerry Lewis movies—and then finding it beautiful and fun.

  In a way, I thought, I had done the same thing with Phlox herself. Everything about her that was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui; her overdone endearments and makeup; all that was in questionable taste and might have embarrassed me or made me snicker, I had come to accept entirely, to look for and even to encourage. She delighted me as did bouffant hairdos and Elvis Presley art. When she came out of her bedroom dressed in a nylon kimono and huge slippers of turquoise fur, I was almost dizzy with appreciation, and the gaudy plastic Twister mat at my feet seemed to be the very matrix, the printed plan, of everything I liked about her.

  “Who’s going to spin?” I said. “Is Annette home?” This was Phlox’s roommate, a big, loud, attractive nurse, the vagaries of whose complicated work schedule I was never able to master.

  “Nope. We’ll have to keep the spinner here beside us and trade off.”

  I crawled around to the other side of the game and sat on my haunches, as did Phlox. We faced each other across the mat for one ceremonial moment. Then she flicked the black plastic arm of the spinner.

  “Right hand blue,” she said.

  I leaned in and put my right hand in the center of a blue spot. She did the same, and as she fell slightly forward, the folds of her kimono parted, and her hair tumbled down over her bowed head. I peered into the shadows of her robe, through the spaces in her swaying two-tone hair. She spun again.

  “Right foot green.”

  This put us both half on the mat and half off. The blue and green rows were closer to me than to her; I sat in a kind of elongated crouch, my right hand and foot on the mat, one behind the other, but Phlox had to come all the way across, her right foot in its furry slipper placed in front of her right hand. She lifted her shiny left leg a few inches into the air to help complete her reach, and wobbled for a few moments, before falling onto her side.

  “You lose,” I said, laughing, but she said it didn’t count, and slid the spinner over to me before hoisting herself forward again, the soft skin of her lifted thigh shaking with effort. I spun.

  “Left foot blue.”

  Since her right hand lay upon the blue spot where it would have been most convenient for me to place my left foot, and since she beat me to the second-best spot, beside my right hand, I was forced to run my left leg through the triangle formed by her right leg and arm, and I felt the muted contact of my left thigh in blue jeans against her bare ankle. We were on three points now, tilted forward, and our heads drew alongside each other, ears kissing. Her deep and Italian laugh, close to my ear, seemed to issue from that darkness within the parting of her warm kimono, and I felt the summit and base of my spine begin to trade anxious messages. I shifted my hips and spun again.

  “Right hand yellow.”

  The balance moved to her side of the mat; she dropped backward, right hand behind her, and I found myself almost atop her, laughing now too, her swinging hair so near my mouth that I opened up and chewed on the nearest stray ends, which crunched strangely, then fell from my lips and hung moistened and clinging to one another like the tips of little paintbrushes.

  “Spin,” she said.

  “I’m spinning.”

  She watched me, her mouth pursed but her eyes ready to start laughing again, and then, with a sweet flex of the muscles of her face, she bit her lower lip and looked worried, as though she thought she might collapse. I spun again, with my left hand, which remained free for just one more second.

  “Left hand green.”

  I went for the best spot, but she, going out of her way, wrenched her body into my path and forced me to go under both of her thighs with my left arm, and I had to bend my upper body around backward. I found myself looking up into the fragrant crook of her underarm, my head cradled between her hip and ribs. My fingers strained to touch the green spot, and my thighs trembled. I felt pain in my knees and shoulders. Somehow she had managed to remain upright. She laughed at my shaking, four-way struggle to keep from falling, but suddenly I was giving it everything I had.

  “You spin,” I said, teeth clenched.

  “I can’t.”

  “Spin, damn it, spin, spin it, come on.” The contorted hold on my right foot on that green spot began to give.

  “I can’t.”

  “Phlox!” I let my head drop against the smooth nylon along her thigh. The Opium and sweat hurried out from her shaking breast. I had an erection—pardon me for once again mentioning the condition of my penis—and it labored against the cotton walls of its lonely cell. I felt my fingers begin to slide.

  The telephone rang, once, twice, three times.

  “Fall,” she said. She leaned down, arching like a bird’s her long neck, and kissed my lips.

  “No.” My slippery feet and hands jerked across the plastic, making quick and telltale squeaks. She bit the tip of my nose.

  “Fall!”

  I fell, at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.

  During the first weeks of July my life settled into a pattern, which is how one knows that it is July. Nights I spent at Phlox’s apartment, days at Boardwalk Books, and evenings alternately in the company of Cleveland and Arthur, or of the Evil Love Nurse, as Cleveland had lately taken to calling Phlox. Some compulsiveness inherited from my father, and also a kind of unnecessary delicacy, had always driven me to keep friends separate, to shun group excursions, but for this calm couple of weeks at the eye of the summer I felt free of the guilt that usually accompanied my juggling of friendships, and free of the sense of duplicity that went along with pushing the people I loved into separate corners of my life, and once in a while Phlox, Arthur, and I would eat our lunches on the same patch of grass.

  Cleveland passed most of his nights with Jane. For years she had maintained a fictitious friend
named Katherine Tracy, an artistic, unbalanced girl who would occasionally attempt suicide, or fall seriously ill with colitis, anorexia, shingles, heartbreak, piles. During these times, Katherine Tracy required attention and constant company, and Dr. and Mrs. Bellwether, who had grown rather fond of the diffident, intensely self-conscious Katherine over the years, always gave their sympathetic approval to Jane’s spending a few days out of the house to help care for Katherine, who had this neurotic fear of telephones and refused to own one. What Cleveland did with his days I was shortly to discover.

  As for Arthur, the beginning of July brought two final exams in his summer-school classes, and a bad case of scabies, which, aside from herpes, was the worst venereal affliction anyone could imagine in those days. It kept him at home most of the time, studying and smelling of Kwell. I felt no pressure to commit myself more to one part of my life than to the other. Phlox (who sensed sooner than I did that she and Arthur were becoming irreconcilable, who perhaps had never really liked Arthur at all—in fact, she once said, “I never like boys; it’s love or it’s hate”) and Arthur indeed ruined the one evening on which the five of us did go out together, after they had destroyed the afternoon that preceded it.

  The evening began, once again, with a vision seen through the big front windows of Boardwalk Books. About fifteen minutes before I expected Phlox, Arthur, Cleveland, and Jane to come collect me, they went down the sidewalk past the shop, and there was one long moment in which I noted but did not recognize them. They were two and two.

  The pair of women came first, one strangely dressed, in pied clothes of three or four eras, talking and examining the wrist and bracelet of the other, who wore a candy-striped skirt and bright yellow sweater. In the wind, their hair trailed from their heads like short scarves, and their faces looked cynical and gay. The two men followed behind, one with a great black lion head and black boots, and the other in white Stan Smiths, looking flushed and wealthy and bathed in sunlight, and each holding his cigarette in a different fashion, the heavy man with a negligent looseness, the thin man pointedly, wildly, as though the cigarette were a tool of speech. My God! I thought, in that spinning instant before they turned and waved to me. Who are those beautiful people?