The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  He put an apologetic hand on my knee, then pulled it away, and I felt filled with forgiveness, with the warm catch in his voice, and, having just exposed him at his manipulative worst—had he conceived of Phlox as some kind of punishment?—with a strange, airy manhood, as though we had just boxed. I tore off handfuls of grass and tossed them into the air.

  “Arthur,” I said, “why are you such a little Machiavelli?”

  He crushed the end of his cigarette into the grass, flicked it away, and seemed carefully to weigh the label, and to be amused by it.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he finally said. “My mother made me this way.”

  Horns honked, a cranked-up radio passed, the ducks, beat water and quacked. We looked at each other.

  “Let’s go swimming,” he said.

  The rich young couple, I was mildly surprised to discover, belonged to the same country club as Uncle Lenny Stern, at which they had been kind enough to inscribe Arthur as their guest. Years before, in the club dining room, during the reception that followed Davy Stern’s bar mitzvah, I had vomited vanilla mousse across my mother’s lavender dress. The pool was Olympic-size and filled with boisterous children. Women with scarves and rigid hair sat under red umbrellas that threw shadows across the women and across the thermoses, kids’ sunglasses, and stacks of fresh towels that lay on the white wire tops of the poolside tables; once an hour a whistle blew, children groaned, and the waters would grow calm, as the pool suffered a fifteen-minute invasion by pregnant women and small white infants. Families were all around us, without their men, and we lay beside each other on chaises longues, exchanging lazy sentences in the strong sunlight.

  From time to time I would glance over at him, stretched out with his eyes shut, his lashes glinting, his body almost bare. I had never before given a man’s body the regard I now gave his—but furtively, and through the flutter of a squint. I felt, I feel, almost as if I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. For one thing, each of the above-named parts was covered with thick blond hair, running to red-brown along the top of his bathing suit and on his chest. I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. I looked at him. He was in a sweat; his stomach was flat; there was hair on the back of his long, damp hand. And I looked also at his crotch, at that strange—that shaven—fist wrapped in slick blue Lycra. But his skin was the most strange, and the most difficult to keep my eyes from; it was dappled all over with tiny shadows, which gave it a look both soft and rough, as of suede or fine sand; and it seemed, stretched so tightly across his bones and muscle, as though it would never give, like a woman’s, to the pressure of my hand. He sat up suddenly, leaning on his elbows, face red, eyes like the water in the brilliant pool, and caught me looking at his skin. I was startled into thinking the sentence that I had all summer forbidden myself to think: I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him.

  “Yes?” he said, with half a smile.

  “Ha. Nothing. Um, I’ve—I’ve been here before,” I said. “A long time ago. I threw up on my mom at a bar mitzvah.” My mom. I had not said this in years. It just slipped out, in my confusion, and I bit my lip. Arthur twisted onto his side and propped himself up with one arm, looking eager.

  “And?”

  I rolled over onto my stomach, as much to conceal the swelling in the bathing suit I’d borrowed from him—he’d already glanced that way—as to avoid the current discussion. I spoke through the slats in my lounge chair, staring at the damp concrete of the deck.

  “And that’s all. Just another cheesy story about a nauseated Jew.”

  “I’ve heard them all,” he said, and after a long moment, he fell back into the path of the sunlight. I breathed out.

  In the pool he swam laps, with a polished, rather old-fashioned Australian crawl; I watched the little waves he made catch sunlight and shatter his submerged body into blue and white smithereens. Then I jumped in and thrust all the air from my lungs, so that I settled onto the cold bottom of the pool. I lay on my back and looked up, through the shifting window of water.

  We took the bus back to Shadyside and, at separate ends of the huge Weatherwoman House, changed into fresh clothes. We wore the fine shirts of the Weatherwoman’s husband. Arthur said he would walk me home. When we got to the Terrace, my phone was ringing again. I threw the door open and ran into the house, but when I put the receiver to my ear there was only the sound of an empty tunnel. I hung up.

  “Phlox,” we said.

  While Arthur went to the toilet, I took one of those giant canisters of Coke from the refrigerator and carried it out to the front steps. I swallowed a couple of blebby mouthfuls and watched a few little things happen: an ant, a faraway jet. When Arthur reappeared, he held in his fingers a marijuana cigarette.

  “Look what I found in my pack of cigarettes,” he said.

  We smoked it with damp fingers and talked blandly, looking mostly at the sky, which was blue as baby clothes. I felt as if I were talking to a friend from the fourth grade, when talking with a friend and sitting in the sun had felt different, had felt like this, more full of possibility than of any real matter. This made me wish to the point of tears that I were wearing sneakers. I had on leather young-man shoes, which were impossible. I stood up and could see the arches and battlements atop the Cathedral of Learning, away off in Oakland. Oh, I thought, the Emerald City in the twelfth century. The sun was so bright. I distinctly heard the click of a woman’s heels on the far sidewalk. Nowhere around me was there anything to remind me of the year—no new cars, no rock-and-roll music; only sky, red brick, cracked pavement, a breeze—and I underwent one of those time slips during which one can say to himself, “This is the summer of 1941,” and nothing, within him or without, can prove him wrong. The sunlight was the sunlight of forty years before. I looked at Arthur, shirtless, his hair still damp at the ends, the corners of his eyes pink with chlorine and grass, and the moment held. I touched his face. He tilted his cheek toward me, almost warily, one skeptical eyebrow raised. The telephone rang.

  “You’ve got to do something about that girl.” “Quiet. No, I’ll bet it’s my dad.” I ran, very clumsily, into the house. “He’s probably been calling every five minutes since nine o’clock this morning.” When I reached the phone I stood and watched it ring a couple of times more.

  “I don’t know if I can handle this.”

  “Let me do the talking.”

  “Hello? Pops. Hi. Oh, I’m swell. I’m dandy.” I heard Arthur say, “Uh oh.” “How’s Bethesda?”

  “Bethesda? Bethesda is a sweltering hell. Very muggy,” said my father, through the squeaks and clicks of the ionosphere. “Very humid. We’re all wearing Aqua-lungs here. And through her breathing apparatus your grandmother says you should write to her.”

  I started to laugh—a bit too hard, I told myself. He would know, he could tell.

  “You really should write. Listen, I won’t keep you, obviously you’re in the middle of something—”

  “Dad, no, not at all—”

  “Ha!” said Arthur.

  “I only wanted to tell you that I just found out I’ll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. Probably for a whole week. I should have several free meals. Maybe a movie.”

  I said I would look forward to it. After I’d hung up and come outside again, Arthur said. “What is this, high school? So what if he knows you’re stoned?”

  “I don’t know.” I sat heavily on the step.

  “You’re just afraid. You can’t do anything to upset him, or you’re cashless.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Look at it. You’re an economics major when obviously you should be making movies, or traveling, or reviewing restaurants, or something frivolous.”

  “Okay.”

  “You live in Pittsburgh when you sho
uld be living in New York or L.A. or Tokyo, or someplace frivolous.”

  “Okay.”

  “You dumped your crazy girlfriend and got yourself another one, who’s also frivolous but who at least wears lipstick and perfume and has a job. Your whole life is just one big ‘Thanks for the check, Dad.’ ”

  “Okay, okay.” For a few seconds I clenched my jaw and shook, wanted to punch his face, break his straight nose, but then I felt confused, and I laughed. “Okay.”

  All at once, I was insanely hungry.

  14

  MARJORIE

  PHLOX, AS IT TURNED out, was the first one over the Wall.

  I fretted all afternoon, after saying good-bye to Arthur, over how to describe my day to her, concocting and rehearsing various half-truths, but when she called that evening from her place, I didn’t even get the opportunity to say I’d been at work, because she told me she’d dropped by Boardwalk at lunchtime and seen the crayoned closed-due-to-fire sign Scotch-taped to the glass door.

  “So what did you do today?”

  “Oh, just hung around.”

  “Did you see Arthur?” She ticked a pencil or pen or her fingernails against the receiver. It was a nervous habit of hers.

  “Yes, I hung around with Arthur. For a little while.”

  “Ah.” There was a long silence. “Well, come over, Art, please,” she said at last. “Come quick.”

  “You sound so sultry when you say that.”

  “In the church of my heart the choir is on fire.”

  “Jesus, I’ll be right over.”

  “Good.”

  “Who was that, anyway?” I tried to keep track of her thousand quotes and citations, as though assembling a Bartlett’s of Phlox. My love of her (I say this despite Cleveland’s caveat) was like scholarship (not falconry)—an effort to master the loved one’s corpus, which, in Phlox’s case, was patchwork and vast as Africa.

  “Oh, some Russian said it. For me. Come.” With that, she hung up, just like in the movies.

  I walked the quiet dinnertime streets, thinking of a cold, simple meal and whispered sex, thinking, more guiltily, that I would have to even out my day with Arthur by speaking softly into Phlox’s ear all evening, but when I got to her apartment it was full of noise, and there was a heavy smell of beef and herbs in the air. The phonograph played Vivaldi full-blast, or some other twittering music, a kitchen appliance ground gravel in the kitchen, and Annette and two of her nurse friends had commandeered the living room and were splashing enormous daiquiries across the carpet, laughing. I yelled hello to them and then went into the kitchen, where Phlox squatted before the open oven, poking at something with a long fork.

  She wore a backless heliotrope minidress that threw an auspicious triangle of shadow across the tops of her thighs. She’d tied back her hair, and a few damp wisps that had come free clung to her cheeks. Before she saw me she drew a forearm across her slick brow, and blew an upward and largely ornamental jet of air that stirred her bangs. She was like a sweaty, smiling stoker in the hot engine room of an apartment in uproar. When we embraced, my hands slipped down her back and tumbled into her dress at the waist, and she squealed.

  “It’s crazy here,” I said. “You smell terrific.”

  “I smell like an athlete. I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that Annette was going to be entertaining this evening. Let me at least cut the stereo.”

  She went out and I opened every simmering pot and poked at the potatoes in the oven, tearing their crisp jackets with the tines of the fork. The meal was four or five months too early, perhaps—some kind of pot roast, a thick sheaf of asparagus, and baked potatoes the size of shoes—but I knew better than to suggest that perhaps a chef’s salad or stir-fried vegetables would have been more appropriate. Anyway, it was such a beguiling menu for the end of July, and even though I’d eaten lox and bagels not three hours before, I had this appetite. When Phlox cut the stereo, the white noise that filled the apartment dropped abruptly to the giggling blue-green of the waitresses’ conversation.

  I bounced around the kitchen, chattering, while she pulled everything together. I steered clear of the subject of Arthur, by embellishing, with a great deal of energy, the story of all the smoke at Boardwalk, and Phlox, deep in food thought, pretty well ignored me. My tale of fire carried us through until just after we sat down to eat in the breeze that came through the windows along the dinner table.

  “Oh, yeah, I talked to my father today,” I said without a thought. “He’s coming into town tomorrow. For a whole week.”

  “Oh, Art, how exciting! I want to meet him!”

  Why, that summer, was I so often the victim of astonishment?

  “Sure, maybe. Sure,” I said, unable to chew.

  “Well, I can, of course, can’t I?”

  “Well, it’s business, you know; he’ll be busy almost all the time. I just don’t know. It’s hard to say.” I began to recover myself.

  “Well, he doesn’t work at night, does he? We can have dinner.” She laid down her fork and stared at me.

  “We’ll have to see.”

  “I think you’re ashamed of me, Art Bechstein.”

  “Oh, Phlox, come on, I’m not ashamed of you.”

  “Then why don’t you want your father to meet me?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s just that—”

  “Why are you ashamed of me? What don’t you like about me?”

  “There’s nothing. I love you, you’re splendid.”

  “Then why can’t I meet your father?”

  Because nobody gets to meet my father!

  “I don’t want to fight about this.”

  “This isn’t a fight, Art; this is you being impossibly weird again.” One tear pooled and then spilled.

  “Phlox.” I reached across the table and ran my finger down the shining path. “Don’t cry. Please.”

  “I’ve stopped. Okay.” She picked up her fork, sniffed once. “Forget it.”

  “Can you just understand that it has nothing—”

  “It’s all right. Forget it.”

  We worked our jaws in silence.

  Tuesday night, the downtown bus was full of kids headed to the Warner for the opening of a new science fiction movie, a mutational romance that later went on to become a sensation. (I saw it twice: once with Phlox and once not with Phlox.) The bus’s air-conditioning had failed, and I was uncomfortable in my sport coat and tie; grit and exhaust blew in through the rattling open window.

  “The bloom on my cheek has withered and faded,” said Phlox.

  I looked at her face, and saw, through her makeup, traces of unmistakable bloom. I said so, and she smiled, pensively.

  “Art, is your father one of those silly fathers?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Does he drink a lot, talk about money, get angry, tell dirty jokes, and laugh loud?”

  She has just described my Uncle Lenny and his close friends Eddie “Bubba” Martino and Jules “Gloves” Goldman (a distant relative). “No, my father is a serious guy,” I said. “He drinks only at weddings. He isn’t vulgar. He hardly ever laughs. He jokes a lot, though. He’s funnier than I am.”

  “Then how can he be a serious guy?”

  “All Jewish comedians are serious guys.”

  “What about the Marx Brothers?”

  “The Marx Brothers were very serious guys.”

  “You’re not a serious guy.”

  “Well, I’m not funny,” I said. I swallowed. “I’m nervous.”

  She laid her fingers against my sleeve. We were to meet at my father’s favorite Italian restaurant. I’d listened for a hint of wariness in his voice when I asked if I might bring Phlox along, but he said “Of course,” very gamely. Phlox would be the first acquaintance of mine since Claire actually to meet my father—and Claire had met him just twice, the first time bravely and miserably, and the second time miserably. I could hardly recall what eating in a restaurant with my father and a third per
son was like, but I had vague, sweet memories, from years before, of my father being hugely entertaining at birthday parties in pizza parlors and on miniature golf courses. I might have been even more nervous than I was (I certainly had the capacity), but we ate in this restaurant together so often, my father and I, that I knew it would be a comfort at least to be there, in the old red darkness. An unfamiliar restaurant can be a very disorienting thing.

  Phlox and I arrived only two minutes late, and came with a sigh into the cool and the garlic. I spotted my father at the table—halfway back, toward the toilets and the cigarette machine—that we had come, over the years, to think of as our table. The first thing I noticed was that his heavy face was even more pink than usual, almost red, and I remembered his saying that he’d lately begun to reclaim the garden gone wild in my grandmother’s backyard. He had on a beautiful beige summer suit, with a salmon tie. I knew that Phlox would find him good-looking. “Tsk,” I said; he looked so handsome and large.

  My father stood for her and took her hand, the gleam in his eye growing more distinct as he pronounced her floral name, which amused him, I could see, as much as it once had me; he admired her dress (the blue-and-white flowered one she’d worn on our first night together) and smiled a delighted, paternal smile; he said something that made her laugh, right off. All this civility meant nothing, of course. He was an extremely civil man. I wouldn’t know what he thought of her until tomorrow. We lifted our menus and complained over their gilt tops about the hot weather. My eyes flitted blindly across the cirrate names of pastas; I have never been able to read a menu and talk at the same time. I managed to maneuver my father and Phlox into a conversation about the library, and took advantage of these thirty seconds to select ravioli filled with sausage. My father ordered the same.

  He turned to Phlox and made a grave face. “Is Art polite with you?”

  “Hmm. Oh, yes, unfailingly.”

  My father lifted his eyebrows, smiled, and turned bright red. “Ah,” he said.

  We ordered, and the waiter expertly spilled a little red wine into each of our glasses, and my father talked, and the food came, and my father talked some more. Over the minestrone and salads, he put me through one long moment of heartbreak, by telling Phlox about a memorable Sunday at Forbes Field with my mother and my infant self—a very old, very pretty story that raised goose bumps along my arms. Phlox didn’t take her eyes off him. She asked short, tactful, and very basic questions about my mother. What was her hair color? Did I look like her? What were her virtues and rewards? Didn’t she just love her boy? After each question my father would look at me, puzzled, and I would watch my food. You idiot, I thought, you should have known this would happen.