The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  When we went to bed that night it was loud and fast again, again she took control, and I found myself, inevitably perhaps, crouching on my elbows and knees—that way; I twisted and buried my face. She said, then, in an odd, clear voice which cut through everything, that she wished she could fuck me, that there must be a way, and something very primitive deep inside me awoke with a start. I rolled over, panting, but came to a definite halt. Phlox began to sob, and I wondered, unclenching my fists, if she was crying because the thing she’d wished for had frightened her, or because she could not have it, or if it was because she knew, now, that she could have it, because somehow I had been changed.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said, tumbling over onto the bed.

  “All right,” I said. I knelt beside her, ran my fingers through her faded hair. I said things that I forgot as soon as I said them. In ten minutes we were going at it again, and although I’d wanted it to be more gentle this time, had wanted to embrace, to linger, in no time at all it was exactly like wrestling; we bit and exclaimed, and I found myself twisting her into the pose I’d held just a little while before. I stared all the way down her glistening back to the tangle of her distant head.

  “Can I?” I said.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Can I?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’d better. Now.”

  I went to her cluttered vanity and scooped out a dollop of cold petroleum jelly, prepared everything Arthur had trained me so well to prepare, but immediately on entering that pinched, plain orifice of so little character, I lost heart, because I simply could not understand what I was about to do; it was neither backward nor forward, or else it was both at the same time, but it was too confusing for me to desire it anymore, and I said, “It’s all a mistake.”

  “It is not,” she said. “Go, ah! go. Slow, baby.” When we were through, and we’d collapsed, she said that it had hurt and it had felt all right, that it was frightening as sex could be, and I said that I knew it. We stopped talking. I felt her grow heavy, heard the slow gathering of her breath. I slipped out of bed and went to find my clothes. Dressing furtively in the darkness, pulling on each sock, I felt very happy, for one instant, as though I were rising at three in the morning for a fishing trip, and there were sandwiches and apples to be packed away. I decided not to leave a note.

  Halfway home under the clear, starry sky and the un-haloed streetlamps, I had yet to form a single coherent thought, a plan of action, when it came to me that I’d forgotten to ask Phlox about Cleveland and the thing he’d said or done that was strange, and I saw then that I didn’t really care. Like that, like a spasm, I spat and wished that the summer were over. Immediately afterward I felt ashamed; I covered my mouth as though I’d blasphemed or something. But a strong desire overtook me to go away, to take a plane out that morning, to go to Mexico, as Arthur had done once, and live irresponsibly in a little pink hotel; or to Italy, to sleep through blinding afternoons in a half fallen villa; or to vanish into the railroad wastes of North America. My only commerce would be with prostitutes and bartenders. I would send postcards without a return address.

  “No,” I said aloud, “don’t give up.” But I was still fantasizing halfheartedly about the places I might visit, and the simple life that I would lead in them, when I reached my front door and heard the telephone ringing inside.

  “How was Latrobe?” I said.

  “Been out?”

  “Yes, I’ve been—” I was on the point of lying, but I saw, for once and with disheartening clarity, the outcome of whatever stupid lie I might manage. I would only involve myself over again in all the tedious nonsense of juggling Arthur and Phlox. I looked at my watch, exhaled, and told him he’d better come over.

  “No,” he said, “I’ll meet you.”

  Arthur house-sat now for a poli-sci professor who lived up in the hills of north Oakland, and so we met roughly halfway, at the statue of Johann Sebastian Bach in front of the Carnegie Institute, not far from the Cloud Factory. It was cool for a summer night; I shivered, sorry I’d worn only a sweatshirt, sorry that we stood so far apart, on the sidewalk beneath the giant green Bach. I was sorry, too, that the air was cold between us, that even under the best of circumstances he could not just put his arm around me and hold me to him, because this was Pittsburgh and J.S. or somebody might see, and so we stood with our hands in our pockets, two young men struggling to be in love and about to have it out.

  “I slept with Phlox,” I said.

  “Oh, Jesus, let’s walk somewhere.” He’d dressed quickly; his sneakers didn’t match, his shirt was half-untucked—he’d already been to bed at least once before I answered my phone. And I have to admit that it was right then, as I blurted out what I’d just done, and his unshaven, stray-hair face creased with a kind of prissy annoyance, that I felt the first failure of the emotion I was about to profess.

  “How did it happen?”

  “How do you think?” I said, snapping because it looked as if things were going that way. “No, Arthur, I’m sorry; it happened very strangely, actually, and I don’t really get it at all.”

  We passed the bronze Shakespeare with his great domed head, the bronze Stephen Foster eternally serenaded by the pickaninny with the bronze banjo, and I saw that we would end up in our usual place high above the Lost Neighborhood, which we did, silently, taking up our usual slouches against the iron rail. The sky glowed and flashed orange, off toward the mills in the south, as if volcano gods were fighting there or, it seemed to me, as if the end of the world had begun—it was an orange so tortured and final.

  He took hold of my elbow, firmly, and turned me till I faced him. Again that day I expected to see anger, and again I was disappointed.

  “Art, don’t leave me,” he said, an unfamiliar look on his face, cheeks hollow, eyes rolling. I’d never seen his face reveal anything before. “I’ve been so afraid that this would happen. I knew when you weren’t home all night. I knew it.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “It was all a big accident. Or that is, she planned it. I fell into it. I can’t say what it really means. It was so strange tonight, Arthur.” My throat tightened. All the sexual battle and stress of the day, the confusion of my final bout with Phlox, the loveliness of her lacy bedroom, and the power of her face mounted within me and came spilling out. Arthur held out his fingers and lightly brushed my cheek.

  “What is it? Art. Come On. Don’t cry.”

  “I don’t know what I’m like anymore,” I said. “I do dumb things.”

  “Shh.”

  “Don’t ask me to choose. Please.”

  “I won’t,” he said, shortly, as though it cost him some effort. “Just don’t leave me.”

  I stopped crying. Everything seemed utterly upside down. The Arthur I thought I knew would be scorning me now, and ridiculing Phlox, and forcing me to admit that she’d suckered me. He would be forcing me to acknowledge that if I didn’t love him, Arthur F. Lecomte, with all the hip places he had been, the perfect manner of the life he led, his sarcastic brilliance, his hard amusement, and, most of all, the male company he could offer me, then I was a fool, a loser, and entirely my father’s obedient boy; cursed, doomed to lose the things my father had lost—art, love, integrity, and all that. A shift, another shift, had taken place. Somehow it was up to me now, and I wanted to know why.

  “Did something else happen to you today?” I said. “Something with Riri?”

  Arthur sat down on a step and looked down onto the miniature lights of the Lost Neighborhood.

  “I took this test,” he said. “I didn’t tell you. I took the foreign service exam. I failed. I knew when I came out of the room, really, but I got the letter this afternoon.”

  I sat beside him and put my arm across his shoulders.

  “So? You can take it again, can’t you?” I tried to think of when he must have taken it.

  “I’m twenty-five. I’m still in college. I’m queer. My lover is about to leave me for Deanna Durbin.” H
e threw a stone. “I’ve been chasing after the same things for a long time now.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You’re a sexual dilettante,” he said. “You have no idea.”

  We made love on the steps. I threw up. He walked me home, told me a bad joke, and we climbed into my narrow bed. In two hours there was daylight at the window and a Wedgwood sky.

  22

  THE BEAST THAT ATE CLEVELAND

  I IMAGINE IT WAS shortly before dinnertime on the twenty-third of August that Cleveland reentered the world of his earliest childhood, intent on doing it harm. Until just a few days before this, I think, he hadn’t set foot in Fox Chapel in years and years, not since the distant winter morning on which the Arnings had moved out to the country, and he’d sat in his little rubber boots and silken, pillowy snowsuit in the back seat of the family car, bewildered, watching the bare window of his bedroom disappear. Now his boots were of black leather, the air smelled like perfect lawns, and he, Evil Incarnate, knew exactly where he was going. He went slowly, keeping a light hand on the throttle so that the giant growls of his German engine wouldn’t draw too much notice. As though his opaque helmet were not disguise enough, he’d cut his hair short, had traded his glasses for a pair of contacts, his black jacket for a twill sport coat, and as he pulled off into the parking lot of a mock-Tudor shopping center whose rustic, pretty stores sold things of no practical use, potpourris, artificial eggs, duck-related merchandise, he did his best to look like the wayward, thrillhound son of a well-to-do Fox Chapel family—one of the local young black sheep who were always flipping over in their Italian cars on winding roads, vomiting on the golf courses at night, diving fully clothed and drunken into the runs and creeks—one of whom, really, he was. Only in my hands, he thought as he killed the engine, it goes further than simple bad behavior. It is an intellectual and moral program. It is the will to bigness.

  He shed his helmet, left his bike in a space around the back of the shopping center, near the Dumpsters, where Tudor ended and blank cinder block began. Then he stood for a moment, patting at his jacket. Gloves, flask, penlight, pocketknife, Poe. From the straps that held it to the saddle he drew a little crowbar and slid it under his watchband, up into his sleeve, until it jabbed at the soft crook of his arm.

  A wood began behind the shopping center, fairly dense with pin oak and brambles, shot through with tiny rills, but he knew that it held sudden clearings, it was passable, and that it continued for almost two miles until it stopped abruptly at a certain concrete wall whose dimensions, by now, he knew quite well. He grinned at the sight of the colonnade of trees before him, he dallied a minute more to enjoy the quick leap of his heart and the warmth that mounted in his stomach. Although he supposed it was a stupid thing to have done, he was what he was—so on the way over he’d stopped at a bar for two lucky shots of Jameson’s Irish whiskey, and now, drawing a hot half-inch from his own flask and contemplating the lovely, dark world he was about to enter, he was filled with alcoholic courage; with a habitual head toss, he started into the trees, twigs crunching underfoot; but he no longer owned his tossing long hair, and he rubbed at the bristly back of his head.

  The trip through the woods took him a little over an hour, so he had far more than enough time to think about what he was about to do, and anyway I think he loved the act of considering himself a jewel thief, like this: “I am a jewel thief”; for he was learning a profession, and, as with doctors, and priests, and the other few true professionals (people, that is, who are trained to recognize peril), merely pronouncing the words “jewel thief” served him as a kind of instantaneous reminder of his many skills and responsibilities, as a restorative slap. It jerked him into bleak, hungry readiness, like the snap of the wrist that frees the humming switchblade.

  Twice or three times the odd cry of a bird, the yell of a jay, would stop him dead, and he’d duck behind a tree for several seconds, watching, breathing. He wasn’t frightened by the many things that could go wrong in the natural course of a job, because these things were more or less the whole point, along with the proverbial fat wads of dough. But he’d been troubled, even mildly spooked, by his teacher Pete Areola’s uncharacteristic anxiety during the previous couple of days. Somebody had been telling Poon to watch his step, to keep a leash on his protégés, and although Punicki laughed and told Pete to tell Cleveland not to worry, he’d also set up elaborate precautions for the fencing later on that night. Areola, ex-Special Forces, trained to steal by the army and then set loose, said it was Frankie Breezy making vague, “probably bullshit” threats, but Cleveland had a dim suspicion that my father might be lurking somewhere behind them, as he clutched a tree and listened hard.

  When he drew near the house, however, his mind cleared again, his heart hardened, and he began to apply himself to his task. There was a young oak five or six feet from the base of the concrete wall; he grabbed its lowest limb and yanked himself up, then inched forward along the limb until he was almost level with the wall’s lip. He studied the house that stood not sixty feet from his already damp forehead. The bough rocked under his weight. It was a great brick house, red and hung with ivy, two dozen windows in the back alone, three chimneys. Areola had chosen it, after their sightseeing tour a few days before, because there appeared to be no guard dogs. Perhaps their last adventure with the snarling bitch in the back of the truck had been a near disaster, or perhaps she was no longer in heat; in any case, they were for the moment unprepared to deal with Dobermans. Cleveland loved dogs, of course, and would never have employed the poisoned wiener.

  All of the downstairs lights were on, all of the upper windows dark, as he’d hoped and expected—it was dinnertime, and Cleveland could see them, Dad, Mom, Junior, Sis, and Baby, sitting around the vast dining room table with their beautiful food, could see the uniformed maid disappear through swinging doors into the kitchen (glimpse of copper pots, flowery wallpaper), and he felt briefly wistful at the familiar sight of the father and the son, and the butter being passed in silence along the unbridgeable distance between them. He spat thick whiskey spit, then climbed out onto the top of the wall, squatting. He looked down along the wall’s inner face, to the grass by its foot, for signs that the perimeter was alarmed, though he knew that if there were an alarm system, it would not be activated, surely, at this hour of happiness and safety; but there were no such signs, and he let himself slowly down into the hostile territory of the well-groomed yard.

  Shrub to shrub he went, avoiding the swaths of light from the windows, which gathered now in the twilight and fell across the grass; avoiding the dining room; trying to decide which of the still-dark upstairs windows was the master bedroom. Master bedroom, he thought. The phrase reminded him for some reason of Jane’s parents, and as he scanned the dozen upstairs windows he permitted himself to engage in deep fantasy for a second or two. With a fat enough wad of dough, he would buy thirty feet of chrome Airstream camper and set out across the Fatherland with Jane, culminating their voyage at Mount Rushmore, where they would surpass Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint by doing the holy deed in the chapel of Teddy Roosevelt’s right ear. There it was! down at the opposite end of the house from the dining room—two thin, tall windows, nearly doors, behind a rail of spiraling wrought iron, about ten feet off the ground. They would be opened every morning, no doubt, for the master’s deeply satisfying survey of his domain.

  It was at this point that he began to wish he had a partner. Pete Areola had lost half a leg in a car accident six months before, and Cleveland, Areola said, was the first guy Poon had found who was even worth training. Punicki fenced only for the true artists and craftsmen of Pittsburgh jewel theft, of which there were perhaps four, or three. Now Cleveland needed someone to crouch and make a platform of his back, to lace hands together and give a boost. He ape-walked over to the dark window and stood beneath it, looking up.

  As he took another pull from his flask, he noticed that the window directly in front of him was open. Hey. He stuck his
head into a dim, empty room, library or study, big desk in the middle, on which burned a tiny lamp in the shape of a heron. The lamp threw its cold light just far enough for him to make out the thousand law books that lined the walls. He put on the gloves. As quietly as possible, he climbed into the library, which smelled of pipe, and then carried back out the thickest, largest books, the tomes. He intensely disliked cold, plutonian libraries like this one, and was actually glad to get outside again, to find himself at last rocking at the peak of the cairn of books, like Buster Keaton, with a firm grip on the wrought-iron rail. He pulled himself up.

  Drawing the slender crowbar from his sleeve now, he forced the window in the patient, incremental, silent way that Pete had taught him; then he was inside the cool, perfumed, silent, black bedroom; panting, with a taste of fire in his mouth from the whiskey that jostled in his gut, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then went to Mom’s vanity and took the chair. He wedged it, softly, against the door, pushing in the lock button. The important part was also the easiest and swiftest. Some of the watches and bracelets were just lying around like pennies; feeling like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, he swept them up, then went through the socks and panties in the antique dresser, the funereal jewel box, until he had himself two big handfuls of heirlooms and anniversary presents from the master.

  Something to put them in—he thought of using a sock, but decided on a pillowcase or sheet, and tiptoed over to the bed. On the left-hand night table was another gold bracelet—snik!—and an old blond doll, the kind with eyes that close for doll-like sleep when the rubber baby is laid on her back. He grinned, pulled the head off with a rather disturbing soft pop, and poured all the jewelry into the hollow body. It took him a grisly minute to get the head screwed in again; then he shook the weird maraca once, and, unable to resist, rewarded himself with another pull from the flask—he was, after all, under a good deal of stress—and it was thus that mighty Cleveland made, at last, one too many fine, brilliant demonstrations of his mighty nonchalance. He should have deferred the moment of exultant glee, left just a little sooner. As he dropped down onto the lawn with a thud that was as quiet as he could manage, he heard the first call of the sirens.