The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  “Hey! Art! What are you saying? You been conked on the head, honey. Your father didn’t have nothing to do with it. Your friend, poor guy, I don’t know, he was a beginner, he got careless. He brought the heat down on himself.” He pulled intently on his ear.

  “Lenny, I’m here in the hospital with a broken head. I’m in pain, Uncle Lenny; please don’t lie to me.” I knew him well enough to know that an appeal from suffering might have some effect. Aunt Elaine, who complained mercilessly of migraines, gallstones, rheumatism, cramps, had transformed her husband over the years into a kind of human palliative; all of his other appetites, for cash, domination, a famous name, had long ago found satisfaction, borne their admirable fruit, and the lone desire left him—doomed to disappointment in his Florida of the ancient—was that everyone should get better.

  “Who called the police on him?” I said, and groaned.

  “Oh, my. Who knows? The guy he robbed, probably.” His long lobe continued to occupy him, but I could see I had him worried. I attempted another groan, and found myself, for a few seconds, unable to stop.

  “My God, Art, I should call the nurse?”

  “I’m okay. Just tell me. Cleveland said my father set him up. Did he?”

  “Art, look, your father’ll be here any minute; you can ask him all the questions you want, and everything. I’ll call the nurse, she’ll get you a pill.” He struggled out of his chair, then looked at me, face twisted as though he were imagining the pain in my head, his hands palm up and helpless before him. “Art, he was only looking out for you. He didn’t like it you were mixed up with the wrong people. He was mad, I guess. Yeah, he was really furious. Jesus, you should of heard him on the telephone; I had to keep the thing this far from my ear. Look, you know how he is about you ever since, I mean, ever since…”

  I sat forward, all the pain flown away, and reached out to grab him by the nubby sleeve of his sweater, as Cleveland would have done.

  “Ever since what, Lenny? They killed my mother instead of him?” For an instant this seemed to explain everything, and then, abruptly, ceased.

  Lenny backed toward the door, sad and alert, suntanned and old.

  “I’m going to get your Aunt Elaine,” he said, word by slow word, as though I were waving a crazy gun around. “All right? You wait here. I’m going out now.”

  “What happened to my mother, Lenny?” What happened to my father? What happened to me?

  He went out. The pain in my head receded before the mounting uproar in my stomach. I pressed the call button, remembering despite everything to wonder if Annette was my nurse, but it was an older woman who swept in, looking crisp and happy, cap perched upon her head like a stuffed dove.

  “I’m going to be sick,” I said, and was, though there was very little inside me. I lay back on the crackling sheets.

  “I won’t be able to see anyone today,” I said, accepting a glass of sweet water. “I don’t feel very well at all.”

  My valiant nurse (whom I now, belatedly, thank—a kiss upon each of your lined cheeks, Eleanor Colletti, R.N.) fought off intense outbursts of paternal concern and gladioli until the first set of visiting hours was over, although each time I heard his high, soft, contrite voice in the hallway I was terribly tempted to relent, since my inclination, as I have said before, was always to accept apologies, which feed on nostalgia. Throughout the afternoon a thunderstorm came tumbling and spilling against my window, as I heard my father plead and hector and sigh; I watched the door to my room remain firmly shut and ached for that return of everything to its previous condition which is the apology’s false promise. But I knew that if he stayed long enough, it would be I who ended up apologizing, which was something—and this is exactly how I put it to myself—that Cleveland would never do. At seven o’clock Nurse Colletti, her jaw grimly set, came in to say my father had gone, and with him the bouquet. She blew upward at a stray gray lock.

  It was, in fact, this continual demand of myself to think as my dead friend had thought that finally led me out of bed and to the tiny closet of my room, where I found my clothes, my battle dress. I dressed slowly, among the faint rattle and ring of hangers, feeling weak and sad in my sad uniform, found my wristwatch, my wallet, my keys, crept out of my room and into the elevator. I informally checked myself out of the hospital, which was not too difficult to do at seven-thirty, and caught a bus back to Squirrel Hill.

  Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the after shower air, can be, in the wake of a catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful routine. I watched, among the forty hot, plain people, a mother brush her daughter’s hair into ponytails wrapped kindly and tight with pink elastic bolos, and by the time I pulled the bell cord for the Terrace stop, I knew that everything would be all right, and that soon, very soon, I was going to be able to cry.

  There was no mail in my mailbox; I came in the door and found Arthur sitting on my sofa, looking at a magazine, his large plaid suitcase on the floor in front of him. He looked ashen and sleepless. A cigarette trembled in his thin fingers. I went to him, we embraced, we wept, wet each other’s shoulders and throats, wiped our streaming noses a hundred times.

  “I have a problem,” he said at last, sniffling. I felt his shoulders tense suddenly. “And it’s your fault, in a way.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Some of your father’s associates came to see me today. At my mother’s.” Through the paleness and shadow of his face there was a hint of his usual wry expression. He could still see the joke. “You never told me you were such a, well, such a scion,” he said.

  “What do you mean? What did they want?”

  He gestured toward the great valise.

  “They wanted me to know I was lucky they didn’t tear off my pretty fag face, for one thing. They requested that I leave town.”

  “How did they—what are you doing?”

  “I’m leaving town. I’m going to New York. I’m just staying long enough to say good-bye to you and clean out my bank account. Can I spend the night here?” He attempted a smile. “Is it safe?”

  “You don’t have to leave town.”

  “Oh, no? Is there something you can do about it?”

  I thought a moment.

  “No,” I said, “there isn’t.”

  I gave myself a moment to feel alarm at my father’s discovery, but none came. “How did they— Oh. The letter.”

  “I believe that’s it,” he said.

  “It was on him when he—when they found him? Why?”

  “What was it?”

  “A letter from Phlox. A very distraught one.”

  “Maybe he kept it around for laughs.”

  I had an idea and stood up, looking about my summer apartment at all the boxes I had never opened, all the piles I had formed.

  “I guess,” I said, “I guess there’s going to be. Well. A funeral. So. Aren’t you going to stay for it?”

  Arthur stared into his lap. I saw the color mount along his neck, up to the pink tips of his ears, but he was not blushing.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think that I am. All funerals are stupid, but Cleveland’s will be the most stupid funeral in the world.”

  “I want to go.”

  “Fine,” he said, without looking up. “Let me know how it is.”

  “I mean, I want to go with you.”

  There was a pause. He raised his face to me.

  “I’m surprised,” he said, but of course he didn’t look it at all. There were only his even, bright gaze and the slight arch of his left eyebrow. “I thought you were gathering around you the tattered shreds of your heterosexuality.”

  I went to sit beside him again, thigh to thigh on the little couch.

  “Well, I don’t know. I might be. Can I go with you, anyway?”
<
br />   “I was thinking maybe Spain,” he said.

  Perhaps it was foolish to be afraid, but I packed a bag too, and we spent the night at a hotel; and perhaps it was foolish not to be more afraid, for we took a room at the Duquesne, under the name of Saunders. The dim, faintly humming corridors, the motionless drapes on the window, reminded me of my last visit to the hotel, with Cleveland; everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he’d left the whole world to me in his will. By the time I slid between the fragrant sheets of the day’s second foreign bed, I was far too aching, aggrieved, too set adrift, to do anything but fall immediately into uneasy sleep, and dream of my father, shouting.

  Among the few things I took with me—clothes, passport, Swiss Army knife, three thousand ancient, inviolate bar mitzvah dollars converted into slick, ethereal blue traveler’s checks—were a photograph of Phlox, and a gold lamé sock that she left in my bathroom, sometime in July: I have often thought, since, that I know I loved Cleveland and Arthur, because they changed me; I know that Arthur lies behind the kindly, absent distance I maintain from other people, that behind each sudden, shocking breach of it lies Cleveland; I have from them my vocabulary, my dress, my love of idle talk. I find in myself no ready trace of Phlox, however; no habit, hobby, fashion, or phrase, and for a long time I wondered if I had loved her or not. But as I have found that I may fall quite completely in love with a man—kiss, weep, give gifts;—I have also discovered the trace a woman leaves, that Phlox left, and it is better than a man’s.

  My father I will never see again, Cleveland is dead, Arthur is now, I believe, on Majorca. But because I can find them so easily in myself, I no longer—say it, Bechstein—I no longer need them. One can learn, for instance, to father oneself. But I can never learn to be a world, as Phlox was a world, with her own flora and physics, atmosphere and birds. I am left, as Coleridge was his useless dream poem, with a glittering sock and a memory, a garbled account of my visit to her planet, uncertain of what transpired there and of why precisely I couldn’t stay. To say that I loved Phlox implies no lesson, no need or lack of need for her. She is a world I gained and lost. I have this picture, this stocking, and that is all. I wish that I had seen her one last time.

  In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you. Arthur and I made it from New York to Paris, and as far as Barcelona, meeting and making brief excursions into a handful of young men and women, before we found ourselves barely speaking to each other; at last, when we spoke, it was of Cleveland, as though he was the only thing left between us, and we would look sadly into our glasses of sea-dark Spanish wine. We closed ranks only imperfectly, because each was subject to a deep mistrust of the other, as well as a true and radiant affection.

  I’m told, by the way, that Cleveland’s funeral was a strange affair, attended by drunks, mysterious riffraff, and all his shadowy family. Feldman and Lurch, with a dozen other bikers, formed the usual MC funeral formation around the hearse. The service itself was conducted by Cleveland’s great-uncle, the Reverend Arning, who was a dwarf; Cleveland’s sister Anna, flown in from New York City, wore his leather jacket at graveside; his father’s lover, Gerald, wept hysterically and had to return to the car. Mohammad stood the whole time, so he has said, with his arm across Jane’s shoulders, dreading the moment that she should begin to cry, but, like the lover of a cancer victim who has been dying for a long time, she seemed strong and resigned and without bowing her head, watched impassively the Reverend’s sorrowful, tiny hands, the subdued antics of the crowd. She wore a weird, pointy black dress that had been her mother’s forty years before in rural Virginia, so that she lent her own touch of comic sadness to the funeral Cleveland could not have designed any better himself. I now regret very keenly that I missed it. I wanted to say good-bye.

  When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness—and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

  A Biography of Michael Chabon

  Michael Chabon is an acclaimed and bestselling author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). One of America’s most distinctive voices, Chabon has been called “a magical prose stylist” by the New York Times Book Review, and is known for his lively writing, nostalgia for bygone modes of storytelling, and deep empathy for the human predicament.

  Born to two lawyers, Robert and Sharon, in Washington, DC, in 1963, Chabon was raised in Columbia, Maryland. As a young boy, he became interested in writing and storytelling through the encouragement of his teachers. His parents divorced when he was eleven, and his father moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Until Chabon graduated high school, he would spend nine months a year with his mother in Maryland and summers with his father in Pittsburgh. He then moved to Pittsburgh fulltime to attend Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh universities.

  After receiving his undergraduate degree, Chabon sought an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. His master’s thesis attracted the attention of professor Donald Heiney, an award-winning author, who sent the manuscript to his agent without telling Chabon beforehand. The book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), set off a bidding war among publishers and earned Chabon a large advance and bestselling success at the age of twenty-four. The experience was gratifying but disorienting. Chabon worked for the next five years on a novel called Fountain City, a sprawling manuscript that he never completed.

  After abandoning work on his would-be second novel, and ending his first marriage to poet Lollie Groth, Chabon poured his frustrations into a new manuscript, about a writer struggling to complete a 2,611-page book after a string of previous successes. The novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was another bestseller and became a film of the same name in 2000, starring Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, and Robert Downey, Jr. His story collections A Model World and Other Stories (1991) and Werewolves in Their Youth (1999) further displayed Chabon’s literary talents, but he cemented his place among the country’s foremost novelists with the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The book, which chronicles the adventures of two Jewish cousins in New York City against the backdrop of World War II, earned Chabon a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. His subsequent novels include The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), which also met with critical and commercial success and won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards for science fiction, among other honors.

  Chabon married the novelist Ayelet Waldman in 1993, and the couple has four children. Aside from narrative fiction, Chabon has worked as a screenwriter, helping with adaptations of his work and with movie projects such as Spider-Man 2. He has also contributed essays to magazines such as Harper’s and the New Yorker. An outspoken proponent of genre fiction, Chabon published Maps and Legends, a collection of critical essays defending literature as a vehicle for entertainment, in 2008.

  Chabon lives in Berkeley, California.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons
, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for the permission to use the following:

  “Goody Two Shoes,” by A. Ant and M. Pirroni. Copyright © 1982 by EMI Music Publishing, Ltd. All rights for the U.S. and Canada controlled by Colgems—EMI Music, Inc.

  “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1943 by Williamson Music Co., copyright renewed. All rights administered by Chappell & Co., Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “Three Airs,” by Frank O’Hara. From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. Copyright © 1971. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  copyright © 1988, 2005 by Michael Chabon

  cover design by Connie Gabbert

  978-1-4532-3409-9

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