The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
“No.”
“You turn into whoever you’re supposed to turn into.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said, thinking of him and not of myself.
“Why, what is your father, anyway? A Jewish neo-Nazi? A proctologist?”
“Let’s get dressed,” I said. “Let’s take that walk.”
“No, just a minute. What is your father, Art? Tell me. Come on, it’s only fair. You’re one up on me now.”
“I love you,” I said, getting up to pull my trousers on.
We walked a long way, leaving behind the fragrant, dark streets of Shadyside, where you had to push aside low and wild-growing branches and to pass through curtains of spiderweb that overhung the sidewalks and left ticklish strands across your lips and eyelashes. We came far into East Liberty, where the neighborhood began to deteriorate, the vegetation dwindled then finally disappeared, and we found ourselves on a commercial street corner, amid a loose cloud of unhappy black men laughing outside the corner saloon and along the closed, barred, steel-shuttered row of storefronts. As we stood poised on the edge of the shutdown neighborhood, and Arthur said that we should turn around, I heard a snarling dog. A pickup truck had stopped at the traffic light, and in its bed was an enraged Doberman pinscher, doing near backflips of fluid hate. Each burst of nervous laughter from the street-corner men sent the dog over again.
“Jesus,” said Arthur.
“I know,” I said. “That dog’s gone mad.”
“It’s Cleveland.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, “not quite,” thinking maybe he’d had an encounter with Cleveland, like my last one, that he hadn’t told me about, but then I looked into the cab of the pickup and saw Cleveland, on the passenger’s side, laughing, holding his cigarette out the window.
“What’s he doing? Who’s he with?” I said, trying to recognize the man sitting behind the wheel of the pickup. The dog continued to emit the same slavering snarl over and over again, without variation, like a machine specially designed to snarl at laughing black men.
“He doesn’t see us,” said Arthur. “Hey, Cleveland!”
Cleveland turned, his jaw dropped, and then he grinned, waving delightedly, and said something that I didn’t catch. The light changed and the pickup truck squealed off, the Doberman clambering to put its forelegs on the lip of the truck bed and to thrust its head into the onrush of wind.
“What’s he up to now?” said Arthur, laughing. “What a dog!”
“What a dog!” I said. “Who knows?”
We laughed, but on the way home, while Arthur continued to exclaim and narrate, I hardly spoke, and there was nothing he could do to cheer me—indeed, his chatter annoyed me, for forgetting everything I had felt only that afternoon, I was gripped by the fear that I would never see Cleveland again. Later we did make love, and it was hard and wordless as ever, but when we were through, and he reminded me that we had only three more days before the rich young couple came home, I tensed.
“Then what?” I said, the question occurring to me for the first time.
“Yes, then what?”
“Where will you go?”
“Well, I was thinking of that perfectly nice place you have on the Terrace, which has been so empty lately.”
“I don’t know,” I said, beginning to feel, with an inward groan, the return of a familiar feeling of pressure, but he said only, “Fine,” and rolled over.
So, on the following Sunday, very early and half-awake, we left the Weatherwoman House, and, because I did not know what I wanted, Arthur stayed with me for three strained, unerotic days before the house-sitting grapevine came through for him again, and he moved out.
21
THE END OF THE WORLD
ONE MORNING ABOUT A week into the strange new August, I was awakened by a telephone call from a woman at the Hillman Library, who told me, in a stunningly icy tone of voice, that I’d been sent several notices informing me of Sigmund Freud’s Selected Letters to Wilhelm Fliess having fallen due on June 10, and that if I did not return the book immediately, my grade transcripts would be frozen, or something like that, endangering all my future employment opportunities, and that if this did not persuade me, the matter would be referred to a collection agency.
“I returned that book in July,” I said, rubbing my eyes, remembering the day very clearly. I’d received no notices, but since I’d moved at the beginning of the summer, I supposed they hadn’t been forwarded.
“Um, well,” she said, her voice melting for a moment. “If that’s the case, you have to come down to the library, in person. Yes, to initiate a Search and Recovery.”
Of course, I’d been carefully avoiding going anywhere near the Hillman Library. I walked into work along back streets, ate my lunch in the workroom of the bookstore, and I was constantly on the alert and ready to run at the first glimpse of a certain aqua ribbon. Arthur and I, through an unacknowledged and unspoken agreement, didn’t discuss his days at work, and if he had any nasty encounters by the card catalogues or at the water fountain, or if vicious rumors about him began to circulate through Reference, Acquisitions, and Gifts and Exchanges, I never found out about them. I begged the righteous librarian to allow me to initiate a Search and Recovery over the telephone, but she would hear nothing of it. I was in midsentence when she hung up.
Arthur had the day off. I found the scrap of paper on which I’d written down his new number, and called him to find out what he knew about Searches and Recoveries, but I got only his sleepy voice on his latest answering machine. He was spending the day, I remembered, with the lovely Riri, at her cousin’s out in Latrobe, something he’d been promising her for months.
“This is Art,” I said, after the tone, “and I’m about to enter the jaws of death.”
Thus I resigned myself, thinking that at least it would be simpler, somehow, if he was not at the library when I finally reentered it, which, half an hour later, I did. Fans of the unconscious will be interested to note that I’d taken care to dress well, in summer colors—pleated khaki pants, white shirt with salmon pinstripes, loosely knotted Hong Kong cotton tie. I hurried up to the tall, actorish fellow who worked behind the front desk, and I looked cautiously around me as I approached him.
“I’m here to initiate a Search and Recovery,” I said.
He blinked his entire face.
“P-pardon?”
“I got a call today from someone here who said that I had to initiate a Search and Recovery.” I glanced over my shoulder, toward the elevators, expecting at any minute to be spotted and seized.
“Uh huh,” he said. “I see.”
Libraries, I knew, are frequently the haunts of twitching, mumbling paranoid schizophrenics, researching their grandiose conspiracies, and so I was embarrassed by the look he gave me, which suggested that my insistence on Search and Recovery was probably due to my fervent belief that Richard Nixon, Stephen King, and Anita Loos were intimately connected to the sinking of the Titanic and the disappearance of Errol Flynn’s son in Cambodia.
“It’s some form I’m supposed to fill out,” I said.
“Oh? I’ve never heard of it. Do you know who you spoke to? No? Maybe you’d better go back to Administration and ask.”
“Um. I was afraid—I was hoping—do you think you could go back and ask for me? Ha ha. See, there’s someone who works in the back offices that I’d rather not run into.”
His eyes lit up and he wiggled his eyebrows. With very dramatic deliberation, he reached behind him for a stool and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it against his temple.
“Be brave,” he said.
It was perfect. I stopped dead at the entrance to the elevator corridor, and there she was, behind her bars, dressed to kill, pearls, blue sundress. Her locks were lighter than ever, nearly strawberry blond, pulled up and wrapped into a palm tree of hair that rose from her head and spilled its bright ends outward in a silly, fetching spray. She raised her face, which was suntanned and barely painted, the
“Phlox,” I said, fifteen inches away from her lips. “Oh, Phlox.”
“Do you love me?” she said, still seated, radiant with patience and anticipation, and obviously feeling that she held the strings. Her light, unconcerned tone of voice might as easily have said, May I help you?
I didn’t stop to think, and said that I did.
“Wait,” she said. She stood, turned from me, and walked out of the office, swinging her hips, and she came around to the other side of the window, where our hands went out, our fingers tangled, and I put my mouth to hers. After we’d kissed for a minute, with all her well-informed co-workers watching us through the magic grille, she drew back and looked at me, without a trace of hurt or anger on her face. There was only half-suppressed mirth, the rapid blinking of disbelief. She cocked her head to one side.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Hush,” she said, and giggled. “Come on.”
She took my hand and pulled me down the hall, into the stairwell, her white pumps tocking against the tiled floor. For a second I shut my eyes just to listen to the promising clatter, to think once again, Ah, there’s a woman coming; here comes a woman. Under the staircase we kissed, pushing our hips together. We began to get the same wild notion then; she grabbed at my hand with both of her hands, walking backward, and pulled me up the stairs, to the third floor of the library, where there were, all around the outer walls, tiny dark rooms, with tiny desks, that the library rented to graduate students.
“They’re locked, aren’t they?”
“Not this one,” she said, tugging me toward a door, which opened with a twist of her flushed hand.
“How do you know about this?” I slipped in behind her, whispering, and she closed the door.
“Hush,” she said. “Everyone knows about this. Sit down, we’ll have to be quick. Here.”
She leaned forward to unzip my pants, like a child unwrapping a doll. They fell and puddled around my ankles. I sat.
“Oh,” said Phlox, touched, when she saw my erection. “It’s so lovely.”
“It is?”
“It’s so handsome and polite.” She hitched up her dress; no panties.
“Were you prepared for this?” I said, this suspicion dawning on me, honestly, for the first time.
“I’ve been prepared for this for a week now,” she said, taking my fingers. “Just feel how prepared I am.”
Down upon me she settled herself, wiggling, making the necessary adjustments, and there, once again, were the aptness, the welcome give of giving skin, the warmth, the human and fragrant slipperiness, and I sighed as though I ached in every muscle and were sinking into a hot bath. In sixty seconds it was all over, and it had all begun again.
But it was different.
That evening, Phlox called to invite me to dinner, and without hesitation I said that I would be right over. Abandoning the necktie this time, I brushed my teeth, grabbed my keys, slapped three flaques of cologne around my open collar. Just as I was closing the door behind me, the telephone rang again, and knowing that it was probably Arthur, I clapped my hands over my ears and took the twenty-six steps two at a time. Walking the streets to Phlox’s house, as so many times before—past that mailbox, past that airy, rampant bed of cosmos, past that old man, oh yes, with the neck brace and the Pomeranian—making the old approach to her apartment through that eternal oily puddle and the stink of that ginkgo tree, I was filled with a frail and sad exhilaration, which I really ought to have recognized for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there—for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time. There was nothing to eat when I arrived, nothing at all, and we threw our bodies together and fell onto the hard, scratching carpet. We didn’t stand, this time, for two hours, until she could no longer hold her water.
“Mau Mau,” I said, when she came back from the toilet. The forbidden name spilled out, although I’d forgotten it completely until this moment.
“Oh, Art, it’s been so long.”
I said yes, it had, but we were talking, I think, about two different things.
“What’s happening?” I said. “What is this?”
“Lust,” she said. “I believe it’s frenzied lust.” She giggled.
“Did you arrange that phone call this morning?”
“What phone call was that?” she said, meeting my eyes but turning a bit red.
“Mau Mau. It was never like this before, Mau Mau.”
“We have to take each other back.”
“I’m back,” I said. And lying beside her on the floor of her living room, with my arm beneath her head, her breath against my shoulder, the orange plaid of last light falling on the carpet, I felt, for a little minute, that I really had returned. I felt weak, languid, as though I’d been for a swim. Phlox spoke into my ear, apologizing, scolding sweetly, and as she spoke, a breeze stirred the damp hairs of my groin, so that it was as though her words raised the goose flesh along my arms and legs, gently chilled me, and I curled myself around her and said, “I’m back.” Yet as the after effects of the drug of sex began to wear off, as my worldly strength returned, as the circulation in my pinned arm was cut off and my hand fell asleep, I began to doubt, to worry, to search my heart. I did not know if I was truly still in love with Phlox or simply blowing off some final heterosexual steam. I thought, with a guilty pang, of Arthur, and remembered his having said once that there was no such thing as bisexuality, that you were either one thing or the other. I guess I still believed in absolutes. I didn’t know what I would tell him now when I saw him again, or if indeed there was something I should be telling Phlox, right this minute, before things went any further. I grew more and more uncomfortable, bound up in Phlox’s arms on the rough carpet. I wanted a cigarette, wanted to unstick my prickling skin from hers. When she began to talk about the letter she’d left on my doorstep, laughing as though it had been twenty years since then, I sat bolt upright.
“The letter!” I said.
“I know, and I’m so sorry, Artichoke. Come back here,” she said, pulling at my shoulders. “I can’t even remember what I wrote. I know it must’ve been pretty silly.”
“No!”
“You didn’t think so?”
“No, I—well.” I stood, ashamed, looking around and around for the shirt that I’d thrown off. I took a deep breath. “I lost it.”
“Art!”
“No, I mean, Cleveland has it.” The shirt was halfway across the room, my cigarettes in its pocket, and I tore for a while at the almost empty pack. Anything but meet her gaze.
“Cleveland! Why does he have my letter?”
“I’ll get it back, don’t worry. He picked it up by mistake.” The match flowered. “And lately I haven’t seen him; he’s been, ah, busy.”
“I saw him the other day,” she said, slowly. “He didn’t say anything about it.”
Now I turned to face her. “You did? Where?”
“But he was very strange. Art. He didn’t read my letter?”
“Strange? What did he do?”
“Art, did Cleveland read my extremely private and personal letter?” She stood up now, hands on her naked hips, tossed her flyaway hair. Nearly all the light had drained from the room.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Well.” She came over, took me in her arms, kissed me; I’d just inhaled a lungful of smoke; we parted and I exhaled grate
“And he might have, you know, by now,” I said lamely. “Knowing Cleveland.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She kissed me again, a happy, dismissive peck. “I’m starved. Let’s get a pizza delivered, how about?”
We half-dressed and sat on separate sides of the windowsill, legs entwined, watching the street for the appearance of the pizza man.
“I’ve been walking a lot, Art,” she said, running a finger down my shin. “Very long walks, since—since our problems. Sometimes it helps me figure things out. Sometimes I just go and go without a single thought in my head.”
“Alone?” I said. It was difficult to imagine Phlox setting out for a long excursion, or for anything at all, all by herself.
“Yes, alone. I’ve gotten much better at being alone lately.”
“It’s only been ten days, Phlox. You keep making it sound like I’ve been off sailing around the Horn.”
“Well, I’m not good at being alone. It was a long ten days.”
She looked away, pretending to watch two hopping robins down on the little lawn, though at first I didn’t see that she was just pretending. At first I saw only her profile, that outline I knew so well, and the dim light falling past it to her ear, the mass of familiar shadows and glints, the darkness along the side of her straight nose, the tiny lights in the hairs of her upper lip, and it pleased me, as it always did, her profile, so that I was impelled now to look more closely, to toss my gaze quickly across it as across a painting reproduced in an artbook, to try to see the whole and its parts at the same time, to bear in mind the regular profile but remark the Egyptian effect of her slightly pointed chin, the fine join of earlobe and jaw, the bone beneath her eye, and as I looked, it was no longer a profile, for profiles, really, don’t exist; it was Phlox’s face; and I had loved it. And then, suddenly, I saw motion, the tightening of her lower lip, the flaring of her nostril, the tears that dwindled down her cheek, and I saw that she pretended to look down at the birds in the grass.