Michael Chabon (13 page)

“Yes,” I said. “Yes,” and I told them about my skyscraper, and my zeppelin, and the hurtling elevator, and Arthur snorted and drained another beer, and said that was a little unbearable too.

“No, it’s big—he’s got it, it’s big,” said Cleveland. “Bigness is the goal of life, of evolution, of men and women. Look at the dinosaurs. They started out as newts, little newts. Everything’s been getting bigger. Cultures, buildings, science—”

“Livers, drinking problems,” said Arthur, and he stood up and went back into the house for some more beer.

“He doesn’t get it,” I said.

“Yes, he does,” said Cleveland. “He’s heard this a million times before. We used to have this thing, this image of ourselves—not ourselves, but, well, it was exactly like your thing with the hotel. What would you call that kind of thing, Bechstein?”

“An image. An image of the big stuff you wanted?”

“Come on, you can do better than that.”

“How about ‘a manifestation of the will-to-bigness,’ ” I said.

“Exactly!” He threw a pebble at my head. “Asshole. Okay, this was about women. Back when Artie was still ambisexually inclined. Bambisexual. Iambisexual.”

“Come on.”

“Shut up. We had this vision—imagine your skyscraper hotel, only think of the whole city around it, think of a whole skyline like that, big and art deco, with searchlights, the beams of searchlights, cutting across the sky, all crazily, frantically. And then you see them. In the sweeping beams of the searchlights.”

“See what?”

“Giant women! Gorgeous women, like Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, but the size of mountains, kicking over buildings, crushing cars under their manicured tremendous toes, with airplanes caught in their hair.”

“I see it,” I said.

“That was the manifestation of our will-to-bigness.” There was a long silence. I heard the toilet flush inside the house. “You know, ah, Bechstein…”

“Hmm?”

“When do I get to meet your father?”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, I can tell I’d like him. He’s big too. I’ve heard about him. I hear he’s one of the real wise guys. I’d like you to introduce me. If you don’t mind. Even if you do mind.”

“What, exactly, are you into with Dave Stern? Numbers?”

“P and D.”

He meant pickup and delivery for a loan shark: dropping off the principal to the unfortuante borrower and then stopping by once a week to collect the ridiculous interest.

At first I hadn’t taken Cleveland’s supposed involvement with the underworld seriously, but now, suddenly, I did. Cleveland would do it. He would breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was.

“No, but, Cleveland, you
can’t
meet my father.” If a whisper and a whine can be combined, that was the tone of my voice. “Come on, tell me more about the searchlights and giant women.”

“I remember them,” said Arthur, who had just returned. “He wanted that, not me. I only wanted to know who built the Cloud Factory. Which, by the way, is rather small.”

“God built the Cloud Factory,” said Cleveland. “And God is the biggest of the big.”

“Wrong,” said Arthur. “There is no Cloud Factory. Or God, or giant women, or zeppelins.”

“Fuck you,” said Cleveland. “They’ll come for me, one of these days. They’ll come for you too. Prepare yourself. Prepare your father too, Bechstein.” And he stood up and went into the house and did not come back.

“What was that about your father?” said Arthur.

“Who knows?” I said. “He probably has me confused with Jane.”

As I stood looking in the mirror at my hangover the next morning, balancing my headache carefully between two hands, I heard shouts, then some thumping at the front of the house, and then a woman’s voice, a familiar southern accent. I trudged out to see.

Cleveland and Jane were squared off just inside the front door, beside two bags of groceries, and Arthur, in his underpants, and wearing the T-shirt that said
LAST CALL,
watched warily, but with a thin smile, his eyes round. I thought of our first meeting outside the library. Jane, sunburned and fine, her hair bleached almost white, wore a pink-and-yellow plaid cotton dress, which did not harmonize with the fists at her sides, or with her muscled shoulders, or with her fierce eyes.

“Go head,” Cleveland said. “I dare you.”

“I will,” said Jane. I’ll hit you.”

“Hi, Jane,” I said. “You look great.”

She turned toward me, undid her fists, and smiled, then turned back and gave Cleveland a right hook across the jaw. He fell against the wall; he touched his finger to the corner of his mouth and looked in bemusement at the blood that came away on it. For a moment he smiled at Jane, at me, at Arthur, before he threw himself at Jane and brought her down with a hard sound to the wooden floor. They began to wrestle, grunting and saying shit, you fucker, et cetera. Cleveland had the advantage of weight, though I doubted he was any stronger than she.

“Come on, Cleveland, Jane, cut it out,” said Arthur mildly. He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, did not move. I went over to try to do something, and got smacked in the groin by someone’s fist. It hurt, and I fell breathless to the floor. Jane, beneath Cleveland, brought her knee up to his chest and pushed. He flew backward, and Jane leapt up and threw herself upon him, screaming, “Cleveland!” Motion ceased. They panted, I panted; I drew myself to my knees and watched Cleveland begin to laugh and Jane to cry.

“Oh, Cleveland,” she said.

“Did you drive a hundred and fifty miles just to beat the shit out of me?”

“Yes,” she said, and she sniffed, in a show of pride, and snapped her head back and thrust out her chin.

“Really?”

“No,” she said, dropping her forehead to his chest and kissing his big belly, and at that moment, Arthur, whom I had not noticed leaving the room, came in again, holding a saucepan full of water, which he emptied onto their desperate heads, grinning.

“They’re fine,” I said. “Pour some water onto my balls, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’ve been waiting so long for you to say that,” said Arthur.

So Jane was among us now, and although I missed the intimacy of the previous day, I found her so thrilling, so prim and
sportive
, that I welcomed her arrival—we all did. She went back to her car to fetch her luggage, singing loudly and earnestly some sad hymn, like a young girl who had learned it only that morning at church. As she came back into the house, she stopped singing, looked around her, dropped her bags, and sighed. She unpacked two pressed, polka-dot dresses from her plaid dress bag and hung them from the living-room doorknob, then carried the groceries in their torn sack from the hallway to the kitchen, and dumped them out on the counter.

“Oh, no—a salad,” said Arthur.

Jane had brought several pounds of vegetables with her, and she proceeded to make an enormous salad and, rather mechanically, to vent her spleen at Cleveland. “You raped our dog,” she said, slicing thin, translucent wafers of cucumber into a wooden salad bowl as big as a bicycle wheel. “I mean…” Cleveland changed completely. He switched from drinking beer to drinking the orange juice that she had brought, and he kept going over to embrace her, to smell her, to assure himself that she was really there. Arthur and I sat down at the kitchen table, ate grapes, and watched them reunite; they forgot us completely, or pretended to do so.

“They said you were dead,” Cleveland said happily. “Dead of dysentery.”

Jane blushed and said, “You made them say that,” changing carrots and scallions to orange nickels and green dimes. “You left them no option.” She made as though to slice her rosy throat with the Sabatier knife, and stuck out her tongue. “I hear you took it very well.”

“I was devastated,” he said, and his face grew grim, and he looked, for a moment, like a devastated man. “How was New Mexico?”

“It was wonderful.”

“Was it stark? Starkly sensual?” As she chopped, he orbited her, slow as Jupiter, regarding her from every angle, but on this last word his orbit decayed and he fell against her, softly.

“Starkly sensual doesn’t even begin to describe it. You asshole,” she said.

Jane and Cleveland had been an item for nearly six years, and although their manner with each other was utterly familiar, they nonetheless displayed all the intoxicated rancor of a brand-new couple. It was as though they still had not decided if they liked each other. When she looked at him lovingly, her eyes were filled with the strong regret and disapproval of a mother with a jailbird son. And though when speaking to her he came closer than with anyone else to ridding his voice of its smirk, nevertheless the smirk remained. I think that fundamentally he was jealous of her: not of any phantom lovers—for she never had any—but jealous of
her,
of her half-English crazy optimism and her manias for salad-making and endless walks. And I think that Jane was afraid for Cleveland, afraid of the inevitable day when he really would ruin everything.

“Do you all like chives?” she said. “I bought some fresh chives.” She waved them hopefully. “I’ll bet you haven’t had a single vegetable since you got here.”

“We had beans,” I said.

There was silence while we all watched her make a vinaigrette, shaking flakes of this and that into the cruet without looking at the labels on the spice jars. I saw her shake nutmeg into the dressing, and curry. After she had held the bottle to the light and examined it closely for half a minute, watching the particles slowly sink through the line from oil to vinegar, she looked at Cleveland. “You know, I did like New Mexico an awful lot. So many interesting animals, and the Indians are so kind. I saw a rattlesnake, Cleveland. And tons and tons of motorcycles. I think you’d like it. I was thinking maybe the two of us could go out there sometime.”

“Sure,” said Cleveland. He fanned out his hands as though to say, Why not leave right now?

“You don’t mean it,” she said.

“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.”