Michael Chabon (23 page)

“Work with him how?”

“I’m afraid to tell you.”

“Oh.”

“So what did you
do
last night?” he said, eyeing the half-crumpled letter in my hand.

I looked at him. He’d been babbling, he was eating the cheese sandwich almost without stopping to swallow, and I wondered if he might be stoned. The usual tracery of broken blood vessels on the skin of his face, under his eyes and across his nose, looked darker than usual; his eyes were pink, his hair was filthy. Although part of me wanted just to tell him everything, I resented his being so out of it, his doing something for Carl Punicki that was evidently worse than what he’d done for Frankie Breezy, and, finally, I was afraid that he would make run of me, or—who knew?—even get angry. And what
had
I done last night?

“Yes, I’m stoned and I’ve been drinking all day. I’m half in the bag,” he said. “Okay?”

“So you came over because there was no food at your house?”

“Right.”

“Oh.”

“Asshole. That isn’t why I came over. I came to converse.”

“You did?”

“Sure.” He reached over and patted my thigh, then took the letter from between my lax fingers. “Disturbing news?”

“I’m not really sure. Confusing news.”

“May I?”

“No. Come on, Cleveland.” I reached for the letter, but he lifted it up over his head, out of my reach. “I can’t believe you’re going to work for that monster Punicki, I don’t feel well, you’re all fucked up—”

“I’m normalized. Look, Bechstein, you’re upset; something’s wrong. Here.” He handed back the letter, tapping it against my knee. “Why don’t you at least tell me something of what’s contained therein.”

My little neighbor started up again with her Beethoven. Cleveland wore a very sincere, if somewhat bleary, expression; there was only the faint trace of a sneer.

“It’s a ransom note, right? She’s taken herself hostage. ‘Dear Art,’ ” he said, biting his lip in thought and rolling his eyes upward. “Um, ‘Leave Arthur in an unmarked paper bag inside locker thirty-eight at the Greyhound station, or you’ll never see me again.’ Is that it?”

“Oh, here,” I said. While he read Phlox’s purple letter, which he did very slowly, as though he was having difficulty making sense of it, I listened to the music next door and stared down at a tiny white sliver of fluff that he had caught on a spider thread and was spinning in the breeze like a pinwheel, at the end of its miniature tether. Cleveland would ball up the letter and throw it to the ground; would stand and spit on my head; then he, too, would leave my life forever. I had ruined everything.

After a few minutes Cleveland raised his giant head and looked at me. He grinned.

“You little slut.”

I half-laughed, through my nose, the way one does when one is also crying.

“Oh, stop it, you big baby. She doesn’t mean any of this. The whole thing is nonsense. Here she says no one has ever done this to her before, and then here she says it happens all the time. She’s jangling your wires.”

“She never wants to see me again.”

“Bullshit.” Carelessly he folded the letter and slid it back into the ragged envelope. “It
sounds
like she’s handing you your papers, but this is just a goddamn ultimatum. These things always are. It’s like, ‘I’ll never see you again, ever.
Unless.’
Jane sends me these all the time. Quarterly. Relax. You can call her tonight if you want,” he said. He picked at a cheese fragment that had lodged in a fold of his jacket. “Unless.”

We sat for a few moments, not talking about Arthur.

“Cleveland?” I said at last.

“Well, I’m not surprised, anyway.”

“You aren’t?”

“It had to happen. It’s pretty funny in the letter when she says they ‘get you from behind.’ Ha ha. Ah, Bechstein, you dope. What are you crying about? Cut it out. I hate crying. Tell me what happened.”

I recounted to him, very briefly, the events of the previous evening.

“He said I shouldn’t bother to call him anymore.”

Cleveland snorted.

“There’s a big ‘unless’ stuck onto that one too,” he said. “They’re both hedging their bets. Stop crying. Goddamn it.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a ragged ball of old Kleenex. “Here. Shit. You haven’t lost them both. It’s either one or the other. Do you want to hear this?”

“I guess.” I began to feel restored, unconfused, even less achy, simply from the weight of Cleveland’s grouchy attentions. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m kind of upset to hear about your working for Punicki too.”

“Working
with
the Evil Poon, Bechstein; we have an arrangement. It’s nothing to cry about, Bechstein, Jesus. I’m being admitted to an ancient and honorable profession. I’m learning a valuable skill. Okay now, let that go for one second and listen.”

“I know, I know. If I forget Arthur forever, call Phlox—”

“You could be back in her arms again, as Phlox, or Diana Ross, would have it, within the hour. Really. But I guess you would really have to forget Arthur. Or the other way around.”

He picked up the envelope again and flapped it thoughtfully against the back of his hand. “So who do you love? Phlox or Arthur? Who do you love more, I mean?”

“I don’t know. The same,” I said.

“Invalid response,” said Cleveland. “Try again.”

I guessed that he was right, that my feeling for Phlox, which I was calling love, could not really be the
same
as my feeling for Arthur, which I was also calling love. I thought of her clear broad forehead, and of her closet full of spectacular skirts, and of the perfume of her bedroom, and when this didn’t instantly move me to decision, I thought of her tenderness and care for me, of her so obvious and persistent affection. It seemed to me that I shouldn’t have to think so hard. Something stood between me and Phlox—perhaps it was myself—which made loving her a perpetual effort; she was a massive collection of small, ardent details that I struggled always to keep in mind, in a certain order, repeating the Phlox List over and over to myself, because if I forgot one particular of her smile or speech, the whole thing came to pieces. Perhaps I did not love Phlox, after all—I just knew her by heart. I had memorized my girlfriend.

Or perhaps it was presumptuous and conceited of me, and of Cleveland, to think that Phlox would really have me back. Perhaps she was calling it quits because it was, in fact, quits.

“Um, Cleveland—do you really not find it a big deal…”

“Find what?”

“That I—that I’m—that I might be…”

“Queer?” He set the letter on top of the Poe and stood up, stretching his arms wide, as though to embrace the entire gathering evening, and emitted, simultaneously, a belch and a fart. “Wow! Do that often enough and you implode.”

“Ha.”

“Queer as my oldest friend? As my father?”

“Um.”

“As a matter of fact, Bechstein, I don’t think that you are. In my corroded opinion, I think you’re just clowning around with your sexual chemistry set. But go ahead—give yourself a rest from the Evil Love Nurse. You can call her—how does she put it?—years from now, ‘when you have seen.’ ”

I protested that what I was doing was more serious than he thought. I wanted to express to him something of my feelings for Arthur, but I remembered all of his sodden protestations of love for Jane, and I kept silent. He stood in front of me, a few steps down, and I could barely make out his features in the near darkness.

“What did
you
do last night?” I said finally, anticipating another tale of excess and hilarity.

“Last night,” he said, as the hem of the blue, sky filled with purple, “I learned how to deactivate an alarm system.”

“Jesus.”

“Neat, huh?”

“No! What the hell for?”

“For a merit badge. What do you think? To get inside houses. Poon owns five jewelry stores in the Mon Valley.”

“He’s a fence.”

“He’s the biggest, Bechstein.”

“And you’re going to steal for him.” I stood up.

“Like the big time. No kidding—Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief.”

I brushed past him, was halfway down the front steps, running away from my own house, when I turned to Cleveland, a vague shape in the light that filtered out from the distant kitchen.

“Cleveland, it’s illegal! It’s burglary. Burglary! You could go to jail.”

“Quiet.” He came down the steps toward me, and we faced each other tensely. “Sodomy,” he said.

That produced a long silence, toward the end of which he turned and went the rest of the way down the stairs.

“I didn’t get all upset and act like an asshole, either,” he said in a loud whisper. “I certainly could have. You seemed to expect it. So why don’t you just let me do what I want, and I’ll let you boys do what you want, and maybe that way we can all stay friends.” He started away, then turned toward me and whispered again. “And don’t get the idea that you can stop me.” He grabbed me by the shoulder and squeezed; it hurt. “Don’t try to blow the whistle on me.” He shook me once. “Don’t you go talking to the heavenly father.”

“Cleveland!”

“Quiet. Because I could just as easily blow the whistle on you.” With a snap of his wrist he released my shoulder, and I fell back against the steps.

“For God’s sake, Cleveland,” I whispered.

He brushed the hair from his eyes, quickly, looking embarrassed.

“All right, then. Thank you for the cheese sandwich. Good night.”

I watched him pass, dwindling, through three patches of streetlight, biggest, bigger, big, nothing. Then I went back into the house, switched on a lamp and the porch light, and stood in the middle of the living room with my hands jammed angrily into my pockets, in the left one of which I felt a scrap of paper that, when I unfolded it, turned out to be the cocktail napkin Cleveland had left at the bar, stuck to the damp side of my beer glass, after our first encounter with Carl Punicki. As I reread absently its three words—
HAVE TO THINK
—I remembered Phlox’s letter, twang! but out on the front step there was now nothing but the huge whirling shadows of the moths that had come to smash their heads against the light bulb. Cleveland must have picked up the letter in the dark, when he’d reached for his book. I would call him the next morning; everything would be fine. I came back inside, walked around in circles for a long time, read part of an old newspaper, then circled the room again. Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.

W
E SLEPT TOGETHER.
H
E
would get up in the morning and rush off to work, scrabbling through piles of our mingled trousers and briefs, running his head under the sink, slamming the front door in farewell, and after he was gone I would spend the luxury of my extra hour by bathing in the Weatherwoman’s claw-foot tub and in the strangeness of it all. We lived well. Arthur cooked elaborate dinners; in the refrigerator there was always pasta in the colors of the Italian flag, a variety of weird wines, capers, kiwis, unheard-of fish with Hawaiian names, and stacks of asparagus, Arthur’s favorite food, in the rubber-banded bundles that he never failed to refer to as fagots. We sent our dirty clothes out to be cleaned and they came back as gifts, tied up in blue paper. And, as often as possible, we went to bed. I did not consider myself to be gay; I did not consider myself, as a rule. But all day long, from the white instant when I opened my eyes in the morning until my last black second of awareness of Arthur’s fading breath against my shoulder, I was always nervous, full of energy, afraid. The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk its streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.

The rich young couple—who were due to return on the last day of July—employed a black woman to clean their house. Her name was Velva. At eight o’clock on my only Wednesday morning at the Weatherwoman House, she entered the bedroom and screamed. After a moment of keen observation, she ran from the room, shouting that she was sorry. Arthur and I separated, went soft, laughed. We lit cigarettes and discussed strategy.

“Maybe I should go downstairs,” he said.

“Put some pants on.”

“What will she do?” he said. “I don’t know her well enough to predict. Black people confuse me.”

“Pick up the extension.”

“Why?”

“Maybe she’s calling the police.”

“Or an ambulance.”

I thought of my fat friends from Boardwalk, arriving in their van to attach their electric paddles to the outraged, apopleptic cleaning lady collapsed on the living-room floor. Arthur picked up the extension, listened, set it down again.

“Dial tone,” he said. “And I’m not going downstairs. You go. Slip her a five or something.” He pushed me, and I fell out of the bed, trailing the bedclothes behind me. A tendril of cotton blanket wrapped itself around a lamp, pulled the lamp to the floor after it, and then muffled the
bang!
of the shattered light bulb. We stared at each other, eyes round, muscles tensed, listening, like two boys who have been warned not to wake the baby. But the pop of the bulb was the incident’s only repercussion. Velva contrived to be in another part of the house throughout our respective breakfasts and departures, and subsequent events indicated that she never said anything to anyone. Perhaps she did not care—I fantasized that she was Lurch’s long-resigned mother. In any case, we were lucky. Like any successful spy, I felt frightened and lucky all the time.

Pittsburgh, too, was in the grip of a humid frenzy. The day after my flip of the coin, the sun had disappeared behind a perpetual gray wall of vapor, which never managed to form itself into rain, and yet the sun’s heat remained as strong as ever, so that the thick, wet, sulfury air seemed to boil around you, and in the late morning veils of steam rose from the blacktop. Arthur said that it was like living on Venus. When I walked to work—arriving sapped and with my damp shirt an alien thing clinging to me—the Cathedral of Learning, ordinarily brown, would look black with wetness, dank, submerged, Atlantean. There were three irrational shootings that week, and two multiple-car pileups on the freeway; a Pirate, in a much-discussed lapse of sportsmanship, broke three teeth belonging to a hapless Phillie; a live infant was found in a Bloomfield garbage can.