Michael Chabon (3 page)

“Delighted,” I said.

“Oh, delighted!” said Riri. “So polite! All your friends are so polite, Arthur! Come in! Everyone is here! Everyone is drunk—but politely! You’ll feel quite at home! Come into the parlor!”

She turned and walked into the parlor, a large, red-curtained room, which deserved its antique name. It was filled with vases, people drinking, and a grand piano.

“Is it really that obvious?” I whispered, close to Arthur’s ear but not too close.

“You mean that you’re polite?” He laughed. “Yes, it’s embarrassingly obvious—you’re making a well-mannered fool of yourself.”

“Well, let’s get rude, then,” I said. “Is there a bar?”

“Wait,” he said, grabbing me by the elbow. “I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?”

He led me through a web of kids, most of whom seemed to be foreign, holding a drink, and smoking a cigarette of one kind or another. Some halted their loud conversations and turned to greet Arthur, who gave all an able, curt, and rather arrogant “Hi.” He seemed to be well-liked, or at least to command respect. Many of the small bundles of people tried to enclose him in their conversations as he passed.

“Where are you taking me?” I said. I tried to sound apprehensive.

“To meet Jane.”

“Oh, good. Who is she?”

“Cleveland’s girlfriend. I think she’s here—just a second. Stay here for a second, okay? I’m sorry. Be right back. I’m sorry about this, but I see someone, um—” said Arthur, and he unhooked me and vanished.

I stayed, and surveyed, and wondered at all the handsome women of many lands. He had deposited me in a corner of the parlor with a towering piece of furniture, which I leaned upon and cooled my cheek against. Many of those I saw had brown skins, every lovely grade of brown: Iranians, Saudis, Peruvians, Kuwaitis, Guatemalans, Indians, North Africans, Kurds—who knew? Caucasian women were draped about like bits of pale lace; and there were boys with interesting headgear and Lacoste shirts, or ill-fitting gabardine suits, laughing and eyeing the women. Arthur studied in that department of the university to which rich or very aggressively lucky foreign children are sent, to learn to administer great sums of international money and the ills of their homelands. Diplomacy, he’d said, when I’d asked him where his future lay.

“I go to these parties to practice,” he’d said. “There are factions, alliances, secrets, debts, and a lot of messing around—I mean, of course, sexual messing around. And they all see themselves as Iranians, Brazilians, whatever, but I—I don’t see myself as an American: I’m an atom, I bounce all over the place, like a mercenary. No, not a mercenary, a free agent—a free atom—isn’t that something in chemistry? I’m always at the outside orbit of all the other, um, molecules?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” I’d said. “I forget what a free atom is. I think you’ve made it up.”

The parlor was noisy, smoky, jammed, and gorgeous. At the shah’s fall, Riri’s father had smuggled out a modest planeload of carpets and statuary, and these rather grimly gay furnishings made his daughter’s party seem dark, ornate, and somehow villainous. I looked into the glass panels of the cabinet that held me up; it was filled with daggers and eggs. The eggs were large enough to have been laid by emus, and jeweled, painted. Delicate hinged doors, cut from the shells, opened onto miniature scenes of courtly, contortionist Persian love in 3-D. The artist had paid more attention to the figurines’ limbs and genitalia than to their faces; the little twisted lovers wore that cowlike expression you see in Asian erotic art, which contrasts so oddly with the agonized knot of bodies. The daggers displayed their hilts but hid their blades in fantastic sheaths of blue velvet and dyed leathers. Scattered here and there on the glass shelves of the cabinet were cunning, unidentifiable implements of silver.

“What do you think?” It was Arthur. Though his tone was light, he looked angry, or preoccupied, anyway.

“I think Riri’s father is a white slaver. Say, this is some party.” I tried to get that tone of slogan in my voice. Then I chanced a slight indiscretion. “Did you find ‘someone um’?”

He evaded the question, physically. He averted his eyes, and blushed, like a maiden, like Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park.
All at once I liked him, his firm grace with others, his unlikely modesty, the exotic parties he attended. The desire to befriend him came over me suddenly and certainly, and, as I debated and decided not to shake his hand yet again, I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I’d been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls.

“No,” he said at last. “ ‘Someone um’ has already been found and disposed of.” He looked off into the blare.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Forget it. Let us find the lovely Jane.”

T
O FIND JANE BELLWETHER
, who acquired a last name and a few vague features during our search, we passed out of the jumping seraglio and through a long series of quieter, darker rooms, until we came to the kitchen, which was white. All the lights shone from overhead, and, as is sometimes the case with kitchens at large parties, an unwholesome-looking group, all the heavy drinkers and eaters, had convened in the fluorescence. Its members all looked at us as we entered the kitchen, and I had the distinct impression that a word had not been said in there for several minutes prior to our arrival.

“Say! Hi, Takeshi,” Arthur said to one of two blenched Japanese who stood near the refrigerator.

“Arthur Lecomte!” he yelled. He was well more than half in the bag. “This is my friend Ichizo. He goes to C-MU.”

“Hi, Ichizo. Glad to meet you.”

“My friend,” Takeshi continued, his voice rising, “is very horny. My friend say that if I were a girl, he would fuck me.”

I laughed, but Arthur stood straight, looked deeply, beautifully sympathetic for perhaps a tenth of a second, and nodded, with that fine, empty courtesy he seemed to show everyone. He had an effortless genius for manners; remarkable, perhaps, just because it was unique among people his age. It seemed to me that Arthur, with his old, strange courtliness, would triumph over any scene he chose to make; that in a world made miserable by frankness, his handsome condescension, his elitism, and his perfect lack of candor were fatal gifts, and I wanted to serve in his corps and to be socially graceful.

“Does any of you know Jane Bellwether?” said Arthur.

The louts, so morose, so overfed and overliquored, said no. None looked at us, and it seemed to me, in the exaggerating way that things seemed to me that exaggerated evening, as though they could not stand the sight of Arthur, or of me in his magic company, in our Technicolor health and high spirits, in our pursuit of the purportedly splendid Jane Bellwether.

“Try on the patio,” one, some kind of Arab, finally said, through a white mouthful of shrimp. “There are many people sporting out there.”

We came out into the yellow light of the back porch, that festival old yellow of Bug Lite, which had illuminated the backyards and soft moth bodies of so many summers past. It was untrue; there were not many people sporting on the murky lawn, though a large group had gathered with their drinks and their light sweaters. Only one young woman sported, and the rest watched her.

“That’s Jane,” Arthur said.

She stood alone in the dim center of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighborhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of the grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father’s ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long. She looked tall, thin, and, in the bad light, rather gray in her white golf skirt and shirt. Her face was blank with concentration.
Thik!
and she smiled, shaking out her yellow hair, and we clapped. She fished in her pocket for a ball and teed it.

“She’s plastered,” a girl said, as though that were all the explanation we might require.

“She’s beautiful,” I heard myself say. Some of the spectators turned toward me. “I mean, her stroke is absolutely perfect. Look at that.”

She smashed another one, and a few moments later I heard the distant sound of the ball striking metal.

“Jane!” Arthur shouted. She turned and lowered her shining club, and the yellow light caught her full in the face and fell across the flawless front of her short skirt. She put a hand to her forehead to try to make out the caller among us shadows on the patio.

“Arthur, hi,” she said. She smiled, and stepped through the grass to him.

“Arthur, she’s whose girlfriend?”

Half a dozen people answered me. “Cleveland’s,” they said.

A few moments later, in one of the less noisy rooms off the parlor, we were three in a row on what could only be called a settee. Jane smelled interestingly of light exertion, beer, perfume, and cut grass. Arthur had presented me as a new friend, and I’d watched Jane’s face for a trace of a knowing leer, but there’d been none. I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake about Arthur’s intentions toward me, and to reproach myself for mistrusting what might have been his mere friendliness. After Jane and I had exchanged our academic pursuits—hers was art history—and agreed that neither of us could explain why we had chosen to pursue them, but that we were glad to be through, we turned to talking of plans for the coming summer.

I knew better than to state my true intentions, which were vague, and base enough that they could easily have included the pursuit of herself and of the ultimate source of all her exciting fragrance, in spite of this Cleveland, whoever he might be.

“I’m going to turn this town upside down,” I said. “Then in the fall I have to become a responsible adult. You know, have a career. My father claims to have something lined up.”

“What does your father do?” said Jane.

He manipulates Swiss bank accounts with money that comes from numbers, whores, protection, loan sharks, and cigarette smuggling.

“He’s in finance,” I said.

“Jane’s going to New Mexico,” said Arthur.

“Really? When?”

“Tomorrow,” Jane said.

“Jesus! Tomorrow. Gee, that’s too bad.”

Arthur laughed, rapidly reading, I suppose, the thrust of my head and the proximity of my denim thigh to her shaven one.

“Too bad?” Jane had a southern accent, and “Too bad” fell out in three droll syllables. “It isn’t bad! I can’t wait—my mother and father and I have wanted to go forever! My mother has been taking Spanish lessons for fourteen years! And I want to go because—”

“Jane wants to go,” Arthur said, “because she wants to have carnal knowledge of a Zuni.”

She blushed, or rather flushed; her next words were only slightly angry, as though he often pestered her about Zuni love.

“I don’t want to have ‘carnal knowledge’ with any old Zuni, asshole.”

“Wow,” I said. “Asshole.” From the way she seemed to relish the word as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, a sign of her intimacy with Arthur, and I was momentarily very jealous of him. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.

“But I’m
intrigued
by the Native Americans, you know? That’s all. And by Georgia O’Keeffe. I want to see that church in Taos that she painted.”

Someone began to play the piano in the other room, a Chopin mazurka that mixed very uncomfortably for a few measures with the thump music that came from the half-dozen speakers scattered around the house, until someone else attacked the pianist with a squeal and a silk cushion. We laughed.

“Some people really know how to have a good time,” Jane said, confirming that it was indeed a motto of theirs, and I was suddenly mad for the opportunity to employ it myself.

“Yes,” said Arthur, and he told her about the scene at which we had stopped, and met, so many hours before.

“But I saw you in the library,” I said. “What was that Spanish potboiler you were reading, anyway?”

“La muerte de un maricón,”
he said, with a humorous flourish.

“Oh. What’s that mean?” I said.

“Ask Jane’s mother, the hispanophone.”

“You can just stop right now about my mother,” she said. “You can just shut your trap.” Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon. “My mother didn’t get to spend a year cutting up in Mexico and getting hepatitis like you did, Arthur.”

“Well, and thank goodness,” said Arthur.

“Oh, no! You didn’t really…cut up, did you?” I said.

“Like the big time,” he said.

“And what will you do this summer, Arthur?”

“I’m going to live at Jane’s and watch the dog. You’ll have to come visit me. It’s going to be a fun place after the Bellwethers leave.”

Arthur and Jane had just gotten to the part where the blind truck-stop waitress, feeling with her spotted, overjoyed hands Cleveland’s nose and forehead, accuses him of being Octavian, the shining man from another planet who had loved her many years ago, but had then returned to his own world, leaving her sightless, and with a brilliant, freakishly formed child—“the kind of thing,” Arthur said, “that is always happening to Cleveland”—when Mohammad fell into the dark room, shouting: “The Count! The Count!”

“The Count,” Arthur said, frowning slightly.

“My friend,” Momo said, almost as though he meant it, “my friend, my tremendous friend Arthur the Count! Tell me, what may I do for you? What would there be that I would not do it for you, my friend?”

He teetered, wore a bib of spilled whiskey, and the wide things he said, I felt, would be discounted as the typical CinemaScope friendliness of a sot. But Lecomte looked at him without answering, looked into his fat eyes while an obviously well-considered reply fought to free itself from his shut mouth.

“Arthur? Only to say it. Only! Anything in the world.”

“You could,” said Lecomte, “keep the fuck away from Richard.”

There was only the din of the party, and it was as nothing. The obscenity flared and then collapsed into itself in the dazzling white half of a second. It was like the echo of an ax blow filling the air between him and Momo. He immediately blushed and looked ashamed at having said too much.