Michael Chabon (7 page)

I took my first good look at him. He did not at all have the face I’d expected. Wrongly but quite naturally, I’d assumed that he would look just like Arthur, blond and rosy. Not at all. He had, to a degree, the head of a biker: uncombed, red-skinned, heavy, with the chipped incisor. But his hauteur and his Clark Kents threw everything off; they made him peculiar.

“Cleveland,” I said, as we walked up to the front door, “how did you know about my father?”

He turned his head toward me for an instant, and his eye was bright and crafty.

“Everyone knows,” he said. “Don’t they?”

“Nobody knows,” I said, grabbing hold of his leather sleeve. “Absolutely no one.”

He turned toward me and threw off my hand, so hard that it slapped against my hip.

“Your cousin David Stern knows.”

“He isn’t my cousin,” I said. “We used to play G.I. Joe together. A long time ago.”

“Well, he grew up into a real asshole.”

“He has a big mouth.” I thought for an instant, then said, “How do you know Dave Stern? You work for his father?”

“I don’t work for anybody. The Sterns are simply associates of mine.”

“It’s nothing to brag about.”

“I get to make my own hours,” Cleveland said. He dashed up the steps, then whirled to face me. “And”—he gave me a menacing, humorous look—“‘Nobody knows. Absolutely no one.’” He rattled the aluminum screen door like a maniac, and it came off in his hand. “Whoops,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said. “You’re a monster.”

“I’m walking destruction,” he sang. “I’m a demolition man.”

We went inside, where it looked nothing like my grandparents’ house, and I relaxed. The most immediately memorable feature of the decor was the carpeting. A “soothing,” embarrassingly synthetic flavor of sky blue, it illuminated the whole floor of the place, like a lit ceiling; and so from my first minute in Jane’s house I felt subliminally but undeniably upside down. The furniture had been accumulated, rather than chosen. An empty wicker birdcage hung in the corner of the living room, its bottom still lined with newspaper and its water bottle a quarter full. They had partitioned the dining room from the living room with an ugly brown stack of metal shelves that held Jane’s many golf trophies and pictures of Jane and her dad, who looked like a frail Alec Guinness. I liked seeing the photographs of Jane, with her strawberry of a face and her remarkably fine posture.

“Hey!” said Arthur, coming from the kitchen in nothing but boxer shorts. Wiping his floury hands on his bare, sunburned legs, he held out the right one for Cleveland and me to shake. “Cleveland!” He wore the only unfeigned look of surprise I was ever to see on him. “What the hell is going on?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Didn’t you send him to get me?”

“Hell, no,” said Cleveland. “I thunk it up myself. Arthur was telling me about his new friend”—here Cleveland gave me a very complex sort of false leer, as though to say, “I know you two aren’t making it, but then again maybe I don’t know”—“Art Bechstein, who works at that shitty little Boardwalk Books on Atwood, which doesn’t have a single book by Brautigan or Charles Bukowski, and I said to myself, ‘Well, Art Bechstein; I know who that is! And I’ll bet that at this very moment that late-afternoon emptiness of the spirit is stealing over him like a shadow.
Like a shadow.’”
He shook his long black hair.

“You two know each other?” said Arthur. He was edging his way toward the blue staircase, and it occurred to me that there was someone upstairs.

“Only by reputation,” said Cleveland. “Who do you have upstairs, Artie?”

“Someone. I was making our dinner. You don’t know him.”

“Cleveland kidnapped me,” I said.

“I’d imagine so,” said Arthur. “Look, could you fellas come back in about a half hour?”

“No!” said Cleveland. They played a game, fell into it instantly, sharpening on each other their abilities—Cleveland’s verbose and graceless, Arthur’s cool and mannered—to manipulate situations, to see the motives behind motives, to note and expose the telltale flicker of a glance. They could, finally, put two and two together; most people cannot. “You’ll just make him go out the back door feeling all sticky and naked and unloved. Why not get him down here? Who is it? Cousin Richard? No—no, I’ll bet it’s Mohammad. I’ll bet you two were making up again. He has some paper about Andrew Jackson he needs you to write for him, and so he came over here with a pound of swordfish and made a big charming kissy-face, and now everything is jake.”

Arthur laughed and looked delighted. “Mohammad!” he shouted. “Come downstairs!”

“Where’s the dog?” said Cleveland.

“Downstairs trembling, as usual. I think she’s in heat.” He turned to me. “Scary, isn’t he? Actually, it was the Emancipation Proclamation and veal scallops. I’m making veal marsala.”

Our stomachs were full of veal and asparagus and we had been drinking for a long time; the sun set and the neighborhood grew still. In between songs on the radio, I could hear a lawn mower off in the distance, a dog barking. The Bellwethers had no screens on their windows, and a cloud of gnats hung over the center of the living room.

Arthur laid great significance on the fact that Momo was full Maronite Christian. This lent him a special charm. He had the thin veneer of civilized French manners and sullenness over the dark, hirsute heart of the Levantine (Arthur liked them swarthy); he was the dazzling Beirut hotel harboring an unexploded bomb. Their very casual affair had been going on for a long time and had fallen into a comfortable pattern. “Every week,” said Arthur, “we have knock-down-drag-out sex and then a tender and passionate fight.” Momo had sat chewing and scowling all through dinner, and left immediately afterward, telling us that he was “a fucky one,” because he had forgotten that his cousin depended on him for a ride home from her music class and would be waiting for him on the sidewalk outside the Y with a few choice phrases of French.

Arthur, after Cleveland had called him on the hidden boy in the bedroom, showed not a trace of embarrassment. Something changed in his behavior because Cleveland was there; he withdrew from his usual position at the center of attention and just laughed, in his underwear and shirttails. Cleveland drank and drank. My involvement with Phlox seemed already to be a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that I had barely spoken to her, and they subjected me to several minutes of intensive teasing. Cleveland said he had slept with her, embarrassed me with the strange details, gave me a few “pointers”—and then said that it had perhaps been with a girl named Floss and not Phlox that he had dressed as Batman and she as Robin and then rolled around on the floor of a dark garage. I changed the subject and asked about Jane.

“I’m in the Out column of the Bellwether Fashion Forecast,” Cleveland told me, crushing another empty can and flinging himself out of the paisley recliner out of which—it was on page eight of the list—Dr. Bellwether had forbidden anyone to fling himself. As he catapulted his big self toward the refrigerator, the La-Z-Boy produced exactly the metallic groan I supposed Dr. Bellwether most dreaded.

“Does that include Jane too?” I said, trying not to sound hopeful. I didn’t, truly, entertain any hopes about Jane; some questions just have a dangerous tone built in.

“Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t,” Arthur said. “Jane and Cleveland have been in love for about three of the six years they’ve been in love.” He grinned—another first. “Bring me a beer, Cleveland?”

“The problem,” said Cleveland, tossing an emerald can of Rolling Rock right at the nook between Arthur’s stretched-out feet, where it lodged perfectly, and then grinding back in the unfortunate chair, “is her parents. In their opinion, of course, the problem is me.”

“Evil Incarnate,” I said.

“Oh, yeah; I’m the problem in Arthur’s mother’s opinion too. In fact, however, I am
not
a problem.”

“Only a little socially disturbed,” said Arthur.

“I am only in love with Jane Bellwether,” Cleveland said, and then said it twice again. “This is a reality that Nettie and Al will just have to accept. However unpleasant. I wish they would just die. I hate both them and their guts.”

“When are they coming home from New Mexico?” I said.

“Soon,” said Arthur. “And I’ll have to move.”

One of the big songs that summer came on the radio.

Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?

Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?

Subtle innuendos follow:

“Must be something inside.”

Before the next song there was a short silence and we could hear some shouting—not angry shouting, more like a cry of “Telephone!”—from inside the next house.

“The kid next door is really kind of unusual,” said Cleveland. “He keeps pit bulls. Of course Nettie and Al hate him because of the dogs, which, as you’ve probably seen on TV, will eat helpless infants and the elderly. And Jane claims that Teddy is violent, and—what does she say?—lewd. I’ve known about him for a long time, but you know, I’ve never met him. Currently he’s nothing but a joke. A Figure of Fun. In fact,” he said, and he got up and went over to the open window and shouted, “Teddeeee!” and from inside the other house someone said, “What?” and we laughed. “Let’s go out back,” said Cleveland. “Fuck the fucking Bellwethers.” Arthur went to put on his pants.

The two backyards were separated by some half-dead shrubs and that was all. They formed one big lawn, filled with fireflies.

“Hey, Teddy!” said Cleveland.

Teddy came out onto the grass with the dogs, three of them, at his heels, in a very obedient kind of arrangement, like a squadron of navy show jets. We waved.

“Hello, Teddy,” said Arthur, his tone cool and condescending again.

“We think he’s retarded,” Cleveland said to me, sotto voce. I made an inquiring face. “Well, because Jane always refers to him as ‘poor Teddy,’ you know? See—his hair is cut too short, the way retarded kids’ hair is, like no one asks him how he wants it, and he can’t sit still for very long, so they just lop the hell out of it one two three.” He lopped the air with two scissoring fingers. “Big shoes. Hey, Teddy, can we see your dogs?”

“Wait,” I said. “Stop. You aren’t going to torment a retarded kid and his pets.”

“Wait,” said Cleveland.

“No, I’m not ready for ugliness from you guys. Sordidness, maybe, but not something brutal, or cruel, okay? I don’t know you well enough.”

“Wait. Everything will be jake.”

Teddy and the pit bulls came snapping through the hedge and crossed over to us.

“Where are the Bellwethers?” he said. “What have you done with them?” He smiled. It was immediately clear that he was not retarded. He was probably eighteen and bright, but his terrible haircut, his small nose and eyes, and his fat cheeks made him look younger and more stupid. Arthur asked him if he would care for a beer and then went back into the house to get him one.

“Terrific dogs,” said Cleveland.

“I trained them myself,” said Teddy. “They’re perfectly trained.”

They sat in a row, panting almost in unison, three tough little good-natured knots of dog muscle that attended every movement of Teddy’s hands. He commanded them to stop panting, and blip! their tongues shot back into their mouths.

“Amazing,” said Cleveland. He knelt down and patted the series of heads. Then he grinned a sinister grin. “Well,” he said, “what
should
we have done with the Bellwethers?”

“Talked them into moving away.”

Arthur came out with Teddy’s beer.

“Say, Artie,” said Cleveland. “Didn’t you mention something about Happy being in heat?”

“Aw, no,” I said. “Aw, no. Come on. Don’t do it.”

“It’s one of the items on the list,” said Arthur, looking up as he tried to remember the wording. “Somewhere toward the end: ‘Do not…do not be alarmed if Happy seems to behave strangely, as she is in estrus right now.’ Good Queen Estrus. As if the dog could get any stranger than it is. Why?”

“Well, just look at these fellows,” said Cleveland. “I imagine they’re dying for some high-class tail. And they have a right to it. Isn’t that so, guys?” he asked the dogs, speaking now almost as though he were their attorney. “They’ve probably had three little pit-bull crushes on Happy for years and years, sending her flowers and gifts and love letters that Nettie always intercepts and throws away. Think how many times these guys have had their hearts broken.”

S
O
C
LEVELAND COULD NOT
be stopped from bringing Happy up from one of her basement hiding places and mating her to Teddy’s three pit bulls, which, when introduced to Happy in the Bellwethers’ dining room, showed a great deal of alacrity in mounting to the distant heights of her vagina.

Initially Happy froze, stood rigidly with her tail down and her ears collapsed against her long head, eyes half-closed, in that distinctive near-catatonic state which Cleveland called a ball-peen trance. Manny (the dogs were named for the Pep Boys), her first consort, tupped a trembling, unresponsive statue of a dog, but by her second partner, Moe (who scramblingly presented himself half an hour later, as it took Manny rather a long time to extract himself from Happy’s tightly clenched depths), she began to loosen up, and even appeared to be enjoying herself. When Jack’s turn came (in the interval Cleveland went out and came roaring back with more beers), Happy sniffed at him as much as he sniffed at her, and even crouched a little, to make his ascent easier. We yelled and cheered the boys on, and kept drinking.

And then we hit the Checkpoint, as Cleveland called it—the bane of his career as one who always tried to push things; and at that inevitable one-way Checkpoint of Too Much Fun, our papers were found in order and we crossed into the invisible country of Bad Luck. Teddy’s mother—whoops, Teddy was only fifteen years old, after all—came looking for her son and found Mr. Genteel, Evil Incarnate, her unretarded, badly coiffed boy, and myself lying on the floor of the Bellwethers’ salon, surrounded by empty green cans of Rolling Rock and four exhausted dogs, two of which were still linked in the midst of a painful-looking dance of extraction. The livid (bluish-white) woman grabbed her son, inhumanely commanded him to liberate Jack, and, after having terrorized Arthur into giving her the name of the Bellwethers’ motel in Albuquerque, started home, trailing her woozy son and Manny, Moe, and Jack, a flawless triangle of dog.