By this time, Arthur resided at the Shadyside home of a rich young couple, his third residence of the summer. After leaving the Bellwethers', he'd spent ten exultant and sinful days, so he said, in a small, pretty Shadyside apartment with a genuine rose window, of which I got a brief glimpse one hectic Sunday when I dropped by. Now, with this third place, he'd continued his upward journey through the World of Homes. The rich young couple, friends of some friends, had gone to Scandinavia for July. I'd seen the wife many times on television (she read the weather), and it was strange now to look at the framed Maxfield Parrish postcard over her toilet, or to wear one of her husband's pale beautiful oxford-cloth shirts, or just to think that there I was, stretched out across the carpet of a lady I'd seen on television, her head wreathed in lightning and tiny paper storm clouds. Arthur had won his battle against the "little animals from hell," but now all the shaved hair was growing back, which itched, apparently, and made him unable to sit still for more than a few minutes.
The morning after Phlox and I did not see Ella Fitzgerald, I stopped by my house, to put on clean clothes for work. The telephone rang as I fumbled with the front door; in the mailbox was a fat wad of mail, most of it, at first glance, informing me of imminent bargains on beef, garden hose, and charcoal briquettes. The apartment felt stuffy, vacant, and the jangling telephone sounded somehow plaintive or lonely, as though it had not been answered in days. It was Arthur.
"Hello," I said. "No, I just walked in the door."
"I'm calling to say I'm sorry."
"Oh. Well." I couldn't think. It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.
"I was very rude and I hate myself for it."
"Urn-"
"Look, do you think we could meet today?"
"I don't think so. Oh, I don't know." There was an unusual warmth in his voice, a note of truth or of plainness. "Okay, maybe later today. I guess we have to talk about this?"
"I'm home today. Call me after work. Oh, and, Art-"
"Yes?"
"Have a nice day."
Not only did Boardwalk suffer under the curse of having to sell books; there seemed also to be a curse on the premises themselves, so that throughout the summer entire days of business were lost, here and there, to the need to remedy some minor disaster or other: Sometimes a pipe would burst in the basement, ruining overstock and making the place stink of wet books, and sometimes the air-conditioning froze and quit working, and once some vandals smashed the huge display window, on this day, there was a fire. It was a small fire, caused by a paramedic cigarette, but Valerie closed the slightly blackened bookstore and sent us all home.
I decided to walk to the Weatherwoman House through the clear, hot Monday morning. For some reason, many crews of men with tar-burning wagons were scattered across the rooftops of East Pittsburgh, and the smell of tar made everything seem even hotter, more yellow, more intensely summer. At the corner of St. James, a white Fiat convertible passed, and then stopped short with a squeal ten yards beyond me. Dark man, big smile; Abdullah. I came up alongside and we shook. I said hello, comment ça va, where are you going, and where are you coming from? Dudu told me one long semistory about both his having to appear in traffic court and his sister's passion for Charles Bronson, which were in some way connected. Periodically he stepped on the gas pedal, making the engine race, to punctuate his story at crucial junctures.
"What kind of mood is Arthur in today?" I said, just after we shook hands again.
"He is in an ugly mind-state as hell," said Abdullah. He smiled and put the car in gear.
Either Abdullah was inexpert at reading Arthur, or Arthur's mood had changed on the Arab's departure, or perhaps the change came with my surprise arrival; in any case, when Arthur opened the door, his smile was the one he occasionally gave Cleveland, loose and puckish. I was touched.
"Wonderful. Come in, come in," he said. "Nice shirt. Nice pants. Nice shoes." We both had on the usual dungarees, white shirts, and brown loafers. I had shaved, he had not. Neither of us mentioned Abdullah.
He led me into the bright, uncomfortable living room. The decorator had made an effort, it seemed, to create the illusion that the whole house existed in some remote future, in the wan, empty years after the extinction from the planet of furniture and cushions. I sat down on three wide dowel rods and a piece of beige canvas and tried not to lean back.
"Is it as lovely outside as it looks? Yes? We should take a walk," he said. He spun on his heel and walked away. "Want coffee?"
"Please. Do you know why I'm off today?" I shouted after him, into the kitchen.
"Why? You quit?" I heard him pouring, then the little rhythm of cup and spoon.
"Sure, I quit. No, I didn't quit; there was a fire."
"My. What happened?"
"The one copy of anything by Swift in the store, Gulliver's Travels, finally couldn't stand the indignity of living at Boardwalk anymore, and burst into righteous flames."
"I see."
"It was a very small fire."
Arthur came back with two white cups. "How do you know Swift started it? Maybe it was Fahrenheit 45I." He let himself down onto another odd tripod and made a display of easily seating himself, with a look of mock hauteur.
"To the twenty-fifth-century manner born," I said. "Ha ha." I was a little nervous. We weren't talking about anything.
"Perfectly plain, isn't it? Do you have a smoke?"
I gave him a cigarette and a light, and my hand shook. Then we sat there, looking at the creamy walls. I decided I didn't really want to talk about Phlox, but it had been very good to hear him say that he was sorry, and I would have liked to hear him say it again.
"So," he said finally, and it came out in a wobbling ring of smoke. "Do you want to walk? We can walk through Chatham."
"Sure." I rose, or rather fell, from my chair thing. "What's this kind of furniture called, anyway?" I said. I drained the tepid sour tail of my coffee.
"That's called science furniture, son," he said. "For the spine of tomorrow."
He locked the door behind us; we stepped out into the stinking, lovely day and headed for Chatham College, a destination that made me think of the party the night we'd met, of our short face-off in the doorway at Riri's, of all the possibilities for brown women, in that already distant June, which I'd surrendered with the advent of Phlox. I thought for a quiet second or two; Arthur's antennae operated inexorably.
"We could drop by Riri's," he said. "Every time I see her she asks after you. She said she thought you were a very sweet boy."
His tone, this faint air of the panderer that he sometimes wore, brought to mind another picture from that evening, which until now I'd forgotten: the change that had come over his face in the Fiat, the aha! in his eyes, when first I asked him about Phlox.
"Arthur, did you…? Why did you…?"
"What?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
"Okay. God, what a stink in the air, huh?" We watched his feet take steps along the slow, hot pavement. "What about Phlox?"
"I just-I love Phlox, Arthur-"
"Ooh, stop."
"Stop. There you go, see; I can't understand it. We have to talk about this, right? I love her, and I love her because I want to love her, of course, but I always feel that somehow Phlox and I are together because of you. Except I can never figure out exactly why I feel that. It's like doing algebra. I can't keep the whole thing in my mind long enough to grasp it. But then every so often everything lines up just right, and I can see for, like, a second, that you made it happen. You're behind it. Somehow. And if that's the truth, then I can't understand why you say the kind of thing you just said. Or why you do the kind of thing you did last night."
There was another long silence, which took us across Fifth Avenue and up the steep drive of the college. Nearby I could hear lawn mowers, and the voices of women at play.
"I never thought you would like her," he said at last.
We came to the pond, and now we sat down in the grass, under some maples. The ducks chattered and splashed.
"Are you angry? Do you hate me? I hope you don't hate me, Art Bechstein. I'm glad you think Phlox is wonderful. Of course, I'm also shocked-no, that's a joke, honestly.
I'm very, very sorry. Really. I'm sure she's very good for you."
He put an apologetic hand on my knee, then pulled it away, and I felt filled with forgiveness, with the warm catch in his voice, and, having just exposed him at his manipulative worst-had he conceived of Phlox as some kind of punishment?-with a strange, airy manhood, as though we had just boxed. I tore off handfuls of grass and tossed them into the air.
"Arthur," I said, "why are you such a little Ma-chiavelli?"
He crushed the end of his cigarette into the grass, flicked it away, and seemed carefully to weigh the label, and to be amused by it.
"Isn't it obvious?" he finally said. "My mother made me this way."
Horns honked, a cranked-up radio passed, the ducks beat water and quacked. We looked at each other.
"Let's go swimming," he said.
The rich young couple, I was mildly surprised to discover, belonged to the same country club as Uncle Lenny Stern, at which they had been kind enough to inscribe Arthur as their guest. Years before, in the club dining room, during the reception that followed Davy Stern's bar mitzvah, I had vomited vanilla mousse across my mother's lavender dress. The pool was Olympic-size and filled with boisterous children. Women with scarves and rigid hair sat under red umbrellas that threw shadows across the women and across the thermoses, kids' sunglasses, and stacks of fresh towels that lay on the white wire tops of the poolside tables; once an hour a whistle blew, children groaned, and the waters would grow calm, as the pool suffered a fifteen-minute invasion by pregnant women and small white infants. Families were all around us, without their men, and we lay beside each other on chaises longues, exchanging lazy sentences in the strong sunlight.
From time to time I would glance over at him, stretched out with his eyes shut, his lashes glinting, his body almost bare. I had never before given a man's body the regard I now gave his-but furtively, and through the flutter of a squint. I felt, I feel, almost as if I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. For one thing, each of the above-named parts was covered with thick blond hair, running to red-brown along the top of his bathing suit and on his chest. I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. I looked at him. He was in a sweat; his stomach was flat; there was hair on the back of his long, damp hand. And I looked also at his crotch, at that strange-that shaven-fist wrapped in slick blue Lycra. But his skin was the most strange, and the most difficult to keep my eyes from; it was dappled all over with tiny shadows, which gave it a look both soft and rough, as of suede or fine sand; and it seemed, stretched so tightly across his bones and muscle, as though it would never give, like a woman's, to the pressure of my hand. He sat up suddenly, leaning on his elbows, face red, eyes like the water in the brilliant pool, and caught me looking at his skin. I was startled into thinking the sentence that I had all summer forbidden myself to think: I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him.
"Yes?" he said, with half a smile.
"Ha. Nothing. Um, I've-I've been here before," I said. "A long time ago. I threw up on my mom at a bar mitzvah." My mom. I had not Said this in years. It just slipped out, in my confusion, and I bit my lip. Arthur twisted onto his side and propped himself up with one arm, looking eager.
"And?"
I rolled over onto my stomach, as much to conceal the swelling in the bathing suit I'd borrowed from him-he'd already glanced that way-as to avoid the current discussion. I spoke through the slats in my lounge chair, staring at the damp concrete of the deck.
"And that's all. Just another cheesy story about a nauseated Jew."
"I've heard them all," he said, and after a long moment, he fell back into the path of the sunlight. I breathed out.
In the pool he swam laps, with a polished, rather old-fashioned Australian crawl; I watched the little waves he made catch sunlight and shatter his submerged body into blue and white smithereens. Then I jumped in and thrust all the air from my lungs, so that I settled onto the cold bottom of the pool. I lay on my back and looked up, through the shifting window of water.
We took the bus back to Shadyside and, at separate ends of the huge Weatherwoman House, changed into fresh clothes. We wore the fine shirts of the Weatherwoman's husband. Arthur said he would walk me home. When we got to the Terrace, my phone was ringing again. I threw the door open and ran into the house, but when I put the receiver to my ear there was only the sound of an empty tunnel. I hung up.
"Phlox," we said.
While Arthur went to the toilet, I took one of those giant canisters of Coke from the refrigerator and carried it out to the front steps. I swallowed a couple of blebby mouthfuls and watched a few little things happen: an ant, a faraway jet. When Arthur reappeared, he held in his fingers a marijuana cigarette.
"Look what I found in my pack of cigarettes," he said.
We smoked it with damp fingers and talked blandly, looking mostly at the sky, which was blue as baby clothes. I felt as if I were talking to a friend from the fourth grade, when talking with a friend and sitting in the sun had felt different, had felt like this, more full of possibility than of any real matter. This made me wish to the point of tears that I were wearing sneakers. Î had on leather young-man shoes, which were impossible. I stood up and could see the arches and battlements atop the Cathedral of Learning, away off in Oakland. Oh, I thought, the Emerald City in the twelfth century. The sun was so bright. I distinctly heard the click of a woman's heels on the far sidewalk. Nowhere around me was there anything to remind me of the year-no new cars, no rock-and-roll music; only sky, red brick, cracked pavement, a breeze-and I underwent one of those time slips during which one can say to himself, "This is the summer of I94I," and nothing, within him or without, can prove him wrong. The sunlight was the sunlight of forty years before. I looked at Arthur, shirtless, his hair still damp at the ends, the corners of his eyes pink with chlorine and grass, and the moment held. I touched his face. He tilted his cheek toward me, almost warily, one skeptical eyebrow raised. The telephone rang.
"You've got to do something about that girl."
"Quiet. No, I'll bet it's my dad." I ran, very clumsily, into the house. "He's probably been calling every five minutes since nine o'clock this morning." When I reached the phone I stood and watched it ring a couple of times more. "I don't know if I can handle this. "
"Let me do the talking."
"Hello? Pops. Hi. Oh, I'm swell. I'm dandy." I heard Arthur say, "Uh oh." "How's Bethesda?"
" Bethesda? Bethesda is a sweltering hell. Very muggy," said my father, through the squeaks and clicks of the ionosphere. "Very humid. We're all wearing Aqua-lungs here. And through her breathing apparatus your grandmother says you should write to her."
I started to laugh-a bit too hard, I told myself. He would know, he could tell.
"You really should write. Listen, I won't keep you, obviously you're in the middle of something-"
"Dad, no, not at all-"
"Ha!" said Arthur.
"I only wanted to tell you that I just found out I'll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. Probably for a whole week. I should have several free meals. Maybe a movie."
I said I would look forward to it. After I'd hung up and come outside again, Arthur said. "What is this, high school? So what if he knows you're stoned?"
"I don't know." I sat heavily on the step.
"You're just afraid. You can't do anything to upset him, or you're cashless."
"No, it's not that."
"Look at it. You're an economics major when obviously you should be making movies, or traveling, or reviewing restaurants, or something frivolous."
"Okay."
"You live in Pittsburgh when you should be living in New York or L.A. or Tokyo, or someplace frivolous."
"Okay."
"You dumped your crazy girlfriend and got yourself another one, who's also frivolous but who at least wears lipstick and perfume and has a job. Your whole life is just one big 'Thanks for the check, Dad.'"
"Okay, okay." For a few seconds I clenched my jaw and shook, wanted to punch his face, break his straight nose, but then I felt confused, and I laughed. "Okay."
All at once, I was insanely hungry.