Michael Chabon - The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"No, no," I called after him. "Don't leave me alone with this woman."

I have a photograph of Phlox here before me; the only one in which she wears no makeup. Her forehead appears, quite frankly, tremendous. She has adopted a disheveled, Thursday-night-at-home-with-my-boyfriend pose, ripped sweatshirt collar dipped over one round olive shoulder, face uncharacteristically Levantine (her father was related to the great Pittsburgh Tambellinis), saintly. A faint something, a hint of redness in the eyes, suggests that she's been crying; the lower lids seem slightly puffy. Of course she's been crying. Her nose, as ever, looks big and straight and radiant. A few limp curls drape the vaulting eyebrows and silver screen of a forehead. And the eyes, the legendary blue eyes of Death Itself. Yes.

Arthur returned from the rest room, looking pale but considerably more rational. He watched with great interest as I hastily undid my fingertips from Phlox's own, lavender-nailed.

"Arthur Bechstein likes you, Phlox Lombardi," he said.

"Oh, do you really think so, Arthur LeComte?" said Phlox. Her bosom heaved measurably.

Arthur slid in beside me, without stirring the foam on the beers. His face had changed; he was feeling, clearly if unusually, a strong feeling about something or other. He spoke into his collar, his beer, the beery table top, his lap, eyes downcast and invisible.

"I hate you, Phlox Lombardi," he said.

I laughed. Arthur looked up and smiled, radium white, an elegant, old-fashioned, moneyed, sad kind of smile, like a relic of that remote age when radium was still our friend. He unleashed this smile on Phlox, right in front of me; I was sitting there, confronted, I imagined, by the unimaginable, dizzying nastiness of homosexuality thwarted.

"Excuse me," I said. Arthur rose to let me out.

This bar was esteemed for the quality or at least the profusion of the graffiti in both its gentlemen's and ladies' rooms, which were rarely washed or repainted. I read this exchange:

what's so great about women, anyway?

And, lower:

HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES

Then:

plus there's the mystery of learning about her childhood

A fourth man had concluded:

AND OF EVERYTHING THAT'S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES

When I returned to our table, Arthur was in the middle of his story, now apparently master of his earlier and revelatory outburst.

"Every so often, Cleveland yelled, 'Teddeeee,' and inside the house someone next door said, 'What?' and we would laugh."

"Just tell me what you did," said Phlox. "Enough."

"No, let him keep you in suspense, why don't you?" I said. "This is good."

"Oh, but I hate suspense, Arthur. Arthurs. Arthurs, ha ha. No, but really, what did you guys do?"

"We drank," said Arthur.

"Well, that can hardly have shocked the Bellwethers."

I sat down across from Phlox and slipped off my shoes. Arthur told her that Teddy's control over the dogs was amazing, and at this point in Arthur's confession, just at the word "amazing," Phlox and I began in earnest a delicate, grueling, almost motionless game of footsie, a classic in excruciation, both of us playing to win, employing every one of the considerable mudras for lust or for a pledge of which the foot is capable. At no point did we take our eyes off Arthur; I was only marginally aware of the rapt attention Phlox expertly appeared to pay to him. She'd withdrawn both feet from her limp sandals. In similar circumstances, that is, drunk as I was, I would probably have done this with any attractive woman who happened to be sitting across from me with her feet bared and her cheeks flushed, but not with the same overwhelming awareness of technique, the same impulse toward skill, that Phlox inspired in me. Neither of us heard much of Arthur's account, delivered as it was by a drunken man in a jukebox-dominated bar to two people whose already beer-impaired attention was largely directed to the slow, feathery wrestling match taking place beneath the wet surface of the table. I later had to run through the whole story with her all over again.

"I'm ashamed of myself," Arthur finished. "I haven't felt so chastised in ages."

"Ah, that's why you got all dressed up today," I said.

Phlox snorted.

"I can't believe it," she said. Abruptly she took her feet from mine, leaving them cold and interrupted, and I was momentarily seized by intense loneliness. "What won't you guys do when you're drunk? It's no wonder her parents were furious-a fifteen-year-old boy, my God."

"It wasn't that, Phlox. They don't give a damn about Teddy. Two facts: the fact that I let the Evil Cleveland in the house, and the fact that I let three Stanley Kowalski dogs take advantage of their delicate darling; that's it."

"Well, they have every right to be angry."

"You women always stick together," I said, which wasn't a particularly funny thing to say, but I was having difficulty thinking, and I wanted back the nylon feel of her toes.

"So what are you going to do, Arthur?"

"I think there's another couple who want me to house-sit for them. And they haven't a dog."

That summer's Stevie Wonder song came on the jukebox. I gathered that it was about a kiss like a watermelon or a chocolate chip.

"Will you dance with me, Art?" said Phlox.

"No," I said, and I ran the nail of my big toe down the length of the top of her foot, hard; but I didn't mean it.

The bar was built around a small central courtyard. When the management turned up the volume on the jukebox, people danced among the white iron tables and tame trees strung with lights, under the open sky. There were too many couples dancing; Phlox and I found ourselves backed into a corner, surrounded by people neither of us knew, who paid us no attention, and our strange but unsurprising conversation had all the exciting flavor of complete isolation. Unseen, unattended, we grew intimate, talkative, drunk, aroused. I kept my feet bare and tickled them against the Astroturf surface of the courtyard.

Phlox had covered herself in pearls that day, at the ear-lobes, the throat, the wrist. As she moved her hands and head in the still-light evening, talking about herself, the pearls seemed to string and restring themselves on the invisible thread of her gestures. This shifting nebula about her head and bust, like a sudden attack of phosphenes, first fascinated, then distracted, and ended by annoying the hell out of me. I had the constant sensation of having stood up too quickly, of seeing stars, which should at the very least have led me to drink fewer gin and tonics, two of which I had had the dubious foresight to carry out into the court and to set down on a little table beside us. A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime, I said, elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation.

We danced; Phlox was trying to speak to me in French. She said amorous things. I answered promptly in English, mentioning also that I'd read that it was nowadays considered in poor taste to talk of love in French. "Don't be mean to me," she said, laughing. I laughed. She wriggled, minutely, in her strapless dress. I looked more closely at her makeup, and could see, as she glanced suddenly over her shoulder, that she had indeed been a punk sometime in the recent past; her eye shadow and blush defied her looks, rather than enhancing them, her ears had been pierced many times, and there was even, I thought, a dimpled trace of the piercing of her nose.

"Look," she said, "look up there. There's some kind of gallery up there. You can see things hanging on the walls. Look, Art, you can see art on the walls. There are African masks. "

"Speaking of Africa, Phlox," I said. She'd been expecting this, I suppose, or something like it, and was instantly outraged, stopped moving. "No. No, no way. If you ever call me Mau Mau, it will be the last thing you say to me."