Michael Chabon - The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"Mmm," I said, inhaling an odor of dirt and soup broth.

I felt as though I were a vacationing child again, walking with some older cousin. When we came alongside a tiny rill, she pulled me to it and knelt down beside the sparkling water. I found a twig and broke it in two, feeling a little self-conscious but willing to try to relax.

"Let's race," I said. We tossed our little boats and watched them bob until they disappeared from view. Then she recovered her alpenstock and we set off again, until we came to a place where the creek was wider, and a plain wooden bridge took you across. We leaned over the low rail for a minute.

"Let's spit," I said. We spat. It was amusing, and we spat again. I was still laughing when she took hold of my wrist, tears in her eyes, and we were no longer two kids on a nature walk. I was trapped.

"Art," she said. "I know you know. Tell me what Cleveland is doing."

"What do you mean?"

"I ran into this sleazy friend of Cleveland's, Dave Stern."

"He's my cousin," I said.

"I'm sorry; he isn't really all that sleazy."

"It's okay," I said. "He isn't my real cousin. What did he say?"

She kept herself from crying; she wiped a hand across her forehead, blew the hair from her eyes, and then started off again. Her pink plaid shift lifted as she ran a few steps, then she stopped and waited for me.

"He didn't say anything, really. Just hinted. I could tell he was trying to bug me. He said Cleveland was working for his father. So I asked him what his father did."

"And he said?"

"He said, 'My father makes deals.'"

"And then he laughed like a big donkey."

"Tell me," she said. Three syllables.

"I don't know," I said. It sounded so much like a lie that I bit my lip. "Did you ask Cleveland?"

"He said to ask you." She stopped and brought her chin up to mine, fixing me with her eyes, and I could feel her next words on my face. "So tell me."

"He said to ask me?" Was he testing me? Did he actually think that I might tell her the truth? "He's jerking you around. I have no idea what Lenny Stern does."

"Lenny Stern?" she said.

"He's kind of my uncle."

"Is he a drug dealer? Is Cleveland dealing drugs?"

I was glad for the opportunity to tell the truth.

"No," I said. "I know that, anyway."

She looked relieved despite herself, despite the fact that she knew she should still worry.

"Well, as long as you know that," she said, and she stepped away from me and looked at me very carefully. She knew that I had lied to her, and although she chose to believe me, she never entirely trusted me again.

When we got back, Jane and Cleveland started drinking, and Arthur and I watched them fight for the rest of the afternoon. For a while I tried, without saying anything, to let Cleveland know that I had not ratted. He ignored me and seemed to be feeling fine. He stood up, inhaled deeply, and cried, "Ah, the sweet piss odor of cedar!" Eventually we just tried to stay out of their way. Still we kept coming upon them kissing within the narrow triangle made by two open doors in the hall, or in the shadow of the chestnut that overhung the front yard. At sundown we laughed at their unlikely silhouettes moving side by side along the beach. We stood by the open door, leaning against opposite jambs and smoking. Then we stopped laughing. I envied them the hands in the back pockets of each other's jeans, and I envied them their history, the plain and the frantic days, the simple length of years behind them.

"No matter how long I know you guys, I'll never be able to catch up."

The cigarette hung slack from Arthur's peeling lower lip, and I saw that he'd had his own reasons for suddenly growing quiet.

"Catch up on what?" His Kool jiggled as he spoke.

"The time. All the days and evenings like this one."

"Ah." He smiled very faintly.

"What are you thinking?"

"Actually, I was just thinking that seeing Cleveland and Jane together again makes me feel tired. You know, all the days and evenings like this one. But it can't last much longer."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean-nothing. Here they come." He flicked the end of his cigarette in their direction with an exaggeratedly formal upswing of his arm, as though firing off a salute, or sending up a flare.

When I got back to the city, I was glad, alarmingly glad, to see Phlox again. At dinnertime that Monday, she met me on the hot pavement in front of Boardwalk Books, and without pausing to think, I lifted her and swung her and kissed her, through all three hundred and sixty degrees, like a soldier and his girl. We got some applause. I gathered in my fists the thin, rough cotton at the waist of her sundress, and squeezed, pressing her hips to mine. We talked a lot of nonsense and headed for the Wok Inn, heads together, feet apart, leaning into each other like the summit of a house of cards. I asked about the new auburn streaks in her hair.

"Sun and lemons," she said. "You wear a loose-weave straw hat and draw some strands of hair through the holes. Then you juice the strands. I spent a lonely weekend juicing myself."

"Same here. That's from Cosmo, that thing with the lemons," I said. "I read about it in your bathroom the other morning."

"You read my Cosmo?"

"I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions."

"How did I do?"

"You cheated," I said.

We passed a thrift shop, its window full of battered no-head mannequins wearing sequined gowns, of old toasters, and of lamps whose bases were little Spanish galleons. In one corner of the window was a flat, multicolored box.

"Twister!" said Phlox. "Oh, Art, let's buy it. Just imagine."

She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the store. The saleswoman retrieved the game from the window for us, and showed us that it was intact; the spinner still spun and the game mat was fairly clean. At dinner it lay under the table, tilted against my foot and hers, and, first as we continued our happy, empty conversation, then as I summarized the weekend at the summer house, the Twister box stirred and tickled me with each kick of her restless ankle.

In the living room of her apartment, we shoved aside chairs and the coffee table and spread the plastic mat across her rug. Its primary-colored spots, and the off-kilter, go-go red letters that spelled out the word "Twister!" at its ends, brought back a flood of memories of I960s birthday parties on rainy Saturdays in finished basements. Phlox hopped off to her bedroom, to "peel away the confining raiment of civilization," as she put it, and I sat down on the floor and unlaced my sneakers. An odd contentment came over me. Although the used Sears furniture, the fake Renoir, the cat statue, et cetera, still seemed kind of ugly and in bad taste, I discovered I had made one of those common aesthetic efforts that consists of just swallowing an entire system of bad taste-Las Vegas, or a bowling alley, or Jerry Lewis movies-and then finding it beautiful and fun.

In a way, I thought, I had done the same thing with Phlox herself. Everything about her that was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui; her overdone endearments and makeup; all that was in questionable taste and might have embarrassed me or made me snicker, I had come to accept entirely, to look for and even to encourage. She delighted me as did bouffant hairdos and Elvis Presley art. When she came out of her bedroom dressed in a nylon kimono and huge slippers of turqouise fur, I was almost dizzy with appreciation, and the gaudy plastic Twister mat at my feet seemed to be the very matrix, the printed plan, of everything I liked about her.