Michael Chabon - The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"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.

Phlox, as it turned out, was the first one over the Wall.

I fretted all afternoon, after saying good-bye to Arthur, over how to describe my day to her, concocting and rehearsing various half-truths, but when she called that evening from her place, I didn't even get the opportunity to say I'd been at work, because she told me she'd dropped by Boardwalk at lunchtime and seen the crayoned closed-due-to-fire sign Scotch-taped to the glass door.

"So what did you do today?"

"Oh, just hung around."

"Did you see Arthur?" She ticked a pencil or pen or her fingernails against the receiver. It was a nervous habit of hers.

"Yes, I hung around with Arthur. For a little while."

"Ah." There was a long silence. "Well, come over, Art, please," she said at last. "Come quick."

"You sound so sultry when you say that."

"In the church of my heart the choir is on fire. "

"Jesus, I'll be right over."

"Good."

"Who was that, anyway?" I tried to keep track of her thousand quotes and citations, as though assembling a Bartlett 's of Phlox. My love of her (I say this despite Cleveland 's caveat) was like scholarship (not falconry)-an effort to master the loved one's corpus, which, in Phlox's case, was patchwork and vast as Africa.

"Oh, some Russian said it. For me. Come." With that, she hung up, just like in the movies.

I walked the quiet dinnertime streets, thinking of a cold, simple meal and whispered sex, thinking, more guiltily, that I would have to even out my day with Arthur by speaking softly into Phlox's ear all evening, but when I got to her apartment it was full of noise, and there was a heavy smell of beef and herbs in the air. The phonograph played Vivaldi full-blast, or some other twittering music, a kitchen appliance ground gravel in the kitchen, and Annette and two of her nurse friends had commandeered the living room and were splashing enormous daiquiries across the carpet, laughing. I yelled hello to them and then went into the kitchen, where Phlox squatted before the open oven, poking at something with a long fork.

She wore a backless heliotrope minidress that threw an auspicious triangle of shadow across the tops of her thighs. She'd tied back her hair, and a few damp wisps that had come free clung to her cheeks. Before she saw me she drew a forearm across her slick brow, and blew an upward and largely ornamental jet of air that stirred her bangs. She was like a sweaty, smiling stoker in the hot engine room of an apartment in uproar. When we embraced, my hands slipped down her back and tumbled into her dress at the waist, and she squealed.

"It's crazy here," I said. "You smell terrific."

"I smell like an athlete. I know, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that Annette was going to be entertaining this evening. Let me at least cut the stereo."

She went out and I opened every simmering pot and poked at the potatoes in the oven, tearing their crisp jackets with the tines of the fork. The meal was four or five months too early, perhaps-some kind of pot roast, a thick sheaf of asparagus, and baked potatoes the size of shoes- but I knew better than to suggest that perhaps a chef's salad or stir-fried vegetables would have been more appropriate. Anyway, it was such a beguiling menu for the end of July, and even though I'd eaten lox and bagels not three hours before, I had this appetite. When Phlox cut the stereo, the white noise that filled the apartment dropped abruptly to the giggling blue-green of the waitresses' conversation.

I bounced around the kitchen, chattering, while she pulled everything together. I steered clear of the subject of Arthur, by embellishing, with a great deal of energy, the story of all the smoke at Boardwalk, and Phlox, deep in food thought, pretty well ignored me. My tale of fire carried us through until just after we sat down to eat in the breeze that came through the windows along the dinner table.

"Oh, yeah, I talked to my father today," I said without a thought. "He's coming into town tomorrow. For a whole week. "

"Oh, Art, how exciting! I want to meet him!"

Why, that summer, was I so often the victim of astonishment?

"Sure, maybe. Sure," I said, unable to chew.

"Well, I can, of course, can't I?"

"Well, it's business, you know; he'll be busy almost all the time. I just don't know. It's hard to say." I began to recover myself.

"Well, he doesn't work at night, does he? We can have dinner." She laid down her fork and stared at me.

"We'll have to see."

"I think you're ashamed of me, Art Bechstein."

"Oh, Phlox, come on, I'm not ashamed of you."

"Then why don't you want your father to meet me?"

"It doesn't have anything to do with you. It's just that-"

"Why are you ashamed of me? What don't you like about me?"

"There's nothing. I love you, you're splendid."

"Then why can't I meet your father?"

Because nobody gets to meet my father!

"I don't want to fight about this."

"This isn't a fight, Art; this is you being impossibly weird again." One tear pooled and then spilled.

"Phlox." I reached across the table and ran my finger down the shining path. "Don't cry. Please."

"I've stopped. Okay." She picked up her fork, sniffed once. "Forget it."

"Can you just understand that it has nothing-"

"It's all right. Forget it. "

We worked our jaws in silence.

Tuesday night, the downtown bus was full of kids headed to the Warner for the opening of a new science fiction movie, a mutational romance that later went on to become a sensation. (I saw it twice: once with Phlox and once not with Phlox.) The bus's air-conditioning had failed, and I was uncomfortable in my sport coat and tie; grit and exhaust blew in through the rattling open window.

"The bloom on my cheek has withered and faded," said Phlox.

I looked at her face, and saw, through her makeup, traces of unmistakable bloom. I said so, and she smiled, pensively.

"Art, is your father one of those silly fathers?"

"Pardon me?"

"Does he drink a lot, talk about money, get angry, tell dirty jokes, and laugh loud?"

She has just described my Uncle Lenny and his close friends Eddie "Bubba" Martino and Jules "Gloves" Goldman (a distant relative). "No, my father is a serious guy," I said. "He drinks only at weddings. He isn't vulgar. He hardly ever laughs. He jokes a lot, though. He's funnier than I am."

"Then how can he be a serious guy?"