Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"You are now glad that you came," Abdullah said to me, rather irrelevantly shaking my hand. Then he barged into the pounding foyer.

"Gee, thanks," I said.

"It's nice that your old girlfriend was so understanding," Arthur said, nearly smiling.

I'd faked an apologetic telephone call to Claire, explaining to the dial tone that something had come up, I wouldn't be able to make dinner, and that I was sorry she had gone to so much trouble for me for nothing, which last, I'd reminded myself, was certainly true.

"Ha. Yes. Where is Dudu from?"

" Lebanon," said Arthur, and then a lovely brown woman in a sarong approached, with a delighted look and arms spread, preparing a brace of wide hugs.

"Dudu! Arthur!" she cried. Her eyes were large and brown, made up with gold flecks and three mingled eye shadows, and her hair was shot through with colorful objects, lacquered chopsticks, and bits of feather and crepe. I stood by the open door, watching the traded embraces, keeping a patient, big, phony smile on my face. Dudu cried out, cursed in French, and ran deep into the house, with a grim, insane look on his face, as if in pursuit of some prey he'd finally cornered after a million-year hunt. Our greeter, whom I took to be Riri, had splendid shoulders, which fell, smoothly and unhindered by clothing, to the bouncing top of her flowered wrapper. Like many Persian women, she had an eagling kind of beauty, hooked and dark, and mean about the eyes. After she had kissed her two boys, she turned to me and held out a hostesslike cute hand.

"Riri, this is my friend, Art," said Arthur.

"Delighted," I said.

"Oh, delighted!" said Riri. "So polite! All your friends are so polite, Arthur! Come in! Everyone is here! Everyone is drunk-but politely! You'll feel quite at home! Come into the parlor!"

She turned and walked into the parlor, a large, red-curtained room, which deserved its antique name. It was filled with vases, people drinking, and a grand piano.

"Is it really that obvious?" I whispered, close to Arthur's ear but not too close.

"You mean that you're polite?" He laughed. "Yes, it's embarrassingly obvious-you're making a well-mannered fool of yourself. "

"Well, let's get rude, then," I said. "Is there a bar?"

"Wait," he said, grabbing me by the elbow. "I want you to meet someone."

"Who?"

He led me through a web of kids, most of whom seemed to be foreign, holding a drink, and smoking a cigarette of one kind or another. Some halted their loud conversations and turned to greet Arthur, who gave all an able, curt, and rather arrogant "Hi." He seemed to be well-liked, or at least to command respect. Many of the small bundles of people tried to enclose him in their conversations as he passed.

"Where are you taking me?" I said. I tried to sound apprehensive.

"To meet Jane."

"Oh, good. Who is she?"

" Cleveland 's girlfriend. I think she's here-just a second. Stay here for a second, okay? I'm sorry. Be right back. I'm sorry about this, but I see someone, um-" said Arthur, and he unhooked me and vanished.

I stayed, and surveyed, and wondered at all the handsome women of many lands. He had deposited me in a corner of the parlor with a towering piece of furniture, which I leaned upon and cooled my cheek against. Many of those I saw had brown skins, every lovely grade of brown: Iranians, Saudis, Peruvians, Kuwaitis, Guatemalans, Indians, North Africans, Kurds-who knew? Caucasian women were draped about like bits of pale lace; and there were boys with interesting headgear and Lacoste shirts, or ill-fitting gabardine suits, laughing and eyeing the women. Arthur studied in that department of the university to which rich or very aggressively lucky foreign children are sent, to learn to administer great sums of international money and the ills of their homelands. Diplomacy, he'd said, when I'd asked him where his future lay.

''I go to these parties to practice," he'd said. "There are factions, alliances, secrets, debts, and a lot of messing around-I mean, of course, sexual messing around. And they all see themselves as Iranians, Brazilians, whatever, but I-I don't see myself as an American: I'm an atom, I bounce all over the place, like a mercenary. No, not a mercenary, a free agent-a free atom-isn't that something in chemistry? I'm always at the outside orbit of all the other, um, molecules?"

"I don't think that's it," I'd said. "I forget what a free atom is. I think you've made it up."

The parlor was noisy, smoky, jammed, and gorgeous. At the shah's fall, Riri's father had smuggled out a modest planeload of carpets and statuary, and these rather grimly gay furnishings made his daughter's party seem dark, ornate, and somehow villainous. I looked into the glass panels of the cabinet that held me up; it was filled with daggers and eggs. The eggs were large enough to have been laid by emus, and jeweled, painted. Delicate hinged doors, cut from the shells, opened onto miniature scenes of courtly, contortionist Persian love in 3-D. The artist had paid more attention to the figurines' limbs and genitalia than to their faces; the little twisted lovers wore that cowlike expression you see in Asian erotic art, which contrasts so oddly with the agonized knot of bodies. The daggers displayed their hilts but hid their blades in fantastic sheaths of blue velvet and dyed leathers. Scattered here and there on the glass shelves of the cabinet were cunning, unidentifiable implements of silver.

"What do you think?" It was Arthur. Though his tone was light, he looked angry, or preoccupied, anyway.

"I think Riri's father is a white slaver. Say, this is some party." I tried to get that tone of slogan in my voice. Then I chanced a slight indiscretion. "Did you find 'someone um'?'

He evaded the question, physically. He averted his eyes, and blushed, like a maiden, like Fanny Price in MansfieldPark. All at once I liked him, his firm grace with others, his unlikely modesty, the exotic parties he attended. The desire to befriend him came over me suddenly and certainly, and, as I debated and decided not to shake his hand yet again, I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I'd been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls.

"No," he said at last. "'Someone urn' has already been found and disposed of." He looked off into the blare.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Forget it. Let us find the lovely Jane."

To find Jane Bellwether, who acquired a last name and a few vague features during our search, we passed out of the jumping seraglio and through a long series of quieter, darker rooms, until we came to the kitchen, which was white. All the lights shone from overhead, and, as is sometimes the case with kitchens at large parties, an unwholesome-looking group, all the heavy drinkers and eaters, had convened in the fluorescence. Its members all looked at us as we entered the kitchen, and I had the distinct impression that a word had not been said in there for several minutes prior to our arrival.

"Say! Hi, Takeshi," Arthur said to one of two blenched Japanese who stood near the refrigerator.

"Arthur Lecomte!" he yelled. He was well more than half in the bag. "This is my friend Ichizo. He goes to C-MU."

"Hi, Ichizo. Glad to meet you."

"My friend," Takeshi continued, his voice rising, "is very horny. My friend say that if I were a girl, he would fuck me."

I laughed, but Arthur stood straight, looked deeply, beautifully sympathetic for perhaps a tenth of a second, and nodded, with that fine, empty courtesy he seemed to show everyone. He had an effortless genius for manners; remarkable, perhaps, just because it was unique among people his age. It seemed to me that Arthur, with his old, strange courtliness, would triumph over any scene he chose to make; that in a world made miserable by frankness, his handsome condescension, his elitism, and his perfect lack of candor were fatal gifts, and I wanted to serve in his corps and to be socially graceful.