Michael Chabon - The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

We slept together. He would get up in the morning and rush off to work, scrabbling through piles of our mingled trousers and briefs, running his head under the sink, slamming the front door in farewell, and after he was gone I would spend the luxury of my extra hour by bathing in the Weatherwoman's claw-foot tub and in the strangeness of it all. We lived well. Arthur cooked elaborate dinners; in the refrigerator there was always pasta in the colors of the Italian flag, a variety of weird wines, capers, kiwis, unheard-of fish with Hawaiian names, and stacks of asparagus, Arthur's favorite food, in the rubber-banded bundles that he never failed to refer to as fagots. We sent our dirty clothes out to be cleaned and they came back as gifts, tied up in blue paper. And, as often as possible, we went to bed. I did not consider myself to be gay; I did not consider myself, as a rule. But all day long, from the white instant when I opened my eyes in the morning until my last black second of awareness of Arthur's fading breath against my shoulder, I was always nervous, full of energy, afraid. The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk its streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.

The rich young couple-who were due to return on the last day of July-employed a black woman to clean their house. Her name was Velva. At eight o'clock on my only Wednesday morning at the Weatherwoman House, she entered the bedroom and screamed. After a moment of keen observation, she ran from the room, shouting that she was sorry. Arthur and I separated, went soft, laughed. We lit cigarettes and discussed strategy.

"Maybe I should go downstairs," he said.

"Put some pants on."

"What will she do?" he said. "I don't know her well enough to predict. Black people confuse me."

"Pick up the extension."

"Why?"

"Maybe she's calling the police."

"Or an ambulance."

I thought of my fat friends from Boardwalk, arriving in their van to attach their electric paddles to the outraged, apopleptic cleaning lady collapsed on the living-room floor. Arthur picked up the extension, listened, set it down again.

"Dial tone," he said. "And I'm not going downstairs. You go. Slip her a five or something." He pushed me, and I fell out of the bed, trailing the bedclothes behind me. A tendril of cotton blanket wrapped itself around a lamp, pulled the lamp to the floor after it, and then muffled the bang! of the shattered light bulb. We stared at each other, eyes round, muscles tensed, listening, like two boys who have been warned not to wake the baby. But the pop of the bulb was the incident's only repercussion. Velva contrived to be in another part of the house throughout our respective breakfasts and departures, and subsequent events indicated that she never said anything to anyone. Perhaps she did not care-I fantasized that she was Lurch's long-resigned mother. In any case, we were lucky. Like any successful spy, I felt frightened and lucky all the time.

Pittsburgh, too, was in the grip of a humid frenzy. The day after my flip of the coin, the sun had disappeared behind a perpetual gray wall of vapor, which never managed to form itself into rain, and yet the sun's heat remained as strong as ever, so that the thick, wet, sulfury air seemed to boil around you, and in the late morning veils of steam rose from the blacktop. Arthur said that it was like living on Venus. When I walked to work-arriving sapped and with my damp shirt an alien thing clinging to me-the Cathedral of Learning, ordinarily brown, would look black with wetness, dank, submerged, Atlantean. There were three irrational shootings that week, and two multiple-car pileups on the freeway; a Pirate, in a much-discussed lapse of sportsmanship, broke three teeth belonging to a hapless Phillie; a live infant was found in a Bloomfield garbage can.

And in bed, as our last week in the Weatherwoman House drew to a close, our dealings with each other became distinctly more Venusian. The stranglehold, the bite, even the light blow, found their way into our sexual repertoire: I discovered purple marks along the tops of my shoulders. It's the weather, I said to myself; or else, I added-once, and only for an instant, since I was so firmly opposed to consideration-this is just the way it is with another man.

I'd given my father the phone number at the Weather-woman House, and I wondered what he imagined I was doing there, since I had a perfectly good house of my own. I'd been putting him off for days now, uncomfortable with him not only because of Cleveland and Punicki and Phlox and my mother and my new, willfully unconsidered activities, but because of the edge of pleading in his voice when we briefly spoke, because of the blatant genuineness of his desire to see me. Our seeing each other during his previous visits had always been neither a priority nor something to be missed. We just saw each other if we could, and then he would leave again for Washington. This time he'd gone so far as to extend the length of his visit by a few needless days, and the strangeness of his determination not to leave without taking me to the movies made me feel more acutely the distance between us, the sorry pass things had come to. I did not like to see my father bending over backward; it didn't suit him. And in the late afternoon of that Wednesday on which Velva was horrified, I got in from work and found a message from my father on the Weather-woman's answering machine, and I trembled at the sad charm in my father's voice, his amusement with the machine, his terrible confusion.

"Ahem. Art, this is your father," said his voice. "Can you hear me? Ahem. Well, I'm glad to know you're moving among the phone-machine set. It's the-ahem-last night of the Joe Bechstein Festival and our records show that you still haven't used your ticket. What about this science fiction film that everyone is so crazy for?"

"Is that your dad?" said Arthur, coming up from behind and surprising me, wrapping his arms around my throat.

"Does that sound like a good idea?" said the voice.

"Yes," I said. "Shh."

"He has a high-pitched voice!"

"Quiet, you made me miss it. " I rewound the tape. "He wants to go to the movies."

"He sounds like the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh."

"-a good idea? Because I'm leaving town tomorrow morning. Art-"

"Sure, let's go. I'd love to meet him."

"Quiet! Don't make fun of his voice." I rewound the tape again.

"-town tomorrow morning, Art-"

"Does he know?"

"Please," I said.

"-is everything okay?"

I called him back and told him I'd be bringing a friend along. A different friend.

"Indeed," said my father, and suddenly, again, I didn't want to see him. "Is that necessary? Couldn't we be alone for once?"

"Well…"

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and now Arthur knelt before me and began to undo my pants.

"Are you afraid to be alone with me, Art?"

"That must be it, Dad. Don't." I pushed at Arthur's burrowing head.

"Don't what?"

"Nothing. Oh. Yes. I don't know."

"Art, there's a good deal I have to say to you, and it isn't the sort of thing I want to discuss with one of your friends around."

"Ah," I whispered, pushing, grasping. "Please."

"Art?"

Jesus. "Yeah, then let's, ah, forget it, Dad, okay? I probably wouldn't want to hear what you have to say, anyway, would I? No, I wouldn't." Jesus! "Go back to Washington. Say hi to Grandma. Ah." Ah!

"Art." There was a terrible shrillness in the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh, the note of dispossession, of loss of control. "What's happening to you?"

"I'm sorry, Dad," I said, feeling myself slip, slip, through fingers and fingers, into the pitiless wave. I fell back onto the bed; Arthur very precisely hung up on my father. He stood, wiped the corner of his mouth, then put me back together and zipped me up, with neat, rather waiterly gestures.