Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"Phlox," I said, fifteen inches away from her lips. "Oh, Phlox."

"Do you love me?" she said, still seated, radiant with patience and anticipation, and obviously feeling that she held the strings. Her light, unconcerned tone of voice might as easily have said, May I help you?

I didn't stop to think, and said that I did.

"Wait," she said. She stood, turned from me, and walked out of the office, swinging her hips, and she came around to the other side of the window, where our hands went out, our fingers tangled, and I put my mouth to hers. After we'd kissed for a minute, with all her well-informed co-workers watching us through the magic grille, she drew back and looked at me, without a trace of hurt or anger on her face. There was only half-suppressed mirth, the rapid blinking of disbelief. She cocked her head to one side.

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"Hush," she said, and giggled. "Come on."

She took my hand and pulled me down the hall, into the stairwell, her white pumps tocking against the tiled floor. For a second I shut my eyes just to listen to the promising clatter, to think once again, Ah, there's a woman coming; here comes a woman. Under the staircase we kissed, pushing our hips together. We began to get the same wild notion then; she grabbed at my hand with both of her hands, walking backward, and pulled me up the stairs, to the third floor of the library, where there were, all around the outer walls, tiny dark rooms, with tiny desks, that the library rented to graduate students.

"They're locked, aren't they?"

"Not this one," she said, tugging me toward a door, which opened with a twist of her flushed hand.

"How do you know about this?" I slipped in behind her, whispering, and she closed the door.

"Hush," she said. "Everyone knows about this. Sit down, we'll have to be quick. Here."

She leaned forward to unzip my pants, like a child unwrapping a doll. They fell and puddled around my ankles. I sat.

"Oh," said Phlox, touched, when she saw my erection. "It's so lovely."

"It is?"

"It's so handsome and polite." She hitched up her dress; no panties.

"Were you prepared for this?" I said, this suspicion dawning on me, honestly, for the first time.

"I've been prepared for this for a week now," she said, taking my fingers. "Just feel how prepared I am."

Down upon me she settled herself, wiggling, making the necessary adjustments, and there, once again, were the aptness, the welcome give of giving skin, the warmth, the human and fragrant slipperiness, and I sighed as though I ached in every muscle and were sinking into a hot bath. In sixty seconds it was all over, and it had all begun again.

But it was different.

That evening, Phlox called to invite me to dinner, and without hesitation I said that I would be right over. Abandoning the necktie this time, I brushed my teeth, grabbed my keys, slapped three flaques of cologne around my open collar. Just as I was closing the door behind me, the telephone rang again, and knowing that it was probably Arthur, I clapped my hands over my ears and took the twenty-six steps two at a time. Walking the streets to Phlox's house, as so many times before-past that mailbox, past that airy, rampant bed of cosmos, past that old man, oh yes, with the neck brace and the Pomeranian-making the old approach to her apartment through that eternal oily puddle and the stink of that ginkgo tree, I was filled with a frail and sad exhilaration, which I really ought to have recognized for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there-for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time. There was nothing to eat when I arrived, nothing at all, and we threw our bodies together and fell onto the hard, scratching carpet. We didn't stand, this time, for two hours, until she could no longer hold her water.

"Mau Mau," I said, when she came back from the toilet. The forbidden name spilled out, although I'd forgotten it completely until this moment.

"Oh, Art, it's been so long."

I said yes, it had, but we were talking, I think, about two different things.

"What's happening?" I said. "What is this?"

"Lust," she said. "I believe it's frenzied lust." She giggled.

"Did you arrange that phone call this morning?"

"What phone call was that?" she said, meeting my eyes but turning a bit red.

"Mau Mau. It was never like this before, Mau Mau."

"We have to take each other back."

"I'm back," I said. And lying beside her on the floor of her living room, with my arm beneath her head, her breath against my shoulder, the orange plaid of last light falling on the carpet, I felt, for a little minute, that I really had returned. I felt weak, languid, as though I'd been for a swim. Phlox spoke into my ear, apologizing, scolding sweetly, and as she spoke, a breeze stirred the damp hairs of my groin, so that it was as though her words raised the goose flesh along my arms and legs, gently chilled me, and I curled myself around her and said, "I'm back." Yet as the aftereffects of the drug of sex began to wear off, as my worldly strength returned, as the circulation in my pinned arm was cut off and my hand fell asleep, I began to doubt, to worry, to search my heart. I did not know if I was truly still in love with Phlox or simply blowing off some final heterosexual steam. I thought, with a guilty pang, of Arthur, and remembered his having said once that there was no such thing as bisexuality, that you were either one thing or the other. I guess I still believed in absolutes. I didn't know what I would tell him now when I saw him again, or if indeed there was something I should be telling Phlox, right this minute, before things went any further. I grew more and more uncomfortable, bound up in Phlox's arms on the rough carpet. I wanted a cigarette, wanted to unstick my prickling skin from hers. When she began to talk about the letter she'd left on my doorstep, laughing as though it had been twenty years since then, I sat bolt upright.

"The letter!" I said.

"I know, and I'm so sorry, Artichoke. Come back here," she said, pulling at my shoulders. "I can't even remember what I wrote. I know it must've been pretty silly."

"No!"

"You didn't think so?"

"No, I-well." I stood, ashamed, looking around and around for the shirt that I'd thrown off. I took a deep breath. "I lost it."

"Art!"

"No, I mean, Cleveland has it." The shirt was halfway across the room, my cigarettes in its pocket, and I tore for a while at the almost empty pack. Anything but meet her gaze.

" Cleveland! Why does he have my letter?"

"I'll get it back, don't worry. He picked it up by mistake. " The match flowered. "And lately I haven't seen him; he's been, ah, busy."

"I saw him the other day," she said, slowly. "He didn't say anything about it."

Now I turned to face her. "You did? Where?"

"But he was very strange. Art. He didn't read my letter?"

"Strange? What did he do?"

"Art, did Cleveland read my extremely private and personal letter?" She stood up now, hands on her naked hips, tossed her flyaway hair. Nearly all the light had drained from the room.

"No," I said. "Of course not."

"Well." She came over, took me in her arms, kissed me; I'd just inhaled a lungful of smoke; we parted and I exhaled gratefully, hating myself for having lied, and for having waited impatiently for the kiss to end. "I don't suppose it would really have mattered if he did, " she said.

"And he might have, you know, by now," I said lamely. "Knowing Cleveland."

"It doesn't matter." She kissed me again, a happy, dismissive peck. "I'm starved. Let's get a pizza delivered, how about?"

We half-dressed and sat on separate sides of the win-dowsill, legs entwined, watching the street for the appearance of the pizza man.

"I've been walking a lot, Art," she said, running a finger down my shin. "Very long walks, since-since our problems. Sometimes it helps me figure things out. Sometimes I just go and go without a single thought in my head."