Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"Does any of you know Jane Bellwether?" said Arthur.

The louts, so morose, so overfed and overliquored, said no. None looked at us, and it seemed to me, in the exaggerating way that things seemed to me that exaggerated evening, as though they could not stand the sight of Arthur, or of me in his magic company, in our Technicolor health and high spirits, in our pursuit of the purportedly splendid Jane Bellwether.

"Try on the patio," one, some kind of Arab, finally said, through a white mouthful of shrimp. "There are many people sporting out there."

We came out into the yellow light of the back porch, that estival old yellow of Bug Lite, which had illuminated the backyards and soft moth bodies of so many summers past. It was untrue; there were not many people sporting on the murky lawn, though a large group had gathered with their drinks and their light sweaters. Only one young woman sported, and the rest watched her.

"That's Jane," Arthur said.

She stood alone in the dim center of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighborhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of the grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father's ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long. She looked tall, thin, and, in the bad light, rather gray in her white golf skirt and shirt. Her face was blank with concentration. Thik! and she smiled, shaking out her yellow hair, and we clapped. She fished in her pocket for a ball and teed it.

"She's plastered," a girl said, as though that were all the explanation we might require.

"She's beautiful," I heard myself say. Some of the spectators turned toward me. "I mean, her stroke is absolutely perfect. Look at that."

She smashed another one, and a few moments later I heard the distant sound of the ball striking metal.

"Jane!" Arthur shouted. She turned and lowered her shining club, and the yellow light caught her full in the face and fell across the flawless front of her short skirt. She put a hand to her forehead to try to make out the caller among us shadows on the patio.

"Arthur, hi," she said. She smiled, and stepped through the grass to him.

"Arthur, she's whose girlfriend?"

Half a dozen people answered me. " Cleveland 's," they said.

A few moments later, in one of the less noisy rooms off the parlor, we were three in a row on what could only be called a settee. Jane smelled interestingly of light exertion, beer, perfume, and cut grass. Arthur had presented me as a new friend, and I'd watched Jane's face for a trace of a knowing leer, but there'd been none. I began to wonder if I'd made a mistake about Arthur's intentions toward me, and to reproach myself for mistrusting what might have been his mere friendliness. After Jane and I had exchanged our academic pursuits-hers was art history-and agreed that neither of us could explain why we had chosen to pursue them, but that we were glad to be through, we turned to talking of plans for the coming summer.

I knew better than to state my true intentions, which were vague, and base enough that they could easily have included the pursuit of herself and of the ultimate source of all her exciting fragrance, in spite of this Cleveland, whoever he might be.

"I'm going to turn this town upside down," I said. "Then in the fall I have to become a responsible adult. You know, have a career. My father claims to have something lined up."

"What does your father do?" said Jane.

He manipulates Swiss bank accounts with money that comes from numbers, whores, protection, loan sharks, and cigarette smuggling.

"He's in finance," I said.

"Jane's going to New Mexico," said Arthur.

"Really? When?"

"Tomorrow," Jane said.

"Jesus! Tomorrow. Gee, that's too bad."

Arthur laughed, rapidly reading, I suppose, the thrust of my head and the proximity of my denim thigh to her shaven one.

"Too bad?" Jane had a southern accent, and "Too bad" fell out in three droll syllables. "It isn't bad! I can't wait- my mother and father and I have wanted to go forever! My mother has been taking Spanish lessons for fourteen years! And I want to go because-"

"Jane wants to go," Arthur said, "because she wants to have carnal knowledge of a Zuni."

She blushed, or rather flushed; her next words were only slightly angry, as though he often pestered her about Zuni love.

"I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole."

"Wow," I said. "Asshole." From the way she seemed to relish the word as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, a sign of her intimacy with Arthur, and I was momentarily very jealous of him. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.

"But I'm intrigued by the Native Americans, you know? That's all. And by Georgia O'Keeffe. I want to see that church in Taos that she painted."

Someone began to play the piano in the other room, a Chopin mazurka that mixed very uncomfortably for a few measures with the thump music that came from the half-dozen speakers scattered around the house, until someone else attacked the pianist with a squeal and a silk cushion. We laughed.

"Some people really know how to have a good time," Jane said, confirming that it was indeed a motto of theirs, and I was suddenly mad for the opportunity to employ it myself.

"Yes," said Arthur, and he told her about the scene at which we had stopped, and met, so many hours before.

"But I saw you in the library," I said. "What was that Spanish potboiler you were reading, anyway?"

"La muerte de un maricôn," he said, with a humorous flourish.

"Oh. What's that mean?" I said.

"Ask Jane's mother, the hispanophone."

"You can't just stop right now about my mother," she said. "You can just shut your trap." Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon. "My mother didn't get to spend a year cutting up in Mexico and getting hepatitis like you did, Arthur."

"Well, and thank goodness," said Arthur.

"Oh, no! You didn't really… cut up, did you?" I said.

"Like the big time," he said.

"And what will you do this summer, Arthur?"

"I'm going to live at Jane's and watch the dog. You'll have to come visit me. It's going to be a fun place after the Bellwethers leave."

Arthur and Jane had just gotten to the part where the blind truck-stop waitress, feeling with her spotted, overjoyed hands Cleveland's nose and forehead, accuses him of being Octavian, the shining man from another planet who had loved her many years ago, but had then returned to his own world, leaving her sightless, and with a brilliant, freakishly formed child-"the kind of thing," Arthur said, "that is always happening to Cleveland"-when Abdullah fell into the dark room, shouting: "The Count! The Count!"

"The Count," Arthur said, frowning slightly.

"My friend," Dudu said, almost as though he meant it, "my friend, my tremendous friend Arthur the Count! Tell me, what may I do for you? What would there be that I would not do it for you, my friend?"

He teetered, wore a bib of spilled whiskey, and the wide things he said, I felt, would be discounted as the typical CinemaScope friendliness of a sot. But Lecomte looked at him without answering, looked into his fat eyes while an obviously well-considered reply fought to free itself from his shut mouth.

"Arthur? Only to say it. Only! Anything in the world."

"You could," said Lecomte, "keep the fuck away from Richard."

There was only the din of the party, and it was as nothing. The obscenity flared and then collapsed into itself in the dazzling white half of a second. It was like the echo of an ax blow filling the air between him and Dudu. He immediately blushed and looked ashamed at having said too much.