Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

Lenny backed toward the door, sad and alert, suntanned and old.

"I'm going to get your Aunt Elaine," he said, word by slow word, as though I were waving a crazy gun around. "All right? You wait here. I'm going out now."

"What happened to my mother, Lenny?" What happened to my father? What happened to me?

He went out. The pain in my head receded before the mounting uproar in my stomach. I pressed the call button, remembering despite everything to wonder if Annette was my nurse, but it was an older woman who swept in, looking crisp and happy, cap perched upon her head like a stuffed dove.

"I'm going to be sick," I said, and was, though there was very little inside me. I lay back on the crackling sheets.

"I won't be able to see anyone today," I said, accepting a glass of sweet water. "I don't feel very well at all. "

My valiant nurse (whom I now, belatedly, thank-a kiss upon each of your lined cheeks, Eleanor Colletti, R.N.) fought off intense outbursts of paternal concern and gladioli until the first set of visiting hours was over, although each time I heard his high, soft, contrite voice in the hallway I was terribly tempted to relent, since my inclination, as I have said before, was always to accept apologies, which feed on nostalgia. Throughout the afternoon a thunderstorm came tumbling and spilling against my window, as I heard my father plead and hector and sigh; I watched the door to my room remain firmly shut and ached for that return of everything to its previous condition which is the apology's false promise. But I knew that if he stayed long enough, it would be I who ended up apologizing, which was something-and this is exactly how I put it to myself-that Cleveland would never do. At seven o'clock Nurse Colletti, her jaw grimly set, came in to say my father had gone, and with him the bouquet. She blew upward at a stray gray lock-It was, in fact, this continual demand of myself to think as my dead friend had thought that finally led me out of bed and to the tiny closet of my room, where I found my clothes, my battle dress. I dressed slowly, among the faint rattle and ring of hangers, feeling weak and sad in my sad uniform, found my wristwatch, my wallet, my keys, crept out of my room and into the elevator. I informally checked myself out of the hospital, which was not too difficult to do at seven-thirty, and caught a bus back to Squirrel Hill.

Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the aftershower air, can be, in the wake of a catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful routine. I watched, among the forty hot, plain people, a mother brush her daughter's hair into ponytails wrapped kindly and tight with pink elastic bolos, and by the time I pulled the bell cord for the Terrace stop, I knew that everything would be all right, and that soon, very soon, I was going to be able to cry.

There was no mail in my mailbox; I came in the door and found Arthur sitting on my sofa, looking at a magazine, his large plaid suitcase on the floor in front of him. He looked ashen and sleepless. A cigarette trembled in his thin fingers. I went to him, we embraced, we wept, wet each other's shoulders and throats, wiped our streaming noses a hundred times.

"I have a problem," he said at last, sniffling. I felt his shoulders tense suddenly. "And it's your fault, in a way."

"What?" I said.

"Some of your father's associates came to see me today. At my mother's." Through the paleness and shadow of his face there was a hint of his usual wry expression. He could still see the joke. "You never told me you were such a, well, such a scion," he said.

"What do you mean? What did they want?"

He gestured toward the great valise.

"They wanted me to know I was lucky they didn't tear off my pretty fag face, for one thing. They requested that I leave town."

"How did they-what are you doing?"

"I'm leaving town. I'm going to New York. I'm just staying long enough to say good-bye to you and clean out my bank account. Can I spend the night here?" He attempted a smile. "Is it safe?"

"You don't have to leave town."

"Oh, no? Is there something you can do about it?"

I thought a moment.

"No," I said, "there isn't."

I gave myself a moment to feel alarm at my father's discovery, but none came. "How did they- Oh. The letter."

"I believe that's it," he said.

"It was on him when he-when they found him? Why?"

"What was it?"

"A letter from Phlox. A very distraught one."

"Maybe he kept it around for laughs."

I had an idea and stood up, looking about my summer apartment at all the boxes I had never opened, all the piles I had formed.

"I guess," I said, "I guess there's going to be. Well. A funeral. So. Aren't you going to stay for it?"

Arthur stared into his lap. I saw the color mount along his neck, up to the pink tips of his ears, but he was not blushing.

"No," he said. "I don't think that I am. All funerals are stupid, but Cleveland 's will be the most stupid funeral in the world."

"I want to go."

"Fine," he said, without looking up. "Let me know how it is."

"I mean, I want to go with you."

There was a pause. He raised his face to me.

"I'm surprised," he said, but of course he didn't look it at all. There were only his even, bright gaze and the slight arch of his left eyebrow. "I thought you were gathering around you the tattered shreds of your heterosexuality. "

I went to sit beside him again, thigh to thigh on the little couch.

"Well, I don't know. I might be. Can I go with you, anyway?"

"I was thinking maybe Spain," he said.

Perhaps it was foolish to be afraid, but I packed a bag too, and we spent the night at a hotel; and perhaps it was foolish not to be more afraid, for we took a room at the Duquesne, under the name of Saunders. The dim, faintly humming corridors, the motionless drapes on the window, reminded me of my last visit to the hotel, with Cleveland; everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he'd left the whole world to me in his will. By the time I slid between the fragrant sheets of the day's second foreign bed, I was far too aching, aggrieved, too set adrift, to do anything but fall immediately into uneasy sleep, and dream of my father, shouting.

Among the few things I took with me-clothes, passport, Swiss Army knife, three thousand ancient, inviolate bar mitzvah dollars converted into slick, ethereal blue traveler's checks-were a photograph of Phlox, and a gold lamé sock that she left in my bathroom, sometime in July. I have often thought, since, that I know I loved Cleveland and Arthur, because they changed me; I know that Arthur lies behind the kindly, absent distance I maintain from other people, that behind each sudden, shocking breach of it lies Cleveland; I have from them my vocabulary, my dress, my love of idle talk. I find in myself no ready trace of Phlox, however; no habit, hobby, fashion, or phrase, and for a long time I wondered if I had loved her or not. But as I have found that I may fall quite completely in love with a man-kiss, weep, give gifts-I have also discovered the trace a woman leaves, that Phlox left, and it is better than a man's.

My father I will never see again, Cleveland is dead, Arthur is now, I believe, on Majorca. But because I can find them so easily in myself, I no longer-say it, Bechstein-I no longer need them. One can learn, for instance, to father oneself. But I can never learn to be a world, as Phlox was a world, with her own flora and physics, atmosphere and birds. I am left, as Coleridge was his useless dream poem, with a glittering sock and a memory, a garbled account of my visit to her planet, uncertain of what transpired there and of why precisely I couldn't stay. To say that I loved Phlox implies no lesson, no need or lack of need for her. She is a world I gained and lost. I have this picture, this stocking, and that is all. I wish that I had seen her one last time.