Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you. Arthur and I made it from New York to Paris, and as far as Barcelona, meeting and making brief excursions into a handful of young men and women, before we found ourselves barely speaking to each other; at last, when we spoke, it was of Cleveland, as though he was the only thing left between us, and we would look sadly into our glasses of sea-dark Spanish wine. We closed ranks only imperfectly, because each was subject to a deep mistrust of the other, as well as a true and radiant affection.

I'm told, by the way, that Cleveland 's funeral was a strange affair, attended by drunks, mysterious riffraff, and all his shadowy family. Feldman and Lurch, with a dozen other bikers, formed the usual MC funeral formation around the hearse. The service itself was conducted by Cleveland 's great-uncle, the Reverend Arning, who was a dwarf; Cleveland 's sister Anna, flown in from New York City, wore his leather jacket at graveside; his father's lover, Gerald, wept hysterically and had to return to the car. Abdullah stood the whole time, so he has said, with his arm across Jane's shoulders, dreading the moment that she should begin to cry, but, like the lover of a cancer victim who has been dying for a long time, she seemed strong and resigned and without bowing her head, watched impassively the Reverend's sorrowful, tiny hands, the subdued antics of the crowd. She wore a weird, pointy black dress that had been her mother's forty years before in rural Virginia, so that she lent her own touch of comic sadness to the funeral Cleveland could not have designed any better himself. I now regret very keenly that I missed it. I wanted to say good-bye.

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness-and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His other books include Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his novelist wife Ayelet Waldman, and their three children.