Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

Boardwalk, a chain, sold books at low prices, in huge, fluorescent, supermarket style, a style pervaded by glumness and by an uncomprehending distaste for its low-profit merchandise. The store, with its long white aisles and mega-lithic piles of discount thrillers and exercise guides, was organized as though the management had hoped to sell luncheon meat or lawn-care products but had somehow been tricked by an unscrupulous wholesaler-I imagined the disappointed "What the hell are we going to do with all these damn books?" of the owners, who had started in postcards and seaside souvenirs on the Jersey shore. As far as they were concerned, a good book was still a plump little paperback that knew how to sit in a beach bag and keep its dirty mouth shut.

Literature was squeezed into a miniature and otherwise useless alcove between War and Home Improvement, and of all the employees, several of whom were fat and wanted to be paramedics, I was the only one who found irregularity in the fact that Boardwalk sold the Monarch notes to works, such as Tristram Shandy, that it did not actually stock. I was to spend the daytime summer stunned by air-conditioning, almost without a thought in my head, waiting for the engagement of evening. Summer would happen after dinner. The job had no claim upon me.

Early one evening at the beginning of June, a few days after the party at Riri's, my lease on the "Claire apartment" had at last come up. I locked the glass door of Boardwalk behind me, said good-bye to Gil Frick, flinched at the slam of sudden heat outside, and, with the very last of the furnishings from the old place in a grocery bag on my lap, rode the bus to my new house, on the Terrace.

The Terrace had been, many years ago, a fashionable place to live. A horseshoe of large, identical brick houses enclosing a long incline of grass, it still retained some of the genteel quality of an enclave that had once attracted families with servants and livery. I knew this last from the fact that I was moving into what had been a kind of coach house or chauffeur's quarters, small rooms over the garages behind the Terrace proper. None of my new neighbors seemed to bear any resemblance to me: an old man, babies, parents.

After setting the brown bag down among the scattered cartons of my life from the old place, I went outside to rest and smoke at the top of the twenty-six fissured concrete steps that drew up to my door. To the left, the Terrace, the kids and happy schnauzers running there; to the right and all before me, the maze of tumbling stables and garages, some doorless, most sheltering skis or autos. Along the tops of all the garages ran apartments like mine, spindly creepers in their windows, various musics from radios coming through their wire screens. The late sun was still the major fact of the day, setting the parked cars around me to creak, heating the metal banister against my bare neck. A warm breeze carried dinner smells and birdsong across the neighborhood, ran lightly over my sweaty face, and stirred the hair on my arms. I had an erection, laughed at it, and patiently pushed it down. Four years of familiarity and unconcern with Pittsburgh turned suddenly to arousal and love, and I hugged myself.

The next day was my day off, and I had plans. I walked into Hillman Library, sleeveless and sunglassy and ready for lunch with Arthur. The summer term had started (but not for me!), and the library was relatively crowded with students in shorts, struggling to remain seated and docile and scholarly. Arthur typed book acquisition forms in a room off the same hallway as the Girl Behind Bars, and to get to him I had to pass those bars, behind which she sat again today. I approached slowly, glad to be wearing sneakers and not my noisy shoes, because she was intent on fooling with her piles of books and did not glance up, and I got a good look at her.

She wore, today, several layers of red and white, T-shirts mostly, with a skirt here or there, and many different kerchiefs and bracelets. Her red-brown hair, cut in a neat, heavy-banged, lopsided forties style, left her bowed profile only partly visible, but she seemed to have a look of deep concentration on her face and did not hear me as I slipped past and headed down the hallway to Arthur's section. I remembered he'd said that she was punk, but her demeanor and her neatness were not, and she clearly placed an un-punklike emphasis on looking somewhat traditionally feminine, pink fingernails and ribbons. I wondered what she was, if not a punk.

Arthur had his lunch bag ready and quickly slipped a bookmark into what he was copying as I came in.

"Hi," he said. "Are you ready? Did you see Phlox?"

"Hi. Yes, I saw her. Phlox, ha ha. What a great name."

"Well, she certainly likes you, boy. You'd better watch it."

"What do you mean? How do you know? What did she say?"

"Come on, let's eat. I'll tell you on the way out. Goodbye, Evelyn-oh, I'm terribly sorry, Evelyn. This is my friend Art Bechstein. Art, this is Evelyn Masciarelli."

Evelyn was one of his co-workers, his superior, nominally. She was a tiny old thing who had trembled away her life in Hillman Library, and, as Arthur later told me, was "in a therm" over him. I walked over and shook hands with her, very conscious of, and somehow more comfortable with, the formality with which Arthur had made the introductions. It allowed me to choose to be for her whoever I wanted to be, and I chose to be bright and young, fresh from the sun of the outer world and free to return to it, as she was not. After I had briefly held her small, wet hand, showing Evelyn all my charming teeth, we made a courteous farewell and left.

On the way out, of course, we came upon Phlox, drinking from the fountain in the hall. She had to place a protective hand above her breast to keep all the gear she wore around her neck from getting into the stream of water when she bent over.

"Phlox," said Arthur, a slightly mocking tone in his voice, "I have somebody I'd like you to meet."

She straightened and turned to face us. Her eyes, in the middle of all that hair and scarf, were the bluest I had ever seen, and they widened at the sight of me. I felt exposed by the bareness of my shoulders. Her face was long, her skin smooth, she had a broad, unflawed forehead; she was unquestionably beautiful, and yet there was something odd, wrong, about her looks, her clothing: something a little too, from her too blue eyes in their too direct stare to the too red stockings she wore. It was as though she had studied American notions of beauty from some great distance and had come all this way only to find she had overdone the details: a debutante from another planet.

"Art Bechstein, I'd like you to meet Phlox," Arthur continued. "Phlox, I'm sorry, I don't know your last name, but this is my friend Art. He's a wonderful person," he finished, somewhat strangely, and suddenly, under the weight of her regard and of Arthur's overintroduction, I felt compelled to impress but no longer wanted to-I wanted to back up the hallway, put on a pair of black horn-rims and a heavy coat, and come out again, this time farting and seized by grotesque tics.

Phlox had not yet spoken. She stood there, her hands poised at her sides, wrists bent upward, fingers slightly splayed: a really classic pose that cried out for a sentimental, string-heavy sound track, that rush of Borodin to mark the Moment Every Girl Dreams About. She looked at me for a long second or two.

"Hello, Art," she said finally. "I can't believe you know each other-I mean, I can't believe that Arthur knows both of us. How are you?"

"Quite well, thanks. How are you?"

"Fine. I'm- Arthur says you're not from Pittsburgh."

"He does?" I looked at Arthur, who was looking at his hands. "No. Washington. No, well, I'm almost from Pittsburgh. My mother's family lives in Newcastle," I said.