the woman. I looked at her again. She was slender and blond, with a green-eyed, small-nosed, nondescript kind of hillbilly face and a flowery skirt. She looked down, at the sidewalk, at nothing. Her thin ankles wobbled on four- inch spikes and her lips moved soundlessly. The two cops were both on their feet now, billy clubs drawn. There was a strange momentary lull in the action, as though the police and the giants were waiting for some soft command from the dazed woman before grabbing for the various difficult things they had assembled to grab. It was suddenly cool and almost night. A new siren threatened and grew from the distance. The girl looked up, listening, and then turned toward the boy who had just freed himself. She pushed against his great chest and clung.
'Larry,' she said.
The other boy undid his fists and looked at the two of them, then turned toward us, with tears in his eyes and an uncomprehending look on his face.
'Too bad, man,' someone said. 'She picked Larry.'
'Good going, Larry,' said another.
It was done; people clapped. The battered policemen rushed over, the reinforcements squealed up, Larry kissed his girl.
'One more Pittsburgh heartbreak,' said a voice right beside me. It was Spanish Potboiler.
'Hey,' I said. 'Yes. Right. There's one for every kielbasa on Forbes Avenue.'
We moved off together in the general chattering retreat of those who weren't interested in seeing the actual arrests.
'When did you come in?' he asked. There certainly was sarcasm in his tone, yet at the same time I thought it seemed as though he'd been impressed or even shaken by what he'd seen. He had short, white-blond hair, pale eyes, and a day's growth of beard, which lent his boyish face a kind of grown-up decadence.
'At the good part,' I said.
He laughed, one perfect ha.
'It was crazy,' I continued. 'I mean, did you see that? I never understand how people can be perfectly frank all over the sidewalk like that, in public.'
'Some people,' he said, 'really know how to have a good time.'
Even the first time that I heard Arthur Lecomte employ this phrase, I already had the faint impression that it functioned for him as a slogan. There was a radio-announcer reverb to his voice as he pronounced it.
We exchanged names and shook hands over the fact that we were both named Arthur; meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief of surprises.
'But they call me Art,' I said.
At Forbes Avenue, Arthur started left, his head half turned to the right, toward me, his right shoulder lingering slightly behind him, as though it waited for me to catch up, or was reaching back to hook me and carry me along. He wore a white evening shirt, still brilliant despite the weakening daylight, of an extravagant, baggy, vintage cut, which billowed out over the top of his blue jeans. He stopped, and seemed on the petulant point of tapping his foot impatiently.
I hadn't a doubt that he was gay, that he was taking advantage of our having crossed paths to make good his short initial attempt in the library, and that he probably supposed that I was as homosexual as he. People made this mistake.
'Which way were you going, anyway, before you ran into Jules and Jim back there?' he said.
'Jules and Larry,' I said. 'Um, I have to have dinner with a friend-my old girlfriend.' I bit it off hard at the 'girl' and spat it at him.
He came back to me, extending his hand, and we shook for the second time.
'Well,' he said. 'I work in the library. Acquisitions. I'd be glad if you'd stop by. ' He spoke stiffly, with an odd courtesy.
'Sure,' I said. I thought momentarily of Claire, and the dinner she might be preparing for me, if only I hadn't invented it, and if only the mere sight of me didn't make her stomach collapse in distress.
'What time are you supposed to be at your friend's?' Arthur asked, as though we had not shaken hands at all and I were not yet free.
'Eight-thirty,' I lied.
'Does she live very far from here?'
'Near Carnegie-Mellon.'
'Ah, well, it's hardly eight o'clock. Why don't we have a beer? She won't care. She's your old girlfriend, anyway.' His emphasis lay on the syllable before 'girl.'
I had to choose between drinking with a fag and saying something inexpert, such as 'Uh-I mean eight-fifteen' or 'Well, gee, I dunno.' He made me afraid of seeming clumsy or dull. It was not as though I had any firm or fearful objection to homosexuals; in certain books by gay writers I thought I had appreciated the weight and secret tremble of their thoughts; and I admired their fine clothes and shrill hard wit, their weapon. It was only that I felt keen to avoid, as they say, a misunderstanding. And yet just that morning, while watching a procession of scar- faced, big-breasted, red-wrapped laughing African girls tap-dance down Ward Street, hadn't I for the fiftieth time berated myself for my failure to encounter, to risk, to land myself in novel and incomprehensible situations-to misunderstand, in fact? And so, with a fatalistic shrug, I went to drink one beer.
2. A Free Atom
My father, solid, pink, handsome, used to say that he was a professional golfer and an amateur painter. His actual career was knowledge I was not fully permitted until the age of thirteen, when it was conferred on me along with the right to read from the Torah. I had always liked his watercolors, orange, pale, reminiscent of Arizona, but not as much as I liked the cartoons he could draw-never if one asked or begged him to, not even if one cried, but when he was suddenly seized, magically, perversely, with the urge to draw a picture of a top-hatted clown on one's bedroom chalkboard, in seven colors.
His comings and goings inside the house, accompanied always by the stink of cigars and the creaking of whatever piece of furniture he had chosen to receive the weight of his gangster body, were a great source of mystery and speculation for me on those nights when we'd both be up with insomnia, the family disease; I resented the fact that because he was old, he could roam around, painting, reading books, watching television, while I had to stay in bed, trying brutally to make myself fall asleep. Some Sunday mornings I would come downstairs, very early, to find him, having already surmounted the titanic Sunday
Before the day of my bar mitzvah I was certain that, with his incredible but rarely displayed powers of mind and body, my father had a secret identity. I realized that the secret identity would have to
He'd been on the point of telling me the truth about his work, he said much later, on the day of my mother's funeral, six months shy of my thirteenth birthday. But his half-brother, my Uncle Sammy 'Red' Weiner, made him stick to his original plan to wait until I put on a tallis for the first time. So instead of telling me the truth about his job on that bright, empty Saturday morning, as we sat at the kitchen table with the sugar bowl between us, he told me, softly, that she had died in an automobile accident. I remember staring at the purple flowers painted on the sugar bowl. The funeral I hardly recall. The next morning, when I asked my father, as usual, for the funny papers and the sports page, an odd look crossed his face, and he looked away. 'The paper didn't come today,' he said. During the night Marty had moved in. He had often come to stay with us in the past, and I liked him-he knew a poem about Christy Mathewson, which he would recite as often as I asked, and once, for an instant, I had seen the gun he wore inside his jacket, under his left arm. He was a thin little man who always wore a tie and a
