The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

'Sorry what?'

'Well, I have to confess that I don't-I don't trust you anymore. Art, you've become a very strange young man.'

'Dad.'

'Last time we met, you spoke like an insane person.

What was all that nonsense? It was upsetting to hear you talk that way. I felt terrible. I was very shaken.'

My father had a way of looking as though he were about to weep but was making a superhuman effort to contain his tears, and it never failed to destroy me. I started to cry quietly as I chewed a wet and interminable piece of bread.

'Dad.'

'I don't know what to think of you. I love you, of course, but-look what you're doing this summer. What are you doing this summer? Working at that ridiculous bookstore. I can't believe you're satisfied by that kind of job.'

'Dad.'

Now that he really had me going, hiccuping and sniffling, so people turned around from their tables to look at this distinguished father speaking calmly to his wild-haired son in tears; now that he had reduced me to my childhood role and demonstrated to me just how far I had fallen in his esteem, he relented, tenderly, speaking as though I had just wrecked my bike or got beat up at school and he was softly applying the fragrant Band-Aid.

'Now, what about this new girl?'

'Oh, Dad,' I said.

The waiter came with our dinners, and I cried a little bit longer, and we hardly said a word until he asked if I wanted to leave. Then we rode down in the rattling funicular, and I watched the lights in the office buildings downtown grow less and less spectacular as we descended, and my father put his hand briefly oh my shoulder and then took it away.

'You'd probably hate her, Pops; you'd probably hate everyone I know and everything I'm doing this summer.'

'Yes, I probably would,' said my father.

'After I leave you I'm going to go to her house and sleep with her,' I said, and then we hit bottom abruptly and the sudden cessation of motion made me feel sick, and my father said that he was not impressed.

10. Sex and Violence

June waned; still Jane Bellwether remained in New Mexico, calling Cleveland only once, to tell him they were through ('Does that make nine times or ten?' Cleveland asked her); by the twenty-ninth of June, Phlox and I were firmly ensconced in a 'thing' that she was-prematurely, I felt- calling love, although I was beginning to wonder, and listened one night to 'You've Really Got a Hold on Me' thinking: Oh, Smokey.

Phlox had taken to coming over to the Terrace every night after I got off work, and we would sit on the steps smoking cigarettes, and sometimes marijuana, or would drink tequila, and just eat the limes and lick the salt from the tiny pouches of each other's hands. One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering.

'Why are you afraid?' I said.

'I don't know. Because vampires are so beautiful,' she said.

Another time she wept bitterly for an hour because Arthur had been cruel to her at work that day and told her she looked fat in her plaid dress.

'I know he's just jealous of me,' she said. 'Art, I know he wants you.'

'Nah,' I said. 'He likes you.'

'Art!' she shouted. 'Listen to me, and don't baby me. I know he wants you, he wants to have sex with you, homosexual sex, disgusting homosexual sex with my Artichoke,' which was what she called me.

'Phlox, what do you have against gays? I like all the gay guys I've met, Arthur especially, but all of his friends too. They're nice guys.'

'Sure they're nice guys, they're beautiful, and it's a goddamn shame they're a bunch of hideous fags. Some of them are more beautiful than I am.'

I denied this.

On the twenty-ninth of June, the night Phlox told me that she loved me, that Daniel was a fool and had an ugly purple penis and I need never worry about him again, she read to me from The Story of O, in the yellow light of my stoop. (I had read this book years before, before my mother died, finding it among her books, and I had failed to understand it. Only the scenes of more conventional sex had excited me, and the whips and owl masks and labial piercing I had found confusing, exotic, and disagreeable.) When Phlox read to me from the book, sitting up against the bricks with her knees to her chest, in a green leather miniskirt with no panties, I was shocked to discover what an evil book it was, although nicely written, and the thought that it was her favorite disturbed me. Nevertheless I felt the thrill of her voice and got an erection, which I could not disguise, and which, reaching over, she freed and relieved me of, and then without stopping her reading, she relieved herself.

'That was wonderful,' she said when she had tired of reading.

'I want to walk you home,' I said, and handed her sweater to her.

'Art, I want to stay with you.'

'I'd rather walk you home.'

'Arthur, I love you,' she said.

'I refuse to flog you,' I said.

She burst out laughing, and told me what a silly boy I was. And, as my father might have put it, indeed I was.

The next night Cleveland and Arthur and I got drunk and decided to go off to Cleveland 's family's summer house in upstate New York. It would be just the three of us. At a still-sober point in the evening, Arthur began to berate Phlox, just barely. He looked terrific that evening, had been lying out in the sun, and he wore a turquoise cotton sweater that did alarming things to his blue eyes. He said that Phlox was nuts, and smiled, and that she would mess me up, and smiled again.

'You introduced me to her,' I said.

'This is true,' he said.

He had been reading, in Spanish, the as-yet-untranslated new book by Garcia Marquez, and he translated for me its rather terrible epigraph, which had impressed him.

''Love is like falconry,'' he said. 'Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?'

'Never say love is like anything,' said Cleveland. 'It isn't.'

I'd long ago noticed that it was Arthur's habit to consult his wristwatch every five minutes. There was always some plan in the back of his mind, some itinerary extending far into the evening, which he would reveal to us only one step at a time. This evening he was particularly attentive to his wrist, and Cleveland, as usual, called him on it, in a way that I supposed had been part of their game for a long time. Arthur would glance quickly at his watch, and Cleveland would say, 'What time is it, Arthur?' Five minutes later, when Arthur glanced again, Cleveland again asked what time it was, making Arthur look ridiculous, and again, and again, and each time Arthur blushed more deeply, until finally he laughed and said he had to leave.

'And where are you going, Artie?' said Cleveland.

'To Mass,' said Arthur.

'Oh, right,' I said. 'When was the last time you went to Mass?'

'Last Sunday, ' said Arthur. He left some money on the table, shook our hands, and went out.