Cleveland and I drank until the bar closed. It was a hot night, and the ceiling fans ruffled our hair and tore the cigarette smoke into little scraps. Each bottle of Rolling Rock came to us pearled with condensation and trailing a streamer of cold steam. He told me stories of past years at the summer house, of the horse he'd ridden into a neighbor's swimming pool, the Good Humor lady who'd taken his virginity. Then we talked about Frank O'Hara, and how he died, struck by a dune buggy, on Fire Island; Cleveland sat back in the booth, rolled his eyes upward, and recited.
''Oh to be an angel (if there were any!),'' he said, ''and go straight up into the sky and look around and then come down.''
He fell silent and his eyes grew kindly and drunken.
'I like you, Bechstein,' he said, which made me blush, and I felt tears come to my eyes. 'For Christ's sake, don't cry, Bechstein. I don't like you that much. Let's get some pickled eggs.' He ordered and proceeded to dispatch about twelve of the little beet-colored nodules, one by one. 'As long as bars continue to serve pickled eggs,' he said, licking his fingers, 'there is reason to hope.'
When the waitress called Last Call, Cleveland said that the bar was very close to his father's house, and that he would just go there to sleep tonight, instead of going all the way back to his own bouse.
'There are no more buses,' he said, 'and it'll take you almost an hour to walk home. Why don't you just sleep over. You can sleep downstairs. You'll like it; it's spooky.'
Before she committed suicide, when he was seventeen, Cleveland Arning's mother, a laughing woman, taught her son to joke and to ridicule. His father, tall, thin, cut his beard in a goatee and wore great red sideburns that ran up his otherwise bald temples. His name was also Cleveland, and although he did indeed have his own grim notions of what made a joke, he laughed only rarely, generally in the privacy of his own study. In the kitchen, Cleveland and his mother would listen to the inexplicable sound of his father's laughter coming through the oaken door, and whatever story Cleveland had been telling to make her laugh would die on his lips. They would chew in silence, clatter the dishes into the sink, and go to their rooms. Cleveland senior was a psychiatrist.
Cleveland told me, I now find, very little about his childhood. He once spoke of having lived in the countryside to the northwest of Pittsburgh, saying only, naturally, that he'd very often gotten into trouble. There was a bartender in one of his usual haunts who had been a neighbor in the country years before. 'This is Charlie,' he said, introducing me one night. 'His parents forbade me to set foot in their house ever again.' Yet despite the fact that I have few details, I have a clear sense of the strangeness of the Arning household-the taciturn, warped father, who took male lovers; the nervous mother, underweight, musical, struggling with her husband's secret for as long as she could manage; Cleveland, bright, violent, already considering himself 'doomed and wild' by age twelve; and his sister, Anna, the baby, her brother's target and first fan.
I visited the house only that one time, sleeping downstairs on the couch, and yet in the ten minutes I spent exploring the dim first floor at three o'clock that morning, alone, with only the sound of the toilet Cleveland had flushed somewhere in the enormous house, I felt the trouble, the tension of the place.
The furnishings were rich, antique, and cold to the touch, even in late June: huge clocks, chairs with fabulously carved arms, old, evil-looking medical paraphernalia, and rugs that would not give under my stocking feet. I entered all the rooms I could find, wincing at every creak of the floor as though I were a burglar, and as I crossed each threshold I would ask myself, Is this the room? Which room would it have been? People usually do it in the bathroom. Or the garage. Cleveland, in fact, had never told me of his mother's suicide, which happened eight, nine years before. I heard of it from Arthur, who hadn't really wanted to tell me.
In Dr. Arning's study-how my chest tightened as I fingered the heavy light switch on his paneled wall!-there was one photograph, of Cleveland's sister Anna, dressed in black, a diamond pendant, no smile. The room smelled of perfume, a man's cologne perhaps, but terribly floral and green. Dr. Arning's golden pens and marble desk implements lay in rows and columns across his enormous desk, which, in its size and in the weak lamplight, looked bare and malignant, the desk of Dr. Moreau.
I wanted to stop to examine the titles of the million books on the shelves, but something pressed me, made me feel as though I had to hurry on before I was discovered, although I knew that the house was asleep and I had, if I desired, all night to satisfy my curiosity. I shivered in my light Hawaiian shirt and flipped off the light.
After I had circled the immense domain of the ground floor, I came once again to the long lemon sofa onto which Cleveland had thrown a fuzzy blanket and a striped silk pillow for my head. I sat down. I pulled my socks off and lay backward, leaving on the lamp, staring up into the shade at the burning bulb until it blinded me. I turned away and watched the optical blobs of color float across the immaculate walls of the living room. I felt far from falling asleep, but drunk, drunk enough to stand and to walk down the dark wooden hallway barefoot.
At the end of the hallway sat a mass of black iron grill-work with silver fittings, a cage worked with leaves and tendrils. Arthur had told me that Cleveland 's father had an elevator in the house. I experienced a brief but overwhelming urge to step in and ride to the upper level, where Cleveland slept, and Dr. Arning and his 'friend.' The upper level! I turned around. A staircase rose on either side; I chose the left-hand set of steps and climbed, quietly, digging the joints of my toes into the soft red carpeting that led to the weird sleep of the Arning family.
There were seven brown doors, three down the corridor to my left, four down the corridor to my right, all of them closed. Cleveland's, the doctor's, a bathroom, a closet, his mother's? Anna's, two closets? two bathrooms? I went left and stopped before the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. I put my ear to the gap and listened for the breathing of a sleeper, heard nothing, put my eye to the gap and looked for the glow of a clock face or radio dial, saw nothing. I leaned a little against the door and it swung open, noiselessly.
I'd been looking into a part of the room where there was nothing to see, a blank wall. At the other side of the room, a large, milky window threw light across an empty white bed, a girl's bed, a girl's room, soft pale draperies and cushions, girlish posters on the walls. I stepped into Anna's abandoned room and closed the door behind me. My heart pounded, and I did nothing but draw heavy breath for several moments. I felt safer and protected and yet still at risk, alone in a forbidden place. I felt ridiculous, also, as I panted and swallowed like a fugitive in a room lined with satin and photographs of infant cats, and unicorns. I laughed softly at her taste, and relaxed a little.
Anna's bed gave enormously under my weight. I leaned over to smell her pillows. I'd been expecting some kind of a girl smell, but the pillows merely smelled laundered, even faintly dusty, very cool to the tip of my nose.
When Anna was twelve and Cleveland fifteen, the family, at the brink of disaster, took their yearly trip to the summer house that Cleveland 's father would buy a few months after Mrs. Arning's death.
The brother and sister pulled on their striped swimsuits and ran out into the lake, Cleveland yards ahead of Anna and heedless of her. The three years that separated them made a greater difference than they ever had before, and the quiet, angry boy wanted nothing to do with his rope-skipping sister, who adored him. He plunged into the green water and swam as fast as he could, leaving Anna to scream 'Cleveland!' at the gravelly hem of the lake and to wipe the tears and snot from her face with her small hand. He surfaced some twenty yards away and trod water, the sun heating his shoulders and drops of water from his long hair cooling them. He watched his sister dance in disappointment and rage for a moment, feeling terrible guilt, before the feeling became too much and he grew angry instead, furious with her for not allowing him to be alone, for being a pest and a girl and the only person in the world who really liked him.
In his anger he swam back to the shore and, without surfacing, grabbed Anna by her skinny knees and with a leap lifted her out of the water. At first Anna laughed and began to say 'Whee,' but she caught sight of the look in his eye. The next moment she was underwater, his hand pressing down on her head, hard. He had dunked her in the past and it always frightened her, but this time it was real and she panicked, thinking she was about to die. When he finally withdrew his murderous pushing hand she surfaced in a fury, screaming, crying, confused. She called him 'fucker,' took up two small handfuls of silt, and threw them. They splattered across his chest in thin gray streaks. 'Shit,' he said, and filled his own bigger fists with dirt and pebbles and hurled them at her outraged little face, where the smallest of small stones entered her eyes and blinded her. She fell over shrieking into the water, slapping wildly at her face and the air around her, while Cleveland, shouting, 'Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!' stood in water up to his knees and in three seconds thought about the awfulness of his betrayal of his sister, and how much he hated her for having been there to accept his rage.
Fortunately-so much more fortunately than I had any right to expect-I woke up on Anna's bed at six-thirty the next morning and crept downstairs, taking an early inventory of my already full-blown hangover, and back onto the yellow sofa. At ten-thirty, Cleveland placed an icy Pepsi against my cheek and I woke up for the second time that
