perhaps the change came with my surprise arrival; in any case, when Arthur opened the door, his smile was the one he occasionally gave Cleveland, loose and puckish. I was touched.
'Wonderful. Come in, come in,' he said. 'Nice shirt. Nice pants. Nice shoes.' We both had on the usual dungarees, white shirts, and brown loafers. I had shaved, he had not. Neither of us mentioned Abdullah.
He led me into the bright, uncomfortable living room. The decorator had made an effort, it seemed, to create the illusion that the whole house existed in some remote future, in the wan, empty years after the extinction from the planet of furniture and cushions. I sat down on three wide dowel rods and a piece of beige canvas and tried not to lean back.
'Is it as lovely outside as it looks? Yes? We should take a walk,' he said. He spun on his heel and walked away. 'Want coffee?'
'Please. Do you know why I'm off today?' I shouted after him, into the kitchen.
'Why? You quit?' I heard him pouring, then the little rhythm of cup and spoon.
'Sure, I quit. No, I didn't quit; there was a fire.'
'My. What happened?'
'The one copy of anything by Swift in the store, Gulliver's Travels, finally couldn't stand the indignity of living at Boardwalk anymore, and burst into righteous flames.'
'I see.'
'It was a very small fire.'
Arthur came back with two white cups. 'How do you know Swift started it? Maybe it was
'To the twenty-fifth-century manner born,' I said. 'Ha ha.' I was a little nervous. We weren't talking about anything.
'Perfectly plain, isn't it? Do you have a smoke?'
I gave him a cigarette and a light, and my hand shook. Then we sat there, looking at the creamy walls. I decided I didn't really want to talk about Phlox, but it had been very good to hear him say that he was sorry, and I would have liked to hear him say it again.
'So,' he said finally, and it came out in a wobbling ring of smoke. 'Do you want to walk? We can walk through Chatham.'
'Sure.' I rose, or rather fell, from my chair thing. 'What's this kind of furniture called, anyway?' I said. I drained the tepid sour tail of my coffee.
'That's called science furniture, son,' he said. 'For the spine of tomorrow.'
He locked the door behind us; we stepped out into the stinking, lovely day and headed for Chatham College, a destination that made me think of the party the night we'd met, of our short face-off in the doorway at Riri's, of all the possibilities for brown women, in that already distant June, which I'd surrendered with the advent of Phlox. I thought for a quiet second or two; Arthur's antennae operated inexorably.
'We could drop by Riri's,' he said. 'Every time I see her she asks after you. She said she thought you were a very sweet boy.'
His tone, this faint air of the panderer that he sometimes wore, brought to mind another picture from that evening, which until now I'd forgotten: the change that had come over his face in the Fiat, the aha! in his eyes, when first I asked him about Phlox.
'Arthur, did you…? Why did you…?'
'What?'
'Nothing. Never mind.'
'Okay. God, what a stink in the air, huh?' We watched his feet take steps along the slow, hot pavement. 'What about Phlox?'
'I just-I love Phlox, Arthur-'
'Ooh, stop.'
'Stop. There you go, see; I can't understand it. We have to talk about this, right? I love her, and I love her because I
There was another long silence, which took us across Fifth Avenue and up the steep drive of the college. Nearby I could hear lawn mowers, and the voices of women at play.
'I never thought you would like her,' he said at last.
We came to the pond, and now we sat down in the grass, under some maples. The ducks chattered and splashed.
'Are you angry? Do you hate me? I hope you don't hate me, Art Bechstein. I'm glad you think Phlox is wonderful. Of course, I'm also shocked-no, that's a joke, honestly.
I'm very, very sorry. Really. I'm sure she's very good for you.'
He put an apologetic hand on my knee, then pulled it away, and I felt filled with forgiveness, with the warm catch in his voice, and, having just exposed him at his manipulative worst-had he conceived of Phlox as some kind of punishment?-with a strange, airy manhood, as though we had just boxed. I tore off handfuls of grass and tossed them into the air.
'Arthur,' I said, 'why are you such a little Ma-chiavelli?'
He crushed the end of his cigarette into the grass, flicked it away, and seemed carefully to weigh the label, and to be amused by it.
'Isn't it obvious?' he finally said. 'My mother made me this way.'
Horns honked, a cranked-up radio passed, the ducks beat water and quacked. We looked at each other.
'Let's go swimming,' he said.
The rich young couple, I was mildly surprised to discover, belonged to the same country club as Uncle Lenny Stern, at which they had been kind enough to inscribe Arthur as their guest. Years before, in the club dining room, during the reception that followed Davy Stern's bar mitzvah, I had vomited vanilla mousse across my mother's lavender dress. The pool was Olympic-size and filled with boisterous children. Women with scarves and rigid hair sat under red umbrellas that threw shadows across the women and across the thermoses, kids' sunglasses, and stacks of fresh towels that lay on the white wire tops of the poolside tables; once an hour a whistle blew, children groaned, and the waters would grow calm, as the pool suffered a fifteen-minute invasion by pregnant women and small white infants. Families were all around us, without their men, and we lay beside each other on chaises longues, exchanging lazy sentences in the strong sunlight.
From time to time I would glance over at him, stretched out with his eyes shut, his lashes glinting, his body almost bare. I had never before given a man's body the regard I now gave his-but furtively, and through the flutter of a squint. I felt, I feel, almost as if I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. For one thing, each of the above-named parts was covered with thick blond hair, running to red-brown along the top of his bathing suit and on his chest. I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. I looked at him. He was in a sweat; his stomach was flat; there was hair on the back of his long, damp hand. And I looked also at his crotch, at that strange-that shaven-fist wrapped in slick blue Lycra. But his skin was the most strange, and the most difficult to keep my eyes from; it was dappled all over with tiny shadows, which gave it a look both soft and rough, as of suede or fine sand; and it seemed, stretched so tightly across his bones and muscle, as though it would never give, like a woman's, to the pressure of my hand. He sat up suddenly, leaning on his elbows, face red, eyes like the water in the brilliant pool, and caught me looking at his skin. I was startled into thinking the sentence that I had all summer forbidden myself to think: I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him.
'Yes?' he said, with half a smile.
'Ha. Nothing. Um, I've-I've been here before,' I said. 'A long time ago. I threw up on my mom at a bar mitzvah.' My mom. I had not Said this in years. It just slipped out, in my confusion, and I bit my lip. Arthur twisted onto his side and propped himself up with one arm, looking eager.
