'I get the message,' I said, but I was determined. I put the kettle on, and in five minutes got pot, cups, spoons, and a sugar bowl on a little tray and out into the living room, where I caught them as they were about to stand up.
'Coffee?' I said.
Slowly they lowered themselves back onto their science-furniture chairs, at the same time and with an identical air of being trapped. I served the coffee and was disappointed, shocked, indicted, and disturbed by the plain fact of Arthur's mother. I had mythologized her, and this might have accounted for my feeling so disillusioned and at sea, but the really disturbing thing was that her sad, wrinkled face and worn smock forced me to recognize that, in some fundamental way, I knew absolutely nothing about Arthur. I had assumed, without his ever having said so, that his manners, dress, and taste were the product of a wealthy, summer-house, three-car, private-tutor, dancing-tea background. Now I began to see that he was largely his own invention.
'I don't know how you get yourself into these kind of houses,' said Mrs. Lecomte with a thin smile, looking around her at the pretty-art on the walls. 'Always so big and empty and fine. They're like-'
'Yes, Mom.'
'Mrs. Lecomte,' I said, 'I really am glad to meet you. I've heard so much about you.'
'Oh.' She slurped her coffee, wincing, and stared deep into it. We gripped our cups and sat watching as four or five angels of silence passed through the room. 'Did you go to Mass Sunday?' she said at last, already ducking her head in anticipation of her son's reply.
'Ah, no, Mom, I didn't. I haven't been since Ash Wednesday.' This was a lie, and I was surprised at him. He'd been to Mass several times that I knew about, and he always claimed, without embarrassment, that it made him feel Good. 'Do you know about Ash Wednesday, Art?' he said. 'All the priests get together Tuesday night-'
'Please,' his mother said, her cup rattling faintly on its dainty flat saucer.
'-and they have this really big party.'
'Arthur.' She set the coffee down.
'And then Wednesday morning,' he said, smiling his hardest smile, 'they empty all the ashtrays into this big bowl-'
'I'm leaving, Arthur,' she said, and stood up, trembling, and I saw then that this, like all of Arthur's relations, was a game they played. He probably came as close to blasphemy as he needed to until she started to cry. Then maybe they had a forgiveness ritual.
'Oh, please don't go,' I said. 'Here, Mrs. Lecomte, have some more coffee.'
'No, I should go,' she said, finally looking at me-for a second or two-with her laughless eyes. 'I've got to get up early tomorrow, but thank you, honey.'
The last word was barely audible and probably automatic, but it touched me. She was, after all, Arthur's mother, and I didn't want her thinking I was some Emissary from Hell sent to despoil her son, or something. Mothers usually thought I was swell.
'Oh?' I said. 'What do you do?'
Arthur came over and put his arm around her shoulders. He started to tow his mother again.
'Thanks for coming by, Mom. Thanks for doing the shirts.'
'I clean houses,' she said. 'Like this one.'
She cast a last wistful and derisive glance across the glittering brass and the rubber plants of the Weatherwoman's salon, and then Arthur kissed her cheek and got her out the door. After he'd shut it, he leaned back against it, outspreading his arms, panting slightly, as people do in the movies when they have at last got rid of the boring date or the terrible creature of slime.
We wound up, as usual, in the bedroom, only this time, for the first time, our rhythms were out of phase, the tongues and touching without effect, and it quickly became apparent that something was wrong.
'I don't attract you anymore,' he said, throwing an arm across his eyes.
'Nonsense,' I said. 'You're more fascinating than ever. '
'Because my mother's a maid?'
'Because your dream mother's a duchess,' I said, and I described the childhood and upbringing that his ways and looks so clearly suggested.
'That's Cleveland,' he said. 'Private tutors, the summer house. He had all those things. Ha. And look at him.'
'Maybe you were switched at birth.'
'What you saw tonight is not who I am.' He sat up on one arm and fixed me sternly with his eyes, as though administering an important lesson or a reprimand.
'No.'
'You turn into whoever you're supposed to turn into.'
'I hope you're right,' I said, thinking of him and not of myself.
'Why, what is your father, anyway? A Jewish neo-Nazi? A proctologist?'
'Let's get dressed,' I said. 'Let's take that walk.'
'No, just a minute. What is your father, Art? Tell me. Come on, it's only fair. You're one up on me now.'
'I love you,' I said, getting up to pull my trousers on.
We walked a long way, leaving behind the fragrant, dark streets of Shadyside, where you had to push aside low and wild'growing branches and to pass through curtains of spiderweb that overhung the sidewalks and left ticklish strands across your lips and eyelashes. We came far into East Liberty, where the neighborhood began to deteriorate, the vegetation dwindled then finally disappeared, and we found ourselves on a commercial street corner, amid a loose cloud of unhappy black men laughing outside the corner saloon and along the closed, barred, steel-shuttered row of storefronts. As we stood poised on the edge of the shutdown neighborhood, and Arthur said that we should turn around, I heard a snarling dog. A pickup truck had stopped at the traffic light, and in its bed was an enraged Doberman pinscher, doing near backflips of fluid hate. Each burst of nervous laughter from the street-corner men sent the dog over again.
'Jesus,' said Arthur.
'I know,' I said. 'That dog's gone mad.'
'It's Cleveland.'
'Oh, come on,' I said, 'not quite,' thinking maybe he'd had an encounter with Cleveland, like my last one, that he hadn't told me about, but then I looked into the cab of the pickup and saw Cleveland, on the passenger's side, laughing, holding his cigarette out the window.
'What's he doing? Who's he with?' I said, trying to recognize the man sitting behind the wheel of the pickup. The dog continued to emit the same slavering snarl over and over again, without variation, like a machine specially designed to snarl at laughing black men.
'He doesn't see us,' said Arthur. 'Hey, Cleveland!'
Cleveland turned, his jaw dropped, and then he grinned, waving delightedly, and said something that I didn't catch. The light changed and the pickup truck squealed off, the Doberman clambering to put its forelegs on the lip of the truck bed and to thrust its head into the onrush of wind.
'What's he up to now?' said Arthur, laughing. 'What a dog!'
'What a dog!' I said. 'Who knows?'
We laughed, but on the way home, while Arthur continued to exclaim and narrate, I hardly spoke, and there was nothing he could do to cheer me-indeed, his chatter annoyed me, for forgetting everything I had felt only that afternoon, I was gripped by the fear that I would never see Cleveland again. Later we did make love, and it was hard and wordless as ever, but when we were through, and he reminded me that we had only three more days before the rich young couple came home, I tensed.
'Then what?' I said, the question occurring to me for the first time.
'Yes, then what?'
'Where will you go?'
'Well, I was thinking of that perfectly nice place you have on the Terrace, which has been so empty lately.'
'I don't know,' I said, beginning to feel, with an inward groan, the return of a familiar feeling of pressure, but he said only, 'Fine,' and rolled over.
So, on the following Sunday, very early and half-awake, we left the Weatherwoman House, and, because I did
