couple of streets and row or two of houses-a diorama, which one sees only from above, if one ever even notices it. I had probably seen it once or twice during my four years in Pittsburgh, but had never known of the half-dozen ancient staircases scattered throughout south Oakland that led down to it, nor realized that there were people really living in it. There were even a school and a baseball field; you could see the tiny shapes of children running bases down there at the bottom of Pittsburgh.
Arthur had chosen this uppermost step, where the sun warmed our backs and wilted the lettuce of our sandwiches. And sitting very close beside him there, behind the Fine Arts Building, at the grassy bottom of one of Oakland's hundred abrupt endings, I felt uncomfortable, extremely conscious of the seclusion and intimacy of our perch and of the distinct possibility that he had brought me here to broach again, as he might say, a delicate subject. I decided to reiterate my position at some point during lunch; unfortunately, my position was that I was crazy about him. I wanted to be like Arthur Lecomte, to drink, take, deny, dominate; and, with the wild friendship of Cleveland, to hold aloft the enchanted flag of summertime.
'What a weird place to live,' I said, gesturing with my ham-and-cheese to the Lost Neighborhood.
'Have you ever been down there?'
'Nuh uh. You?'
'Yes, sure. Cleveland and I used to go down there all the time. We used to cut school'-here he gestured back over his shoulder toward, presumably, Central Catholic High School -'and come down that way'-tracing the route with his blue-and-white-striped arm-'behind the museum, past the Cloud Factory, and down along the junkyard. There used to be marijuana growing up through the trash and old tires and stuff.'
'The Cloud Factory?'
He laughed, looked down at his hands, then looked back up again, avoiding my eyes, as usual, and blushing slightly. I'd never met a man who blushed so frequently, although he was to begin with a rather pink person.
'Yes, the Cloud Factory. Haven't you ever noticed it? When you walk across the Schenley Park bridge, there, from the park into Oakland, you pass above the Cloud Factory. What does it do? we used to wonder. Why do these great clouds, perfectly white and clean, white as new baseballs, come out of that building by the tracks? Cleveland and I would be all stoned and out of school and we'd loosen our neckties, and there would be the Cloud Factory, turning out a fresh batch of these virgin clouds.'
I'd seen the building a million times, I realized, and it was indeed a cloud factory, nothing else. I said that, and then thought about Catholic school, how typical it was for Arthur to have gone in an altar boy and come out a catamite.
'Is Cleveland Catholic?' I asked.
'No, he's nothing,' said Arthur. 'He's an alcholic. Do you want some pear?'
I thanked him and took a warm, grainy slice. The reiteration of my straightness began to retreat from its urgent position on the tip of my tongue, and I found myself unwilling to derange the smooth rhythm of our conversation, full of leisurely pauses and the sound of chewing.
'When can I meet Cleveland?'
'Yes, he wants to meet you too; I've told him about you. Well, this weekend I'm having a little party out at the Bellwethers'-and hey, you haven't come out to visit me yet, Bechstein. You should come out and spend the night. '
'Oh,' I said.
'Abdullah has. We've broken the rules. We've profaned Nettie and Al's bedclothes.'
'Oh!' I said. 'That's against the rules?'
'Are you kidding? You should see! There's a twelve-page list of things I'm supposed and not supposed to do. Their bed is off limits.'
This casual revelation of his having slept with Abdullah after the incident at the party was so complex, so wondrous, that it left me simultaneously relieved, curious, confused, nauseated, and admiring. I formulated and rejected eight or nine incoherent questions before realizing that they all boiled down to something along the lines of 'You slept with Dudu?' Instead I said, 'I'll come out for the party, I guess, this weekend. Cleveland 'll be there?'
'Well, he's on the list too.'
'Supposed or-'
'Forbidden. Absolutely. But we'll see.'
'Why is he forbidden to come over?'
'Because,' Arthur said, 'he is feared and despised wherever he goes. He is, my mother avers, Evil Incarnate.'
'I see,' I said, laughing.
He stood up, lit a cigarette, and jerked his head toward the library.
'I have to get back,' he said.
I shook his hand and left him at the main doors, thanking him for another fine half hour, and, silently, for not having ruined everything with a furtive caress. When he went back to work, I later learned, he invited Phlox to the party and told her that I planned to attend only to dance with her.
I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
5. Invaders
At six-thirty in the morning of a wet June Tuesday that promised only the dry revelations of another day at Boardwalk Books, I showered (radio loud on the toilet in the steam), took my orange juice, chewed a hard brown heel of bread whitened with margarine, and clunked around the apartment-still half in cartons-trying on and abandoning a long series of shirts, at the same time rooting about, with no particular intent, for a photograph I had of the egg from which Godzilla hatched.
I'd slept badly, wakened too early; but it is good for a habitual late sleeper to waken early once in a while and have nothing to do. I drank instant coffee and looked through the water drops on the wire screen, at the rain quietly running down the gutters, at the dwarf loading the morning papers with an alarming clank into the yellow steel vendor chained to the lamppost on the corner of Forbes and Wightman, at my next-door neighbor the psychiatric nurse, coming home from the graveyard shift at Western Psych, swinging her umbrella and shaking her long blond hair out of the bun into which she had bound it. Being up this early made me feel as though I'd been taken to a new part of town, or like a hardened New Yorker who, finally standing atop the Statue of Liberty, cannot spot the water tank on the roof of his building and realizes with a strange delight how big and beyond him his city is.
I found and threw out the badly packed, crumpled photograph (minute figures on a wan beach ring the monster in his dappled shell). Since the rain had stopped and there was still time before Boardwalk expected me and my bad attitude to show up for work, I decided to skip the bus and to walk into Oakland.
The morning was warm; vapor drifted and curled along the fragrant asphalt and covered the golf course as I approached. A bit of antique ribbon rose from the cotton wool of mist around the clubhouse flagpole. As I reached the gates of Schenley Park, the grounds keepers climbed onto their green lawn mowers and filled the air with the utmost sound of a wet summer morning. Hopping the low white rail, I checked as always for the little tangle of graffiti I'd scrawled on it one laughing, runny-nosed night with Claire two winters before. I trod across the long, flawless way of grass, until the scruples drummed into me after years of golfing with my father overcame me, and I stepped off the inviolate links and into a stand of oak that bordered the clubhouse and the eighteenth green.
Running my fingers along the half-tumbled wire-and-picket fence, picking up silvery drops of old rain on the tips of my shoes, I felt a momentary pang for my father, and then, as I pronounced the soft word 'Dad' and inhaled the turfy air, I remembered that he was flying into Pittsburgh again tomorrow; we'd have lunch, and I would shout, 'Elevator-going up!' and he'd shake his big head, pay the check, and tell me for the tenth time about the Weitzman girl, on a full fellowship at Brandeis, and perfectly lovely, and remarkably intelligent.
