“That’s bullshit,” said Phlox. Her teeth flashed.
“She’s right,” said Arthur.
“I hate you, Arthur Lecomte.” She whirled. She was atavistic and gorgeous in her anger, with her splayed fingers, her cheeks. “I’ll never forgive you for doing this.”
“You’ll thank me.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Come with me, Art.”
“Go on,” said Arthur.
“I’ll call you.”
“That’s all right,” said Arthur, “really. Don’t bother.”
Phlox and I started off, at first without discussion or destination. It was twilight, and the Cathedral of Learning, pile and battlements, threw great beams of light into the air, and looked like the 20th Century-Fox emblem. I took Phlox’s hand, but she let her fingers slip and we walked with a breeze between us.
“Did he tell you we were having dinner tonight?”
“Why did you lie to me?”
She put her fingers around my hand, lifted it, and then threw it from her like an empty bottle.
“Why?”
“How did you know?”
“I knew,” she said. “That’s all. I knew.”
“Arthur told you.”
“How stupid do you think I am?” She ran ahead a few steps and then turned on me, her hair sweeping out around her head. We had come to the Schenley Park bridge, which hummed with the cars that crossed it. The two stacks of the Cloud Factory were ink against the inky sky. “I didn’t need Arthur to tell me. I knew when I got those roses.”
“I bought the roses—”
“Forget it,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it. You’ll just lie. You poor dumb liar.” She turned.
“—before I knew I was having dinner with Arthur tonight.” Each time I mentioned Arthur’s name I heard him saying, “Don’t bother,” and felt dizzy; it was like peering over a cliff, and now, as Phlox walked off, the ground on the other side of me split and began to give way. I thought, I fancied, that in a moment I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has. When Phlox, who had vanished into the darkness along the bridge, reached the other side, she reappeared briefly in the streetlight, skirt and scarf and two white legs, and then the park closed around her.
19
THE BIG P
“BECHSTEIN.” BLACKNESS. “BECHESTEIN.” LIGHT. “Bechstein.”
“Hey. What. Oh.”
Filling my front doorway, in a welter of bloody twilight, was the huge silhouette of a man, hands on his hips. He raised one black arm and the red rays shifted around it like the blades of a fan.
“Jesus.” I blinked and sat up on one elbow. “Good thing this isn’t a Sergio Leone movie.”
“Bang.”
“I guess I fell asleep. Time is it?”
“Night is falling,” said Cleveland. He came and sat on the arm of the couch, down by my feet; the top of a paperback protruded from his jacket pocket, and he held a white envelope. “Look at you—you’re all sweaty,” he said. With a vast, rattling sigh, he leaned back, against the wall, and patted his fat gut. “What do you have to eat?”
I twisted around, sat full up. Arthur’s laugh pealed in my ear for an instant, and I realized I’d been dreaming of him.
“I can probably manage some form of cheese sandwich,” I said. I tried to stand, tottered slightly, caught myself; I was sore all over. “I may have a few olives.”
“Great. Olives.” He lit a cigarette. “You sick?”
“I don’t think so. No.” Hannah, the little girl next door, was practicing “Fur Elise” again. There had been piano music in my lustful dream. “I’ll get you a sandwich. Um, what have you been up to?”
I went into the kitchen and took out the necessary jars and packages. It felt nice inside the refrigerator.
“Oh, just a million and one things. Poon things, I’m afraid. This was on the doorstep, Bechstein,” Cleveland said, clunking into the kitchen behind me. He handed me the envelope I’d noted, on which was printed only my name, in Phlox’s schoolish handwriting, without stamp or address. It was a business envelope. My heart made a sudden violent motion—leapt, sank. It’s the same feeling.
“Oh, it’s from Phlox,” I said. “Well. Hmm.”
“Hmm.”
“Well.”
“Hmm.” He grinned. “Jesus, Bechstein, are you going to read it?”
“Sure, yes—I mean, why not? Would you mind…?” I said, gesturing toward the unassembled sandwich.
“Of course. Let’s see. Ah, bread, fine, perfect. Just the heels? Fine, that’s fine. Love the heels. Bread and cheese, cadmium-orange American cheese—perfect, exactly. You’re a minimalist. Go, go read.” He turned from me and gave his attention to the food.
I stepped out of the kitchen with the envelope, trying not to guess at its contents, then broke it open and unfolded the two-page letter, also handwritten, in dark-purple ink on pale-purple stationery with her monogram—“PLU.”
“The past tense of plaire,” she liked to say; her middle name was Ursula. My eyes skipped across the paper for a moment, before I could restrain them, and the words “sex,” “mother,” and “horrible” peered out at me like miserable inmates through the barbed tangle of her paragraphs. I forced myself to begin at the beginning.
ART,
I have never written to you before and it feels strange. I think it is going to be hard for me to write you a letter, and I am trying to decide why this is. Maybe it is because I know how intelligent you are, and I do not want you reading what I write, because you might look at my letter in a too critical fashion. Maybe it is also because I feel stilted when I express myself in a letter, confined. I am afraid to write long sentences or to use words wrongly. And then there’s just the fact that before, everything I ever wanted to say to you I could just say, right into your ear. Isn’t that how it should be? Writing is so unnatural. Nevertheless there are some things I must tell you, and since I cannot see you ever again, I must write.
You are probably afraid that I am mad at you, and I am. I’m furious. No one has ever done anything like this to me before. Not like this. Not so weirdly and horribly. Art, I have touched your throat and your sex, we have slept with each other as fierce and spoken to each other as close as a man and a woman possibly can. You must know that what you are now doing disgusts me utterly.
I keep hearing (and don’t think this is stupid) a million Supremes songs in my head. Stop in the Name of Love, etc. Art, how can you have sex with a man? I know you and Arthur have slept together because I know Arthur. He has to have sex. He once said he always has to feel a man’s hands on his body or he will die. I distinctly recall him saying this.
Oh, how can you? It is so unnatural, so obviously wrong, when you really think about it. I mean, think about it, really consider it. Isn’t it ludicrous? There is only one place in the world where you are supposed to put your penis—inside of me. Anyway, all of this is beside the point now. It has been obvious to me for a long time that you have some kind of hang-up about your mother, but I did not think it was this grave. Believe me Art, because I do care about you—you need help, soon, and badly (from a qualified psychiatrist).
I still love you, but I will not be able to see you anymore. You say that you love me, but as long as you are seeing Arthur that just cannot be true. You don’t understand how much this upsets me. You must know (I believe I told you) that this is not the first time I have fallen in love with a weak man who turned out to be homosexual. It’s horrible. After you spend so much time looking out—not being jealous, just keeping an eye on the women who come around the boy you love—which is normal, after all, is it not?—they come and get you from behind. That’s the worst.
Don’t call me anymore, darling. I love you. I hope you’re happy. I’m sorry for the letter. I never could have said any of this to you. It’s easier this way. Call me sometime, maybe a long time from now, years, perha
ps, when you have seen.
PHLOX
“Let’s go sit on the steps,” said Cleveland, pointing, a hollow olive stuck on the tip of his index finger. The cheese in his sandwich stood an inch thick. “You look like you could use some fresh air, Bechstein. You really look sick.”
“Hmm? Oh, no, no, it’s just, um, something.”
“Oh, well, something. That’s a relief.”
“I had a bad night.”
We sat down on the cracked steps and I wondered if I really might be sick. It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening. I had a very dim memory of having woken up that morning, come out to the living room, and lain down again on the sofa; I’d slept for around seventeen hours. Cleveland slipped the paperback from his pocket and chucked it into my lap. It was a cheap old assortment of Poe, secondhand, a skull and a bat on the cover.
“Ten Tales of Tension and Terror,” I read.
“I’m rereading the Big P,” he said, talking around the cheese in his mouth. “I used to be crazy about him. I used to think I might be Poe reincarnated.” He lifted his lank bangs to show me his pale Poe brow. “Whew. I’ll tell you something, Bechstein.” He poked his thumb into another olive and then flicked the olive, like a shooter, into his mouth. “The evil Carl Punicki is an okay fellow. He laughs a little too hard, and he throws his money around a little too much, and he slaps me on the back a little too often, but I can work with him.”
“Work with him how?”
“I’m afraid to tell you.”
“Oh.”
“So what did you do last night?” he said, eyeing the half-crumpled letter in my hand.
I looked at him. He’d been babbling, he was eating the cheese sandwich almost without stopping to swallow, and I wondered if he might be stoned. The usual tracery of broken blood vessels on the skin of his face, under his eyes and across his nose, looked darker than usual; his eyes were pink, his hair was filthy. Although part of me wanted just to tell him everything, I resented his being so out of it, his doing something for Carl Punicki that was evidently worse than what he’d done for Frankie Breezy, and, finally, I was afraid that he would make run of me, or—who knew?—even get angry. And what had I done last night?
“Yes, I’m stoned and I’ve been drinking all day. I’m half in the bag,” he said. “Okay?”
“So you came over because there was no food at your house?”
“Right.”
“Oh.”
“Asshole. That isn’t why I came over. I came to converse.”
“You did?”
“Sure.” He reached over and patted my thigh, then took the letter from between my lax fingers. “Disturbing news?”
“I’m not really sure. Confusing news.”
“May I?”
“No. Come on, Cleveland.” I reached for the letter, but he lifted it up over his head, out of my reach. “I can’t believe you’re going to work for that monster Punicki, I don’t feel well, you’re all fucked up—”
“I’m normalized. Look, Bechstein, you’re upset; something’s wrong. Here.” He handed back the letter, tapping it against my knee. “Why don’t you at least tell me something of what’s contained therein.”
My little neighbor started up again with her Beethoven. Cleveland wore a very sincere, if somewhat bleary, expression; there was only the faint trace of a sneer.
“It’s a ransom note, right? She’s taken herself hostage. ‘Dear Art,’ ” he said, biting his lip in thought and rolling his eyes upward. “Um, ‘Leave Arthur in an unmarked paper bag inside locker thirty-eight at the Greyhound station, or you’ll never see me again.’ Is that it?”
“Oh, here,” I said. While he read Phlox’s purple letter, which he did very slowly, as though he was having difficulty making sense of it, I listened to the music next door and stared down at a tiny white sliver of fluff that he had caught on a spider thread and was spinning in the breeze like a pinwheel, at the end of its miniature tether. Cleveland would ball up the letter and throw it to the ground; would stand and spit on my head; then he, too, would leave my life forever. I had ruined everything.
After a few minutes Cleveland raised his giant head and looked at me. He grinned.
“You little slut.”
I half-laughed, through my nose, the way one does when one is also crying.
“Oh, stop it, you big baby. She doesn’t mean any of this. The whole thing is nonsense. Here she says no one has ever done this to her before, and then here she says it happens all the time. She’s jangling your wires.”
“She never wants to see me again.”
“Bullshit.” Carelessly he folded the letter and slid it back into the ragged envelope. “It sounds like she’s handing you your papers, but this is just a goddamn ultimatum. These things always are. It’s like, ‘I’ll never see you again, ever. Unless.’ Jane sends me these all the time. Quarterly. Relax. You can call her tonight if you want,” he said. He picked at a cheese fragment that had lodged in a fold of his jacket. “Unless.”
We sat for a few moments, not talking about Arthur.
“Cleveland?” I said at last.
“Well, I’m not surprised, anyway.”
“You aren’t?”
“It had to happen. It’s pretty funny in the letter when she says they ‘get you from behind.’ Ha ha. Ah, Bechstein, you dope. What are you crying about? Cut it out. I hate crying. Tell me what happened.”
I recounted to him, very briefly, the events of the previous evening.
“He said I shouldn’t bother to call him anymore.”
Cleveland snorted.
“There’s a big ‘unless’ stuck onto that one too,” he said. “They’re both hedging their bets. Stop crying. Goddamn it.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a ragged ball of old Kleenex. “Here. Shit. You haven’t lost them both. It’s either one or the other. Do you want to hear this?”
“I guess.” I began to feel restored, unconfused, even less achy, simply from the weight of Cleveland’s grouchy attentions. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m kind of upset to hear about your working for Punicki too.”
“Working with the Evil Poon, Bechstein; we have an arrangement. It’s nothing to cry about, Bechstein, Jesus. I’m being admitted to an ancient and honorable profession. I’m learning a valuable skill. Okay now, let that go for one second and listen.”
“I know, I know. If I forget Arthur forever, call Phlox—”
“You could be back in her arms again, as Phlox, or Diana Ross, would have it, within the hour. Really. But I guess you would really have to forget Arthur. Or the other way around.”
He picked up the envelope again and flapped it thoughtfully against the back of his hand. “So who do you love? Phlox or Arthur? Who do you love more, I mean?”
“I don’t know. The same,” I said.
“Invalid response,” said Cleveland. “Try again.”
I guessed that he was right, that my feeling for Phlox, which I was calling love, could not really be the same as my feeling for Arthur, which I was also calling love. I thought of her clear broad forehead, and of her closet full of spectacular skirts, and of the perfume of her bedroom, and when this didn’t instantly move me to decision, I thought of her tenderness and care for me, of her so obvious and persistent affection. It seemed to me that I shouldn’t have to think so hard. Something stood between me and Phlox—perhaps it was myself—which made loving her a perpetual effort; she was a massive collection of small, ardent details that I struggled always to keep in mind, in a certain order, repeating the Phlox List over and over to myself, because if I forgot one particular of her smile or speech, the whole thing came to pieces. Perhaps I did not love Phlox, after all—I just knew her by heart. I had memorized my girlfriend.
Or perhaps it was presumptuous and conceited of me, and of Cleveland, to think that Phlox would really have me back. Perhaps she was calling it quits because it was, in fact, quits.
“Um, Cleveland—do you really not fi
nd it a big deal…”
“Find what?”
“That I—that I’m—that I might be…”
“Queer?” He set the letter on top of the Poe and stood up, stretching his arms wide, as though to embrace the entire gathering evening, and emitted, simultaneously, a belch and a fart. “Wow! Do that often enough and you implode.”
“Ha.”
“Queer as my oldest friend? As my father?”
“Um.”
“As a matter of fact, Bechstein, I don’t think that you are. In my corroded opinion, I think you’re just clowning around with your sexual chemistry set. But go ahead—give yourself a rest from the Evil Love Nurse. You can call her—how does she put it?—years from now, ‘when you have seen.’ ”
I protested that what I was doing was more serious than he thought. I wanted to express to him something of my feelings for Arthur, but I remembered all of his sodden protestations of love for Jane, and I kept silent. He stood in front of me, a few steps down, and I could barely make out his features in the near darkness.
“What did you do last night?” I said finally, anticipating another tale of excess and hilarity.
“Last night,” he said, as the hem of the blue, sky filled with purple, “I learned how to deactivate an alarm system.”
“Jesus.”
“Neat, huh?”
“No! What the hell for?”
“For a merit badge. What do you think? To get inside houses. Poon owns five jewelry stores in the Mon Valley.”
“He’s a fence.”
“He’s the biggest, Bechstein.”
“And you’re going to steal for him.” I stood up.
“Like the big time. No kidding—Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.”
I brushed past him, was halfway down the front steps, running away from my own house, when I turned to Cleveland, a vague shape in the light that filtered out from the distant kitchen.
“Cleveland, it’s illegal! It’s burglary. Burglary! You could go to jail.”