Michael Chabon (5 page)

“Art Bechstein, I’d like you to meet Phlox,” Arthur continued. “Phlox, I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name, but this is my friend Art. He’s a wonderful person,” he finished, somewhat strangely, and suddenly, under the weight of her regard and of Arthur’s overintroduction, I felt compelled to impress but no longer wanted to—I wanted to back up the hallway, put on a pair of black horn-rims and a heavy coat, and come out again, this time farting and seized by grotesque tics.

Phlox had not yet spoken. She stood there, her hands poised at her sides, wrists bent upward, fingers slightly splayed: a really classic pose that cried out for a sentimental, string-heavy sound track, that rush of Borodin to mark the Moment Every Girl Dreams About. She looked at me for a long second or two.

“Hello, Art,” she said finally. “I can’t believe you know each other—I mean, I can’t believe that Arthur knows both of us. How are you?”

“Quite well, thanks. How are you?”

“Fine. I’m—Arthur says you’re not from Pittsburgh.”

“He does?” I looked at Arthur, who was looking at his hands. “No. Washington. No, well, I’m almost from Pittsburgh. My mother’s family lives in Newcastle,” I said.

“She’s dead.” Sympathetic smile.

I looked at Arthur again. His fine hands obsessed him.

“Uh, yes. A long time. Are you from here?”

“I,” she said, “am a very important part of Pittsburgh,” and she fixed me with her twin blues. There was a lull in the action.

“All right,” said Arthur, “that’s enough.” He took my elbow.

“Um, will you, um, will you be visiting the library—visiting Arthur—are you having lunch together?”

Arthur, adopting a sort of medical voice, explained the nature of our rendezvous, my liberty from my job that day, his unfortunate lack of lunchtime, and pulled me away, promising Phlox for me that she would see me again. Then we walked out into the blinding noon.

“Whew,” I said, “that is one bizarre girl. What did you say they call her?”

“Mau Mau. Only that was when she was punk. I understand now that she’s a Christian.”

“I knew it had to be something. What will she be next?”

“Joan Crawford,” he said.

No one ever satisfactorily explained to me the enormous hole, bridged in three separate places by long iron spans, that makes the whole southeastern end of the Oakland section of Pittsburgh into a precipice. Between the arrogant stupid prow of Carnegie-Mellon University and the ugly back end of the Carnegie Institute, between the little shrines to Mary in the front yards along Parkview and the park itself, lies the wide, dry ravine that contains, essentially, four things: the Lost Neighborhood, the Cloud Factory, train tracks, and a tremendous amount of garbage.

It was from a semisecret luncheon belvedere, the top step of a high concrete staircase that rose at least ten landings from the floor of the big hole, that I got my first long look at the Lost Neighborhood: the mysterious 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.

“Mohammad 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 Mohammad 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 Momo?” 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.

A
T 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.

The golf course eventually gave way to the parklike skirt of Carnegie-Mellon University, and then the park gave way to the bridge, the ravine, and Oakland. Nothing doing at the Cloud Factory; they weren’t making any today. A block of white brick, two beige stacks, an enigmatic series of catwalks and closed doors, the Cloud Factory sat on the other side of the bridge, down the hill from the Carnegie Museum, along the railroad tracks that ran beneath the bridge. The steel confusion of scaffolding and cable around the building seemed to connect it both to the museum above, filled with geodes and dinosaurs, and to the automobile-laden trains that passed alongside it in the night.

As I approached, I looked far below me, into the ravine, and tried to imagine two cravatted schoolboys, kicking through the sand and Coke cans down there, discussing the primes of their lives as though they were yet far off, and not already upon them. Since I had no idea of how Cleveland looked, however, the image was unclear, and anyway, I thought, they would probably have been stoned, just talking about trigonometry, John Lennon, and fathers.

When I reached the end of the bridge, I ducked right, on an impulse, and down a set of concrete stairs I’d never before noticed, which ended in the chain-link and iron grating of a padlocked entrance to the Cloud Factory. From there, steps of wood led down to the sandy floor of the ravine, and I took them, checking my watch; I had a half hour or so. When I hit bottom I looked up at the corroded red bridge stretched over my head, reverberating with each passing car. I came around the Cloud Factory a bit, trying to look through its opaque white windows.

Arthur, I suppose, was content to think it a cloud factory; but I had to know its real purpose before proceeding to
pretend
I was equally content. I couldn’t decide whether the place had to do with the museum or with the rails, however, and after a brief, fruitless examination of some rusted signs lying bent and nearly illegible in the dirt around the building, I turned to climb the steps.

Inside the building something engaged, and a low rumble grew quickly to a whine and a tattoo. I took my steps in time with the metallic tapping of the Cloud Factory, jolted out of my rainy-Tuesday sleepiness. Looking backward at it as I climbed, I had nearly gained the summit when a dense white billow blew from a giant valve, and then spread and rose into the air until a model cloud hung above my head, a textbook cloud, like a sheep, like cotton and all the cloud cliches. At the same time, Phlox rather prissily crossed the bridge on her bicycle, trailing thin scarves, posture perfect, sunglassed face forward and intent, probably, on the waiting white library in the distance. She seemed to be beautifully dressed. I stood still, half hidden against a cold red pile of the bridge, until the cloud began to break apart and she vanished into traffic. I’d spied on Phlox again. Something about her frightened me, though at the time I hadn’t the word for it.

As I walked into Boardwalk I caught the unmistakable signs of “it” being “whooped up” in the back room. Gil Frick, ex-Yeshiva, weekend marksman, and a deadly boring shrimp of an engineering student, had been left to attend the front cash register, a rare procedure, the management generally reserving for Gil the tasks it considered too menial or benumbing even for me and my malcontent ilk, such as peeling the price stickers from huge cairns of unsold paperbacks or burying the dead remaindered autobiographies of noncelebrities in the remote and freezing basement. In addition, the fifteen or so customers around the wrestling and men’s magazines and the Sports section of the store had their heads turned attentively toward the workroom at the back; some of them seemed to be laughing in deep appreciation of whatever fun was being had back there: shouts, hysterical feminine laughter, someone singing.