Michael Chabon

We went inside, where it looked nothing like my grandparents’ house, and I relaxed. The most immediately memorable feature of the decor was the carpeting. A “soothing,” embarrassingly synthetic flavor of sky blue, it illuminated the whole floor of the place, like a lit ceiling; and so from my first minute in Jane’s house I felt subliminally but undeniably upside down. The furniture had been accumulated, rather than chosen. An empty wicker birdcage hung in the corner of the living room, its bottom still lined with newspaper and its water bottle a quarter full. They had partitioned the dining room from the living room with an ugly brown stack of metal shelves that held Jane’s many golf trophies and pictures of Jane and her dad, who looked like a frail Alec Guinness. I liked seeing the photographs of Jane, with her strawberry of a face and her remarkably fine posture.

“Hey!” said Arthur, coming from the kitchen in nothing but boxer shorts. Wiping his floury hands on his bare, sunburned legs, he held out the right one for Cleveland and me to shake. “Cleveland!” He wore the only unfeigned look of surprise I was ever to see on him. “What the hell is going on?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Didn’t you send him to get me?”

“Hell, no,” said Cleveland. “I thunk it up myself. Arthur was telling me about his new friend”—here Cleveland gave me a very complex sort of false leer, as though to say, “I know you two aren’t making it, but then again maybe I don’t know”—“Art Bechstein, who works at that shitty little Boardwalk Books on Atwood, which doesn’t have a single book by Brautigan or Charles Bukowski, and I said to myself, ‘Well, Art Bechstein; I know who that is! And I’ll bet that at this very moment that late-afternoon emptiness of the spirit is stealing over him like a shadow. Like a shadow.’” He shook his long black hair.

“You two know each other?” said Arthur. He was edging his way toward the blue staircase, and it occurred to me that there was someone upstairs.

“Only by reputation,” said Cleveland. “Who do you have upstairs, Artie?”

“Someone. I was making our dinner. You don’t know him.”

“Cleveland kidnapped me,” I said.

“I’d imagine so,” said Arthur. “Look, could you fellas come back in about a half hour?”

“No!” said Cleveland. They played a game, fell into it instantly, sharpening on each other their abilities—Cleveland’s verbose and graceless, Arthur’s cool and mannered—to manipulate situations, to see the motives behind motives, to note and expose the telltale flicker of a glance. They could, finally, put two and two together; most people cannot. “You’ll just make him go out the back door feeling all sticky and naked and unloved. Why not get him down here? Who is it? Cousin Richard? No—no, I’ll bet it’s Mohammad. I’ll bet you two were making up again. He has some paper about Andrew Jackson he needs you to write for him, and so he came over here with a pound of swordfish and made a big charming kissy-face, and now everything is jake.”

Arthur laughed and looked delighted. “Mohammad!” he shouted. “Come downstairs!”

“Where’s the dog?” said Cleveland.

“Downstairs trembling, as usual. I think she’s in heat.” He turned to me. “Scary, isn’t he? Actually, it was the Emancipation Proclamation and veal scallops. I’m making veal marsala.”

Our stomachs were full of veal and asparagus and we had been drinking for a long time; the sun set and the neighborhood grew still. In between songs on the radio, I could hear a lawn mower off in the distance, a dog barking. The Bellwethers had no screens on their windows, and a cloud of gnats hung over the center of the living room.

Arthur laid great significance on the fact that Momo was full Maronite Christian. This lent him a special charm. He had the thin veneer of civilized French manners and sullenness over the dark, hirsute heart of the Levantine (Arthur liked them swarthy); he was the dazzling Beirut hotel harboring an unexploded bomb. Their very casual affair had been going on for a long time and had fallen into a comfortable pattern. “Every week,” said Arthur, “we have knock-down-drag-out sex and then a tender and passionate fight.” Momo had sat chewing and scowling all through dinner, and left immediately afterward, telling us that he was “a fucky one,” because he had forgotten that his cousin depended on him for a ride home from her music class and would be waiting for him on the sidewalk outside the Y with a few choice phrases of French.