Michael Chabon

“Thank you,” said Cleveland, and stepped over to her, and kissed her fat cheek with the reverence of a son. He put the hat on his head, then doffed it, bowed, gracefully swept the floor with the tacky thing, and split. He had won something: Now that Jane was dead at her mother’s hand, she was someone else, she was a girl without parents, which is the dream of every young man like Cleveland, if not every young man, period.

Mrs. Bellwether went over to the La-Z-Boy and fell into it. She had won something too, but it was something made up and pretty stupid.

“He believed you,” said Arthur in a suitably awed tone. “He’s probably wild with grief.”

“I hope he doesn’t try something foolish,” I said.

“Let him jump off a bridge,” said Mrs. Bellwether. “And good riddance.” A sudden pragmatic thought seemed to invade her perfectly factless mind. “You’ll tell him. I shouldn’t have told you. You’ll tell him she’s alive!”

“Gee, I just might, Mrs. B.,” said Arthur. He had sat back down in his chair and was lacing up his sneakers.

“Don’t tell him. Please. Let him think she’s dead.”

“But what if they end up on the same bus someday? Or at adjoining tables in the Dirty O?”

“I’ll send her away. I’ll send her down to my mother’s farm in Virginia. She’ll be safe there. Don’t tell him!”

Arthur sat up and gave the demented woman the relentless, clear stare that was going to make his career at the State Department.

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said.

While Mrs. Bellwether, looking pleased with herself, made out the check to Arthur on the kitchen table, I carried his suitcase out of the house.

“Nice meeting you, Mrs. Bellwether,” I called. “Shalom!”

We walked all the way back to my house. For some reason I felt depressed, and we didn’t laugh. Arthur smoked cigarette after cigarette; when I gave him an account of my abduction by Cleveland he only sighed; he cursed the humid weather.

“Do you feel bad because you failed in your responsibility to the Bellwethers, or something ridiculous like that?” I said.

“No.”

We reached the corner of Forbes and Wightman, wide, empty, and phony-looking in the light of the halogen lamps. Chained to one of the lampposts was the vending machine, now empty, that I had watched the dwarf fill with newspapers that morning. The sky to the south, over the steel mills, looked evil and orange and miasmic. We came to the Terrace and walked up through the maze of garages to my apartment, and I fumbled with the house key. I was still very drunk.

As I pushed open the door, Arthur put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned to face him.

“Art,” he said. He touched my face. His beard was too heavy, there was a puffiness under his eyes, and he seemed almost to waver on his feet, as though he might fall over at any moment. There was something so drunken and ugly about him that I flinched.

“No,” I said. “You’re tired. You’re just tired. Come on.”

And then, as the song says, he kissed me, or rather pressed his lips against the upper part of my chin. I stepped back, into my apartment, and he fell forward, catching himself as his knees hit the floor.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” I said.

“What an asshole I am, huh?” he said, standing carefully. “I’m just tired.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s all right.”

He apologized, said again that he was an asshole, and I said again that it was all right. I loved him and I wished he would leave. He slept on my floor among the boxes, while I trembled in bed under my cool, damp comforter. When I woke up the next morning, he had gone. He had ripped open his pack of Kools and folded it into the shape of a dog, or a saxophone, and left it on the pillow beside my head.

8

THE MAU MAU CATALOGUE

WORK THE NEXT DAY was not the circus I had expected. People are always ready to hear that something disturbing was after all only a prank—and that includes the police, who had come shortly after my abrupt departure. I called and explained to them, and to my fellow employees, that the Black Rider was a Pi Kappa Delta brother, upset over the fact that I had been seen dancing with his girlfriend, but essentially a nice guy who had only wanted to put a little of the fear of God into me. This story went over big, and even earned me some points, in the strange estimation of the apprentice paramedics and the Pittsburgh police, for having had the balls to dance with the girlfriend of a Pike, notoriously large fellows. By eleven o’clock I was able to go about my work as though I had never been torn from the register stand, manhandled, and driven away on the back of a gigantic motorcycle, and the momentary vortex I had created in the usually calm surface of Boardwalk Books closed over me.