Michael Chabon

After work I stepped outside, weakened by air-conditioning, and tugged out the last cigarette in the pack. Arthur and Phlox, side by side, approached from the direction of the library. Phlox wore pearls, a strapless white dress patterned with blue flowers, and a pair of high-heeled white sandals; Arthur, light-gray trousers and a powder-blue blazer, with a tie, and oxfords without socks, like Prince Philip. They were still far from me, and I watched as those they passed turned admiring heads; they drew near like an advertisement for summer and beauty and healthy American sex. The sun was in their faces, but they neither squinted nor averted their eyes; the light fell across Phlox’s necklace and Arthur’s hair and the hint of silver wristwatch at his cuff. I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings.

“Hi, Art Bechstein,” said Arthur, when they’d reached me. I had about half a cigarette left.

“Hi, Art Bechstein,” said Phlox.

“Hello, Phlox; hello, Arthur. Wow.”

The two of them panted after their brisk walk through sunlight, admiring stares, and the posh resorts and spas of my imagination. Thin strands of perspiration hung across their foreheads.

“Did you go to work like this?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Arthur. “It seemed like a good day to do it.”

“Arthur and I had the same idea today. Telepathically. Come into the old library all dressed up. We created a sensation. Telepathically. For your pleasure.” She was plainly excited, by my undisguised astonishment at her lovely big face and by the handsome man standing beside her, his fingertips nearly—bewilderingly—brushing her wrist.

“Well, I’m very pleased,” I said.

“I could care less,” said Arthur, “about your pleasure.”

“Thank heavens,” I said.

We looked at each other oddly, as though we neither of us knew what exactly we were talking about.

“Ha,” I said.

“Let’s drink something cool and refreshing,” Phlox said, bobbing her head, widening then narrowing her eyes like some lustful and wily biblical queen.

“Beer,” said Arthur and I.

“Jane is dead,” Arthur was saying. “And everything is fine. That’s all.” He was drunk.

“But what did you do?” Phlox asked. She’d already asked him five or six times, and each time he’d blushed, looked down, and refused to explain.

“Do you want to know?”

“Ah,” she said, perhaps imprudently, “you’re finally drunk enough to confess.”

“No!” he said, lurching slightly into Phlox, who sat beside him in the booth, and spilling his fine hair across her bare shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“Watch it,” she said, not taking her eyes from me as she delicately shoved Arthur back over to his corner. Each cool and refreshing sip she took seemed to increase the pressure of her unsandaled silken foot against my sockless ankle. In my drunkenness I’d lost any trace of the caution that had propelled me only the day before into the brambles along the Schenley Park bridge. I wondered suddenly (as suddenly as my eyes falling for the hundredth time upon her blue-flowered breasts) whether or not she wore a bra.

“Phlox,” I said, before I could reconsider, “are you wearing a brassiere?”

“Never,” she said. “Never in high June.” She spoke without coyness, without shock or outrage at my impertinence.

“Hey, Blanche DuBois!” said Arthur. “ ‘Never in high June.’ ”

She continued to look at me levelly and nearly without blinking. I began to get an unmistakable impression that this girl wanted me in a matter-of-fact, practical, and serious way. Arthur, I think, got the same impression. He stood up and excused himself, blushing again, but with a slightly businesslike tone, as though he had a job to do and were doing it.

“No, no,” I called after him. “Don’t leave me alone with this woman.”

I have a photograph of Phlox here before me; the only one in which she wears no makeup. Her forehead appears, quite frankly, tremendous. She has adopted a disheveled, Thursday-night-at-home-with-my-boyfriend pose, ripped sweatshirt collar dipped over one round olive shoulder, face uncharacteristically Levantine (her father was related to the great Pittsburgh Tambellinis), saintly. A faint something, a hint of redness in the eyes, suggests that she’s been crying; the lower lids seem slightly puffy. Of course she’s been crying. Her nose, as ever, looks big and straight and radiant. A few limp curls drape the vaulting eyebrows and silver screen of a forehead. And the eyes, the legendary blue eyes of Death Itself. Yes.

Arthur returned from the rest room, looking pale but considerably more rational. He watched with great interest as I hastily undid my fingertips from Phlox’s own, lavender-nailed.

“Arthur Bechstein likes you, Phlox Lombardi,” he said.

“Oh, do you really think so, Arthur LeComte?” said Phlox. Her bosom heaved measurably.