Michael Chabon

Arthur slid in beside me, without stirring the foam on the beers. His face had changed; he was feeling, clearly if unusually, a strong feeling about something or other. He spoke into his collar, his beer, the beery tabletop, his lap, eyes downcast and invisible.

“I hate you, Phlox Lombardi,” he said.

I laughed. Arthur looked up and smiled, radium white, an elegant, old-fashioned, moneyed, sad kind of smile, like a relic of that remote age when radium was still our friend. He unleashed this smile on Phlox, right in front of me; I was sitting there, confronted, I imagined, by the unimaginable, dizzying nastiness of homosexuality thwarted.

“Excuse me,” I said. Arthur rose to let me out.

This bar was esteemed for the quality or at least the profusion of the graffiti in both its gentlemen’s and ladies’ rooms, which were rarely washed or repainted. I read this exchange: WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY?

And, lower:

HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES

Then:

PLUS THERE’S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD

A fourth man had concluded:

AND OF EVERYTHING THAT’S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES

When I returned to our table, Arthur was in the middle of his story, now apparently master of his earlier and revelatory outburst.

“Every so often, Cleveland yelled, ‘Teddeeee,’ and inside the house someone next door said, ‘What?’ and we would laugh.”

“Just tell me what you did,” said Phlox. “Enough.”

“No, let him keep you in suspense, why don’t you?” I said. “This is good.”

“Oh, but I hate suspense, Arthur. Arthurs. Arthurs, ha ha. No, but really, what did you guys do?”

“We drank,” said Arthur.

“Well, that can hardly have shocked the Bellwethers.”

I sat down across from Phlox and slipped off my shoes. Arthur told her that Teddy’s control over the dogs was amazing, and at this point in Arthur’s confession, just at the word “amazing,” Phlox and I began in earnest a delicate, grueling, almost motionless game of footsie, a classic in excruciation, both of us playing to win, employing every one of the considerable mudras for lust or for a pledge of which the foot is capable. At no point did we take our eyes off Arthur; I was only marginally aware of the rapt attention Phlox expertly appeared to pay to him. She’d withdrawn both feet from her limp sandals. In similar circumstances, that is, drunk as I was, I would probably have done this with any attractive woman who happened to be sitting across from me with her feet bared and her cheeks flushed, but not with the same overwhelming awareness of technique, the same impulse toward skill, that Phlox inspired in me. Neither of us heard much of Arthur’s account, delivered as it was by a drunken man in a jukebox-dominated bar to two people whose already beer-impaired attention was largely directed to the slow, feathery wrestling match taking place beneath the wet surface of the table. I later had to run through the whole story with her all over again.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” Arthur finished. “I haven’t felt so chastised in ages.”

“Ah, that’s why you got all dressed up today,” I said.

Phlox snorted.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. Abruptly she took her feet from mine, leaving them cold and interrupted, and I was momentarily seized by intense loneliness. “What won’t you guys do when you’re drunk? It’s no wonder her parents were furious—a fifteen-year-old boy, my God.”

“It wasn’t that, Phlox. They don’t give a damn about Teddy. Two facts: the fact that I let the Evil Cleveland in the house, and the fact that I let three Stanley Kowalski dogs take advantage of their delicate darling; that’s it.”

“Well, they have every right to be angry.”

“You women always stick together,” I said, which wasn’t a particularly funny thing to say, but I was having difficulty thinking, and I wanted back the nylon feel of her toes.

“So what are you going to do, Arthur?”

“I think there’s another couple who want me to house-sit for them. And they haven’t a dog.”

That summer’s Stevie Wonder song came on the jukebox. I gathered that it was about a kiss like a watermelon or a chocolate chip.

“Will you dance with me, Art?” said Phlox.

“No,” I said, and I ran the nail of my big toe down the length of the top of her foot, hard; but I didn’t mean it.

The bar was built around a small central courtyard. When the management turned up the volume on the jukebox, people danced among the white iron tables and tame trees strung with lights, under the open sky. There were too many couples dancing; Phlox and I found ourselves backed into a corner, surrounded by people neither of us knew, who paid us no attention, and our strange but unsurprising conversation had all the exciting flavor of complete isolation. Unseen, unattended, we grew intimate, talkative, drunk, aroused. I kept my feet bare and tickled them against the Astroturf surface of the courtyard.