Michael Chabon

Phlox had covered herself in pearls that day, at the ear-lobes, the throat, the wrist. As she moved her hands and head in the still-light evening, talking about herself, the pearls seemed to string and restring themselves on the invisible thread of her gestures. This shifting nebula about her head and bust, like a sudden attack of phosphenes, first fascinated, then distracted, and ended by annoying the hell out of me. I had the constant sensation of having stood up too quickly, of seeing stars, which should at the very least have led me to drink fewer gin and tonics, two of which I had had the dubious foresight to carry out into the court and to set down on a little table beside us. A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime, I said, elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation.

We danced; Phlox was trying to speak to me in French. She said amorous things. I answered promptly in English, mentioning also that I’d read that it was nowadays considered in poor taste to talk of love in French. “Don’t be mean to me,” she said, laughing. I laughed. She wriggled, minutely, in her strapless dress. I looked more closely at her makeup, and could see, as she glanced suddenly over her shoulder, that she had indeed been a punk sometime in the recent past; her eye shadow and blush defied her looks, rather than enhancing them, her ears had been pierced many times, and there was even, I thought, a dimpled trace of the piercing of her nose.

“Look,” she said, “look up there. There’s some kind of gallery up there. You can see things hanging on the walls. Look, Art, you can see art on the walls. There are African masks.”

“Speaking of Africa, Phlox,” I said. She’d been expecting this, I suppose, or something like it, and was instantly outraged, stopped moving. “No. No, no way. If you ever call me Mau Mau, it will be the last thing you say to me.”

“But why?” I said. “Why do they call you that?”

“Nobody calls me that. Don’t you call me that.”

“Never,” I said. “Never will I call you that name.”

“Merci.” She reached up and pulled tentatively on a lock of my hair. “Que tu es beau, Arthur,” she said.

“Don’t call me that. Never call me ‘Artoor,’ ” I mimicked. “And ‘que tu es beau’—come on.”

She ranged her fingertips along my arm. I couldn’t stop looking at her oversophisticated, tricolor eye shadow.

“That’s what Daniel says to me. Que tu es belle, Phlox. Tries to say. His accent’s terrible.”

“I see. And just who is this Daniel fellow, anyway?” The name had cropped up in Arthur’s conversation, at odd intervals, without any specific virtue or stigma being attached to it, but often enough that knowing some vague person named Daniel had come to seem one of Arthur’s minor traits; and it was jarring somehow to hear Phlox say the name.

“A friend. He works in the library. The three of us go drinking sometimes.”

This little statement left two unmistakable impressions: that I had a rival for Phlox’s affections, and that I had somehow been deceived by Arthur, who obviously knew Phlox much better than he’d led me to believe. I thought: Well, it’s okay, I am a rivalrous guy, this is going to be fun. But I also felt I had, or certainly ought to have, one or two important questions for Arthur.

“Daniel says I’m beautiful in a post-Godardian way.”

“That Daniel. What a charmer.”

“But there’s something I dislike about him. I like you much more. He’s moody, he’s cruel. He suffers from spleen; do you know what spleen is? He’s, well, he’s an artist. You know. But you’re a happy person, I can tell. Smiley. Sunny. I’m going to call you Sunny,” she said.

“Next!” I called, lightly shooing her away, snapping my fingers impatiently, as though she’d just blown the audition.

“Stop. All right. But I’ll find something else to call you, I swear. Are you going to kiss me, Arthur Bechstein?” she said.

“Eventually, I’m sure.”

“Now,” she said.

“You look very beautiful, Phlox,” I said, and with my ridiculous heart beating as though I were that first German laborer, ignorant of engineering and about to remove that first wooden support from that first lacy thousand-ton dome of poured concrete, I made a fractional movement toward her lips with mine; then I drew her slightly into the shadow of a little tree and kissed her; somebody coughed. I heard the scrape of her dress against the thin branches, and the faint noise of her lips, fleshy, wet, tasting of lime and gin. I opened my eyes.

“There,” she said, “that’s over.”

We went at it.

When we got back to the booth, a tall, skinny boy dressed for basketball, with an Italian face and filterless cigarettes, was sitting with Arthur. The tall boy was lighting Arthur’s cigarette and I saw that the evening’s arrangements had shifted. Now we were two couples who would go our separate ways.

“Phlox, Arthur, this is Bobby.”