Michael Chabon

Before the day of my bar mitzvah I was certain that, with his incredible but rarely displayed powers of mind and body, my father had a secret identity. I realized that the secret identity would have to be my father. Hundreds of times I looked in his closets, in the basement, under furniture, in the trunk of the car, on a fruitless hunt for his multicolored superhero (or supervillain) costume. He suspected my suspicions, I think, and every couple of months would encourage them, by demonstrating that he could drive our car without touching the steering wheel, or by unerringly trapping, with three fingers, flies and even bumblebees in midflight, or by hammering nails into a wall with his bare fist.

He’d been on the point of telling me the truth about his work, he said much later, on the day of my mother’s funeral, six months shy of my thirteenth birthday. But his half-brother, my Uncle Sammy “Red” Weiner, made him stick to his original plan to wait until I put on a tallis for the first time. So instead of telling me the truth about his job on that bright, empty Saturday morning, as we sat at the kitchen table with the sugar bowl between us, he told me, softly, that she had died in an automobile accident. I remember staring at the purple flowers painted on the sugar bowl. The funeral I hardly recall. The next morning, when I asked my father, as usual, for the funny papers and the sports page, an odd look crossed his face, and he looked away. “The paper didn’t come today,” he said. During the night Marty had moved in. He had often come to stay with us in the past, and I liked him—he knew a poem about Christy Mathewson, which he would recite as often as I asked, and once, for an instant, I had seen the gun he wore inside his jacket, under his left arm. He was a thin little man who always wore a tie and a hat.

Marty never moved out. He would drive me to school in the morning, or sometimes take me on sudden vacations to Ocean City, and I did not have to go to school at all. It would be a long time before I knew the circumstances of the abrupt removal from the world of my singing mother, but I must have sensed that I had been lied to, because I never asked about her, or hardly even mentioned her, ever again.

When, on the afternoon of my bar mitzvah, my father first revealed to me his true profession, I enthusiastically declared that I wanted to follow in his glamorous footsteps. This made him frown. He had long ago resolved to buy me college and “unsoiled hands.” He had been the first Bechstein to get a degree, but had been drawn into the Family (the Maggios of Baltimore) by the death of a crucial uncle, and by the possibilities that had just begun to open up for a man with a business degree and a C.P.A. He lectured me sternly—almost angrily. I had, after years of searching, finally discovered the nature of my father’s work, and he forbade me to admire him for it. I saw that it inspired in him an angry shame, so I came to associate it with shame, and with the advent of manhood, which seemed to separate me, in two different ways, from both my parents. I never afterward had the slightest desire to tell his secret to any of my friends; indeed, I ardently concealed it.

My first thirteen years, years of ecstatic, uncomfortable, and speechless curiosity, followed by six months of disaster and disappointment, convinced me somehow that every new friend came equipped with a terrific secret, which one day, deliberately, he would reveal; I need only maintain a discreet, adoring, and fearful silence.

When I met Arthur Lecomte, I immediately settled in to await his revelation. I formulated a hundred questions about homosexuality, which I didn’t ask. I wanted to know how he’d decided that he was gay, and if he ever felt that his decision was a mistake. I would very much have liked to know this. Instead I drank beers, quite a few of them, and I began my patient vigil.

Perhaps five seconds after I realized that we were standing on a loud street corner, surrounded by Mohawks and black men with frankfurters, and were no longer in the bar with a strangling ashtray and a voided pitcher between us, a green Audi convertible with an Arab in it pulled up and honked at us.

“Mohammad, right?”

“Hey, Mohammad!” Arthur shouted, running around to the passenger’s seat and diving into the red splash of interior.

“Hey, Mohammad,” I said. I still stood on the sidewalk. I had drunk very much very quickly and wasn’t following the action of the film too well. Everything seemed impossibly fast and lit and noisy.

“Come on!” shouted the blond head and the black head. I remembered that we were going to a party.

“Go on, asshole,” someone behind me said.

“Arthur!” I said. “Did I have a backpack at some earlier point this evening?”

“What?” he shouted.