Michael Chabon

“You’re a crazy woman,” Arthur said. “Those ladies have probably never even noticed you.”

“You saw me crying! You should have heard the things they said about me!”

“What did they call you?” said Jane, very sweetly. As soon as she heard that anyone was or had been in any kind of distress, she became an engine of sympathy, hurtling to the rescue. She reached across the table and put her hand on Phlox’s.

“I can’t say it. I don’t remember.”

“I remember,” said Arthur.

“Okay, Artie,” said Cleveland.

“You said they called you a strange-looking white bitch who thought she was hot shit waving her ass in a window to the boys all day.”

Silence fell over our party. Phlox threw her head back proudly and her nostrils flared. I had heard this story already, a few times, but Phlox’s life was so full of incidents in which other women vented their jealous rage at her that the impressive, rhythmic hatefulness of the Hillman Library cleaning ladies hadn’t really affected me before. I felt terrible, unfamiliar, unwilling anger toward Arthur.

“Wow,” said Cleveland, finally.

A few little tears pooled at the corners of Phlox’s eyes and rolled down her face, one two three. Her lower lip quivered and then stopped. I squeezed her other hand. Both of Phlox’s hands were now being squeezed.

“Arthur,” I said, “um, you should probably apologize.”

“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, without much conviction. He looked down at his lap.

“Why do you hate me, Arthur?”

“You’re terrible, Arthur,” said Jane. “He doesn’t hate you, Phlox, do you, Arthur?” She hit him on the shoulder.

I looked at my linguine in red clam sauce. All the heat seemed to have suddenly gone out of it, the dusting of Parmesan I’d given it had cooled and congealed into a thick lumpy blanket of cheese spread across the top, and the whole thing, with the gray bits of clam, looked smeary red, and biological.

“I’m leaving,” said Phlox. She sniffed and snapped shut her pocketbook.

I got up with her and we struggled around Cleveland.

“Looks like we’ve all got a fun evening ahead,” I said quietly. I dropped some money onto the table.

“Whom the gods would destroy,” Cleveland said, “they first make pasta.” He reached up and touched my elbow. “Wednesday.”

“Wednesday,” I said, and started to run.

Out on the street, Phlox was pulling herself together, snapping shut her purse. I came up behind her and pushed my face into her hair. She inhaled deeply, held her breath; exhaled; and her shoulders unbound. Just then—at the very instant she turned a fairly calm face to me—all the cicadas in the trees went ape, who knows why, and their music was as loud and ugly as a thousand televisions tuned to the news. In Pittsburgh, even the cicadas are industrial. We covered our ears and mouthed words at one another.

“Wow,” she mouthed.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“What?”

“This is driving me nuts.”

“What?”

I pulled open the door of a restaurant adjacent to the one we had just quit, a coffee shop; we stood in the lobby next to the Kiwanis gum-ball machine and kissed in the quiet of forks and Muzak.

13

PINK EYES

BY THIS TIME, ARTHUR resided at the Shadyside home of a rich young couple, his third residence of the summer. After leaving the Bellwethers’, he’d spent ten exultant and sinful days, so he said, in a small, pretty Shadyside apartment with a genuine rose window, of which I got a brief glimpse one hectic Sunday when I dropped by. Now, with this third place, he’d continued his upward journey through the World of Homes. The rich young couple, friends of some friends, had gone to Scandinavia for July. I’d seen the wife many times on television (she read the weather), and it was strange now to look at the framed Maxfield Parrish postcard over her toilet, or to wear one of her husband’s pale beautiful oxford-cloth shirts, or just to think that there I was, stretched out across the carpet of a lady I’d seen on television, her head wreathed in lightning and tiny paper storm clouds. Arthur had won his battle against the “little animals from hell,” but now all the shaved hair was growing back, which itched, apparently, and made him unable to sit still for more than a few minutes.

The morning after Phlox and I did not see Ella Fitzgerald, I stopped by my house, to put on clean clothes for work. The telephone rang as I rumbled with the front door; in the mailbox was a fat wad of mail, most of it, at first glance, informing me of imminent bargains on beef, garden hose, and charcoal briquettes. The apartment felt stuffy, vacant, and the jangling telephone sounded somehow plaintive or lonely, as though it had not been answered in days. It was Arthur.

“Hello,” I said. “No, I just walked in the door.”

“I’m calling to say I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Well.” I couldn’t think. It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.

“I was very rude and I hate myself for it.”

“Um—”

“Look, do you think we could meet today?”