Michael Chabon

His tone, this faint air of the panderer that he sometimes wore, brought to mind another picture from that evening, which until now I’d forgotten: the change that had come over his face in the Fiat, the aha! in his eyes, when first I asked him about Phlox.

“Arthur, did you…? Why did you…?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Okay. God, what a stink in the air, huh?” We watched his feet take steps along the slow, hot pavement. “What about Phlox?”

“I just—I love Phlox, Arthur—”

“Ooh, stop.”

“Stop. There you go, see; I can’t understand it. We have to talk about this, right? I love her, and I love her because I want to love her, of course, but I always feel that somehow Phlox and I are together because of you. Except I can never figure out exactly why I feel that. It’s like doing algebra. I can’t keep the whole thing in my mind long enough to grasp it. But then every so often everything lines up just right, and I can see for, like, a second, that you made it happen. You’re behind it. Somehow. And if that’s the truth, then I can’t understand why you say the kind of thing you just said. Or why you do the kind of thing you did last night.”

There was another long silence, which took us across Fifth Avenue and up the steep drive of the college. Nearby I could hear lawn mowers, and the voices of women at play.

“I never thought you would like her,” he said at last.

We came to the pond, and now we sat down in the grass, under some maples. The ducks chattered and splashed.

“Are you angry? Do you hate me? I hope you don’t hate me, Art Bechstein. I’m glad you think Phlox is wonderful. Of course, I’m also shocked—no, that’s a joke, honestly. I’m very, very sorry. Really. I’m sure she’s very good for you.”

He put an apologetic hand on my knee, then pulled it away, and I felt filled with forgiveness, with the warm catch in his voice, and, having just exposed him at his manipulative worst—had he conceived of Phlox as some kind of punishment?—with a strange, airy manhood, as though we had just boxed. I tore off handfuls of grass and tossed them into the air.

“Arthur,” I said, “why are you such a little Machiavelli?”

He crushed the end of his cigarette into the grass, flicked it away, and seemed carefully to weigh the label, and to be amused by it.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he finally said. “My mother made me this way.”

Horns honked, a cranked-up radio passed, the ducks, beat water and quacked. We looked at each other.

“Let’s go swimming,” he said.

The rich young couple, I was mildly surprised to discover, belonged to the same country club as Uncle Lenny Stern, at which they had been kind enough to inscribe Arthur as their guest. Years before, in the club dining room, during the reception that followed Davy Stern’s bar mitzvah, I had vomited vanilla mousse across my mother’s lavender dress. The pool was Olympic-size and filled with boisterous children. Women with scarves and rigid hair sat under red umbrellas that threw shadows across the women and across the thermoses, kids’ sunglasses, and stacks of fresh towels that lay on the white wire tops of the poolside tables; once an hour a whistle blew, children groaned, and the waters would grow calm, as the pool suffered a fifteen-minute invasion by pregnant women and small white infants. Families were all around us, without their men, and we lay beside each other on chaises longues, exchanging lazy sentences in the strong sunlight.

From time to time I would glance over at him, stretched out with his eyes shut, his lashes glinting, his body almost bare. I had never before given a man’s body the regard I now gave his—but furtively, and through the flutter of a squint. I felt, I feel, almost as if I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. For one thing, each of the above-named parts was covered with thick blond hair, running to red-brown along the top of his bathing suit and on his chest. I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. I looked at him. He was in a sweat; his stomach was flat; there was hair on the back of his long, damp hand. And I looked also at his crotch, at that strange—that shaven—fist wrapped in slick blue Lycra. But his skin was the most strange, and the most difficult to keep my eyes from; it was dappled all over with tiny shadows, which gave it a look both soft and rough, as of suede or fine sand; and it seemed, stretched so tightly across his bones and muscle, as though it would never give, like a woman’s, to the pressure of my hand. He sat up suddenly, leaning on his elbows, face red, eyes like the water in the brilliant pool, and caught me looking at his skin. I was startled into thinking the sentence that I had all summer forbidden myself to think: I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him.

“Yes?” he said, with half a smile.