Michael Chabon

“Ha. Nothing. Um, I’ve—I’ve been here before,” I said. “A long time ago. I threw up on my mom at a bar mitzvah.” My mom. I had not said this in years. It just slipped out, in my confusion, and I bit my lip. Arthur twisted onto his side and propped himself up with one arm, looking eager.

“And?”

I rolled over onto my stomach, as much to conceal the swelling in the bathing suit I’d borrowed from him—he’d already glanced that way—as to avoid the current discussion. I spoke through the slats in my lounge chair, staring at the damp concrete of the deck.

“And that’s all. Just another cheesy story about a nauseated Jew.”

“I’ve heard them all,” he said, and after a long moment, he fell back into the path of the sunlight. I breathed out.

In the pool he swam laps, with a polished, rather old-fashioned Australian crawl; I watched the little waves he made catch sunlight and shatter his submerged body into blue and white smithereens. Then I jumped in and thrust all the air from my lungs, so that I settled onto the cold bottom of the pool. I lay on my back and looked up, through the shifting window of water.

We took the bus back to Shadyside and, at separate ends of the huge Weatherwoman House, changed into fresh clothes. We wore the fine shirts of the Weatherwoman’s husband. Arthur said he would walk me home. When we got to the Terrace, my phone was ringing again. I threw the door open and ran into the house, but when I put the receiver to my ear there was only the sound of an empty tunnel. I hung up.

“Phlox,” we said.

While Arthur went to the toilet, I took one of those giant canisters of Coke from the refrigerator and carried it out to the front steps. I swallowed a couple of blebby mouthfuls and watched a few little things happen: an ant, a faraway jet. When Arthur reappeared, he held in his fingers a marijuana cigarette.

“Look what I found in my pack of cigarettes,” he said.

We smoked it with damp fingers and talked blandly, looking mostly at the sky, which was blue as baby clothes. I felt as if I were talking to a friend from the fourth grade, when talking with a friend and sitting in the sun had felt different, had felt like this, more full of possibility than of any real matter. This made me wish to the point of tears that I were wearing sneakers. I had on leather young-man shoes, which were impossible. I stood up and could see the arches and battlements atop the Cathedral of Learning, away off in Oakland. Oh, I thought, the Emerald City in the twelfth century. The sun was so bright. I distinctly heard the click of a woman’s heels on the far sidewalk. Nowhere around me was there anything to remind me of the year—no new cars, no rock-and-roll music; only sky, red brick, cracked pavement, a breeze—and I underwent one of those time slips during which one can say to himself, “This is the summer of 1941,” and nothing, within him or without, can prove him wrong. The sunlight was the sunlight of forty years before. I looked at Arthur, shirtless, his hair still damp at the ends, the corners of his eyes pink with chlorine and grass, and the moment held. I touched his face. He tilted his cheek toward me, almost warily, one skeptical eyebrow raised. The telephone rang.

“You’ve got to do something about that girl.” “Quiet. No, I’ll bet it’s my dad.” I ran, very clumsily, into the house. “He’s probably been calling every five minutes since nine o’clock this morning.” When I reached the phone I stood and watched it ring a couple of times more.

“I don’t know if I can handle this.”

“Let me do the talking.”

“Hello? Pops. Hi. Oh, I’m swell. I’m dandy.” I heard Arthur say, “Uh oh.” “How’s Bethesda?”

“Bethesda? Bethesda is a sweltering hell. Very muggy,” said my father, through the squeaks and clicks of the ionosphere. “Very humid. We’re all wearing Aqua-lungs here. And through her breathing apparatus your grandmother says you should write to her.”

I started to laugh—a bit too hard, I told myself. He would know, he could tell.

“You really should write. Listen, I won’t keep you, obviously you’re in the middle of something—”

“Dad, no, not at all—”

“Ha!” said Arthur.

“I only wanted to tell you that I just found out I’ll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. Probably for a whole week. I should have several free meals. Maybe a movie.”

I said I would look forward to it. After I’d hung up and come outside again, Arthur said. “What is this, high school? So what if he knows you’re stoned?”

“I don’t know.” I sat heavily on the step.

“You’re just afraid. You can’t do anything to upset him, or you’re cashless.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Look at it. You’re an economics major when obviously you should be making movies, or traveling, or reviewing restaurants, or something frivolous.”

“Okay.”

“You live in Pittsburgh when you should be living in New York or L.A. or Tokyo, or someplace frivolous.”

“Okay.”