Michael Chabon

I looked at Phlox, who looked at me as though I looked upset, and then at my father, who sighed. He seemed suddenly, very tired.

“I remember,” I said. “Excuse me.” I stood up and went into the men’s room, where I knelt with my head over the toilet, and was sick, on and off, for two hundred and forty thundering clicks of the quartz watch my father had given to me at graduation.

“Art,” said Phlox, later. We were in her bed. There was the green glow of her radio dial and the faint, lost voice of Patti Page singing “Old Cape Cod.” “What happened? Tell me. It was rude to leave like that. I’m embarrassed.”

I spoke into her pillow, which smelled of Opium and soap. “My father understood. Don’t worry about Lenny and Elaine.”

“But what happened? Is it your mother? Why can’t anyone mention her without you getting upset?”

I pressed up against her, spoonwise, and spoke over the soft and slightly damp lip of her ear. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Everyone has some things he doesn’t like to discuss, no?”

“You have too many,” said Phlox.

“This song always kills me,” I said.

She sighed, and then gave up. “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nostalgia. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn’t even alive.”

“That’s what I do to you too,” she said. “I’ll just bet.”

It was what everything I loved did to me.

15

THE MUSEUM OF REAL LIFE

HANGING OUT AT THE Cloud Factory on the hottest day of the year, shoulders to the wire fence, the sky still that yellow Pittsburgh gray, but the sweat already pasting the hair to my forehead and the cotton to the small of my back. Cleveland was ten minutes late. I looked at the black windowless flank of the Carnegie Institute, watched people slip down the back stairs to the rear door of the museum cafeteria; they had nice old Slovak ladies in there who wore clear plastic gloves and served spaetzle and ham and other heavy things. I thought about how I used to prefer that cafeteria to the dinosaurs, the diamonds, and even the mummies. Then I watched the impenetrable Cloud Factory, which was running full tilt, one ideal cloud after another flourishing from its valve and drifting off; they looked dry somehow, crisp and white against the dull, humid sky. I tilted back my head and blew big tangles of cigarette smoke into the air in time with the clicks of the Factory. That morning after breakfast, Phlox and I had screamed at each other for the first time. Now my hands were shaking.

She hadn’t wanted me to leave her bed, or her breakfast table, or her lap as I sat in it, lacing my shoes. But I was getting anxious; it had been three days since I’d last spoken to Arthur or Cleveland, and three days, I calculated, was three percent of my summer, which seemed a terrible amount of time to lose. My clear June Technicolor dream of a summer spent fluttering ever upward, like a paper airplane over the heat and hubbub of Times Square, had not faded; all my stupid hopes were still pinned to the stupid two of them. I had to see Cleveland, that was what I felt, even if it was to enter with him the world I had said I never would enter. What I had screamed at Phlox was something else, however; I have no memory of what I said, but I’m sure it was irrational, nasty, and petty. One cigarette later, I heard the loud, slobbering cough of Cleveland’s motorcycle. He popped the curb at the end of the Schenley Park bridge, and I started over to him, but then I saw that he’d killed the engine and was swinging off the saddle and hanging his helmet on the bar; so I stopped, and stood, and waited some more.

We shook hands, then he walked right past me, up to the padlocked gate of the Cloud Factory, where he put his fingers through the diamond-shaped gaps in the fence and looked up at the magic valve. I went to stand beside him, but watched his face and not the hissing white production, except for what I could see of it in the lenses of his eyeglasses. He was unshowered, his long hair limp and sticky, a black smudge on his cheek. From something about the expression on his face, the tense fold of his eyelids, the dry lips, I guessed that he was hung over, but he smiled up at the infant clouds and rattled the gate—happily, I thought.

“Careful,” I said. “You might tear it off.”

“I did once.”

“Sure.”

“You know, this damn Cloud Factory…” He tightened his grip on the wire and pulled.

“What?”

He looked at me. I watched his knuckles turn pale.

“Do you know where I’m taking you today?”

“I guess. Cleveland, what?”

“I’m broke, Bechstein, I don’t have a dime.” His voice sounded sandy.

“So? Look, I know why people start working for Uncle Lenny.”

“No, you don’t.” He pulled harder on the thick wires of the fence. “No, you don’t. To hell with money. And from hell with money. To and from hell with money. I’m broke…” His voice trailed off. “Something has to change. I love Jane, Bechstein.”

I saw now that he was not just hung over; he was still drunk. He probably hadn’t been to bed yet.