Michael Chabon

“The point? The point was those guys would have done your nails and made you a cheese omelet if you’d asked them to. Your father’s a wise guy, Bechstein, he’s big. I told you. And by extension, see, you’re big too. You partake of the bigness of your father. What is there to be ashamed of? The point was—”

“If you think now I’m going to let you meet my father—”

“I don’t need you to make the introductions. Dennis. I can just pick up the red courtesy phone in the lobby.” He lit a cigarette and shook out the match. “Look, Art, I guess this is sort of insane.”

I was overcome with a feeling of great, wary relief, the way one is when one grasps at a straw. “It is insane, Cleveland. Yes. It is. Let’s not even discuss it.”

“Of course you don’t have to come along. I can drop you off at the bus if you want. Or you could just wait around, kill some time in Kaufmann’s or something, and then I’ll take you home.”

“Oh.”

“But I would like you to come with, you know, it would make everything so much simpler. I mean, what is the big deal? I’m your friend, am I not? You don’t introduce your friends to your father? I take it he’s met Phlox?”

“Yes, he has.”

“Well? I just want to meet him, that’s all. Just shake his fabled iron hand.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t. I just won’t. No, you are not my friend, Cleveland. You’ve played around with me too much. Forget it.”

“Fine. I’ll have to call for an appointment.”

“You really would go without me.”

I turned from him and walked down to the riverside and stood in weeds and rusty cans. I was hot, overcome by a feeling of brute sleepiness, and I was two hours late for my foredoomed rendezvous with Phlox. I saw that I’d been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two places, two worlds, whereas, if anything, I was nothing but a portal, ever widening, along a single obscure corridor that ran all the way from my mother and father to Cleveland, Arthur, and Phlox, from the beautiful Sunday morning on which my mother had abandoned me, to the unimaginable August that now, for the first time, began to loom. And a wall says no; a portal doesn’t say anything.

“I’m not your friend?” He crunched into the grass beside me. An old, yellow flap of newspaper wrapped itself around his boot.

“Cleveland, do you realize what you’re asking me to do? Do you appreciate the misery this means for me?”

“No. I can’t,” he said. “You never let me.”

I looked at him. He almost smiled, but his eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, his forehead wrinkled. Then he started over to the motorcycle. I followed with his broken eyeglasses, and he fit the parts together as well as he could.

It is true, I know, that I failed to permit Cleveland any real sense of the world within me, which was, and is, a world of secrets (but that is putting it too grandly, for it was only a world of things that I could not—no, that I needed not to say), and I regret this failure all the more now, when I realize that he—oh, Cleveland—five times opened wide to me the doors of his strange world. Five times that summer I rode Cleveland’s motorcycle, my head squeezed into the banana-yellow helmet that had once belonged to his little sister. Each time, as we set out, I would clutch the metal bar behind me, but he drove, of course, like a maniac, threading his way among speeding cars, running down yellow lights, even hopping briefly up and off the sidewalk to avoid tie-ups, and I always finished with my hands more securely upon his hips, and would shout and laugh into his helmet. It was at these times, these five quick, alarming times, my fists full of hot black jacket, my helmet clicking against his, that I felt most linked to him, most understanding. I knew why he did the things he did. There would be nothing but his wide back, his laughter, and Pittsburgh whirling past, each of its trees a short hiss. The speed and the roar and the nothing that isolated us were more exciting, more true and intimate, than anything I ever felt that summer with either Phlox or Arthur; there was no shadow of sex to mar or deepen it. There were only laughing fear and my hands, like so, on his hips. We were friends.