Michael Chabon

The parlor was noisy, smoky, jammed, and gorgeous. At the shah’s fall, Riri’s father had smuggled out a modest planeload of carpets and statuary, and these rather grimly gay furnishings made his daughter’s party seem dark, ornate, and somehow villainous. I looked into the glass panels of the cabinet that held me up; it was filled with daggers and eggs. The eggs were large enough to have been laid by emus, and jeweled, painted. Delicate hinged doors, cut from the shells, opened onto miniature scenes of courtly, contortionist Persian love in 3-D. The artist had paid more attention to the figurines’ limbs and genitalia than to their faces; the little twisted lovers wore that cowlike expression you see in Asian erotic art, which contrasts so oddly with the agonized knot of bodies. The daggers displayed their hilts but hid their blades in fantastic sheaths of blue velvet and dyed leathers. Scattered here and there on the glass shelves of the cabinet were cunning, unidentifiable implements of silver.

“What do you think?” It was Arthur. Though his tone was light, he looked angry, or preoccupied, anyway.

“I think Riri’s father is a white slaver. Say, this is some party.” I tried to get that tone of slogan in my voice. Then I chanced a slight indiscretion. “Did you find ‘someone um’?”

He evaded the question, physically. He averted his eyes, and blushed, like a maiden, like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. All at once I liked him, his firm grace with others, his unlikely modesty, the exotic parties he attended. The desire to befriend him came over me suddenly and certainly, and, as I debated and decided not to shake his hand yet again, I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I’d been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls.

“No,” he said at last. “ ‘Someone um’ has already been found and disposed of.” He looked off into the blare.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Forget it. Let us find the lovely Jane.”

3

SOME PEOPLE REALLY KNOW HOW TO HAVE A GOOD TIME

TO FIND JANE BELLWETHER, who acquired a last name and a few vague features during our search, we passed out of the jumping seraglio and through a long series of quieter, darker rooms, until we came to the kitchen, which was white. All the lights shone from overhead, and, as is sometimes the case with kitchens at large parties, an unwholesome-looking group, all the heavy drinkers and eaters, had convened in the fluorescence. Its members all looked at us as we entered the kitchen, and I had the distinct impression that a word had not been said in there for several minutes prior to our arrival.

“Say! Hi, Takeshi,” Arthur said to one of two blenched Japanese who stood near the refrigerator.

“Arthur Lecomte!” he yelled. He was well more than half in the bag. “This is my friend Ichizo. He goes to C-MU.”

“Hi, Ichizo. Glad to meet you.”

“My friend,” Takeshi continued, his voice rising, “is very horny. My friend say that if I were a girl, he would fuck me.”

I laughed, but Arthur stood straight, looked deeply, beautifully sympathetic for perhaps a tenth of a second, and nodded, with that fine, empty courtesy he seemed to show everyone. He had an effortless genius for manners; remarkable, perhaps, just because it was unique among people his age. It seemed to me that Arthur, with his old, strange courtliness, would triumph over any scene he chose to make; that in a world made miserable by frankness, his handsome condescension, his elitism, and his perfect lack of candor were fatal gifts, and I wanted to serve in his corps and to be socially graceful.

“Does any of you know Jane Bellwether?” said Arthur.

The louts, so morose, so overfed and overliquored, said no. None looked at us, and it seemed to me, in the exaggerating way that things seemed to me that exaggerated evening, as though they could not stand the sight of Arthur, or of me in his magic company, in our Technicolor health and high spirits, in our pursuit of the purportedly splendid Jane Bellwether.

“Try on the patio,” one, some kind of Arab, finally said, through a white mouthful of shrimp. “There are many people sporting out there.”

We came out into the yellow light of the back porch, that festival old yellow of Bug Lite, which had illuminated the backyards and soft moth bodies of so many summers past. It was untrue; there were not many people sporting on the murky lawn, though a large group had gathered with their drinks and their light sweaters. Only one young woman sported, and the rest watched her.

“That’s Jane,” Arthur said.