Michael Chabon

Pittsburgh, too, was in the grip of a humid frenzy. The day after my flip of the coin, the sun had disappeared behind a perpetual gray wall of vapor, which never managed to form itself into rain, and yet the sun’s heat remained as strong as ever, so that the thick, wet, sulfury air seemed to boil around you, and in the late morning veils of steam rose from the blacktop. Arthur said that it was like living on Venus. When I walked to work—arriving sapped and with my damp shirt an alien thing clinging to me—the Cathedral of Learning, ordinarily brown, would look black with wetness, dank, submerged, Atlantean. There were three irrational shootings that week, and two multiple-car pileups on the freeway; a Pirate, in a much-discussed lapse of sportsmanship, broke three teeth belonging to a hapless Phillie; a live infant was found in a Bloomfield garbage can.

And in bed, as our last week in the Weatherwoman House drew to a close, our dealings with each other became distinctly more Venusian. The stranglehold, the bite, even the light blow, found their way into our sexual repertoire: I discovered purple marks along the tops of my shoulders. It’s the weather, I said to myself; or else, I added—once, and only for an instant, since I was so firmly opposed to consideration—this is just the way it is with another man.

I’d given my father the phone number at the Weatherwoman House, and I wondered what he imagined I was doing there, since I had a perfectly good house of my own. I’d been putting him off for days now, uncomfortable with him not only because of Cleveland and Punicki and Phlox and my mother and my new, willfully unconsidered activities, but because of the edge of pleading in his voice when we briefly spoke, because of the blatant genuineness of his desire to see me. Our seeing each other during his previous visits had always been neither a priority nor something to be missed. We just saw each other if we could, and then he would leave again for Washington. This time he’d gone so far as to extend the length of his visit by a few needless days, and the strangeness of his determination not to leave without taking me to the movies made me feel more acutely the distance between us, the sorry pass things had come to. I did not like to see my father bending over backward; it didn’t suit him. And in the late afternoon of that Wednesday on which Velva was horrified, I got in from work and found a message from my father on the Weatherwoman’s answering machine, and I trembled at the sad charm in my father’s voice, his amusement with the machine, his terrible confusion.

“Ahem. Art, this is your father,” said his voice. “Can you hear me? Ahem. Well, I’m glad to know you’re moving among the phone-machine set. It’s the—ahem—last night of the Joe Bechstein Festival and our records show that you still haven’t used your ticket. What about this science fiction film that everyone is so crazy for?”

“Is that your dad?” said Arthur, coming up from behind and surprising me, wrapping his arms around my throat.

“Does that sound like a good idea?” said the voice.

“Yes,” I said. “Shh.”

“He has a high-pitched voice!”

“Quiet, you made me miss it.” I rewound the tape. “He wants to go to the movies.”

“He sounds like the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“—a good idea? Because I’m leaving town tomorrow morning. Art—”

“Sure, let’s go. I’d love to meet him.”

“Quiet! Don’t make fun of his voice.” I rewound the tape again.

“—town tomorrow morning, Art—”

“Does he know?”

“Please,” I said.

“—is everything okay?”

I called him back and told him I’d be bringing a friend along. A different friend.

“Indeed,” said my father, and suddenly, again, I didn’t want to see him. “Is that necessary? Couldn’t we be alone for once?”

“Well…”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and now Arthur knelt before me and began to undo my pants.

“Are you afraid to be alone with me, Art?”

“That must be it, Dad. Don’t.” I pushed at Arthur’s burrowing head.

“Don’t what?”

“Nothing. Oh. Yes. I don’t know.”

“Art, there’s a good deal I have to say to you, and it isn’t the sort of thing I want to discuss with one of your friends around.”

“Ah,” I whispered, pushing, grasping.

“Please.”

“Art?”

Jesus. “Yeah, then let’s, ah, forget it, Dad, okay? I probably wouldn’t want to hear what you have to say, anyway, would I? No, I wouldn’t.” Jesus! “Go back to Washington. Say hi to Grandma. Ah.” Ah!

“Art.” There was a terrible shrillness in the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh, the note of dispossession, of loss of control. “What’s happening to you?”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said, feeling myself slip, slip, through fingers and fingers, into the pitiless wave. I fell back onto the bed; Arthur very precisely hung up on my father. He stood, wiped the corner of his mouth, then put me back together and zipped me up, with neat, rather waiterly gestures.

“Which other friend did he meet?” he said.

I slid forward and knelt before the telephone, head hung.

“Cleveland.”

“Oh? Why didn’t I know that?”