Michael Chabon

She stood alone in the dim center of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighborhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of the grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father’s ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long. She looked tall, thin, and, in the bad light, rather gray in her white golf skirt and shirt. Her face was blank with concentration. Thik! and she smiled, shaking out her yellow hair, and we clapped. She fished in her pocket for a ball and teed it.

“She’s plastered,” a girl said, as though that were all the explanation we might require.

“She’s beautiful,” I heard myself say. Some of the spectators turned toward me. “I mean, her stroke is absolutely perfect. Look at that.”

She smashed another one, and a few moments later I heard the distant sound of the ball striking metal.

“Jane!” Arthur shouted. She turned and lowered her shining club, and the yellow light caught her full in the face and fell across the flawless front of her short skirt. She put a hand to her forehead to try to make out the caller among us shadows on the patio.

“Arthur, hi,” she said. She smiled, and stepped through the grass to him.

“Arthur, she’s whose girlfriend?”

Half a dozen people answered me. “Cleveland’s,” they said.

A few moments later, in one of the less noisy rooms off the parlor, we were three in a row on what could only be called a settee. Jane smelled interestingly of light exertion, beer, perfume, and cut grass. Arthur had presented me as a new friend, and I’d watched Jane’s face for a trace of a knowing leer, but there’d been none. I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake about Arthur’s intentions toward me, and to reproach myself for mistrusting what might have been his mere friendliness. After Jane and I had exchanged our academic pursuits—hers was art history—and agreed that neither of us could explain why we had chosen to pursue them, but that we were glad to be through, we turned to talking of plans for the coming summer.

I knew better than to state my true intentions, which were vague, and base enough that they could easily have included the pursuit of herself and of the ultimate source of all her exciting fragrance, in spite of this Cleveland, whoever he might be.

“I’m going to turn this town upside down,” I said. “Then in the fall I have to become a responsible adult. You know, have a career. My father claims to have something lined up.”

“What does your father do?” said Jane.

He manipulates Swiss bank accounts with money that comes from numbers, whores, protection, loan sharks, and cigarette smuggling.

“He’s in finance,” I said.

“Jane’s going to New Mexico,” said Arthur.

“Really? When?”

“Tomorrow,” Jane said.

“Jesus! Tomorrow. Gee, that’s too bad.”

Arthur laughed, rapidly reading, I suppose, the thrust of my head and the proximity of my denim thigh to her shaven one.

“Too bad?” Jane had a southern accent, and “Too bad” fell out in three droll syllables. “It isn’t bad! I can’t wait—my mother and father and I have wanted to go forever! My mother has been taking Spanish lessons for fourteen years! And I want to go because—”

“Jane wants to go,” Arthur said, “because she wants to have carnal knowledge of a Zuni.”

She blushed, or rather flushed; her next words were only slightly angry, as though he often pestered her about Zuni love.

“I don’t want to have ‘carnal knowledge’ with any old Zuni, asshole.”

“Wow,” I said. “Asshole.” From the way she seemed to relish the word as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, a sign of her intimacy with Arthur, and I was momentarily very jealous of him. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.

“But I’m intrigued by the Native Americans, you know? That’s all. And by Georgia O’Keeffe. I want to see that church in Taos that she painted.”

Someone began to play the piano in the other room, a Chopin mazurka that mixed very uncomfortably for a few measures with the thump music that came from the half-dozen speakers scattered around the house, until someone else attacked the pianist with a squeal and a silk cushion. We laughed.

“Some people really know how to have a good time,” Jane said, confirming that it was indeed a motto of theirs, and I was suddenly mad for the opportunity to employ it myself.

“Yes,” said Arthur, and he told her about the scene at which we had stopped, and met, so many hours before.

“But I saw you in the library,” I said. “What was that Spanish potboiler you were reading, anyway?”

“La muerte de un maricón,” he said, with a humorous flourish.

“Oh. What’s that mean?” I said.

“Ask Jane’s mother, the hispanophone.”