Michael Chabon

“You can just stop right now about my mother,” she said. “You can just shut your trap.” Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon. “My mother didn’t get to spend a year cutting up in Mexico and getting hepatitis like you did, Arthur.”

“Well, and thank goodness,” said Arthur.

“Oh, no! You didn’t really…cut up, did you?” I said.

“Like the big time,” he said.

“And what will you do this summer, Arthur?”

“I’m going to live at Jane’s and watch the dog. You’ll have to come visit me. It’s going to be a fun place after the Bellwethers leave.”

Arthur and Jane had just gotten to the part where the blind truck-stop waitress, feeling with her spotted, overjoyed hands Cleveland’s nose and forehead, accuses him of being Octavian, the shining man from another planet who had loved her many years ago, but had then returned to his own world, leaving her sightless, and with a brilliant, freakishly formed child—“the kind of thing,” Arthur said, “that is always happening to Cleveland”—when Mohammad fell into the dark room, shouting: “The Count! The Count!”

“The Count,” Arthur said, frowning slightly.

“My friend,” Momo said, almost as though he meant it, “my friend, my tremendous friend Arthur the Count! Tell me, what may I do for you? What would there be that I would not do it for you, my friend?”

He teetered, wore a bib of spilled whiskey, and the wide things he said, I felt, would be discounted as the typical CinemaScope friendliness of a sot. But Lecomte looked at him without answering, looked into his fat eyes while an obviously well-considered reply fought to free itself from his shut mouth.

“Arthur? Only to say it. Only! Anything in the world.”

“You could,” said Lecomte, “keep the fuck away from Richard.”

There was only the din of the party, and it was as nothing. The obscenity flared and then collapsed into itself in the dazzling white half of a second. It was like the echo of an ax blow filling the air between him and Momo. He immediately blushed and looked ashamed at having said too much.

Mohammad’s hand, which he had intended to give to Arthur to be shaken, hung from his wrist as though un-muscled. He fought down his astonishment, with the aid of his alcoholic heart, and smiled at me, and then at Jane.

“Jane,” he said, “you will tell him I am quite okay for Richard and everything is okay and he has not the claim to everyone like he think he has and you will now tell him this.”

“Let’s go outside,” Jane said to me. “I know how to get the neighborhood dogs to bark all at once.”

“Hey, yes, fine,” said Mohammad, “then it is enough for now. I will be back later.” He headed for the large, dark parlor and disappeared into the large, dark music there.

“Arthur, was Richard—” I said.

“Let’s not talk about it,” he said.

Jane put her moist pout just by my ear and whispered, raising the hairs all down me.

“Richard is Cleveland’s cousin,” she said.

“Ah, Cleveland!” I said. I wondered at the Eiffel mesh of liaisons rising up and up around me. Were all of them related? Were Arthur and Richard an item? I looked at him. He stared down into his cool, yellow-foaming plastic cup of regret. His hair fell over his rather flat profile and hid the eye.

“The subject,” Jane murmured into my ear again, undoing a giant zipper within me.

I grabbed her hard hand. “What subject?”

“Change it.” Three syllables.

“So, Arthur, you didn’t tell me,” I said, “about the waitress’s baby. Was it his? Did it have Cleveland’s good looks and fabulous sense of humor?”

And the thought of Cleveland lifted him, and threw him, and within a few minutes I listened as a hitchhiking Cleveland made his way headlong through the Black Hills toward Mount Rushmore, with an AWOL army demolition man in a pickup full of trinitrotoluene and plastique, and tears appeared at the corners of Arthur’s eyes, he laughed so.

Later, long into the ever dimmer and louder evening, I looked around me, as though for the first time in hours.

“Cleveland,” I said.

My vision and hence recent memory had smeared completely at the edges, and the edges had contracted with each drink, until two faces, Jane’s and Arthur’s, bewilderingly alike, filled the unbearably focused, narrow center of everything, and babbled. I wanted Jane, I wanted quiet, I wanted just to stop; so I stood up, a feat, and went out of doors to slap my face three times.

Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland! They had spoken of nearly nothing but his exploits. Cleveland riding a horse into a swimming pool; coauthoring a book on baseball at the age of thirteen; picking up a prostitute, only to take her to the church wedding of a cousin; living in a Philadelphia garret and returning to Pittsburgh six months later, after having hardly communicated with any of his friends, with a pair of dirty tattoos and a scholarly, hilarious, twenty-thousand-word essay on the cockroaches with which he’d shared his room.