"Gee, I just might, Mrs. B.," said Arthur. He had sat back down in his chair and was lacing up his sneakers.
"Don't tell him. Please. Let him think she's dead."
"But what if they end up on the same bus someday? Or at adjoining tables in the Dirty O?"
"I'll send her away. I'll send her down to my mother's farm in Virginia. She'll be safe there. Don't tell him!"
Arthur sat up and gave the demented woman the relentless, clear stare that was going to make his career at the State Department.
"Two hundred and fifty dollars," he said.
While Mrs. Bellwether, looking pleased with herself, made out the check to Arthur on the kitchen table, I carried his suitcase out of the house.
"Nice meeting you, Mrs. Bellwether," I called. "Shalom!"
We walked all the way back to my house. For some reason I felt depressed, and we didn't laugh. Arthur smoked cigarette after cigarette; when I gave him an account of my abduction by Cleveland he only sighed; he cursed the humid weather.
"Do you feel bad because you failed in your responsibility to the Bellwethers, or something ridiculous like that?" I said.
"No."
We reached the corner of Forbes and Wightman, wide, empty, and phony-looking in the light of the halogen lamps. Chained to one of the lampposts was the vending machine, now empty, that I had watched the dwarf fill with newspapers that morning. The sky to the south, over the steel mills, looked evil and orange and miasmic. We came to the Terrace and walked up through the maze of garages to my apartment, and I fumbled with the house key. I was still very drunk.
As I pushed open the door, Arthur put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned to face him.
"Art," he said. He touched my face. His beard was too heavy, there was a puffiness under his eyes, and he seemed almost to waver on his feet, as though he might fall over at any moment. There was something so drunken and ugly about him that I flinched.
"No," I said. "You're tired. You're just tired. Come on."
And then, as the song says, he kissed me, or rather pressed his lips against the upper part of my chin. I stepped back, into my apartment, and he fell forward, catching himself as his knees hit the floor.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry," I said.
"What an asshole I am, huh?" he said, standing carefully. "I'm just tired."
"I know," I said. "It's all right."
He apologized, said again that he was an asshole, and I said again that it was all right. I loved him and I wished he would leave. He slept on my floor among the boxes, while I trembled in bed under my cool, damp comforter. When I woke up the next morning, he had gone. He had ripped open his pack of Kools and folded it into the shape of a dog, or a saxophone, and left it on the pillow beside my head.
8. The Mau Mau Catalogue
Work the next day was not the circus I had expected. People are always ready to hear that something disturbing was after all only a prank-and that includes the police, who had come shortly after my abrupt departure. I called and explained to them, and to my fellow employees, that the Black Rider was a Pi Kappa Delta brother, upset over the fact that I had been seen dancing with his girlfriend, but essentially a nice guy who had only wanted to put a little of the fear of God into me. This story went over big, and even earned me some points, in the strange estimation of the apprentice paramedics and the Pittsburgh police, for having had the balls to dance with the girlfriend of a Pike, notoriously large fellows. By eleven o'clock I was able to go about my work as though I had never been torn from the register stand, manhandled, and driven away on the back of a gigantic motorcycle, and the momentary vortex I had created in the usually calm surface of Boardwalk Books closed over me.
After work I stepped outside, weakened by air-conditioning, and tugged out the last cigarette in the pack. Arthur and Phlox, side by side, approached from the direction of the library. Phlox wore pearls, a strapless white dress patterned with blue flowers, and a pair of high-heeled white sandals; Arthur, light-gray trousers and a powder-blue blazer, with a tie, and oxfords without socks, like Prince Philip. They were still far from me, and I watched as those they passed turned admiring heads; they drew near like an advertisement for summer and beauty and healthy American sex. The sun was in their faces, but they neither squinted nor averted their eyes; the light fell across Phlox's necklace and Arthur's hair and the hint of silver wristwatch at his cuff. I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings.
"Hi, Art Bechstein," said Arthur, when they'd reached me. I had about half a cigarette left.
"Hi, Art Bechstein," said Phlox.
"Hello, Phlox; hello, Arthur. Wow."
The two of them panted after their brisk walk through sunlight, admiring stares, and the posh resorts and spas of my imagination. Thin strands of perspiration hung across their foreheads.
"Did you go to work like this?" I asked.
"Sure," said Arthur. "It seemed like a good day to do it."
"Arthur and I had the same idea today. Telepathically. Come into the old library all dressed up. We created a sensation. Telepathically. For your pleasure." She was plainly excited, by my undisguised astonishment at her lovely big face and by the handsome man standing beside her, his fingertips nearly-bewilderingly-brushing her wrist.
"Well, I'm very pleased," I said.
"I could care less," said Arthur, "about your pleasure."
"Thank heavens," I said.
We looked at each other oddly, as though we neither of us knew what exactly we were talking about.
"Ha," I said.
"Let's drink something cool and refreshing," Phlox said, bobbing her head, widening then narrowing her eyes like some lustful and wily biblical queen.
"Beer," said Arthur and I.
"Jane is dead," Arthur was saying. "And everything is fine. That's all." He was drunk.
"But what did you do?" Phlox asked. She'd already asked him five or six times, and each time he'd blushed, looked down, and refused to explain.
"Do you want to know?"
"Ah," she said, perhaps imprudently, "you're finally drunk enough to confess."
"No!" he said, lurching slightly into Phlox, who sat beside him in the booth, and spilling his fine hair across her bare shoulder. "I'm not going to tell you."
"Watch it," she said, not taking her eyes from me as she delicately shoved Arthur back over to his corner. Each cool and refreshing sip she took seemed to increase the pressure of her unsandaled silken foot against my sockless ankle. In my drunkenness I'd lost any trace of the caution that had propelled me only the day before into the brambles along the Schenley Park bridge. I wondered suddenly (as suddenly as my eyes falling for the hundredth time upon her blue-flowered breasts) whether or not she wore a bra.
"Phlox," I said, before I could reconsider, "are you wearing a brassiere?"
"Never," she said. "Never in high June." She spoke without coyness, without shock or outrage at my impertinence.
"Hey, Blanche DuBois!" said Arthur. '"Never in high June.'"
She continued to look at me levelly and nearly without blinking. I began to get an unmistakable impression that this girl wanted me in a matter-of-fact, practical, and serious way. Arthur, I think, got the same impression. He stood up and excused himself, blushing again, but with a slightly businesslike tone, as though he had a job to do and were doing it.
"No, no," I called after him. "Don't leave me alone with this woman."
I have a photograph of Phlox here before me; the only one in which she wears no makeup. Her forehead appears, quite frankly, tremendous. She has adopted a disheveled, Thursday-night-at-home-with-my-boyfriend pose, ripped sweatshirt collar dipped over one round olive shoulder, face uncharacteristically Levantine (her father was related to the great Pittsburgh Tambellinis), saintly. A faint something, a hint of redness in the eyes, suggests that she's been crying; the lower lids seem slightly puffy. Of course she's been crying. Her nose, as ever, looks big and straight and radiant. A few limp curls drape the vaulting eyebrows and silver screen of a forehead. And the eyes, the legendary blue eyes of Death Itself. Yes.