"I'm a fool," she said. "I'm a complete fool. I'm an idiot. Don't say anything. Shut up. Go back. I'm a fool."
We turned toward Arthur, who walked our way. He looked serious, but it was false; I could tell by his smirking eyes.
"I hate both of you," she whispered.
"What are you doing here?" I said.
Rather than answer me, she looked up at Arthur as he came to stand beside us. They stared, Phlox angrily, Arthur furtively, shifting his gaze away from her to something that lay at his feet and then back.
"I was thinking of getting some lime sherbet, " he said at last.
"That's a good idea," I said. "Let's all go get some lime sherbet."
"No!" said Phlox. "I'm not going anywhere with you, Arthur. " She drew herself erect and threw back her shoulders, and her eyes glazed over with a kind of Vivien Leigh haughtiness; she enunciated. "Please come with me, Art. I'm only going to ask you this one time."
I looked at Arthur, who gave me a cool shrug.
"Okay, okay," I said. People on the sidewalk turned their heads our way. "That's enough. Stop. Okay? Can we cut it out? Can we just stop it? Okay? Okay, look, we have to get rid of this thing once and for all. " I was surprised that I could speak. I turned to Arthur and said, "Arthur, I love Phlox." I turned to Phlox. "Phlox," I said, "I love Arthur. We have to learn to be together. We can do it."
"That's bullshit," said Phlox. Her teeth flashed.
"She's right," said Arthur.
"I hate you, Arthur Lecomte." She whirled. She was atavistic and gorgeous in her anger, with her splayed fingers, her cheeks. "I'll never forgive you for doing this."
"You'll thank me."
"What are you talking about?" I said.
"Come with me, Art."
"Go on," said Arthur.
"I'll call you."
"That's all right," said Arthur, "really. Don't bother."
Phlox and I started off, at first without discussion or destination. It was twilight, and the Cathedral of Learning, pile and battlements, threw great beams of light into the air, and looked like the 20th Century-Fox emblem. I took Phlox's hand, but she let her fingers slip and we walked with a breeze between us.
"Did he tell you we were having dinner tonight?"
"Why did you lie to me?"
She put her fingers around my hand, lifted it, and then threw it from her like an empty bottle.
"Why?"
"How did you know?"
"I knew," she said. "That's all. I knew."
"Arthur told you."
"How stupid do you think I am?" She ran ahead a few steps and then turned on me, her hair sweeping out around her head. We had come to the Schenley Park bridge, which hummed with the cars that crossed it. The two stacks of the Cloud Factory were ink against the inky sky. "I didn't need Arthur to tell me. I knew when I got those roses."
"I bought the roses-"
"Forget it," she said. "I don't want to hear it. You'll just lie. You poor dumb liar." She turned.
"-before I knew I was having dinner with Arthur tonight." Each time I mentioned Arthur's name I heard him saying, "Don't bother," and felt dizzy; it was like peering over a cliff, and now, as Phlox walked off, the ground on the other side of me split and began to give way. I thought, I fancied, that in a moment I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has. When Phlox, who had vanished into the darkness along the bridge, reached the other side, she reappeared briefly in the streetlight, skirt and scarf and two white legs, and then the park closed around her.
19.The Big P
"Bechstein." Blackness. "Bechstein." Light. "Bechstein."
"Hey. What. Oh."
Filling my front doorway, in a welter of bloody twilight, was the huge silhouette of a man, hands on his hips. He raised one black arm and the red rays shifted around it like the blades of a fan.
"Jesus." I blinked and sat up on one elbow. "Good thing this isn't a Sergio Leone movie."
"Bang."
"I guess I fell asleep. Time is it?"
"Night is falling," said Cleveland. He came and sat on the arm of the couch, down by my feet; the top of a paperback protruded from his jacket pocket, and he held a white envelope. "Look at you-you're all sweaty," he said. With a vast, rattling sigh, he leaned back, against the wall, and patted his fat gut. "What do you have to eat?"
I twisted around, sat full up. Arthur's laugh pealed in my ear for an instant, and I realized I'd been dreaming of him.
"I can probably manage some form of cheese sandwich," I said. I tried to stand, tottered slightly, caught myself; I was sore all over. "I may have a few olives."
"Great. Olives." He lit a cigarette. "You sick?"
"I don't think so. No." Hannah, the little girl next door, was practicing "Fur Elise" again. There had been piano music in my lustful dream. "I'll get you a sandwich. Um, what have you been up to?"
I went into the kitchen and took out the necessary jars and packages. It felt nice inside the refrigerator.
"Oh, just a million and one things. Poon things, I'm afraid. This was on the doorstep, Bechstein," Cleveland said, clunking into the kitchen behind me. He handed me the envelope I'd noted, on which was printed only my name, in Phlox's schoolish handwriting, without stamp or address. It was a business envelope. My heart made a sudden violent motion-leapt, sank. It's the same feeling.
"Oh, it's from Phlox," I said. "Well. Hmm."
"Hmm."
"Well."
"Hmm." He grinned. "Jesus, Bechstein, are you going to read it?"
"Sure, yes-I mean, why not? Would you mind…?" I said, gesturing toward the unassembled sandwich.
"Of course. Let's see. Ah, bread, fine, perfect. Just the heels? Fine, that's fine. Love the heels. Bread and cheese, cadmium-orange American cheese-perfect, exactly. You're a minimalist. Go, go read." He turned from me and gave his attention to the food.
I stepped out of the kitchen with the envelope, trying not to guess at its contents, then broke it open and unfolded the two-page letter, also handwritten, in dark-purple ink on pale-purple stationery with her monogram-"PLU."
"The past tense of plaire, " she liked to say; her middle name was Ursula. My eyes skipped across the paper for a moment, before I could restrain them, and the words "sex," "mother," and "horrible" peered out at me like miserable inmates through the barbed tangle of her paragraphs. I forced myself to begin at the beginning.
ART,
I have never written to you before and it feels strange. I think it is going to be hard for me to write you a letter, and I am trying to decide why this is. Maybe it is because I know how intelligent you are, and I do not want you reading what I write, because you might look at my letter in a too critical fashion. Maybe it is also because I feel stilted when I express myself in a letter, confined. I am afraid to write long sentences or to use words wrongly. And then there's just the fact that before, everything I ever wanted to say to you I could just say, right into your ear. Isn't that how it should be? Writing is so unnatural. Nevertheless there are some things I must tell you, and since I cannot see you ever again, I must write.
You are probably afraid that I am mad at you, and I am. I'm furious. No one has ever done anything like this to me before. Not like this. Not so weirdly and horribly. Art, I have touched your throat and your sex, we have slept with each other as fierce and spoken to each other as close as a man and a woman possibly can. You must know that what you are now doing disgusts me utterly.
I keep hearing (and don't think this is stupid) a million Supremes songs in my head. Stop in the Name of Love, etc. Art, how can you have sex with a man? I know you and Arthur have slept together because I know Arthur. He has to have sex. He once said he always has to feel a man's hands on his body or he will die. I distinctly recall him saying this.