"Fine, fine," he said. "Listen, Artie just walked in. Yeah, yeah, he looks great. I'll tell him hello, sure. Right. Thirty-seven five. Right. See you tomorrow. Good-bye."
"Uncle Lenny," I said.
"He says you should come for dinner."
"I can't stand Aunt Elaine."
"Neither can he. My God, Art, your hair-you look terrible. Do you want me to give you the money to buy a comb?"
"No, thanks, Dad. I'm going to make one at home. Out of common household items. You look great."
"Business is good."
"Oh."
We both frowned. I never knew what to say upon hearing that business was good; it was always as though my father had just gleefully told me that he'd taken out a huge life insurance policy on himself, with me as beneficiary.
Then we said we were hungry and went out, down the laborious old elevator and into the street. A thunderstorm was imminent; big dusty rings of newspapers and the straw-pierced plastic lids of paper cups blew along Smithfield Street. We walked across the Smithfield Street Bridge to the South Side, and my father reminded me of the day fifteen years before when we'd driven across this bridge and I had astonished him by spelling Monongahela, unbidden.
"You were a smart boy," he said.
"What happened?" I said, and laughed, and he laughed, and said, What indeed.
I had decided to ask him about Cleveland, though I knew that if Cleveland had not met my father, a fairly important man, it was unlikely that my father would even know of Cleveland, whom I supposed to be an errand boy for the Stern family. Rarely did I ask my father about his work, and I didn't like to do it.
"Pops," I said, trying to imply my nonchalance by dipping a morsel of French bread into my enormous bowl of lobster bisque, "do you know any of the guys who work for Uncle Lenny?"
"Know them?" he said. "I went to the weddings of half of them. Danced with their wives."
"Yes, well. I mean some of the guys in the lower echelons."
"Why, do you know one? One of the kids?" He looked annoyed. "Where are you hanging around that you're meeting that kind of kid?"
"Well, gee, at the Symphony, the Carnegie Institute, the opera, the economics department, you know. Around. "
"Look," he said, the blood flowing into his ever-pink face. "You always profess such a disdain for the business of your family. And those are men who, yes, don't have the education that you and I do, but who've been working hard all their lives, who have children and wives, and who make money to give it to their children and wives. And now you, Mr. Academic, you're hanging around with punks. Greedy little morons who give their money to other greedy little morons. "
"Okay, Dad, okay. I'm not hanging around with any of Uncle Lenny's apes. I just asked if you knew them."
"Happily, no," he said, in his best dry voice.
We fell silent. I looked down from our perch in the highest and most expensive restaurant in Pittsburgh onto the lights of downtown, and the black wishbone of rivers and the stadium on the other shore, illuminated for a night game, and thought about old ball games for a minute or two.
My father was the moneyman for the Maggio family (the Bechsteins, like the Sterns and all the Jewish crime families, having long since dwindled and been absorbed), but he also served as a kind of liaison between the people in the capital and those in Pittsburgh. Coming to Pittsburgh was pleasure as much as business for my father; he had met my mother at a wedding in Squirrel Hill, and so had a lot of family here; he knew its streets and crazed beltway system and suburbs and golf courses, and was a long-standing Pirates fan. I had been to Forbes Field as a tiny boy, and to Three Rivers Stadium a thousand times. The day I kept track of an entire nine innings in my scorebook, without making a single mistake, he bought me two hundred dollars' worth of toys at Kaufmann's, far more toys than I had ever wanted.
"Pops, I met this new girl."
He drained his glass of tonic water.
"Why do you make a face?" I said.
"After Claire, why shouldn't I? I'm sorry, Art."
"Sorry what?"
"Well, I have to confess that I don't-I don't trust you anymore. Art, you've become a very strange young man."
"Dad."
"Last time we met, you spoke like an insane person.
What was all that nonsense? It was upsetting to hear you talk that way. I felt terrible. I was very shaken."
My father had a way of looking as though he were about to weep but was making a superhuman effort to contain his tears, and it never failed to destroy me. I started to cry quietly as I chewed a wet and interminable piece of bread.
"Dad."
"I don't know what to think of you. I love you, of course, but-look what you're doing this summer. What are you doing this summer? Working at that ridiculous bookstore. I can't believe you're satisfied by that kind of job."
"Dad."
Now that he really had me going, hiccuping and sniffling, so people turned around from their tables to look at this distinguished father speaking calmly to his wild-haired son in tears; now that he had reduced me to my childhood role and demonstrated to me just how far I had fallen in his esteem, he relented, tenderly, speaking as though I had just wrecked my bike or got beat up at school and he was softly applying the fragrant Band-Aid.
"Now, what about this new girl?"
"Oh, Dad," I said.
The waiter came with our dinners, and I cried a little bit longer, and we hardly said a word until he asked if I wanted to leave. Then we rode down in the rattling funicular, and I watched the lights in the office buildings downtown grow less and less spectacular as we descended, and my father put his hand briefly oh my shoulder and then took it away.
"You'd probably hate her, Pops; you'd probably hate everyone I know and everything I'm doing this summer."
"Yes, I probably would," said my father.
"After I leave you I'm going to go to her house and sleep with her," I said, and then we hit bottom abruptly and the sudden cessation of motion made me feel sick, and my father said that he was not impressed.
10. Sex and Violence
June waned; still Jane Bellwether remained in New Mexico, calling Cleveland only once, to tell him they were through ("Does that make nine times or ten?" Cleveland asked her); by the twenty-ninth of June, Phlox and I were firmly ensconced in a "thing" that she was-prematurely, I felt- calling love, although I was beginning to wonder, and listened one night to "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" thinking: Oh, Smokey.
Phlox had taken to coming over to the Terrace every night after I got off work, and we would sit on the steps smoking cigarettes, and sometimes marijuana, or would drink tequila, and just eat the limes and lick the salt from the tiny pouches of each other's hands. One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering.
"Why are you afraid?" I said.
"I don't know. Because vampires are so beautiful," she said.
Another time she wept bitterly for an hour because Arthur had been cruel to her at work that day and told her she looked fat in her plaid dress.
"I know he's just jealous of me," she said. "Art, I know he wants you."
"Nah," I said. "He likes you."