"I can't say it. I don't remember."
"I remember," said Arthur.
"Okay, Artie," said Cleveland.
"You said they called you a strange-looking white bitch who thought she was hot shit waving her ass in a window to the boys all day."
Silence fell over our party. Phlox threw her head back proudly and her nostrils flared. I had heard this story already, a few times, but Phlox's life was so full of incidents in which other women vented their jealous rage at her that the impressive, rhythmic hatefulness of the Hillman Library cleaning ladies hadn't really affected me before. I felt terrible, unfamiliar, unwilling anger toward Arthur.
"Wow," said Cleveland, finally.
A few little tears pooled at the corners of Phlox's eyes and rolled down her face, one two three. Her lower lip quivered and then stopped. I squeezed her other hand. Both of Phlox's hands were now being squeezed.
"Arthur," I said, "um, you should probably apologize."
"I'm sorry," he said immediately, without much conviction. He looked down at his lap.
"Why do you hate me, Arthur?"
"You're terrible, Arthur," said Jane. "He doesn't hate you, Phlox, do you, Arthur?" She hit him on the shoulder.
I looked at my linguine in red clam sauce. All the heat seemed to have suddenly gone out of it, the dusting of Parmesan I'd given it had cooled and congealed into a thick lumpy blanket of cheese spread across the top, and the whole thing, with the gray bits of clam, looked smeary red, and biological.
"I'm leaving," said Phlox. She sniffed and snapped shut her pocketbook.
I got up with her and we struggled around Cleveland.
"Looks like we've all got a fiin evening ahead," I said quietly. I dropped some money onto the table.
"Whom the gods would destroy," Cleveland said, "they first make pasta." He reached up and touched my elbow. "Wednesday."
"Wednesday," I said, and started to run.
Out on the street, Phlox was pulling herself together, snapping shut her purse. I came up behind her and pushed my face into her hair. She inhaled deeply, held her breath; exhaled; and her shoulders unbound. Just then-at the very instant she turned a fairly calm face to me-all the cicadas in the trees went ape, who knows why, and their music was as loud and ugly as a thousand televisions tuned to the news. In Pittsburgh, even the cicadas are industrial. We covered our ears and mouthed words at one another.
"Wow," she mouthed.
"Let's get out of here."
"What?"
"This is driving me nuts."
"What?"
I pulled open the door of a restaurant adjacent to the one we had just quit, a coffee shop; we stood in the lobby next to the Kiwanis gum-ball machine and kissed in the quiet of forks and Muzak.
13. Pink Eyes
By this time, Arthur resided at the Shadyside home of a rich young couple, his third residence of the summer. After leaving the Bellwethers', he'd spent ten exultant and sinful days, so he said, in a small, pretty Shadyside apartment with a genuine rose window, of which I got a brief glimpse one hectic Sunday when I dropped by. Now, with this third place, he'd continued his upward journey through the World of Homes. The rich young couple, friends of some friends, had gone to Scandinavia for July. I'd seen the wife many times on television (she read the weather), and it was strange now to look at the framed Maxfield Parrish postcard over her toilet, or to wear one of her husband's pale beautiful oxford-cloth shirts, or just to think that there I was, stretched out across the carpet of a lady I'd seen on television, her head wreathed in lightning and tiny paper storm clouds. Arthur had won his battle against the "little animals from hell," but now all the shaved hair was growing back, which itched, apparently, and made him unable to sit still for more than a few minutes.
The morning after Phlox and I did not see Ella Fitzgerald, I stopped by my house, to put on clean clothes for work. The telephone rang as I fumbled with the front door; in the mailbox was a fat wad of mail, most of it, at first glance, informing me of imminent bargains on beef, garden hose, and charcoal briquettes. The apartment felt stuffy, vacant, and the jangling telephone sounded somehow plaintive or lonely, as though it had not been answered in days. It was Arthur.
"Hello," I said. "No, I just walked in the door."
"I'm calling to say I'm sorry."
"Oh. Well." I couldn't think. It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.
"I was very rude and I hate myself for it."
"Urn-"
"Look, do you think we could meet today?"
"I don't think so. Oh, I don't know." There was an unusual warmth in his voice, a note of truth or of plainness. "Okay, maybe later today. I guess we have to talk about this?"
"I'm home today. Call me after work. Oh, and, Art-"
"Yes?"
"Have a nice day."
Not only did Boardwalk suffer under the curse of having to sell books; there seemed also to be a curse on the premises themselves, so that throughout the summer entire days of business were lost, here and there, to the need to remedy some minor disaster or other: Sometimes a pipe would burst in the basement, ruining overstock and making the place stink of wet books, and sometimes the air-conditioning froze and quit working, and once some vandals smashed the huge display window, on this day, there was a fire. It was a small fire, caused by a paramedic cigarette, but Valerie closed the slightly blackened bookstore and sent us all home.
I decided to walk to the Weatherwoman House through the clear, hot Monday morning. For some reason, many crews of men with tar-burning wagons were scattered across the rooftops of East Pittsburgh, and the smell of tar made everything seem even hotter, more yellow, more intensely summer. At the corner of St. James, a white Fiat convertible passed, and then stopped short with a squeal ten yards beyond me. Dark man, big smile; Abdullah. I came up alongside and we shook. I said hello, comment ça va, where are you going, and where are you coming from? Dudu told me one long semistory about both his having to appear in traffic court and his sister's passion for Charles Bronson, which were in some way connected. Periodically he stepped on the gas pedal, making the engine race, to punctuate his story at crucial junctures.
"What kind of mood is Arthur in today?" I said, just after we shook hands again.
"He is in an ugly mind-state as hell," said Abdullah. He smiled and put the car in gear.
Either Abdullah was inexpert at reading Arthur, or Arthur's mood had changed on the Arab's departure, or perhaps the change came with my surprise arrival; in any case, when Arthur opened the door, his smile was the one he occasionally gave Cleveland, loose and puckish. I was touched.
"Wonderful. Come in, come in," he said. "Nice shirt. Nice pants. Nice shoes." We both had on the usual dungarees, white shirts, and brown loafers. I had shaved, he had not. Neither of us mentioned Abdullah.
He led me into the bright, uncomfortable living room. The decorator had made an effort, it seemed, to create the illusion that the whole house existed in some remote future, in the wan, empty years after the extinction from the planet of furniture and cushions. I sat down on three wide dowel rods and a piece of beige canvas and tried not to lean back.
"Is it as lovely outside as it looks? Yes? We should take a walk," he said. He spun on his heel and walked away. "Want coffee?"
"Please. Do you know why I'm off today?" I shouted after him, into the kitchen.
"Why? You quit?" I heard him pouring, then the little rhythm of cup and spoon.
"Sure, I quit. No, I didn't quit; there was a fire."
"My. What happened?"
"The one copy of anything by Swift in the store, Gulliver's Travels, finally couldn't stand the indignity of living at Boardwalk anymore, and burst into righteous flames."