Marty never moved out. He would drive me to school in the morning, or sometimes take me on sudden vacations to Ocean City, and I did not have to go to school at all. It would be a long time before I knew the circumstances of the abrupt removal from the world of my singing mother, but I must have sensed that I had been lied to, because I never asked about her, or hardly even mentioned her, ever again.
When, on the afternoon of my bar mitzvah, my father first revealed to me his true profession, I enthusiastically declared that I wanted to follow in his glamorous footsteps. This made him frown. He had long ago resolved to buy me college and "unsoiled hands." He had been the first Bech-stein to get a degree, but had been drawn into the Family (the Maggios of Baltimore) by the death of a crucial uncle, and by the possibilities that had just begun to open up for a man with a business degree and a C.P.A. He lectured me sternly-almost angrily. I had, after years of searching, finally discovered the nature of my father's work, and he forbade me to admire him for it. I saw that it inspired in him an angry shame, so I came to associate it with shame, and with the advent of manhood, which seemed to separate me, in two different ways, from both my parents. I never afterward had the slightest desire to tell his secret to any of my friends; indeed, I ardently concealed it.
My first thirteen years, years of ecstatic, uncomfortable, and speechless curiosity, followed by six months of disaster and disappointment, convinced me somehow that every new friend came equipped with a terrific secret, which one day, deliberately, he would reveal; I need only maintain a discreet, adoring, and fearful silence.
When I met Arthur Lecomte, I immediately settled in to await his revelation. I formulated a hundred questions about homosexuality, which I didn't ask. I wanted to know how he'd decided that he was gay, and if he ever felt that his decision was a mistake. I would very much have liked to know this. Instead I drank beers, quite a few of them, and I began my patient vigil.
Perhaps five seconds after I realized that we were standing on a loud street corner, surrounded by Mohawks and black men with frankfurters, and were no longer in the bar with a strangling ashtray and a voided pitcher between us, a white Fiat convertible with an Arab in it pulled up and honked at us.
"Abdullah, right?"
"Hey, Abdullah!" Arthur shouted, running around to the passenger's seat and diving into the red splash of interior.
"Hey, Abdullah," I said. I still stood on the sidewalk. I had drunk very much very quickly and wasn't following the action of the film too well. Everything seemed impossibly fast and lit and noisy.
"Come on!" shouted the blond head and the black head. I remembered that we were going to a party.
"Go on, asshole," someone behind me said.
"Arthur!" I said. "Did I have a backpack at some earlier point this evening?"
"What?" he shouted.
"My backpack!" I was already on my way back into the bar. Everything was darker, quieter; glancing at the Pirates game flashing silently, in awful color, over the bald head of the bartender, I ran to our booth and grabbed my sack. It was better, there in the ill light, and I stopped; I felt as though I had forgotten to breathe for several minutes.
"My backpack," I said to the ganged-up waitresses who chewed gum and drank coffee at a table by the dead jukebox.
"Uh huh," they said. "Ha ha." In Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anywhere else in our languid nation, a barmaid does not care.
On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Freud painting cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Fiat full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.
I walked out to the car. They said to get in, get in. Between the backs of the bucket seats and the top of the trunk was a space the size of a toaster.
"Go and fit yourself there," said Abdullah, craning around to shine his brown movie-star face into my eyes. "Tell him, make the boot a seat, Arthur." He spoke with a French accent.
"The boot?" I threw in my backpack. "Now there's no room for me," I said.
"The trunk. He calls it the boot, " said Arthur, smiling. Lecomte had a hard, sarcastic smile, which made only rare appearances, chiefly when he meant to persuade or to ridicule, or both. Sometimes it surfaced only to give a kind of cruel warning, come far too late, of the plans that he had made for you, a genuine smile of false reassurance, the smile Montresor cast at Fortunato, hand on the trowel in his pocket. "You have to sit on the edge of the trunk, where the roof folds up. "
And this, though I have always been easily terrified, did.
We pulled into the heavy Saturday-night traffic on Forbes Avenue, and perhaps because of the incident I'd witnessed earlier, the welter of taillights around me-so near and red!-reminded me of police sirens.
"Is this legal, what I'm doing?" I yelled into the overwhelming slipstream.
Arthur turned around. His hair blew across his face, and the cigarette he had lit threw bright ash, like a sparkler.
"No!" he shouted. "So don't fall out! Abdullah has a lot of tickets already!"
The people in the cars that managed to pull alongside the Fiat gave me the same shake of the head and roll of the eyes that I myself had often given other young drunks in fast cars. I decided not to think about them, which proved to be a simple thing, and stared into the wind, and into the steady flow of streetlights. Gradually, lathed and smoothed by my five hasty drinks, I recognized only the speed Abdullah expertly gathered, and the whine of the tires on the blacktop, so fragrant and near my head. Then the wind died as we fell into a red light at Craig and stopped.
I took out my cigarettes and lit one in the momentary stillness. Arthur turned again, looking slightly surprised not to find me livid, sick, or half-unconscious.
"Hey, Arthur," I said.
"Hey what?"
"You work in the library, right?"
"Yes."
"Who's the Girl Behind Bars?"
"Who?"
"By the elevators on the ground floor. A window. Bars. There's a girl in there."
"You must mean Phlox."
"Phlox? Her name is Phlox? There are girls named Phlox?"
"She is nuts," said Arthur, with mingled scorn and enthusiasm. Then his eyes widened, as though something had occurred to him. "A punk," he said slowly. "They call her Mau Mau."
"Mau Mau," I repeated.
When the light changed, Abdullah pulled left quickly, only signaling for the turn after he was halfway into it.
"What are you doing, Dudu?" said Arthur.
"Dudu?" I asked.
"Ahshit! We go to Riri's!" said Abdullah. He seemed to have just recalled that we had an actual destination.
"Dudu," I said again. "Riri's."
"You should have kept going up Forbes, Dudu," said Arthur, laughing at me. "Riri's house is straight up Forbes Avenue."
"Okay, yes, I know, shut up," shouted Abdullah. He made a U in the fortunately bare middle of Craig Street, and pulled, with a loud rumor of tires, back out onto the avenue. Despite the sixty-mile-an-hour wind, his black hair lay fat and shiny and motionless on his head, like ersatz hair of papier-mâché and varnish. Another happy cloud of dullness bloomed and settled over my senses. I tossed away my cigarette and took up my position once more, clenching the chrome luggage rack behind me and taking great swallows of air, like a jet engine.
Riri's house was a Tudor hugeness off the campus of Chatham College, where her widowed father, Arthur told me as we climbed the driveway to the front door, taught Farsi, and from which he took many sabbaticals, as he now had; his house poured light all over its immense lawn, and the neighborhood rang with loud music.