I spoke into her pillow, which smelled of Opium and soap. "My father understood. Don't worry about Lenny and Elaine."
"But what happened? Is it your mother? Why can't anyone mention her without you getting upset?"
I pressed up against her, spoonwise, and spoke over the soft and slightly damp lip of her ear. "I'm sorry," I whispered. "Everyone has some things he doesn't like to discuss, no?"
"You have too many," said Phlox.
"This song always kills me," I said.
She sighed, and then gave up. "Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nostalgia. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive."
"That's what I do to you too," she said. "I'll just bet."
It was what everything I loved did to me.
15. The Museum of Real Life
Hanging out at the Cloud Factory on the hottest day of the year, shoulders to the wire fence, the sky still that yellow Pittsburgh gray, but the sweat already pasting the hair to my forehead and the cotton to the small of my back. Cleveland was ten minutes late. I looked at the black win-dowless flank of the Carnegie Institute, watched people slip down the back stairs to the rear door of the museum cafeteria; they had nice old Slovak ladies in there who wore clear plastic gloves and served spaetzle and ham and other heavy things. I thought about how I used to prefer that cafeteria to the dinosaurs, the diamonds, and even the mummies. Then I watched the impenetrable Cloud Factory, which was running full tilt, one ideal cloud after another flourishing from its valve and drifting off; they looked dry somehow, crisp and white against the dull, humid sky. I tilted back my head and blew big tangles of cigarette smoke into the air in time with the clicks of the Factory. That morning after breakfast, Phlox and I had screamed at each other for the first time. Now my hands were shaking.
She hadn't wanted me to leave her bed, or her breakfast table, or her lap as I sat in it, lacing my shoes. But I was getting anxious; it had been three days since I'd last spoken to Arthur or Cleveland, and three days, I calculated, was three percent of my summer, which seemed a terrible amount of time to lose. My clear June Technicolor dream of a summer spent fluttering ever upward, like a paper airplane over the heat and hubbub of Times Square, had not faded; all my stupid hopes were still pinned to the stupid two of them. I had to see Cleveland, that was what I felt, even if it was to enter with him the world I had said I never would enter. What I had screamed at Phlox was something else, however; I have no memory of what I said, but I'm sure it was irrational, nasty, and petty.
One cigarette later, I heard the loud, slobbering cough of Cleveland 's motorcycle. He popped the curb at the end of the Schenley Park bridge, and I started over to him, but then I saw that he'd killed the engine and was swinging off the saddle and hanging his helmet on the bar; so I stopped, and stood, and waited some more.
We shook hands, then he walked right past me, up to the padlocked gate of the Cloud Factory, where he put his fingers through the diamond-shaped gaps in the fence and looked up at the magic valve. I went to stand beside him, but watched his face and not the hissing white production, except for what I could see of it in the lenses of his eyeglasses. He was unshowered, his long hair limp and sticky, a black smudge on his cheek. From something about the expression on his face, the tense fold of his eyelids, the dry lips, I guessed that he was hung over, but he smiled up at the infant clouds and rattled the gate-happily, I thought.
"Careful," I said. "You might tear it off."
"I did once."
"Sure."
"You know, this damn Cloud Factory…" He tightened his grip on the wire and pulled.
"What?"
He looked at me. I watched his knuckles turn pale.
"Do you know where I'm taking you today?"
"I guess. Cleveland, what?"
"I'm broke, Bechstein, I don't have a dime." His voice sounded sandy.
"So? Look, I know why people start working for Uncle Lenny."
"No, you don't." He pulled harder on the thick wires of the fence. "No, you don't. To hell with money. And from hell with money. To and from hell with money. I'm broke…" His voice trailed off. "Something has to change. I love Jane, Bechstein."
I saw now that he was not just hung over; he was still drunk. He probably hadn't been to bed yet.
"You always tell me you love Jane when you're drunk." He didn't answer. "Okay, so let's go, Virgil. Shock me."
We went over to the big black BMW, leaving behind us two hand'sized bulges in the fence. You could still make them out from fifty yards away, two little blurs in the pattern of wire.
We rode through strange sections to a part of the city that I hardly knew. I knew, in fact, only that there was another good Italian restaurant somewhere around there; my father often mentioned it. We were at the foot of one of the hillside neighborhoods, its houses sparse up along the distant ridge, but coming thicker and thicker toward the bottom, like a cataract, one atop another, sideways and backward and connected by crazy catwalks and staircases, and all tumbling downhill to the river-the Allegheny or the Monongahela, I was not sure which. I made out some children playing on one of the few high streets that cut across the hillside, and a car, and two women talking on a far back porch.
Before he stopped the engine, Cleveland said something I didn't catch. In the sudden silence I asked him to repeat it.
"This, this is my country," he said, with a broad Charlton Heston sweep of his arm, "and these, these are my people."
We started up one of the concrete stairways, which shifted back and forth among the knots of houses, all the way to the top; it looked like a long way.
"There's a road, but I like to make a stealthy approach. Don't worry, we only have to go as far as the Second Circle." His heels tocked concrete, steadily, slowly, and our breath came more quickly with each landing.
"Is this a poor neighborhood?"
"About to get poorer."
"How much poorer?"
"Depends on the vig."
"The vig."
"Depends."
"Oh."
That was it for a while. Cleveland stopped once and mopped his forehead with a rose bandanna. He said the agents in his bloodstream were being oxidized too quickly. We were up in the midst of things now, and I looked back down to the motorcycle, and beyond it to the river, its water the color of the water in a jar of used paintbrushes.
"The lovely Monongahela, " I said.
"That's the Allegheny, Doctor Fact," said Cleveland. "Okay, I'm better now. Come."
Another few minutes of silent climbing brought us to a long road that ran perpendicular to the staircase. On the left the road curved all the way down the hill, and on the right it rose to the ridge, which, I now saw, was not as sparse as it had seemed from the bottom. There was a church up there, with a big red sign that said Jesus did something: saved, lived, gave-I couldn't make out the verb. Cleveland and I gasped for a few moments, then I followed him up the road. Two motorcycles flew past with a huge racket, and we hugged the shoulder to get out of their deafening way. They came extremely close, the near bike with its helmeted enormous rider almost nicking my hip. Cleveland tried to pound its back fender as it pulled away.
"Assholes. Jesus, I just relived every cigarette I ever smoked," he said, panting.
" Cleveland, why are you taking me here? Do I need to see this?"
"What do you think you're going to see?"
"Sad people."
"Never hurts to see sad people. Anyway, it'll give you something to tell your dad."
"Right." Dad. "Do you know what my dad would say if I told him I made the rounds with one of Lenny Stern's pickup boys? He'd say, 'I want you out of Pittsburgh. You've developed too many unsavory associates.' No, he'd say, 'Are you doing this to punish me, Art?'"