"Ha."
"Queer as my oldest friend? As my father?"
"Urn."
"As a matter of fact, Bechstein, I don't think that you are. In my corroded opinion, I think you're just clowning around with your sexual chemistry set. But go ahead-give yourself a rest from the Evil Love Nurse. You can call her- how does she put it?-years from now, 'when you have seen.'"
I protested that what I was doing was more serious than he thought. I wanted to express to him something of my feelings for Arthur, but I remembered all of his sodden protestations of love for Jane, and I kept silent. He stood in front of me, a few steps down, and I could barely make out his features in the near darkness.
"What did you do last night?" I said finally, anticipating another tale of excess and hilarity.
"Last night," he said, as the hem of the blue sky filled with purple, "I learned how to deactivate an alarm system."
"Jesus."
"Neat, huh?"
"No! What the hell for?"
"For a merit badge. What do you think? To get inside houses. Poon owns five jewelry stores in the Mon Valley."
"He's a fence."
"He's the biggest, Bechstein."
"And you're going to steal for him." I stood up.
"Like the big time. No kidding- Gary Grant in ToCatch a Thief."
I brushed past him, was halfway down the front steps, running away from my own house, when I turned to Cleveland, a vague shape in the light that filtered out from the distant kitchen.
" Cleveland, it's illegal! It's burglary. Burglary! You could go to jail."
"Quiet." He came down the steps toward me, and we faced each other tensely. "Sodomy," he said.
That produced a long silence, toward the end of which he turned and went the rest of the way down the stairs.
"I didn't get all upset and act like an asshole, either," he said in a loud whisper. "I certainly could have. You seemed to expect it. So why don't you just let me do what I want, and I'll let you boys do what you want, and maybe that way we can all stay friends." He started away, then turned toward me and whispered again. "And don't get the idea that you can stop me." He grabbed me by the shoulder and squeezed; it hurt. "Don't try to blow the whistle on me." He shook me once. "Don't you go talking to the heavenly father."
" Cleveland!"
"Quiet. Because I could just as easily blow the whistle on you. " With a snap of his wrist he released my shoulder, and I fell back against the steps.
"For God's sake, Cleveland," I whispered.
He brushed the hair from his eyes, quickly, looking embarrassed.
"All right, then. Thank you for the cheese sandwich. Good night."
I watched him pass, dwindling, through three patches of streetlight, biggest, bigger, big, nothing. Then I went back into the house, switched on a lamp and the porch light, and stood in the middle of the living room with my hands jammed angrily into my pockets, in the left one of which I felt a scrap of paper that, when I unfolded it, turned out to be the cocktail napkin Cleveland had left at the bar, stuck to the damp side of my beer glass, after our first encounter with Carl Punicki. As I reread absently its three words- have to think-I remembered Phlox's letter, twang! but out on the front step there was now nothing but the huge whirling shadows of the moths that had come to smash their heads against the light bulb. Cleveland must have picked up the letter in the dark, when he'd reached for his book. I would call him the next morning; everything would be fine. I came back inside, walked around in circles for a long time, read part of an old newspaper, then circled the room again. Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
20. Life on Venus
We slept together. He would get up in the morning and rush off to work, scrabbling through piles of our mingled trousers and briefs, running his head under the sink, slamming the front door in farewell, and after he was gone I would spend the luxury of my extra hour by bathing in the Weatherwoman's claw-foot tub and in the strangeness of it all. We lived well. Arthur cooked elaborate dinners; in the refrigerator there was always pasta in the colors of the Italian flag, a variety of weird wines, capers, kiwis, unheard-of fish with Hawaiian names, and stacks of asparagus, Arthur's favorite food, in the rubber-banded bundles that he never failed to refer to as fagots. We sent our dirty clothes out to be cleaned and they came back as gifts, tied up in blue paper. And, as often as possible, we went to bed. I did not consider myself to be gay; I did not consider myself, as a rule. But all day long, from the white instant when I opened my eyes in the morning until my last black second of awareness of Arthur's fading breath against my shoulder, I was always nervous, full of energy, afraid. The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk its streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
The rich young couple-who were due to return on the last day of July-employed a black woman to clean their house. Her name was Velva. At eight o'clock on my only Wednesday morning at the Weatherwoman House, she entered the bedroom and screamed. After a moment of keen observation, she ran from the room, shouting that she was sorry. Arthur and I separated, went soft, laughed. We lit cigarettes and discussed strategy.
"Maybe I should go downstairs," he said.
"Put some pants on."
"What will she do?" he said. "I don't know her well enough to predict. Black people confuse me."
"Pick up the extension."
"Why?"
"Maybe she's calling the police."
"Or an ambulance."
I thought of my fat friends from Boardwalk, arriving in their van to attach their electric paddles to the outraged, apopleptic cleaning lady collapsed on the living-room floor. Arthur picked up the extension, listened, set it down again.
"Dial tone," he said. "And I'm not going downstairs. You go. Slip her a five or something." He pushed me, and I fell out of the bed, trailing the bedclothes behind me. A tendril of cotton blanket wrapped itself around a lamp, pulled the lamp to the floor after it, and then muffled the bang! of the shattered light bulb. We stared at each other, eyes round, muscles tensed, listening, like two boys who have been warned not to wake the baby. But the pop of the bulb was the incident's only repercussion. Velva contrived to be in another part of the house throughout our respective breakfasts and departures, and subsequent events indicated that she never said anything to anyone. Perhaps she did not care-I fantasized that she was Lurch's long-resigned mother. In any case, we were lucky. Like any successful spy, I felt frightened and lucky all the time.
Pittsburgh, too, was in the grip of a humid frenzy. The day after my flip of the coin, the sun had disappeared behind a perpetual gray wall of vapor, which never managed to form itself into rain, and yet the sun's heat remained as strong as ever, so that the thick, wet, sulfury air seemed to boil around you, and in the late morning veils of steam rose from the blacktop. Arthur said that it was like living on Venus. When I walked to work-arriving sapped and with my damp shirt an alien thing clinging to me-the Cathedral of Learning, ordinarily brown, would look black with wetness, dank, submerged, Atlantean. There were three irrational shootings that week, and two multiple-car pileups on the freeway; a Pirate, in a much-discussed lapse of sportsmanship, broke three teeth belonging to a hapless Phillie; a live infant was found in a Bloomfield garbage can.
And in bed, as our last week in the Weatherwoman House drew to a close, our dealings with each other became distinctly more Venusian. The stranglehold, the bite, even the light blow, found their way into our sexual repertoire: I discovered purple marks along the tops of my shoulders. It's the weather, I said to myself; or else, I added-once, and only for an instant, since I was so firmly opposed to consideration-this is just the way it is with another man.