"It is not," she said. "Go, ah! go. Slow, baby." When we were through, and we'd collapsed, she said that it had hurt and it had felt all right, that it was frightening as sex could be, and I said that I knew it. We stopped talking. I felt her grow heavy, heard the slow gathering of her breath. I slipped out of bed and went to find my clothes. Dressing furtively in the darkness, pulling on each sock, I felt very happy, for one instant, as though I were rising at three in the morning for a fishing trip, and there were sandwiches and apples to be packed away. I decided not to leave a note.
Halfway home under the clear, starry sky and the un-haloed streetlamps, I had yet to form a single coherent thought, a plan of action, when it came to me that I'd forgotten to ask Phlox about Cleveland and the thing he'd said or done that was strange, and I saw then that I didn't really care. Like that, like a spasm, I spat and wished that the summer were over. Immediately afterward I felt ashamed; I covered my mouth as though I'd blasphemed or something. But a strong desire overtook me to go away, to take a plane out that morning, to go to Mexico, as Arthur had done once, and live irresponsibly in a little pink hotel; or to Italy, to sleep through blinding afternoons in a half-fallen villa; or to vanish into the railroad wastes of North America. My only commerce would be with prostitutes and bartenders. I would send postcards without a return address.
"No," I said aloud, "don't give up." But I was still fantasizing halfheartedly about the places I might visit, and the simple life that I would lead in them, when I reached my front door and heard the telephone ringing inside.
"How was Latrobe?" I said.
"Been out?"
"Yes, I've been-" I was on the point of lying, but I saw, for once and with disheartening clarity, the outcome of whatever stupid lie I might manage. I would only involve myself over again in all the tedious nonsense of juggling Arthur and Phlox. I looked at my watch, exhaled, and told him he'd better come over.
"No," he said, "I'll meet you."
Arthur house-sat now for a poli-sci professor who lived up in the hills of north Oakland, and so we met roughly halfway, at the statue of Johann Sebastian Bach in front of the Carnegie Institute, not far from the Cloud Factory. It was cool for a summer night; I shivered, sorry I'd worn only a sweatshirt, sorry that we stood so far apart, on the sidewalk beneath the giant green Bach. I was sorry, too, that the air was cold between us, that even under the best of circumstances he could not just put his arm around me and hold me to him, because this was Pittsburgh and J.S. or somebody might see, and so we stood with our hands in our pockets, two young men struggling to be in love and about to have it out.
"I slept with Phlox," I said.
"Oh, Jesus, let's walk somewhere." He'd dressed quickly; his sneakers didn't match, his shirt was half-untucked-he'd already been to bed at least once before I answered my phone. And I have to admit that it was right then, as I blurted out what I'd just done, and his unshaven, stray-hair face creased with a kind of prissy annoyance, that I felt the first failure of the emotion I was about to profess.
"How did it happen?"
"How do you think?" I said, snapping because it looked as if things were going that way. "No, Arthur, I'm sorry; it happened very strangely, actually, and I don't really get it at all."
We passed the bronze Shakespeare with his great domed head, the bronze Stephen Foster eternally serenaded by the pickaninny with the bronze banjo, and I saw that we would end up in our usual place high above the Lost Neighborhood, which we did, silently, taking up our usual slouches against the iron rail. The sky glowed and flashed orange, off toward the mills in the south, as if volcano gods were fighting there or, it seemed to me, as if the end of the world had begun-it was an orange so tortured and final.
He took hold of my elbow, firmly, and turned me till I faced him. Again that day I expected to see anger, and again I was disappointed.
"Art, don't leave me," he said, an unfamiliar look on his face, cheeks hollow, eyes rolling. I'd never seen his face reveal anything before. "I've been so afraid that this would happen. I knew when you weren't home all night. I knew it."
"I had no idea," I said. "It was all a big accident. Or that is, she planned it. I fell into it. I can't say what it really means. It was so strange tonight, Arthur." My throat tightened. All the sexual battle and stress of the day, the confusion of my final bout with Phlox, the loveliness of her lacy bedroom, and the power of her face mounted within me and came spilling out. Arthur held out his fingers and lightly brushed my cheek.
"What is it? Art. Come on. Don't cry."
"I don't know what I'm like anymore," I said. "I do dumb things."
"Shh."
"Don't ask me to choose. Please."
"I won't," he said, shortly, as though it cost him some effort. "Just don't leave me."
I stopped crying. Everything seemed utterly upside down. The Arthur I thought I knew would be scorning me now, and ridiculing Phlox, and forcing me to admit that she'd suckered me. He would be forcing me to acknowledge that if I didn't love him, Arthur F. Lecomte, with all the hip places he had been, the perfect manner of the life he led, his sarcastic brilliance, his hard amusement, and, most of all, the male company he could offer me, then I was a fool, a loser, and entirely my father's obedient boy; cursed, doomed to lose the things my father had lost-art, love, integrity, and all that. A shift, another shift, had taken place. Somehow it was up to me now, and I wanted to know why.
"Did something else happen to you today?" I said. "Something with Riri?"
Arthur sat down on a step and looked down onto the miniature lights of the Lost Neighborhood.
"I took this test," he said. "I didn't tell you. I took the foreign service exam. I failed. I knew when I came out of the room, really, but I got the letter this afternoon."
I sat beside him and put my arm across his shoulders.
"So? You can take it again, can't you?" I tried to think of when he must have taken it.
"I'm twenty-five. I'm still in college. I'm queer. My lover is about to leave me for Deanna Durbin." He threw a stone. "I've been chasing after the same things for a long time now."
"I love you," I said.
"You're a sexual dilettante," he said. "You have no idea."
We made love on the steps. I threw up. He walked me home, told me a bad joke, and we climbed into my narrow bed. In two hours there was daylight at the window and a Wedgwood sky.
22. The Beast That Ate Cleveland
I imagine it was shortly before dinnertime on the twenty-third of August that Cleveland reentered the world of his earliest childhood, intent on doing it harm. Until just a few days before this, I think, he hadn't set foot in Fox Chapel in years and years, not since the distant winter morning on which the Arnings had moved out to the country, and he'd sat in his little rubber boots and silken, pillowy snowsuit in the back seat of the family car, bewildered, watching the bare window of his bedroom disappear. Now his boots were of black leather, the air smelled like perfect lawns, and he, Evil Incarnate, knew exactly where he was going. He went slowly, keeping a light hand on the throttle so that the giant growls of his German engine wouldn't draw too much notice. As though his opaque helmet were not disguise enough, he'd cut his hair short, had traded his glasses for a pair of contacts, his black jacket for a twill sport coat, and as he pulled off into the parking lot of a mock-Tudor shopping center whose rustic, pretty stores sold things of no practical use, potpourris, artificial eggs, duck-related merchandise, he did his best to look like the wayward, thrillhound son of a well-to-do Fox Chapel family-one of the local young black sheep who were always flipping over in their Italian cars on winding roads, vomiting on the golf courses at night, diving fully clothed and drunken into the runs and creeks-one of whom, really, he was. Only in my hands, he thought as he killed the engine, it goes further than simple bad behavior. It is an intellectual and moral program. It is the will to bigness.