There was no mail in my mailbox; I came in the door and found Arthur sitting on my sofa, looking at a magazine, his large plaid suitcase on the floor in front of him. He looked ashen and sleepless. A cigarette trembled in his thin fingers. I went to him, we embraced, we wept, wet each other's shoulders and throats, wiped our streaming noses a hundred times.
"I have a problem," he said at last, sniffling. I felt his shoulders tense suddenly. "And it's your fault, in a way."
"What?" I said.
"Some of your father's associates came to see me today. At my mother's." Through the paleness and shadow of his face there was a hint of his usual wry expression. He could still see the joke. "You never told me you were such a, well, such a scion," he said.
"What do you mean? What did they want?"
He gestured toward the great valise.
"They wanted me to know I was lucky they didn't tear off my pretty fag face, for one thing. They requested that I leave town."
"How did they-what are you doing?"
"I'm leaving town. I'm going to New York. I'm just staying long enough to say good-bye to you and clean out my bank account. Can I spend the night here?" He attempted a smile. "Is it safe?"
"You don't have to leave town."
"Oh, no? Is there something you can do about it?"
I thought a moment.
"No," I said, "there isn't."
I gave myself a moment to feel alarm at my father's discovery, but none came. "How did they- Oh. The letter."
"I believe that's it," he said.
"It was on him when he-when they found him? Why?"
"What was it?"
"A letter from Phlox. A very distraught one."
"Maybe he kept it around for laughs."
I had an idea and stood up, looking about my summer apartment at all the boxes I had never opened, all the piles I had formed.
"I guess," I said, "I guess there's going to be. Well. A funeral. So. Aren't you going to stay for it?"
Arthur stared into his lap. I saw the color mount along his neck, up to the pink tips of his ears, but he was not blushing.
"No," he said. "I don't think that I am. All funerals are stupid, but Cleveland 's will be the most stupid funeral in the world."
"I want to go."
"Fine," he said, without looking up. "Let me know how it is."
"I mean, I want to go with you."
There was a pause. He raised his face to me.
"I'm surprised," he said, but of course he didn't look it at all. There were only his even, bright gaze and the slight arch of his left eyebrow. "I thought you were gathering around you the tattered shreds of your heterosexuality. "
I went to sit beside him again, thigh to thigh on the little couch.
"Well, I don't know. I might be. Can I go with you, anyway?"
"I was thinking maybe Spain," he said.
Perhaps it was foolish to be afraid, but I packed a bag too, and we spent the night at a hotel; and perhaps it was foolish not to be more afraid, for we took a room at the Duquesne, under the name of Saunders. The dim, faintly humming corridors, the motionless drapes on the window, reminded me of my last visit to the hotel, with Cleveland; everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he'd left the whole world to me in his will. By the time I slid between the fragrant sheets of the day's second foreign bed, I was far too aching, aggrieved, too set adrift, to do anything but fall immediately into uneasy sleep, and dream of my father, shouting.
Among the few things I took with me-clothes, passport, Swiss Army knife, three thousand ancient, inviolate bar mitzvah dollars converted into slick, ethereal blue traveler's checks-were a photograph of Phlox, and a gold lamé sock that she left in my bathroom, sometime in July. I have often thought, since, that I know I loved Cleveland and Arthur, because they changed me; I know that Arthur lies behind the kindly, absent distance I maintain from other people, that behind each sudden, shocking breach of it lies Cleveland; I have from them my vocabulary, my dress, my love of idle talk. I find in myself no ready trace of Phlox, however; no habit, hobby, fashion, or phrase, and for a long time I wondered if I had loved her or not. But as I have found that I may fall quite completely in love with a man-kiss, weep, give gifts-I have also discovered the trace a woman leaves, that Phlox left, and it is better than a man's.
My father I will never see again, Cleveland is dead, Arthur is now, I believe, on Majorca. But because I can find them so easily in myself, I no longer-say it, Bechstein-I no longer need them. One can learn, for instance, to father oneself. But I can never learn to be a world, as Phlox was a world, with her own flora and physics, atmosphere and birds. I am left, as Coleridge was his useless dream poem, with a glittering sock and a memory, a garbled account of my visit to her planet, uncertain of what transpired there and of why precisely I couldn't stay. To say that I loved Phlox implies no lesson, no need or lack of need for her. She is a world I gained and lost. I have this picture, this stocking, and that is all. I wish that I had seen her one last time.
In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you. Arthur and I made it from New York to Paris, and as far as Barcelona, meeting and making brief excursions into a handful of young men and women, before we found ourselves barely speaking to each other; at last, when we spoke, it was of Cleveland, as though he was the only thing left between us, and we would look sadly into our glasses of sea-dark Spanish wine. We closed ranks only imperfectly, because each was subject to a deep mistrust of the other, as well as a true and radiant affection.
I'm told, by the way, that Cleveland 's funeral was a strange affair, attended by drunks, mysterious riffraff, and all his shadowy family. Feldman and Lurch, with a dozen other bikers, formed the usual MC funeral formation around the hearse. The service itself was conducted by Cleveland 's great-uncle, the Reverend Arning, who was a dwarf; Cleveland 's sister Anna, flown in from New York City, wore his leather jacket at graveside; his father's lover, Gerald, wept hysterically and had to return to the car. Abdullah stood the whole time, so he has said, with his arm across Jane's shoulders, dreading the moment that she should begin to cry, but, like the lover of a cancer victim who has been dying for a long time, she seemed strong and resigned and without bowing her head, watched impassively the Reverend's sorrowful, tiny hands, the subdued antics of the crowd. She wore a weird, pointy black dress that had been her mother's forty years before in rural Virginia, so that she lent her own touch of comic sadness to the funeral Cleveland could not have designed any better himself. I now regret very keenly that I missed it. I wanted to say good-bye.
When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness-and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.
Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His other books include Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his novelist wife Ayelet Waldman, and their three children.
