"Arthur? Only to say it. Only! Anything in the world."
"You could," said Lecomte, "keep the fuck away from Richard."
There was only the din of the party, and it was as nothing. The obscenity flared and then collapsed into itself in the dazzling white half of a second. It was like the echo of an ax blow filling the air between him and Dudu. He immediately blushed and looked ashamed at having said too much.
Abdullah's hand, which he had intended to give to Arthur to be shaken, hung from his wrist as though unmuscled. He fought down his astonishment, with the aid of his alcoholic heart, and smiled at me, and then at Jane.
"Jane," he said, "you will tell him I am quite okay for Richard and everything is okay and he has not the claim to everyone like he think he has and you will now tell him this."
"Let's go outside," Jane said to me. "I know how to get the neighborhood dogs to bark all at once."
"Hey, yes, fine," said Abdullah, "then it is enough for now. I will be back later." He headed for the large, dark parlor and disappeared into the large, dark music there.
"Arthur, was Richard-" I said.
"Let's not talk about it," he said.
Jane put her moist pout just by my ear and whispered, raising the hairs all down me.
"Richard is Cleveland 's cousin," she said.
"Ah, Cleveland!" I said. I wondered at the Eiffel mesh of liaisons rising up and up around me. Were all of them related? Were Arthur and Richard an item? I looked at him. He stared down into his cool, yellow-foaming plastic cup of regret. His hair fell over his rather flat profile and hid the eye.
"The subject," Jane murmured into my ear again, undoing a giant zipper within me.
I grabbed her hard hand. "What subject?"
"Change it." Three syllables.
"So, Arthur, you didn't tell me," I said, "about the waitress's baby. Was it his? Did it have Cleveland 's good looks and fabulous sense of humor?"
And the thought of Cleveland lifted him, and threw him, and within a few minutes I listened as a hitchhiking Cleveland made his way headlong through the Black Hills toward Mount Rushmore, with an AWOL army demolition man in a pickup full of trinitrotoluene and plastique, and tears appeared at the corners of Arthur's eyes, he laughed so.
Later, long into the ever dimmer and louder evening, I looked around me, as though for the first time in hours.
" Cleveland," I said.
My vision and hence recent memory had smeared completely at the edges, and the edges had contracted with each drink, until two faces, Jane's and Arthur's, be-wilderingly alike, filled the unbearably focused, narrow center of everything, and babbled. I wanted Jane, I wanted quiet, I wanted just to stop; so I stood up, a feat, and went out of doors to slap my face three times.
Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland! They had spoken of nearly nothing but his exploits. Cleveland riding a horse into a swimming pool; coauthoring a book on baseball at the age of thirteen; picking up a prostitute, only to take her to the church wedding of a cousin; living in a Philadelphia garret and returning to Pittsburgh six months later, after having hardly communicated with any of his friends, with a pair of dirty tattoos and a scholarly, hilarious, twenty-thousand-word essay on the cockroaches with which he'd shared his room.
I had the impression that as far as Arthur and Jane were concerned, Cleveland flew, or had flown, as far above their twin blond heads as I saw them flying above me-but he had fallen, or was falling, or they were all on their way clown. They hadn't said it, but I saw that in their fancies, the great epoch, the time when Cleveland and Arthur had been two and angelic and fast, was long gone. Here I am, I thought, for I felt shitty and sour and wry, at the start of the first summer of my new life, and they tell me I've come in late and missed everything.
Though I'd intended to step out into the yellow comfort of the back porch again, my condition, and my un-familiarity with the house, led me through the wrong series of rooms, and I found myself verging on another part of the immense lawn, a part completely illuminated, in green shock. A pair of swimmers was talking quietly in the water, a boy still softly trying to convince a girl to do that thing whose moment had probably come and gone much earlier in the evening. I couldn't hear the words, but the urgency in the refusal of the young woman was clear and familiar. There would be denial, then silence, and then the rapid beat of water.
Someone touched my elbow, and I turned.
"Hi," said Arthur.
"I'm just getting a little air," I said. "I guess I've been silting too long. Drinking too long."
"Do you like to dance? Would you like to go dancing?"
I wondered what he meant. I didn't really want to go dancing, mostly because I never had "gone dancing" (Claire did not dance), but also because something in his tone, and the whole idea of a discotheque, frightened me. "Sure," I said. "Sure I like to dance." "Well. There's a club in East Liberty. Not far."
"Okay."
"Well. It's a gay club."
"Oh."
There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and coolly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I knew, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust.
This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Home and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Schaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibly, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.
I looked at Arthur. There was a faint golden stubble on his cheek and a flush at the pink skin of his throat. His eyes were clear and pale, as though he had not been drinking. I felt something. It flew around my chest like a black bat that has got into the house, terrified me for an alien moment, and then vanished.
"I don't think so. I'm straight, Arthur. I like girls."
He smiled his politic smile.
"That's what they all say." He reached up and almost touched my hair. I shrank from his hand. "Okay, you're straight. " It was as though I had passed or failed some test.
"But we can be friends, can't we?"
"You'll see," he said, and he turned on his heel and went back into the house.
Objects changed during the long run of Riri's party: A girl's frail satin handbag became the spoils, torn in half, of a battle between two briefly furious boys; a lamp became a pile of shards to be cursed, swept up, and hastily thrown away; and the swimming pool, which had probably started the evening as everyone's notion of beautiful wealthy blue fun, was now garish and green and almost empty. I'd spent my whole evening, however, in sweet, subtle darkness, in the company of fun, and I had my shirt half off by the time I reached poolside.
4. The Cloud Factory
My worst nightmare was a boring nightmare, the dream of visiting an empty place where nothing happened, with awful slowness. I would awake tired, with a few unremarkable traces that never seemed to do justice to the dull fear I had felt while still asleep: the memory of the low hum of an electric clock, of an aimless albino hound, of a voice incessantly announcing departure times over a public address system; and that summer, my job was a dream of this sort. I'd wanted to work in a true, old-fashioned bookshop, crammed with the mingled smells of literature and Pittsburgh blowing in through the open door. Instead I'd got myself hired by Boardwalk Books.