Michael Chabon (12 page)

That night I took Phlox to dinner at the Elbow Room, but my stomach still felt frail and I ate only spinach leaves while I watched her put away a bowl of chowder, a heap of tortellini, and a pretty little dish of ice cream.

“We’ll only be gone a few days,” I said. “Absence makes the heart grow fronds, as my father says.”

“But why can’t I come?” said Phlox. “It’s because Arthur hates me. Right?”

“No, it’s because I hate you.” This did not go over well. “Come on, Phlox, no one hates you.”

“Do you love me?”

“Like the big time,” I said. “Look, it’s just me and Cleveland and Arthur. Crude jokes, poker games, sports talk, boozy sentimentality—you know, boys’ stuff.”

She frowned. I knew I was being too flip, but I felt lousy, and more than that, I think, I wanted to get away from her; to pause for a moment. I’d heard, somewhere in the past couple of days, the stealthy entrance of creepiness into my unsecured summer, a faint creaking of the woodwork, and I felt as though I ought to lie very still, not draw a breath, and listen for the something that might be there, for the next telltale footfall.

N
EXT MORNING BEFORE SUNRISE
, I sat in the backseat of the old Arning Barracuda, wiping flakes of doughnut glaze from my lips and struggling to appreciate the negligible effects of a single cup of coffee. Cleveland and Arthur sang along with an old John and Yoko cassette and pointed out the windmill-shaped restaurants, the car dealerships surmounted by giant plaster statues of bears and fat men, the gunshops and gospel billboards, that were the beloved landmarks on the way to Fredonia. I sang “Hail, Freedonia,” from the Marx Brothers movie. I hadn’t driven a long distance since coming, with all my belongings, from Washington to Pittsburgh to start school four years before, and had forgotten how much I enjoyed lying across the backseat of a car with my hair hanging out one window and my feet out the other, watching the phone poles pass, listening to music, the engine, the wind passing over the car.

After we’d been twice through the Lennon and I’d slept, apparently, through Cleveland’s other cassette, there were only the sounds of the Barracuda and of Patsy Cline on the radio, coming in faintly from somewhere, and it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I watched happily the backs of my friends’ heads. We pulled into a Stop & Shop for more coffee, and then I felt like talking; I asked how long, exactly, had they been friends?

“Nine years. We met in our first year at Central Catholic,” said Cleveland. “We found ourselves what you might call together apart.”

“He means that everyone else hated us,” said Arthur.

“Speak for yourself,” said Cleveland. “I simply noticed that we weren’t like any of the other boys in that excellent school.”

“Central always looks to me like Santa’s Castle,” I said.

“We weren’t like any of the other elves,” said Arthur.

“Arthur, here, already had, I believe, some vague notion of the perverse and sinful sexual longings that would shortly make him as un-Catholic as one might conceivably be—”

“And Cleveland was already drinking a six-pack of beer a day, and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. And reading every book on the
Index librorum prohibitorum.
And Cleveland,” said Arthur, turning to look sadly at his friend, but speaking with the same sarcastic tone,
“wrote
in those days.”

“Yeah. Say, isn’t it too early for this discussion? Couldn’t we save it for such time as I am drunk enough to ignore it and fall asleep mid-reply? That reminds me,” he said, and without slowing he swerved the car off the small state highway and we stopped in the deserted parking lot of a grocery store, where Cleveland got out and went around to the trunk.

“What’s in the trunk?” I asked Arthur, who yawned, stretched, and turned to face me, looking pink and unshaven.

“Oblivion,” he said. “Oblivion is in the trunk.”

Cleveland climbed back in with a six-pack from the cooler, and by the time we reached the house on the lake, he was well into his second green aluminum fist of Rolling Rock, and though his driving hadn’t really fallen apart yet, I was glad we weren’t going any farther. The road grew narrow and crooked, the trees grew denser, and to our left I began to make out, through rare gaps in the pine and sycamore, strips of silver lake, and the striped awnings of distant houses; soon we came to a gravel drive, to a cluster of rusted mailboxes like a row of tumbledown tenements, their red metal flags hoisted and falling at all angles. As we pulled, gravel popping, into the driveway, Cleveland stopped the car, threw it into park, and got out.

“I’m going to walk,” he said. He slammed the door and set off, carrying a can of beer. Arthur and I sat a moment, watching him shamble toward the empty house, something determined yet wary in his tread. The engine began laboriously to idle. Three or four minutes passed. Arthur put his feet up on the dashboard.

“Well?” I said.

“He always does this,” said Arthur. “He’ll be back.”

“You mean we just sit here and wait?”

“Can you drive?”

“Can’t you?” I scrambled over the seatback and settled in behind the steering wheel, which was warm in just two places, as though from the heat of Cleveland’s hands. “You really are a relic,” I said.

“There have always been people willing to do my driving for me,” he said, shrugging, as I put the car in gear. “People like you.”

Although Cleveland had said that his father visited it every other weekend, the summer house looked long abandoned. It was white wood, trimmed in blue, with a veranda that ran all the way around and a white rowboat rotting on its wild front lawn; this lawn, weedy and filled with gnats, began at the edge of the lakefront beach, surrounded the house, and then ended abruptly in a sagging, vine-covered slat fence at the treeline, as though it could barely withstand the encroachments of the forest around it—indeed, here and there amid the weeds, packs of saplings and even young trees were closing in. One of the front steps had come unnailed, the paint peeled from the white columns of the veranda, the bench of a broken porch glider dangled by a single chain under the wide front window, and standing on the threshold, I felt keenly aware of all the vacations that had been passed here over the last half century, all the ghostly cries of “A hummingbird!” “A meteor!” all the bitter sighs and campfires of a dozen vanished families.

When I came into the dark, cedar-smelling house, Cleveland was standing in the living room with his back to me, looking at a photograph framed over the fireplace. I came up behind him and looked. It was a picture of himself at the age of fifteen or sixteen, an angelic smirk on his face, eyes bright, hair long and of a lighter color; already he held a can of Rolling Rock in one hand, a cigarette in the other, but there was something different in this characteristic pose, something enthusiastic, gloating; and the smirk was that of a novice who had only just learned the Secret and couldn’t quite believe that it was so simple. In the picture he looked handsome and nearly famous, and looking at him now, big and scarred and immobile, I saw, for the first time, what Arthur and Jane must have seen when they looked at Cleveland: diminution in growth, loss through increase, a star that has passed from yellow to red. Perhaps I read too much into this photograph, but Cleveland’s reaction to it soon confirmed my own feeling. I couldn’t help but say, “Gee, Cleveland, you look really terrific in this photo.”

“Yes,” he said. “I was happy.”

“Was it summertime?”

“Uh huh. Here at the lake.”

“Doesn’t summertime always make you feel kind of the way you look in this picture, though?”

“Sure,” he said, but I could tell he said it only to humor me, and his tone more honestly said: Not anymore; no. He tapped the glass of the frame once with his finger, and then turned toward me.

“Let me show you your bedroom,” he said, avoiding my gaze. He started off, then turned back toward the photograph and tapped it once again.

My bedroom was the back porch, which, when the tide was in, overhung Lake Erie. I changed slowly into my swimming trunks and then, stiff from the long ride in the car, ran down to the beach, where I found Arthur and Cleveland already stretched out on towels and laughing, their cans of beer little bunkers half-buried in the sand. There was a light breeze off the water, and they had kept their shirts on; Arthur’s said
LAST CALL.
We drank, we swam, we lay on the dingy sand and looked out at the boats on the lake. Cleveland disappeared into the house for a while, and returned with an air rifle and a trash bag full of tin cans. I stayed on my towel and watched as he erected a row of targets along the fence, took aim, and blew them off without a miss.

“How can he do that when he’s drunk?” I asked Arthur.

“He isn’t drunk,” said Arthur. “He’s never drunk. He just drinks and drinks and drinks until he passes out, but he never gets drunk.”

This reminded me of the photograph on the mantel, the can of beer.

“What kinds of things did he used to write?”

“Oh, essays, I guess you’d call them, odd essays. I told you about the one on cockroaches. We had this teacher in high school, a terrific woman. He started writing because of her.”

“And,” I said.

“And later she met with, of course, some kind of disaster.”

“Which kind?”

“Death.” He rolled over and faced away from me, so that I could see only the back of his head and hear his voice only in an unsatisfactory and into-the-wind way. “So, theoretically, that’s why he stopped. But that’s just his same old Cleveland bullshit. Every one of his failings has a perfectly good excuse. Usually some kind of disaster.”

“Like?”

“Like his mom kills herself, his dad becomes about the scariest queer I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen scary ones, believe me—so Cleveland is pardoned from ever having to do anything good, or productive, ever again.” He pulled off his T-shirt and draped it over his head, baring his slender, rosy back.

“Did he want to be a writer?” I said, and tried to pull the shirt from his head, but he grabbed hold of it and remained hidden.

“Sure he would have liked to be a writer, but see, now he has these great excuses. It’s so much easier to get fucked up almost every night.”

“You drink a lot.”

“It’s different.”

“Look at me.”

“No. Look, he’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this Lost Weekend thing. I’m as guilty as anyone of laughing at him and respecting him for being a fuck-up. He knows lots of people, and most of them want to be his friend. At least initially. They do change their minds.”

This was true. He had already deteriorated in charm and in drunken brightness to the point where one occasionally met someone who, at the mention of Cleveland’s name, would say, “That creep?”

“I told you that when his mom died she left him about twenty thousand dollars. It’s gone. He spent it. Mostly on dope and beer and records and trips to see the Grateful Dead play Charleston, or Boston, or Oakland, California, once. On bullshit. Do you know what he does now?”

“Yes,” I said.

He threw off his shirt and whirled to face me, though of course his face didn’t betray any surprise.

“Did he tell you?”

I stood up.

“I’m bombed,” I said. “How many cans do you think I can hit?”

I took a nap on the screened porch, over the lapping tide, and suddenly I smelled chili. I lay on the cot, waking slowly, in stages, the warm red odor working its way into my brain until my eyes opened. I went into the kitchen and stood next to Cleveland as he opened one can after another, until he had two dozen targets for tomorrow and a gallon of chili in the pot. He was shirtless and had a drunk’s bruise on his left shoulder, as he did on his shin and forearm.

“Gee, you have a big stomach,” I said.

He stopped stirring the aromatic brown slop in the tureen and patted his belly proudly.

“Of course I do,” he said. “I’m in the process of eating the entire world. Country by country. Last week I polished off Bahrain and Botswana. And Belize.”

We sat down at the scratched, old, fine oak dinner table with our bowls of chili, and I started drinking beer again, which was cold and cleared my head. After dinner we went out. It was still, though barely, light. Arthur found a Wiffle ball and a fungo bat, so we went out into the water, and he skillfully hit long flies that we swam yards and yards to field. After we’d waded in to shore, we stood shivering in the breeze and put on our sweatshirts. Cleveland taught me to cup a windblown match, “like the Marlboro Man,” and then how to flick the cigarette butt twenty-five feet when I was done. The sun went down, but we stayed on the beach, watching the fireflies and the momentary bats. The woods were full of crickets, and the music from the radio on the porch mingled with the sound of the insects. I sat on the sand and thought, for a moment, of Phlox. Cleveland and Arthur wandered down to the water’s edge, too far for me to hear their talk, and smoked two long Antonio y Cleopatra cigars, then put them out in the sand. They pulled off their sweatshirts and ran into the water where years before Cleveland had brutalized his little sister.

I felt happy—or some weak, pretty feeling centered in my stomach, brought on by beer—at the sight of the fading blue sky tormented at its edges with heat lightning, and at crickets and the shouting over the water, and by Jackie Wilson on the radio, but it was a happiness so like sadness that the next moment I hung my head.

“How can you spend so much time with her?” Arthur was saying, as he threw pine needles into the heart of the fire that Cleveland had built on the beach, where they caught, flared, and disappeared, as my little moods had all day. “She thinks she’s such a glamour girl.”

“So do you,” said Cleveland. Two small campfires burned in the lenses of his black glasses. “And what’s
wrong
with thinking that? She exaggerates herself. It’s healthy.”

“It’s unbearable,” said Arthur.

“It’s genius,” said Cleveland. “A genius you don’t possess. Do I myself not claim to be in the process of eating the entire world? A patent exaggeration. Do I not claim to be Evil Incarnate?”