The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

12. The Evil Love Nurse

When I got back to the city, I was glad, alarmingly glad, to see Phlox again. At dinnertime that Monday, she met me on the hot pavement in front of Boardwalk Books, and without pausing to think, I lifted her and swung her and kissed her, through all three hundred and sixty degrees, like a soldier and his girl. We got some applause. I gathered in my fists the thin, rough cotton at the waist of her sundress, and squeezed, pressing her hips to mine. We talked a lot of nonsense and headed for the Wok Inn, heads together, feet apart, leaning into each other like the summit of a house of cards. I asked about the new auburn streaks in her hair.

"Sun and lemons," she said. "You wear a loose-weave straw hat and draw some strands of hair through the holes. Then you juice the strands. I spent a lonely weekend juicing myself."

"Same here. That's from Cosmo, that thing with the lemons," I said. "I read about it in your bathroom the other morning."

"You read my Cosmo?"

"I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions."

"How did I do?"

"You cheated," I said.

We passed a thrift shop, its window full of battered no-head mannequins wearing sequined gowns, of old toasters, and of lamps whose bases were little Spanish galleons. In one corner of the window was a flat, multicolored box.

"Twister!" said Phlox. "Oh, Art, let's buy it. Just imagine."

She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the store. The saleswoman retrieved the game from the window for us, and showed us that it was intact; the spinner still spun and the game mat was fairly clean. At dinner it lay under the table, tilted against my foot and hers, and, first as we continued our happy, empty conversation, then as I summarized the weekend at the summer house, the Twister box stirred and tickled me with each kick of her restless ankle.

In the living room of her apartment, we shoved aside chairs and the coffee table and spread the plastic mat across her rug. Its primary-colored spots, and the off-kilter, go-go red letters that spelled out the word "Twister!" at its ends, brought back a flood of memories of I960s birthday parties on rainy Saturdays in finished basements. Phlox hopped off to her bedroom, to "peel away the confining raiment of civilization," as she put it, and I sat down on the floor and unlaced my sneakers. An odd contentment came over me. Although the used Sears furniture, the fake Renoir, the cat statue, et cetera, still seemed kind of ugly and in bad taste, I discovered I had made one of those common aesthetic efforts that consists of just swallowing an entire system of bad taste-Las Vegas, or a bowling alley, or Jerry Lewis movies-and then finding it beautiful and fun.

In a way, I thought, I had done the same thing with Phlox herself. Everything about her that was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui; her overdone endearments and makeup; all that was in questionable taste and might have embarrassed me or made me snicker, I had come to accept entirely, to look for and even to encourage. She delighted me as did bouffant hairdos and Elvis Presley art. When she came out of her bedroom dressed in a nylon kimono and huge slippers of turqouise fur, I was almost dizzy with appreciation, and the gaudy plastic Twister mat at my feet seemed to be the very matrix, the printed plan, of everything I liked about her.

"Who's going to spin?" I said. "Is Annette home?" This was Phlox's roommate, a big, loud, attractive nurse, the vagaries of whose complicated work schedule I was never able to master.

"Nope. We'll have to keep the spinner here beside us and trade off."

I crawled around to the other side of the game and sat on my haunches, as did Phlox. We faced each other across the mat for one ceremonial moment. Then she flicked the black plastic arm of the spinner.

"Right hand blue," she said.

I leaned in and put my right hand in the center of a blue spot. She did the same, and as she fell slightly forward, the folds of her kimono parted, and her hair tumbled down over her bowed head. I peered into the shadows of her robe, through the spaces in her swaying two-tone hair. She spun again.

"Right foot green."

This put us both half on the mat and half off. The blue and green rows were closer to me than to her; I sat in a kind of elongated crouch, my right hand and foot on the mat, one behind the other, but Phlox had to come all the way across, her right foot in its furry slipper placed in front of her right hand. She lifted her shiny left leg a few inches into the air to help complete her reach, and wobbled for a few moments, before falling onto her side.

"You lose," I said, laughing, but she said it didn't count, and slid the spinner over to me before hoisting herself forward again, the soft skin of her lifted thigh shaking with effort. I spun.

"Left foot blue."

Since her right hand lay upon the blue spot where it would have been most convenient for me to place my left foot, and since she beat me to the second-best spot, beside my right hand, I was forced to run my left leg through the triangle formed by her right leg and arm, and I felt the muted contact of my left thigh in blue jeans against her bare ankle. We were on three points now, tilted forward, and our heads drew alongside each other, ears kissing. Her deep and Italian laugh, close to my ear, seemed to issue from that darkness within the parting of her warm kimono, and I felt the summit and base of my spine begin to trade anxious messages. I shifted my hips and spun again.

"Right hand yellow."

The balance moved to her side of the mat; she dropped backward, right hand behind her, and I found myself almost atop her, laughing now too, her swinging hair so near my mouth that I opened up and chewed on the nearest stray ends, which crunched strangely, then fell from my lips and hung moistened and clinging to one another like the tips of little paintbrushes.

"Spin," she said.

"I'm spinning."

She watched me, her mouth pursed but her eyes ready to start laughing again, and then, with a sweet flex of the muscles of her face, she bit her lower lip and looked worried, as though she thought she might collapse. I spun again, with my left hand, which remained free for just one more second.

"Left hand green."

I went for the best spot, but she, going out of her way, wrenched her body into my path and forced me to go under both of her thighs with my left arm, and I had to bend my upper body around backward. I found myself looking up into the fragrant crook of her underarm, my head cradled between her hip and ribs. My fingers strained to touch the green spot, and my thighs trembled. I felt pain in my knees and shoulders. Somehow she had managed to remain upright. She laughed at my shaking, four-way struggle to keep from falling, but suddenly I was giving it everything I had.

"You spin," I said, teeth clenched.

"I can't."

"Spin, damn it, spin, spin it, come on." The contorted hold on my right foot on that green spot began to give.

"I can't."

"Phlox!" I let my head drop against the smooth nylon along her thigh. The Opium and sweat hurried out from her shaking breast. I had an erection-pardon me for once again mentioning the condition of my penis-and it labored against the cotton walls of its lonely cell. I felt my fingers begin to slide.

The telephone rang, once, twice, three times.

"Fall," she said. She leaned down, arching like a bird's her long neck, and kissed my lips.

"No." My slippery feet and hands jerked across the plastic, making quick and telltale squeaks. She bit the tip of my nose.

"Fall!"

I fell, at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.

During the first weeks of July my life settled into a pattern, which is how one knows that it is July. Nights I spent at Phlox's apartment, days at Boardwalk Books, and evenings alternately in the company of Cleveland and Arthur, or of the Evil Love Nurse, as Cleveland had lately taken to calling Phlox. Some compulsiveness inherited from my father, and also a kind of unnecessary delicacy, had always driven me to keep friends separate, to shun group excursions, but for this calm couple of weeks at the eye of the summer I felt free of the guilt that usually accompanied my juggling of friendships, and free of the sense of duplicity that went along with pushing the people I loved into separate corners of my life, and once in a while Phlox, Arthur, and I would eat our lunches on the same patch of grass.

Cleveland passed most of his nights with Jane. For years she had maintained a fictitious friend named Katherine Tracy, an artistic, unbalanced girl who would occasionally attempt suicide, or fall seriously ill with colitis, anorexia, shingles, heartbreak, piles. During these times, Katherine Tracy required attention and constant company, and Dr. and Mrs. Bellwether, who had grown rather fond of the diffident, intensely self-conscious Katherine over the years, always gave their sympathetic approval to Jane's spending a few days out of the house to help care for Katherine, who had this neurotic fear of telephones and refused to own one. What Cleveland did with his days I was shortly to discover.

As for Arthur, the beginning of July brought two final exams in his summer-school classes, and a bad case of scabies, which, aside from herpes, was the worst venereal affliction anyone could imagine in those days. It kept him at home most of the time, studying and smelling of Kwell. I felt no pressure to commit myself more to one part of my life than to the other. Phlox (who sensed sooner than I did that she and Arthur were becoming irreconcilable, who perhaps had never really liked Arthur at all-in fact, she once said, "I never like boys; it's love or it's hate") and Arthur indeed ruined the one evening on which the five of us did go out together, after they had destroyed the afternoon that preceded it.

The evening began, once again, with a vision seen through the big front windows of Boardwalk Books. About fifteen minutes before I expected Phlox, Arthur, Cleveland, and Jane to come collect me, they went down the sidewalk past the shop, and there was one long moment in which I noted but did not recognize them. They were two and two.

The pair of women came first, one strangely dressed, in pied clothes of three or four eras, talking and examining the wrist and bracelet of the other, who wore a candy-striped skirt and bright yellow sweater. In the wind, their hair trailed from their heads like short scarves, and their faces looked cynical and gay. The two men followed behind, one with a great black lion head and black boots, and the other in white Stan Smiths, looking flushed and wealthy and bathed in sunlight, and each holding his cigarette in a different fashion, the heavy man with a negligent looseness, the thin man pointedly, wildly, as though the cigarette were a tool of speech. My God! I thought, in that spinning instant before they turned and waved to me. Who are those beautiful people?

They went past and I pressed my face against the glass to follow their disappearing forms. I felt like a South Sea Islander watching his white gods climb into their shining cargo plane and fly off, with the added and appropriate impression that I was somehow deluded in feeling this way. I turned wildly to see if anyone in the store had witnessed the theophany, but apparently nobody had, or at least nobody had been as commoved as I. I jumped up and down at the cash register, hopped from one foot to the other. I punched the clock. When they came back, at six sharp, I rushed out into the street and hung there, still confused after the lunchtime disaster, not knowing whom to embrace first; finally I shook hands with Arthur, before taking Phlox into my arms. I may have renewed with that error all the discord of lunch. As I held her she pinched my arm, lightly, and Arthur, of course, noticed.

"A handshake before a hug," he told her. "Look it up."

I hugged Jane too, was enveloped briefly in smooth arms and Chanel No. 5, and then stood facing Cleveland, who pushed up his big black glasses and frowned.

"Enough touching already," he said.

We headed back toward the library, where Cleveland had parked the Barracuda. I was in a state of perfect ambivalence, worse than ever before. My arm was around Phlox's waist, chafing against the funny white leather belt she'd used to hitch up her dress, but I kept walking backward, turning to face Cleveland, Arthur, and Jane. I could tell it annoyed Phlox, but I told myself I had recently spent plenty of attention on her, and when Jane dropped Cleveland 's hand and came forward to talk to Phlox, I fell back among the boys. Jane liked Phlox, and said so all the time. Phlox thought that Jane was dull, that she was stupid still to be dragging herself through the mud for Cleveland, and, of course, that she was secretly in love with me.

"You're gonna get it," said Arthur, and smiled.

"Good to see you guys."

"Good to see you too," said Cleveland. He seemed to be in high spirits; he huffed along the sidewalk, boot heels pounding, gut pulled in. "Listen, Bechstein, when's your day off?"

"Wednesday," I said. I looked toward Phlox. She was laughing at some story Jane told with waving brown hands; I watched the pair of butts and the four high-heeled legs. I had promised Wednesday to Phlox.

"Meet me."

"Where?"

"Here. Oakland. Say by the Cloud Factory."

"To do what?"

He didn't say anything. Arthur, who was walking between us, turned to me, a look of mild annoyance on his face. I was surprised to note that apparently Cleveland hadn't told Arthur about my father. I felt a quick thrill when I saw that there was something between Cleveland and me that Arthur wasn't a party to, something outside their friendship, and then, just as quickly, I felt sadness and even shame at the nature of that something. It was not what I wanted us to have most in common. But the invitation, of course, was irresistible.

"Okay," I said, "but can we meet in the morning? I'm supposed to spend the afternoon with Phlox."

"Fine," said Cleveland. "Ten o'clock, say." He inhaled hugely, rattling all the snot in his nose. "Do we have to walk so fast?"

Phlox turned her head, squinting and opening and squinting her eyes in the light of sunset, her look changing from protective to vulnerable and back again.

We had planned on dinner and Ella Fitzgerald, who was playing Point Park that night. Cleveland claimed that they would be airlifting her into Pittsburgh with a sky hook, like Jesus in La Dolce Vita , and someday, he said, they would be doing the same thing with him. In the restaurant, I sat next to Phlox and across from Arthur; Jane was beside Arthur, and Cleveland took up all the space at the head of the table, making it awkward for the waitress, whom he apparently knew, in some connection that made Jane blush frequently. Arthur and Phlox had already started to go at each other in the car, in little ways, unfriendly jokes and a lot of smiling.

They were continuing that afternoon's show. The three of us, see, had been making an effort to meet for lunch now and then-behind the library, in the park, or on the lawn of Soldiers' and Sailors', but on this afternoon my luck had run out, and in the midst of a terribly important argument I had found myself siding with Arthur.

We were discussing Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen. I said that it was the most Roman Catholic record album ever made.

"Look what you've got," I said. "You've got Mary dancing like a vision across the porch while the radio plays. You've got people trying in vain to breathe the fire they was born in, riding through mansions of glory, and hot-rod angels, virgins and whores-"

"And 'She's the One,'" said Arthur. "It's Mariolatry city."

"Right."

"'Killer graces and secret places.'"

"I hate that," said Phlox, splitting open a tangerine with two long thumbs. "I hate that thing about 'secret places that no boy can fill.' I don't believe in that. There are no such places."

"Now, Phlox," said Arthur. "Surely you must have one or two secret places."

"She does," I said. "I know she does."

"I do not. What good would boys be if they couldn't fill all the places?"

Arthur and I presented a united front in support of the measureless caverns of a woman, Phlox sternly and with increasing anger defended her total knowability, and something about the situation upset Phlox. I guessed it was partly that the argument was so trivial, and partly that it was two against one, but mostly that the whole thing was so horribly in reverse.

Perhaps I did know all the reasons she could have for being upset with me, and perhaps there would be no mystery to women at all if I would just lift the corner of my own purdah. Anyway, it had been an ugly lunch, and now, over red plates of pasta, things were intensifying rapidly.

"That's because you're so insecure," Arthur was saying. "And besides, you love sitting in that window all day- admit it."

"I do not," said Phlox. "I hate it. And you just wish it was you."

"Okay, okay," said Cleveland, his mouth full.

"You're a crazy woman," Arthur said. "Those ladies have probably never even noticed you."

"You saw me crying! You should have heard the things they said about me!"

"What did they call you?" said Jane, very sweetly. As soon as she heard that anyone was or had been in any kind of distress, she became an engine of sympathy, hurtling to the rescue. She reached across the table and put her hand on Phlox's.

"I can't say it. I don't remember."

"I remember," said Arthur.

"Okay, Artie," said Cleveland.

"You said they called you a strange-looking white bitch who thought she was hot shit waving her ass in a window to the boys all day."

Silence fell over our party. Phlox threw her head back proudly and her nostrils flared. I had heard this story already, a few times, but Phlox's life was so full of incidents in which other women vented their jealous rage at her that the impressive, rhythmic hatefulness of the Hillman Library cleaning ladies hadn't really affected me before. I felt terrible, unfamiliar, unwilling anger toward Arthur.

"Wow," said Cleveland, finally.

A few little tears pooled at the corners of Phlox's eyes and rolled down her face, one two three. Her lower lip quivered and then stopped. I squeezed her other hand. Both of Phlox's hands were now being squeezed.

"Arthur," I said, "um, you should probably apologize."

"I'm sorry," he said immediately, without much conviction. He looked down at his lap.

"Why do you hate me, Arthur?"

"You're terrible, Arthur," said Jane. "He doesn't hate you, Phlox, do you, Arthur?" She hit him on the shoulder.

I looked at my linguine in red clam sauce. All the heat seemed to have suddenly gone out of it, the dusting of Parmesan I'd given it had cooled and congealed into a thick lumpy blanket of cheese spread across the top, and the whole thing, with the gray bits of clam, looked smeary red, and biological.

"I'm leaving," said Phlox. She sniffed and snapped shut her pocketbook.

I got up with her and we struggled around Cleveland.

"Looks like we've all got a fiin evening ahead," I said quietly. I dropped some money onto the table.

"Whom the gods would destroy," Cleveland said, "they first make pasta." He reached up and touched my elbow. "Wednesday."

"Wednesday," I said, and started to run.

Out on the street, Phlox was pulling herself together, snapping shut her purse. I came up behind her and pushed my face into her hair. She inhaled deeply, held her breath; exhaled; and her shoulders unbound. Just then-at the very instant she turned a fairly calm face to me-all the cicadas in the trees went ape, who knows why, and their music was as loud and ugly as a thousand televisions tuned to the news. In Pittsburgh, even the cicadas are industrial. We covered our ears and mouthed words at one another.

"Wow," she mouthed.

"Let's get out of here."

"What?"

"This is driving me nuts."

"What?"

I pulled open the door of a restaurant adjacent to the one we had just quit, a coffee shop; we stood in the lobby next to the Kiwanis gum-ball machine and kissed in the quiet of forks and Muzak.