The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

15. The Museum of Real Life

Hanging out at the Cloud Factory on the hottest day of the year, shoulders to the wire fence, the sky still that yellow Pittsburgh gray, but the sweat already pasting the hair to my forehead and the cotton to the small of my back. Cleveland was ten minutes late. I looked at the black win-dowless flank of the Carnegie Institute, watched people slip down the back stairs to the rear door of the museum cafeteria; they had nice old Slovak ladies in there who wore clear plastic gloves and served spaetzle and ham and other heavy things. I thought about how I used to prefer that cafeteria to the dinosaurs, the diamonds, and even the mummies. Then I watched the impenetrable Cloud Factory, which was running full tilt, one ideal cloud after another flourishing from its valve and drifting off; they looked dry somehow, crisp and white against the dull, humid sky. I tilted back my head and blew big tangles of cigarette smoke into the air in time with the clicks of the Factory. That morning after breakfast, Phlox and I had screamed at each other for the first time. Now my hands were shaking.

She hadn't wanted me to leave her bed, or her breakfast table, or her lap as I sat in it, lacing my shoes. But I was getting anxious; it had been three days since I'd last spoken to Arthur or Cleveland, and three days, I calculated, was three percent of my summer, which seemed a terrible amount of time to lose. My clear June Technicolor dream of a summer spent fluttering ever upward, like a paper airplane over the heat and hubbub of Times Square, had not faded; all my stupid hopes were still pinned to the stupid two of them. I had to see Cleveland, that was what I felt, even if it was to enter with him the world I had said I never would enter. What I had screamed at Phlox was something else, however; I have no memory of what I said, but I'm sure it was irrational, nasty, and petty.

One cigarette later, I heard the loud, slobbering cough of Cleveland 's motorcycle. He popped the curb at the end of the Schenley Park bridge, and I started over to him, but then I saw that he'd killed the engine and was swinging off the saddle and hanging his helmet on the bar; so I stopped, and stood, and waited some more.

We shook hands, then he walked right past me, up to the padlocked gate of the Cloud Factory, where he put his fingers through the diamond-shaped gaps in the fence and looked up at the magic valve. I went to stand beside him, but watched his face and not the hissing white production, except for what I could see of it in the lenses of his eyeglasses. He was unshowered, his long hair limp and sticky, a black smudge on his cheek. From something about the expression on his face, the tense fold of his eyelids, the dry lips, I guessed that he was hung over, but he smiled up at the infant clouds and rattled the gate-happily, I thought.

"Careful," I said. "You might tear it off."

"I did once."

"Sure."

"You know, this damn Cloud Factory…" He tightened his grip on the wire and pulled.

"What?"

He looked at me. I watched his knuckles turn pale.

"Do you know where I'm taking you today?"

"I guess. Cleveland, what?"

"I'm broke, Bechstein, I don't have a dime." His voice sounded sandy.

"So? Look, I know why people start working for Uncle Lenny."

"No, you don't." He pulled harder on the thick wires of the fence. "No, you don't. To hell with money. And from hell with money. To and from hell with money. I'm broke…" His voice trailed off. "Something has to change. I love Jane, Bechstein."

I saw now that he was not just hung over; he was still drunk. He probably hadn't been to bed yet.

"You always tell me you love Jane when you're drunk." He didn't answer. "Okay, so let's go, Virgil. Shock me."

We went over to the big black BMW, leaving behind us two hand'sized bulges in the fence. You could still make them out from fifty yards away, two little blurs in the pattern of wire.

We rode through strange sections to a part of the city that I hardly knew. I knew, in fact, only that there was another good Italian restaurant somewhere around there; my father often mentioned it. We were at the foot of one of the hillside neighborhoods, its houses sparse up along the distant ridge, but coming thicker and thicker toward the bottom, like a cataract, one atop another, sideways and backward and connected by crazy catwalks and staircases, and all tumbling downhill to the river-the Allegheny or the Monongahela, I was not sure which. I made out some children playing on one of the few high streets that cut across the hillside, and a car, and two women talking on a far back porch.

Before he stopped the engine, Cleveland said something I didn't catch. In the sudden silence I asked him to repeat it.

"This, this is my country," he said, with a broad Charlton Heston sweep of his arm, "and these, these are my people."

We started up one of the concrete stairways, which shifted back and forth among the knots of houses, all the way to the top; it looked like a long way.

"There's a road, but I like to make a stealthy approach. Don't worry, we only have to go as far as the Second Circle." His heels tocked concrete, steadily, slowly, and our breath came more quickly with each landing.

"Is this a poor neighborhood?"

"About to get poorer."

"How much poorer?"

"Depends on the vig."

"The vig."

"Depends."

"Oh."

That was it for a while. Cleveland stopped once and mopped his forehead with a rose bandanna. He said the agents in his bloodstream were being oxidized too quickly. We were up in the midst of things now, and I looked back down to the motorcycle, and beyond it to the river, its water the color of the water in a jar of used paintbrushes.

"The lovely Monongahela, " I said.

"That's the Allegheny, Doctor Fact," said Cleveland. "Okay, I'm better now. Come."

Another few minutes of silent climbing brought us to a long road that ran perpendicular to the staircase. On the left the road curved all the way down the hill, and on the right it rose to the ridge, which, I now saw, was not as sparse as it had seemed from the bottom. There was a church up there, with a big red sign that said Jesus did something: saved, lived, gave-I couldn't make out the verb. Cleveland and I gasped for a few moments, then I followed him up the road. Two motorcycles flew past with a huge racket, and we hugged the shoulder to get out of their deafening way. They came extremely close, the near bike with its helmeted enormous rider almost nicking my hip. Cleveland tried to pound its back fender as it pulled away.

"Assholes. Jesus, I just relived every cigarette I ever smoked," he said, panting.

" Cleveland, why are you taking me here? Do I need to see this?"

"What do you think you're going to see?"

"Sad people."

"Never hurts to see sad people. Anyway, it'll give you something to tell your dad."

"Right." Dad. "Do you know what my dad would say if I told him I made the rounds with one of Lenny Stern's pickup boys? He'd say, 'I want you out of Pittsburgh. You've developed too many unsavory associates.' No, he'd say, 'Are you doing this to punish me, Art?'"

He spun and faced me. "I told you I'm not Lenny Stern's anything."

"Okay, okay."

"And what-is your father ashamed of what he is?"

"I'm ashamed."

"Well, maybe I'll tell him what we've been up to, then. You know I want to meet Joe the Egg."

I must have flinched at this nickname. "So you've said. "

"Sorry," he said, not very apologetically. "Look, here we are."

We reached the first house in a row of houses all built across the tiny stretch of earth that lay between the road and nothing, empty air. The houses were supported at the rear by an intricate and feeble-looking system of peeling gray two-by-fours that worked their capricious way down to concrete anchors set into the hill. The greenish paint was also peeling from the side of the first wooden house, which had one newspapered window cut into it, toward the top. We picked our way to the front door along a cracked walk littered with old toys, an enormous Sony television carton, and a soggy pink sneaker.

"I really would like to talk to your father," he whispered, knocking.

" Cleveland."

He patted me once on the shoulder, and then tapped again on the door, with the same hand.

The woman who answered Cleveland 's three lazy knocks had a nice smile that lasted for the fifth of a second before she realized who was at the door.

"He ain't here," she said, looking back and forth between us several times, not nervously but with annoyance, and as though memorizing our faces.

"Well, I am." There was an instant and very convincing meanness to his voice. "And there is that invisible man who has been so generous to your brother. He's here too. In spirit."

She glanced at me before realizing whom Cleveland meant: probably not Uncle Lenny, or whoever was over him, but one of the Stern soldiers. The woman, or girl- she looked about sixteen-had narrowed the space between the door and the jamb, and drawn her body back into the house, so that now only her face showed.

"Who is it?" a man shouted from somewhere within.

The girl blushed. Cleveland smiled.

"Wait," she said, and shut the door in our faces.

"Come in? No, thank you; I'll just wait right here on the porch." He turned toward me and smiled again, lit a cigarette, and leaned against the crumbling side of the house.

"Get a load of this ménage," he said. "I always come here first; it's my favorite."

"Ha."

"They're your father's kind of people."

"Come on, Cleveland, stop."

This time a tall, unshaven young man in an undershirt, with long black hair like Cleveland 's, opened the door, wide. His smile did not fade as his sister's had, but lingered too long, big and yellow and pitiful.

"Come on in."

We stepped into the house, which was full of odors. There was an immediate tart and sweaty smell of marijuana, and then, beneath or woven into that smell, fainter ones of tomato sauce, sex, and old furniture. The place looked grandmotherly and clean: easy chairs, frilly lamps, a beat-up china closet. The girl, her hair black like her brother's, sat on a sofa beside another young woman, who held a toddler on her lap. The little kid didn't look at us-he played with a toy helicopter. On the television, a game-show audience screamed out counsel.

"Who's this guy?" said the tall man, jerking his head at me.

"My dad," said Cleveland. "He doesn't believe I have a steady job."

We all laughed: we men, that is; the two women glared at Cleveland. Then we listened awhile to the television.

"Well," said Cleveland.

"Just give it to him and get them out of here. " It was the woman with the baby; she spoke into the top of the bald little head.

"Why don't you shut up." He reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out a black plastic wallet, which looked new, and took from it two crumpled twenties, which he handed to Cleveland. "Not this week," he said.

"No problem," said Cleveland, producing a small manda envelope from his own pocket and poking the bills into it. "No problem at all."

"They say they're going to be hiring back some guys before September, you know, so, like, well." He smiled that awful smile again.

Now the little boy climbed down from the woman's lap and lurched across the living room, stopping when he reached the three of us. He looked up at me, with a crease in his brow, and uttered a few syllables, very seriously.

"Yes, I know," I said.

After the door had closed behind us and we came down the shattered walk, I asked Cleveland what he found so remarkable about the household.

"They're both his sisters," he said.

There was a short silence while I digested this.

"Whose…?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's not even his. You should see them on a good day, though. Today they were all stoned. On a good day, that place is like a circus."

This made me angry.

" Cleveland. You- This is horrible. You're taking advantage of this unemployed guy, you walk into their house once a week and you ruin their day, I'll bet they have huge nghts after you leave, and you think the whole thing is funny. You get a kick out of it. Those people hate your guts. They hate you. How can you stand to look at that guy's shit-eating grin every week?"

"The world of business is built on shit-eating grins. "

"You can cut the fake cynicism, Cleveland."

"You're the economist. You know what economics is."

"I don't remember."

"You remember. It's the precise measurement of shit eating, it's the science of misery. Look, I have to think it's funny, don't I? Okay."

He stopped. We were halfway along the row of houses, and the sun had just come out, making it hotter than before. He bent down to pull the fabric of his jeans away from the backs of his knees, and I realized how stuck together I felt, too, and bent down alongside him.

"Okay. Look. I brought you along, Bechstein. I've never brought anyone before. No one else except Artie even knows that I do this. Jane doesn't know. And I would never have brought Lecomte. Why? I don't know. I'm not supposed to bring anybody at all. But for some reason I wanted you to see this. You should understand this. Can't you see why I do this?" He was almost shouting, seemingly angrier than I had been a moment before. Drops of sweat had pooled over his eyebrows and poured down the sides of his face. But I didn't believe him. I felt all at once like Arthur with his X-ray heart, and I was sure that Cleveland was misleading me somehow, that he did know why I was standing on that hill with him, soaking wet, ashamed, and in a sudden rage.

"Because it's easy," I shouted. "Because it's easy, and it pays well, and it makes you feel like you're better than the people you exploit."

I thought he was going to punch me. He made fists and kept them, barely, at his sides. Then the anger went out of his shoulders; he unbailed his hands and smiled, faintly.

"Wrong. No. Wrong. I do it because it is fun and fascinating work."

"Ah."

"See, I'm a people person." He gave an airy toss of his great head.

"I see."

"And also-I'm surprised that you haven't guessed this, Bechstein-I do it because-"

"I know," I said. "Because it is Bad."

He grinned and said, "I wear a rattlesnake for a necktie."

I laughed.

"I have a mojo hand," he said.

It was very difficult for me to admit it to myself, almost as difficult as it would have been to express admiration for my father's job and associates (and still I took his money), but collecting illegal interest on loans, although perhaps not fun, was terribly fascinating work. I had always felt pleasure on looking into the houses of strangers. As a child, coming home at sunset through the infinite chain of backyards that led from the schoolyard to our house, I would catch glimpses in windows of dining rooms, tables set for supper; of crayon drawings tacked to refrigerators, cartons of milk standing on counters; of feet on low hassocks, framed photographs, and empty sofas, all lit by the bland light of the television; and these quickly shifting tableaux, of strange furniture and the lives and families they divulged, would send me into a trance of curiosity. For a long time I thought that one became a spy in order to watch the houses of other people, to be confronted by the simple, wondrous fact of other kitchens, other clocks, and ottomans.

Cleveland took me to ten or twelve houses on that hill, and I stood in kitchens, on patios, wanting so little to watch the smarminess and resentment passed along with each ten-dollar bill that I noted every thing in each room, feverishly-the silk flowers on the televisions, the statues of Our Lady, the babies' stockings on the floors. At first I pretended that Cleveland was conducting me along the galleries of a Museum of Real Life, a series of careful, clever re-creations of houses, in which one could almost but not quite imagine plain and awful things happening, as though the houses were uninhabited, fake, and for my amusement; but by the seventh or eighth house, with its blue-veined pair of legs, filthy child, pretty sister, spoiled lunch hour, I was out of the museum. His "people" had me in their spell. They did not like him, nor did he care very much for them; but there was a basic, hard, genuine acquaintance, an odd kind of comfort between them and him, and I felt as though I were being shown, in this world that seemed somehow better than mine, yet another way in which I would never come to know Cleveland.

" Cleveland," said one older woman, whose husband had borrowed one hundred and fifty dollars at an endlessly compounding rate of interest long enough ago that she now thought of Cleveland in the same way she thought of the mailman, "you look more like Russell every day. It makes me want to cry." She'd been treating her hair when we arrived and now wore a see-through plastic babushka that crinkled when she shook her head. The whole place smelled of bad eggs.

"Why is that?"

"Do you know where Russell is right this minute?"

"At the mill?"

"Nope, he's in the bedroom sleeping off a hangover. And you've got that same swoll-up face that he does. You got a girl?"

"Yeah." I was surprised to see that he put his fingers to his cheeks and pressed them tentatively.

"Well, I feel sorry for her. You get uglier every week."