The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

21. The End of the World

One morning about a week into the strange new August, I was awakened by a telephone call from a woman at the Hillman Library, who told me, in a stunningly icy tone of voice, that I'd been sent several notices informing me of Sigmund Freud's Selected Letters to Wilhelm Fliess having fallen due on June I0, and that if I did not return the book immediately, my grade transcripts would be frozen, or something like that, endangering all my future employment opportunities, and that if this did not persuade me, the matter would be referred to a collection agency.

"I returned that book in July," I said, rubbing my eyes, remembering the day very clearly. I'd received no notices, but since I'd moved at the beginning of the summer, I supposed they hadn't been forwarded.

"Urn, well," she said, her voice melting for a moment. "If that's the case, you have to come down to the library, in person. Yes, to initiate a Search and Recovery."

Of course, I'd been carefully avoiding going anywhere near the Hillman Library. I walked into work along back streets, ate my lunch in the workroom of the bookstore, and I was constantly on the alert and ready to run at the first glimpse of a certain aqua ribbon. Arthur and I, through an unacknowledged and unspoken agreement, didn't discuss his days at work, and if he had any nasty encounters by the card catalogues or at the water fountain, or if vicious rumors about him began to circulate through Reference, Acquisitions, and Gifts and Exchanges, I never found out about them. I begged the righteous librarian to allow me to initiate a Search and Recovery over the telephone, but she would hear nothing of it. I was in midsentence when she hung up.

Arthur had the day off. I found the scrap of paper on which I'd written down his new number, and called him to find out what he knew about Searches and Recoveries, but I got only his sleepy voice on his latest answering machine. He was spending the day, I remembered, with the lovely Riri, at her cousin's out in Latrobe, something he'd been promising her for months.

"This is Art," I said, after the tone, "and I'm about to enter the jaws of death."

Thus I resigned myself, thinking that at least it would be simpler, somehow, if he was not at the library when I finally reentered it, which, half an hour later, I did. Fans of the unconscious will be interested to note that I'd taken care to dress well, in summer colors-pleated khaki pants, white shirt with salmon pinstripes, loosely knotted Hong Kong cotton tie. I hurried up to the tall, actorish fellow who worked behind the front desk, and I looked cautiously around me as I approached him.

"I'm here to initiate a Search and Recovery," I said.

He blinked his entire face.

"P-pardon?"

"I got a call today from someone here who said that I had to initiate a Search and Recovery." I glanced over my shoulder, toward the elevators, expecting at any minute to be spotted and seized.

"Uh huh," he said. "I see."

Libraries, I knew, are frequently the haunts of twitching, mumbling paranoid schizophrenics, researching their grandiose conspiracies, and so I was embarrassed by the look he gave me, which suggested that my insistence on Search and Recovery was probably due to my fervent belief that Richard Nixon, Stephen King, and Anita Loos were intimately connected to the sinking of the Titanic and the disappearance of Errol Flynn's son in Cambodia.

"It's some form I'm supposed to fill out," I said.

"Oh? I've never heard of it. Do you know who you spoke to? No? Maybe you'd better go back to Administration and ask."

"Um. I was afraid-I was hoping-do you think you could go back and ask for me? Ha ha. See, there's someone who works in the back offices that I'd rather not run into."

His eyes lit up and he wiggled his eyebrows. With very dramatic deliberation, he reached behind him for a stool and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it against his temple.

"Be brave," he said.

It was perfect. I stopped dead at the entrance to the elevator corridor, and there she was, behind her bars, dressed to kill, pearls, blue sundress. Her locks were lighter than ever, nearly strawberry blond, pulled up and wrapped into a palm tree of hair that rose from her head and spilled its bright ends outward in a silly, fetching spray. She raised her face, which was suntanned and barely painted, the stalk of hair swayed, and whatever expression I expected to see- rage, embarrassment, unrecognition-was absent. She grinned. It was all I could do then, in the flash of her old, unlooked-for smile, to keep myself from running to press my face against the grille, into the window that I loved so much. But I kept a grip on myself and slowly came, self-conscious, suddenly stiff-legged, and holding out my hands, as though to catch a spinning beach ball. As I passed the elevators, their Up arrows lit and chimed, one, two. The doors slid open with the sound of murmured approval, and the corridor behind me filled with a little audience.

"Phlox," I said, fifteen inches away from her lips. "Oh, Phlox."

"Do you love me?" she said, still seated, radiant with patience and anticipation, and obviously feeling that she held the strings. Her light, unconcerned tone of voice might as easily have said, May I help you?

I didn't stop to think, and said that I did.

"Wait," she said. She stood, turned from me, and walked out of the office, swinging her hips, and she came around to the other side of the window, where our hands went out, our fingers tangled, and I put my mouth to hers. After we'd kissed for a minute, with all her well-informed co-workers watching us through the magic grille, she drew back and looked at me, without a trace of hurt or anger on her face. There was only half-suppressed mirth, the rapid blinking of disbelief. She cocked her head to one side.

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"Hush," she said, and giggled. "Come on."

She took my hand and pulled me down the hall, into the stairwell, her white pumps tocking against the tiled floor. For a second I shut my eyes just to listen to the promising clatter, to think once again, Ah, there's a woman coming; here comes a woman. Under the staircase we kissed, pushing our hips together. We began to get the same wild notion then; she grabbed at my hand with both of her hands, walking backward, and pulled me up the stairs, to the third floor of the library, where there were, all around the outer walls, tiny dark rooms, with tiny desks, that the library rented to graduate students.

"They're locked, aren't they?"

"Not this one," she said, tugging me toward a door, which opened with a twist of her flushed hand.

"How do you know about this?" I slipped in behind her, whispering, and she closed the door.

"Hush," she said. "Everyone knows about this. Sit down, we'll have to be quick. Here."

She leaned forward to unzip my pants, like a child unwrapping a doll. They fell and puddled around my ankles. I sat.

"Oh," said Phlox, touched, when she saw my erection. "It's so lovely."

"It is?"

"It's so handsome and polite." She hitched up her dress; no panties.

"Were you prepared for this?" I said, this suspicion dawning on me, honestly, for the first time.

"I've been prepared for this for a week now," she said, taking my fingers. "Just feel how prepared I am."

Down upon me she settled herself, wiggling, making the necessary adjustments, and there, once again, were the aptness, the welcome give of giving skin, the warmth, the human and fragrant slipperiness, and I sighed as though I ached in every muscle and were sinking into a hot bath. In sixty seconds it was all over, and it had all begun again.

But it was different.

That evening, Phlox called to invite me to dinner, and without hesitation I said that I would be right over. Abandoning the necktie this time, I brushed my teeth, grabbed my keys, slapped three flaques of cologne around my open collar. Just as I was closing the door behind me, the telephone rang again, and knowing that it was probably Arthur, I clapped my hands over my ears and took the twenty-six steps two at a time. Walking the streets to Phlox's house, as so many times before-past that mailbox, past that airy, rampant bed of cosmos, past that old man, oh yes, with the neck brace and the Pomeranian-making the old approach to her apartment through that eternal oily puddle and the stink of that ginkgo tree, I was filled with a frail and sad exhilaration, which I really ought to have recognized for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there-for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time. There was nothing to eat when I arrived, nothing at all, and we threw our bodies together and fell onto the hard, scratching carpet. We didn't stand, this time, for two hours, until she could no longer hold her water.

"Mau Mau," I said, when she came back from the toilet. The forbidden name spilled out, although I'd forgotten it completely until this moment.

"Oh, Art, it's been so long."

I said yes, it had, but we were talking, I think, about two different things.

"What's happening?" I said. "What is this?"

"Lust," she said. "I believe it's frenzied lust." She giggled.

"Did you arrange that phone call this morning?"

"What phone call was that?" she said, meeting my eyes but turning a bit red.

"Mau Mau. It was never like this before, Mau Mau."

"We have to take each other back."

"I'm back," I said. And lying beside her on the floor of her living room, with my arm beneath her head, her breath against my shoulder, the orange plaid of last light falling on the carpet, I felt, for a little minute, that I really had returned. I felt weak, languid, as though I'd been for a swim. Phlox spoke into my ear, apologizing, scolding sweetly, and as she spoke, a breeze stirred the damp hairs of my groin, so that it was as though her words raised the goose flesh along my arms and legs, gently chilled me, and I curled myself around her and said, "I'm back." Yet as the aftereffects of the drug of sex began to wear off, as my worldly strength returned, as the circulation in my pinned arm was cut off and my hand fell asleep, I began to doubt, to worry, to search my heart. I did not know if I was truly still in love with Phlox or simply blowing off some final heterosexual steam. I thought, with a guilty pang, of Arthur, and remembered his having said once that there was no such thing as bisexuality, that you were either one thing or the other. I guess I still believed in absolutes. I didn't know what I would tell him now when I saw him again, or if indeed there was something I should be telling Phlox, right this minute, before things went any further. I grew more and more uncomfortable, bound up in Phlox's arms on the rough carpet. I wanted a cigarette, wanted to unstick my prickling skin from hers. When she began to talk about the letter she'd left on my doorstep, laughing as though it had been twenty years since then, I sat bolt upright.

"The letter!" I said.

"I know, and I'm so sorry, Artichoke. Come back here," she said, pulling at my shoulders. "I can't even remember what I wrote. I know it must've been pretty silly."

"No!"

"You didn't think so?"

"No, I-well." I stood, ashamed, looking around and around for the shirt that I'd thrown off. I took a deep breath. "I lost it."

"Art!"

"No, I mean, Cleveland has it." The shirt was halfway across the room, my cigarettes in its pocket, and I tore for a while at the almost empty pack. Anything but meet her gaze.

" Cleveland! Why does he have my letter?"

"I'll get it back, don't worry. He picked it up by mistake. " The match flowered. "And lately I haven't seen him; he's been, ah, busy."

"I saw him the other day," she said, slowly. "He didn't say anything about it."

Now I turned to face her. "You did? Where?"

"But he was very strange. Art. He didn't read my letter?"

"Strange? What did he do?"

"Art, did Cleveland read my extremely private and personal letter?" She stood up now, hands on her naked hips, tossed her flyaway hair. Nearly all the light had drained from the room.

"No," I said. "Of course not."

"Well." She came over, took me in her arms, kissed me; I'd just inhaled a lungful of smoke; we parted and I exhaled gratefully, hating myself for having lied, and for having waited impatiently for the kiss to end. "I don't suppose it would really have mattered if he did, " she said.

"And he might have, you know, by now," I said lamely. "Knowing Cleveland."

"It doesn't matter." She kissed me again, a happy, dismissive peck. "I'm starved. Let's get a pizza delivered, how about?"

We half-dressed and sat on separate sides of the win-dowsill, legs entwined, watching the street for the appearance of the pizza man.

"I've been walking a lot, Art," she said, running a finger down my shin. "Very long walks, since-since our problems. Sometimes it helps me figure things out. Sometimes I just go and go without a single thought in my head."

"Alone?" I said. It was difficult to imagine Phlox setting out for a long excursion, or for anything at all, all by herself.

"Yes, alone. I've gotten much better at being alone lately."

"It's only been ten days, Phlox. You keep making it sound like I've been off sailing around the Horn."

"Well, I'm not good at being alone. It was a long ten days."

She looked away, pretending to watch two hopping robins down on the little lawn, though at first I didn't see that she was just pretending. At first I saw only her profile, that outline I knew so well, and the dim light falling past it to her ear, the mass of familiar shadows and glints, the darkness along the side of her straight nose, the tiny lights in the hairs of her upper lip, and it pleased me, as it always did, her profile, so that I was impelled now to look more closely, to toss my gaze quickly across it as across a painting reproduced in an artbook, to try to see the whole and its parts at the same time, to bear in mind the regular profile but remark the Egyptian effect of her slightly pointed chin, the fine join of earlobe and jaw, the bone beneath her eye, and as I looked, it was no longer a profile, for profiles, really, don't exist; it was Phlox's face; and I had loved it. And then, suddenly, I saw motion, the tightening of her lower lip, the flaring of her nostril, the tears that dwindled down her cheek, and I saw that she pretended to look down at the birds in the grass.

When we went to bed that night it was loud and fast again, again she took control, and I found myself, inevitably perhaps, crouching on my elbows and knees-that way; I twisted and buried my face. She said, then, in an odd, clear voice which cut through everything, that she wished she could fuck me, that there must be a way, and something very primitive deep inside me awoke with a start. I rolled over, panting, but came to a definite halt. Phlox began to sob, and I wondered, unclenching my fists, if she was crying because the thing she'd wished for had frightened her, or because she could not have it, or if it was because she knew, now, that she could have it, because somehow I had been changed.

"I didn't mean it," she said, tumbling over onto the bed.

"All right," I said. I knelt beside her, ran my fingers through her faded hair. I said things that I forgot as soon as I said them. In ten minutes we were going at it again, and although I'd wanted it to be more gentle this time, had wanted to embrace, to linger, in no time at all it was exactly like wrestling; we bit and exclaimed, and I found myself twisting her into the pose I'd held just a little while before. I stared all the way down her glistening back to the tangle of her distant head.

"Can I?" I said.

"Do you want to?"

"Can I?"

"Yes," she said. "You'd better. Now."

I went to her cluttered vanity and scooped out a dollop of cold petroleum jelly, prepared everything Arthur had trained me so well to prepare, but immediately on entering that pinched, plain orifice of so little character, I lost heart, because I simply could not understand what I was about to do; it was neither backward nor forward, or else it was both at the same time, but it was too confusing for me to desire it anymore, and I said, "It's all a mistake."

"It is not," she said. "Go, ah! go. Slow, baby." When we were through, and we'd collapsed, she said that it had hurt and it had felt all right, that it was frightening as sex could be, and I said that I knew it. We stopped talking. I felt her grow heavy, heard the slow gathering of her breath. I slipped out of bed and went to find my clothes. Dressing furtively in the darkness, pulling on each sock, I felt very happy, for one instant, as though I were rising at three in the morning for a fishing trip, and there were sandwiches and apples to be packed away. I decided not to leave a note.

Halfway home under the clear, starry sky and the un-haloed streetlamps, I had yet to form a single coherent thought, a plan of action, when it came to me that I'd forgotten to ask Phlox about Cleveland and the thing he'd said or done that was strange, and I saw then that I didn't really care. Like that, like a spasm, I spat and wished that the summer were over. Immediately afterward I felt ashamed; I covered my mouth as though I'd blasphemed or something. But a strong desire overtook me to go away, to take a plane out that morning, to go to Mexico, as Arthur had done once, and live irresponsibly in a little pink hotel; or to Italy, to sleep through blinding afternoons in a half-fallen villa; or to vanish into the railroad wastes of North America. My only commerce would be with prostitutes and bartenders. I would send postcards without a return address.

"No," I said aloud, "don't give up." But I was still fantasizing halfheartedly about the places I might visit, and the simple life that I would lead in them, when I reached my front door and heard the telephone ringing inside.

"How was Latrobe?" I said.

"Been out?"

"Yes, I've been-" I was on the point of lying, but I saw, for once and with disheartening clarity, the outcome of whatever stupid lie I might manage. I would only involve myself over again in all the tedious nonsense of juggling Arthur and Phlox. I looked at my watch, exhaled, and told him he'd better come over.

"No," he said, "I'll meet you."

Arthur house-sat now for a poli-sci professor who lived up in the hills of north Oakland, and so we met roughly halfway, at the statue of Johann Sebastian Bach in front of the Carnegie Institute, not far from the Cloud Factory. It was cool for a summer night; I shivered, sorry I'd worn only a sweatshirt, sorry that we stood so far apart, on the sidewalk beneath the giant green Bach. I was sorry, too, that the air was cold between us, that even under the best of circumstances he could not just put his arm around me and hold me to him, because this was Pittsburgh and J.S. or somebody might see, and so we stood with our hands in our pockets, two young men struggling to be in love and about to have it out.

"I slept with Phlox," I said.

"Oh, Jesus, let's walk somewhere." He'd dressed quickly; his sneakers didn't match, his shirt was half-untucked-he'd already been to bed at least once before I answered my phone. And I have to admit that it was right then, as I blurted out what I'd just done, and his unshaven, stray-hair face creased with a kind of prissy annoyance, that I felt the first failure of the emotion I was about to profess.

"How did it happen?"

"How do you think?" I said, snapping because it looked as if things were going that way. "No, Arthur, I'm sorry; it happened very strangely, actually, and I don't really get it at all."

We passed the bronze Shakespeare with his great domed head, the bronze Stephen Foster eternally serenaded by the pickaninny with the bronze banjo, and I saw that we would end up in our usual place high above the Lost Neighborhood, which we did, silently, taking up our usual slouches against the iron rail. The sky glowed and flashed orange, off toward the mills in the south, as if volcano gods were fighting there or, it seemed to me, as if the end of the world had begun-it was an orange so tortured and final.

He took hold of my elbow, firmly, and turned me till I faced him. Again that day I expected to see anger, and again I was disappointed.

"Art, don't leave me," he said, an unfamiliar look on his face, cheeks hollow, eyes rolling. I'd never seen his face reveal anything before. "I've been so afraid that this would happen. I knew when you weren't home all night. I knew it."

"I had no idea," I said. "It was all a big accident. Or that is, she planned it. I fell into it. I can't say what it really means. It was so strange tonight, Arthur." My throat tightened. All the sexual battle and stress of the day, the confusion of my final bout with Phlox, the loveliness of her lacy bedroom, and the power of her face mounted within me and came spilling out. Arthur held out his fingers and lightly brushed my cheek.

"What is it? Art. Come on. Don't cry."

"I don't know what I'm like anymore," I said. "I do dumb things."

"Shh."

"Don't ask me to choose. Please."

"I won't," he said, shortly, as though it cost him some effort. "Just don't leave me."

I stopped crying. Everything seemed utterly upside down. The Arthur I thought I knew would be scorning me now, and ridiculing Phlox, and forcing me to admit that she'd suckered me. He would be forcing me to acknowledge that if I didn't love him, Arthur F. Lecomte, with all the hip places he had been, the perfect manner of the life he led, his sarcastic brilliance, his hard amusement, and, most of all, the male company he could offer me, then I was a fool, a loser, and entirely my father's obedient boy; cursed, doomed to lose the things my father had lost-art, love, integrity, and all that. A shift, another shift, had taken place. Somehow it was up to me now, and I wanted to know why.

"Did something else happen to you today?" I said. "Something with Riri?"

Arthur sat down on a step and looked down onto the miniature lights of the Lost Neighborhood.

"I took this test," he said. "I didn't tell you. I took the foreign service exam. I failed. I knew when I came out of the room, really, but I got the letter this afternoon."

I sat beside him and put my arm across his shoulders.

"So? You can take it again, can't you?" I tried to think of when he must have taken it.

"I'm twenty-five. I'm still in college. I'm queer. My lover is about to leave me for Deanna Durbin." He threw a stone. "I've been chasing after the same things for a long time now."

"I love you," I said.

"You're a sexual dilettante," he said. "You have no idea."

We made love on the steps. I threw up. He walked me home, told me a bad joke, and we climbed into my narrow bed. In two hours there was daylight at the window and a Wedgwood sky.