The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

2. A Free Atom

My father, solid, pink, handsome, used to say that he was a professional golfer and an amateur painter. His actual career was knowledge I was not fully permitted until the age of thirteen, when it was conferred on me along with the right to read from the Torah. I had always liked his watercolors, orange, pale, reminiscent of Arizona, but not as much as I liked the cartoons he could draw-never if one asked or begged him to, not even if one cried, but when he was suddenly seized, magically, perversely, with the urge to draw a picture of a top-hatted clown on one's bedroom chalkboard, in seven colors.

His comings and goings inside the house, accompanied always by the stink of cigars and the creaking of whatever piece of furniture he had chosen to receive the weight of his gangster body, were a great source of mystery and speculation for me on those nights when we'd both be up with insomnia, the family disease; I resented the fact that because he was old, he could roam around, painting, reading books, watching television, while I had to stay in bed, trying brutally to make myself fall asleep. Some Sunday mornings I would come downstairs, very early, to find him, having already surmounted the titanic Sunday Post, doing his sit-ups on the back porch, awake for the twenty-ninth or thirtieth straight hour.

Before the day of my bar mitzvah I was certain that, with his incredible but rarely displayed powers of mind and body, my father had a secret identity. I realized that the secret identity would have to be my father. Hundreds of times I looked in his closets, in the basement, under furniture, in the trunk of the car, on a fruitless hunt for his multicolored superhero (or supervillain) costume. He suspected my suspicions, I think, and every couple of months would encourage them, by demonstrating that he could drive our car without touching the steering wheel, or by unerringly trapping, with three fingers, flies and even bumblebees in midflight, or by hammering nails into a wall with his bare fist.

He'd been on the point of telling me the truth about his work, he said much later, on the day of my mother's funeral, six months shy of my thirteenth birthday. But his half-brother, my Uncle Sammy "Red" Weiner, made him stick to his original plan to wait until I put on a tallis for the first time. So instead of telling me the truth about his job on that bright, empty Saturday morning, as we sat at the kitchen table with the sugar bowl between us, he told me, softly, that she had died in an automobile accident. I remember staring at the purple flowers painted on the sugar bowl. The funeral I hardly recall. The next morning, when I asked my father, as usual, for the funny papers and the sports page, an odd look crossed his face, and he looked away. "The paper didn't come today," he said. During the night Marty had moved in. He had often come to stay with us in the past, and I liked him-he knew a poem about Christy Mathewson, which he would recite as often as I asked, and once, for an instant, I had seen the gun he wore inside his jacket, under his left arm. He was a thin little man who always wore a tie and a hat.

Marty never moved out. He would drive me to school in the morning, or sometimes take me on sudden vacations to Ocean City, and I did not have to go to school at all. It would be a long time before I knew the circumstances of the abrupt removal from the world of my singing mother, but I must have sensed that I had been lied to, because I never asked about her, or hardly even mentioned her, ever again.

When, on the afternoon of my bar mitzvah, my father first revealed to me his true profession, I enthusiastically declared that I wanted to follow in his glamorous footsteps. This made him frown. He had long ago resolved to buy me college and "unsoiled hands." He had been the first Bech-stein to get a degree, but had been drawn into the Family (the Maggios of Baltimore) by the death of a crucial uncle, and by the possibilities that had just begun to open up for a man with a business degree and a C.P.A. He lectured me sternly-almost angrily. I had, after years of searching, finally discovered the nature of my father's work, and he forbade me to admire him for it. I saw that it inspired in him an angry shame, so I came to associate it with shame, and with the advent of manhood, which seemed to separate me, in two different ways, from both my parents. I never afterward had the slightest desire to tell his secret to any of my friends; indeed, I ardently concealed it.

My first thirteen years, years of ecstatic, uncomfortable, and speechless curiosity, followed by six months of disaster and disappointment, convinced me somehow that every new friend came equipped with a terrific secret, which one day, deliberately, he would reveal; I need only maintain a discreet, adoring, and fearful silence.

When I met Arthur Lecomte, I immediately settled in to await his revelation. I formulated a hundred questions about homosexuality, which I didn't ask. I wanted to know how he'd decided that he was gay, and if he ever felt that his decision was a mistake. I would very much have liked to know this. Instead I drank beers, quite a few of them, and I began my patient vigil.

Perhaps five seconds after I realized that we were standing on a loud street corner, surrounded by Mohawks and black men with frankfurters, and were no longer in the bar with a strangling ashtray and a voided pitcher between us, a white Fiat convertible with an Arab in it pulled up and honked at us.

"Abdullah, right?"

"Hey, Abdullah!" Arthur shouted, running around to the passenger's seat and diving into the red splash of interior.

"Hey, Abdullah," I said. I still stood on the sidewalk. I had drunk very much very quickly and wasn't following the action of the film too well. Everything seemed impossibly fast and lit and noisy.

"Come on!" shouted the blond head and the black head. I remembered that we were going to a party.

"Go on, asshole," someone behind me said.

"Arthur!" I said. "Did I have a backpack at some earlier point this evening?"

"What?" he shouted.

"My backpack!" I was already on my way back into the bar. Everything was darker, quieter; glancing at the Pirates game flashing silently, in awful color, over the bald head of the bartender, I ran to our booth and grabbed my sack. It was better, there in the ill light, and I stopped; I felt as though I had forgotten to breathe for several minutes.

"My backpack," I said to the ganged-up waitresses who chewed gum and drank coffee at a table by the dead jukebox.

"Uh huh," they said. "Ha ha." In Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anywhere else in our languid nation, a barmaid does not care.

On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Freud painting cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Fiat full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.

I walked out to the car. They said to get in, get in. Between the backs of the bucket seats and the top of the trunk was a space the size of a toaster.

"Go and fit yourself there," said Abdullah, craning around to shine his brown movie-star face into my eyes. "Tell him, make the boot a seat, Arthur." He spoke with a French accent.

"The boot?" I threw in my backpack. "Now there's no room for me," I said.

"The trunk. He calls it the boot, " said Arthur, smiling. Lecomte had a hard, sarcastic smile, which made only rare appearances, chiefly when he meant to persuade or to ridicule, or both. Sometimes it surfaced only to give a kind of cruel warning, come far too late, of the plans that he had made for you, a genuine smile of false reassurance, the smile Montresor cast at Fortunato, hand on the trowel in his pocket. "You have to sit on the edge of the trunk, where the roof folds up. "

And this, though I have always been easily terrified, did.

We pulled into the heavy Saturday-night traffic on Forbes Avenue, and perhaps because of the incident I'd witnessed earlier, the welter of taillights around me-so near and red!-reminded me of police sirens.

"Is this legal, what I'm doing?" I yelled into the overwhelming slipstream.

Arthur turned around. His hair blew across his face, and the cigarette he had lit threw bright ash, like a sparkler.

"No!" he shouted. "So don't fall out! Abdullah has a lot of tickets already!"

The people in the cars that managed to pull alongside the Fiat gave me the same shake of the head and roll of the eyes that I myself had often given other young drunks in fast cars. I decided not to think about them, which proved to be a simple thing, and stared into the wind, and into the steady flow of streetlights. Gradually, lathed and smoothed by my five hasty drinks, I recognized only the speed Abdullah expertly gathered, and the whine of the tires on the blacktop, so fragrant and near my head. Then the wind died as we fell into a red light at Craig and stopped.

I took out my cigarettes and lit one in the momentary stillness. Arthur turned again, looking slightly surprised not to find me livid, sick, or half-unconscious.

"Hey, Arthur," I said.

"Hey what?"

"You work in the library, right?"

"Yes."

"Who's the Girl Behind Bars?"

"Who?"

"By the elevators on the ground floor. A window. Bars. There's a girl in there."

"You must mean Phlox."

"Phlox? Her name is Phlox? There are girls named Phlox?"

"She is nuts," said Arthur, with mingled scorn and enthusiasm. Then his eyes widened, as though something had occurred to him. "A punk," he said slowly. "They call her Mau Mau."

"Mau Mau," I repeated.

When the light changed, Abdullah pulled left quickly, only signaling for the turn after he was halfway into it.

"What are you doing, Dudu?" said Arthur.

"Dudu?" I asked.

"Ahshit! We go to Riri's!" said Abdullah. He seemed to have just recalled that we had an actual destination.

"Dudu," I said again. "Riri's."

"You should have kept going up Forbes, Dudu," said Arthur, laughing at me. "Riri's house is straight up Forbes Avenue."

"Okay, yes, I know, shut up," shouted Abdullah. He made a U in the fortunately bare middle of Craig Street, and pulled, with a loud rumor of tires, back out onto the avenue. Despite the sixty-mile-an-hour wind, his black hair lay fat and shiny and motionless on his head, like ersatz hair of papier-mâché and varnish. Another happy cloud of dullness bloomed and settled over my senses. I tossed away my cigarette and took up my position once more, clenching the chrome luggage rack behind me and taking great swallows of air, like a jet engine.

Riri's house was a Tudor hugeness off the campus of Chatham College, where her widowed father, Arthur told me as we climbed the driveway to the front door, taught Farsi, and from which he took many sabbaticals, as he now had; his house poured light all over its immense lawn, and the neighborhood rang with loud music.

"You are now glad that you came," Abdullah said to me, rather irrelevantly shaking my hand. Then he barged into the pounding foyer.

"Gee, thanks," I said.

"It's nice that your old girlfriend was so understanding," Arthur said, nearly smiling.

I'd faked an apologetic telephone call to Claire, explaining to the dial tone that something had come up, I wouldn't be able to make dinner, and that I was sorry she had gone to so much trouble for me for nothing, which last, I'd reminded myself, was certainly true.

"Ha. Yes. Where is Dudu from?"

" Lebanon," said Arthur, and then a lovely brown woman in a sarong approached, with a delighted look and arms spread, preparing a brace of wide hugs.

"Dudu! Arthur!" she cried. Her eyes were large and brown, made up with gold flecks and three mingled eye shadows, and her hair was shot through with colorful objects, lacquered chopsticks, and bits of feather and crepe. I stood by the open door, watching the traded embraces, keeping a patient, big, phony smile on my face. Dudu cried out, cursed in French, and ran deep into the house, with a grim, insane look on his face, as if in pursuit of some prey he'd finally cornered after a million-year hunt. Our greeter, whom I took to be Riri, had splendid shoulders, which fell, smoothly and unhindered by clothing, to the bouncing top of her flowered wrapper. Like many Persian women, she had an eagling kind of beauty, hooked and dark, and mean about the eyes. After she had kissed her two boys, she turned to me and held out a hostesslike cute hand.

"Riri, this is my friend, Art," said Arthur.

"Delighted," I said.

"Oh, delighted!" said Riri. "So polite! All your friends are so polite, Arthur! Come in! Everyone is here! Everyone is drunk-but politely! You'll feel quite at home! Come into the parlor!"

She turned and walked into the parlor, a large, red-curtained room, which deserved its antique name. It was filled with vases, people drinking, and a grand piano.

"Is it really that obvious?" I whispered, close to Arthur's ear but not too close.

"You mean that you're polite?" He laughed. "Yes, it's embarrassingly obvious-you're making a well-mannered fool of yourself. "

"Well, let's get rude, then," I said. "Is there a bar?"

"Wait," he said, grabbing me by the elbow. "I want you to meet someone."

"Who?"

He led me through a web of kids, most of whom seemed to be foreign, holding a drink, and smoking a cigarette of one kind or another. Some halted their loud conversations and turned to greet Arthur, who gave all an able, curt, and rather arrogant "Hi." He seemed to be well-liked, or at least to command respect. Many of the small bundles of people tried to enclose him in their conversations as he passed.

"Where are you taking me?" I said. I tried to sound apprehensive.

"To meet Jane."

"Oh, good. Who is she?"

" Cleveland 's girlfriend. I think she's here-just a second. Stay here for a second, okay? I'm sorry. Be right back. I'm sorry about this, but I see someone, um-" said Arthur, and he unhooked me and vanished.

I stayed, and surveyed, and wondered at all the handsome women of many lands. He had deposited me in a corner of the parlor with a towering piece of furniture, which I leaned upon and cooled my cheek against. Many of those I saw had brown skins, every lovely grade of brown: Iranians, Saudis, Peruvians, Kuwaitis, Guatemalans, Indians, North Africans, Kurds-who knew? Caucasian women were draped about like bits of pale lace; and there were boys with interesting headgear and Lacoste shirts, or ill-fitting gabardine suits, laughing and eyeing the women. Arthur studied in that department of the university to which rich or very aggressively lucky foreign children are sent, to learn to administer great sums of international money and the ills of their homelands. Diplomacy, he'd said, when I'd asked him where his future lay.

''I go to these parties to practice," he'd said. "There are factions, alliances, secrets, debts, and a lot of messing around-I mean, of course, sexual messing around. And they all see themselves as Iranians, Brazilians, whatever, but I-I don't see myself as an American: I'm an atom, I bounce all over the place, like a mercenary. No, not a mercenary, a free agent-a free atom-isn't that something in chemistry? I'm always at the outside orbit of all the other, um, molecules?"

"I don't think that's it," I'd said. "I forget what a free atom is. I think you've made it up."

The parlor was noisy, smoky, jammed, and gorgeous. At the shah's fall, Riri's father had smuggled out a modest planeload of carpets and statuary, and these rather grimly gay furnishings made his daughter's party seem dark, ornate, and somehow villainous. I looked into the glass panels of the cabinet that held me up; it was filled with daggers and eggs. The eggs were large enough to have been laid by emus, and jeweled, painted. Delicate hinged doors, cut from the shells, opened onto miniature scenes of courtly, contortionist Persian love in 3-D. The artist had paid more attention to the figurines' limbs and genitalia than to their faces; the little twisted lovers wore that cowlike expression you see in Asian erotic art, which contrasts so oddly with the agonized knot of bodies. The daggers displayed their hilts but hid their blades in fantastic sheaths of blue velvet and dyed leathers. Scattered here and there on the glass shelves of the cabinet were cunning, unidentifiable implements of silver.

"What do you think?" It was Arthur. Though his tone was light, he looked angry, or preoccupied, anyway.

"I think Riri's father is a white slaver. Say, this is some party." I tried to get that tone of slogan in my voice. Then I chanced a slight indiscretion. "Did you find 'someone um'?'

He evaded the question, physically. He averted his eyes, and blushed, like a maiden, like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park . All at once I liked him, his firm grace with others, his unlikely modesty, the exotic parties he attended. The desire to befriend him came over me suddenly and certainly, and, as I debated and decided not to shake his hand yet again, I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I'd been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls.

"No," he said at last. "'Someone urn' has already been found and disposed of." He looked off into the blare.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Forget it. Let us find the lovely Jane."