The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

3. Some People Really Know How to Have a Good Time

To find Jane Bellwether, who acquired a last name and a few vague features during our search, we passed out of the jumping seraglio and through a long series of quieter, darker rooms, until we came to the kitchen, which was white. All the lights shone from overhead, and, as is sometimes the case with kitchens at large parties, an unwholesome-looking group, all the heavy drinkers and eaters, had convened in the fluorescence. Its members all looked at us as we entered the kitchen, and I had the distinct impression that a word had not been said in there for several minutes prior to our arrival.

"Say! Hi, Takeshi," Arthur said to one of two blenched Japanese who stood near the refrigerator.

"Arthur Lecomte!" he yelled. He was well more than half in the bag. "This is my friend Ichizo. He goes to C-MU."

"Hi, Ichizo. Glad to meet you."

"My friend," Takeshi continued, his voice rising, "is very horny. My friend say that if I were a girl, he would fuck me."

I laughed, but Arthur stood straight, looked deeply, beautifully sympathetic for perhaps a tenth of a second, and nodded, with that fine, empty courtesy he seemed to show everyone. He had an effortless genius for manners; remarkable, perhaps, just because it was unique among people his age. It seemed to me that Arthur, with his old, strange courtliness, would triumph over any scene he chose to make; that in a world made miserable by frankness, his handsome condescension, his elitism, and his perfect lack of candor were fatal gifts, and I wanted to serve in his corps and to be socially graceful.

"Does any of you know Jane Bellwether?" said Arthur.

The louts, so morose, so overfed and overliquored, said no. None looked at us, and it seemed to me, in the exaggerating way that things seemed to me that exaggerated evening, as though they could not stand the sight of Arthur, or of me in his magic company, in our Technicolor health and high spirits, in our pursuit of the purportedly splendid Jane Bellwether.

"Try on the patio," one, some kind of Arab, finally said, through a white mouthful of shrimp. "There are many people sporting out there."

We came out into the yellow light of the back porch, that estival old yellow of Bug Lite, which had illuminated the backyards and soft moth bodies of so many summers past. It was untrue; there were not many people sporting on the murky lawn, though a large group had gathered with their drinks and their light sweaters. Only one young woman sported, and the rest watched her.

"That's Jane," Arthur said.

She stood alone in the dim center of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighborhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of the grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father's ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long. She looked tall, thin, and, in the bad light, rather gray in her white golf skirt and shirt. Her face was blank with concentration. Thik! and she smiled, shaking out her yellow hair, and we clapped. She fished in her pocket for a ball and teed it.

"She's plastered," a girl said, as though that were all the explanation we might require.

"She's beautiful," I heard myself say. Some of the spectators turned toward me. "I mean, her stroke is absolutely perfect. Look at that."

She smashed another one, and a few moments later I heard the distant sound of the ball striking metal.

"Jane!" Arthur shouted. She turned and lowered her shining club, and the yellow light caught her full in the face and fell across the flawless front of her short skirt. She put a hand to her forehead to try to make out the caller among us shadows on the patio.

"Arthur, hi," she said. She smiled, and stepped through the grass to him.

"Arthur, she's whose girlfriend?"

Half a dozen people answered me. " Cleveland 's," they said.

A few moments later, in one of the less noisy rooms off the parlor, we were three in a row on what could only be called a settee. Jane smelled interestingly of light exertion, beer, perfume, and cut grass. Arthur had presented me as a new friend, and I'd watched Jane's face for a trace of a knowing leer, but there'd been none. I began to wonder if I'd made a mistake about Arthur's intentions toward me, and to reproach myself for mistrusting what might have been his mere friendliness. After Jane and I had exchanged our academic pursuits-hers was art history-and agreed that neither of us could explain why we had chosen to pursue them, but that we were glad to be through, we turned to talking of plans for the coming summer.

I knew better than to state my true intentions, which were vague, and base enough that they could easily have included the pursuit of herself and of the ultimate source of all her exciting fragrance, in spite of this Cleveland, whoever he might be.

"I'm going to turn this town upside down," I said. "Then in the fall I have to become a responsible adult. You know, have a career. My father claims to have something lined up."

"What does your father do?" said Jane.

He manipulates Swiss bank accounts with money that comes from numbers, whores, protection, loan sharks, and cigarette smuggling.

"He's in finance," I said.

"Jane's going to New Mexico," said Arthur.

"Really? When?"

"Tomorrow," Jane said.

"Jesus! Tomorrow. Gee, that's too bad."

Arthur laughed, rapidly reading, I suppose, the thrust of my head and the proximity of my denim thigh to her shaven one.

"Too bad?" Jane had a southern accent, and "Too bad" fell out in three droll syllables. "It isn't bad! I can't wait- my mother and father and I have wanted to go forever! My mother has been taking Spanish lessons for fourteen years! And I want to go because-"

"Jane wants to go," Arthur said, "because she wants to have carnal knowledge of a Zuni."

She blushed, or rather flushed; her next words were only slightly angry, as though he often pestered her about Zuni love.

"I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole."

"Wow," I said. "Asshole." From the way she seemed to relish the word as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, a sign of her intimacy with Arthur, and I was momentarily very jealous of him. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.

"But I'm intrigued by the Native Americans, you know? That's all. And by Georgia O'Keeffe. I want to see that church in Taos that she painted."

Someone began to play the piano in the other room, a Chopin mazurka that mixed very uncomfortably for a few measures with the thump music that came from the half-dozen speakers scattered around the house, until someone else attacked the pianist with a squeal and a silk cushion. We laughed.

"Some people really know how to have a good time," Jane said, confirming that it was indeed a motto of theirs, and I was suddenly mad for the opportunity to employ it myself.

"Yes," said Arthur, and he told her about the scene at which we had stopped, and met, so many hours before.

"But I saw you in the library," I said. "What was that Spanish potboiler you were reading, anyway?"

"La muerte de un maricôn," he said, with a humorous flourish.

"Oh. What's that mean?" I said.

"Ask Jane's mother, the hispanophone."

"You can't just stop right now about my mother," she said. "You can just shut your trap." Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon. "My mother didn't get to spend a year cutting up in Mexico and getting hepatitis like you did, Arthur."

"Well, and thank goodness," said Arthur.

"Oh, no! You didn't really… cut up, did you?" I said.

"Like the big time," he said.

"And what will you do this summer, Arthur?"

"I'm going to live at Jane's and watch the dog. You'll have to come visit me. It's going to be a fun place after the Bellwethers leave."

Arthur and Jane had just gotten to the part where the blind truck-stop waitress, feeling with her spotted, overjoyed hands Cleveland's nose and forehead, accuses him of being Octavian, the shining man from another planet who had loved her many years ago, but had then returned to his own world, leaving her sightless, and with a brilliant, freakishly formed child-"the kind of thing," Arthur said, "that is always happening to Cleveland"-when Abdullah fell into the dark room, shouting: "The Count! The Count!"

"The Count," Arthur said, frowning slightly.

"My friend," Dudu said, almost as though he meant it, "my friend, my tremendous friend Arthur the Count! Tell me, what may I do for you? What would there be that I would not do it for you, my friend?"

He teetered, wore a bib of spilled whiskey, and the wide things he said, I felt, would be discounted as the typical CinemaScope friendliness of a sot. But Lecomte looked at him without answering, looked into his fat eyes while an obviously well-considered reply fought to free itself from his shut mouth.

"Arthur? Only to say it. Only! Anything in the world."

"You could," said Lecomte, "keep the fuck away from Richard."

There was only the din of the party, and it was as nothing. The obscenity flared and then collapsed into itself in the dazzling white half of a second. It was like the echo of an ax blow filling the air between him and Dudu. He immediately blushed and looked ashamed at having said too much.

Abdullah's hand, which he had intended to give to Arthur to be shaken, hung from his wrist as though unmuscled. He fought down his astonishment, with the aid of his alcoholic heart, and smiled at me, and then at Jane.

"Jane," he said, "you will tell him I am quite okay for Richard and everything is okay and he has not the claim to everyone like he think he has and you will now tell him this."

"Let's go outside," Jane said to me. "I know how to get the neighborhood dogs to bark all at once."

"Hey, yes, fine," said Abdullah, "then it is enough for now. I will be back later." He headed for the large, dark parlor and disappeared into the large, dark music there.

"Arthur, was Richard-" I said.

"Let's not talk about it," he said.

Jane put her moist pout just by my ear and whispered, raising the hairs all down me.

"Richard is Cleveland 's cousin," she said.

"Ah, Cleveland!" I said. I wondered at the Eiffel mesh of liaisons rising up and up around me. Were all of them related? Were Arthur and Richard an item? I looked at him. He stared down into his cool, yellow-foaming plastic cup of regret. His hair fell over his rather flat profile and hid the eye.

"The subject," Jane murmured into my ear again, undoing a giant zipper within me.

I grabbed her hard hand. "What subject?"

"Change it." Three syllables.

"So, Arthur, you didn't tell me," I said, "about the waitress's baby. Was it his? Did it have Cleveland 's good looks and fabulous sense of humor?"

And the thought of Cleveland lifted him, and threw him, and within a few minutes I listened as a hitchhiking Cleveland made his way headlong through the Black Hills toward Mount Rushmore, with an AWOL army demolition man in a pickup full of trinitrotoluene and plastique, and tears appeared at the corners of Arthur's eyes, he laughed so.

Later, long into the ever dimmer and louder evening, I looked around me, as though for the first time in hours.

" Cleveland," I said.

My vision and hence recent memory had smeared completely at the edges, and the edges had contracted with each drink, until two faces, Jane's and Arthur's, be-wilderingly alike, filled the unbearably focused, narrow center of everything, and babbled. I wanted Jane, I wanted quiet, I wanted just to stop; so I stood up, a feat, and went out of doors to slap my face three times.

Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland! They had spoken of nearly nothing but his exploits. Cleveland riding a horse into a swimming pool; coauthoring a book on baseball at the age of thirteen; picking up a prostitute, only to take her to the church wedding of a cousin; living in a Philadelphia garret and returning to Pittsburgh six months later, after having hardly communicated with any of his friends, with a pair of dirty tattoos and a scholarly, hilarious, twenty-thousand-word essay on the cockroaches with which he'd shared his room.

I had the impression that as far as Arthur and Jane were concerned, Cleveland flew, or had flown, as far above their twin blond heads as I saw them flying above me-but he had fallen, or was falling, or they were all on their way clown. They hadn't said it, but I saw that in their fancies, the great epoch, the time when Cleveland and Arthur had been two and angelic and fast, was long gone. Here I am, I thought, for I felt shitty and sour and wry, at the start of the first summer of my new life, and they tell me I've come in late and missed everything.

Though I'd intended to step out into the yellow comfort of the back porch again, my condition, and my un-familiarity with the house, led me through the wrong series of rooms, and I found myself verging on another part of the immense lawn, a part completely illuminated, in green shock. A pair of swimmers was talking quietly in the water, a boy still softly trying to convince a girl to do that thing whose moment had probably come and gone much earlier in the evening. I couldn't hear the words, but the urgency in the refusal of the young woman was clear and familiar. There would be denial, then silence, and then the rapid beat of water.

Someone touched my elbow, and I turned.

"Hi," said Arthur.

"I'm just getting a little air," I said. "I guess I've been silting too long. Drinking too long."

"Do you like to dance? Would you like to go dancing?"

I wondered what he meant. I didn't really want to go dancing, mostly because I never had "gone dancing" (Claire did not dance), but also because something in his tone, and the whole idea of a discotheque, frightened me. "Sure," I said. "Sure I like to dance." "Well. There's a club in East Liberty. Not far."

"Okay."

"Well. It's a gay club."

"Oh."

There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and coolly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I knew, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust.

This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Home and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Schaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibly, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.

I looked at Arthur. There was a faint golden stubble on his cheek and a flush at the pink skin of his throat. His eyes were clear and pale, as though he had not been drinking. I felt something. It flew around my chest like a black bat that has got into the house, terrified me for an alien moment, and then vanished.

"I don't think so. I'm straight, Arthur. I like girls."

He smiled his politic smile.

"That's what they all say." He reached up and almost touched my hair. I shrank from his hand. "Okay, you're straight. " It was as though I had passed or failed some test.

"But we can be friends, can't we?"

"You'll see," he said, and he turned on his heel and went back into the house.

Objects changed during the long run of Riri's party: A girl's frail satin handbag became the spoils, torn in half, of a battle between two briefly furious boys; a lamp became a pile of shards to be cursed, swept up, and hastily thrown away; and the swimming pool, which had probably started the evening as everyone's notion of beautiful wealthy blue fun, was now garish and green and almost empty. I'd spent my whole evening, however, in sweet, subtle darkness, in the company of fun, and I had my shirt half off by the time I reached poolside.