Michael Chabon

We said hello. Phlox and I were standing very close to each other, and I couldn’t tell whether Bobby’s careful top-to-bottom scrutiny was of Phlox or of me. I slid into the booth, next to Arthur, but Phlox remained on her feet, eyeing her purse.

“Oh,” I said, “I guess we’re going.”

“Yes, I guess you are,” said Arthur. “Good-bye.” He looked away from us, Bobby handed Phlox her little bag. I left a few dollars on the table, and we went out.

“How strange,” I said.

She took my arm, a bit brusquely.

“I think it’s disgusting,” she said. “I think it’s terrible that poor Arthur is gay.”

“Why?” I said. “It doesn’t—”

“I’m sorry, I just think it’s disgusting and a shame. Men who sleep with men are just big cowards.” She shivered once, then redoubled her grip on my arm and turned smiling to me. “Art, let’s go to my house.”

I kissed her behind the ear, came away with a mouthful of hair.

“Ooh,” she said. “Do you want to take the bus or walk?”

“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’ll give me a chance to burn off some of this rampaging heterosexual energy.”

“I’ll bet you’re just a big battery, aren’t you?”

“Um, Phlox, could we do something about these endearments of yours? ‘Ooh.’ ‘A big battery.’ You sound like a starlet, like Mamie Van Doren or someone.”

“I love Mamie Van Doren,” Phlox said, slapping me lightly across the face. “I am a starlet.”

9

THE HEARTBREAK THING

I ADMIT I HAVE an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public relations. She has been betrayed into the study of French, heedless of the terrible consequences, by her enchantment with this language, which has ruined more young American women than any other foreign tongue.

Second, if her studies were confined simply to grammar and vocabulary, then perhaps the French major would develop no differently from those who study Spanish or German, but the unlucky girl who pursues her studies past the second year comes inevitably and headlong into contact with French Literature, potentially one of the most destructive forces known to mankind; and she begins to relish such previously unglamorous elements of her vocabulary as langueur and funeste, and, speaking English, inverts her adjectives, to let one know that she sometimes even thinks in French. The writers she comes to appreciate—Breton, Baudelaire, Sartre, de Sade, Cocteau—have an alienating effect, especially on her attitude toward love, and her manner of expressing her emotions becomes difficult and theatrical; while those French writers whose influence might be healthy, such as Stendhal or Flaubert, she dislikes and takes to reading in translation, where their effect on her thought and speech is negligible; or she willfully misreads Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse, making dark romances of them. I gathered that Phlox, in particular, considered herself “linked by destiny” (liée par le destin) both to Nadja and to O. That is how a female French major thinks.

She lived in an apartment on the second floor of an old house, in a vague, quiet area between Squirrel Hill and Shadyside. As we climbed her bright stairway, I counted steps and watched the play of flowers on her broad, rather flat derriere. I knew what was about to happen, but I did not stop to think, except to think that I knew what was about to happen.

“We can talk loudly,” she said, stepping into her apartment and turning on the light. “It’s only ten o’clock, and my roommate is never home, anyway.”

“Good!” I shouted.

The living room was small and plain, an ordinary student’s living room, with secondhand furniture that had, probably looked old the day it was made, a Renoir poster on one of the long walls, and a terrible, homemade painting of a cat on the other. On the coffee table there was a porcelain statuette of a white Persian cat like a huge scoop of whipped cream, with two lifelike and grotesque blue eyes. The table was strewn with issues of Paris-Match and Vogue.

“Whose cat idol is that?” I said.

“That’s my Chloe,” said Phlox. She stepped over to the ugly thing and began to tickle its porcelain chin. “Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe,” she said in a doll voice. “He lives at my mother’s. I’m not allowed to keep a cat here. This is my little substitute Chloe. I made him in art in high school.”

“It is beautiful. Isn’t Chloe a girl’s name?”

“Come and see my bedroom,” she said, clasping my fingers and pulling me gently into the dark of the corridor.