Michael Chabon

The aphorism may be false (it sounds good, which is all an aphorism need do), but I had not been in Phlox’s apartment for forty-five seconds before she gathered up whatever clues there were to gather in my face, voice, and caress—perhaps even in my smell—and accused me of doing what I had done once again at two o’clock that morning, after which Arthur had fallen asleep, though I could not and so had crossed empty Fifth Avenue and walked home through the trafficless streets.

“Who was it?” she said, pushing me away, taking hold of the back of a chair.

“Someone you don’t know.” I didn’t have strength enough to lie convincingly. I’d been taken by surprise. All I could do was sink deep into her old sofa and dread hearing whatever she might next divine. She had woken me with a phone call that morning, and already, I realized, the knowledge had been in her voice, the urgency that had drawn me over to her apartment all unready, on three hours’ sleep and a single cup of coffee. She stood in the center of the plain little living room, in a torn gray sweatshirt and gym shorts, arms angrily folded, but she didn’t say anything. She began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I talked into my shirt. “It wasn’t anything. It was a mistake. I felt lonely and horrible and I ran into…this girl I knew a long time ago.”

“Claire?” cried Phlox.

I looked up. I couldn’t help smiling at this thought, or half-smiling, anyway. “No. God, no. What a notion. Look, Phlox.”

She came over. I pulled her down into my lap and rubbed my cheek against the torn, nubby, soft cloth she wore. Solace is in the fabric of sweatshirts. “Please, Phlox, you have to forgive me, you have to. I don’t have any feelings for this woman. It’s nothing.”

She whirled around, angry and curious, eyes red.

“What does she look like?”

“She’s blond. Very blond and cold.”

“As blond and cold as Arthur?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

She wrapped her arms around my neck and said she didn’t know. Phlox said that I could tell her anything; she would believe anything I told her. She cried, on and off, for the rest of the day. It was a wounded, slow, delicate Sunday; our feelings and the things we said to each other were cautious and tender. It rained in the late afternoon. We half-undressed, climbed out onto her roof, and stood barefoot in the puddles, and under the cool water the tar of the roof was still warm against the feet. Across the neighborhood, drainpipes chuckled and rang, and we could hear cars tossing up curtains of water in the street. I smoked a cigarette in the rain, which is the best way to smoke a cigarette. I looked at Phlox’s beautiful sad lunar face and wet lashes. When we came inside, we dried each other’s hair and ate with plastic forks out of cold Tupperware bowls. The day before, Phlox had bought a little bottle of bubble soap and a plastic pipe, and we filled the air of her bedroom with bubbles and damp little pops; in the evening I took her picture. I resolved that I would not see Arthur for a whole week.

When I walked into work the next day, Ed Lavella was manning the cash register, ringing up the fifty-seven-dollar purchase, an eight-inch tower of books and magazines, of my father, who held out a hundred-dollar bill. My father was dressed for business, in a blue suit and sober tie, and he had the closed, unreadable face he always adopted at ten o’clock in the morning of what he hoped would be a full day’s work. I knew that he despised Boardwalk Books, so he was obviously here because he wanted to speak to me, but we both realized as soon as we saw one another that now was not the time. He had work to do and wouldn’t want the wild words of his son ringing in his ears all day, and I would be frustrated, by his professionally blank look and by our being there for all to see, in any attempt to obtain his forgiveness or solicitude. So we stood in the aisle by the best-sellers, unable to speak. He smelled of aftershave. Finally he asked me to dinner and a movie on Wednesday night, slipped me a twenty-dollar bill, and went out. At lunchtime I noticed that the money, rolled into a little green ball, was still in my hand. I had a dozen roses delivered to Phlox at the library. As I came out of the florist’s, I ran into Arthur. That morning he had had his hair cut short, but a long, fashionable, forward-falling lock hid his left eyebrow. He looked odd, boyish, and gay.

“You live,” he said.

Women passed us on either side, carrying sandwiches and ice cream cones, talking with their mouths full. The weather, after yesterday’s rain, was unusually dry and fine, and dazzling Forbes avenue filled with nurses and secretaries who had freed themselves from air-conditioning and fluorescent light. I laughed because the air was full of these women’s talk.

“Have you eaten yet?” he said. “Let’s go sit over by the law school.”

Yes, I remembered my resolution. With a pang.