"She stayed on. She'll be back in a few days. But not for Cleveland, she won't."

Cleveland came back into the house, beer in hand, wearing an ornate black felt sombrero, embroidered in silver thread, that he must have found in the Bellwethers' car.

"Where is she?"

Mrs. Bellwether's face lit up, and she said that Jane was dead. "It was awful, wasn't it, Albert?" Mr. Bellwether shook his head and said something. "And here we come home in our grief, we want only to remember Jane in the peace of our own home, and what do we find? Depravity! Cruelty to animals! And you!"

Arthur started to speak, after Jane's mother said that she had died-to deny, I suppose, the most ridiculous lie I had ever heard in my entire life, a lie made with such wild disregard for probability of success that I saw then how crazed she really was, and I saw that telling a good, simple lie was a sign of sanity; but Cleveland smirked, very briefly, and Arthur said nothing.

"Dead! No, it can't be!" said Cleveland. "Not Jane! Oh, God, no! How-how did it happen?" He started to cry; it was beautifully done.

"Dysentery," she said, less harshly, perhaps brought up short by the effect her lie was having on Cleveland.

"And this hat…" He was overcome, and could not speak for just the right amount of moments. "This hat is all that's left of her isn't it?"

"Yes. We had to burn her clothes."

"Look, Nettie, in a minute I'll walk out your front door, never to darken your welcome mat again. That's a promise. I know that you hate me, and I certainly always hated you-until now-but I loved your daughter, passionately. I know you know that. And so-may I keep this sombrero?"

Here Dr. Bellwether raised a pale hand and started to speak again, but his wife overrode him and said that Cleveland might keep it.

"Thank you," said Cleveland, and stepped over to her, and kissed her fat cheek with the reverence of a son. He put the hat on his head, then doffed it, bowed, gracefully swept the floor with the tacky thing, and split. He had won something: Now that Jane was dead at her mother's hand, she was someone else, she was a girl without parents, which is the dream of every young man like Cleveland, if not every young man, period.

Mrs. Bellwether went over to the La-Z-Boy and fell into it. She had won something too, but it was something made up and pretty stupid.

"He believed you," said Arthur in a suitably awed tone. "He's probably wild with grief."

"I hope he doesn't try something foolish," I said.

"Let him jump off a bridge," said Mrs. Bellwether. "And good riddance. " A sudden pragmatic thought seemed to invade her perfectly factless mind. "You'll tell him. I shouldn't have told you. You'll tell him she's alive!"

"Gee, I just might, Mrs. B.," said Arthur. He had sat back down in his chair and was lacing up his sneakers.

"Don't tell him. Please. Let him think she's dead."

"But what if they end up on the same bus someday? Or at adjoining tables in the Dirty O?"

"I'll send her away. I'll send her down to my mother's farm in Virginia. She'll be safe there. Don't tell him!"

Arthur sat up and gave the demented woman the relentless, clear stare that was going to make his career at the State Department.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars," he said.

While Mrs. Bellwether, looking pleased with herself, made out the check to Arthur on the kitchen table, I carried his suitcase out of the house.

"Nice meeting you, Mrs. Bellwether," I called. "Shalom!"

We walked all the way back to my house. For some reason I felt depressed, and we didn't laugh. Arthur smoked cigarette after cigarette; when I gave him an account of my abduction by Cleveland he only sighed; he cursed the humid weather.

"Do you feel bad because you failed in your responsibility to the Bellwethers, or something ridiculous like that?" I said.

"No."

We reached the corner of Forbes and Wightman, wide, empty, and phony-looking in the light of the halogen lamps. Chained to one of the lampposts was the vending machine, now empty, that I had watched the dwarf fill with newspapers that morning. The sky to the south, over the steel mills, looked evil and orange and miasmic. We came to the Terrace and walked up through the maze of garages to my apartment, and I fumbled with the house key. I was still very drunk.

As I pushed open the door, Arthur put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned to face him.

"Art," he said. He touched my face. His beard was too heavy, there was a puffiness under his eyes, and he seemed almost to waver on his feet, as though he might fall over at any moment. There was something so drunken and ugly about him that I flinched.

"No," I said. "You're tired. You're just tired. Come on."

And then, as the song says, he kissed me, or rather pressed his lips against the upper part of my chin. I stepped back, into my apartment, and he fell forward, catching himself as his knees hit the floor.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry," I said.

"What an asshole I am, huh?" he said, standing carefully. "I'm just tired."

"I know," I said. "It's all right."

He apologized, said again that he was an asshole, and I said again that it was all right. I loved him and I wished he would leave. He slept on my floor among the boxes, while I trembled in bed under my cool, damp comforter. When I woke up the next morning, he had gone. He had ripped open his pack of Kools and folded it into the shape of a dog, or a saxophone, and left it on the pillow beside my head.

8. The Mau Mau Catalogue

Work the next day was not the circus I had expected. People are always ready to hear that something disturbing was after all only a prank-and that includes the police, who had come shortly after my abrupt departure. I called and explained to them, and to my fellow employees, that the Black Rider was a Pi Kappa Delta brother, upset over the fact that I had been seen dancing with his girlfriend, but essentially a nice guy who had only wanted to put a little of the fear of God into me. This story went over big, and even earned me some points, in the strange estimation of the apprentice paramedics and the Pittsburgh police, for having had the balls to dance with the girlfriend of a Pike, notoriously large fellows. By eleven o'clock I was able to go about my work as though I had never been torn from the register stand, manhandled, and driven away on the back of a gigantic motorcycle, and the momentary vortex I had created in the usually calm surface of Boardwalk Books closed over me.

After work I stepped outside, weakened by air-conditioning, and tugged out the last cigarette in the pack. Arthur and Phlox, side by side, approached from the direction of the library. Phlox wore pearls, a strapless white dress patterned with blue flowers, and a pair of high-heeled white sandals; Arthur, light-gray trousers and a powder-blue blazer, with a tie, and oxfords without socks, like Prince Philip. They were still far from me, and I watched as those they passed turned admiring heads; they drew near like an advertisement for summer and beauty and healthy American sex. The sun was in their faces, but they neither squinted nor averted their eyes; the light fell across Phlox's necklace and Arthur's hair and the hint of silver wristwatch at his cuff. I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings.

"Hi, Art Bechstein," said Arthur, when they'd reached me. I had about half a cigarette left.

"Hi, Art Bechstein," said Phlox.

"Hello, Phlox; hello, Arthur. Wow."

The two of them panted after their brisk walk through sunlight, admiring stares, and the posh resorts and spas of my imagination. Thin strands of perspiration hung across their foreheads.