"Did you go to work like this?" I asked.

"Sure," said Arthur. "It seemed like a good day to do it."

"Arthur and I had the same idea today. Telepathically. Come into the old library all dressed up. We created a sensation. Telepathically. For your pleasure." She was plainly excited, by my undisguised astonishment at her lovely big face and by the handsome man standing beside her, his fingertips nearly-bewilderingly-brushing her wrist.

"Well, I'm very pleased," I said.

"I could care less," said Arthur, "about your pleasure."

"Thank heavens," I said.

We looked at each other oddly, as though we neither of us knew what exactly we were talking about.

"Ha," I said.

"Let's drink something cool and refreshing," Phlox said, bobbing her head, widening then narrowing her eyes like some lustful and wily biblical queen.

"Beer," said Arthur and I.

"Jane is dead," Arthur was saying. "And everything is fine. That's all." He was drunk.

"But what did you do?" Phlox asked. She'd already asked him five or six times, and each time he'd blushed, looked down, and refused to explain.

"Do you want to know?"

"Ah," she said, perhaps imprudently, "you're finally drunk enough to confess."

"No!" he said, lurching slightly into Phlox, who sat beside him in the booth, and spilling his fine hair across her bare shoulder. "I'm not going to tell you."

"Watch it," she said, not taking her eyes from me as she delicately shoved Arthur back over to his corner. Each cool and refreshing sip she took seemed to increase the pressure of her unsandaled silken foot against my sockless ankle. In my drunkenness I'd lost any trace of the caution that had propelled me only the day before into the brambles along the Schenley Park bridge. I wondered suddenly (as suddenly as my eyes falling for the hundredth time upon her blue-flowered breasts) whether or not she wore a bra.

"Phlox," I said, before I could reconsider, "are you wearing a brassiere?"

"Never," she said. "Never in high June." She spoke without coyness, without shock or outrage at my impertinence.

"Hey, Blanche DuBois!" said Arthur. '"Never in high June.'"

She continued to look at me levelly and nearly without blinking. I began to get an unmistakable impression that this girl wanted me in a matter-of-fact, practical, and serious way. Arthur, I think, got the same impression. He stood up and excused himself, blushing again, but with a slightly businesslike tone, as though he had a job to do and were doing it.

"No, no," I called after him. "Don't leave me alone with this woman."

I have a photograph of Phlox here before me; the only one in which she wears no makeup. Her forehead appears, quite frankly, tremendous. She has adopted a disheveled, Thursday-night-at-home-with-my-boyfriend pose, ripped sweatshirt collar dipped over one round olive shoulder, face uncharacteristically Levantine (her father was related to the great Pittsburgh Tambellinis), saintly. A faint something, a hint of redness in the eyes, suggests that she's been crying; the lower lids seem slightly puffy. Of course she's been crying. Her nose, as ever, looks big and straight and radiant. A few limp curls drape the vaulting eyebrows and silver screen of a forehead. And the eyes, the legendary blue eyes of Death Itself. Yes.

Arthur returned from the rest room, looking pale but considerably more rational. He watched with great interest as I hastily undid my fingertips from Phlox's own, lavender-nailed.

"Arthur Bechstein likes you, Phlox Lombardi," he said.

"Oh, do you really think so, Arthur LeComte?" said Phlox. Her bosom heaved measurably.

Arthur slid in beside me, without stirring the foam on the beers. His face had changed; he was feeling, clearly if unusually, a strong feeling about something or other. He spoke into his collar, his beer, the beery table top, his lap, eyes downcast and invisible.

"I hate you, Phlox Lombardi," he said.

I laughed. Arthur looked up and smiled, radium white, an elegant, old-fashioned, moneyed, sad kind of smile, like a relic of that remote age when radium was still our friend. He unleashed this smile on Phlox, right in front of me; I was sitting there, confronted, I imagined, by the unimaginable, dizzying nastiness of homosexuality thwarted.

"Excuse me," I said. Arthur rose to let me out.

This bar was esteemed for the quality or at least the profusion of the graffiti in both its gentlemen's and ladies' rooms, which were rarely washed or repainted. I read this exchange:

what's so great about women, anyway?

And, lower:

HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES

Then:

plus there's the mystery of learning about her childhood

A fourth man had concluded:

AND OF EVERYTHING THAT'S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES

When I returned to our table, Arthur was in the middle of his story, now apparently master of his earlier and revelatory outburst.

"Every so often, Cleveland yelled, 'Teddeeee,' and inside the house someone next door said, 'What?' and we would laugh."

"Just tell me what you did," said Phlox. "Enough."

"No, let him keep you in suspense, why don't you?" I said. "This is good."

"Oh, but I hate suspense, Arthur. Arthurs. Arthurs, ha ha. No, but really, what did you guys do?"

"We drank," said Arthur.

"Well, that can hardly have shocked the Bellwethers."

I sat down across from Phlox and slipped off my shoes. Arthur told her that Teddy's control over the dogs was amazing, and at this point in Arthur's confession, just at the word "amazing," Phlox and I began in earnest a delicate, grueling, almost motionless game of footsie, a classic in excruciation, both of us playing to win, employing every one of the considerable mudras for lust or for a pledge of which the foot is capable. At no point did we take our eyes off Arthur; I was only marginally aware of the rapt attention Phlox expertly appeared to pay to him. She'd withdrawn both feet from her limp sandals. In similar circumstances, that is, drunk as I was, I would probably have done this with any attractive woman who happened to be sitting across from me with her feet bared and her cheeks flushed, but not with the same overwhelming awareness of technique, the same impulse toward skill, that Phlox inspired in me. Neither of us heard much of Arthur's account, delivered as it was by a drunken man in a jukebox-dominated bar to two people whose already beer-impaired attention was largely directed to the slow, feathery wrestling match taking place beneath the wet surface of the table. I later had to run through the whole story with her all over again.

"I'm ashamed of myself," Arthur finished. "I haven't felt so chastised in ages."

"Ah, that's why you got all dressed up today," I said.

Phlox snorted.

"I can't believe it," she said. Abruptly she took her feet from mine, leaving them cold and interrupted, and I was momentarily seized by intense loneliness. "What won't you guys do when you're drunk? It's no wonder her parents were furious-a fifteen-year-old boy, my God."

"It wasn't that, Phlox. They don't give a damn about Teddy. Two facts: the fact that I let the Evil Cleveland in the house, and the fact that I let three Stanley Kowalski dogs take advantage of their delicate darling; that's it."

"Well, they have every right to be angry."

"You women always stick together," I said, which wasn't a particularly funny thing to say, but I was having difficulty thinking, and I wanted back the nylon feel of her toes.

"So what are you going to do, Arthur?"

"I think there's another couple who want me to house-sit for them. And they haven't a dog."

That summer's Stevie Wonder song came on the jukebox. I gathered that it was about a kiss like a watermelon or a chocolate chip.