10. Sex and Violence

June waned; still Jane Bellwether remained in New Mexico, calling Cleveland only once, to tell him they were through ("Does that make nine times or ten?" Cleveland asked her); by the twenty-ninth of June, Phlox and I were firmly ensconced in a "thing" that she was-prematurely, I felt- calling love, although I was beginning to wonder, and listened one night to "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" thinking: Oh, Smokey.

Phlox had taken to coming over to the Terrace every night after I got off work, and we would sit on the steps smoking cigarettes, and sometimes marijuana, or would drink tequila, and just eat the limes and lick the salt from the tiny pouches of each other's hands. One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering.

"Why are you afraid?" I said.

"I don't know. Because vampires are so beautiful," she said.

Another time she wept bitterly for an hour because Arthur had been cruel to her at work that day and told her she looked fat in her plaid dress.

"I know he's just jealous of me," she said. "Art, I know he wants you."

"Nah," I said. "He likes you."

"Art!" she shouted. "Listen to me, and don't baby me. I know he wants you, he wants to have sex with you, homosexual sex, disgusting homosexual sex with my Artichoke," which was what she called me.

"Phlox, what do you have against gays? I like all the gay guys I've met, Arthur especially, but all of his friends too. They're nice guys."

"Sure they're nice guys, they're beautiful, and it's a goddamn shame they're a bunch of hideous fags. Some of them are more beautiful than I am."

I denied this.

On the twenty-ninth of June, the night Phlox told me that she loved me, that Daniel was a fool and had an ugly purple penis and I need never worry about him again, she read to me from The Story of O, in the yellow light of my stoop. (I had read this book years before, before my mother died, finding it among her books, and I had failed to understand it. Only the scenes of more conventional sex had excited me, and the whips and owl masks and labial piercing I had found confusing, exotic, and disagreeable.) When Phlox read to me from the book, sitting up against the bricks with her knees to her chest, in a green leather miniskirt with no panties, I was shocked to discover what an evil book it was, although nicely written, and the thought that it was her favorite disturbed me. Nevertheless I felt the thrill of her voice and got an erection, which I could not disguise, and which, reaching over, she freed and relieved me of, and then without stopping her reading, she relieved herself.

"That was wonderful," she said when she had tired of reading.

"I want to walk you home," I said, and handed her sweater to her.

"Art, I want to stay with you."

"I'd rather walk you home."

"Arthur, I love you," she said.

"I refuse to flog you," I said.

She burst out laughing, and told me what a silly boy I was. And, as my father might have put it, indeed I was.

The next night Cleveland and Arthur and I got drunk and decided to go off to Cleveland 's family's summer house in upstate New York. It would be just the three of us. At a still-sober point in the evening, Arthur began to berate Phlox, just barely. He looked terrific that evening, had been lying out in the sun, and he wore a turquoise cotton sweater that did alarming things to his blue eyes. He said that Phlox was nuts, and smiled, and that she would mess me up, and smiled again.

"You introduced me to her," I said.

"This is true," he said.

He had been reading, in Spanish, the as-yet-untranslated new book by Garcia Marquez, and he translated for me its rather terrible epigraph, which had impressed him.

"'Love is like falconry,'" he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?"

"Never say love is like anything," said Cleveland. "It isn't."

I'd long ago noticed that it was Arthur's habit to consult his wristwatch every five minutes. There was always some plan in the back of his mind, some itinerary extending far into the evening, which he would reveal to us only one step at a time. This evening he was particularly attentive to his wrist, and Cleveland, as usual, called him on it, in a way that I supposed had been part of their game for a long time. Arthur would glance quickly at his watch, and Cleveland would say, "What time is it, Arthur?" Five minutes later, when Arthur glanced again, Cleveland again asked what time it was, making Arthur look ridiculous, and again, and again, and each time Arthur blushed more deeply, until finally he laughed and said he had to leave.

"And where are you going, Artie?" said Cleveland.

"To Mass," said Arthur.

"Oh, right," I said. "When was the last time you went to Mass?"

"Last Sunday, " said Arthur. He left some money on the table, shook our hands, and went out.

Cleveland and I drank until the bar closed. It was a hot night, and the ceiling fans ruffled our hair and tore the cigarette smoke into little scraps. Each bottle of Rolling Rock came to us pearled with condensation and trailing a streamer of cold steam. He told me stories of past years at the summer house, of the horse he'd ridden into a neighbor's swimming pool, the Good Humor lady who'd taken his virginity. Then we talked about Frank O'Hara, and how he died, struck by a dune buggy, on Fire Island; Cleveland sat back in the booth, rolled his eyes upward, and recited.

'"Oh to be an angel (if there were any!),'" he said, '"and go straight up into the sky and look around and then come down.'"

He fell silent and his eyes grew kindly and drunken.

"I like you, Bechstein," he said, which made me blush, and I felt tears come to my eyes. "For Christ's sake, don't cry, Bechstein. I don't like you that much. Let's get some pickled eggs." He ordered and proceeded to dispatch about twelve of the little beet-colored nodules, one by one. "As long as bars continue to serve pickled eggs," he said, licking his fingers, "there is reason to hope."

When the waitress called Last Call, Cleveland said that the bar was very close to his father's house, and that he would just go there to sleep tonight, instead of going all the way back to his own bouse.

"There are no more buses," he said, "and it'll take you almost an hour to walk home. Why don't you just sleep over. You can sleep downstairs. You'll like it; it's spooky."

Before she committed suicide, when he was seventeen, Cleveland Arning's mother, a laughing woman, taught her son to joke and to ridicule. His father, tall, thin, cut his beard in a goatee and wore great red sideburns that ran up his otherwise bald temples. His name was also Cleveland, and although he did indeed have his own grim notions of what made a joke, he laughed only rarely, generally in the privacy of his own study. In the kitchen, Cleveland and his mother would listen to the inexplicable sound of his father's laughter coming through the oaken door, and whatever story Cleveland had been telling to make her laugh would die on his lips. They would chew in silence, clatter the dishes into the sink, and go to their rooms. Cleveland senior was a psychiatrist.

Cleveland told me, I now find, very little about his childhood. He once spoke of having lived in the countryside to the northwest of Pittsburgh, saying only, naturally, that he'd very often gotten into trouble. There was a bartender in one of his usual haunts who had been a neighbor in the country years before. "This is Charlie," he said, introducing me one night. "His parents forbade me to set foot in their house ever again." Yet despite the fact that I have few details, I have a clear sense of the strangeness of the Arning household-the taciturn, warped father, who took male lovers; the nervous mother, underweight, musical, struggling with her husband's secret for as long as she could manage; Cleveland, bright, violent, already considering himself "doomed and wild" by age twelve; and his sister, Anna, the baby, her brother's target and first fan.