My bedroom was the back porch, which, when the tide was in, overhung Lake Erie. I changed slowly into my swimming trunks and then, stiff from the long ride in the car, ran down to the beach, where I found Arthur and Cleveland already stretched out on towels and laughing, their cans of beer little bunkers half-buried in the sand. There was a light breeze off the water, and they had kept their shirts on; Arthur's said last call. We drank, we swam, we lay on the dingy sand and looked out at the boats on the lake. Cleveland disappeared into the house for a while, and returned with an air rifle and a trash bag full of tin cans. I stayed on my towel and watched as he erected a row of targets along the fence, took aim, and blew them off without a miss.

"How can he do that when he's drunk?" I asked Arthur.

"He isn't drunk," said Arthur. "He's never drunk. He just drinks and drinks and drinks until he passes out, but he never gets drunk."

This reminded me of the photograph on the mantel, the can of beer.

"What kinds of things did he used to write?"

"Oh, essays, I guess you'd call them, odd essays. I told you about the one on cockroaches. We had this teacher in high school, a terrific woman. He started writing because of her."

"And," I said.

"And later she met with, of course, some kind of disaster."

"Which kind?"

"Death." He rolled over and faced away from me, so that I could see only the back of his head and hear his voice only in an unsatisfactory and into-the-wind way. "So, theoretically, that's why he stopped. But that's just his same old Cleveland bullshit. Every one of his failings has a perfectly good excuse. Usually some kind of disaster."

"Like?"

"Like his mom kills herself, his dad becomes about the scariest queer I've ever seen-and I've seen scary ones, believe me-so Cleveland is pardoned from ever having to do anything good, or productive, ever again." He pulled off his T-shirt and draped it over his head, baring his slender, rosy back.

"Did he want to be a writer?" I said, and tried to pull the shirt from his head, but he grabbed hold of it and remained hidden.

"Sure he would have liked to be a writer, but see, now he has these great excuses. It's so much easier to get fucked up almost every night."

"You drink a lot."

"It's different."

"Look at me."

"No. Look, he's gotten a lot of mileage out of this Lost Weekend thing. I'm as guilty as anyone of laughing at him and respecting him for being a fuck-up. He knows lots of people, and most of them want to be his friend. At least initially. They do change their minds."

This was true. He had already deteriorated in charm and in drunken brightness to the point where one occasionally met someone who, at the mention of Cleveland 's name, would say, "That creep?"

"I told you that when his mom died she left him about twenty thousand dollars. It's gone. He spent it. Mostly on dope and beer and records and trips to see the Grateful Dead play Charleston, or Boston, or Oakland, California, once. On bullshit. Do you know what he does now?"

"Yes," I said.

He threw off his shirt and whirled to face me, though of course his face didn't betray any surprise.

"Did he tell you?"

I stood up.

"I'm bombed," I said. "How many cans do you think I can hit?"

I took a nap on the screened porch, over the lapping tide, and suddenly I smelled chili. I lay on the cot, waking slowly, in stages, the warm red odor working its way into my brain until my eyes opened. I went into the kitchen and stood next to Cleveland as he opened one can after another, until he had two dozen targets for tomorrow and a gallon of chili in the pot. He was shirtless and had a drunk's bruise on his left shoulder, as he did on his shin and forearm.

"Gee, you have a big stomach," I said.

He stopped stirring the aromatic brown slop in the tureen and patted his belly proudly.

"Of course I do," he said. "I'm in the process of eating the entire world. Country by country. Last week I polished off Bahrain and Botswana. And Belize."

We sat down at the scratched, old, fine oak dinner table with our bowls of chili, and I started drinking beer again, which was cold and cleared my head. After dinner we went out. It was still, though barely, light. Arthur found a Wiffle ball and a fungo bat, so we went out into the water, and he skillfully hit long flies that we swam yards and yards to field. After we'd waded in to shore, we stood shivering in the breeze and put on our sweatshirts. Cleveland taught me to cup a windblown match, "like the Marlboro Man," and then how to flick the cigarette butt twenty-five feet when I was done. The sun went down, but we stayed on the beach, watching the fireflies and the momentary bats. The woods were full of crickets, and the music from the radio on the porch mingled with the sound of the insects. I sat on the sand and thought, for a moment, of Phlox. Cleveland and Arthur wandered down to the water's edge, too far for me to hear their talk, and smoked two long Antonio y Cleopatra cigars, then put them out in the sand. They pulled off their sweatshirts and ran into the water where years before Cleveland had brutalized his little sister.

I felt happy-or some weak, pretty feeling centered in my stomach, brought on by beer-at the sight of the fading blue sky tormented at its edges with heat lightning, and at the crickets and the shouting over the water, and by Jackie Wilson on the radio, but it was a happiness so like sadness that the next moment I hung my head.

"How can you spend so much time with her?" Arthur was saying, as he threw pine needles into the heart of the fire that Cleveland had built on the beach, where they caught, flared, and disappeared, as my little moods had all day. "She thinks she's such a glamour girl."

"So do you," said Cleveland. Two small campfires burned in the lenses of his black glasses. "And what's wrong with thinking that? She exaggerates herself. It's healthy."

"It's unbearable," said Arthur.

"It's genius," said Cleveland. "A genius you don't possess. Do I myself not claim to be in the process of eating the entire world? A patent exaggeration. Do I not claim to be Evil Incarnate?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes," and I told them about my skyscraper, and my zeppelin, and the hurtling elevator, and Arthur snorted and drained another beer, and said that was a little unbearable too.

"No, it's big-he's got it, it's big," said Cleveland. "Bigness is the goal of life, of evolution, of men and women. Look at the dinosaurs. They started out as newts, little newts. Everything's been getting bigger. Cultures, buildings, science-"

"Livers, drinking problems," said Arthur, and he stood up and went back into the house for some more beer.

"He doesn't get it," I said.

"Yes, he does," said Cleveland. "He's heard this a million times before. We used to have this thing, this image of ourselves-not ourselves, but, well, it was exactly like your thing with the hotel. What would you call that kind of thing, Bechstein?"

"An image. An image of the big stuff you wanted?"

"Come on, you can do better than that."

"How about 'a manifestation of the will-to-bigness,'" I said.

"Exactly!" He threw a pebble at my head. "Asshole. Okay, this was about women. Back when Artie was still ambisexually inclined. Bambisexual. Iambisexual. "

"Come on."

"Shut up. We had this vision-imagine your skyscraper hotel, only think of the whole city around it, think of a whole skyline like that, big and art deco, with searchlights, the beams of searchlights, cutting across the sky, all crazily, frantically. And then you see them. In the sweeping beams of the searchlights."

"See what?"

"Giant women! Gorgeous women, like Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, but the size of mountains, kicking over buildings, crushing cars under their manicured tremendous toes, with airplanes caught in their hair."