When I came into the dark, cedar-smelling house, Cleveland was standing in the living room with his back to me, looking at a photograph framed over the fireplace. I came up behind him and looked. It was a picture of himself at the age of fifteen or sixteen, an angelic smirk on his face, eyes bright, hair long and of a lighter color; already he held a can of Rolling Rock in one hand, a cigarette in the other, but there was something different in this characteristic pose, something enthusiastic, gloating; and the smirk was that of a novice who had only just learned the Secret and couldn’t quite believe that it was so simple. In the picture he looked handsome and nearly famous, and looking at him now, big and scarred and immobile, I saw, for the first time, what Arthur and Jane must have seen when they looked at Cleveland: diminution in growth, loss through increase, a star that has passed from yellow to red. Perhaps I read too much into this photograph, but Cleveland’s reaction to it soon confirmed my own feeling. I couldn’t help but say, “Gee, Cleveland, you look really terrific in this photo.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was happy.”
“Was it summertime?”
“Uh huh. Here at the lake.”
“Doesn’t summertime always make you feel kind of the way you look in this picture, though?”
“Sure,” he said, but I could tell he said it only to humor me, and his tone more honestly said: Not anymore; no. He tapped the glass of the frame once with his finger, and then turned toward me.
“Let me show you your bedroom,” he said, avoiding my gaze. He started off, then turned back toward the photograph and tapped it once again.
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 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 unbearabl
e 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.”
“I see it,” I said.
“That was the manifestation of our will-to-bigness.” There was a long silence. I heard the toilet flush inside the house. “You know, ah, Bechstein…”
“Hmm?”
“When do I get to meet your father?”
“You’re crazy.”
“No, I can tell I’d like him. He’s big too. I’ve heard about him. I hear he’s one of the real wise guys. I’d like you to introduce me. If you don’t mind. Even if you do mind.”
“What, exactly, are you into with Dave Stern? Numbers?”
“P and D.”
He meant pickup and delivery for a loan shark: dropping off the principal to the unfortuante borrower and then stopping by once a week to collect the ridiculous interest.
At first I hadn’t taken Cleveland’s supposed involvement with the underworld seriously, but now, suddenly, I did. Cleveland would do it. He would breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was.
“No, but, Cleveland, you can’t meet my father.” If a whisper and a whine can be combined, that was the tone of my voice. “Come on, tell me more about the searchlights and giant women.”
“I remember them,” said Arthur, who had just returned. “He wanted that, not me. I only wanted to know who built the Cloud Factory. Which, by the way, is rather small.”
“God built the Cloud Factory,” said Cleveland. “And God is the biggest of the big.”
“Wrong,” said Arthur. “There is no Cloud Factory. Or God, or giant women, or zeppelins.”
“Fuck you,” said Cleveland. “They’ll come for me, one of these days. They’ll come for you too. Prepare yourself. Prepare your father too, Bechstein.” And he stood up and went into the house and did not come back.
“What was that about your father?” said Arthur.
“Who knows?” I said. “He probably has me confused with Jane.”
As I stood looking in the mirror at my hangover the next morning, balancing my headache carefully between two hands, I heard shouts, then some thumping at the front of the house, and then a woman’s voice, a familiar southern accent. I trudged out to see.
Cleveland and Jane were squared off just inside the front door, beside two bags of groceries, and Arthur, in his underpants, and wearing the T-shirt that said LAST CALL, watched warily, but with a thin smile, his eyes round. I thought of our first meeting outside the library. Jane, sunburned and fine, her hair bleached almost white, wore a pink-and-yellow plaid cotton dress, which did not harmonize with the fists at her sides, or with her muscled shoulders, or with her fierce eyes.
“Go head,” Cleveland said. “I dare you.”
“I will,” said Jane. I’ll hit you.”
“Hi, Jane,” I said. “You look great.”
She turned toward me, undid her fists, and smiled, then turned back and gave Cleveland a right hook across the jaw. He fell against the wall; he touched his finger to the corner of his mouth and looked in bemusement at the blood that came away on it. For a moment he smiled at Jane, at me, at Arthur, before he threw himself at Jane and brought her down with a hard sound to the wooden floor. They began to wrestle, grunting and saying shit, you fucker, et cetera. Cleveland had the advantage of weight, though I doubted he was any stronger than she.
“Come on, Cleveland, Jane, cut it out,” said Arthur mildly. He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, did not move. I went over to try to do something, and got smacked in the groin by someone’s fist. It hurt, and I fell breathless to the floor. Jane, beneath Cleveland, brought her knee up to his chest and pushed. He flew backward, and Jane leapt up and threw herself upon him, screaming, “Cleveland!” Motion ceased. They panted, I panted; I drew myself to my knees and watched Cleveland begin to laugh and Jane to cry.
“Oh, Cleveland,” she said.
“Did you drive a hundred and fifty miles just to beat the shit out of me?”
“Yes,” she said, and she sniffed, in a show of pride, and snapped her head back and thrust out her chin.
“Really?”
“No,” she said, dropping her forehead to his chest and kissing his big belly, and at that moment, Arthur, whom I had not noticed leaving the room, came in again, holding a saucepan full of water, which he emptied onto their desperate heads, grinning.
“They’re fine,” I said. “Pour some water onto my balls, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’ve been waiting so long for you to say that,” said Arthur.
So Jane was among us now, and although I missed the intimacy of the previous day, I found her so thrilling, so prim and sportive, that I welcomed her arrival—we all did. She went back to her car to fetch her luggage, singing loudly and earnestly some sad hymn, like a young girl who had learned it only that morning at church. As she came back into the house, she stopped singing, looked around her, dropped her bags, and sighed. She unpacked two pressed, polka-dot dresses from her plaid dress bag and hung them from the living-room doorknob, then carried the groceries in their torn sack from the hallway to the kitchen, and dumped them out on the counter.
“Oh, no—a salad,” said Arthur.
Jane had brought several pounds of vegetables with her, and she proceeded to make an enormous salad and, rather mechanically, to vent her spleen at Cleveland. “You raped our dog,” she said, slicing thin, translucent wafers of cucumber into a wooden salad bowl as big as a bicycle wheel. “I mean…” Cleveland changed completely. He switched from drinking beer to drinking the orange juice that she had brought, and he kept going over to embrace her, to smell her, to assure himself that she was really there. Arthur and I sat down at the kitchen table, ate grapes, and watched them reunite; they forgot us completely, or pretended to do so.
“They said you were dead,” Cleveland said happily. “Dead of dysentery.”
Jane blushed and said, “You made them say that,” changing carrots and scallions to orange nickels and green dimes. “You left them no option.” She made as though to slice her rosy throat with the Sabatier knife, and stuck out her tongue. “I hear you took it very well.”
“I was devastated,” he said, and his face grew grim, and he looked, for a moment, like a devastated man. “How was New Mexico?”
“It was wonderful.”
“Was it stark? Starkly sensual?” As she chopped, he orbited her, slow as Jupiter, regarding her from every angle, but on this last word hi
s orbit decayed and he fell against her, softly.
“Starkly sensual doesn’t even begin to describe it. You asshole,” she said.
Jane and Cleveland had been an item for nearly six years, and although their manner with each other was utterly familiar, they nonetheless displayed all the intoxicated rancor of a brand-new couple. It was as though they still had not decided if they liked each other. When she looked at him lovingly, her eyes were filled with the strong regret and disapproval of a mother with a jailbird son. And though when speaking to her he came closer than with anyone else to ridding his voice of its smirk, nevertheless the smirk remained. I think that fundamentally he was jealous of her: not of any phantom lovers—for she never had any—but jealous of her, of her half-English crazy optimism and her manias for salad-making and endless walks. And I think that Jane was afraid for Cleveland, afraid of the inevitable day when he really would ruin everything.
“Do you all like chives?” she said. “I bought some fresh chives.” She waved them hopefully. “I’ll bet you haven’t had a single vegetable since you got here.”
“We had beans,” I said.
There was silence while we all watched her make a vinaigrette, shaking flakes of this and that into the cruet without looking at the labels on the spice jars. I saw her shake nutmeg into the dressing, and curry. After she had held the bottle to the light and examined it closely for half a minute, watching the particles slowly sink through the line from oil to vinegar, she looked at Cleveland. “You know, I did like New Mexico an awful lot. So many interesting animals, and the Indians are so kind. I saw a rattlesnake, Cleveland. And tons and tons of motorcycles. I think you’d like it. I was thinking maybe the two of us could go out there sometime.”
“Sure,” said Cleveland. He fanned out his hands as though to say, Why not leave right now?
“You don’t mean it,” she said.