The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

“I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”

hadn’t I for the fiftieth time berated myself for my failure to encounter, to risk, to land myself in novel and incomprehensible situations—to misunderstand, in fact? And so, with a fatalistic shrug, I went to drink one beer.

In Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anywhere else in our languid nation, a barmaid does not care.

Like many Persian women, she had an eagling kind of beauty, hooked and dark, and mean about the eyes.

“I go to these parties to practice,” he’d said. “There are factions, alliances, secrets, debts, and a lot of messing around—I mean, of course, sexual messing around. And they all see themselves as Iranians, Brazilians, whatever, but I—I don’t see myself as an American: I’m an atom, I bounce all over the place, like a mercenary. No, not a mercenary, a free agent—a free atom—isn’t that something in chemistry? I’m always at the outside orbit of all the other, um, molecules?”

I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I’d been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls.

Here I am, I thought, for I felt shitty and sour and wry, at the start of the first summer of my new life, and they tell me I’ve come in late and missed everything.

As far as they were concerned, a good book was still a plump little paperback that knew how to sit in a beach bag and keep its dirty mouth shut.

Summer would happen after dinner. The job had no claim upon me.

It was as though she had studied American notions of beauty from some great distance and had come all this way only to find she had overdone the details: a debutante from another planet.

and then thought about Catholic school, how typical it was for Arthur to have gone in an altar boy and come out a catamite.

I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

When Jane took Happy out, people slowed their cars to watch the dog’s perfect gait, her leash superfluous, slack, vulgar.

“I’m walking destruction,” he sang. “I’m a demolition man.”

And I’ll bet that at this very moment that late-afternoon emptiness of the spirit is stealing over him like a shadow. Like a shadow.’” He

I didn’t see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn’t care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing that he was an alcoholic. And an alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the most carefully planned and prepared for events in the world.

everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he’d left the whole world to me in his will.

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness—and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.