The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

The store, with its long white aisles and megalithic piles of discount thrillers and exercise guides, was organized as though the management had hoped to sell luncheon meat or lawn-care products but had somehow been tricked by an unscrupulous wholesaler—I imagined the disappointed “What the hell are we going to do with all these damn books?” of the owners, who had started in postcards and seaside souvenirs on the Jersey shore. 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.

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.

Being up this early made me feel as though I’d been taken to a new part of town, or like a hardened New Yorker who, finally standing atop the Statue of Liberty, cannot spot the water tank on the roof of his building and realizes with a strange delight how big and beyond him his city is.

I ADMIT I HAVE an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French.

“Never say love is like anything,” said Cleveland. “It isn’t.”

The furnishings were rich, antique, and cold to the touch, even in late June: huge clocks, chairs with fabulously carved arms, old, evil-looking medical paraphernalia, and rugs that would not give under my stocking feet.

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.

discovered I had made one of those common aesthetic efforts that consists of just swallowing an entire system of bad taste—Las Vegas, or a bowling alley, or Jerry Lewis movies—and then finding it beautiful and fun.

I was filled with a frail and sad exhilaration, which I really ought to have recognized for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there—for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time.

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