I’m re-reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which is something I do every few years. It’s not Michael Chabon’s best work, but it was his first and he was SO GOD DAMN YOUNG when he wrote it. It’s too earnest and tries too hard, but fuck it. That’s what I love about it, really. He overuses commas and tries to use Very Big Words to be impressive. Again, things that most people would hate in a book, but I find absolutely charming. Also, it’s like SUPER of its time (1980′s) which pleases me to no end.
But also, it has one of my favorite passages ever written in any book. And I don’t really know why I love it so much? It’s the scene where the protagonist (Art Bechstein) finally stops lying to himself and realizes he’s in love with his friend Arthur. Even though the reader could see it coming, Art had obviously been lying to his bisexual self. And...I don’t know. You think books with bisexual characters (written by a bi guy no less) are hard to find now? It was ten times harder in the 1980′s.
Anyway, a lot of Tumblr probably hasn’t read the book but I think a lot of Tumblr would like this scene.
“From time to time I would glance over at him, stretched out with his eyes shut, his lashes glinting, his body almost bare. I had never before given a man’s body the regard I now gave his-but furtively, and through the flutter of a squint. I felt - I feel, almost as if I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. For one thing, each of the above-named parts was covered with thick blond hair, running to red-brown along the top of his bathing suit and his chest. I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. I looked at him. He was in a sweat; his stomach was flat; there was hair on the back of his long, damp hand. And I looked also at his crotch, at that strange - that shaven- fist wrapped in slick blue Lycra. But his skin was the most strange, and the most difficult to keep my eyes from; it was dappled all over with tiny shadows, which gave it a look both soft and rough, as of suede or fine sand; and it seemed, stretched so tightly across his bones and muscle, as though it would never give, like a woman’s, to the pressure of my hand.
He sat up suddenly, leaning on his elbows, face red, eyes like the water in the brilliant pool, and caught me looking at his skin. I was startled into thinking the sentence that I had all summer forbidden myself to think; I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him.
“Yes?” he said, with half a smile.
“Ha. Nothing. Um. I’ve-I’ve been here before,: I said. “A long time ago. I threw up on my mom at a bar mitzvah.” My mom. I had not said this in years. It just slipped out, in my confusion, I bit my lip. Arthur twisted himself onto his side and propped himself up with one arm looking eager.
“And?”
I rolled onto my stomach, as much to conceal the swelling in the bathing suit I’d borrowed from him - he’d already glanced that way - as to avoid the current discussion. I spoke through the slats in my lounge chair, staring at the damp concrete on the deck. “And that’s all. Just another cheesy story about a nauseated Jew.”
“I’ve heard them all,” he said, and after a long moment, he fell back into the path of the sunlight. I breathed out.
