"I slept with Phlox," I said.

"Oh, Jesus, let's walk somewhere." He'd dressed quickly; his sneakers didn't match, his shirt was half-untucked-he'd already been to bed at least once before I answered my phone. And I have to admit that it was right then, as I blurted out what I'd just done, and his unshaven, stray-hair face creased with a kind of prissy annoyance, that I felt the first failure of the emotion I was about to profess.

"How did it happen?"

"How do you think?" I said, snapping because it looked as if things were going that way. "No, Arthur, I'm sorry; it happened very strangely, actually, and I don't really get it at all."

We passed the bronze Shakespeare with his great domed head, the bronze Stephen Foster eternally serenaded by the pickaninny with the bronze banjo, and I saw that we would end up in our usual place high above the Lost Neighborhood, which we did, silently, taking up our usual slouches against the iron rail. The sky glowed and flashed orange, off toward the mills in the south, as if volcano gods were fighting there or, it seemed to me, as if the end of the world had begun-it was an orange so tortured and final.

He took hold of my elbow, firmly, and turned me till I faced him. Again that day I expected to see anger, and again I was disappointed.

"Art, don't leave me," he said, an unfamiliar look on his face, cheeks hollow, eyes rolling. I'd never seen his face reveal anything before. "I've been so afraid that this would happen. I knew when you weren't home all night. I knew it."

"I had no idea," I said. "It was all a big accident. Or that is, she planned it. I fell into it. I can't say what it really means. It was so strange tonight, Arthur." My throat tightened. All the sexual battle and stress of the day, the confusion of my final bout with Phlox, the loveliness of her lacy bedroom, and the power of her face mounted within me and came spilling out. Arthur held out his fingers and lightly brushed my cheek.

"What is it? Art. Come on. Don't cry."

"I don't know what I'm like anymore," I said. "I do dumb things."

"Shh."

"Don't ask me to choose. Please."

"I won't," he said, shortly, as though it cost him some effort. "Just don't leave me."

I stopped crying. Everything seemed utterly upside down. The Arthur I thought I knew would be scorning me now, and ridiculing Phlox, and forcing me to admit that she'd suckered me. He would be forcing me to acknowledge that if I didn't love him, Arthur F. Lecomte, with all the hip places he had been, the perfect manner of the life he led, his sarcastic brilliance, his hard amusement, and, most of all, the male company he could offer me, then I was a fool, a loser, and entirely my father's obedient boy; cursed, doomed to lose the things my father had lost-art, love, integrity, and all that. A shift, another shift, had taken place. Somehow it was up to me now, and I wanted to know why.

"Did something else happen to you today?" I said. "Something with Riri?"

Arthur sat down on a step and looked down onto the miniature lights of the Lost Neighborhood.

"I took this test," he said. "I didn't tell you. I took the foreign service exam. I failed. I knew when I came out of the room, really, but I got the letter this afternoon."

I sat beside him and put my arm across his shoulders.

"So? You can take it again, can't you?" I tried to think of when he must have taken it.

"I'm twenty-five. I'm still in college. I'm queer. My lover is about to leave me for Deanna Durbin." He threw a stone. "I've been chasing after the same things for a long time now."

"I love you," I said.

"You're a sexual dilettante," he said. "You have no idea."

We made love on the steps. I threw up. He walked me home, told me a bad joke, and we climbed into my narrow bed. In two hours there was daylight at the window and a Wedgwood sky.

I imagine it was shortly before dinnertime on the twenty-third of August that Cleveland reentered the world of his earliest childhood, intent on doing it harm. Until just a few days before this, I think, he hadn't set foot in Fox Chapel in years and years, not since the distant winter morning on which the Arnings had moved out to the country, and he'd sat in his little rubber boots and silken, pillowy snowsuit in the back seat of the family car, bewildered, watching the bare window of his bedroom disappear. Now his boots were of black leather, the air smelled like perfect lawns, and he, Evil Incarnate, knew exactly where he was going. He went slowly, keeping a light hand on the throttle so that the giant growls of his German engine wouldn't draw too much notice. As though his opaque helmet were not disguise enough, he'd cut his hair short, had traded his glasses for a pair of contacts, his black jacket for a twill sport coat, and as he pulled off into the parking lot of a mock-Tudor shopping center whose rustic, pretty stores sold things of no practical use, potpourris, artificial eggs, duck-related merchandise, he did his best to look like the wayward, thrillhound son of a well-to-do Fox Chapel family-one of the local young black sheep who were always flipping over in their Italian cars on winding roads, vomiting on the golf courses at night, diving fully clothed and drunken into the runs and creeks-one of whom, really, he was. Only in my hands, he thought as he killed the engine, it goes further than simple bad behavior. It is an intellectual and moral program. It is the will to bigness.

He shed his helmet, left his bike in a space around the back of the shopping center, near the Dumpsters, where Tudor ended and blank cinder block began. Then he stood for a moment, patting at his jacket. Gloves, flask, penlight, pocketknife, Poe. From the straps that held it to the saddle he drew a little crowbar and slid it under his watchband, up into his sleeve, until it jabbed at the soft crook of his arm.

A wood began behind the shopping center, fairly dense with pin oak and brambles, shot through with tiny rills, but he knew that it held sudden clearings, it was passable, and that it continued for almost two miles until it stopped abruptly at a certain concrete wall whose dimensions, by now, he knew quite well. He grinned at the sight of the colonnade of trees before him, he dallied a minute more to enjoy the quick leap of his heart and the warmth that mounted in his stomach. Although he supposed it was a stupid thing to have done, he was what he was-so on the way over he'd stopped at a bar for two lucky shots of Jameson's Irish whiskey, and now, drawing a hot half-inch from his own flask and contemplating the lovely, dark world he was about to enter, he was filled with alcoholic courage; with a habitual head toss, he started into the trees, twigs crunching underfoot; but he no longer owned his tossing long hair, and he rubbed at the bristly back of his head.

The trip through the woods took him a little over an hour, so he had far more than enough time to think about what he was about to do, and anyway I think he loved the act of considering himself a jewel thief, like this: "I am a jewel thief"; for he was learning a profession, and, as with doctors, and priests, and the other few true professionals (people, that is, who are trained to recognize peril), merely pronouncing the words "jewel thief" served him as a kind of instantaneous reminder of his many skills and responsibilities, as a restorative slap. It jerked him into bleak, hungry readiness, like the snap of the wrist that frees the humming switchblade.

Twice or three times the odd cry of a bird, the yell of a jay, would stop him dead, and he'd duck behind a tree for several seconds, watching, breathing. He wasn't frightened by the many things that could go wrong in the natural course of a job, because these things were more or less the whole point, along with the proverbial fat wads of dough. But he'd been troubled, even mildly spooked, by his teacher Pete Areola's uncharacteristic anxiety during the previous couple of days. Somebody had been telling Poon to watch his step, to keep a leash on his protégés, and although Punicki laughed and told Pete to tell Cleveland not to worry, he'd also set up elaborate precautions for the fencing later on that night. Areola, ex-Special Forces, trained to steal by the army and then set loose, said it was Frankie Breezy making vague, "probably bullshit" threats, but Cleveland had a dim suspicion that my father might be lurking somewhere behind them, as he clutched a tree and listened hard.