A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Sheila says you live next door to her folks?” Ira said. Carmen nodded, then turned her head to exhale a long jet of smoke. The contact of their eyes was brief but he thought it had something to it. There was about an inch and a half of Sauza left in Ira’s glass and he drained a quarter inch of it, figuring this left him with enough to get through another five questions. He could already tell that talking to Carmen was not going to be easy, but he considered this an excellent omen. Easy flirtation had always struck him as an end in itself and one which did not particularly interest him.

  “Is it that big wooden house with the sort of, I don’t know, those things, those rafters or whatever, sticking out from under all the roofs?” He spread the fingers of one hand and slid them under the other until they protruded, making a crude approximation of the overhanging eaves of a California bungalow. There was such a grand old house, to the north of Sheila’s parents, that he’d always admired.

  Another nod. She had a habit of opening her eyes very wide, every so often, almost a tic, and Ira wondered if her contact lenses might not be slipping.

  “It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” she said bitterly, as though this were the most withering pair of epithets that could be applied to a house. These were the first words she had addressed to him and in them, though he didn’t know what she was talking about, he sensed a story. He took another little sip of tequila and nodded agreeably.

  “You live in a Hetrick and Dewitt?” said Doreen, interrupting her conversation with Donna and Audrey to reach across Audrey’s lap and tap Carmen on the arm. She looked amazed. “Which one?”

  “It’s the big pretentious one on Orange Blossom, in Altadena,” Carmen said, stubbing out her cigarette. She gave a very caustic sigh and then rose to her feet; she was taller than Ira had thought. Having risen to her feet rather dramatically, she now seemed uncertain of what to do next and stood wavering a little on her blue spike heels, It was clear she felt that she had been wrong to come to Sheila’s wedding, but that was all she seemed able to manage, and after a moment she sank slowly back into her seat. Ira felt very sorry for her and tried to think of something she could do besides sit and look miserable. At that moment the band launched into “Night and Day,” and Ira happened to look toward the table where he had left his aunts. Mr. Lapidus was pulling out his aunt Sophie’s chair and taking her arm. They were going to dance.

  “Carmen, would you like to dance?” Ira said, blushing, and wiggling his toes.

  Her reply was no more than a whisper, and Ira wasn’t sure if he heard it correctly, but it seemed to him that she said, “Anything.”

  They walked, separately, out to the dance floor, and turned to face each other. For an awful moment they just stood, tapping their hesitant feet. But the two old people were describing a slow arc in Ira’s general direction, and finally in order to forestall any embarrassing exhortations from Mr. Lapidus, who was known for such things, Ira reached out and took Carmen by the waist and palm, and twirled her off across the wide parquet floor of the Oasis Room. It was an old-fashioned sort of tune and there was no question of their dancing to it any way but in each other’s arms.

  “You’re good at this,” Carmen said, smiling for the first time that he could remember.

  “Thanks,” said Ira. He was in fact a competent dancer— his mother, preparing him for a fantastic and outmoded destiny, had taught him a handful of hokey old steps. Carmen danced beautifully, and he saw to his delight that he had somehow hit upon the precise activity to bring her, for the moment anyway, out of her beta-carotene and black jellybean gloom. “So are you.”

  “I used to work at the Arthur Murray on La Cienega,” she said, moving one hand a little lower on his back. “That was fifteen years ago.”

  This apparently wistful thought seemed to revive her accustomed gloominess a little, and she took on the faraway, hollow expression of a taxi dancer, and grew heavy in his arms. The action of her legs became overly thoughtful and accurate. Ira searched for something to talk about, to distract her with, but all of the questions he came up with had to do, at least in some respect, with her, and he sensed that anything on this subject might plunge her, despite her easy two-step, into an irrevocable sadness. At last the bubble of silence between them grew too great, and Ira pierced it helplessly.

  “Where did you grow up?” he said, looking away as he spoke.

  “In hotels,” said Carmen, and that was that. “I don’t think Sheila is happy, do you?” She coughed, and then the song came abruptly to an end. The bandleader set down his trumpet, tugged the microphone up to his mouth, and announced that in just a few short moments the cake was going to be cut.

  When they returned to the table a tall, handsome man, his black hair thinning but his chin cleft and his eyes pale green, was standing behind Carmen’s empty chair, leaning against it and talking to Donna, Audrey, and Doreen. He wore a fancy, European-cut worsted suit, a purple and sky blue paisley necktie, a blazing white-on-white shirt, and a tiny sparkler in the lobe of his left ear. His nose was large, bigger even than Ira’s, and of a complex shape, like the blade of some highly specialized tool; it dominated his face in a way that made the man himself seem dominating. The shirting fabric of his suit jacket caught and stretched across the muscles of his shoulders. When Carmen approached her place at the table, he drew her chair for her. She thanked him with a happy and astonishingly carnal smile, and as she sat down he peered, with a polished audacity that made Ira wince in envy, into the scooped neck of her dress.

  “Carmen, Ira,” said Doreen, “this is Jeff Freebone.” As Doreen introduced the handsome Mr. Freebone, all of the skin that was visible across her body colored a rich blood-orange red. Ira’s hand vanished momentarily into a tanned, forehand-smashing grip. Ira looked at Donna, hoping to see at least some hint of unimpressedness in her lesbian and often cynical gaze, but his cousin had the same shining-eyed sort of Tiger Beat expression on her face as Doreen and Carmen—and Audrey, for that matter—and Ira realized that Jeff Freebone must be very, very rich.

  “What’s up, Ira?” he said, in a smooth, flattened-out baritone to which there clung a faint tang of New York City, and Ira recognized him, with a start, as the coarse man at the bar who had fired an unfortunate woman named Charlotte in her own bed.

  “Jeff here used to work in the same office as Barry and me,” Doreen told Carmen. “Now he has his own company.”

  “Freebone Properties,” Carmen said, looking more animated than she had all afternoon. “I’ve seen the signs on front lawns, right?”

  “Billboards,” said Donna. “Ads on TV.”

  “How was the wedding?” Jeff wanted to know. He went around Carmen and sat down in the chair beside her, leaving Ira to stand, off to one side, glowering at his cousin Donna, who was clearly going to leave him high and dry in this. “Did they stand under that tent thing and break the mirror or whatever?”

  Ira was momentarily surprised, and gratified, by this display of ignorance, since he had taken Jeff for Jewish. Then he remembered that many of Donna’s Hollywood friends spoke with a schmoozing accent whether they were Jewish or not, even ex-cheerleaders from Ames, Iowa, and men named Lars.

  “It was weird,” Carmen declared, without elaborating—not even Jeff Freebone, apparently, could draw her out—and the degree of acquiescence this judgment received at the table shocked Ira. He turned to seek out Sheila among the hundreds of faces that filled the Oasis Room, to see if she was all right, but could not find her. There was a small crowd gathered around the cathedral cake at the far end of the room, but the bride did not seem to be among them. Weird—what had been weird about it? Was Sheila not, after all, in love with her two hours’ husband? Ira tapped his foot to the music, self-conscious, and pretended to continue his search for Sheila, although in truth he was not looking at anything anymore. He was mortified by the quickness with which his love affair with the sad and beautiful woman of his dreams had been derailed, and all at once—the tequila he had drunk had begun to betr
ay him—he came face to face with the distinct possibility that not only would he never find the one he was meant to find, but that no else ever did, either. The discussion around the table hurtled off into the imaginary and vertiginous world of real estate. Finally he had to take hold of a nearby chair and sit down.

  “I can get you three mil for it, sight unseen,” Jeff Freebone was declaring. He leaned back in his seat and folded his hands behind his head.

  “It’s worth way more,” said Donna, giving Carmen a poke in the ribs. “It’s a work of art, Jeff.”

  “It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” said everyone at the table, all at once.

  “You have to see it,” Doreen said.

  “All right then, let’s see it. I drove my Rover, we can all fit. Take me to see it.”

  There was moment of hesitation, during which the four women seemed to consider the dictates of decorum and the possible implications of the proposed expedition to see the house that Carmen hated.

  “The cake is always like sliced cardboard at these things, anyway,” said Donna.

  This seemed to decide them, and there followed a general scraping of chairs and gathering of summer wraps.

  “Aren’t you coming?” said Donna, leaning over Ira—who had settled into a miserable, comfortable slouch—and whispering into his ear. The others were already making their way out of the Oasis Room. Ira scowled at her.

  “Hey, come on, I. She needs a realtor, not a lover. Besides, she was way too old for you.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his head. “Okay, sulk. I’ll call you.” Then she buttoned her sharkskin jacket and turned on one heel.

  After Ira had been sitting alone at the table for several minutes, half hoping his aunt Lillian would notice his distress and bring over a piece of cake or a petit four and a plateful of her comforting platitudes, he noticed that Carmen, not too surprisingly, had left her handbag behind. He got up from his chair and went to pick it up. For a moment he peered into it, aroused, despite himself, by the intimacy of this act, like reading a woman’s diary, or putting one’s hand inside her empty shoe. Then he remembered his disappointment and his anger, and his fist closed around one of the vials of pills, which he quickly slipped into his pocket.

  “Ira, have you seen Sheila?”

  Ira dropped the purse, and whirled around. It was indeed his aunt Lillian but she looked very distracted and didn’t seem aware of having caught Ira in the act. She kept tugging at the fringes of her wildly patterned scarf.

  “Not recently,” said Ira. “Why?”

  Aunt Lillian explained that someone, having drunk too much, had fallen onto the train of Sheila’s gown and torn it slightly; this had seemed to upset Sheila a good deal and she had gone off somewhere, no one knew where. The bathrooms and the lobbies of the hotel had all been checked. The cake-cutting was fifteen minutes overdue.

  “I’ll find her,” said Ira.

  He went out into the high, cool lobby and crossed it several times, his heels clattering across the marble floors and his soles susurrant along the Persian carpets. He climbed a massive oak staircase to the mezzanine, where he passed through a pair of French doors that opened onto a long balcony overlooking the sparkling pool. Here he found her, dropped in one corner of the terrace like a blown flower. She had taken the garland from her brow and was twirling it around and around in front of her face with the mopey fascination of a child. When she felt Ira’s presence she turned, and, seeing him, broke out in a teary-eyed grin that he found very difficult to bear. He walked over to her and sat down beside her on the rough stucco deck of the balcony.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Are they all going nuts down there?”

  “I guess. I heard about your dress. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” She stared through the posts of the balustrade at the great red sun going down over Santa Monica. There had been a lot of rain the past few days and the air was heartbreakingly clear. “You just feel like such a, I don’t know, a big stupid puppet or something, getting pulled around.”

  Ira edged a little closer to his cousin and she laid her head against his shoulder, and sighed. The contact of her body was so welcome and unsurprising that it frightened him, and he began to fidget with the vial in his pocket.

  “What’s that?” she said, at the faint rattle.

  He withdrew the little bottle and held it up to the dying light. There was no label of any kind on its side.

  “I sort of stole them from your friend Carmen.”

  Sheila managed an offhand smile.

  “Oh—how did that work out? I saw you dancing.”

  “She wasn’t for me,” said Ira. He unscrewed the cap and tipped the vial into his hand. There were only two pills left, small, pink, shaped like commas—two little pink teardrops. “Any idea what these are? Could they be beta-carotene?”

  Sheila shook her head and extended one hand, palm upward. At first Ira thought she wanted him to place one of the pills upon it, but she shook her head again; when he took her outstretched fingers in his she nodded.

  “Ira,” she said in the heaviest of voices, bringing her bridal mouth toward his. Just before he kissed her he closed his eyes, brought his own hand to his mouth, and swallowed, hard.

  “My darling,” he said.

  Ocean Avenue

  IF YOU CAN STILL see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible. One day not too long ago, in Laguna Beach, California, an architect named Bobby Lazar went downtown to have a cup of coffee at the Café Zinc with his friend Albert Wong and Albert’s new wife, Dawn (who had, very sensibly, retained her maiden name). Albert and Dawn were still in that period of total astonishment that follows a wedding, grinning at each other like two people who have survived an air crash without a scratch, touching one another frequently, lucky to be alive. Lazar was not a cynical man and he wished them well, but he had also been lonely for a long time, and their happiness was making him a little sick. Albert had brought along a copy of Science, in which he had recently published some work on the String Theory, and it was as Lazar looked up from Al’s name and abbreviations in the journal’s table of contents that he saw Suzette, in her exercise clothes, coming toward the cafe from across the street, looking like she weighed about seventy-five pounds.

  She was always too thin, though at the time of their closest acquaintance he had thought he liked a woman with bony shoulders. She had a bony back, too, he suddenly remembered, like a marimba, as well as a pointed, bony nose and chin, and she was always—but always—on a diet, even though she had a naturally small appetite and danced aerobically or ran five miles every day. Her face looked hollowed and somehow mutated, as do the faces of most women who get too much exercise, but there was a sheen on her brow and a mad, aerobic glimmer in her eye. She’d permed her hair since he last saw her, and it flew out around her head in two square feet of golden Pre-Raphaelite rotini—the lily maid of Astolat on an endorphin high. A friend had once said she was the kind of woman who causes automobile accidents when she walks down the street, and, as a matter of fact, as she stepped up onto the patio of the café, a man passing on his bicycle made the mistake of following her with his eyes for a moment and nearly rode into the open door of a parked car.

  “Isn’t that Suzette?” Al said. Albert was, as it happened, the only one of his friends after the judgment who refused to behave as though Suzette had never existed, and he was always asking after her in his pointed, physicistic manner, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Needless to say, Lazar did not like to be reminded. In the course of their affair, he knew, he had been terribly erratic, by turns tightfisted and profligate, glum and overeager, unsociable and socially aflutter, full of both flattery and glib invective—a shithead, in short—and, to his credit, he was afraid that he had treated Suzette very badly. It may have been this repressed consciousness, more than anything else, that led him to tell himself, when he first saw her again, that he did not lov
e her anymore.

  “Uh-oh,” said Dawn, after she remembered who Suzette was.

  “I have nothing to be afraid of,” Lazar said. As she passed, he called out, “Suzette?” He felt curiously invulnerable to her still evident charms, and uttered her name with the lightness and faint derision of someone on a crowded airplane signaling to an attractive but slightly elderly stewardess. “Hey, Suze!”

  She was wearing a Walkman, however, with the earphones turned up very loud, and she floated past on a swell of Chaka Khan and Rufus.

  “Didn’t she hear you?” said Albert, looking surprised.

  “No, Dr. Five Useful Non-Implications of the String Theory, she did not,” Lazar said. “She was wearing earphones.”

  “I think she was ignoring you.” Albert turned to his bride and duly consulted her. “Didn’t she look like she heard him? Didn’t her face kind of blink?”

  “There she is, Bobby,” said Dawn, pointing toward the entrance of the café. As it was a beautiful December morning, they were sitting out on the patio, and Lazar had his back to the Zinc. “Waiting on line.”

  He felt that he did not actually desire to speak to her but that Albert and Dawn’s presence forced him into it somehow. A certain tyranny of in-touchness holds sway in that part of the world—a compulsion to behave always as though one is still in therapy but making real progress, and the rules of enlightened behavior seemed to dictate that he not sneak away from the table with his head under a newspaper—as he might have done if alone—and go home to watch the Weather Channel or Home Shopping Network for three hours with a twelve-pack of Mexican beer and the phone off the hook. He turned around in his chair and looked at Suzette more closely. She had on one of those glittering, opalescent Intergalactic Amazon leotard-and-tights combinations that seem to be made of cavorite or adamantium and do not so much cling to a woman’s body as seal her off from gamma rays and lethal Stardust. Lazar pronounced her name again, more loudly, calling out across the sunny patio. She looked even thinner from behind.