A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Oh, Bobby,” she said, removing the headphones but keeping her place in the coffee line.

  “Hello, Suze,” he said. They nodded pleasantly to one another, and that might have been it right there. After a second or two she dipped her head semiapologetically, smiled an irritated smile, and put the earphones—“ear-buds,” he recalled, was the nauseous term—back into her ears.

  “She looks great,” Lazar said magnanimously to Albert and Dawn, keeping his eyes on Suzette.

  “She looks so thin, so drawn,” said Dawn, who frankly could have stood to drop about fifteen pounds.

  “She looks fine to me,” said Al. “I’d say she looks better than ever.”

  “I know you would,” Lazar snapped. “You’d say it just to bug me.”

  He was a little irritated himself now. The memory of their last few days together had returned to him, despite all his heroic efforts over the past months to repress it utterly. He thought of the weekend following that bad review of their restaurant in the Times (they’d had a Balearic restaurant called Ibiza in San Clemente)—a review in which the critic had singled out his distressed-stucco interior and Suzette’s Majorcan paella, in particular, for censure. Since these were precisely the two points around which, in the course of opening the restaurant, they had constructed their most idiotic and horrible arguments, the unfavorable notice hit their already shaky relationship like a dumdum bullet, and Suzette went a little nuts. She didn’t show up at home or at Ibiza all the next day—so that poor hypersensitive little José had to do all the cooking—but instead disappeared into the haunts of physical culture. She worked out at the gym, went to Zahava’s class, had her body waxed, and then, to top it all off, rode her bicycle all the way to El Toro and back. When she finally came home she was in a mighty hormonal rage and suffered under the delusion that she could lift a thousand pounds and chew her way through vanadium steel. She claimed that Lazar had bankrupted her, among other outrageous and untrue assertions, and he went out for a beer to escape from her. By the time he returned, several hours later, she had moved out, taking with her only his belongings, as though she had come to see some fundamental inequity in their relationship—such as their having been switched at birth—and were attempting in this way to rectify it.

  This loss, though painful, he would have been willing to suffer if it hadn’t included his collection of William Powelliana, which was then at its peak and contained everything from the checkered wingtips Powell wore in The Kennel Club Murder Case to Powell’s personal copy of the shooting script for Life with Father to a 1934 letter from Dashiell Hammett congratulating Powell on his interpretation of Nick Charles, which Lazar had managed to obtain from a Powell grand-nephew only minutes before the epistolary buzzards from the University of Texas tried to snap it up. Suzette sold the entire collection, at far less than its value, to that awful Kelso McNair up in Lawndale, who only annexed it to his vast empire of Myrna Loy memorabilia and locked it away in his vault. In retaliation Lazar went down the next morning to their safe-deposit box at Dana Point, removed all six of Suzette’s 1958 and ’59 Barbie Dolls, and sold them to a collectibles store up in Orange for not quite four thousand dollars, at which point she brought the first suit against him.

  “Why is your face turning so red, Bobby?” said Dawn, who must have been all of twenty-two.

  Oh!” he said, not bothering even to sound sincere. “I just remembered. I have an appointment.”

  “See you, Bobby,” said Al.

  “See you,” he said, but he did not stand up.

  “You don’t have to keep looking at her, anyway,” Al continued reasonably. “You can just look out at Ocean Avenue here, or at my lovely new wife—hi, sweetie—and act as though Suzette’s not there.”

  “I know,” Lazar said, smiling at Dawn, then returning his eyes immediately to Suzette. “But I’d like to talk to her. No, really.”

  So saying, he rose from his chair and walked, as nonchalantly as he could, toward her. He had always been awkward about crossing public space, and could not do it without reeling somehow cheesy and hucksterish, as though he were crossing a makeshift dais in a Legion Hall to accept a diploma from a bogus school of real estate; he worried that his pants were too tight across the seat, that his gait was hitched and dorky, that his hands swung chimpishly at his sides. Suzette was next in line now and studying the menu, even though he could have predicted, still, exactly what she would order: a decaf au lait and a wedge of frittata with two little cups of cucumber salsa. He came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder; the taps were intended to be devil-may-care and friendly, but of course he overdid them and they came off as the brusque importunities of a man with a bone to pick. Suzette turned around looking more irritated than ever, and when she saw who it was her dazzling green eyes grew tight little furrows at their corners.

  “How are you?” said Lazar, daring to leave his hand on her shoulder, where, as though it were approaching c, very quickly it seemed to acquire a great deal of mass. He was so conscious of his hand on her damp, solid shoulder that he missed her first few words and finally had to withdraw it, blushing.

  “… great. Everything’s really swell,” Suzette was saying, looking down at the place on her shoulder where his hand had just been. Had he laid a freshly boned breast of raw chicken there and then taken it away her expression could not have been more bemused. She turned away. “Hi, Norris,” she said to the lesbian woman behind the counter. “Just an espresso.”

  “On a diet?” Lazar said, feeling his smile tighten.

  “Not hungry,” she said. “You’ve gained a few pounds.”

  “You could be right,” he said, and patted his stomach. Since he had thrown Suzette’s Borg bathroom scale onto the scrap heap along with her other belongings (thus leaving the apartment all but empty), he had no idea of how much he weighed, and, frankly, as he put it to himself, smiling all the while at his ex-lover, he did not give a rat’s ass. “I probably did. You look thinner than ever, really, Suze.”

  “Here’s your espresso,” said Norris, smiling oddly at Lazar, as though they were old friends, and he was confused until he remembered that right after Suzette left him he’d run into this Norris at a party in Bluebird Canyon, and they had a short, bitter, drunken conversation about what it felt like when a woman left you, and Lazar impressed her by declaring, sagely, that it felt as though you’d arrived home to find that your dearest and most precious belongings in the world had been sold to a man from Lawndale.

  “What about that money you owe me?” he said. The question was halfway out of his mouth before he realized it, and although he appended a hasty ha-ha at the finish, his jaw was clenched and he must have looked as if he was about to slug her.

  “Whoa!” said Suzette, stepping neatly around him. “I’m getting out of here, Bobby. Good-bye.” She tucked her chin against her chest, dipped her head, and slipped out the door, as though ducking into a rainstorm.

  “Wait!” he said. “Suzette!”

  She turned toward him as he came out onto the patio, her shoulders squared, and held him at bay with her cup of espresso coffee.

  “I don’t have to reckon with you anymore, Bobby Lazar,” she said. “Colleen says I’ve already reckoned with you enough.” Colleen was Suzette’s therapist. They had seen her together for a while, and Lazar was both scornful and afraid of her and her linguistic advice.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be, um, yielding. I’ll yield. I promise. I just—I don’t know. How about let’s sit down?”

  He turned to the table where he’d left Albert, Dawn, and his cup of coffee, and discovered that his friends had stood up and were collecting their shopping bags, putting on their sweaters.

  “Are you going?” he said.

  “If you two are getting back together,” said Albert, “this whole place is going. It’s all over. It’s the Big One.”

  “Albert!” said Dawn.

  “You’re a sick man, Bob,” said Albert. He shook L
azar’s hand and grinned. “You’re sick, and you like sick women.”

  Lazar cursed him, kissed Dawn on both cheeks, and laughed a reckless laugh.

  “Is he drunk or something?” he heard Dawn say before they were out of earshot, and, indeed, as he returned to Suzette’s table the world seemed suddenly more stressful and gay, the sky more tinged at its edges with violet.

  “Is that Al’s new wife?” said Suzette. She waved to them as they headed down the street. “She’s pretty, but she needs to work on her thighs.”

  “I think Al’s been working on them,” he said.

  “Shush,” said Suzette.

  They sat back and looked at each other warily and with pleasure. The circumstances under which they parted had been so strained and unfriendly and terminal that to find themselves sitting, just like that, at a bright cafe over two cups of black coffee seemed as thrilling as if they were violating some powerful taboo. They had been warned, begged, and even ordered to stay away from each other by everyone, from their shrinks to their parents to the bench of Orange County itself; yet here they were, in plain view, smiling and smiling. A lot of things had been lacking in their relationship, but unfortunately mutual physical attraction was not one of them, and Lazar could feel that hoary old devouring serpent uncoiling deep in its Darwinian cave.

  “It’s nice to see you,” said Suzette.

  “You look pretty,” he said. “I like what you’ve done with your hair. You look like a Millais.”

  “Thank you,” she said, a little tonelessly; she was not quite ready to listen to all his prattle again. She pursed her lips and looked at him in a manner almost surgical, as though about to administer a precise blow with a very small ax. She said, “Song of the Thin Man was on last week.”

  “I know,” he said. He was impressed, and oddly touched. “That’s pretty daring of you to mention that. Considering.”

  She set down her coffee cup, firmly, and he caught the flicker of her right biceps. “You got more than I got,” she said. “You got six thousand dollars! I got five thousand four hundred and ninety-five. I don’t owe you anything.”

  “I only got four thousand, remember?” he said. He felt himself blushing. “That came out, well, in court—don’t you remember? I—well, I lied.”

  “That’s right,” she said slowly. She rolled her eyes and bit her lip, remembering. “You lied. Four thousand. They were worth twice that.”

  “A lot of them were missing hair or limbs,” he said.

  “You pig!” She gave her head a monosyllabic shake, and the golden curls rustled like a dress. Since she had at one time been known to call him a pig with delicacy and tenderness, this did not immediately alarm Lazar. “You sold my dolls,” she said, dreamily, though of course she knew this perfectly well, and had known it for quite some time. Only now, he could see, it was all coming back to her, the memory of the cruel things they had said, of the tired, leering faces of the lawyers, of the acerbic envoi of the county judge dismissing all their suits and countersuits, of the day they had met for the last time in the empty building that had been their restaurant, amid the bare fixtures, the exposed wires, the crumbs of plaster on the floor; of the rancor that from the first had been the constant flower of their love. “You sold their things, too,” she remembered. “All of their gowns and pumps and little swimwear.”

  “I was just trying to get back at you.”

  “For what? For making sure I at least got something out of all the time I wasted on you?”

  “Take it easy, Suze.”

  “And then to lie about how much you got for them? Four thousand dollars!”

  “At first my lawyers instructed me to lie about it,” he lied.

  “Kravitz! Di Martino! Those sleazy, lizardy, shystery old fat guys! Oh, you pigs!”

  Now she was on her feet, and everyone out on the patio had turned with great interest to regard them. He realized, or rather remembered, that he had strayed into dangerous territory here, that Suzette had a passion for making scenes in restaurants. This is how it was, said a voice within Lazar—a gloomy, condemnatory voice—this is what you’ve been missing. He saw the odd angle at which she was holding her cup of coffee, and he hoped against hope that she did not intend to splash his face with espresso. She was one of those women who like to hurl beverages.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, despite himself, his voice coated with the most unctuous sarcasm, “you’re reckoning with me again.”

  You could see her consulting with herself about trajectories and wind shear and beverage velocity and other such technical considerations—collecting all the necessary data, and courage—and then she let fly. The cup sailed past Lazar’s head, and he just had time to begin a tolerant, superior smile, and to uncurl partially the middle finger of his right hand, before the cup bounced off the low wall beside him and ricocheted into his face.

  Suzette looked startled for a moment, registering this as one registers an ace in tennis or golf, and then laughed the happy laugh of a lucky shot. As the unmerciful people on the patio applauded—oh, but that made Lazar angry—Suzette turned on her heel and, wearing a maddening smile, strode balletically off the patio of the café, out into the middle of Ocean Avenue. Lazar scrambled up from his chair and went after her, cold coffee running in thin fingers down his cheeks. Neither of them bothered to look where they were going; they trusted, in those last couple of seconds before he caught her and kissed her hollow cheek, that they would not be met by some hurtling bus or other accident.

  A Model World

  MY FRIEND LEVINE HAD only a few months to go on his doctoral dissertation, but when, one Sunday afternoon at Acres or Books, he came upon the little black paperback by Dr. Frank J. Kemp, he decided almost immediately to plagiarize it. It was lying at the bottom of a whiskey crate full of old numbers of the Evergreen Review, which he had been examining intently because he was trying to get a woman named Betty, who liked the poetry of Gregory Corso, to fall in love with him; he was overexuberant and unlucky in love and had just resolved—for example—to grow some beatnik facial hair. The little book was marked on the outside neither front nor back; it was a plain, black square. Levine picked it up only because he had been lonely for a long time and he idly hoped, on the basis of its anonymous cover, that it might contain salacious material. When he opened it to its title page, he received an indelible shock. “Antarctic Models of Induced Nephokinesis,” he read. This was the branch of meteorological engineering he was concerned with in his own researches—in fact, it was the very title he had chosen for his dissertation. Beneath this, Dr. Frank J. Kemp’s name was printed, and then the name Satis House—an academic vanity press in Ann Arbor; Levine had seen its discreet advertisement in the back pages of the Journal of Applied Meteorology. The date of publication was given, to his astonishment, as 1970, almost twenty years before Levine had had even the dimmest notion of the potential power of Antarctic models—a notion that, despite all his ascetic labor over the past year and a half, remained only partly elucidated. It was a radical conception of nephokinesis even today, and in 1970 sufficiently heterodox, no doubt, to have prevented Kemp from publishing his theory by any other means than paying for it himself.

  Levine turned the page and saw that Dr. Kemp had, with a precision that struck Levine as tragic and fine, dedicated his work to the beloved memory of his wife, Jean, 21 May 1900–21 May 1969. Levine imagined the sorrowing, hairless scientist, slumped in a chair beside his wife’s hospital bed on a spring day in 1969, his head filled with polar wind. Levine was literally horrified—the hairs on the back of his neck stood erect—at the ignoble fate that had befallen the widower’s theory. It was like the horror he had felt, a few weeks earlier, when he had come across the row of bookshelves in the graduate library where the bound dissertations were kept—a thousand white surnames inscribed on a thousand uncracked blue spines, like the grim face of a monument. It was a horror of death, of the doom that awaited all his efforts, and it was this horror, more than anyth
ing else—he really was only a few months from finishing—that determined him to commit the mortal sin of Academe.

  I had been browsing among the Drama shelves, looking for a copy of anything by Mehmet Monsour, the fashionable Franco-Egyptian theater guru, who was currently serving as guru-in-residence at the university’s School of Drama. I was at the beginning of an affair with a guru-prone would-be actress named Jewel, and I had come with Levine to Long Beach only in the hope of finding something that would please her; Levine had been irritable, paranoiac, and unwashed for the past several months, and in general, I confess, I tried to avoid him. When I found nothing at all Franco-Egyptian in the Drama section I went to find Levine, who had said something about going for lunch to a local taqueria that served goat. It was the sort of thing one did with Levine, and I was halfway looking forward to it.

  “Levine,” I said, “let’s go get those tacos.” He was slouching against a fire extinguisher at the back of the store, completely absorbed in his reading, eyeglasses slipped down his nose, his mouth open. He suffered from a deviated septum and was a chronic mouth breather. His lank red hair covered one eye. He seemed unpleasantly surprised by what he was reading, as if it were a friend’s diary.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  Levine looked up, his face first blank, then irritated; he had forgotten where he was, and with whom, and why.

  “That book,” I said, with a nod. “You look fascinated. You look scared.”

  With a sigh Levine stared down at the black book, and bit his lip. “It’s going to be my dissertation,” he said. “Once I retype it.”

  “You’re going to plagiarize it?”

  “I’m going to rescue it,” he said. “It and myself.”

  “Is it on the same subject? There are other books on Antarctic models of induced nephokinesis?”

  Embarrassed, afraid that I must disapprove of him, he nodded his head. Then, with the childish look of apology he wore when at his most abject—he always looked this way around Betty—he opened the book to its fly and held it out to me.