A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Thanks.”

  They shook hands, and then Magee bent down to kiss her. She sniffled and leaned forward to accept his kiss. Her pointed nose was still red from the cold, and he found her cheeks a little wet. The sable coat felt delightful and smelled both of warm fur and of Quelques Fleurs, and he had to force himself to let go of her. They had slept together for two months during the minor-league season of 1979, and Magee still held a fond regard for her. Her uncle had been a wartime pitcher for the St. Louis Browns; she knew baseball, especially pitchers, and she could write a nice line. Because of her name, she favored the color green, and under the coat her funeral suit was a worn gabardine the somber hue of winter seawater.

  “What a shame it is,” he said, wiping at his own eyes. Magee was a sucker for weeping women, and lachrymose when he had been drinking.

  “He had a great April,” said Beryl. Her Pittsburgh accent was flat and angular. She had fifteen years on Magee, and it was starting to tell. Her hair, blond as an ashwood bat, was entirely the product of technology now, and her face was looking papery and translucent and pinched at the corners. But she still had nice legs, with the pomaceous calves of a Pittsburgh girl. She had been raised on the steep staircases of Mt. Washington.

  “He did,” said Magee. “Three-thirty-one with seven home runs and eighteen ribbies.”

  “Hey, how about you?” She looked him up and down as though he had just gotten out of the hospital. “How’s the arm?”

  He shrugged; the arm was fine. Magee had a problem with his mechanics. He had become balky and as wild as a loose fire hose. Although on the hill he felt the same as he had since the age of fourteen, jangling and irritable and clearheaded, some invisible element of his delivery had changed. The coaches felt that it was the fault of his right foot, which seemed to have grown half a shoe size in recent years. Whatever the cause, he could no longer find what Eli Drinkwater had called the wormhole. Drinkwater had picked up this term from Dr. Carl Sagan’s television program. A pitched ball passing through the wormhole disappeared for an instant and then reappeared somewhere else entirely, at once right on target and nowhere near where it ought to be, halfway across the galaxy, right on the edge of the black. Magee’s repeated, multiseasonal failure to find the wormhole had bred fear, and fear caution; he had undergone some horrendous shellings.

  “It’s fine,” said Magee, rubbing at his left shoulder. “I’m going up to Buffalo this afternoon. Right after this.” He nodded in the general direction of the altar, before which sat the closed casket that held the body of Eli Drinkwater. It was a fancy black casket, whose size and finish and trim recalled those of the massive American automobiles its occupant had preferred.

  The pastor finished his bit, and Gamble Wicklow, the Pittsburgh manager, rose to his feet and approached the pulpit. He was an eloquent speaker with a degree in law from Fordham—his sending down of Magee had been a masterpiece of regret and paternal solicitude—but he looked tired and elderly today. Magee could not make out what he was saying. Gamble had been sitting beside Roxille Drinkwater, in the foremost pew, and now there was a gap between Roxille and little Coleman. The sight of this gap was poignant, and Magee looked away.

  “Will you look at that,” said Beryl. She went up on tiptoe to get a clearer view.

  “I can’t,” said Magee.

  “Look how Roxille’s looking at that casket.”

  The reporters on either side of them, saddened, serious as the occasion required, were still rapacious and insatiable. They turned toward the grieving widow with the simultaneity of starlings taking wing. There was indeed something odd in the face and the posture of Roxille Drinkwater. Roxille was a pretty woman, a little heavy. Her russet hair was pulled tightly against her head and tied at the back. She wore no veil, and the look in her eyes was angry and complicated, but Magee thought he recognized it. Her husband had blown away, out of her life, like an empty wrapper, like a cloud of smoke. She was wondering how she could ever have thought he was real. As Magee watched she began to rock a little in the pew, back and forth. It was hardly noticeable at first, but as Wicklow’s voice rose to praise her dead husband for his constancy and steadiness, and to foretell the endurance of his presence in the game, Roxille’s rocking gathered force, and Magee knew he would have to do something.

  Once, on an airplane, Magee had seen Roxille lose it. It had been during a night flight from New York, where Drinkwater had gone to collect an award, to Pittsburgh, aboard a careering, rattling, moaning little two-propeller plane. Roxille had begun by rocking in her seat, rocking and staring into the darkness outside the window of the plane. She had finished by shrieking and praying aloud, and then slapping a stewardess who attempted to calm her down. Now the people sitting in the pews around Roxille exchanged worried looks. Joey Puppo, the G.M., was frowning, and glancing frequently toward the reporters, who had begun to mutter and click their tongues. Magee saw that she intended, whether she knew it or not, to hurl herself across the gleaming black lid of the coffin.

  “She won’t do it,” said Beryl, in a voice that just qualified as a whisper. She had little esteem for other women, in particular for baseball wives.

  “This is a funeral,” said a television sports reporter, a former outfielder named Leon Lamartine who once at Wrigley had knocked one of Magee’s sliders—a high, hard one that was not quite hard enough—out onto Waveland Avenue, under a rosebush and into pictures that were shown on national TV. His tone seemed to imply not that decorum would prevent Roxille from doing something outrageous but that anything was possible at funerals.

  “Hey, c’mon, you guys,” said Magee. “Keep it down.” But he cracked his knuckles and worked his shoulder blades a couple of times, just in case.

  Gamble Wicklow was winding down now. His chin had settled into his chest, and he was commending the departed soul of Eli Drinkwater to the Man in charge of putting together the Great Roster in the Sky. Roxille licked her lips. Her eyelids fluttered. She reached out tentatively toward the stylish coffin. Three dozen cameras and recording devices turned upon her. Magee moved.

  “Where you going, Matty?” said Beryl, whirling. “Oh, my. Oh, my.”

  “… now that Eli Drinkwater has forever become, as I think we may truly say, All-Star,” said Gamble Wicklow, putting a period to his elegy with a sad smile.

  “I told you,” Leon Lamartine said, pointing.

  Magee had delayed too long—his timing was irrevocably off—and his initial smooth glide down the aisle toward the first pew became a two-way foot race as Gamble stepped down from the pulpit. Magee was forced to run while pretending that he was still walking, all the time trying to keep his head down and remain inconspicuous. The result was an unintentional but skilled approximation of the gait of Groucho Marx. Only the fact that Gamble and the next eulogist collided by the entrance to the chancel allowed Magee to occupy Gamble’s place in the pew. Magee put his left arm around Roxille, as though to comfort her, and wrestled her back into her seat.

  “Take it easy,” said Magee in his softest voice.

  When Gamble Wicklow saw that Magee had usurped his seat, he frowned, gave an odd little wave, then turned and trudged managerially up the aisle. His suit was of old tweed and fit him ill. The nave of St. Stephen’s filled with rumor and alarm and a faint, funereal laughter.

  “Magee. Oh, Magee. What in the hell am I going to do?” Roxille said quietly. Her voice was almost inaudible when she said the word “hell.” Her eyes were bloodshot and lively. She was not really looking at Magee but around him, at her son, who had turned and clambered to his knees in the pew to see what was going on back there among the cameras. Coleman had grown to be a good-looking little boy, long-limbed and as dark as his father. His hair had been cut very short, and, according to the fashion, a design had been carved into the stubble at the side or his head; it looked like a couple of eyeballs.

  Magee put his hand on Roxille’s forearm. She had on an expensive-looking black knit dress with a black lace collar an
d noticeable gores. She smelted of Castile soap.

  “I don’t know, Roxie,” he said. He blushed. He felt very out of place, here in the front row, and he was ashamed to have gone so long without visiting or speaking to her, but he was glad that he had kept her off national TV. “You’ll get along.”

  Roxille shuddered and took a deep breath. She closed her wild eyes and then opened them carefully. The minister had regained the pulpit and managed, by dint of looking pale and disappointed, to quiet the murmuring. He then introduced the next eulogist, a writer from Sports Illustrated. This man had started out working at the same Erie newspaper as Beryl, and not all that long ago. He was talented and he had done well for himself. Beryl hated him, in a good-humored way, and this led Magee to wonder why he had not hated Eli Drinkwater, whose fortunes had begun to rise so soon after Magee lost sight of the wormhole. He looked at Drinkwater’s coffin, now no more than a few feet away from him. The Teacher’s had worn off, and all at once he felt incurably tired. It occurred to him that you could probably tell a joke whose punch line involved a choice between being dead and being outrighted to Buffalo. It didn’t seem like much of a choice, but he supposed that Buffalo held a slight edge. On the other hand, at least Drinkwater didn’t have to know that he had died.

  He had the vague impression that something was disturbing his exhaustion and then realized that it was Coleman Drinkwater, pulling on his sleeve. The little boy pointed at the coffin. He was watching it as though he had been told that it was going to perform a trick.

  “Is my daddy in there?” he said, in a clear, thin, terribly normal voice.

  Magee and Coleman looked at each other for what became several seconds. Magee, who had no children, searched for the correct way to answer. He wanted to say something that would be fair to Coleman and yet would not make him afraid. He wished that his head were clearer and that he were not so damn tired. He felt as though everyone in the church were waiting on his reply. His forehead grew damp and he opened his mouth, but he said nothing. Finally, helpless, he put an arm around Coleman’s small shoulders, and turned back to the speaker in the pulpit. The little boy suffered his godfather’s arm upon him, and as the funeral dragged on he even rested his head against Magee’s rib cage. Presently he fell asleep.

  After a while, Magee himself, who had been awake for some thirty-two hours, drifted into an easy sleep. He dreamed his usual dream, the one in which he had found his stuff again and was on the mound at Three Rivers throwing seven different kinds of smoke. The sunshine was fragrant and the grass brilliant. When he awoke, feeling refreshed, the funeral was over and the coffin had already been wheeled out. Beryl was standing in front of him, her arms folded, looking as she had once looked on bailing him out of the Erie County Prison. Magee smiled, rubbed his eyes, and then realized that Coleman and Roxille had gone. He spun around in time to see the little boy being towed by his mother out the front door of the church. Coleman smiled across the empty pews at Magee, who saw from this distance that the design shaved into the side of the little boy’s head was not two eyeballs. It was Eli Drinkwater’s uniform number, the double zero.

  “Poor kid,” said Beryl. “I heard what he asked you. God. I almost lost it.”

  “I know,” said Magee, scratching his chin. He could not seem to remember what his reply had been, or if he had said anything at all.

  “So,” said Beryl, sitting down beside him and taking hold of his throwing hand. She began, with a firm, nursely touch, to massage it. The backs of her hands hadn’t aged very much at all, and Magee, reeling nostalgic, watched them for a while as they worked him over. A soft lock of her platinum hair brushed against his cheek. “So. What are you going to do? Buffalo? You’re really going to let them do that to you?”

  “I want to pitch, Ber. I have to get my mechanics back. I think it’ll be a little easier in Triple A.”

  Beryl tightened her grasp on his hand and looked at him. Her face was neither incredulous nor mocking; she only bit her lip and wrinkled the bridge of her nose. Beryl’s nose, though small, could be expressive of great sadness.

  “Magee,” she said. “Matty. Maybe I’m wrong to even put this thought in your head. I know how hard you’re trying, Matty, but—what if they’re just gone, baby?” Her voice cracked sweetly as she said this. “Have you ever thought of that?”

  Magee withdrew his pitching hand and flexed it a couple of times. He watched it with a puzzled expression, as though it were a new model, of uncertain capacity. Then he looked away from it, up toward the ceiling of the church, and tried, for the last time, to remember if he had answered Coleman Drinkwater, and what he had told him.

  “Yes,” he said to the empty choir.

  Millionaires

  AT ONE TIME HARRY and I shared everything; it is an error common to fast friendship. We idolized the same artists, movies, and ballplayers (particularly Cornell, The Conversation, and Madlock) and liked our food—even our breakfasts—with equally generous garnishes of the Vietnamese hot sauce we purchased at Tran’s on Murray Avenue. We wore each other’s clothes and merged our record collections. The expenses on our apartment and the grocery bills we paid with one another’s money, spending in a rough and free rotation until both of us were broke. The one thing we were unable to share—of course—was female companionship. When Harry began to sleep with Ruthie Louise Dollar or Atalanta Chin, or I with Evelyn Smrek, we did our best to stay above it, and made nervous jokes about the young woman and about the beast with three backs, but a shadow would fall across our friendship for the duration of the affair.

  Nevertheless, Harry and I were still living together after the advents and ascensions of a good dozen girlfriends, and there was a special shelf above the radiator in the bathroom on which we displayed a tortoiseshell barrette, a gold Star of David on a chain, and a plaster impression of Ruthie Louise’s snaggled lower teeth, made by her orthodontist when she was in junior high, which had somehow come into Harry’s possession. I regret to say that in conversation we took a good deal of pride in our friendship’s proven invulnerability to women; and I kept to myself the potentially disruptive information that I was in love with his newest girlfriend, Kim Trilby, and that there were many Saturday nights during the winter they were together upon which, as I lay alone and shivering on my futon in the empty house, the thought of Harry and Kim sleeping spoon-wise and naked in Kim’s hot bedroom made me wish that he were dead.

  I was working at the time as a disk jockey for a failing A.O.R. station that not long afterward went all-polka and cornered a small but solid share of the market. There was a high-watt, long-established rock-and-roll station two point six notches to the right, and no one listened to WDAN except, I imagined, people in hotel rooms who chose it on their clock radio for their wakeup call on the morning they left Pittsburgh forever. I had a Sunday-to-Friday midnight-to-six slot that wrecked my social life but afforded me the opportunity to talk a lot of outrageous nonsense in a variety of voices and now and then slip in a cut by Blurt or the Virgin Prunes without fear that anyone might hear it and complain. On the air I became once more an only child in his room on a rainy Saturday afternoon with his dolls and his record player, temporarily unaware of the weight of loneliness upon me.

  Very early one Tuesday morning in March—I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner—I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim’s, over on Beacon, but I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry’s chronic tightfistedness—we were responsible for half of the heating bill—and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years’ friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam
produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry.

  “Hey!” I said, walking through the empty living room—we had one chair. I imagined that Harry would be in the kitchen, fixing breakfast, but there was no reply. I let my coat and scarf fall to the floor around me, listening for his footsteps or his voice talking on the telephone. Just as I was about to call his name again, there was the sound of a breaking dish or glass from the basement. We were on the first floor of a two-story house that had been made into a duplex, and the way to the basement was through our apartment. There was another explosion of glass, then another, then several more in rapid succession, as though Harry had set a tow of tumblers along the top of the washing machine and were now blowing them off with an air rifle. He did not own an air rifle, however, and I ran, almost falling, down the steps, knowing that at their base I would find my friend heartbroken and half in the bag.

  In fact, I found him in just his boxer shorts and ski cap, holding a half-empty bottle of George Dickel in his right hand and one of my late mother’s Franciscan dinner plates in his left. His left arm was raised and cocked at the elbow, and he held the plate as for a flea-flicker into the end zone. The service for twelve was part of my mother’s legacy to me and she had intended me to present it to whatever unfortunate woman might become my bride. On the concrete floor all about him lay one hundred and twenty-seven shards of consolation. I knew at once that he’d split up with Kim; I had seen him in the mood to shatter things many times before. As usual he wore a smile, peculiar to this mood, that combined the glee of the vandal with the grim, self-loathing amusement of the drunk. The ski cap was pulled down crookedly over one eye, and this, when he whirled toward me and brandished the plate and the bottle of whiskey, gave him a piratical air. He was a big fellow, wore a full black beard, and his left eye, I saw, had been badly blackened.