A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Well, she’s all yours, Vince!” he said, in an ugly voice.

  “It’s my bedtime,” I said, suddenly very tired. “Why are you doing this now?”

  Harry was always considerate of my hours—he suffered from intermittent insomnia, and held sleep in high esteem—and he set the dish down on the floor with a drunken gentleness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess Kim dumped me.”

  “You guess?”

  “It’s one of those.”

  “You mean you might have dumped her.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Did she give you that shiner?” Not too long before this, Kim and a baseball bat had broken up a knife fight at the bar where she worked, the Squirrel Cage—maybe you saw that jerk Snake Fleming walking around with his head all bandaged—and she had a reputation, despite her size, for being pretty good with her fists.

  “What shiner?” said Harry. He took a long swallow from the bottle of Dickel. It went down a little rough, and this seemed to sober him up for a minute. He looked around him at the wreckage of my mother’s dishes and frowned.

  “It was the toys,” he said at last.

  Harry was the director of research and development for Other Worlds, Inc., a Pittsburgh firm that manufactured what its advertisements called “playthings for the unusual child,” or, as Harry described them, “toys for kids nobody will like in high school.” It was a small firm, and Harry constituted the entire department. The president and other half of the firm was an elderly Orthodox man named Mr. Levinsky, a thirties socialist and tri-state sales representative for Piatt & Munk, or Funk & Wagnalls—I forget which—who now devoted his days to driving all over the eastern seaboard attending customs auctions and buying up abandoned shipments of whatever looked interesting and cheap. All manner of odd and useless items, in huge lots, are auctioned off every day in the ports of the East: twelve hundred hydraulic fan blades, nine thousand spools of orange thread, fifty-two cases of baby-food jars, a half-mile of plastic forks still on their sprues. Mr. Levinsky and Claude, the company driver, would return with these prizes, in a drug-bust-impounded Mercedes truck that Mr. Levinsky had also bought at auction, to the Other Worlds warehouse, in Monroeville.

  It was Harry’s job to attempt to play with each item, to discover if it had any “intrinsic ludic value,” as Mr. Levinsky put it, apart from its intended function. Harry would devise some way of building with it, or decorating his body, or annoying his elders, and then the item would be packed in an attractive box and sold nationally for $24.95 at museum gift shops and at toy stores with track lighting and Scandinavian-sounding names. Harry’s greatest success so far had been Odd Ject. You’ve seen it—an assortment of polystyrene balls, golf tees, and those multicolored cocktail toothpicks that have a lock of curly cellophane hair at one end. This “Self-Generating Deconstruction Kit” had caught on the Christmas before, selling out eighteen thousand units in two and a half weeks, and had earned him a raise and a rare handshake from Mr. Levinsky. The chief drawback of his otherwise enviable line of work was that it led Harry to regard every object around him—his shoes, a box of brads, a woman’s birth-control-pill dispenser—as a potential plaything. In the middle of a serious conversation about the Supreme Court or chlamydia, you would catch him poking straightened paper clips into a sponge, staging a mock naval battle with dry macaroni, or rolling his pocket lint into the shapes of animals and setting them on parade. I mention the pill dispenser because this was the item that had precipitated his break with Kim.

  “They make really cool spaceships,” said Harry. He sagged to his knees and began to sweep up the broken dishes with his hands. “When you turn the dial, you can pop the pills out like little, uh, hormone bombs. Pow. Pow. An entire population suddenly unable to conceive.”

  “Harry,” I said. “Come on upstairs. I’m going to bed now.”

  “There’s this way you can make them shoot really far.”

  “Leave the mess. Come on.”

  I took him by the arm, guided him to the steps, and gave him a little push. He returned the push, more forcefully, and I fell backward. My head cracked against the floor and I heard within my skull the sound of a rock hitting a sheet of taut aluminum. I smelled blood in my nose and I imagined, for a half second, that I was about to pass away. I lived.

  “Stay away from her,” he said. “I know what you have in mind.”

  It was a while before I was able to speak. “You asshole,” I said. “I don’t have anything in mind.”

  This was not, I realized as I said it, entirely true. I had already begun to form vague plans to unbutton Kim’s blouse, remove her cowboy boots, peel off her blue jeans, and lick her body from sole to crown. The pain in my head was all at once as nothing.

  “Oh, my God, you’re bleeding, Vince,” said Harry. He extended a hand and then pulled me to my feet. I touched a finger to my nose and smiled at him.

  “You just made a big mistake,” I said.

  I awoke early that afternoon, showered, and performed my toilet with the care of a man intent on seduction. Kim worked as a waitress at the Squirrel Cage and did not go on until evening, and I expected to find her at home. I had come to believe in my interchangeability with Harry so completely that it did not occur to me that Kim would have any qualms about going to bed with a new partner while still in the midst of a painful breakup; I simply assumed that she would have me, as she would have had Harry, as though he’d called in sick and I were the equally qualified temporary sent by some Kelly Services of love. I had known her as long as he had, and we got along well. She was a thin, raspy-voiced woman with a sarcastic manner, expressive hands, and a respectable knowledge of what is sometimes known as industrial rock—a particular favorite of mine. I had taken her once to see my friend Lee Skirboll perform in a band called Hex Wrench, for which Lee beat on a steel filing cabinet with an assortment of golf clubs and spatulas while his partner sat in on tape deck, amplified shortwave radio, and a bank of old-fashioned Philco sine-wave generators supplied, without his knowing it, by Mr. Levinsky. Kim had enjoyed it, and, I now reminded myself, lathering my chin with increasing zeal, there had been a furtive kiss and hand squeeze in the instant before we’d gone into the bar, where we were rendezvousing with Harry, who liked only Debussy, DeFalla, and Erik Satie.

  When I came out to the dining table—the heat was turned off again, and I wore my gloves and a hat—there was a note from Harry propped against the sugar bowl. “SORRY,” it read, “JESUS, WHAT A HEADACHE I HAVE, YOU MUST TOO. SORRY SORRY SORRY. H” As a matter of fact, I had a rather large lump on the back of my head, and a faint sensation of pain if I turned too quickly; otherwise I was all right. Beside the note were looped five dozen yards of very thin telephone wire, in seven colors with contrasting stripes, that Harry had been experimenting with recently for his long-planned masterpiece, Aporia—ran “inverted board game” whose rules changed unpredictably with each roll of the dice but whose outcome was always the same. I sat down with a cup of coffee and idly picked up a length of yellow-and-blue wire. I had grown up in a young community in which there was a continual construction of houses all through my youth, and I remembered finding this kind of wire at the building sites and twisting it into finger rings, single loops of wire—about that wide for Kim’s finger, I guessed—along which you wrapped little coils, like this, pressed together so that in the end each coil made a bead, yellow or blue. After ten minutes’ work I had a handsome piece, the sight of which recalled to me a hopeful love offering of my boyhood that had not been rejected. I slipped it into my pocket and went, almost skipping, out the front door.

  It was much warmer outside than inside, and I soon shed my hat and gloves and stuffed them into the pocket of my coat. The sun shone most promisingly, there was a slight gasoline hint of summer traffic in the air, and on the lawn of the Methodist church on the corner I saw blades of early daffodils where a few days before there had been a crust of old snow. A warm breeze blew up along the sidewa
lk, and it seemed to me I had only to kick twice and thrust upward my chin in order to lift off the pavement and glide, touching down every twenty feet or so, toward the house of my slender love. People in cars had their windows rolled down, and I could hear the airy music from their radios as they passed. Now I unzipped my coat and rocked my head from side to side. The resultant ache was poignant and appropriate. Two elderly men emerged from Isaly’s, both of them biting into the first Klondikes of the season, and I sailed after them along Murray Avenue, listening as they argued about the potential of a good-hitting shortstop the Pirates had decided to promote from the minors. Oh, I thought, it is almost Opening Day!

  When I arrived at Kim’s door I found to my surprise that I had lost the better part of my desire to sleep with her. It would be nice to see her, to sit down in her sunny kitchen and look at some absurd daytime program on the television—we had done that many times before—but I was so happy just then, slapping up the concrete steps with my coat flapping behind me and the warmth of my body rising up through my open collar in a fragrant column of air, that I didn’t think anything, not even taking her into my arms, could improve my mood. The sexual act, in prospect, seemed to offer only danger and regret.

  I proceeded more cautiously up the three steps of her front porch and across to her front door, and as soon as I rang her doorbell I wished that I had not. I wavered a moment on the welcome mat, then fled back down the steps; but there was no time to get away without being seen. I looked this way, then that, turned back toward the door, turned away. I heard her tread in the hallway, her hand on the knob, and at the last possible moment I ducked between the concrete skirt of the porch and the low hedge of holly that concealed it, crouching in the dirt, in the narrow space between the prickling holly and the house. A thorn scratched my cheek as she opened the door, and it was all I could do to keep from cursing.

  There was a long pause during which I had time to realize that I was crouching in a hard pile of snow and my butt was getting very wet. I heard Kim sniffle a few times, as though she were smelling me out, and then a beleaguered sigh.

  “You have hat-head, Vince,” she said. “As usual.”

  I rose, pulled the hat from my pocket, and put it back on my head. It might have been the hat—perhaps it was enchanted—or simply the sight of Kim in a long cable sweater that sagged at the neck and reached down to the tops of her knees; in any case, as soon as I saw her I wanted her again. Harry was my best friend, but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.

  “I slept in my hat,” I said. “As usual. Don’t ever let your life get to the point where you have to sleep with your hat on.”

  “Come on in. It’s nice and warm.”

  “I know it is.”

  I followed her into the house and down her long front hallway to the kitchen, where the radio played and there was a smell of bay leaf, onion, and fresh dirt.

  “I’m making lentil soup,” she said, turning to the stove and peering into a cast-iron pot. In the bulky sweater Kim looked plump and wifely; she who was so thin that Harry would sometimes clean and jerk her over his head and spin around calling, “Choppers! Incoming wounded!” At the time she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds. “This’ll be the last lentil soup of the winter, I guess.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “You can have some when it’s ready.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If you promise not to mention Harry.”

  “I can promise that,” I said.

  The old pink radio on the kitchen table emitted a familiar promo. Two bars of the psycho-kazoo opening to “Crosstown Traffic,” followed by the synthesized effect of a starship’s landing, and then my own voice, filtered and phased, sounding as though I were a twenty-seven-foot black man about to get very angry. “WDAN!” said my disturbing voice. “Huge Music!”

  “You’re the one who listens,” I said. In general I pretended that it did not trouble me to labor in the ratings cellar, but at the discovery that Kim tuned in to that doomed little station, I was moved and took it as incontestable proof of her rightness for me.

  “Harry makes me,” she said.

  She carefully straddled a kitchen chair and motioned for me to do the same. I sat. I looked at the ashtray between us, in which there were fifteen or sixteen bent butts. Kim smoked far too much, even for a waitress. Now she lit another.

  “I’m going to have to stop,” she said, in a sad little voice, as though it had never occurred to her before.

  “Sure you are.”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Was he trashed when you got home?”

  “Oh, no, not really,” I said.

  “Don’t lie.”

  “He was breaking my mother’s dishes in the basement.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “And he had the heat on.”

  She put down her cigarette, and her brown eyes got very wide and surprised.

  Then she laughed, without sarcasm, with a happiness so genuine that I was taken aback. It was deep and caroling laughter, and it seemed to invite me to turn Harry, the idea of Harry, into a risible fool, to flatten him into a cartoon character and laugh him right out of her affections. This was the simple task before me.

  “What’s so funny?” I said; the question sounded more harsh than I had intended.

  “Nothing,” said Kim. She looked down at the coal of her cigarette and bit her lip.

  “Kimberly Ellen Donna Marie Trilby,” I said. I went over to her chair and knelt on the floor beside her. She sat, looking at her cigarette and calmly crying. I didn’t know why she was crying, whether because Harry was gone or because I was still there, but I felt very sorry for her. Once in a while you will see a waitress like that, crying at the back of a restaurant or in the hallway by the phone, staring down at a monogrammed matchbook in her fingers, and consider for a second or two the untold hardness of a waitress’s life. I reached around and pulled her to me. There followed the briefest of struggles before she fell sprawling into my arms.

  “Come with me,” she said, after a minute or two. She stood and led me down the hallway and into her bedroom. Her gait was too brisk to be seductive; she had some business to attend to. I had been in her bedroom many times before, had felt the thrill of seeing her white bedclothes and rows of empty shoes, but never with this acute a sense of being suffered, like a smelly old dog on a miserable night, just this once allowed to sleep indoors, on the still warm hearth—of being such a lucky dog.

  On her bed there stood a large cardboard Seagram’s box, taped shut, and bearing, in Harry’s antic handwriting, the Magic Marketed label TREASURE.

  “What’s in the box?” I said.

  “I have no idea.” She looked at it as though it might go off any second. “He brought it over yesterday after work. Will you give it back to him for me?”

  “He didn’t say what was in it?”

  “I didn’t ask. I stopped asking questions about his junk a long time ago.”

  “Because you didn’t love him anymore,” I said, taking hold of her chin and drawing her to my lips. At this mild demonstration of amorous force—an effect I have never been adept at pulling off—she put her knee into my stomach, firmly, and I fell gasping to the floor.

  “I will always love Harry,” said Kim. “I will always, always love Harry.”

  “I understand that,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I kicked you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, getting up. “I’m sorry, too. It was just all that kissing we did back there in the kitchen.”

  “Sure it was.”

  “Wait here,” I said. I sighed, as much to catch my breath as to register my impatience with her and with Harry’s goddam toys, then picked up the cardboard box and carried it out of the room.

  “I know what to do with it,” I called over my shoulder.

  “What?” she
said, with a strange furrow in her voice. She followed me out of the door and laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. “What are you going to do with it? Vince?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The box was a good deal heavier than it looked, and I wondered, as I bore it out of the kitchen door and down the back steps, what might be in it, and why Harry had packed it all up in this way and left it sitting on Kim Trilby’s bed. The sun was still shining, there in the backyard amid the skinny poplars and the rusted-out Kelvinator with its door chained shut, and it was going to be a beautiful afternoon. I set the treasure down on the brittle grass and went into the cellar, where I had left the battered old spade I’d used to shovel the walk all that winter, ostensibly for the benefit of Kim’s upstairs landlady, Mrs. Colodny, who afterward would always feed me frozen kishkes from the KosherMart. The spade in question had got hidden, I saw, behind a stack of Harry’s boxes marked BEEHIVE PANELS and G.I. JOE HEADS in the far corner, but I got it out and went straight to work.

  “Come on, Vince,” said Kim, calling to me from the back steps of her apartment. “That’s Mrs. Colodny’s dirt you’re messing up. Hey, Vince, come on. I get it, O.K.?”

  I grinned at her and kept on. Digging is one of the most difficult of boring chores, if I have not transposed the adjectives, and it took me a good fifteen minutes of sweating and cursing, but when I finished I was wet and hot and exhilarated and the thing was three feet under the ground. Kim stayed where she was, hugging herself in that loose sweater and lighting a third cigarette with her second. I leaned on the spade, and for a moment we regarded one another across the lawn. I didn’t know what I had proved, exactly, and she probably didn’t know what had impressed her, but I had proved something, and she looked impressed. I let the spade fall, went to her, and rested my head against the doorjamb, breathing hard, and waited for Kim to throw herself, without regret, without apprehension, into my faithless embrace.