A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “What happens to it now?” she said, staring bitterly out into the sunny backyard at the black patch of earth I had uncovered.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess that would depend on what it is.” Perhaps, I speculated guiltily, Harry had packed up every note I’d ever left him, and all of the baseball cards and Playboys I had bought him when his asthma got bad, and the cigar box of ancient Inuit teeth from my trip to Alaska that he’d said he needed, and the French edition of Tropic of Cancer labeled, thrillingly, “Not to be taken into the U.S.A.,” which I’d picked up for him at the Bryn Mawr-Vassar bookstore on Winthrop Street one day. There might have been some pretty swell stuff in that box; I realized that.

  “You don’t know,” she said. “I like that.” She grinned, as though she could be satisfied with this response, at least for an hour or two.

  Early that evening, in her bedroom, she awoke with a start. She was trembling, and she felt so frail that I was afraid I had harmed her somehow in our thrashings and busculation, and when she lit a cigarette it frightened me to hear the rattle in her breast as she exhaled—a terrible sound like the shivering of withered leaves on a branch.

  “Put out that cigarette and come on back to bed,” I cried.

  “All right,” she said, with an odd tenderness. As she slid down under the covers again, I leaned over, found my trousers in the heap of clothes on the floor, and reached into the left pocket. My fingers closed around the wire ring and held it fast. I was afraid that we had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds. We made a tent of the bedclothes with our knees, and sat within this intimate yurt, breathing one another’s exhalations and listening to everything around us. After a moment, as the air grew thick and sweet, I found her left hand, counted off the fingers, and then slipped on the ring. (It was a little too big, but it would come, eventually, to fit her.) I lifted it, with her fingers, to my mouth, and printed a kiss upon them. Our tent collapsed and the cold March evening, with its last gray skies, flooded in. I was panting with relief. I would figure out something to tell Harry, both about Kim and about the thing I had buried, and we would all just have to adjust.

  “I have to get to work,” said Kim, twisting the ring around on her finger as though it chafed her, or as though to invoke whatever doubtful protection its loops of wire might provide. Then she turned to me, smiling, and said something hopeful about the baby she was going to bear, and I smiled back at her in the dimness, as though I had known about it all along. I did not admit—as I ought to have, God knows—that the bauble I had given her was really only a toy.

  I dropped in on Harry not too long ago. These days he shares a four-room flat in East Liberty with two Japanese girls named Tomoko. We’re still friends, I guess—to the extent that we can make each other laugh—but it’s rare that we get together for longer than a few hours, and our relations have passed into that stage at which they draw their greatest animation from beer and reminiscence. Usually when I see him, at Chief’s or at the Electric Banana, there is a third person present—some friend of his whom I don’t get along with, or a woman I work with whom Harry dislikes—and our conversation is ungainly, unfamiliar, and touches not upon important matters.

  Since the day Kim left us, we have never truly talked about her—I doubt if we will ever be able to talk seriously about Kim again—nor have we succeeded in forgetting her and putting all that behind us. For one thing, there are the pictures of little Raymond James Trilby that Kim sends both Harry and me from time to time. Then there is the odd evening when Harry and I run into each other at the Squirrel Cage, where, in a frame over the bar, right next to the Sign that reads IT’S NICE TO BE IMPORTANT BUT IT’S MORE IMPORTANT TO BE NICE, you will still find a carnival-midway caricature of Kim brandishing a Louisville Slugger. And another constant reminder, I guess you could say, is the large, whistling hole that was torn in the fabric of our lives by my marriage to and then divorce from Kim—a hole that opens onto frigid emptiness and the brilliant debris of stars. We were married for seven months in all, and toward the end Kim was—almost despite herself—eating her dinner more often with Harry than with me, and calling him constantly to bitch and commiserate. And then one day, a family of purple lint polar bears appeared on top of the clothes dryer, amid the flakes of Ivory Snow, and in the kitchen wastebasket we found a crumpled squadron of cigarette-foil fighter jets; and Kim, who had already made one or two mistakes, got out of Pittsburgh as quickly as she could.

  When I stopped by Harry’s the other night, the two Tomokos were out for the evening with a visitor from Nagoya, and after Harry had shown me their neat beds, their pastel closets, the photos on their walls, and samples of their handwriting, and had generally filled me in on them and on his own xenophilia, we sat down in the living room, on opposite sides of a six-pack of Rolling Rock, and looked at each other. I am not seeing anyone at present and had few accounts to amuse him with in this regard.

  “So it sounds like you’ve been very busy,” I said.

  “Really busy,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Busy.”

  There ensued an awkward pause, during which I might easily have drained my beer, slapped my knee, and slipped off into the October evening—the sun had gone down distressingly early. I could not think of anything to say, not a single thing, and I saw how much I had come to depend on the presence of a third person at our meetings—on having someone there to fill up the awful gap in our facetious conversation. I looked again at Harry’s beard, which had of late grown to mermanish proportions, floating out from his face. Then I looked all around me. “It’s nice and warm in here,” I said at last.

  Oh, my God,” he said, shivering in recollection. “I can’t believe we lived that way. Do you remember that one morning there was a, like, a skin of ice on the water in the toilet?”

  “Oh, God, I remember,” I said.

  “Ha.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Have you heard anything from Kim?” he said, standing, making for the refrigerator to cover the question. I said that I had not, nor had I any news of little Raymond James. I understood from Kim’s mother, whom I’d met in the Giant Eagle a couple of months before, that Kim was working out of Honolulu as a personal secretary on board a rich woman’s yacht, but someone else had told me she was working as a paralegal in Philadelphia. Harry said he had heard these reports already and disbelieved them both. He handed me another can of beer.

  “Funny how that all ended up, huh?” he said.

  “Funny.”

  “I pretty much bailed on her, I guess. On the baby, too.”

  We sipped our beers and wondered at one another, at what was left of all that and of those prodigal days.

  “Not too funny, really,” Harry said.

  “Kind of not too funny at all,” I said.

  The telephone rang, and Harry went into the kitchen to answer it. He spoke in curt and secretive tones to some friend I would never meet, promising—ah, but this came as a blow to me—that he would be free to call him or her back in a little while. He returned with a mostly empty bottle of George Dickel and a long face.

  “Maybe I’d better go, Harry,” I said.

  Oh, no!” he said, looking so earnest that my doubts were almost erased. “I have things to show you.”

  He took me down into the basement of the house, where there were a washer and dryer, three bicycles, a stranded toilet lying on its side, some camping gear—including two voided backpacks bearing Rising Suns and some of those horrific Hello Kitty patches—and a vast assortment of cardboard cartons, perhaps sixty or seventy in all, stacked in ragged stacks and labeled in Harry’s familiar, Mayan-looking handwriting: PIPE TAMPERS, VELVETEEN, HEMP, SQUARE BUTTONS, GUM ARABIC, MR. POTATO HEAD HATS, ATOMIZER BULBS, PLASTIC SUSHI REPLICAS, FAN BELTS, LITTLE RED MONKEYS. He showed me the plans for
a new game called Car Crash, involving bottle caps, miniature Christmas light bulbs, tin-whistle sirens, and cans of some knockoff red Play-Doh from Malaysia, and then, crouching down on the floor and reaching in behind the carton of gum arabic, drew out a large square box.

  “This is going to be my next toy,” he said. “I’m calling it Treasure.”

  This time the word TREASURE was machine-stenciled on the box’s sides, in large letters, along with the name of a leading British toy manufacturer and the two words “Spanish Main,” in Old English type.

  “They tried to market it over here, but it stiffed early,” he explained, opening the seal on the box with his thumbnail. “Levinsky made a killing in Baltimore on a misdelivered shipment of game pieces.”

  I watched his face for any sign that he was toying with me, but there was none; he seemed to want only to show me, with a hint of desperation, what was inside the crate, as though the hardest part of it for him had been having no one in whom to confide the secrets of his fabulous vault. He lifted the flaps to reveal a king’s ransom, a cool million, in cardboard doubloons, painted gold and dimly glittering in the basement light, and I wondered if this was what had been in the box I’d buried in Mrs. Colodny’s yard, or if it had been some other treasure entirely. I knew little about the subject, but I hoped that once you had buried a treasure you did not have to keep reburying it again and again.

  “It’s supposedly real gold dust in the paint,” Harry said. “That was the gimmick, I guess.”

  He handed me a thick coin, and I examined it. It bore an illegible mock inscription and a crude cartoon of an emperor’s head, and as I fingered it some of its luster came away on my hands. Harry was looking right at me now with a fevered smile, and once more I didn’t know what to say, but there was no one else there, and I had to say something.

  “We’re rich,” I said.

  Part II

  The Lost World

  The Little Knife

  ONE SATURDAY IN THAT last, interminable summer before his parents separated and the Washington Senators baseball team was expunged forever from the face of the earth, the Shapiros went to Nags Head, North Carolina, where Nathan, without planning to, perpetrated a great hoax. They drove down I-95, through the Commonwealth of Virginia, to a place called the Sandpiper—a ragged, charming oval of motel cottages painted white and green as the Atlantic, and managed by a kind, astonishingly fat old man named Colonel Larue, who smoked cherry cigars and would, if asked, play catch or keep-away. Outside his office, in the weedy gravel, stood an old red-and-radium-white Coke machine, which dispensed bottles from a vertical glass door that sighed when you opened it, and which reminded Nathan of the Automat his grandmother had taken him to once in New York City. The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiper—like that of the Automat—filled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.

  There were children in every cottage—with all manner of floats, pails, paddles, trucks, and flying objects—and his younger brother Ricky, to Nathan’s envy, immediately fell in with a gang of piratical little boys with water pistols, who were always reproducing fart sounds and giggling chaotically when their mothers employed certain ordinary words such as “hot dog” and “rubber.” The Shapiros went to the ocean every summer, and at the beginning of this trip, as on all those that had preceded it, Nathan and his brother got along better than they usually did, their mother broke out almost immediately in a feathery red heat rash, and their father lay pale and motionless in the sun, like a monument, and always forgot to take off his wristwatch when he went into the sea. Nathan had brought a stack of James Bond books and his colored pencils; there were board games—he and his father were in the middle of their Strat-O-Matic baseball playoffs—and miniature boxes of cereal; the family ate out every single night. But when they were halfway through the slow, dazzling week—which was as far as they were to get—Nathan began to experience an unfamiliar longing: He wanted to go home.

  He awoke very early on Wednesday morning, went into the cottage’s small kitchen, where the floor was sticky and the table rocked and trembled, and chose the last of the desirable cereals from the Variety pack, leaving for Ricky only those papery, sour brands with the scientific names—the sort that their grandparents liked. As he began to eat, Nathan heard, from the big bedroom down the hall, the unmistakable, increasingly familiar sound of his father burying his mother under a heap of scorn and ridicule. It was, oddly, a soft and pleading sound. Lately, the conversation and actions of Dr. Shapiro’s family seemed to disappoint him terribly. His left hand was always flying up to smack his sad and outraged forehead, so hard that Nathan often thought he could hear his father’s wedding ring crack against his skull. When they’d played their baseball game the day before—Nathan’s Baltimore Bonfires against his father’s Brooklyn Eagles—every decision Nathan made led to a disaster, and his father pointed out each unwise substitution and foolish attempt to steal in this new tone of miserable sarcasm, so that Nathan had spent the afternoon apologizing, and, finally, crying. Now he listened for his mother’s voice, for the note of chastened shame.

  The bedroom door slammed, and Mrs. Shapiro came out into the kitchen. She was in her bathrobe, a wild, sleepless smile on her face.

  “Good morning, honey,” she said, then hummed to herself as she boiled water and made a cup of instant coffee. Her spoon tinkled gaily against the cup.

  “Where are you going, Mom?” said Nathan. She had taken up her coffee and was heading for the sliding glass door that led out of the kitchen and down to the beach.

  “See you, honey,” she sang.

  “Mom!” said Nathan. He stood up—afraid, absurdly, that she might be leaving for good, because she seemed so happy. After a few seconds he heard her whistling, and he went to the door and pressed his face against the wire screen. His mother had a Disney whistle, melodious and full, like a Scotsman’s as he walks across a meadow in a brilliant kilt. She paced briskly along the ramshackle slat-and-wire fence, back and forth through the beach grass, drinking from the huge white mug of coffee and whistling heartily into the breeze; her red hair rose from her head and trailed like a defiant banner. He watched her observe the sunrise—it was going to be a perfect, breezy day—then continued to watch as she set her coffee on the ground, removed her bathrobe, and, in her bathing suit, began to engage in a long series of yoga exercises—a new fad of hers—as though she were playing statues all alone. Nathan was soon lost, with the fervor of a young scientist, in contemplation of his pretty, whistling mother rolling around on the ground.

  “Oh, how can she?” said Dr. Shapiro.

  “Yes,” said Nathan, gravely, before he blushed and whirled around to find his father, in pajamas, staring out at Mrs. Shapiro. His smile was angry and clenched, but in his eyes was the same look of bleak surprise, of betrayal, that had been there when Nathan took out Johnny Sain, a slugging pitcher, and the pinch-hitter, Enos Slaughter, immediately went down on strikes. There were a hundred new things that interested Nathan’s mother—bonsai, the Zuni, yoga, real estate—and although Dr. Shapiro had always been a liberal, generous, encouraging man (as Nathan had heard his mother say to a friend), and had at first happily helped her to purchase the necessary manuals, supplies, and coffee-table books, lately each new fad seemed to come as a blow to him—a going astray, a false step.

  “How can she?” he said again, shaking his big bearded head.

  “She says it’s really good for you,” said Nathan.

  His father smiled down on his son ruefully, and tapped him once on the head. Then he turned and went to the refrigerator, hitching up his pajama bottoms. They were the ones patterned with a blue stripe and red chevrons—the ones that Nathan always imagined were the sort worn by the awkward, doomed elephant in the Groucho Marx joke.

  Later that day, as they made egg-salad sandwiches to carry down to the beach, Dr. and Mrs. Shapiro fought bitterly, for the fifth time s
ince their arrival. In the cottage’s kitchen was a knife—a small, new, foreign knife, which Mrs. Shapiro admired. As she used it to slice neat little horseshoes of celery, she praised it again. “Such a good little knife,” she said. “Why don’t you just take it?” said Dr. Shapiro. The air in the kitchen was suddenly full of sharp, caramel smoke, and Dr. Shapiro ran to unplug the toaster.

  “That would be stealing,” said Nathan’s mother, ignoring her husband’s motions of alarm and the fact that their lunch was on fire. “We are not taking this knife, Martin.”

  “Give it to me.” Dr. Shapiro held out his hand, palm up.

  “I’m not going to let you—make me—dishonest anymore!” said his mother. She seemed to struggle, at first, not to finish the sentence she had begun, but in the end she turned, put her face right up to his, and cried out boldly. After her outburst, both adults turned to look, with a simultaneity that was almost funny, at their sons. Nathan hadn’t the faintest notion of what his mother was talking about.

  “Don’t steal, Dad,” Ricky said.

  “I only wanted it to extract the piece of toast,” said their father. He was looking at their mother again. “God damn it.” He turned and went out of the kitchen.

  Her knuckles white around the handle of the knife, their mother freed the toast and began scraping the burnt surfaces into the sink. Because their father had said “God damn,” Ricky wiggled his eyebrows and smiled at Nathan. At the slamming of the bedroom door, Nathan clambered up suddenly from the rickety kitchen table as though he had found an insect crawling on his leg.

  “Kill it!” said Ricky. “What is it?”

  “What is it?” said his mother. She scanned Nathan’s body quickly, one hand half raised to swat.

  “Nothing,” said Nathan. He took off his glasses. “I’m going for a walk.”

  When he got to the edge of the water, he turned to look toward the Sandpiper. At that time in Nags Head there were few hotels and no condominiums, and it seemed to Nathan that their little ring of cottages stood alone, like Stonehenge, in the middle of a giant wasteland. He set off down the beach, watching his feet print and following the script left in the sand by the birds for which the motel was named. He passed a sand castle, then a heart drawn with a stick enclosing the names Jimmy and Beth. Sometimes his heels sank deeply into the sand, and he noticed the odd marks this would leave—a pair of wide dimples. He discovered that he could walk entirely on his heels, and his trail became two lines of big periods. If he took short steps, it looked as though a creature—a bird with two peg legs—had come to fish along the shore.