A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Nate! Nate!” said Ricky, from somewhere at the front of the toy store. Nathan looked one last time at the toy horse and crusader, reared up on their swath of metal turf—the only thing in the store that he even faintly coveted—then went to find his brother. Ricky stood on tiptoe, clutching the top of the low wood partition that protected the display of untouchable toys in the front window; he was looking past all the duckies and dancers to something in the street outside.

  First Nathan saw the fabulous car, It was like a color-plate in the cumbersome book he’d been given for his eleventh birthday, The History of the Motor Car—a Cord, or a Duesenberg, or a Daimler, or one of those other extinct breeds of car that looked like small, wheeled mansions, with curtains, doorknobs, tiny lamps, the running boards like long verandas. And, as in the illustrations Nathan had gazed at, on the toilet or under the covers of his bed for hours at a time, there was something airless and artificial about the car—something as dead and impossible as the reconstructed skeletons of Allosaurus and Triceratops in a museum. There was a story, famous in their family—even Anne knew it—about Nathan at age four asking his parents which had come first, the dinosaurs or the old-fashioned cars. It still sometimes seemed to him that the things that had happened before he was born—Pearl Harbor, hieroglyphics, catapults, the day his parents fell in love—were equally ancient and interesting, cryptic and gone.

  “It’s a millionaire,” said Ricky.

  “It’s a playboy,” said Nathan.

  The man stood in the light rain with one foot on the running board of his car, staring off toward the distant bay. He wore a blue blazer with a coat of arms on the breast pocket, white trousers, no socks, blue sailor’s sneakers. In one hand he casually held a briar, and in the other a gold lighter. He neither slouched nor stood erect, and Nathan immediately adjusted his own posture to match the playboy’s, but it was the man’s short silver hair that Nathan admired most, and the perfect wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his slight smile.

  “See that silver hair?” said Nathan. “When I’m old I want to have hair like that.”

  “It’s gray,” said Ricky. “Can that car go a hundred miles an hour?”

  “Any car can go a hundred miles an hour,” said Nathan the older brother. “You’re just supposed to look at that car. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

  Their father appeared on the sidewalk in front of the toy store, and he and the playboy said hello.

  “Dad’s talking to him,” said Ricky.

  “You’re allowed to talk to guys like that when they stand there with their cars,” said Nathan. “They like it.”

  Dr. Shapiro walked over to the man with silver hair and gestured at his car. The man nodded politely but didn’t smile. Beside him their father looked small, wet, bald, and faintly sloppy, and the fluttery hand he held out toward the vaulting fender of the car seemed to try—and fail—to grasp, to clutch. The playboy said something and then looked away again. Nathan saw in that instant that his father was a man whom a playboy would shun. Then a woman carrying shopping bags came toward the men—a television blonde, wearing an ash-gray trenchcoat and lots of makeup; she was very tall, with beautiful teeth. She twirled her umbrella over her head and it shot drops around her like a firework of water.

  “An actress,” said Ricky, pinching Nathan’s arm.

  The playboy nodded again to Dr. Shapiro, then went around to open the door for the actress, who gave the playboy a look that Nathan recognized. He had seen his mother give this look to Chuck, and she had no doubt once given it to his father—this look which, now that he recognized it, seemed to convey everything that, Nathan imagined, constituted sexual desire, a look of soft, distrustful frankness, wide- and wet-eyed. And then they got in and drove away, the car sweeping out of the parking space and into the street without a sound, without a squeal, like a sailboat.

  “You lied,” said Ricky. “It does go.”

  “Look at Dad,” said Nathan.

  Dr. Shapiro stood watching the fabulous car disappear for a moment, wiping the rain from his glasses, his head slightly turned away, as though he were listening to the couple’s dwindling laughter.

  “He’s only a psychiatrist,” said Ricky.

  “Here he comes,” said Nathan. He grabbed Ricky and pulled him into the board-game aisle. When their father came in, he was soaking wet, and he bought his sons several bright things that they had not asked for.

  That night in the motel room, as he lay beside his brother, Nathan listened to the people sleeping around him; Ricky snored delicately. Nathan could hear the hum of the ice machine in the corridor, could hear his father’s wristwatch ticking on the night table, and the general, half-imaginary murmur that all motels emit at night. Anne had drawn the curtains; the room was so completely black that Nathan began to see bright colors, luminous Persian rugs. Lately he suffered from night anxieties, and although he would think and think about everything in his life that might be upsetting him—library fines, his recent failure to pass the parallel-bars exam, his fear of high school—he couldn’t determine what it was that kept him awake, with a stomach ache, night after night. It was as though he were trying to remember the answer to one of his father’s questions. He rolled onto his back, the motel sheets crackled, and, after a while, he began to drift, and the colors faded from his eyes. Ricky coughed in his sleep once, angrily. Then, in the instant before Nathan went under, a picture came into his mind. He lay like Moses in a little basket, floating among the bulrushes, and his parents stood on the bank above him, their arms around each other’s waists, looking down. They were singing to him. “We love you,” they sang.

  The Halloween Party

  WHENEVER NATHAN SHAPIRO REGARDED Eleanor Parnell, it was like looking at a transparent overlay in the World Book Encyclopedia. In his mind he would flip back and forth from today’s deep-voiced, black-haired, chain-smoking, heavy-breasted woman in a red sheath dress or tight dungarees, gracefully working the cork from another bottle of pink California wine, to the vague, large, friendly woman in plaids who had fed him year after year on Cokes and deviled-ham sandwiches, whose leaves he had raked for seven autumns now, and who still lay somewhere underneath the new Eleanor, like the skeleton of a frog beneath the bright chaos of its circulatory system.

  It was only since Nathan had turned fourteen and found himself privy to the reckless conversation of divorcées—of those half-dozen funny, sad women with whom his mother had surrounded herself—that he had discovered Eleanor Parnell to be a woman of bad habits and of enterprises that ended in disaster. They said that she baked and consumed marijuana desserts, and that she liked to spend Christmas Eye playing blackjack in Las Vegas, alone. She drove her scarlet Alfa Romeo with the abandon of someone who, as Mrs. Shapiro pointed out, had always been very unlucky.

  When she was hardly older than Nathan was now, Eleanor had spent two triumphant years on the L.P.G.A. tour; then she’d fallen from a horse and broken her left elbow. Nathan had seen her trophies once, in a glass cabinet up in Eleanor and Major Ray’s bedroom. Her real-estate company went down under a hailstorm of lawsuits and threats of criminal prosecution, which Nathan and his mother had read about in the Huxley New Idea and even, eventually, in The Washington Post. Cayenne, her New Orleans–style restaurant in Huxley Mall, closed after only a few months. And there had been a pale little baby, a redhead named Sullivan, who lived so briefly that Ricky, Nathan’s little brother, did not even remember him.

  All these tales of misfortune, all the melancholy under Eleanor’s eyes and around her mouth, had the surprising—to Nathan—effect of causing him to fall helplessly in love. It began one August when, after a hiatus of several years, he resumed his ancient habit of visiting the Parnells’ house every day, for soft drinks and conversation with Eleanor. He was driven to her, at first, simply by loneliness and by the sadness of boredom. Ricky was gone—he had gone to live in Boston with their father the previous spring—and during the tedious, spectacular afternoons of August the h
ouse was distressingly empty. All month, Mrs. Shapiro, who was a nurse, had to work late on the ward, so Nathan ate dinner with his friend Edward St. John and Edward’s bohemian family more often than usual, and he was glad to spend the last afternoons of the summer down the street at the Parnells’. Major Ray—Major Raymond Parnell, of Galveston, Texas—did not get home from the base until seven o’clock, and Nathan would sit in the kitchen until Major Ray’s boisterous arrival, watching Eleanor smoke cigarettes and squeeze lemons into her diet Coke, of which she drank sixty ounces a day—enough, as Major Ray often declared, to reanimate a dead body. She would ask Nathan for his opinions on hair styles, decorating, ecology, religion, and music, and he would offer them only after a good deal of consideration, in an airy, humorous, pedantic tone of voice, which he borrowed, without knowing it, from his father. Eleanor had treated him without condescension when he was a little boy, and she now listened to him with an intentness that was both respectful and amused, as though she half expected him to tell her something new.

  Nathan’s love for Eleanor followed hard on the heels of his long-awaited and disastrous growth spurt, and it wrenched him every bit as much, until his chest ached from the sudden and irregular expansion of his feelings. In the mirror the sight of his heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and unfortunate complexion; of the new, irregular largeness of his body, of his suddenly big—his fat—stomach, would send him off on giddy binges of anxiety. He ate sweet snacks and slept badly and jumped at loud sounds. The sight of Eleanor’s red Alfa Romeo—the sight of any red car—disturbed him. He was filled with deep compassion for animals and children, in particular for Nickel Boy, the Parnells’ dog, a sensitive, courtly old beagle. In fact, Nathan spoke at length to Nickel Boy about his feelings for Eleanor, even though he knew that talking to a dog was not really talking but, as he had read in Psychology Today, simply making a lot of comforting sounds in order to secrete some enzyme that would lower his own blood pressure and slow his pulse.

  Every night before he switched off the lamp, and every morning when he awoke, he took out the collection of photographs of Eleanor Parnell he had pilfered from his mother’s album and looked deeply into each of them, trying to speak to Eleanor with the telepathy of love. In his freshman-English class they arrived at the writing of poetry, and Nathan, startled into action, composed haiku, limericks, odes, and cinquains to Eleanor, as well as an acrostic sonnet, the first letters of whose lines daringly spelled out E-L-E-A-N-O-R P-A-R-N-E-L-L; whenever, in these poems, he referred to her directly, he called her Jennifer—like “Eleanor” a dactyl.

  On the Saturday before the start of his freshman year of high school, as Nathan wandered home through the woods from Edward’s house, trying to walk erect, he saw Eleanor under the tulip poplars, in a battered pith helmet, wildly shooting down wasps’ nests with the pistol nozzle of a garden hose. Great golden, malevolent wasps had been something of a problem all summer, but after all the rain in July they proliferated and flew into the houses at suppertime.

  “Is it working?” called Nathan, trotting toward her. One of the things he loved about Eleanor was her inventiveness, however doomed.

  “Oh, no,” Eleanor said. As soon as she glimpsed Nathan she began to laugh, and the stream of water shivered and fell to the ground. Her laugh, which was the first thing Nathan remembered noticing about Eleanor, had always been odd—raucous and dark, like a cartoon magpie’s or spider’s—but lately it had come for Nathan to be invested with the darkness of sex and the raucousness of having survived misfortune. She had been in the sun too long, and her face was bright red. “No one was supposed to see me doing this. Do you think this is a bad idea? They look pretty pissed off. Major Ray thought this wasn’t a good idea.” Major Ray did not appreciate Eleanor.

  “I disagree,” said Nathan, gazing up at the treetops, where the wasps had hung their cities of paper. A dense golden cloud of wasps wavered around them. “There’s a lot less of them now.”

  “Do you think so?” said Eleanor. She took off her hat and stared upward. Her bangs clung to her damp, sunburned forehead.

  “Yes,” said Nathan. “I guess you drowned them. Or maybe the impact kills them. Of the water.” The cloud of wasps widened and descended. “Uh, Eleanor. Could I—Maybe I should try it.”

  “All right,” said Eleanor. She handed him the squirting, hissing nozzle and then, solemnly, the pith helmet, all the while keeping an eye on the insects and biting her lip. Almost immediately Nathan got the feeling that a blanket, or a net, was about to fall on him. Eleanor jumped backward with a cry, and Nathan was left to fight off the wasps with his lunatic weapon, which he did for fifteen valiant seconds. Then he ran, with Eleanor behind him. He tore around the front of the Parnells’ house, crossed the front lawn, and ran out onto Les Adieux Circle. At the center of the cul-de-sac lay a round patch of grass, planted with a single, frail oak tree. No one on the street knew who was supposed to mow this island and so it generally went unmown, and, according to the local children’s legend, it harbored a family of field rats. He and Eleanor fell into the weeds, and Nathan’s eyeglasses, which were photosensitive and had darkened in the afternoon sunshine, flew from his face. Dazzled, frightened, he rolled laughing in her rosy arms, and they embraced like a couple of fortunate castaways. Then, his heart pounding, he scrambled to his knees and sought the comforting weight, the protection of his glasses.

  Of the four stings that Nathan received, three were on his thigh and one was on his shoulder. Eleanor took him into the house, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, where blue laundry lay folded on the big bed and where Eleanor’s gold trophies, like so many miniature Mormon temples, sat shining dimly in their cabinet. Then she led him into the bathroom, lowered the lid onto the toilet, and sat him down.

  “Roll up your cutoffs, Nathan,” she said. She found a box of baking soda and mixed a little with some tap water in the plastic bathroom cup. Nathan pulled upward on the frazzled leg of his shorts and tried to keep from crying. She knelt beside him to daub his pale, fat, blistered thigh. Nathan flinched, but the paste was cool, and he was overcome with gratitude. He didn’t know what to do, and so he stared at the parting of her hair, at Eleanor’s miraculous scalp, white and fine as polished wood.

  “I guess Major Ray was right,” said Eleanor. “It wasn’t such a hot idea.” She cackled nervously, and it was a relief to Nathan to see that she also felt that something weird was happening—such a relief that he began to cry, although he hated crying more than anything else in the world.

  “Oh, Jesus, does it hurt, honey?” Eleanor said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”

  This expression of concern made Nathan inordinately happy, and he tried to tell her it didn’t hurt a bit, but he was too miserable to speak. He was frightened by the zeal of his crying, but it felt too good to stop. So he covered his face and hee-hawed like a child.

  Eleanor stopped ministering to his wasp stings and sat back on her heels, regarding Nathan. A different kind of concern entered her face, and all at once she looked very sad. “What’s the matter, Nathan?” she said.

  But Nathan told no one, not even Edward, to whom he generally confided all his ludicrous amours. The two boys had supported and amused one another through a long series of fanciful loves, but until now the objects of their affections had always been unattainable, unlikely, and laughable: a prom queen, a postwoman, the earth-sciences teacher Miss Patocki, or the disturbing Sabina McFay, Edward’s nineteen-year-old neighbor, who was half Vietnamese and rode a motorcycle. Not so Eleanor Parnell; she was unattainable and farfetched, but she was not at all laughable, and Nathan said nothing to Edward about her.

  When he learned, from his mother, that he had been invited to the Parnells’ Halloween party, he was flattered and struck with fear, and during the abject, optimistic weeks that followed he resolved to declare his feelings to Eleanor Parnell once and for all at this party. For ten days his head was filled with whispered, intricate repartee.

  At dusk on Hallowe
en, just as the youngest and most carefully chaperoned of the demons and nurses and mice were beginning to make their rounds, Nathan and Edward were standing in the living room of the Shapiros’ house, drawing pictures with colored pencils onto Mrs. Shapiro’s arms, back, and shoulders. Nathan’s mother sat on a horsehide ottoman, in blue fishnet tights, blue high-heeled shoes, and a strapless Popsicle-blue bathing suit, laughing and complaining that the boys were pressing too hard as they drew anchors, hearts, thunderbolts, and snakes across her skin. The boys dipped the tips of the pencils into a jar of water, which made the colors run rich. As the drawings began to predominate over unmarked patches of skin, Nathan put his crimson pencil down and stepped back, as if to admire their handiwork.

  “I think that’s enough tattoos, Mom,” he said.

  “Is that so?” said his mother.

  “Personally,” said Edward, inspecting her, “I think a big, you know, triumphant eagle, with a javelin in its claw, right here under your neck, would look really cool, Mrs. Shapiro. Rose.”

  “That sounds fine, Edward,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

  Nathan looked at his friend, who began to paint a gray, screaming eagle. Nothing about his voice or studious little face indicated that he felt anything but the enthusiasm of art. As a matter of fact, his drawings were much better than Nathan’s—bold, well drafted, easily recognizable; the snakes Nathan had drawn looked kind of like sewing needles, or flattened teaspoons.

  “If you think about it,” said Edward, in the careful but dazed way he had of propounding his many insights, “the symbol of our country is a really warlike symbol.”