A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Hmm,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  When her costume was finally complete, and Nathan regarded her in all her fiery, gay motley, his heart sank, and he was seized with doubts about the costume he’d decided on. After much indecision and agonized debate with Edward, whose father was an avant-garde artist, Nathan had decided upon a conceptual Halloween costume. He had made a coat hanger into a wire ring that sat like a diadem on his brow, bent the end of it so that it would stand up over the back of his head, then made a small loop into which he could screw a light bulb. When he wore this contraption the light bulb seemed to hang suspended a few inches above him, and the wire was, in a dim room, practically invisible. He was going to the Parnells’ Halloween party, in Edward’s excited formulation, as a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume.

  The whole notion now struck Nathan as childish, and anemic, and it bothered him that the light bulb would never actually be lit up, and would just bob there, gray and dull, atop his head, as though he were really going to Eleanor’s party as a guy in the process of having a bad idea for a costume. The truth was that Nathan felt so keenly how plain, how squat and clumsy he had become—his belly had begun to strain against the ribbed elastic of his new gym shorts, and his mother had received his last school pictures with a fond, motherly, devastating sigh—that he regretted having passed up the opportunity of concealing himself, if only for one night, in the raiment of a robot or a king.

  “Cool,” said Edward, standing up straight and blowing gently on the eagle tattoo.

  Mrs. Shapiro rose from the Ottoman, went to the chrome mirror that had been one of his parents’ last joint purchases, and seemed greatly pleased by the apparition that she saw there. She hadn’t wanted them to illustrate her face, and now it rose pale and almost shockingly bare from her shoulders. “You did a great job,” she said. “I like the hula girl, Edward,” she added, looking down at her right biceps.

  “Make a muscle,” he said. He went to the mirror and took hold of her right arm and wrist. Nathan followed.

  “Flex your arm,” said Edward.

  Mrs. Shapiro flexed her arm. Nathan leaned over his friend’s shoulder to watch the hula girl do a rudimentary bump and grind. He looked around for something to stand on, to get a better view, and his glance fell upon the matching chrome wastebasket, which stood beside the mirror, but when he balanced himself on its edge and peered down at the dancing tattoo the wastebasket immediately gave way. Nathan’s eyeglasses, which for weeks he’d been meaning to tighten, slipped from his face, and when he fell he landed on them with a gruesome crunch.

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “Not again.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” said Nathan.

  “Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?”

  Edward, laughing, held out his hand to Nathan to pull him to his feet.

  “You’re insane, Dr. Lester,” he said.

  “You’re deranged, Madame LaFarge,” said Nathan, automatically. He looked at his friend and his tattooed mother gazing down upon him with a kind of mild, perfunctory concern. They turned to one another and laughed. A barrage of miniature-demon knocks rang out against the front door of the house. Nathan passed a hand before his eyes, blinked, and shook his head.

  “I can see,” he said flatly.

  After Edward went home, he and his mother sat down at the kitchen table that smelled of 409 and called Ricky in Boston, to find out how his trick-or-treating had gone and to tell him that Nathan could see without his glasses. This was a development that ophthalmologists had been calling for since Nathan was five and had donned his first little owlish pair of horn-rims. Though its coming to pass was certainly something of a shock, it did not surprise him, especially now, when the behavior of his body was so continually shocking, and when so many of the ancient fixtures of his life—his slight form, his smooth face, his father and brother—were vanishing one by one.

  Anne, his stepmother, answered the phone but went immediately to find Ricky, as she always did, and it occurred to Nathan for the first time that he was never particularly kind to her. He looked at the receiver, wishing he could run after her, and waited for Ricky to pick up his extension. His brother had just come in from trick-or-treating and was almost delirious with sated greed.

  “Almond Roca, Nate!” he exulted. “Popcorn balls that are orange!”

  “You can’t eat the ones that aren’t wrapped. Throw away the popcorn balls.”

  “Why?”

  “Razor blades,” said Nathan. He missed his brother so badly that it made him nervous to speak to Ricky on the phone. They talked to each other three times a week, but they could never generate any real silliness, and Nathan, in spite of himself, was always irritable and mocking, or stern.

  “Yeah,” Ricky said excitedly. “Halloween razor blades. Oh, my God, Nate, someone gave me raisin bread! Raisin bread, Nate!”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Nathan. “Ricky, guess what?”

  “I bet it was Mrs. Gilette. Hey, what are you going to be? Galactus?”

  Ricky had spent his entire life waiting for Nathan to dress as Galactus, the World Eater, for Halloween, which was something Nathan a long time ago had said he was going to do, not dreaming that Ricky would never forget it, and would even come to regard it as the greatest and most magical of all the magical promises that his older brother had ever broken. In this instance Nathan felt more guilty than usual about having to tell Ricky the sorry truth, and he swiveled around in his chair so that his mother wouldn’t be able to see his face.

  “I’m going as a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume,” he mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “You wouldn’t understand it.”

  “I don’t understand it because it’s dumb,” said Ricky. “I can tell it must be dumb.”

  “Go to hell,” said Nathan.

  “Nathan,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

  “Go to hell you,” said Ricky.

  “Guess what? I can see without my glasses.” Nathan spun around to face his mother, and she looked at him with mild amazement.

  “You mean you never have to wear them ever again?” said Ricky. Absently he added, “Now you won’t be so ugly.”

  This thought had not occurred to Nathan. He heard the sound of a plastic bag full of candy bars being rummaged around in and felt that he had exhausted Ricky’s attention span, just when he most needed to speak to him. This incompleteness was why Nathan had first come to hate talking on the telephone to his father, in the days of his parents’ trial separation. Ricky tore open a wrapper and began to chew. Bit-O-Honey, from the sound of it. Nathan pictured his brother surrounded by candy, lying in his fancy bedroom in Boston on his bed shaped like a racing car. It was a big bedroom, with a large, empty alcove at the back, which Ricky claimed to be afraid of entering. Nathan imagined the Boston Halloween night through the windows in the dark alcove as Ricky would see it from his speeding bed. “The big brother is always uglier,” Ricky said.

  “I know you’re only teasing me,” said Nathan. As he had several times before, he felt very far away from his brother just then, as he felt far from Anne and his father and mother and everyone he knew, isolated in his love and anxiety, but for the first time the void around him seemed to offer a new perspective, as though he were standing safely on top of a house in the midst of a great flood. He had no desire to return Ricky’s insults. He looked at Mrs. Shapiro, who, although she didn’t know what Ricky had said, nodded her head. “I know I’m not ugly,” said Nathan.

  “No,” said the sleepy little boy in Boston, flowing off away from Nathan on his bed of sweets. “You have nice shoulders.”

  It was as Nathan walked with his mother through the woods to the Parnells’ house that he began to feel distinctly altered. These trees were going to be cut down soon, to make way for three new houses, and as he strode, barefaced, across the little wood, there seemed a particular clarity to the starlit Halloween air, a sharpn
ess that hitherto he had only smelled, and the sight of the world struck him with the austere flavor of smoke and dead leaves. Up the street the beam of a child’s flashlight tumbled to the ground, igniting the red oak leaves that littered the Parnells’ lawn, and then flew upward, illuminating the bare tops of previously invisible trees.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Nathan. “I must be cured.”

  “You look very nice without your glasses,” said his mother. “You look like your father.”

  “Dad wears glasses.”

  “He didn’t always,” she said. She shivered in her coat, which was made from rabbits and had been the gift of Humberto, the Brazilian professional soccer player she had dated last winter.

  “Do you think my concept is stupid, Mom?”

  “I just don’t really understand it, Nathan,” said his mother. “I never really understand your jokes. I’m sure lots of people will think it’s hilarious.”

  They came to the short incline of yellow lawn which rose to the cedar planks of the Parnells’ front porch, and which was transected by a crooked line of stepping-stones that led to the shallow goldfish pond beside the front door. Major Ray had been stationed for five years in Yokohama during the sixties, and the Parnells had returned with a houseful of Japanese things. The carved pumpkin shared the porch with a stone lamp shaped like a pointed Japanese house, and as Nathan and his mother stepped up to the front door—you could already hear them inside, dozens of laughing adults—it struck him that a jack-o’-lantern was truly a lantern. His last thought before Eleanor threw open the door was an idea for a science-fiction novel in which the denizens of a distant world furnished their lives with various giant vegetables, carving out their beds, dressing in long, curly peels, illuminating their homes with the light of pumpkins. Then the door flew open. In all his anxiety over his own wardrobe, in all the editing and revision of the tortured sentence he intended that night jauntily to pronounce to Eleanor, he had forgotten to wonder about what she might wear, and he found himself taken completely by surprise.

  Nathan had been prey, of course, to night fantasies of Eleanor Parnell. He concocted these happy narratives of seduction with the same thoroughness he brought to all his imaginary projects, such as Davor, the Golden Planet, and the vast turnpike, each of its rest stops and motor courts carefully named, that he had once mapped across two hundred pages of his loose-leaf notebook. He had envisioned Mrs. Parnell in all manner of empty rooms, and on desert beaches, and under a remote lean-to in the Far West, but during these trysts she remained demurely clothed. (At those crucial moments when Eleanor began to remove her garments, Nathan’s vision tended to falter.) But he had never imagined her in a black leather bikini, black cape, black boots, and black visor with a great pointed pair of black leather ears.

  “I’m Batman,” Eleanor said, giving Nathan a dry kiss on the cheek. “You look wonderful,” she said to Mrs. Shapiro. She stepped back to examine Nathan, and her eyes narrowed within their moon-shaped black windows. “Nathan, you’re a—You’re a lamp. You’re a lamppost.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

  “That’s right,” said Nathan the Lamppost. “Ha, ha.” He could not say whether it was desire he felt for her or total, irredeemable embarrassment.

  “Nathan,” said his mother. “You are not a lamp. Tell her.”

  “Come in,” said Eleanor. “We’re in the Yellow Room. So what are you, Nathan?”

  She drew them into the house, taking their hands in her own, as was her habit. The Yellow Room was filled, as Nathan had known it would be, with alcohol and disco music and adulthood in its most intimidating aspect. Two dozen men and women in costume—Nathan spotted a knight, a baseball player, and some sort of witch or hag—held their drinks and shouted mildly at each other over the agitated music, and five or six couples were dancing in the middle of the room. Ever since his mother had become a single woman she had increasingly involved herself, it seemed, with adults who liked to dance—a sight that for Nathan had not lost its novelty. He especially enjoyed watching the diligent men as they jogged in place.

  “O.K., I give up,” Eleanor said. She turned to face him and Nathan stopped dead. “No, I don’t.” A pinched look crossed her face as she scanned his body, and she seemed to take in for the first time the poverty of Nathan’s lamentable concept. Nathan blushed and looked away, though this was partly because he feared he had already looked too many times at her breasts and at her radiant stomach.

  “Are you supposed to be Thomas Edison? Is that it? Are you Thomas Alva Edison?”

  Nathan forced himself to meet the humiliation of her sympathetic gaze. He opened his mouth to explain, to tell her that he was indeed the Wizard of Menlo Park, on the verge of stealing fire.

  “He’s a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume,” said Mrs. Shapiro, crossing her arms and shrugging her tattooed shoulders. “What do you think of that?”

  “Nathan,” said Eleanor, smiling at Nathan and taking his chin between the long fingers of her hand. “You’re such a strange young man.”

  She laughed her magpie’s laugh, and in her hooded eyes Nathan read both pain and amusement, as though she already knew that he loved her. Then she turned away from him, and the two women put their arms around one another—a habit his mother had picked up from Eleanor, who had learned it from Major Ray, who put his arm around everybody. They went to the long table, draped by a black paper tablecloth, that served as the bar. Major Ray, wearing his Bruce Wayne smoking jacket, came over to hug Mrs. Shapiro. He said something to her, she laughed, and then he led her off to one side, so that Eleanor was left momentarily alone. For a moment Nathan, suffused with the careless, wild-haired courage of an inventor, contemplated Eleanor in her racy suit. He took a step toward her, then another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance—that was all. In the few seconds before he reached her bat-winged side he searched his memory for a suave line or smooth invitation from some movie, but all he could think of at that moment was Young Mr. Lincoln. “Eleanor,” he said, “I would like to dance with you in the worst way.”

  Eleanor smiled, then leaned close to him and put her hand on his shoulder, her lips to his ear. For a long time she hesitated. “I know a couple of very bad ways,” she said at last, “but you’re too young for them, Nathan.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, almost happily. He doffed his wire hat and set it down on the bar. There was now nothing on his face or his temples, and he felt light, almost headless, as he imagined he would feel on the brilliant evening he tried liquor for the first time. He took her hand, peacefully, and put it over his eyes, then covered her visor with his own damp palm. They stood a moment in this darkness. Then he said, “Guess who I am now.”

  The Lost World

  ONE SUMMER NIGHT NOT long after he turned sixteen, Nathan Shapiro drank four tall cans of Old English 800 and very soon found himself sitting in the front seat of a huge, banana-colored Ford LTD, with his friends Buster, Felix, and Tiger Montaine. They had swallowed the malt liquor while bathing in Buster French’s hot tub (the Frenches were from Los Angeles) and, as a result, were driving around boiled, steaming drunk, and in various stages of undress. Buster and Felix E. still had on their scant Speedo bathing suits, Tiger Montaine wore only a black mesh tank top and one sanitary sock, and Nathan, through some combination of glee and desperation, was naked from head to toe.

  Two weeks before this, his mother, in a modest and homemade little ceremony, had married a man named Ed, a kindly, balding geologist from Idaho whom she had been dating for six months. And then just this evening, an hour before Nathan went over to Buster French’s house, Dr. Shapiro had telephoned jubilantly from Boston to announce the first pregnancy of his wife, Anne. Ricky, Nathan’s brother, had been living in Boston for a year now, and he went on and on over the phone a
bout the little bubble of life that had blossomed in the vial of Anne’s home pregnancy test, which Ricky had taken to his room and placed between his soccer trophy and a photograph of his mother and father and Nathan standing in the wind at Nag’s Head.

  All of these developments, though he did his best to welcome them, had left Nathan somewhat more than normally confused. He liked his new stepfather, who had been to Antarctica and Peru and Novaya Zemlya and returned with all sorts of hair-raising tales and queer stones; in his own way he was genuinely as excited as Ricky by the prospect of a new baby; and he was old enough to regard these changes as the inevitable outward expansion, as of an empire or a galaxy, of what once had been his family. He was happy for his parents in their new lives, the way he had always been happy for them, all along, as step by step they had dismantled their marriage; and so he was looking for a reason, an excuse to feel so unmoored, at once so angry and nostalgic; and alcohol seemed to be doing the job. He had no idea of where he and his friends were going, and it was not until they had been lurching aimlessly along the empty, fragrant streets of Huxley for what seemed like hours that he understood that they were headed—as Buster French put it—to the crib of Chaya Feldman.

  Buster, driving Mrs. French’s car, made this declaration just as the drink, the deep velour seats, and the sweet smell of lawns flowing in through the open windows had begun to lull Nathan to sleep, and at the mention of Chaya’s name Nathan sat bolt upright. Buster then called Chaya a “skeezer,” which meant, as far as Nathan had been able to determine, that she was certain to permit them—all four of them—those dark liberties of which he was still very much ignorant, a notion which filled him only with wonder, and with solicitude for Chaya, whom he had known since he was six years old. She was a quiet girl, with a serious brown face and tangled hair, and her parents dressed her like a doll. He remembered her as someone who was always coming upon orphaned puppies and sparrow chicks with broken wings, in meadows and along roads where anyone else would have found nothing at all, and then trying imperfectly and with an eyedropper full of milk or sugar water to nurse them back to health. Her chief social art—until recently, at least—had been that, upon request, she could draw you an extremely realistic picture of an eyeball, with a sparkle on the iris, and fathomless pupils, and the finest tracery of veins.