A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  They had never really been friends, but from time to time Nathan still thought about one distant afternoon when he and Chaya had somehow ended up playing together, in the fields behind the Huxley Interfaith Plexus. In the tall grass and the weeds they had played a game of Chaya’s own invention, called Planet of the Birds. Nathan had been an intergalactic castaway trying to survive in a windy, grassy world, and Chaya’s hair had tossed like a crest of feathers as she sang to him in a variety of cries. Chaya even claimed that when she grew up she was going to write a book set on this imaginary planet, whose name, she said, was Jadis; in the dust she scratched a map of its oceans and aeries. As with all of those blissful Sunday afternoons he had ever passed with some child with whom he never played again—every childhood has a dozen or so—his memory of this vanished afternoon was luminous and clear. In the three years since his liberation from Hebrew school he had seen Chaya twice, from a distance, coming out of a movie with her parents and her sister, Mara. Now Nathan was suddenly afraid for her, and he was afraid, for the first time ever, of the raucous bodies of his friends.

  “Hey, Buster,” said Felix E. Scott, leaning forward so that for an instant his thigh lay smooth and cool against Nathan’s, “what you going to do to Chaya Feldman?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t already know, Felix E.,” said Buster, heaving the LTD into a small cul-de-sac which Nathan recognized, from some long-ago car pool, as Chaya’s street.

  “Gut the engine,” suggested Tiger Montaine, who excelled in stealthy behavior. He ran his battered little Fiat on siphoned gasoline, filched cigarettes from the supermarket, and had for several months, with Nathan’s shocked connivance, been replacing Mrs. Shapiro’s codeine pills with extra-strength Tylenol, one at a time. “Don’t be waking up that mean Israelite daddy.” Chaya’s father, Moshe, an oncologist, had been born and raised in Israel, and was, in fact, the most humorless and stern of the one hundred and five fathers Nathan had known in his life. He had a dense black beard and crazy eyebrows, and it was widely half-believed that he kept an Uzi submachine gun, from his days in the army of Israel, hidden under his bed.

  Buster turned off the ignition and the car began to glide silently toward Chaya’s house. The sudden calm cast a pall over the party and no one spoke; perhaps they were only being careful. Nathan pictured Chaya, asleep, her legs tangled under a light summer blanket; a skeezer! Then, because the ignition had been cut, the steering wheel locked, automatically, and before Buster could do anything they had hopped up over the curb, and came to a stop halfway across somebody’s front lawn.

  “We’re there,” said Buster, and everyone laughed. “Now who’s going to go knocking on that skeezer’s window?”

  “I’ll go,” said Nathan. “I know her.”

  All of the other boys turned to regard him. Although Nathan felt fairly confident that his friends held him in a certain esteem—his naked presence among them was testimony to that—he had never distinguished himself for his daring, and in fact generally had to be persuaded even to perform minor feats such as dancing with Twanda Woods, or wearing his sneakers without any laces, an affectation which drove his mother out of her mind. And all of the boys knew, for Nathan had been unable, despite himself, to conceal it, that he had never made love to a girl. Emboldened by the malt liquor, he reached out and pushed Felix E. and Tiger in their faces, so that they fell backward into each other.

  “I went to Hebrew school with her,” he explained.

  Perhaps it was only their shock at this uncharacteristic display of fearlessness, but as Nathan stepped out of the car, he noticed a strange look in the eyes of his friends. It was a kind of blank, blinking puzzlement, as though the game had gone awry. Nathan wondered if the whole thing was a lie, if Chaya was not a skeezer at all, and the boys were all of them virgins, and none of them knew what fate awaited him as he began to make his way, naked, barefoot as a child, across the soft grass. He glanced toward the car, toward the three shadowy heads now drawn together in what looked like anxious parley, and almost turned back.

  The next moment, however, he felt an entirely new kind of drunkenness; the air was warm against his skin, his lips, his forearms, and—incredibly—moonlight fell upon his penis. He wished that it were a mile to Chaya’s house, and not a few short steps, so that he might walk this way a little longer, like a fairy on a moonlit heath. Just this summer—just this month—his body had begun to grow lean, and he strode across the grass with the jangling gait of a young man, delighting in the purpose of his legs. He came to the Feldmans’ driveway and zigzagged quickly around to the left side of the house, where he was confronted with a gated, wooden fence. He stopped and contemplated the latticed gate. His breath came quickly now and there was sweat in his eyebrows; a drop spattered against his cheek. Just when he felt the water on his face he saw, through the spaces in the lattice, that a swimming pool, long and unusually narrow, lay beyond. It was not a pool for a pleasure swim; it was a lap pool, no wider than a pair of racing freestylers. Nathan remembered hearing that Dr. Feldman required himself and his family to swim a mile every day.

  Pretending for the moment that he was tricksy Tiger Montaine, Nathan held his breath, eased up the steel latch, and slowly let open the gate, without a sound. He walked to the railroad ties that formed the near end of the lap pool and curled his toes over their edge. Thus perched he stood a moment, looking at the reflected moon on the black water and trying to force the tumult in his stomach to abate. He was so nervous that he forgot why he was nervous, and simply hovered at the edge of Chaya’s swimming pool, shaking. What was he doing here? Where were his clothes? He crouched and then slipped, like a deer fleeing a forest fire, into the cool water. He swam across the pool with a light and leisurely stroke. The exercise of his arms and heart in the cold water cleared his thoughts, and left him with a pleasant chlorine sting in his eyes, and when he arrived at the far side of the lap pool, he felt a greater trust in himself and in the general benevolence of a Tuesday night in July. He pulled himself from the pool and tiptoed around to the back of the Feldmans’ house. There were some bed-sheets, striped pillowcases, and a pair of bath towels hanging from a revolving clothesline in the backyard, and he considered taking a towel and tying it around his waist. But he felt, obscurely, that there was some advantage in his nakedness, an almost magical advantage that Tiger Montaine, for example, would never have surrendered, and he went over to the windows of the daylight basement in which Chaya had always had her room and stood a moment, with his hands on his wet hips, looking into the dark windows, preparing to wake her. The pool water streamed down his chest to his thighs, raising goosebumps along his legs and arms as Nathan drummed lightly on the glass, attempting a sort of suave seductive rhythm that came out, inexorably, as shave-and-a-hair-cut, two-bits.

  A light snapped on inside. Someone sat up in the bed—in Chaya’s bed—and this someone did not appear to be Chaya. She was too tall, and her hair was fuller and darker, and through the armhole of her sheer short nightgown he saw the startling contour of a woman’s heavy breast. He turned and began to hightail it out of the backyard, but the door opened almost immediately, and he turned sheepishly back.

  “Is, uh, Chaya here?” he said, in a tone which he hoped would make him sound too stupid to be doing something illicit.

  “Nathan? Nathan Shapiro?”

  “Chaya?”

  “What are you doing here? Where are your clothes?”

  The light spilling out around her reduced her to a silhouette and he could not tell if she looked angry or merely puzzled. Her voice was a cracked whisper and sounded rather plaintive in the dark, as though she were also afraid of getting into some kind of trouble.

  “I swam in your pool,” Nathan offered, uncertain if this would explain everything adequately.

  “Well, you’d better get out of here. My dad is sleeping and he hasn’t been well.”

  “Okay,” said Nathan. “Good-bye. You got so big, Chaya.” He was staring.

  “Puber
ty,” she said. “Ever hear of it?” She stepped back into the light of her room and smiled a sort of frowny smile she had always had, and then Nathan felt that he recognized her.

  “Chaya, I feel so weird,” he said. At the sight of her familiar, serious face he was all at once on the verge of tears.

  “Well. Okay, come inside. You have to be quiet.”

  “Okay.”

  Nathan followed Chaya into her room, which had the drop ceiling and damp-carpet odor of a basement. On one paneled wall there was a print of The Starry Night and an El Al poster with a picture of the Old City of Jerusalem; on the other wall was a painting that Chaya herself must have made, a picture of a palm tree full of bright parrots under a double sun, and Nathan remembered the day he had spent on the Planet Jadis. Beside the painting was an old mounted deer’s head, with a split ear, wearing sunglasses and a purple beret. On the table beside her bed was a squat jug lamp with a green shade, a package of Kool cigarettes, and a book by Erica Jong that Nathan had twice been admonished against reading by his grandfather. The circle of light from the lamp seemed to fall almost entirely on the bed, and Nathan averted his eyes, so intimate was the sight of the exposed white sheets and the deep declivity in the pillow. The imprint of her sleeping head, the whole idea of Chaya asleep, struck him as terribly poignant, and he could not look. He heard the creak of the bedsprings and the rustle of sheets as she climbed back into bed.

  “I mean you’re not ugly, or anything, Nathan,” said Chaya, “but put something on, okay?”

  “I’m naked!” said Nathan. He looked down at himself, and knew that he was naked. And he saw, as through Chaya’s eyes, that in assuming some of its manly proportions and features, his penis had also begun to take on a concomitant forlorn and humorous aspect, sort of like the Jeep in Popeye cartoons; and he made an apron of his hands and forearms. This did nothing to conceal, however, the whiteness of his thighs, or the soft, sad divot of hair around his left—but not yet his right—nipple.

  “There’s a towel on the chair.”

  “I’d better go,” said Nathan. He turned and began to walk out the door, attempting now to cover his probably ridiculous-looking rear end.

  “It’s okay, go ahead, put it on, Nathan,” said Chaya.

  “They brought me,” he said, turning again and crab-walking over to the chair beside Chaya’s desk. “The guys. Tiger and Buster and Felix E.” Hurriedly he wrapped the towel around his waist and tucked in one end, in the fashion that his grandmother had always referred to, for some reason, as Turkish. It was a scratchy white towel that had been stolen, to judge from the illegible Hebrew lettering that was woven like a pattern into one side, from some hotel in Israel. The lopsided situation of his chest hair remained a keen embarrassment, and the towel was so skimpy that the knot at his hip just barely held.

  “Are they out there?”

  “Yeah. They sent me in. They said—”

  “Your hair is all wet.” She folded her hands over her stomach, on the pleat of the bedclothes, and stared at him. She seemed all in all only mildly surprised to see Nathan, as though he were visiting her in a dream. Her face had grown wider, her cheekbones more pronounced, since the last time he had seen her, and with her tawny skin and her thick eyebrows and that big, wild hair Nathan thought she looked beautiful and a little scary. He sat down and hugged himself. His teeth were chattering.

  “Okay, now I better go.” He stood up again.

  “Wait,” said Chaya. She patted the sheets and indicated that he sit beside her. He came to sit gingerly at her feet, keeping hold with one hand of the tenuous Turkish knot.

  “Nathan Shapiro,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Chaya Feldman.”

  “Mrs. Falutnick’s class.”

  “Kvit chewink your gum in fronta da r-radio,” said Nathan, repeating a favorite inscrutable admonishment of Mrs. Falutnick’s in an accent he had not mimicked for six or seven years. Chaya laughed, but Nathan only snorted once through his nose. It had been so long since the days of Mrs. Falutnick’s class! He saw himself sitting in a flecked plastic chair at the back of the droning classroom in the Huxley Interfaith Plexus, defacing with moustaches and monkey’s fur the grave photographs of Emma Lazarus and Abraham Cahan in his copy of Adventures in American Jewry, furtively folding all ten inches of a stick of grape Big Buddy into his mouth when Mrs. Falutnick turned her enormous back on the class, and at this he was unaccountably saddened, and he sighed, startling Chaya out of her dream.

  “I heard your parents got a divorce,” she said. She looked down, and her long hair splashed her folded hands.

  “Yeah,” said Nathan, hugging himself again. The shiver that this word produced in him never lasted more than a second or two.

  “Why did they?”

  “I don’t know,” Nathan said.

  “You don’t?”

  He thought about it for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I mean they told me, but I forget what they said.”

  “It’s complicated,” Chaya offered, helpfully. “People change.”

  “I think that was part of it,” Nathan said, but he didn’t believe that there was really any explanation at all.

  “Does your dad still live around here?”

  “He moved to Boston.”

  “That’s cool,” said Chaya. She lifted the curtain of hair from her face and smiled another crooked smile. “I wish my dad would move to Boston.”

  Nathan said automatically, “No, you don’t.” He had hitherto managed to forget about the fearsome doctor and he glanced over his shoulder. In the far corner of the room he noticed three large plastic suitcases and a guitar case, neatly lined up as for an imminent departure.

  “Where are you going?” he said, gesturing toward the luggage.

  “Jerusalem,” said Chaya. “Tomorrow. Today, I guess. Later this morning.”

  “With your family? Or all alone?”

  “All alone.”

  “Are you ever coming back?”

  “Of course I am, you,” she said. “My father thinks I’ve gotten—he just wants me to learn to be an Israeli.”

  “Oh,” said Nathan. He was not certain what this entailed, but he suddenly pictured Chaya operating a crane on the bristling lip of a giant construction site in the desert, lowering a turbine generator or a sheaf of I-beams down into the void, the dust of the Negev blowing around her like a long scarf.

  “Did they tell you I put out?” said Chaya. “Those guys?”

  “Kind of,” said Nathan, taken aback, before it occurred to him that this was admitting he had come here for sex, when in fact he had come—why had he come? “It was more like a dare, I guess,” he said. “They sort of more or less dared me to come.”

  “None of them’s ever sat on my bed the way you are,” said Chaya.

  Nathan wondered for a moment exactly what she meant by this, and then, in the next moment, leaned toward her and kissed her lips. This was done only on an off chance and he did not expect that she would take such forceful hold of his body. Startled, without a clue of what he ought to do next, he put one hand on the nape of her neck, the other at the small of her back, and then he lay very still in her arms. He could feel the bones of her hips pressing against him, like a pair of fists, and his lips and somehow his breathing became entangled in her hair. The laundered smell of her bedclothes was overpowering and sweet.

  “Are you a virgin, Nathan?” she said, her mouth very close to his.

  He considered his reply much longer than he needed to, trying to phrase it as ambiguously as he could. “In a manner of speaking,” he said at last, blushing in self-congratulation at the urbanity of this reply.

  Her grip upon him relaxed, and she drew back slowly and then fell back against her pillow, looking calm again. He had the feeling that she had been hoping for some reply totally other than the one he had given. Then Chaya sighed, in a bored, theatrical way that to Nathan’s ears sounded very grown up, and he was afraid, at last, that she really might have b
ecome a skeezer, that it really was possible to lose track of someone so completely that they turned into someone else without your knowing about it.

  “Can you still draw eyeballs?” he said.

  “Eyeballs?” she said, her face blank. “Sure, I can.”

  “Chaya! Mara!” called Dr. Feldman from somewhere in the house. His voice resounded like an axe-blow. “That’s enough!”

  They both started, and stared a moment at one another as children or as lovers caught.

  “Can I tell you something, Nathan?” she said. “When I get to Israel I’m not coming back.”

  “You have to come back,” he said, taking her hand.

  “Chaya!” thundered Dr. Feldman from very far away. “Go to sleep.”

  “I’ll write you,” said Chaya. “Give me your address.”

  “Sixty-four twenty-three Les Adieux Circle. Is he going to come down here?”

  “No,” she said. “He thinks you’re my little sister. I’ll never remember that address. Let me write it down.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Nathan, getting up. “You don’t need to write me a letter.”

  “No, wait. Hold on.”

  She climbed out of bed again, grinning, and went to a blue wooden desk, under the stairs that led up to the first floor of the house. Nathan watched the play of her nightgown across her little behind as she bent over to open a drawer, and then scrabbled around in it, looking for a pen. She found a sheet of pink stationery and began to scratch across it with a Smurf pencil.

  “Chaya, I’d better go,” said Nathan. He headed for the door.