Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

Roxille shuddered and took a deep breath. She closed her wild eyes and then opened them carefully. The minister had regained the pulpit and managed, by dint of looking pale and disappointed, to quiet the murmuring. He then introduced the next eulogist, a writer from Sports Illustrated . This man had started out working at the same Erie newspaper as Beryl, and not all that long ago. He was talented and he had done well for himself. Beryl hated him, in a good-humored way, and this led Magee to wonder why he had not hated Eli Drinkwater, whose fortunes had begun to rise so soon after Magee lost sight of the wormhole. He looked at Drinkwater’s coffin, now no more than a few feet away from him. The Teacher’s had worn off, and all at once he felt incurably tired. It occurred to him that you could probably tell a joke whose punch line involved a choice between being dead and being outrighted to Buffalo. It didn’t seem like much of a choice, but he supposed that Buffalo held a slight edge. On the other hand, at least Drinkwater didn’t have to know that he had died.

He had the vague impression that something was disturbing his exhaustion and then realized that it was Coleman Drinkwater, pulling on his sleeve. The little boy pointed at the coffin. He was watching it as though he had been told that it was going to perform a trick.

“Is my daddy in there?” he said, in a clear, thin, terribly normal voice.

Magee and Coleman looked at each other for what became several seconds. Magee, who had no children, searched for the correct way to answer. He wanted to say something that would be fair to Coleman and yet would not make him afraid. He wished that his head were clearer and that he were not so damn tired. He felt as though everyone in the church were waiting on his reply. His forehead grew damp and he opened his mouth, but he said nothing. Finally, helpless, he put an arm around Coleman’s small shoulders, and turned back to the speaker in the pulpit. The little boy suffered his godfather’s arm upon him, and as the funeral dragged on he even rested his head against Magee’s rib cage. Presently he fell asleep.

After a while, Magee himself, who had been awake for some thirty-two hours, drifted into an easy sleep. He dreamed his usual dream, the one in which he had found his stuff again and was on the mound at Three Rivers throwing seven different kinds of smoke. The sunshine was fragrant and the grass brilliant. When he awoke, feeling refreshed, the funeral was over and the coffin had already been wheeled out. Beryl was standing in front of him, her arms folded, looking as she had once looked on bailing him out of the Erie County Prison. Magee smiled, rubbed his eyes, and then realized that Coleman and Roxille had gone. He spun around in time to see the little boy being towed by his mother out the front door of the church. Coleman smiled across the empty pews at Magee, who saw from this distance that the design shaved into the side of the little boy’s head was not two eyeballs. It was Eli Drinkwater’s uniform number, the double zero.

“Poor kid,” said Beryl. “I heard what he asked you. God. I almost lost it.”

“I know,” said Magee, scratching his chin. He could not seem to remember what his reply had been, or if he had said anything at all.

“So,” said Beryl, sitting down beside him and taking hold of his throwing hand. She began, with a firm, nursely touch, to massage it. The backs of her hands hadn’t aged very much at all, and Magee, reeling nostalgic, watched them for a while as they worked him over. A soft lock of her platinum hair brushed against his cheek. “So. What are you going to do? Buffalo? You’re really going to let them do that to you?”

“I want to pitch, Ber. I have to get my mechanics back. I think it’ll be a little easier in Triple A.”

Beryl tightened her grasp on his hand and looked at him. Her face was neither incredulous nor mocking; she only bit her lip and wrinkled the bridge of her nose. Beryl’s nose, though small, could be expressive of great sadness.

“Magee,” she said. “Matty. Maybe I’m wrong to even put this thought in your head. I know how hard you’re trying, Matty, but — what if they’re just gone, baby?” Her voice cracked sweetly as she said this. “Have you ever thought of that?”

Magee withdrew his pitching hand and flexed it a couple of times. He watched it with a puzzled expression, as though it were a new model, of uncertain capacity. Then he looked away from it, up toward the ceiling of the church, and tried, for the last time, to remember if he had answered Coleman Drinkwater, and what he had told him.

“Yes,” he said to the empty choir.

AT ONE TIME HARRY and I shared everything; it is an error common to fast friendship. We idolized the same artists, movies, and ballplayers (particularly Cornell, The Conversation , and Madlock) and liked our food — even our breakfasts — with equally generous garnishes of the Vietnamese hot sauce we purchased at Tran’s on Murray Avenue. We wore each other’s clothes and merged our record collections. The expenses on our apartment and the grocery bills we paid with one another’s money, spending in a rough and free rotation until both of us were broke. The one thing we were unable to share — of course — was female companionship. When Harry began to sleep with Ruthie Louise Dollar or Atalanta Chin, or I with Evelyn Smrek, we did our best to stay above it, and made nervous jokes about the young woman and about the beast with three backs, but a shadow would fall across our friendship for the duration of the affair.

Nevertheless, Harry and I were still living together after the advents and ascensions of a good dozen girlfriends, and there was a special shelf above the radiator in the bathroom on which we displayed a tortoiseshell barrette, a gold Star of David on a chain, and a plaster impression of Ruthie Louise’s snaggled lower teeth, made by her orthodontist when she was in junior high, which had somehow come into Harry’s possession. I regret to say that in conversation we took a good deal of pride in our friendship’s proven invulnerability to women; and I kept to myself the potentially disruptive information that I was in love with his newest girlfriend, Kim Trilby, and that there were many Saturday nights during the winter they were together upon which, as I lay alone and shivering on my futon in the empty house, the thought of Harry and Kim sleeping spoon-wise and naked in Kim’s hot bedroom made me wish that he were dead.

I was working at the time as a disk jockey for a failing A.O.R. station that not long afterward went all-polka and cornered a small but solid share of the market. There was a high-watt, long-established rock-and-roll station two point six notches to the right, and no one listened to WDAN except, I imagined, people in hotel rooms who chose it on their clock radio for their wakeup call on the morning they left Pittsburgh forever. I had a Sunday-to-Friday midnight-to-six slot that wrecked my social life but afforded me the opportunity to talk a lot of outrageous nonsense in a variety of voices and now and then slip in a cut by Blurt or the Virgin Prunes without fear that anyone might hear it and complain. On the air I became once more an only child in his room on a rainy Saturday afternoon with his dolls and his record player, temporarily unaware of the weight of loneliness upon me.

Very early one Tuesday morning in March — I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner — I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim’s, over on Beacon, but I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry’s chronic tightfistedness — we were responsible for half of the heating bill — and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years’ friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry.