Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

“Hey!” I said, walking through the empty living room — we had one chair. I imagined that Harry would be in the kitchen, fixing breakfast, but there was no reply. I let my coat and scarf fall to the floor around me, listening for his footsteps or his voice talking on the telephone. Just as I was about to call his name again, there was the sound of a breaking dish or glass from the basement. We were on the first floor of a two-story house that had been made into a duplex, and the way to the basement was through our apartment. There was another explosion of glass, then another, then several more in rapid succession, as though Harry had set a tow of tumblers along the top of the washing machine and were now blowing them off with an air rifle. He did not own an air rifle, however, and I ran, almost falling, down the steps, knowing that at their base I would find my friend heartbroken and half in the bag.

In fact, I found him in just his boxer shorts and ski cap, holding a half-empty bottle of George Dickel in his right hand and one of my late mother’s Franciscan dinner plates in his left. His left arm was raised and cocked at the elbow, and he held the plate as for a flea-flicker into the end zone. The service for twelve was part of my mother’s legacy to me and she had intended me to present it to whatever unfortunate woman might become my bride. On the concrete floor all about him lay one hundred and twenty-seven shards of consolation. I knew at once that he’d split up with Kim; I had seen him in the mood to shatter things many times before. As usual he wore a smile, peculiar to this mood, that combined the glee of the vandal with the grim, self-loathing amusement of the drunk. The ski cap was pulled down crookedly over one eye, and this, when he whirled toward me and brandished the plate and the bottle of whiskey, gave him a piratical air. He was a big fellow, wore a full black beard, and his left eye, I saw, had been badly blackened.

“Well, she’s all yours, Vince!” he said, in an ugly voice.

“It’s my bedtime,” I said, suddenly very tired. “Why are you doing this now?”

Harry was always considerate of my hours — he suffered from intermittent insomnia, and held sleep in high esteem — and he set the dish down on the floor with a drunken gentleness.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess Kim dumped me.”

“You guess?”

“It’s one of those.”

“You mean you might have dumped her.”

“It’s possible.”

“Did she give you that shiner?” Not too long before this, Kim and a baseball bat had broken up a knife fight at the bar where she worked, the Squirrel Cage — maybe you saw that jerk Snake Fleming walking around with his head all bandaged — and she had a reputation, despite her size, for being pretty good with her fists.

“What shiner?” said Harry. He took a long swallow from the bottle of Dickel. It went down a little rough, and this seemed to sober him up for a minute. He looked around him at the wreckage of my mother’s dishes and frowned.

“It was the toys,” he said at last.

Harry was the director of research and development for Other Worlds, Inc., a Pittsburgh firm that manufactured what its advertisements called “playthings for the unusual child,” or, as Harry described them, “toys for kids nobody will like in high school.” It was a small firm, and Harry constituted the entire department. The president and other half of the firm was an elderly Orthodox man named Mr. Levinsky, a thirties socialist and tri-state sales representative for Piatt & Munk, or Funk & Wagnalls — I forget which — who now devoted his days to driving all over the eastern seaboard attending customs auctions and buying up abandoned shipments of whatever looked interesting and cheap. All manner of odd and useless items, in huge lots, are auctioned off every day in the ports of the East: twelve hundred hydraulic fan blades, nine thousand spools of orange thread, fifty-two cases of baby-food jars, a half-mile of plastic forks still on their sprues. Mr. Levinsky and Claude, the company driver, would return with these prizes, in a drug-bust-impounded Mercedes truck that Mr. Levinsky had also bought at auction, to the Other Worlds warehouse, in Monroeville.

It was Harry’s job to attempt to play with each item, to discover if it had any “intrinsic ludic value,” as Mr. Levinsky put it, apart from its intended function. Harry would devise some way of building with it, or decorating his body, or annoying his elders, and then the item would be packed in an attractive box and sold nationally for $24.95 at museum gift shops and at toy stores with track lighting and Scandinavian-sounding names. Harry’s greatest success so far had been Odd Ject. You’ve seen it — an assortment of polystyrene balls, golf tees, and those multicolored cocktail toothpicks that have a lock of curly cellophane hair at one end. This “Self-Generating Deconstruction Kit” had caught on the Christmas before, selling out eighteen thousand units in two and a half weeks, and had earned him a raise and a rare handshake from Mr. Levinsky. The chief drawback of his otherwise enviable line of work was that it led Harry to regard every object around him — his shoes, a box of brads, a woman’s birth-control-pill dispenser — as a potential plaything. In the middle of a serious conversation about the Supreme Court or chlamydia, you would catch him poking straightened paper clips into a sponge, staging a mock naval battle with dry macaroni, or rolling his pocket lint into the shapes of animals and setting them on parade. I mention the pill dispenser because this was the item that had precipitated his break with Kim.

“They make really cool spaceships,” said Harry. He sagged to his knees and began to sweep up the broken dishes with his hands. “When you turn the dial, you can pop the pills out like little, uh, hormone bombs. Pow. Pow. An entire population suddenly unable to conceive.”

“Harry,” I said. “Come on upstairs. I’m going to bed now.”

“There’s this way you can make them shoot really far.”

“Leave the mess. Come on.”

I took him by the arm, guided him to the steps, and gave him a little push. He returned the push, more forcefully, and I fell backward. My head cracked against the floor and I heard within my skull the sound of a rock hitting a sheet of taut aluminum. I smelled blood in my nose and I imagined, for a half second, that I was about to pass away. I lived.

“Stay away from her,” he said. “I know what you have in mind.”

It was a while before I was able to speak. “You asshole,” I said. “I don’t have anything in mind.”

This was not, I realized as I said it, entirely true. I had already begun to form vague plans to unbutton Kim’s blouse, remove her cowboy boots, peel off her blue jeans, and lick her body from sole to crown. The pain in my head was all at once as nothing.

“Oh, my God, you’re bleeding, Vince,” said Harry. He extended a hand and then pulled me to my feet. I touched a finger to my nose and smiled at him.

“You just made a big mistake,” I said.

I awoke early that afternoon, showered, and performed my toilet with the care of a man intent on seduction. Kim worked as a waitress at the Squirrel Cage and did not go on until evening, and I expected to find her at home. I had come to believe in my interchangeability with Harry so completely that it did not occur to me that Kim would have any qualms about going to bed with a new partner while still in the midst of a painful breakup; I simply assumed that she would have me, as she would have had Harry, as though he’d called in sick and I were the equally qualified temporary sent by some Kelly Services of love. I had known her as long as he had, and we got along well. She was a thin, raspy-voiced woman with a sarcastic manner, expressive hands, and a respectable knowledge of what is sometimes known as industrial rock — a particular favorite of mine. I had taken her once to see my friend Lee Skirboll perform in a band called Hex Wrench, for which Lee beat on a steel filing cabinet with an assortment of golf clubs and spatulas while his partner sat in on tape deck, amplified shortwave radio, and a bank of old-fashioned Philco sine-wave generators supplied, without his knowing it, by Mr. Levinsky. Kim had enjoyed it, and, I now reminded myself, lathering my chin with increasing zeal, there had been a furtive kiss and hand squeeze in the instant before we’d gone into the bar, where we were rendezvousing with Harry, who liked only Debussy, DeFalla, and Erik Satie.