Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

When I came out to the dining table — the heat was turned off again, and I wore my gloves and a hat — there was a note from Harry propped against the sugar bowl. “SORRY,” it read, “JESUS, WHAT A HEADACHE I HAVE, YOU MUST TOO. SORRY SORRY SORRY. H” As a matter of fact, I had a rather large lump on the back of my head, and a faint sensation of pain if I turned too quickly; otherwise I was all right. Beside the note were looped five dozen yards of very thin telephone wire, in seven colors with contrasting stripes, that Harry had been experimenting with recently for his long-planned masterpiece, Aporia — ran “inverted board game” whose rules changed unpredictably with each roll of the dice but whose outcome was always the same. I sat down with a cup of coffee and idly picked up a length of yellow-and-blue wire. I had grown up in a young community in which there was a continual construction of houses all through my youth, and I remembered finding this kind of wire at the building sites and twisting it into finger rings, single loops of wire — about that wide for Kim’s finger, I guessed — along which you wrapped little coils, like this, pressed together so that in the end each coil made a bead, yellow or blue. After ten minutes’ work I had a handsome piece, the sight of which recalled to me a hopeful love offering of my boyhood that had not been rejected. I slipped it into my pocket and went, almost skipping, out the front door.

It was much warmer outside than inside, and I soon shed my hat and gloves and stuffed them into the pocket of my coat. The sun shone most promisingly, there was a slight gasoline hint of summer traffic in the air, and on the lawn of the Methodist church on the corner I saw blades of early daffodils where a few days before there had been a crust of old snow. A warm breeze blew up along the sidewalk, and it seemed to me I had only to kick twice and thrust upward my chin in order to lift off the pavement and glide, touching down every twenty feet or so, toward the house of my slender love. People in cars had their windows rolled down, and I could hear the airy music from their radios as they passed. Now I unzipped my coat and rocked my head from side to side. The resultant ache was poignant and appropriate. Two elderly men emerged from Isaly’s, both of them biting into the first Klondikes of the season, and I sailed after them along Murray Avenue, listening as they argued about the potential of a good-hitting shortstop the Pirates had decided to promote from the minors. Oh, I thought, it is almost Opening Day!

When I arrived at Kim’s door I found to my surprise that I had lost the better part of my desire to sleep with her. It would be nice to see her, to sit down in her sunny kitchen and look at some absurd daytime program on the television — we had done that many times before — but I was so happy just then, slapping up the concrete steps with my coat flapping behind me and the warmth of my body rising up through my open collar in a fragrant column of air, that I didn’t think anything, not even taking her into my arms, could improve my mood. The sexual act, in prospect, seemed to offer only danger and regret.

I proceeded more cautiously up the three steps of her front porch and across to her front door, and as soon as I rang her doorbell I wished that I had not. I wavered a moment on the welcome mat, then fled back down the steps; but there was no time to get away without being seen. I looked this way, then that, turned back toward the door, turned away. I heard her tread in the hallway, her hand on the knob, and at the last possible moment I ducked between the concrete skirt of the porch and the low hedge of holly that concealed it, crouching in the dirt, in the narrow space between the prickling holly and the house. A thorn scratched my cheek as she opened the door, and it was all I could do to keep from cursing.

There was a long pause during which I had time to realize that I was crouching in a hard pile of snow and my butt was getting very wet. I heard Kim sniffle a few times, as though she were smelling me out, and then a beleaguered sigh.

“You have hat-head, Vince,” she said. “As usual.”

I rose, pulled the hat from my pocket, and put it back on my head. It might have been the hat — perhaps it was enchanted — or simply the sight of Kim in a long cable sweater that sagged at the neck and reached down to the tops of her knees; in any case, as soon as I saw her I wanted her again. Harry was my best friend, but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.

“I slept in my hat,” I said. “As usual. Don’t ever let your life get to the point where you have to sleep with your hat on.”

“Come on in. It’s nice and warm.”

“I know it is.”

I followed her into the house and down her long front hallway to the kitchen, where the radio played and there was a smell of bay leaf, onion, and fresh dirt.

“I’m making lentil soup,” she said, turning to the stove and peering into a cast-iron pot. In the bulky sweater Kim looked plump and wifely; she who was so thin that Harry would sometimes clean and jerk her over his head and spin around calling, “Choppers! Incoming wounded!” At the time she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds. “This’ll be the last lentil soup of the winter, I guess.”

“Looks like it.”

“You can have some when it’s ready.”

“Thanks.”

“If you promise not to mention Harry.”

“I can promise that,” I said.

The old pink radio on the kitchen table emitted a familiar promo. Two bars of the psycho-kazoo opening to “Crosstown Traffic,” followed by the synthesized effect of a starship’s landing, and then my own voice, filtered and phased, sounding as though I were a twenty-seven-foot black man about to get very angry. “WDAN!” said my disturbing voice. “Huge Music!”

“ You’re the one who listens,” I said. In general I pretended that it did not trouble me to labor in the ratings cellar, but at the discovery that Kim tuned in to that doomed little station, I was moved and took it as incontestable proof of her rightness for me.

“Harry makes me,” she said.

She carefully straddled a kitchen chair and motioned for me to do the same. I sat. I looked at the ashtray between us, in which there were fifteen or sixteen bent butts. Kim smoked far too much, even for a waitress. Now she lit another.

“I’m going to have to stop,” she said, in a sad little voice, as though it had never occurred to her before.

“Sure you are.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Was he trashed when you got home?”

“Oh, no, not really,” I said.

“Don’t lie.”

“He was breaking my mother’s dishes in the basement.”

“Oh, boy.”

“And he had the heat on.”

She put down her cigarette, and her brown eyes got very wide and surprised.

Then she laughed, without sarcasm, with a happiness so genuine that I was taken aback. It was deep and caroling laughter, and it seemed to invite me to turn Harry, the idea of Harry, into a risible fool, to flatten him into a cartoon character and laugh him right out of her affections. This was the simple task before me.

“What’s so funny?” I said; the question sounded more harsh than I had intended.

“Nothing,” said Kim. She looked down at the coal of her cigarette and bit her lip.

“Kimberly Ellen Donna Marie Trilby,” I said. I went over to her chair and knelt on the floor beside her. She sat, looking at her cigarette and calmly crying. I didn’t know why she was crying, whether because Harry was gone or because I was still there, but I felt very sorry for her. Once in a while you will see a waitress like that, crying at the back of a restaurant or in the hallway by the phone, staring down at a monogrammed matchbook in her fingers, and consider for a second or two the untold hardness of a waitress’s life. I reached around and pulled her to me. There followed the briefest of struggles before she fell sprawling into my arms.