Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

By the time they got home their father had already gone. Mrs. Shapiro sat alone at the kitchen table. As the boys came in, she stood quickly and, before she hugged them, swept two coffee cups and a plate of crumbs off the table and into the sink, blushing strangely. In their mother’s wet embrace Nathan felt all at once smothered, blind, panicked, as he sometimes did when play required that he climb into a refrigerator carton or a crawl space. He squirmed wildly out of her arms and drew back.

“If you two are just going to cry all day,” he announced, “I don’t want to be around.” He felt very wicked as he said this, and retreated from the kitchen in confusion. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom but was drawn inexorably to his parents’ door. It was ajar and he pushed at it with the tip of his big toe, as though he might startle some animal asleep on the bed. There were indentations in the carpet, he saw, from his father’s dresser, his desk, his creaking armoire, a pattern of twelve little circles like the spots on a domino. It hadn’t occurred to Nathan that Dr. Shapiro would take the furniture, and its absence, curiously, made him feel sorry for his father, who was going to have to make do with so little now. Would there be a bed in this unimaginable apartment? Would there be a soft leather chair that reclined?

He stood in the middle of the half-empty room for a minute or so, until his glance fell on a wastebasket that stood beside the space where his father’s desk had been. It was mostly full of shirt cardboard and the white wrappers of coat hangers, but at the bottom he spied a crumpled yellow ball of legal paper, which he fished out and spread flat on the floor. It was some kind of a list, made by his father, and Nathan knew at once that it was a secret list, and that after he had finished reading it he would probably wish he hadn’t, as he was continually pained by the memory of a love letter he had found in a box in the basement, written to his father by a girl who had once been Nathan’s favorite baby-sitter. He lay on his stomach in the space where there was no longer a great, oaken desk and read what his father had set down. The handwriting was neat and restrained, as though Dr. Shapiro had been angry while he wrote.

“RESOLUTIONS,” Nathan read: “1. I will never again raise my voice with my children, or threaten them with the back of my hand. 2. I will not think ill of any man or woman, for no one could possibly be motivated by more trivial or more venal concerns than I. 3. I will cease calling my father and mother by their first names, and will strive to regain what I lost when they became Milton and Flo to me. That is, I will love my parents. 4. I will not claim to have read books that I have not read, or to have been borne out in predictions that I never made. 5. I will cease to infect Nathan with a debilitating love of facts, nor will I pursue them myself with greed and possessiveness, as I have heretofore. 6. I will be a better father. 7. I will listen to Bartók every morning, and to Mozart before I sleep. 8. I will lay aside all ambitions save the one I have cherished since the age of nineteen, when I made my first list of ten resolutions — to love and understand art, sport, science, literature, and music, and to become, someday, a true Renaissance Man. 9. I will not throw away this list.”

In the midst of feeling sick to his stomach, and faintly horrified as by the glimpses given in his father’s medical texts of the inner human body, the thought that Dr. Shapiro had already broken number nine was of some small comfort to Nathan. He gathered up the paper in his hands and himself crushed it, bit it, tore it in two. The telephone rang, and from the soft, interrogative sound of Ricky’s voice in the kitchen he guessed that it was Dr. Shapiro calling. In a minute he would have to tell his father something, something his father would never forget because it would be the first thing Nathan said to him under these new and remarkable circumstances. Nathan hoped, he prayed very quickly to God, rocking back and forth on his knees, that his father would break all eight of the others as well, that he would continue to spank his sons, fall asleep with the radio playing Harry Belafonte and Doris Day, memorize the altitudes of the mountains of the world. None of these things seemed to Nathan to be of the slightest importance, and yet they had caused Dr. Shapiro to drive himself from the house where he had dwelt for so many years as a kind of adored, only occasionally dangerous giant, an intelligent, dexterous bear with a vast repertoire of tricks. Nathan could see from the list that Dr. Shapiro didn’t know of the constant delight that his sons had taken in him or of the legends and fables that had grown up around his name. How impossible was the life of a father! thought Nathan. The best man in the world could fill a thousand pages with fine resolutions and still feel forced to leave his home in shame.

“Listen, Dad,” said Nathan when he picked up the phone, throwing himself across his father’s abandoned side of the bed, “I’ve been thinking. And really. You could come home any time you want to.”

“I know that,” said Dr. Shapiro.

“You were a good father, Dad,” said Nathan, clutching tight the torn little ball of yellow paper. “You were the best father in the world.”

“Thanks,” said Dr. Shapiro, but he said it abstractedly, a little too fast, as though it were only a reply, as though his mind were on other more difficult, more wondrous things.

NATHAN JAMMED HIS SNEAKERS against the back of his father’s seat and listened, eager and miserable, to the opening notes of the song on the car radio. He had no idea. His father had been quizzing him for as long as he could remember, and as a result Nathan knew the presidents of the United States (in order), the capitals of all fifty states, the provinces of Canada and the nations of Europe and their capitals (including Vaduz), the great inventions and their inventors, the major rivers of the world in order of length, famous black and Jewish Americans and their achievements, gods and heroes of ancient Greece, planets and moons of the solar system, as well as two dozen common phobias, including pantophobia, the fear of everything.

Unfortunately, the topic of the day was rock-and-roll music, and the quiz was for the benefit of Anne, Dr. Shapiro’s girlfriend, the play lady from the children’s hospital where Nathan’s father was the psychiatrist. They were on their way to Annapolis (the capital of Maryland), to stay in a motel, even though Annapolis was only half an hour from Ellicott City, where Nathan, his brother, and their mother lived. It had been raining lightly all morning, the air was chilly for May, and Nathan felt a kind of dread of this false vacation. Dr. Shapiro turned up the volume on the radio and glanced over his shoulder at Nathan, then looked at Anne to make sure that she was paying attention.

“O.K.,” said Dr. Shapiro, slowly rolling one hand in the air, as though guiding Nathan into a tight parking space. “Who is this?”

“David Bowie,” said Ricky, Nathan’s little brother. He arched forward to pat Anne on the top of her head, which was just visible to the boys in the backseat. Ricky — seven, affectionate, ill-tempered, and wild — had seen David Bowie once on television, dressed like a Navajo from Jupiter, and had been greatly impressed.

“Quiet, Ricky,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Nathan?”

Since his parents’ divorce, a year and a half ago, Nathan had become interested in rock-and-roll, but aside from songs by the Beatles, which he knew fairly well, and a few by the Rolling Stones, he wasn’t much good at this topic. For a moment, running the names of random bands and singers through his mind, Nathan panicked, and his knees began to ache from the pressure he was exerting against his father’s seat, until it occurred to him that this was a new kind of quiz. This time his father didn’t know the correct answer any more than he did. He could give any name at all.