Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

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.

“Puberty,” 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.