Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

“Wait,” said Chaya. She patted the sheets and indicated that he sit beside her. He came to sit gingerly at her feet, keeping hold with one hand of the tenuous Turkish knot.

“Nathan Shapiro,” she said, shaking her head.

“Chaya Feldman.”

“Mrs. Falutnick’s class.”

“Kvit chewink your gum in fronta da r-r adio,” said Nathan, repeating a favorite inscrutable admonishment of Mrs. Falutnick’s in an accent he had not mimicked for six or seven years. Chaya laughed, but Nathan only snorted once through his nose. It had been so long since the days of Mrs. Falutnick’s class! He saw himself sitting in a flecked plastic chair at the back of the droning classroom in the Huxley Interfaith Plexus, defacing with moustaches and monkey’s fur the grave photographs of Emma Lazarus and Abraham Cahan in his copy of Adventures in American Jewry , furtively folding all ten inches of a stick of grape Big Buddy into his mouth when Mrs. Falutnick turned her enormous back on the class, and at this he was unaccountably saddened, and he sighed, startling Chaya out of her dream.

“I heard your parents got a divorce,” she said. She looked down, and her long hair splashed her folded hands.

“Yeah,” said Nathan, hugging himself again. The shiver that this word produced in him never lasted more than a second or two.

“Why did they?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan said.

“You don’t?”

He thought about it for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I mean they told me, but I forget what they said.”

“It’s complicated,” Chaya offered, helpfully. “People change.”

“I think that was part of it,” Nathan said, but he didn’t believe that there was really any explanation at all.

“Does your dad still live around here?”

“He moved to Boston.”

“That’s cool,” said Chaya. She lifted the curtain of hair from her face and smiled another crooked smile. “I wish my dad would move to Boston.”

Nathan said automatically, “No, you don’t.” He had hitherto managed to forget about the fearsome doctor and he glanced over his shoulder. In the far corner of the room he noticed three large plastic suitcases and a guitar case, neatly lined up as for an imminent departure.

“Where are you going?” he said, gesturing toward the luggage.

“Jerusalem,” said Chaya. “Tomorrow. Today, I guess. Later this morning.”

“With your family? Or all alone?”

“All alone.”

“Are you ever coming back?”

“Of course I am, you,” she said. “My father thinks I’ve gotten — he just wants me to learn to be an Israeli.”

“Oh,” said Nathan. He was not certain what this entailed, but he suddenly pictured Chaya operating a crane on the bristling lip of a giant construction site in the desert, lowering a turbine generator or a sheaf of I-beams down into the void, the dust of the Negev blowing around her like a long scarf.

“Did they tell you I put out?” said Chaya. “Those guys?”

“Kind of,” said Nathan, taken aback, before it occurred to him that this was admitting he had come here for sex, when in fact he had come — why had he come? “It was more like a dare, I guess,” he said. “They sort of more or less dared me to come.”

“None of them’s ever sat on my bed the way you are,” said Chaya.

Nathan wondered for a moment exactly what she meant by this, and then, in the next moment, leaned toward her and kissed her lips. This was done only on an off chance and he did not expect that she would take such forceful hold of his body. Startled, without a clue of what he ought to do next, he put one hand on the nape of her neck, the other at the small of her back, and then he lay very still in her arms. He could feel the bones of her hips pressing against him, like a pair of fists, and his lips and somehow his breathing became entangled in her hair. The laundered smell of her bedclothes was overpowering and sweet.

“Are you a virgin, Nathan?” she said, her mouth very close to his.

He considered his reply much longer than he needed to, trying to phrase it as ambiguously as he could. “In a manner of speaking,” he said at last, blushing in self-congratulation at the urbanity of this reply.

Her grip upon him relaxed, and she drew back slowly and then fell back against her pillow, looking calm again. He had the feeling that she had been hoping for some reply totally other than the one he had given. Then Chaya sighed, in a bored, theatrical way that to Nathan’s ears sounded very grown up, and he was afraid, at last, that she really might have become a skeezer, that it really was possible to lose track of someone so completely that they turned into someone else without your knowing about it.

“Can you still draw eyeballs?” he said.

“Eyeballs?” she said, her face blank. “Sure, I can.”

“Chaya! Mara!” called Dr. Feldman from somewhere in the house. His voice resounded like an axe-blow. “That’s enough!”

They both started, and stared a moment at one another as children or as lovers caught.

“Can I tell you something, Nathan?” she said. “When I get to Israel I’m not coming back.”

“You have to come back,” he said, taking her hand.

“Chaya!” thundered Dr. Feldman from very far away. “Go to sleep.”

“I’ll write you,” said Chaya. “Give me your address.”

“Sixty-four twenty-three Les Adieux Circle. Is he going to come down here?”

“No,” she said. “He thinks you’re my little sister. I’ll never remember that address. Let me write it down.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Nathan, getting up. “You don’t need to write me a letter.”

“No, wait. Hold on.”

She climbed out of bed again, grinning, and went to a blue wooden desk, under the stairs that led up to the first floor of the house. Nathan watched the play of her nightgown across her little behind as she bent over to open a drawer, and then scrabbled around in it, looking for a pen. She found a sheet of pink stationery and began to scratch across it with a Smurf pencil.

“Chaya, I’d better go,” said Nathan. He headed for the door.

“Wait!” said Chaya. She was writing furiously now, in a pointed, ribbony script almost like cursive Hebrew, and he waited, one hand on the knob, for her to finish, and hoped that Dr. Feldman would not call out again. When she put down her pen she took a red, white, and blue airmail envelope from another drawer, folded the slip of pink paper in half, slid it into the envelope, and ran her tongue along the flap. Then she bent over the desk again and, brushing her hair from the face of the envelope, wrote out what Nathan knew even from a distance to be his name and address.

“There, I wrote you a letter from Jerusalem,” she said, turning toward him. “Don’t read it until tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. “Good-bye.” He hugged her awkwardly, afraid that he might get an erection, and then eased open the basement door. “Have fun in Jerusalem.”

“But I’m already there,” she said, continuing in this teasing and mysterious vein. She put a hand on each of his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. Nathan took the letter from her, a little uncertainly. Probably it was just a bunch of scribble, or an apology for not wanting to have sex with him.

“I know what you’re doing!” said Dr. Feldman, with that weird Yisraeli accent of his, and Nathan went out naked into the night. He was not quite so drunk anymore, and this time the trip around the house, past the swimming pool, did not seem especially fine or ominous. The dog next door to the Feldmans’ caught wind of Nathan and began to rail at him, and he ran the rest of the way, all the while trying to determine if Dr. Feldman and his Uzi were in pursuit. As he was running across the Feldmans’ yard and into the neighbors’, the white towel finally slipped from his waist and fell away, nearly tripping him; he left it to Chaya to explain how it got there, and went naked the rest of the way.