Eric Puchner - Model Home

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Model Home: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Warren Ziller moved his family to Southern California in search of a charmed life, and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of the 1980s. But the Zillers’ American dream is about to be rudely interrupted. Warren has squandered their savings on a bad real estate investment, which he conceals from his wife, Camille, who misreads his secrecy as a sign of an affair. Their children, Dustin, Lyle, and Jonas, have grown as distant as satellites, too busy with their own betrayals and rebellions to notice their parents’ distress. When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move to Warren’s abandoned housing development in the desert. In this comically bleak new home, each must reckon with what’s led them there and who’s to blame — and whether they can summon the forgiveness needed to hold the family together.
With penetrating insights into modern life and an uncanny eye for everyday absurdities, Eric Puchner delivers a wildly funny, heartbreaking, and thoroughly original portrait of an American family.

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Kira tuned the radio to her favorite station, which was playing “Peace Train.” Dustin hadn’t told his bandmates about Kira’s secret penchant for Cat Stevens and Fleetwood Mac. Nor had he told them the other things that, in a future wife, he found faintly troubling. Last week they’d gone to see a play in downtown L.A., one that Biesty had told him about, and during the performance an actor had unzipped his pants onstage and pissed into a bucket. Afterward, it was the first thing that Kira mentioned: Was it really necessary that he take a whiz in front of everyone? It wasn’t even her objection that bothered Dustin but that he’d foreseen it so perfectly even before the actor had zipped up his pants, right down to the word “whiz.” He couldn’t shake the feeling that everything she did was utterly predictable. He knew that she’d close her eyes for a second and take a deep breath before entering a party; that she’d eat the edges of a Peppermint Pattie first and save the gooey center for last, asking jokingly if he wanted a bite; that she would stare at him sometimes when they were watching a movie and say, in the middle of the best scene, “You’re so adorable when you’re serious.”

The problem was he had a different vision of himself. In this vision he was not adorable at all. He was strange and spontaneous and did charismatically delinquent things, like piss in a bucket for a crowd of strangers.

“I made you something,” Kira said now, reaching into her purse. Always, as soon as he saw her beautiful, heart-melting face, any reservations he had immediately vanished. She pulled out a cassette tape and handed it to him. Slanting across the case, in embossed letters, was a label that said THIS OBJECT IS DESIGNED TO MAKE NOISE. “It’s those songs you recorded at Biesty’s house. I made ten copies.”

“You did?”

“I thought we could sell them the next time you play.”

Dustin was moved. She was always doing things like this, helping to set up gigs or sneaking into the teachers’ lounge at school to Xerox flyers. Her belief in his talent stunned him sometimes. It was like having a fantastic dream about yourself, then waking up to find that someone else had had it too.

“Shit,” she said, sitting up on her towel. “There’s Taz. She saw me. The Witch of Endor.”

Kira’s sister trudged up the sand with a cigarette in her mouth, trailed by a shirtless boy in Elvis sunglasses. She had a streak of white dyed into her bangs. For some reason, the cigarette made her seem even younger.

“I need some money,” Taz said without even glancing at Dustin. She was wearing a saggy bathing suit and a pair of cutoff jeans that seemed to be biodegrading. She looked like Kira but wasn’t half as pretty; it was nice seeing them together because it made Kira seem even hotter. Her friend with the Elvis sunglasses stood there quietly, observing Jonas as if he were maybe a mesmerizing speed bump.

“Didn’t Mom give you any?” Kira said.

“I spent it already.”

“On cigarettes?”

Taz scowled. “What is this, the Inquisition? Like you don’t smoke all the time in your bathroom.”

“Is he dead?” the boy in the Elvis glasses said, nudging Jonas with his foot.

“Waiting to get picked apart,” Dustin said.

The boy stepped back.

“What are you going to buy with it?” Kira asked Taz.

“Some angel dust. At the Snack Shack.”

“Christ, just take some,” Kira said, pulling a five out of her purse. Her sister stuffed it in the pocket of her cutoffs without saying thank you and headed off down the beach, stranding her friend in a lizardlike trance. “Boo,” Jonas said, opening his eyes. The boy started and jogged after her.

“Little slut,” Kira said, watching them leave. “I guarantee you she just met that creep an hour ago.”

Dustin kissed Kira’s neck and made her squirm, because it was a beautiful day and you had to make your girlfriend forget about her bitchy sister, who’d been kicked out of ninth grade and sent to a “therapeutic boarding school” in Northern California for troubled teens. Something told him it was going to be a long summer. “Maybe she’s changed. You haven’t seen her all year.”

“Yeah, right.” She kissed him, smiling. “You’re too nice, that’s your problem.”

Dustin frowned. He took off his shirt and jogged down to the water, more swiftly than he’d intended. Some guys he knew — surfers — waved at him from the other side of the lifeguard tower, giving him the hang loose, their boards jutting from the sand in a Druidic-looking circle. All bro-ness and sunshine. Sometimes he wished people didn’t think he was so friendly. It was an annoying misunderstanding. For one thing, the thoughts running through his head weren’t always very kind. They were nasty and irreverent. He wasn’t sure how the misunderstanding had happened, but it had. He wasn’t particularly nice to his parents, but no one ever got to see that and it did him no good.

He swam in the ocean for a while, bodysurfing on the close-to-unrideable waves, avoiding the little-kid surfers wiping out and getting sand facials. He gave up after a while and decided to head in, catching a puny swell that walled off into a sandy wash of foam. When he surfaced, Kira was standing waist-deep in the water in front of him, her face damp and somber. A bubble of foam withered in her hair. She’s going to break up with me, Dustin thought miserably.

“What is it?”

She started to say something and then trailed off, blushing through her tan. “I think we should just… you know. Do it for real.”

He kissed her happily. “When?”

“I don’t know. Before you go to college.”

His heart sank. “That’s, like, three months away.” He waded backward into the surf, so no one would see his hard-on. “Anyway, what difference does college make?”

“Everything will be different.”

“UCLA’s forty minutes from here. It won’t change anything.”

She frowned as if she knew more than he did about college life, even though he’d visited UCLA three times and even spent the night in some crazy art major’s dorm room. “July thirtieth,” she said quietly. “A month from this Thursday. It’s our year anniversary.”

Dustin nodded. She hugged him, smiling now, and they walked up the beach together in the sun, the water shrinking from his back like silk. A month! He’d waited this much time; in the history of the universe, a month was no more than a blip. But there was something about having sex for the first time on your year anniversary that seemed hopelessly conventional. Nice . They walked by an elderly woman in a beach chair, tan as a waffle, who smiled at Kira as they passed. What a lovely couple, he could see the woman thinking. Dustin glanced at his girlfriend’s face, smiling sweetly in return, and felt a surprising twirl of revulsion.

Ahead of them, over by their towels, some kids were messing around in the sand; Dustin was astonished that his brother seemed to have made some friends. And then he saw Jonas. Or rather, Jonas’s scrawny-looking ass: he was naked from the waist down and lunging at the kids, who were throwing his orange cords back and forth and dancing in little triumphant hops. The penis-builders from earlier. Dustin yelled at the kids and they took off running, ditching Jonas’s cords in the sand. He wrapped a towel around Jonas’s waist.

“Where’s your underwear?”

“I wasn’t wearing any,” Jonas said.

“Jonas, why ?”

“I don’t have any orange ones.”

Dustin glanced down the beach at Kira, who was retrieving Jonas’s pants. He saw how his brother’s life would be an endless trial of humiliations that he was too orange and clueless to avoid. Jonas dropped the towel to put his corduroys back on, his shriveled little penis darker than the rest of him.

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