A Model World and Other Stories Read online

  “She hates me,” Roksana says quietly.

  “No, she doesn’t. Why do you say that?”

  “It’s all right, I don’t care. She can hate me.”

  I try to pull her to me, and I’m about to say again those three helpless words when she stops short.

  “Look,” she says.

  Behind the scratched display window of the candy machine is a brand of chocolate bar with an English name: Big Nuts. Roksana laughs. I buy one and put it in my pocket, and when we reach the Heugel Renault, I am still smiling.

  “Oh, what beautiful teeth,” says Madame Heugel.

  “Yes, they’re like that—American teeth,” says Hervé.

  We eat outside, at a long table, and lunch is a mountain of steamed shrimp, a stacked cord of fresh asparagus, cider, and bread. Hervé’s father, who looks like Hervé—thin with a large head and a sharp nose—tells us in French about his trip to New York City in 1968. I am delighted by his account of a misadventure in “les Bronx,” and everything goes well until I notice that my plate is the only one on which mounts a pile of tails, shells, rosy filaments, and shrimp heads; Hervé and his parents are eating the entire shrimp, unpeeled. Roksana will not eat shrimp.

  “No one told me what kind of a neighborhood I would have to walk through to get to the Cloisters,” says Monsieur Heugel, struggling with the word. He has shot five small fowl that morning and seems to be in fine spirits; I saw the brown and iridescent-green pile of birds on the kitchen table. “Harlem! Think of that! Full of blacks! Did I care?”

  “Yes,” Hervé says.

  “No, I did not. I walked right through. On my way home I had an appetite, I stopped at a little coffee shop, I bought a sandwich, I sat right down on the curb, in Harlem, and ate it. No one bothered me.” He smiles at his wife, who probably hears this story every time the Heugels feed an American, and she smiles and reaches to move his sleeve out of the butter dish. “I have nothing against blacks; you see.”

  “Since when?” Hervé turns to me. “He’s completely prejudiced against blacks. Blacks and Arabs.”

  Right away he puts an embarrassed hand to his mouth, and we all turn to look at Roksana—myself included, which makes me ashamed—who has no idea of what’s been said and continues calmly to eat her asparagus and bread, eyes to her plate. While Monsieur Heugel protests that he has known several Arabs who were very worthwhile fellows and, it must be said, skilled businessmen, and Hervésnorts and puts away fistfuls of shrimp, I push back my chair.

  Our table is spread in the grassy clos between two of the estate’s several houses. On my right is an ivy-covered stone building with a turret, five chimneys, and fabulous eaves—the house of Hervé’s family; on my left, across the lawn, is one of the larger outbuildings, a brown barn that has been converted into a guesthouse. All around our table are bees and butterflies and giant oaks, the air smells lightly of manure and salt, and across from me, in the distance behind Monsieur Heugel, is the bay, filled with sails. I watch Roksana chew, closed, dark, mute, immovable, and I think: I am a fool.

  “Oh, the little American,” says Madame Heugel, pointing delicately with her fork at my plate. “He will not eat the heads!”

  They laugh, and Roksana looks up.

  “In America,” I say, “it’s unlucky to eat them.” I fold another buttery stalk of asparagus into my mouth. The Heugels shoot another round of glances at my staring wife.

  “Monsieur Heugel,” I say, “how many centuries has this manor been in your family?”

  “Hervé’s grandfather purchased the manor in 1948,” says Madame Heugel.

  Everyone laughs much louder this time. Roksana looks up again, her face blank, her jaw working, and for one moment, and for the first time, I feel like striking her.

  I excuse myself, leaving Roksana to sit at their table, to suck up all their joy and conversation like a black hole. I hate all of them.

  Upstairs, I sit in the tub and hold the hand nozzle over my head for a few minutes, showering off the train ride and the strange conversation, which, after all, I may have misunderstood. Then I go back into the bedroom the Heugels have given us, which smells of cedar. With a towel on my head I step over to one of the lozenge-shaped windows and look outside, onto the yard, where the table is still covered with the wreckage of lunch and where Hervé and his father drink Calvados from little glasses. Roksana and Hervé’s mother have disappeared, perhaps into the house, and I have this brief, stupid, happy fantasy of the two of them doing the dishes together, working in smooth and wordless concert.

  When I take from my suitcase the new dress shirt, white with coral pinstripes, that I bought specially at an outlet store in the rue du Commerce, because Hervé had promised to take us to a Breton club where the women would go wild over my accent, the shirt is wrinkled and my shaving cream has exploded all across the collar. I sit down on the bed, looking for a long time at the pale blue smear of foam and trying to remember the word for clothes iron.

  The stairs creak. Roksana’s face is in the doorway for half a second, and I think she’s coming into the bedroom. I toss aside the spoiled shirt, but she turns and I hear her start to creak back downstairs. I shut my eyes. “Roksana.”

  Plates in the kitchen, laughter outside.

  “I need to be alone.”

  “Please come here.”

  When I open my eyes she’s in the doorway again. This time I see the anger on her face, and before the words come out of her mouth I know, with a rush of bent happiness, that we’re going to have a fight, after a year and a half of wedlock as empty and quiet as a dark theater.

  “I want to leave,” she says, coming into the room and slamming the door behind her. “I’m not welcome here. You stay. They like you.”

  “You’re as welcome as you choose to be.”

  “No. Bullshit. They were laughing. They were laughing at me. I could tell. You were laughing at me, you bastard.”

  “You bitch.”

  I’m still sitting down, and Roksana steps so close to me now that the tips of her pointed black shoes come down, hard, on my toes. She throws a shadow across me.

  “Please, don’t,” I say.

  “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “You’re here because it’s Bastille Day. You’re here to have fun. Ouch! Can’t you ever have fun?”

  Roksana looks down upon me, her eyes perfectly dry and black, and says that she hates fun more than anything else in this world, and I see that I misunderstood her when she said she didn’t know why she was here, because I thought that by “here” she just meant in Brittany.

  “You sound like Khomeini,” I say, trying to slide my pinched feet out from under her shoes, and reeling somehow offended, as though I were responsible for all of us, and for the fireworks and feast days and surfeits of the entire fun hemisphere. I manage to free my feet, but now she grabs me by the ears and pulls, and it hurts.

  “What do you know about Khomeini? What do you know about me? I am not fun. Do you think to run away from Iran was fun? From my mother? From the bodies of my family?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, still angry. “Fine. Go. Go back. All I have to do is say the word to Mr. Immigration and you can go right back to the land of seriousness.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I might,” I say, and think, well, I could. But I can’t stand the frightened, stubborn way she has narrowed her eyes or the way the room and the air between us seems filled with the cheesy smell of blackmail. I look down and my gaze falls upon the blue on my shirt collar. “You said I should have charged you. I’m charging you now.”

  There is no human sound from downstairs, which means, I suppose, that the Heugels have been listening to our raised foreign voices. Roksana sits down beside me, rubbing softly now at the sides of my head. Her shoulders droop, and her little pink earrings swing back and forth like the clappers of two invisible bells.

  “What is Bastille Day, anyway?”

  “It’s like the Fourth of July.”
r />   “Beer and noise,” says my wife, the ayatollah of love, remembering last year in Texas with an unanswerable frown. This year, for us, there was no Fourth of July. I woke up on the fifth, feeling guilty and strange for having forgotten, and went alone to the Burger King on the Champs-Elysées.

  “I’m sorry, Brian Blumenthal,” she says at last. “I can’t do it.”

  Dinner, from discussion to drinks to preparation, from further drinks to further discussion to eating, from the time we passed around five kinds of cheese for dessert to the time we wearily threw down our napkins and drank a bit more, took five hours, and now, stunned by food, I’m drifting with Hervé and his family along the heights of the cliff town of Kerguen, where we’ve come to see the fireworks. Roksana has stayed behind. The last orange light of the day flows across the houses and across the faces of the Heugels, and in the coolness, the clouds of gnats and fireflies and the smell of the nearby farms grow denser. I’ve drunk too much brandy, understood too little talk, and, as night falls around us, I feel deaf and blind. Only my nose is alive, with mown fields, livestock, low tide.

  The townspeople are all out-of-doors, strolling from the place to the cliff’s edge and back, shaking hands, waiting for the display to begin; and the children and careful fathers fill the wait with match flares, loud firecracker pops and whistles and laughter, just as in the United States. But there’s that difference I always feel in French crowds, a lack of excitement that is not exactly boredom, but like an air of age, of deep habit, even among the children, as though these same five hundred people have been coming to stand and talk together forever and ever. A platform for dancing has been built, and it stands empty and brightly lighted at one end of the place, surrounded by loudspeakers and tricolors.

  We hear the first commanding bang from across the inlet and lift our eyes. The fireworks are fireworks; they spray and glitter and lightly move me like every display of fireworks I have seen in every July I remember, and lingering octopi of smoke float over our heads. During the applause and cries after the long last outburst, Hervé takes my arm and pulls me down along the cliffs, where we kick stones out into the water, and he surprises me by asking if there is anything wrong. I try to find the French for it; I tell him about all the useless gold in her downturned mouth.

  Hervé says, “Oh la la,” which I didn’t think Frenchmen ever really said; and in a language that is always wistful, it is the most wistful phrase that I have heard, and I start to cry.

  And then he says, “Why did you marry her?,” although he already knows the practical and bureaucratic answer to this question.

  We walk farther and stand high above the water on the last two feet of Kerguen. “She is not pretty. Elle a une drôle de tête. And she is so gloomy, it must be said. No, it’s a good thing you did, perhaps. I see that. But it’s an arrangement. No? And she understands. You are the one who makes the mess.”

  There are a few stray firecrackers, then a loud whomp, then laughter.

  “Sometimes,” he says, “it irritates me to see you made a fool.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “But then I remember that you’re an American.”

  They start the music down in the place, and before I can say anything, Hervé moves slowly back away from the edge, and looks down on the town. I go to stand beside him, and we watch the distant dancing to a French song that sounds like it’s from the fifties, a ballad about a girl named Aline. The kids hold each other and rock, barely, from foot to foot.

  “Ah, le slow,” says Hervé, tying the sleeves of his sweater more firmly around his neck. “This is an ancient song. It gives me nostalgia, this music.”

  “Me, too,” I say.

  “Do you dance with your wife?”

  “I could never get my arms all the way around her,” I say.

  We laugh. I sniffle and wipe my nose, and I’m on the point of asking him for advice, for the cool, sober shrug of French counsel that will brace me for the act of surrendering up my wife, when the wind shifts, and the reckless note of the saxophone is carried off to the east. In the sudden absence of music, it comes to me that Hervé has already told me what to do, and that I must follow, until the finish, the foolish policy of all my hopeless race.

  Smoke

  IT WAS A FRIGID May morning at the end of a freak cold snap that killed all the daffodils on the lawns of the churches of Pittsburgh. Matt Magee sat in the front seat of his old red Metropolitan, struggling with the French cuffs of his best shirt. This was a deliberate and calm struggle. He did not relish the prospect of Drinkwater’s funeral, and he was in no hurry to go in. He had already sat and fiddled and listened to the radio and rubbed lovingly at his left shoulder for ten minutes in the parking lot of St. Stephen’s, watching the other mourners and the media arrive. Magee was not all that young anymore, and it seemed to him that he had been to a lot of funerals.

  On the evening that Eli Drinkwater wrecked his Fleetwood out on Mt. Nebo Road, Magee had been sent down to Buffalo after losing his third consecutive start, in the second inning, when he got a fastball up to a good right-handed hitter with the bases loaded and nobody out. He’d walked two batters and hit a third on the elbow, and then he had thrown the bad pitch after shaking off Drinkwater’s sign for a slider, because he was so nervous about walking in a run.

  Eli Drinkwater had been a scholarly catcher, a redoubtable batsman, and a kind, affectionate person, but as Magee lost his stuff their friendship had deteriorated into the occasional beer at the Post Tavern and terse expressions of pity and shame. Little Coleman Drinkwater was Magee’s godson, but he hadn’t seen the boy in nearly four years. It was the necessity of encountering Drinkwater’s widow and son at the funeral, along with his erstwhile teammates, that kept Magee hunched over behind the wheel of his car in an empty corner of the church parking lot, rolling his cuffs and unrolling them, as the car filled with the varied exhalations of his body. For eleven and a half hours now, he’d been working on a quart of Teacher’s. He was not attempting to get roaring drunk, or to assuage his professional disgrace and the sorrow of Drinkwater’s death, but with care and a method to poison himself. It was not only from Drinkwater that he had drifted apart in recent years; he seemed to have simply drifted apart, like a puff of breath. He was five years past his best season, and his light was on the verge of winking out.

  At last Magee started to shiver in the cold. He fastened his pink tourmaline cuff links, turned off the radio, and climbed out of the car. He was nearly six feet five, and it always gave other people a good deal of pleasure to watch him unfold himself out of the tiny Metropolitan. According to the settlement of his divorce from his wife, Elaine, he had ended up with it, even though it had been hers before. Elaine had ended up with everything else. Thanks to a bad investment Magee had made in an ill-fated chain of baseball-themed, combination laundromat-and-crabhouses, this consisted of less than seventy-one thousand dollars, a king- size mobile home in Monroeville with a dish and a Jacuzzi bathtub, and a five-year-old Shar-Pei with colitis. Magee retrieved his sober charcoal suit jacket and navy tie from the minute rear bench of the Metropolitan and slowly knotted the necktie. The tie had white clocks on it, and the suit was flecked with a paler gray. He had lost his overcoat—a Hart Schaffner & Marx—on the flight down to Florida that spring, and had hoped he wouldn’t be needing one again. Just before Magee slammed the car door, he paused a moment to study his two small suitcases, side by side on the passenger seat, and allowed himself to imagine carrying them to any one of a thousand destinations other than Buffalo, New York. Then he checked his hair in the window, patted it in two places, and headed across the parking lot toward the handsome stone church.

  It was warm inside St. Stephen’s, and there was a wan smell of woolens and paper-whites and old furniture polish. Magee took up a place behind the last row of pews, over by the far wall, among some reporters he knew well enough to hope that they would not be embarrassed to see him. The arrangements for the funeral had been made without
fanfare, and although the church was filled from front to back, there were still not as many people as Magee had expected. The minister, a handsome old man in a gilded chasuble, murmured out over the scattered heads of Drinkwater’s family and teammates. There was to be a memorial ceremony later in the week which ought to pack them in. By then the newspaper eulogies would have worked their way past shock and fond anecdote and begun to put the numbers together, and people would see what they had lost. Drinkwater had led the league in home runs the past two years, and his on-base average over that period was .415. He had walked three times as often as he struck out, and had last year broken the season record for bases stolen by a catcher—not that this had been all that difficult. The lifetime won-lost percentage for games he had caught, which to Magee’s mind was the most important statistic of all, was close to .600; had he not been required to catch most of the fifty-odd games Magee had lost during that period, it would have been even better. Drinkwater had been cut down in his prime, all right. And that was what the numbers would show.

  “Too bad it couldn’t have been you instead of him,” said a gravelly female voice at his ear. He turned, startled at hearing his own thought echoed aloud. It was Beryl Zmuda, in a fur coat, and she was only kidding, in her gravelly way. Beryl was a sports columnist for the Erie morning paper, and she had known Magee ever since Magee had come up in that city, with the Cardinals organization. A laudatory article by Beryl, written after Magee’s first professional shutout, had gotten things rolling for him eleven years before. In that game Magee had struck out nine batters in a row and made the last out himself by bare-handing a line drive. No one was more disappointed by what had become of Magee’s career than Beryl Zmuda.

  “Hey, Ber,” said Magee in a whisper. “When do I get to go to your funeral?”

  “It was last year. You missed it.” She did not trouble to whisper. She wore a myrtle-green hat with a heron feather which he had seen many times before. “You look terrible. But as usual that’s a lovely suit.”