A Model World And Other Stories (11 page)

“Come with me,” she said, after a minute or two. She stood and led me down the hallway and into her bedroom. Her gait was too brisk to be seductive; she had some business to attend to. I had been in her bedroom many times before, had felt the thrill of seeing her white bedclothes and rows of empty shoes, but never with this acute a sense of being suffered, like a smelly old dog on a miserable night, just this once allowed to sleep indoors, on the still warm hearth—of being such a lucky dog.

On her bed there stood a large cardboard Seagram’s box, taped shut, and bearing, in Harry’s antic handwriting, the Magic Marketed label
TREASURE
.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

“I have no idea.” She looked at it as though it might go off any second. “He brought it over yesterday after work. Will you give it back to him for me?”

“He didn’t say what was in it?”

“I didn’t ask. I stopped asking questions about his junk a long time ago.”

“Because you didn’t love him anymore,” I said, taking hold of her chin and drawing her to my lips. At this mild demonstration of amorous force—an effect I have never been adept at pulling off—she put her knee into my stomach, firmly, and I fell gasping to the floor.

“I will always love Harry,” said Kim. “I will always, always love Harry.”

“I understand that,” I said.

“I’m sorry I kicked you.”

“Thanks,” I said, getting up. “I’m sorry, too. It was just all that kissing we did back there in the kitchen.”

“Sure it was.”

“Wait here,” I said. I sighed, as much to catch my breath as to register my impatience with her and with Harry’s goddam toys, then picked up the cardboard box and carried it out of the room.

“I know what to do with it,” I called over my shoulder.

“What?” she said, with a strange furrow in her voice. She followed me out of the door and laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. “What are you going to do with it? Vince?”

“You’ll see.”

The box was a good deal heavier than it looked, and I wondered, as I bore it out of the kitchen door and down the back steps, what might be in it, and why Harry had packed it all up in this way and left it sitting on Kim Trilby’s bed. The sun was still shining, there in the backyard amid the skinny poplars and the rusted-out Kelvinator with its door chained shut, and it was going to be a beautiful afternoon. I set the treasure down on the brittle grass and went into the cellar, where I had left the battered old spade I’d used to shovel the walk all that winter, ostensibly for the benefit of Kim’s upstairs landlady, Mrs. Colodny, who afterward would always feed me frozen kishkes from the KosherMart. The spade in question had got hidden, I saw, behind a stack of Harry’s boxes marked
BEEHIVE PANELS
and
G.I. JOE HEADS
in the far corner, but I got it out and went straight to work.

“Come on, Vince,” said Kim, calling to me from the back steps of her apartment. “That’s Mrs. Colodny’s dirt you’re messing up. Hey, Vince, come on. I get it, O.K.?”

I grinned at her and kept on. Digging is one of the most difficult of boring chores, if I have not transposed the adjectives, and it took me a good fifteen minutes of sweating and cursing, but when I finished I was wet and hot and exhilarated and the thing was three feet under the ground. Kim stayed where she was, hugging herself in that loose sweater and lighting a third cigarette with her second. I leaned on the spade, and for a moment we regarded one another across the lawn. I didn’t know what I had proved, exactly, and she probably didn’t know what had impressed her, but I had proved something, and she looked impressed. I let the spade fall, went to her, and rested my head against the doorjamb, breathing hard, and waited for Kim to throw herself, without regret, without apprehension, into my faithless embrace.

“What happens to it now?” she said, staring bitterly out into the sunny backyard at the black patch of earth I had uncovered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess that would depend on what it is.” Perhaps, I speculated guiltily, Harry had packed up every note I’d ever left him, and all of the baseball cards and
Playboys
I had bought him when his asthma got bad, and the cigar box of ancient Inuit teeth from my trip to Alaska that he’d said he needed, and the French edition of
Tropic of Cancer
labeled, thrillingly, “Not to be taken into the U.S.A.,” which I’d picked up for him at the Bryn Mawr-Vassar bookstore on Winthrop Street one day. There might have been some pretty swell stuff in that box; I realized that.

“You don’t know,” she said. “I like that.” She grinned, as though she could be satisfied with this response, at least for an hour or two.

Early that evening, in her bedroom, she awoke with a start. She was trembling, and she felt so frail that I was afraid I had harmed her somehow in our thrashings and busculation, and when she lit a cigarette it frightened me to hear the rattle in her breast as she exhaled—a terrible sound like the shivering of withered leaves on a branch.

“Put out that cigarette and come on back to bed,” I cried.

“All right,” she said, with an odd tenderness. As she slid down under the covers again, I leaned over, found my trousers in the heap of clothes on the floor, and reached into the left pocket. My fingers closed around the wire ring and held it fast. I was afraid that we had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds. We made a tent of the bedclothes with our knees, and sat within this intimate yurt, breathing one another’s exhalations and listening to everything around us. After a moment, as the air grew thick and sweet, I found her left hand, counted off the fingers, and then slipped on the ring. (It was a little too big, but it would come, eventually, to fit her.) I lifted it, with her fingers, to my mouth, and printed a kiss upon them. Our tent collapsed and the cold March evening, with its last gray skies, flooded in. I was panting with relief. I would figure out something to tell Harry, both about Kim and about the thing I had buried, and we would all just have to adjust.

“I have to get to work,” said Kim, twisting the ring around on her finger as though it chafed her, or as though to invoke whatever doubtful protection its loops of wire might provide. Then she turned to me, smiling, and said something hopeful about the baby she was going to bear, and I smiled back at her in the dimness, as though I had known about it all along. I did not admit—as I ought to have, God knows—that the bauble I had given her was really only a toy.

I dropped in on Harry not too long ago. These days he shares a four-room flat in East Liberty with two Japanese girls named Tomoko. We’re still friends, I guess—to the extent that we can make each other laugh—but it’s rare that we get together for longer than a few hours, and our relations have passed into that stage at which they draw their greatest animation from beer and reminiscence. Usually when I see him, at Chief’s or at the Electric Banana, there is a third person present—some friend of his whom I don’t get along with, or a woman I work with whom Harry dislikes—and our conversation is ungainly, unfamiliar, and touches not upon important matters.

Since the day Kim left us, we have never truly talked about her—I doubt if we will ever be able to talk seriously about Kim again—nor have we succeeded in forgetting her and putting all that behind us. For one thing, there are the pictures of little Raymond James Trilby that Kim sends both Harry and me from time to time. Then there is the odd evening when Harry and I run into each other at the Squirrel Cage, where, in a frame over the bar, right next to the Sign that reads
IT’S NICE TO BE IMPORTANT BUT IT’S MORE IMPORTANT TO BE NICE
, you will still find a carnival-midway caricature of Kim brandishing a Louisville Slugger. And another constant reminder, I guess you could say, is the large, whistling hole that was torn in the fabric of our lives by my marriage to and then divorce from Kim—a hole that opens onto frigid emptiness and the brilliant debris of stars. We were married for seven months in all, and toward the end Kim was—almost despite herself—eating her dinner more often with Harry than with me, and calling him constantly to bitch and commiserate. And then one day, a family of purple lint polar bears appeared on top of the clothes dryer, amid the flakes of Ivory Snow, and in the kitchen wastebasket we found a crumpled squadron of cigarette-foil fighter jets; and Kim, who had already made one or two mistakes, got out of Pittsburgh as quickly as she could.

When I stopped by Harry’s the other night, the two Tomokos were out for the evening with a visitor from Nagoya, and after Harry had shown me their neat beds, their pastel closets, the photos on their walls, and samples of their handwriting, and had generally filled me in on them and on his own xenophilia, we sat down in the living room, on opposite sides of a six-pack of Rolling Rock, and looked at each other. I am not seeing anyone at present and had few accounts to amuse him with in this regard.

“So it sounds like you’ve been very busy,” I said.

“Really busy,” he said. “How about you?”

“Busy.”

There ensued an awkward pause, during which I might easily have drained my beer, slapped my knee, and slipped off into the October evening—the sun had gone down distressingly early. I could not think of anything to say, not a single thing, and I saw how much I had come to depend on the presence of a third person at our meetings—on having someone there to fill up the awful gap in our facetious conversation. I looked again at Harry’s beard, which had of late grown to mermanish proportions, floating out from his face. Then I looked all around me. “It’s nice and warm in here,” I said at last.

Oh, my God,” he said, shivering in recollection. “I can’t believe we lived that way. Do you remember that one morning there was a, like, a skin of ice on the water in the toilet?”

“Oh, God, I remember,” I said.

“Ha.”

“Hmm.”

“Have you heard anything from Kim?” he said, standing, making for the refrigerator to cover the question. I said that I had not, nor had I any news of little Raymond James. I understood from Kim’s mother, whom I’d met in the Giant Eagle a couple of months before, that Kim was working out of Honolulu as a personal secretary on board a rich woman’s yacht, but someone else had told me she was working as a paralegal in Philadelphia. Harry said he had heard these reports already and disbelieved them both. He handed me another can of beer.

“Funny how that all ended up, huh?” he said.

“Funny.”

“I pretty much bailed on her, I guess. On the baby, too.”

We sipped our beers and wondered at one another, at what was left of all that and of those prodigal days.

“Not too funny, really,” Harry said.

“Kind of not too funny at all,” I said.

The telephone rang, and Harry went into the kitchen to answer it. He spoke in curt and secretive tones to some friend I would never meet, promising—ah, but this came as a blow to me—that he would be free to call him or her back in a little while. He returned with a mostly empty bottle of George Dickel and a long face.

“Maybe I’d better go, Harry,” I said.

Oh, no!” he said, looking so earnest that my doubts were almost erased. “I have things to show you.”

He took me down into the basement of the house, where there were a washer and dryer, three bicycles, a stranded toilet lying on its side, some camping gear—including two voided backpacks bearing Rising Suns and some of those horrific Hello Kitty patches—and a vast assortment of cardboard cartons, perhaps sixty or seventy in all, stacked in ragged stacks and labeled in Harry’s familiar, Mayan-looking handwriting:
PIPE TAMPERS, VELVETEEN, HEMP, SQUARE BUTTONS, GUM ARABIC, MR. POTATO HEAD HATS, ATOMIZER BULBS, PLASTIC SUSHI REPLICAS, FAN BELTS, LITTLE RED MONKEYS
. He showed me the plans for a new game called Car Crash, involving bottle caps, miniature Christmas light bulbs, tin-whistle sirens, and cans of some knockoff red Play-Doh from Malaysia, and then, crouching down on the floor and reaching in behind the carton of gum arabic, drew out a large square box.

“This is going to be my next toy,” he said. “I’m calling it Treasure.”

This time the word
TREASURE
was machine-stenciled on the box’s sides, in large letters, along with the name of a leading British toy manufacturer and the two words “Spanish Main,” in Old English type.

“They tried to market it over here, but it stiffed early,” he explained, opening the seal on the box with his thumbnail. “Levinsky made a killing in Baltimore on a misdelivered shipment of game pieces.”

I watched his face for any sign that he was toying with me, but there was none; he seemed to want only to show me, with a hint of desperation, what was inside the crate, as though the hardest part of it for him had been having no one in whom to confide the secrets of his fabulous vault. He lifted the flaps to reveal a king’s ransom, a cool million, in cardboard doubloons, painted gold and dimly glittering in the basement light, and I wondered if this was what had been in the box I’d buried in Mrs. Colodny’s yard, or if it had been some other treasure entirely. I knew little about the subject, but I hoped that once you had buried a treasure you did not have to keep reburying it again and again.

“It’s supposedly real gold dust in the paint,” Harry said. “That was the gimmick, I guess.”

He handed me a thick coin, and I examined it. It bore an illegible mock inscription and a crude cartoon of an emperor’s head, and as I fingered it some of its luster came away on my hands. Harry was looking right at me now with a fevered smile, and once more I didn’t know what to say, but there was no one else there, and I had to say something.

“We’re rich,” I said.

O
NE
S
ATURDAY IN THAT
last, interminable summer before his parents separated and the Washington Senators baseball team was expunged forever from the face of the earth, the Shapiros went to Nags Head, North Carolina, where Nathan, without planning to, perpetrated a great hoax. They drove down I-95, through the Commonwealth of Virginia, to a place called the Sandpiper—a ragged, charming oval of motel cottages painted white and green as the Atlantic, and managed by a kind, astonishingly fat old man named Colonel Larue, who smoked cherry cigars and would, if asked, play catch or keep-away. Outside his office, in the weedy gravel, stood an old red-and-radium-white Coke machine, which dispensed bottles from a vertical glass door that sighed when you opened it, and which reminded Nathan of the Automat his grandmother had taken him to once in New York City. The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiper—like that of the Automat—filled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.