A Model World And Other Stories (14 page)

“I know that,” said Dr. Shapiro.

“You were a good father, Dad,” said Nathan, clutching tight the torn little ball of yellow paper. “You were the best father in the world.”

“Thanks,” said Dr. Shapiro, but he said it abstractedly, a little too fast, as though it were only a reply, as though his mind were on other more difficult, more wondrous things.

N
ATHAN JAMMED HIS SNEAKERS
against the back of his father’s seat and listened, eager and miserable, to the opening notes of the song on the car radio. He had no idea. His father had been quizzing him for as long as he could remember, and as a result Nathan knew the presidents of the United States (in order), the capitals of all fifty states, the provinces of Canada and the nations of Europe and
their
capitals (including Vaduz), the great inventions and their inventors, the major rivers of the world in order of length, famous black and Jewish Americans and their achievements, gods and heroes of ancient Greece, planets and moons of the solar system, as well as two dozen common phobias, including pantophobia, the fear of everything.

Unfortunately, the topic of the day was rock-and-roll music, and the quiz was for the benefit of Anne, Dr. Shapiro’s girlfriend, the play lady from the children’s hospital where Nathan’s father was the psychiatrist. They were on their way to Annapolis (the capital of Maryland), to stay in a motel, even though Annapolis was only half an hour from Ellicott City, where Nathan, his brother, and their mother lived. It had been raining lightly all morning, the air was chilly for May, and Nathan felt a kind of dread of this false vacation. Dr. Shapiro turned up the volume on the radio and glanced over his shoulder at Nathan, then looked at Anne to make sure that she was paying attention.

“O.K.,” said Dr. Shapiro, slowly rolling one hand in the air, as though guiding Nathan into a tight parking space. “Who is this?”

“David Bowie,” said Ricky, Nathan’s little brother. He arched forward to pat Anne on the top of her head, which was just visible to the boys in the backseat. Ricky—seven, affectionate, ill-tempered, and wild—had seen David Bowie once on television, dressed like a Navajo from Jupiter, and had been greatly impressed.

“Quiet, Ricky,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Nathan?”

Since his parents’ divorce, a year and a half ago, Nathan had become interested in rock-and-roll, but aside from songs by the Beatles, which he knew fairly well, and a few by the Rolling Stones, he wasn’t much good at this topic. For a moment, running the names of random bands and singers through his mind, Nathan panicked, and his knees began to ache from the pressure he was exerting against his father’s seat, until it occurred to him that this was a new kind of quiz. This time his father didn’t know the correct answer any more than he did. He could give any name at all.

“Eric Clapton,” said Nathan in an offhand way, watching the back of his father’s head, then, in a burst of fresh alarm, looking to see if Anne was going to call his bluff. She was younger than his father, and he remembered with a start her having told him that the Buffalo Springfield had played at her homecoming in college.

“Eric Clapton?” said his father. “O.K.! That’s amazing, isn’t it, Anne?” She smiled. “Couldn’t have been more than a dozen bars before he got it.”

“That’s great,” said Anne, turning to smile at Nathan. Anne was very nice, Nathan reminded himself, and then felt guilty because he had to remind himself. He’d always liked Anne—had loved her, in fact, when she was just the play lady at his father’s work. He and Ricky had spent entire days down in her playroom, gluing together Popsicle sticks and weaving multicolored pot holders that they brought home to their mother, and Anne would buy them Chinese lunches and comic books. But ever since she was his father’s girlfriend, Nathan had come to suspect all of her former friendliness. He shunned her hugs and sat apart from her.

“It’s David Bowie,” said Ricky. “Ask me, Dad. Ask me.”

“David Bowie,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Get out of here.”

They passed a sign for Annapolis.

“Chuck lives in Annapolis,” said Ricky. “Mom says.”

“Who’s Chuck?” said their father.

Without knowing exactly why, Nathan hit Ricky on the arm, hard—much harder than he had intended to, really—and Ricky began to cry, then stopped and looked at Nathan, his forehead wrinkled and red.

“Um—a doo-doo head,” said Ricky, valiantly turning silly. “Chuck, buck, duck, muck, luck.”

Then the song was over, and Nathan’s heart sank as he realized that the disk jockey in just a moment would identify the singer, and as Ricky arrived, with a gasp, at the end of his incantation. “Fuck,” he whispered behind his hand. He stared blankly at Nathan for an instant, then smiled in horror and delight, his eyes still full of tears. “We’re there,” said Anne, and switched off the radio.

Nathan’s mother had had four boyfriends since the divorce, and, until Chuck, Nathan had liked them all. The first three boyfriends—all of them—wore beards and glasses, like Nathan’s father, and drove calm, square foreign cars. They’d tried very hard to make friends with Nathan, and so he had tried, too; there were ballgames and bats’ jaws and discussions of science. Each time, Nathan felt sad when the boyfriend stopped calling and didn’t come to dinner anymore, though not as sad as his mother. Of the many new spectacles the divorce had created—his mother, in a suit, happily leaving for work in the morning, Nathan fixing their dinner with the radio blaring—the most disturbing was that of their mother crying, which she hadn’t done even at the death of their grandfather but which now they had seen ten times at least.

And now Chuck, a small-plane pilot, was pushing their mother to even greater extremes of emotion. He had an Italian car, with only two seats. On Friday nights when Chuck broke dates, their mother sank into jealous despair, and spent the evening devouring an entire novel or talked on the phone to her friends for hours. She would indulge the boys with popcorn and board games and gin rummy, half-sadly smiling throughout. Very late one evening the past winter, she’d come downstairs in her boots, drawn on her coat, and gone out, returning in tears an hour later. The next morning Nathan found her sitting on the stairs, in her big bathrobe, the rolled Sunday paper lying in her lap. He reached down and took the paper from her and opened it, laughing, as if she were only absent-minded.

“Mom,” he said. “Where did you go last night?”

She told him, crying; the story came out in little bursts as she held her breath between each sob. And over a breakfast at which Nathan drank coffee, and they heard Ricky’s cartoons come on upstairs, as she confided to him other, less desperate tales of checking up on Chuck, he had felt himself, almost physically, growing older.

He felt it even now, with his father. Dr. Shapiro borrowed a dollar’s worth of quarters from Nathan, to feed the parking meter, and Nathan trembled as, for the first time, he made his father a loan. They went into a bookstore, where they ridiculed the romance novels and took turns looking through a history of chess. Dr. Shapiro found a guidebook to the restaurants of Maryland and, having narrowed down the choices to three, allowed Nathan to decide where they would eat lunch. After studying the encapsulated reviews, Nathan settled finally on a waterfront seafood restaurant called the Bonhomme Richard, which specialized in soft-shell crabs, his father’s favorite food. They left the bookstore and headed toward the bay, Anne and Ricky following along behind. The morning clouds had at last begun to scatter, the sun shone; they walked into the lobby of the Bonhomme Richard, and, in the few short moments before they ran into Chuck and some lady, Nathan saw very keenly how soon would come the day when he would be able to walk into a seafood restaurant and anticipate, like a dessert, a pale-brown cocktail. Then he saw Chuck in the lounge, helping a lady with red hair to put on her raincoat.

“It’s like mine,” said Ricky, just before he noticed Chuck. “Hey!”

It was. The lady wore a rubber slicker, the color of a taxicab, with a detachable hood. Chuck held out her empty left sleeve and she smiled at Ricky, as strangers often did. Nathan grabbed his little brother’s arm, as gently as he could bear, and turned him toward their father and Anne, who were already disappearing into the dining room. As the boys followed after, Nathan struggled—like Orpheus and Lot’s wife—against the urge to turn and look back at the handsome, mysterious airplane pilot and the lady in the child’s raincoat. Finally he gave in and was irritated to see that Ricky, too, had turned to look.

“Don’t look,” said Nathan.

“You did,” said Ricky.

They watched Chuck set an extra dollar in the little tray of money, then take the lady’s arm; she looked up brightly into Chuck’s face, and he blew a puff of air, ruffling her red bangs, and then they came at the boys, laughing. They were a happy couple. It was sad. Nathan thought of a time, long ago in Richmond, Virginia, when his parents had stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking into each other’s faces and at little Nathan dancing naked on his bed, their arms around each other’s waists. Nathan’s father had called his mother Rosie, the only time ever, and Nathan had stopped dancing. “Rosie!” he had cried.

“Here’s Dad,” said Ricky.

Their father approached, his hands outspread, one eyebrow lifted in mock annoyance.

“We’re coming,” said Nathan. “Here we come.”

“What did you see?” said Dr. Shapiro.

They sat down and Nathan opened his menu. At first he was too upset to do anything but stare at the descriptions of all the different dishes. Colored drawings of fish swam around the menu’s border—haddock, cod, flat flounder and sole, and the ugly fish that wasn’t a dolphin but was called a dolphin. He felt—as though suddenly and irrevocably he were his mother’s ambassador to Annapolis and to the whole world—as if he were going to cry.

“Look,” said Ricky. “Admirals.”

They’d been seated in a part of the restaurant that stretched out over the water, at a table beside a window. Across the room, along another row of windows, was the bar, just now entirely taken up by naval officers in white uniforms, nearly two dozen, a flock of admirals. Their upside-down hats littered the top of the bar; the lunchtime sun fell across their square shoulders and lit up their dazzling coats. All the men looked handsome and happy, their cocktails flashed in their hands, and Nathan cherished the elegant lime in a gin-and-tonic.

“What are you having, Nathan?” said his father.

“How much can it cost?” he asked, since the only things that sounded good were expensive. Nathan preferred, as a rule, to order the dishes with the most ingredients and with the most adjectives applied to them. His father tossed his head and waved away Nathan’s question.

“You can have whatever you want,” he said. It was what he always said, and it was one of the four thousand things for which Nathan adored him.

The waiter came and did his waiter’s tricks for Ricky, snapping out a napkin, mixing Ricky’s chocolate milk right at the table, pouring milk into the glass at first from just above it, then from a great height, then dipping and rising again, as though the milk were a white rubber band. Dr. Shapiro ordered soft-shell crabs, then rose from the table and went to find a pay telephone.

This was another recent and disturbing phenomenon. Nathan knew that his father liked to listen to the boys’ orders, to express his ceremonial approval or surprise. But in the past couple of months Dr. Shapiro had begun to disappear suddenly—to go off looking for pay phones in restaurants and department stores, preoccupied by “keeping in touch” with his patients’ parents, with the hospital, with his Pakistani colleagues. He telephoned so regularly and resignedly that Nathan came to associate these dutiful calls with the twice-weekly ones the boys got from him, which Ricky seemed to enjoy but which Nathan (and, he suspected, his father) found both difficult and somehow unjust.

Anne and Nathan looked at each other and shared a sarcastic smile, as though Dr. Shapiro’s new telephone mania were only ridiculous. Then the sarcasm went out of Anne’s face. She looked after her boyfriend with a furrowed brow, then turned to Nathan and tried to smile again. It was as though, for a moment, she had laid down her mask and told him that it was O.K. to worry, that, indeed, something abnormal was happening around them. In that moment Nathan felt that he loved her. But then she smiled.

Ricky, ordering the fried jumbo shrimps (he was in the throes of a mad shrimp phase), knocked over the entire glass of chocolate milk. His apologies were so irritable and sincere that a few of the shining admirals across the room looked over and laughed, grandly; the glass, after all, had not broken. Ricky smiled and calmed down. When their father came back, pulling at his beard, Ricky leaned toward him.

“Dad, the admirals laughed at me,” he said. “All the way from across the room.”

Anne took Nathan’s hand and whispered into his ear.

“It wasn’t Eric Clapton,” she told him, blushing.

“Oh,” said Nathan, watching his father look out emptily and awestruck over the platinum water, as though a great, gay ocean liner were passing by.

“It was the Rolling Stones,” she said. “It was ‘We Love You.’”

As they left the restaurant, it began to sprinkle again, and they hurried through the streets from shop to shop. One, full of old tables and chairs, stood beside another that was full of artistic toys—painted clowns, dancers on cords, wooden trains in the shapes of ducks and ducklings. So they split up. Lately Dr. Shapiro and Anne had become interested in old furniture, and although Nathan had tried for a little while to share their interest, as an adult would—to examine the splinters of wear in a wicker seat, to see how tables could be important—it was not easy to do, so when Ricky failed to spot the toyshop immediately, Nathan pointed it out to him. He waited for Ricky’s shouts of discovery, then feigned acquiescence when his father ordered him to escort his brother into the shop.

They quickly discovered that most of the artistic toys were in the windows, and that it was really just an ordinary toy store, with fine, ordinary toys. Ricky was overjoyed. He shot at Nathan with a ray gun that threw sparks and whined, put on a small diving mask and hooted through the snorkel, got all the battery-powered toys to crawl and beep across the table on which they were displayed, exclaiming happily when they crashed into each other. Whenever Nathan went into toy stores these days, a confusion of feelings came over him, and now he stood, hands in pockets, beside a glass case of miniature knights, soldiers, and farm animals, absently watching his brother cause toy disaster.