A Model World And Other Stories (16 page)

Of the four stings that Nathan received, three were on his thigh and one was on his shoulder. Eleanor took him into the house, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, where blue laundry lay folded on the big bed and where Eleanor’s gold trophies, like so many miniature Mormon temples, sat shining dimly in their cabinet. Then she led him into the bathroom, lowered the lid onto the toilet, and sat him down.

“Roll up your cutoffs, Nathan,” she said. She found a box of baking soda and mixed a little with some tap water in the plastic bathroom cup. Nathan pulled upward on the frazzled leg of his shorts and tried to keep from crying. She knelt beside him to daub his pale, fat, blistered thigh. Nathan flinched, but the paste was cool, and he was overcome with gratitude. He didn’t know what to do, and so he stared at the parting of her hair, at Eleanor’s miraculous scalp, white and fine as polished wood.

“I guess Major Ray was right,” said Eleanor. “It wasn’t such a hot idea.” She cackled nervously, and it was a relief to Nathan to see that she also felt that something weird was happening—such a relief that he began to cry, although he hated crying more than anything else in the world.

“Oh, Jesus, does it hurt, honey?” Eleanor said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”

This expression of concern made Nathan inordinately happy, and he tried to tell her it didn’t hurt a bit, but he was too miserable to speak. He was frightened by the zeal of his crying, but it felt too good to stop. So he covered his face and hee-hawed like a child.

Eleanor stopped ministering to his wasp stings and sat back on her heels, regarding Nathan. A different kind of concern entered her face, and all at once she looked very sad. “What’s the matter, Nathan?” she said.

But Nathan told no one, not even Edward, to whom he generally confided all his ludicrous amours. The two boys had supported and amused one another through a long series of fanciful loves, but until now the objects of their affections had always been unattainable, unlikely, and laughable: a prom queen, a postwoman, the earth-sciences teacher Miss Patocki, or the disturbing Sabina McFay, Edward’s nineteen-year-old neighbor, who was half Vietnamese and rode a motorcycle. Not so Eleanor Parnell; she was unattainable and farfetched, but she was not at all laughable, and Nathan said nothing to Edward about her.

When he learned, from his mother, that he had been invited to the Parnells’ Halloween party, he was flattered and struck with fear, and during the abject, optimistic weeks that followed he resolved to declare his feelings to Eleanor Parnell once and for all at this party. For ten days his head was filled with whispered, intricate repartee.

At dusk on Halloween, just as the youngest and most carefully chaperoned of the demons and nurses and mice were beginning to make their rounds, Nathan and Edward were standing in the living room of the Shapiros’ house, drawing pictures with colored pencils onto Mrs. Shapiro’s arms, back, and shoulders. Nathan’s mother sat on a horsehide ottoman, in blue fishnet tights, blue high-heeled shoes, and a strapless Popsicle-blue bathing suit, laughing and complaining that the boys were pressing too hard as they drew anchors, hearts, thunderbolts, and snakes across her skin. The boys dipped the tips of the pencils into a jar of water, which made the colors run rich. As the drawings began to predominate over unmarked patches of skin, Nathan put his crimson pencil down and stepped back, as if to admire their handiwork.

“I think that’s enough tattoos, Mom,” he said.

“Is that so?” said his mother.

“Personally,” said Edward, inspecting her, “I think a big, you know, triumphant eagle, with a javelin in its claw, right here under your neck, would look really cool, Mrs. Shapiro. Rose.”

“That sounds fine, Edward,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

Nathan looked at his friend, who began to paint a gray, screaming eagle. Nothing about his voice or studious little face indicated that he felt anything but the enthusiasm of art. As a matter of fact, his drawings were much better than Nathan’s—bold, well drafted, easily recognizable; the snakes Nathan had drawn looked kind of like sewing needles, or flattened teaspoons.

“If you think about it,” said Edward, in the careful but dazed way he had of propounding his many insights, “the symbol of our country is a really warlike symbol.”

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “Isn’t that interesting?”

When her costume was finally complete, and Nathan regarded her in all her fiery, gay motley, his heart sank, and he was seized with doubts about the costume he’d decided on. After much indecision and agonized debate with Edward, whose father was an avant-garde artist, Nathan had decided upon a
conceptual
Halloween costume. He had made a coat hanger into a wire ring that sat like a diadem on his brow, bent the end of it so that it would stand up over the back of his head, then made a small loop into which he could screw a light bulb. When he wore this contraption the light bulb seemed to hang suspended a few inches above him, and the wire was, in a dim room, practically invisible. He was going to the Parnells’ Halloween party, in Edward’s excited formulation, as a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume.

The whole notion now struck Nathan as childish, and anemic, and it bothered him that the light bulb would never actually be lit up, and would just bob there, gray and dull, atop his head, as though he were really going to Eleanor’s party as a guy in the process of having a
bad
idea for a costume. The truth was that Nathan felt so keenly how plain, how squat and clumsy he had become—his belly had begun to strain against the ribbed elastic of his new gym shorts, and his mother had received his last school pictures with a fond, motherly, devastating sigh—that he regretted having passed up the opportunity of concealing himself, if only for one night, in the raiment of a robot or a king.

“Cool,” said Edward, standing up straight and blowing gently on the eagle tattoo.

Mrs. Shapiro rose from the Ottoman, went to the chrome mirror that had been one of his parents’ last joint purchases, and seemed greatly pleased by the apparition that she saw there. She hadn’t wanted them to illustrate her face, and now it rose pale and almost shockingly bare from her shoulders. “You did a great job,” she said. “I like the hula girl, Edward,” she added, looking down at her right biceps.

“Make a muscle,” he said. He went to the mirror and took hold of her right arm and wrist. Nathan followed.

“Flex your arm,” said Edward.

Mrs. Shapiro flexed her arm. Nathan leaned over his friend’s shoulder to watch the hula girl do a rudimentary bump and grind. He looked around for something to stand on, to get a better view, and his glance fell upon the matching chrome wastebasket, which stood beside the mirror, but when he balanced himself on its edge and peered down at the dancing tattoo the wastebasket immediately gave way. Nathan’s eyeglasses, which for weeks he’d been meaning to tighten, slipped from his face, and when he fell he landed on them with a gruesome crunch.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “Not again.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” said Nathan.

“Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?”

Edward, laughing, held out his hand to Nathan to pull him to his feet.

“You’re insane, Dr. Lester,” he said.

“You’re deranged, Madame LaFarge,” said Nathan, automatically. He looked at his friend and his tattooed mother gazing down upon him with a kind of mild, perfunctory concern. They turned to one another and laughed. A barrage of miniature-demon knocks rang out against the front door of the house. Nathan passed a hand before his eyes, blinked, and shook his head.

“I can see,” he said flatly.

After Edward went home, he and his mother sat down at the kitchen table that smelled of 409 and called Ricky in Boston, to find out how his trick-or-treating had gone and to tell him that Nathan could see without his glasses. This was a development that ophthalmologists had been calling for since Nathan was five and had donned his first little owlish pair of horn-rims. Though its coming to pass was certainly something of a shock, it did not surprise him, especially now, when the behavior of his body was so continually shocking, and when so many of the ancient fixtures of his life—his slight form, his smooth face, his father and brother—were vanishing one by one.

Anne, his stepmother, answered the phone but went immediately to find Ricky, as she always did, and it occurred to Nathan for the first time that he was never particularly kind to her. He looked at the receiver, wishing he could run after her, and waited for Ricky to pick up his extension. His brother had just come in from trick-or-treating and was almost delirious with sated greed.

“Almond Roca, Nate!” he exulted. “Popcorn balls that are orange!”

“You can’t eat the ones that aren’t wrapped. Throw away the popcorn balls.”

“Why?”

“Razor blades,” said Nathan. He missed his brother so badly that it made him nervous to speak to Ricky on the phone. They talked to each other three times a week, but they could never generate any real silliness, and Nathan, in spite of himself, was always irritable and mocking, or stern.

“Yeah,” Ricky said excitedly. “Halloween razor blades. Oh, my God, Nate, someone gave me raisin bread!
Raisin bread
, Nate!”

“I don’t believe it,” said Nathan. “Ricky, guess what?”

“I bet it was Mrs. Gilette. Hey, what are you going to be? Galactus?”

Ricky had spent his entire life waiting for Nathan to dress as Galactus, the World Eater, for Halloween, which was something Nathan a long time ago had said he was going to do, not dreaming that Ricky would never forget it, and would even come to regard it as the greatest and most magical of all the magical promises that his older brother had ever broken. In this instance Nathan felt more guilty than usual about having to tell Ricky the sorry truth, and he swiveled around in his chair so that his mother wouldn’t be able to see his face.

“I’m going as a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume,” he mumbled.

“Huh?”

“You wouldn’t understand it.”

“I don’t understand it because it’s dumb,” said Ricky. “I can tell it must be dumb.”

“Go to hell,” said Nathan.

“Nathan,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

“Go to hell
you
,” said Ricky.

“Guess what? I can see without my glasses.” Nathan spun around to face his mother, and she looked at him with mild amazement.

“You mean you never have to wear them ever again?” said Ricky. Absently he added, “Now you won’t be so ugly.”

This thought had not occurred to Nathan. He heard the sound of a plastic bag full of candy bars being rummaged around in and felt that he had exhausted Ricky’s attention span, just when he most needed to speak to him. This incompleteness was why Nathan had first come to hate talking on the telephone to his father, in the days of his parents’ trial separation. Ricky tore open a wrapper and began to chew. Bit-O-Honey, from the sound of it. Nathan pictured his brother surrounded by candy, lying in his fancy bedroom in Boston on his bed shaped like a racing car. It was a big bedroom, with a large, empty alcove at the back, which Ricky claimed to be afraid of entering. Nathan imagined the Boston Halloween night through the windows in the dark alcove as Ricky would see it from his speeding bed. “The big brother is always uglier,” Ricky said.

“I know you’re only teasing me,” said Nathan. As he had several times before, he felt very far away from his brother just then, as he felt far from Anne and his father and mother and everyone he knew, isolated in his love and anxiety, but for the first time the void around him seemed to offer a new perspective, as though he were standing safely on top of a house in the midst of a great flood. He had no desire to return Ricky’s insults. He looked at Mrs. Shapiro, who, although she didn’t know what Ricky had said, nodded her head. “I know I’m not ugly,” said Nathan.

“No,” said the sleepy little boy in Boston, flowing off away from Nathan on his bed of sweets. “You have nice shoulders.”

It was as Nathan walked with his mother through the woods to the Parnells’ house that he began to feel distinctly altered. These trees were going to be cut down soon, to make way for three new houses, and as he strode, barefaced, across the little wood, there seemed a particular clarity to the starlit Halloween air, a sharpness that hitherto he had only smelled, and the sight of the world struck him with the austere flavor of smoke and dead leaves. Up the street the beam of a child’s flashlight tumbled to the ground, igniting the red oak leaves that littered the Parnells’ lawn, and then flew upward, illuminating the bare tops of previously invisible trees.

“I can’t believe it,” said Nathan. “I must be cured.”

“You look very nice without your glasses,” said his mother. “You look like your father.”

“Dad wears glasses.”

“He didn’t always,” she said. She shivered in her coat, which was made from rabbits and had been the gift of Humberto, the Brazilian professional soccer player she had dated last winter.

“Do you think my concept is stupid, Mom?”

“I just don’t really understand it, Nathan,” said his mother. “I never really understand your jokes. I’m sure lots of people will think it’s hilarious.”

They came to the short incline of yellow lawn which rose to the cedar planks of the Parnells’ front porch, and which was transected by a crooked line of stepping-stones that led to the shallow goldfish pond beside the front door. Major Ray had been stationed for five years in Yokohama during the sixties, and the Parnells had returned with a houseful of Japanese things. The carved pumpkin shared the porch with a stone lamp shaped like a pointed Japanese house, and as Nathan and his mother stepped up to the front door—you could already hear them inside, dozens of laughing adults—it struck him that a jack-o’-lantern was truly a lantern. His last thought before Eleanor threw open the door was an idea for a science-fiction novel in which the denizens of a distant world furnished their lives with various giant vegetables, carving out their beds, dressing in long, curly peels, illuminating their homes with the light of pumpkins. Then the door flew open. In all his anxiety over his own wardrobe, in all the editing and revision of the tortured sentence he intended that night jauntily to pronounce to Eleanor, he had forgotten to wonder about what she might wear, and he found himself taken completely by surprise.