A Model World And Other Stories (8 page)

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.”

“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.

I
T 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.”

“Thanks.”

They shook hands, and then Magee bent down to kiss her. She sniffled and leaned forward to accept his kiss. Her pointed nose was still red from the cold, and he found her cheeks a little wet. The sable coat felt delightful and smelled both of warm fur and of Quelques Fleurs, and he had to force himself to let go of her. They had slept together for two months during the minor-league season of 1979, and Magee still held a fond regard for her. Her uncle had been a wartime pitcher for the St. Louis Browns; she knew baseball, especially pitchers, and she could write a nice line. Because of her name, she favored the color green, and under the coat her funeral suit was a worn gabardine the somber hue of winter seawater.

“What a shame it is,” he said, wiping at his own eyes. Magee was a sucker for weeping women, and lachrymose when he had been drinking.

“He had a great April,” said Beryl. Her Pittsburgh accent was flat and angular. She had fifteen years on Magee, and it was starting to tell. Her hair, blond as an ashwood bat, was entirely the product of technology now, and her face was looking papery and translucent and pinched at the corners. But she still had nice legs, with the pomaceous calves of a Pittsburgh girl. She had been raised on the steep staircases of Mt. Washington.

“He did,” said Magee. “Three-thirty-one with seven home runs and eighteen ribbies.”

“Hey, how about you?” She looked him up and down as though he had just gotten out of the hospital. “How’s the arm?”

He shrugged; the arm was fine. Magee had a problem with his mechanics. He had become balky and as wild as a loose fire hose. Although on the hill he felt the same as he had since the age of fourteen, jangling and irritable and clearheaded, some invisible element of his delivery had changed. The coaches felt that it was the fault of his right foot, which seemed to have grown half a shoe size in recent years. Whatever the cause, he could no longer find what Eli Drinkwater had called the wormhole. Drinkwater had picked up this term from Dr. Carl Sagan’s television program. A pitched ball passing through the wormhole disappeared for an instant and then reappeared somewhere else entirely, at once right on target and nowhere near where it ought to be, halfway across the galaxy, right on the edge of the black. Magee’s repeated, multiseasonal failure to find the wormhole had bred fear, and fear caution; he had undergone some horrendous shellings.

“It’s fine,” said Magee, rubbing at his left shoulder. “I’m going up to Buffalo this afternoon. Right after this.” He nodded in the general direction of the altar, before which sat the closed casket that held the body of Eli Drinkwater. It was a fancy black casket, whose size and finish and trim recalled those of the massive American automobiles its occupant had preferred.

The pastor finished his bit, and Gamble Wicklow, the Pittsburgh manager, rose to his feet and approached the pulpit. He was an eloquent speaker with a degree in law from Fordham—his sending down of Magee had been a masterpiece of regret and paternal solicitude—but he looked tired and elderly today. Magee could not make out what he was saying. Gamble had been sitting beside Roxille Drinkwater, in the foremost pew, and now there was a gap between Roxille and little Coleman. The sight of this gap was poignant, and Magee looked away.

“Will you look at that,” said Beryl. She went up on tiptoe to get a clearer view.

“I can’t,” said Magee.

“Look how Roxille’s looking at that casket.”