A Model World And Other Stories (18 page)

A light snapped on inside. Someone sat up in the bed—in Chaya’s bed—and this someone did not appear to be Chaya. She was too tall, and her hair was fuller and darker, and through the armhole of her sheer short nightgown he saw the startling contour of a woman’s heavy breast. He turned and began to hightail it out of the backyard, but the door opened almost immediately, and he turned sheepishly back.

“Is, uh, Chaya here?” he said, in a tone which he hoped would make him sound too stupid to be doing something illicit.

“Nathan? Nathan Shapiro?”

“Chaya?”

“What are you doing here? Where are your clothes?”

The light spilling out around her reduced her to a silhouette and he could not tell if she looked angry or merely puzzled. Her voice was a cracked whisper and sounded rather plaintive in the dark, as though she were also afraid of getting into some kind of trouble.

“I swam in your pool,” Nathan offered, uncertain if this would explain everything adequately.

“Well, you’d better get out of here. My dad is sleeping and he hasn’t been well.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. “Good-bye. You got so big, Chaya.” He was staring.

“Puberty,” she said. “Ever hear of it?” She stepped back into the light of her room and smiled a sort of frowny smile she had always had, and then Nathan felt that he recognized her.

“Chaya, I feel so weird,” he said. At the sight of her familiar, serious face he was all at once on the verge of tears.

“Well. Okay, come inside. You have to be quiet.”

“Okay.”

Nathan followed Chaya into her room, which had the drop ceiling and damp-carpet odor of a basement. On one paneled wall there was a print of
The Starry Night
and an El Al poster with a picture of the Old City of Jerusalem; on the other wall was a painting that Chaya herself must have made, a picture of a palm tree full of bright parrots under a double sun, and Nathan remembered the day he had spent on the Planet Jadis. Beside the painting was an old mounted deer’s head, with a split ear, wearing sunglasses and a purple beret. On the table beside her bed was a squat jug lamp with a green shade, a package of Kool cigarettes, and a book by Erica Jong that Nathan had twice been admonished against reading by his grandfather. The circle of light from the lamp seemed to fall almost entirely on the bed, and Nathan averted his eyes, so intimate was the sight of the exposed white sheets and the deep declivity in the pillow. The imprint of her sleeping head, the whole idea of Chaya asleep, struck him as terribly poignant, and he could not look. He heard the creak of the bedsprings and the rustle of sheets as she climbed back into bed.

“I mean you’re not ugly, or anything, Nathan,” said Chaya, “but put something on, okay?”

“I’m naked!” said Nathan. He looked down at himself, and knew that he was naked. And he saw, as through Chaya’s eyes, that in assuming some of its manly proportions and features, his penis had also begun to take on a concomitant forlorn and humorous aspect, sort of like the Jeep in Popeye cartoons; and he made an apron of his hands and forearms. This did nothing to conceal, however, the whiteness of his thighs, or the soft, sad divot of hair around his left—but not yet his right—nipple.

“There’s a towel on the chair.”

“I’d better go,” said Nathan. He turned and began to walk out the door, attempting now to cover his probably ridiculous-looking rear end.

“It’s okay, go ahead, put it on, Nathan,” said Chaya.

“They brought me,” he said, turning again and crab-walking over to the chair beside Chaya’s desk. “The guys. Tiger and Buster and Felix E.” Hurriedly he wrapped the towel around his waist and tucked in one end, in the fashion that his grandmother had always referred to, for some reason, as Turkish. It was a scratchy white towel that had been stolen, to judge from the illegible Hebrew lettering that was woven like a pattern into one side, from some hotel in Israel. The lopsided situation of his chest hair remained a keen embarrassment, and the towel was so skimpy that the knot at his hip just barely held.

“Are they out there?”

“Yeah. They sent me in. They said—”

“Your hair is all wet.” She folded her hands over her stomach, on the pleat of the bedclothes, and stared at him. She seemed all in all only mildly surprised to see Nathan, as though he were visiting her in a dream. Her face had grown wider, her cheekbones more pronounced, since the last time he had seen her, and with her tawny skin and her thick eyebrows and that big, wild hair Nathan thought she looked beautiful and a little scary. He sat down and hugged himself. His teeth were chattering.

“Okay, now I better go.” He stood up again.

“Wait,” said Chaya. She patted the sheets and indicated that he sit beside her. He came to sit gingerly at her feet, keeping hold with one hand of the tenuous Turkish knot.

“Nathan Shapiro,” she said, shaking her head.

“Chaya Feldman.”

“Mrs. Falutnick’s class.”

“Kvit chewink your gum in fronta da
r-r
adio,” said Nathan, repeating a favorite inscrutable admonishment of Mrs. Falutnick’s in an accent he had not mimicked for six or seven years. Chaya laughed, but Nathan only snorted once through his nose. It had been so long since the days of Mrs. Falutnick’s class! He saw himself sitting in a flecked plastic chair at the back of the droning classroom in the Huxley Interfaith Plexus, defacing with moustaches and monkey’s fur the grave photographs of Emma Lazarus and Abraham Cahan in his copy of
Adventures in American Jewry
, furtively folding all ten inches of a stick of grape Big Buddy into his mouth when Mrs. Falutnick turned her enormous back on the class, and at this he was unaccountably saddened, and he sighed, startling Chaya out of her dream.

“I heard your parents got a divorce,” she said. She looked down, and her long hair splashed her folded hands.

“Yeah,” said Nathan, hugging himself again. The shiver that this word produced in him never lasted more than a second or two.

“Why did they?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan said.

“You don’t?”

He thought about it for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I mean they told me, but I forget what they said.”

“It’s complicated,” Chaya offered, helpfully. “People change.”

“I think that was part of it,” Nathan said, but he didn’t believe that there was really any explanation at all.

“Does your dad still live around here?”

“He moved to Boston.”

“That’s cool,” said Chaya. She lifted the curtain of hair from her face and smiled another crooked smile. “I wish my dad would move to Boston.”

Nathan said automatically, “No, you don’t.” He had hitherto managed to forget about the fearsome doctor and he glanced over his shoulder. In the far corner of the room he noticed three large plastic suitcases and a guitar case, neatly lined up as for an imminent departure.

“Where are you going?” he said, gesturing toward the luggage.

“Jerusalem,” said Chaya. “Tomorrow. Today, I guess. Later this morning.”

“With your family? Or all alone?”

“All alone.”

“Are you ever coming back?”

“Of course I am, you,” she said. “My father thinks I’ve gotten—he just wants me to learn to be an Israeli.”

“Oh,” said Nathan. He was not certain what this entailed, but he suddenly pictured Chaya operating a crane on the bristling lip of a giant construction site in the desert, lowering a turbine generator or a sheaf of I-beams down into the void, the dust of the Negev blowing around her like a long scarf.

“Did they tell you I put out?” said Chaya. “Those guys?”

“Kind of,” said Nathan, taken aback, before it occurred to him that this was admitting he had come here for sex, when in fact he had come—why had he come? “It was more like a dare, I guess,” he said. “They sort of more or less dared me to come.”

“None of them’s ever sat on my bed the way you are,” said Chaya.

Nathan wondered for a moment exactly what she meant by this, and then, in the next moment, leaned toward her and kissed her lips. This was done only on an off chance and he did not expect that she would take such forceful hold of his body. Startled, without a clue of what he ought to do next, he put one hand on the nape of her neck, the other at the small of her back, and then he lay very still in her arms. He could feel the bones of her hips pressing against him, like a pair of fists, and his lips and somehow his breathing became entangled in her hair. The laundered smell of her bedclothes was overpowering and sweet.

“Are you a virgin, Nathan?” she said, her mouth very close to his.

He considered his reply much longer than he needed to, trying to phrase it as ambiguously as he could. “In a manner of speaking,” he said at last, blushing in self-congratulation at the urbanity of this reply.

Her grip upon him relaxed, and she drew back slowly and then fell back against her pillow, looking calm again. He had the feeling that she had been hoping for some reply totally other than the one he had given. Then Chaya sighed, in a bored, theatrical way that to Nathan’s ears sounded very grown up, and he was afraid, at last, that she really might have become a skeezer, that it really was possible to lose track of someone so completely that they turned into someone else without your knowing about it.

“Can you still draw eyeballs?” he said.

“Eyeballs?” she said, her face blank. “Sure, I can.”

“Chaya! Mara!” called Dr. Feldman from somewhere in the house. His voice resounded like an axe-blow. “That’s enough!”

They both started, and stared a moment at one another as children or as lovers caught.

“Can I tell you something, Nathan?” she said. “When I get to Israel I’m
not
coming back.”

“You have to come back,” he said, taking her hand.

“Chaya!” thundered Dr. Feldman from very far away. “Go to sleep.”

“I’ll write you,” said Chaya. “Give me your address.”

“Sixty-four twenty-three Les Adieux Circle. Is he going to come down here?”

“No,” she said. “He thinks you’re my little sister. I’ll never remember that address. Let me write it down.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Nathan, getting up. “You don’t need to write me a letter.”

“No, wait. Hold on.”

She climbed out of bed again, grinning, and went to a blue wooden desk, under the stairs that led up to the first floor of the house. Nathan watched the play of her nightgown across her little behind as she bent over to open a drawer, and then scrabbled around in it, looking for a pen. She found a sheet of pink stationery and began to scratch across it with a Smurf pencil.

“Chaya, I’d better go,” said Nathan. He headed for the door.

“Wait!” said Chaya. She was writing furiously now, in a pointed, ribbony script almost like cursive Hebrew, and he waited, one hand on the knob, for her to finish, and hoped that Dr. Feldman would not call out again. When she put down her pen she took a red, white, and blue airmail envelope from another drawer, folded the slip of pink paper in half, slid it into the envelope, and ran her tongue along the flap. Then she bent over the desk again and, brushing her hair from the face of the envelope, wrote out what Nathan knew even from a distance to be his name and address.

“There, I wrote you a letter from Jerusalem,” she said, turning toward him. “Don’t read it until tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. “Good-bye.” He hugged her awkwardly, afraid that he might get an erection, and then eased open the basement door. “Have fun in Jerusalem.”

“But I’m already there,” she said, continuing in this teasing and mysterious vein. She put a hand on each of his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. Nathan took the letter from her, a little uncertainly. Probably it was just a bunch of scribble, or an apology for not wanting to have sex with him.

“I know what you’re doing!” said Dr. Feldman, with that weird Yisraeli accent of his, and Nathan went out naked into the night. He was not quite so drunk anymore, and this time the trip around the house, past the swimming pool, did not seem especially fine or ominous. The dog next door to the Feldmans’ caught wind of Nathan and began to rail at him, and he ran the rest of the way, all the while trying to determine if Dr. Feldman and his Uzi were in pursuit. As he was running across the Feldmans’ yard and into the neighbors’, the white towel finally slipped from his waist and fell away, nearly tripping him; he left it to Chaya to explain how it got there, and went naked the rest of the way.

He came around to his side of the car and hesitated with a hand on the door. They were asleep, all three of them, Felix E. and Tiger slumped in opposite corners of the backseat, Buster stretched out across the front seat of the car. The radio played very softly and threw green light across Buster’s thighs. They were snoring with the lustiness of children, and Nathan felt a surge of pity for them and wished that they might just keep on sleeping. When he got into the car, he knew, his friends would want to know what, or rather how much, Chaya had given him; and when he showed them the letter, they would want to read what she had written. He was afraid that its contents might somehow embarrass him, and now he looked for somewhere to conceal it.

At first he considered retrieving the discarded towel, but he was afraid to go back, and anyway, if he wrapped the letter in the towel it would make a pretty suspicious bundle. Then he looked around at the lawn on which they were parked, to see if it held any place in which he could hide the letter, but there was only the silver expanse of lawn, an entire neighborhood of grass and flat moonlight. Under the front windows of the neighbors’ house stood one small row of bushes, and he tried poking the envelope deep into this, but you could see it from a mile away, reflecting the light of the moon like a shard of mirror glass, and he retrieved it and looked around again.

Just when he was about to give up and try to hide the letter somewhere in the Frenches’ car itself, under a mat, or even in the glove compartment, he spotted a bird feeder, about twenty feet away, hanging from the low branch of a young maple tree. It was shaped like a small transparent house, with a peaked plastic roof and glass walls, about half-filled with birdseed. Nathan unhooked it from its wire and turned it over, his hands shaking with fear and with the aptness of his plan. He pulled off the plastic base of the bird feeder and laid the letter within, burying it amid the smooth and rattling seeds. When he returned the little house to its hook, the letter was nearly invisible, and he trotted back, with a certain air of coolness, to the big yellow LTD.