A Model World. Michael Chabon

all right.” She stared through the posts of the balustrade at the great red sun going down over Santa Monica. There had been a lot of rain the past few days and the air was heartbreakingly clear. “You just feel like such a, I don’t know, a big stupid puppet or something, getting pulled around.”

      Ira edged a little closer to his cousin and she laid her head against his shoulder, and sighed. The contact of her body was so welcome and unsurprising that it frightened him, and he began to fidget with the vial in his pocket.

      “What’s that?” she said, at the faint rattle.

      He withdrew the little bottle and held it up to the dying light. There was no label of any kind on its side.

      “I sort of stole them from your friend Carmen.”

      Sheila managed an offhand smile.

      “Oh—how did that work out? I saw you dancing.”

      “She wasn’t for me,” said Ira. He unscrewed the cap and tipped the vial into his hand. There were only two pills left, small, pink, shaped like commas—two little pink teardrops. “Any idea what these are? Could they be beta-carotene?”

      Sheila shook her head and extended one hand, palm upward. At first Ira thought she wanted him to place one of the pills upon it, but she shook her head again; when he took her outstretched fingers in his she nodded.

      “Ira,” she said in the heaviest of voices, bringing her bridal mouth toward his. Just before he kissed her he closed his eyes, brought his own hand to his mouth, and swallowed, hard.

      “My darling,” he said.

       OCEAN AVENUE

      If you can still see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible. One day not too long ago, in Laguna Beach, California, an architect named Bobby Lazar went downtown to have a cup of coffee at the Café Zinc with his friend Albert Wong and Albert’s new wife, Dawn (who had, very sensibly, retained her maiden name). Albert and Dawn were still in that period of total astonishment that follows a wedding, grinning at each other like two people who have survived an air crash without a scratch, touching one another frequently, lucky to be alive. Lazar was not a cynical man and he wished them well, but he had also been lonely for a long time, and their happiness was making him a little sick. Albert had brought along a copy of Science, in which he had recently published some work on the String Theory, and it was as Lazar looked up from Al’s name and abbreviations in the journal’s table of contents that he saw Suzette, in her exercise clothes, coming toward the café from across the street, looking like she weighed about seventy-five pounds.

      She was always too thin, though at the time of their closest acquaintance he had thought he liked a woman with bony shoulders. She had a bony back, too, he suddenly remembered, like a marimba, as well as a pointed, bony nose and chin, and she was always—but always—on a diet, even though she had a naturally small appetite and danced aerobically or ran five miles every day. Her face looked hollowed and somehow mutated, as do the faces of most women who get too much exercise, but there was a sheen on her brow and a mad, aerobic glimmer in her eye. She’d permed her hair since he last saw her, and it flew out around her head in two square feet of golden Pre-Raphaelite rotini—the lily maid of Astolat on an endorphin high. A friend had once said she was the kind of woman who causes automobile accidents when she walks down the streets, and, as a matter of fact, as she stepped up onto the patio of the café, a man passing on his bicycle made the mistake of following her with his eyes for a moment and nearly rode into the open door of a parked car.

      “Isn’t that Suzette?” Al said. Albert was, as it happened, the only one of his friends after the judgment who refused to behave as though Suzette had never existed, and he was always asking after her in his pointed, physicistic manner, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Needless to say, Lazar did not like to be reminded. In the course of their affair, he knew, he had been terribly erratic, by turns tightfisted and profligate, glum and overeager, unsociable and socially aflutter, full of both flattery and glib invective—a shithead, in short—and, to his credit, he was afraid that he had treated Suzette very badly. It may have been this repressed consciousness, more than anything else, that led him to tell himself, when he first saw her again, that he did not love her anymore.

      “Uh-oh,” said Dawn, after she remembered who Suzette was.

      “I have nothing to be afraid of,” Lazar said. As she passed, he called out, “Suzette?” He felt curiously invulnerable to her still evident charms, and uttered her name with the lightness and faint derision of someone on a crowded airplane signaling to an attractive but slightly elderly stewardess. “Hey, Suze!”

      She was wearing a Walkman, however, with the earphones turned up very loud, and she floated past on a swell of Chaka Khan and Rufus.

      “Didn’t she hear you?” said Albert, looking surprised.

      “No, Dr. Five Useful Non-Implications of the String Theory, she did not,” Lazar said. “She was wearing earphones.”

      “I think she was ignoring you.” Albert turned to his bride and duly consulted her. “Didn’t she look like she heard him? Didn’t her face kind of blink?”

      “There she is, Bobby,” said Dawn, pointing toward the entrance of the café. As it was a beautiful December morning, they were sitting out on the patio, and Lazar had his back to the Zinc. “Waiting on line.”

      He felt that he did not actually desire to speak to her but that Albert and Dawn’s presence forced him into it somehow. A certain tyranny of in-touchness holds sway in that part of the world—a compulsion to behave always as though one is still in therapy but making real progress, and the rules of enlightened behavior seemed to dictate that he not sneak away from the table with his head under a newspaper—as he might have done if alone—and go home to watch the Weather Channel or Home Shopping Network for three hours with a twelve-pack of Mexican beer and the phone off the hook. He turned around in his chair and looked at Suzette more closely. She had on one of those glittering, opalescent Intergalactic Amazon leotard-and-tights combinations that seem to be made of cavorite or adamantium and do not so much cling to a woman’s body as seal her off from gamma rays and lethal stardust. Lazar pronounced her name again, more loudly, calling out across the sunny patio. She looked even thinner from behind.

      “Oh, Bobby,” she said, removing the headphones but keeping her place in the coffee line.

      “Hello, Suze,” he said. They nodded pleasantly to one another, and that might have been it right there. After a second or two she dipped her head semiapologetically, smiled an irritated smile, and put the earphones—“earbuds,” he recalled, was the nauseous term—back into her ears.

      “She looks great,” Lazar said magnanimously to Albert and Dawn, keeping his eyes on Suzette.

      “She looks so thin, so drawn,” said Dawn, who frankly could have stood to drop about fifteen pounds.

      “She looks fine to me,” said Al. “I’d say she looks better than ever.”

      “I know you would,” Lazar snapped. “You’d say it just to bug me.”

      He was a little irritated himself now. The memory of their last few days together had returned to him, despite all his heroic efforts over the past months to repress it utterly. He thought of the weekend following that bad review of their restaurant in the Times (they’d had a Balearic restaurant called Ibiza in San Clemente)—a review in which the critic had singled out his distressed-stucco interior and Suzette’s Majorcan paella, in particular, for censure. Since these were precisely the two points around which, in the course of opening the restaurant, they had constructed their most idiotic and horrible arguments, the unfavorable notice hit their already shaky relationship like a dumdum bullet, and Suzette went a little nuts. She didn’t show up at home or at Ibiza all the next day—so that poor hypersensitive little José had to do