A Model World. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ The question was halfway out of his mouth before he realized it, and although he appended a hasty ha-ha at the finish, his jaw was clenched and he must have looked as if he was about to slug her.

      “Whoa!” said Suzette, stepping neatly around him. “I’m getting out of here, Bobby. Good-bye.” She tucked her chin against her chest, dipped her head, and slipped out the door, as though ducking into a rainstorm.

      “Wait!” he said. “Suzette!”

      She turned toward him as he came out onto the patio, her shoulders squared, and held him at bay with her cup of espresso coffee.

      “I don’t have to reckon with you anymore, Bobby Lazar,” she said. “Colleen says I’ve already reckoned with you enough.” Colleen was Suzette’s therapist. They had seen her together for a while, and Lazar was both scornful and afraid of her and her lingoistic advice.

      “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be, um, yielding. I’ll yield. I promise. I just—I don’t know. How about let’s sit down?”

      He turned to the table where he’d left Albert, Dawn, and his cup of coffee, and discovered that his friends had stood up and were collecting their shopping bags, putting on their sweaters.

      “Are you going?” he said.

      “If you two are getting back together,” said Albert, “this whole place is going. It’s all over. It’s the Big One.”

      “Albert!” said Dawn.

      “You’re a sick man, Bob,” said Albert. He shook Lazar’s hand and grinned. “You’re sick, and you like sick women.”

      Lazar cursed him, kissed Dawn on both cheeks, and laughed a reckless laugh.

      “Is he drunk or something?” he heard Dawn say before they were out of earshot, and, indeed, as he returned to Suzette’s table the world seemed suddenly more stressful and gay, the sky more tinged at its edges with violet.

      “Is that Al’s new wife?” said Suzette. She waved to them as they headed down the street. “She’s pretty, but she needs to work on her thighs.”

      “I think Al’s been working on them,” he said.

      “Shush,” said Suzette.

      They sat back and looked at each other warily and with pleasure. The circumstances under which they parted had been so strained and unfriendly and terminal that to find themselves sitting, just like that, at a bright café over two cups of black coffee seemed as thrilling as if they were violating some powerful taboo. They had been warned, begged, and even ordered to stay away from each other by everyone, from their shrinks to their parents to the bench of Orange County itself; yet here they were, in plain view, smiling and smiling. A lot of things had been lacking in their relationship, but unfortunately mutual physical attraction was not one of them, and Lazar could feel that hoary old devouring serpent uncoiling deep in its Darwinian cave.

      “It’s nice to see you,” said Suzette.

      “You look pretty,” he said. “I like what you’ve done with your hair. You look like a Millais.”

      “Thank you,” she said, a little tonelessly; she was not quite ready to listen to all his prattle again. She pursed her lips and looked at him in a manner almost surgical, as though about to administer a precise blow with a very small ax. She said, “Song of the Thin Man was on last week.”

      “I know,” he said. He was impressed, and oddly touched. “That’s pretty daring of you to mention that. Considering.”

      She set down her coffee cup, firmly, and he caught the flicker of her right biceps. “You got more than I got,” she said. “You got six thousand dollars! I got five thousand four hundred and ninety-five. I don’t owe you anything.”

      “I only got four thousand, remember?” he said. He felt himself blushing. “That came out, well, in court—don’t you remember? I—well, I lied.”

      “That’s right,” she said slowly. She rolled her eyes and bit her lip, remembering. “You lied. Four thousand. They were worth twice that.”

      “A lot of them were missing hair or limbs,” he said.

      “You pig!” She gave her head a monosyllabic shake, and the golden curls rustled like a dress. Since she had at one time been known to call him a pig with delicacy and tenderness, this did not immediately alarm Lazar. “You sold my dolls,” she said, dreamily, though of course she knew this perfectly well, and had known it for quite some time. Only now, he could see, it was all coming back to her, the memory of the cruel things they had said, of the tired, leering faces of the lawyers, of the acerbic envoi of the county judge dismissing all their suits and countersuits, of the day they had met for the last time in the empty building that had been their restaurant, amid the bare fixtures, the exposed wires, the crumbs of plaster on the floor; of the rancor that from the first had been the constant flower of their love. “You sold their things, too,” she remembered. “All of their gowns and pumps and little swimwear.”

      “I was just trying to get back at you.”

      “For what? For making sure I at least got something out of all the time I wasted on you?”

      “Take it easy, Suze.”

      “And then to lie about how much you got for them? Four thousand dollars!”

      “At first my lawyers instructed me to lie about it,” he lied.

      “Kravitz! Di Martino! Those sleazy, lizardy, shystery old fat guys! Oh, you pigs!”

      Now she was on her feet, and everyone out on the patio had turned with great interest to regard them. He realized, or rather remembered, that he had strayed into dangerous territory here, that Suzette had a passion for making scenes in restaurants. This is how it was, said a voice within Lazar—a gloomy, condemnatory voice—this is what you’ve been missing. He saw the odd angle at which she was holding her cup of coffee, and he hoped against hope that she did not intend to splash his face with espresso. She was one of those women who like to hurl beverages.

      “Don’t tell me,” he said, despite himself, his voice coated with the most unctuous sarcasm, “you’re reckoning with me again.”

      You could see her consulting with herself about trajectories and wind shear and beverage velocity and other such technical considerations—collecting all the necessary data, and courage—and then she let fly. The cup sailed past Lazar’s head, and he just had time to begin a tolerant, superior smile, and to uncurl partially the middle finger of his right hand, before the cup bounced off the low wall beside him and ricocheted into his face.

      Suzette looked startled for a moment, registering this as one registers an ace in tennis or golf, and then laughed the happy laugh of a lucky shot. As the unmerciful people on the patio applauded—oh, but that made Lazar angry—Suzette turned on her heel and, wearing a maddening smile, strode balletically off the patio of the café, out into the middle of Ocean Avenue. Lazar scrambled up from his chair and went after her, cold coffee running in thin fingers down his cheeks. Neither of them bothered to look where they were going; they trusted, in those last couple of seconds before he caught her and kissed her hollow cheek, that they would not be met by some hurtling bus or other accident.

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