A Model World And Other Stories

The Little Knife

ONE SATURDAY IN THAT last, interminable summer before his parents separated and the Washington Senators baseball team was expunged forever from the face of the earth, the Shapiros went to Nags Head, North Carolina, where Nathan, without planning to, perpetrated a great hoax. They drove down I-95, through the Commonwealth of Virginia, to a place called the Sandpiper — a ragged, charming oval of motel cottages painted white and green as the Atlantic, and managed by a kind, astonishingly fat old man named Colonel Larue, who smoked cherry cigars and would, if asked, play catch or keep-away. Outside his office, in the weedy gravel, stood an old red-and-radium-white Coke machine, which dispensed bottles from a vertical glass door that sighed when you opened it, and which reminded Nathan of the Automat his grandmother had taken him to once in New York City. The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiper — like that of the Automat — filled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.

There were children in every cottage — with all manner of floats, pails, paddles, trucks, and flying objects — and his younger brother Ricky, to Nathan’s envy, immediately fell in with a gang of piratical little boys with water pistols, who were always reproducing fart sounds and giggling chaotically when their mothers employed certain ordinary words such as “hot dog” and “rubber.” The Shapiros went to the ocean every summer, and at the beginning of this trip, as on all those that had preceded it, Nathan and his brother got along better than they usually did, their mother broke out almost immediately in a feathery red heat rash, and their father lay pale and motionless in the sun, like a monument, and always forgot to take off his wristwatch when he went into the sea. Nathan had brought a stack of James Bond books and his colored pencils; there were board games — he and his father were in the middle of their Strat-O-Matic baseball playoffs — and miniature boxes of cereal; the family ate out every single night. But when they were halfway through the slow, dazzling week — which was as far as they were to get — Nathan began to experience an unfamiliar longing: He wanted to go home.

He awoke very early on Wednesday morning, went into the cottage’s small kitchen, where the floor was sticky and the table rocked and trembled, and chose the last of the desirable cereals from the Variety pack, leaving for Ricky only those papery, sour brands with the scientific names — the sort that their grandparents liked. As he began to eat, Nathan heard, from the big bedroom down the hall, the unmistakable, increasingly familiar sound of his father burying his mother under a heap of scorn and ridicule. It was, oddly, a soft and pleading sound. Lately, the conversation and actions of Dr. Shapiro’s family seemed to disappoint him terribly. His left hand was always flying up to smack his sad and outraged forehead, so hard that Nathan often thought he could hear his father’s wedding ring crack against his skull. When they’d played their baseball game the day before — Nathan’s Baltimore Bonfires against his father’s Brooklyn Eagles — every decision Nathan made led to a disaster, and his father pointed out each unwise substitution and foolish attempt to steal in this new tone of miserable sarcasm, so that Nathan had spent the afternoon apologizing, and, finally, crying. Now he listened for his mother’s voice, for the note of chastened shame.

The bedroom door slammed, and Mrs. Shapiro came out into the kitchen. She was in her bathrobe, a wild, sleepless smile on her face.

“Good morning, honey,” she said, then hummed to herself as she boiled water and made a cup of instant coffee. Her spoon tinkled gaily against the cup.

“Where are you going, Mom?” said Nathan. She had taken up her coffee and was heading for the sliding glass door that led out of the kitchen and down to the beach.

“See you, honey,” she sang.

“Mom!” said Nathan. He stood up — afraid, absurdly, that she might be leaving for good, because she seemed so happy. After a few seconds he heard her whistling, and he went to the door and pressed his face against the wire screen. His mother had a Disney whistle, melodious and full, like a Scotsman’s as he walks across a meadow in a brilliant kilt. She paced briskly along the ramshackle slat-and-wire fence, back and forth through the beach grass, drinking from the huge white mug of coffee and whistling heartily into the breeze; her red hair rose from her head and trailed like a defiant banner. He watched her observe the sunrise — it was going to be a perfect, breezy day — then continued to watch as she set her coffee on the ground, removed her bathrobe, and, in her bathing suit, began to engage in a long series of yoga exercises — a new fad of hers — as though she were playing statues all alone. Nathan was soon lost, with the fervor of a young scientist, in contemplation of his pretty, whistling mother rolling around on the ground.

“Oh, how can she?” said Dr. Shapiro.

“Yes,” said Nathan, gravely, before he blushed and whirled around to find his father, in pajamas, staring out at Mrs. Shapiro. His smile was angry and clenched, but in his eyes was the same look of bleak surprise, of betrayal, that had been there when Nathan took out Johnny Sain, a slugging pitcher, and the pinch-hitter, Enos Slaughter, immediately went down on strikes. There were a hundred new things that interested Nathan’s mother — bonsai, the Zuni, yoga, real estate — and although Dr. Shapiro had always been a liberal, generous, encouraging man (as Nathan had heard his mother say to a friend), and had at first happily helped her to purchase the necessary manuals, supplies, and coffee-table books, lately each new fad seemed to come as a blow to him — a going astray, a false step.

“How can she?” he said again, shaking his big bearded head.

“She says it’s really good for you,” said Nathan.

His father smiled down on his son ruefully, and tapped him once on the head. Then he turned and went to the refrigerator, hitching up his pajama bottoms. They were the ones patterned with a blue stripe and red chevrons — the ones that Nathan always imagined were the sort worn by the awkward, doomed elephant in the Groucho Marx joke.

Later that day, as they made egg-salad sandwiches to carry down to the beach, Dr. and Mrs. Shapiro fought bitterly, for the fifth time since their arrival. In the cottage’s kitchen was a knife — a small, new, foreign knife, which Mrs. Shapiro admired. As she used it to slice neat little horseshoes of celery, she praised it again. “Such a good little knife,” she said. “Why don’t you just take it?” said Dr. Shapiro. The air in the kitchen was suddenly full of sharp, caramel smoke, and Dr. Shapiro ran to unplug the toaster.

“That would be stealing,” said Nathan’s mother, ignoring her husband’s motions of alarm and the fact that their lunch was on fire. “We are not taking this knife, Martin.”

“Give it to me.” Dr. Shapiro held out his hand, palm up.

“I’m not going to let you — make me — dishonest anymore!” said his mother. She seemed to struggle, at first, not to finish the sentence she had begun, but in the end she turned, put her face right up to his, and cried out boldly. After her outburst, both adults turned to look, with a simultaneity that was almost funny, at their sons. Nathan hadn’t the faintest notion of what his mother was talking about.

“Don’t steal, Dad,” Ricky said.

“I only wanted it to extract the piece of toast,” said their father. He was looking at their mother again. “God damn it.” He turned and went out of the kitchen.

Her knuckles white around the handle of the knife, their mother freed the toast and began scraping the burnt surfaces into the sink. Because their father had said “God damn,” Ricky wiggled his eyebrows and smiled at Nathan. At the slamming of the bedroom door, Nathan clambered up suddenly from the rickety kitchen table as though he had found an insect crawling on his leg.

“Kill it!” said Ricky. “What is it?”

“What is it?” said his mother. She scanned Nathan’s body quickly, one hand half raised to swat.

“Nothing,” said Nathan. He took off his glasses. “I’m going for a walk.”

When he got to the edge of the water, he turned to look toward the Sandpiper. At that time in Nags Head there were few hotels and no condominiums, and it seemed to Nathan that their little ring of cottages stood alone, like Stonehenge, in the middle of a giant wasteland. He set off down the beach, watching his feet print and following the script left in the sand by the birds for which the motel was named. He passed a sand castle, then a heart drawn with a stick enclosing the names Jimmy and Beth. Sometimes his heels sank deeply into the sand, and he noticed the odd marks this would leave — a pair of wide dimples. He discovered that he could walk entirely on his heels, and his trail became two lines of big periods. If he took short steps, it looked as though a creature — a bird with two peg legs — had come to fish along the shore.

He lurched a long way in this fashion, watching his feet, and nearly forgot his parents’ quarrel. But when at last he grew bored with walking on his heels and turned to go back, he saw that his mother and father had also decided to take a walk, and that they were, in fact, coming toward him — clasping hands, letting go, clasping hands again. Nathan ran to meet them, and they parted to let him walk between them. They all continued down the beach, stooping to pick up shells, glass, dead crabs, twine, and all the colored or smelly things that Nathan had failed to take note of before. At first his parents exclaimed with him over these discoveries, and his father took each striped seashell into his hands, to keep it safe, until there were two dozen and they jingled there like money. But after a while they seemed to lose interest, and Nathan found himself walking a few feet ahead of them, stooping alone, glumly dusting his toes with sand as he tried to eavesdrop on their careless and incomprehensible conversation.

“Never again,” his mother said at last.

Dr. Shapiro let the shells fall. He rubbed his hands together and then stared at them as though waking from a dream in which he had been holding a fortune in gold Straightening up so quickly that his head spun, Nathan let out a cry and pointed down at the sand beneath their feet, among the scattered shells. “Look at those weird tracks!” he cried.

They all looked down.

Speculation on the nature of the beast that went toeless down the shore went on for several minutes, and although Nathan was delighted at first, he soon began to feel embarrassed and, obscurely, frightened by the ease with which he had deceived his parents. His treachery was almost exposed when Ricky, carrying a long stick and wearing a riot of Magic Marker tattoos on his face and all down his arms, ran over to find out what was happening. The little boy immediately tipped back onto his heels, and would have taken a few steps like that had Nathan not grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him aside.

“Why do you have a dog on your face?” said Nathan.

“It’s a jaguar,” said Ricky.

Nathan bent to whisper into his brother’s ear. “I’m tricking Mom and Dad,” he said.

“Good,” said Ricky.

“They think there’s some kind of weird creature on the beach.”

Ricky pushed Nathan away and then surveyed their mother and father, who were talking again, quietly, as though they were trying not to alarm their sons. “It can’t be real,” said Nathan’s father.

Ricky’s skin under the crude tattoos was tanned, his hair looked stiff and ragged from going unwashed and sea-tangled, and as he regarded their parents he held his skinny stick like a javelin at his side. “They’re dumb,” he said flatly.

Dr. Shapiro approached, stepping gingerly across the mysterious tracks, and then knelt beside his sons. His face was red, though not from the sun, and he seemed to have trouble looking directly at the boys. Nathan began to cry before his father even spoke.

“Boys,” he said. He looked away, then back, and bit his lip. “I’m afraid — I’m sorry. We’re going to go home. Your mom and I — don’t feel very well. We don’t seem to be well.”

“No! No! It was Nathan!” said Ricky, laying down his spear and throwing himself into his father’s arms. “It wasn’t me. Make him go home.”

Nathan, summoning up his courage, decided to admit that the curious trail of the crippled animal was his, and he said, “I’m responsible.”

“Oh, no!” cried both his parents together, startling him. His mother rushed over and fell to her knees, and they took Nathan into their arms and said that it was never, never him, and they ruffled his hair with their fingers, as though he had done something they could love him for.

After they came back from dinner, the Shapiros, save Nathan, went down to the sea for a final, sad promenade. At the restaurant, Ricky had pleaded with his parents to stay through the end of the week — they had not even been to see the monument at Kitty Hawk, the Birthplace of Aviation. For Ricky’s sake, Nathan had also tried to persuade them, but his heart wasn’t in it — he himself wanted so badly to go home — and the four of them had all ended up crying and chewing their food in the brass-and-rope dining room of the Port O’ Call; even Dr. Shapiro had shed a tear. They were going to leave that night. Nathan’s family now stood, in sweatshirts, by the sliding glass door, his parents straining to adopt hard and impatient looks, and Nathan saw that they felt guilty about leaving him behind in the cottage.

“I’ll pack my stuff,” he said. “Just go.” For a moment his stomach tightened with angry, secret glee as his mother and father, sighing, turned their backs on him and obeyed his small command. Then he was alone in the kitchen again, for the second time that day, and he wished that he had gone to look at the ocean, and he hated his parents, uncertainly, for leaving him behind. He got up and walked into the bedroom that he and Ricky had shared. There, in the twilight that fell in orange shafts through the open window, the tangle of their clothes and bedsheets, their scattered toys and books, the surfaces of the broken dresser and twin headboards seemed dusted with a film of radiant sand, as though the tide had washed across them and withdrawn, and the room was strewn with the seashells they had found. Nathan, after emptying his shoebox of baseball cards into his suitcase, went slowly around the room and harvested the shells with careful sweeps of his trembling hand. Bearing the shoebox back into the kitchen, he collected the few stray shards of salt-white and green beach glass that lay in a pile beside the electric can opener, and then added a hollow pink crab’s leg in whose claw Ricky had fixed a colored pencil. When Nathan saw the little knife in the drainboard by the sink, he hesitated only a moment before dropping it into the box, where it swam, frozen, like a model shark in a museum diorama of life beneath the sea. Nathan chuckled. As clearly as if he were remembering them, he foresaw his mother’s accusation, his father’s enraged denial, and with an unhappy chuckle he foresaw, recalled, and fondly began to preserve all the discord for which, in his wildly preserving imagination, he was and would always be responsible.

More Than Human

THROUGHOUT THE DISMAL, INADEQUATE spring that preceded his moving out of the house, Dr. Shapiro drew his sustenance and cheer from the evenings on which he and his son made library rounds. The Henrietta County Library System was wealthy and adventuring, and maintained well-provisioned outposts even at the farthest reaches of its empire, so that in only a few hours he and Nathan, like a bookish Mongol horde of two, could hit a dozen different libraries and return with a rich booty of fourteen-day New Arrivals and, for Nathan, books about baseball, mythology, and the exploits of civilized mice. Dr. Shapiro was trying to wean his son onto science fiction, according to the natural progression, as he had experienced it, from childhood to adolescence, and had been recommending the paranoid novels of his own youth—Slan and The Demolished Man and What Mad Universe—of which Nathan had preferred the first, whose youthful protagonist has two hearts.

There was avid competition for fourteen-day books in Henrietta County, which was the ostensible reason for these weekly raids and the explanation that Dr. Shapiro gave to his wife and even to Nathan. His true motive was his lifelong need of minor rituals, a need that had lately become almost compulsive as the extreme state of his marriage and the sadness of his new job — he was working at Sunny Valley Farms, a small private psychiatric clinic for children, where he was exposed to a great deal of various and fairly sinister childhood lunacy — had robbed his life of the quotidian and left him with all the surprising novelty of a nightmare. His pipe, his weekly move in his correspondence chess game, and his trips with Nathan across the backroads of Henrietta County were the only commonplace ceremonies he had.

On Thursday nights, when the libraries stayed open until nine, he would come home from work, shower, put on blue jeans and a clean shirt, and sit down to watch the last fifteen minutes of Lost in Space with Nathan. Dr. Shapiro, who at his son’s age had attempted, according to a recipe given by an article in Science Wonder Stories, to create life in a laundry pail, took a guilty interest in the show, and had seen every absurd episode at least once. After it was over, he and Nathan would leave Rose and Ricky to their dinner, step, still chuckling, into the drizzle and hydrangea, and drive off. As he guided the car onto the winding old tobacco road that led across townhouse parks and cornfields to the Gunpowder Creek Branch, the unremarkable Landscape and the quizzical conversation of his son would bore and relax him, and leave him feeling halfway blessed and less mindful of his grip on the wheel.

They made up nicknames for his colleagues at Sunny Valley and for Nathan’s schoolmates, wrought long chains of bad puns, sang operatic versions of advertising jingles. Dr. Shapiro had few friends, and his older son, from the time of his first words, had been the chief partner in his imaginative life. He knew that it could not be good for a father to depend in this way on his child, and disapproved of himself for it; he supposed that his was not an adult need at all, and that he should long ago have surrendered the soothing foolishness of words. Once, he had been able to dwell with Nathan for hours on end in a perpetually expanding universe of nonsense, but as they both got older, and as marital unhappiness and financial ambition and the passage of time came increasingly to dominate his thoughts, these hours had shrunk to the three they spent visiting libraries each week. Dr. Shapiro’s need had never diminished, however, and had, if anything, been strengthened, in recent months, by the changing character of their conversations. Nathan tended increasingly to pose difficult questions that required careful replies, asked him to explain the rings of Saturn, the partition of India, the New York subway. The ardor of Nathan’s desire for facts seemed to quicken a sympathetic current within the father, and his heart would pound as he endeavored, despite damnable gaps in his knowledge, to provide his son with good information.

One Thursday evening, about two weeks before the beginning of the summer, Dr. Shapiro at last found himself faced with the task of explaining to Nathan the nature of divorce. He was loath to derange their weekly idyll with this particular collection of sad facts, but he had been putting it off for nearly a month now, and come Saturday he would — how incredible — no longer be living within the same building as his family. It would have to be tonight.

It was a windy, damp evening with no trace of June in it, and as they drove into the pale, almost imperceptible sunset he toyed with the idea of leaving without saying a word, of truly deserting Nathan — as his own father had done, in a different way, a year ago. The thought of his own insubstantiality, of his capacity simply to vanish, was horrible and seductive.

They had just come from the G. Earl King Memorial Branch, sixth on their route, and were headed for Lucci’s, the Italian delicatessen where they always broke their trip. Nathan, who’d been unusually silent all evening, had a stack of paperbacks balanced on the back of his bent right forearm and was attempting to play Quarters with them, to grasp them abruptly in his hand before they could fall. They kept spilling across the front seat, over and over, with a disturbed, truncated flutter, as of startled pigeons. One struck Dr. Shapiro on the cheek, and the boy jumped preemptively away so that his father could not strike back, but Dr. Shapiro did not respond. It seemed to him that the road flew beneath them, that they had not hit a single red light, that there was nothing to slow their hurtling career. They were less than five minutes from Lucci’s. Generally, he knew, he burdened his son with bad news or disapprobation in restaurants, for reasons that were unclear to him, and he didn’t want it to happen that way this time. Unless he spoke now, he would have to wait until after they had eaten their pink, oily submarines and were on their way to the Cross Fork Branch, the very best, when he would not want to spoil for Nathan the prospect of its luxurious Young Adults Room, with the potted palms and microfilm machines. He cleared his throat and cursed his own cowardice; he foresaw himself stalling until the last possible moment, sputtering out the words in the darkness of their driveway as with a ponderous hand he restrained his son from getting out, as he cut the engine and the interior filled with the sighs and ticking of a car at journey’s end.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” said Nathan, arranging his books now into a neat and penitent stack on the seat between them and folding his hands in his lap.

“It’s all right,” Dr. Shapiro replied. Then he was aware of the throbbing of his cheek where the book had hit him, a triangular pain over the bone. “It was an accident.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nathan said. “It was an accident.”

The boy smiled at him with his wild teeth, and his bright eyes behind the heavy eyeglasses looked false, a little out of kilter, as though his son were a doll of humble workmanship. Like those of his patients, Nathan’s was an almost heartbreakingly plain face, and in it he thought he could read the same short narrative of rage and confusion. He had resolved a hundred times not to be a doctor to his sons, not to listen for and study the messages coded in their sudden misbehaviors, and to allow his children to disarm and to perplex him, but as he looked at Nathan he saw quite clearly that the boy was cognizant, however dimly, of the fear and shame and failure his father could not bring himself to express, and had already begun — accidentally— to retaliate. Dr. Shapiro’s information was suddenly an unbearable weight upon him, an iron belt around his chest.

“Ask me anything,” he said, too loudly, taking his foot off the accelerator pedal. The car slowed and then drifted to a halt in the middle of Old Rolling Road, five hundred yards from the next intersection. “Isn’t there anything you’d like me to explain?”

Nathan looked over his shoulder, out the rear window, then turned back to face Dr. Shapiro. He bit his lip and at the same time smiled the anxious, sober smile of someone confronted with the folly, the minor act of vandalism, of a friend on a drunken spree. The few drivers lined up behind them honked their horns, then swerved brusquely around, shaking their fists as though in encouragement. “Do it!” they exhorted him. “Let the kid have it!” For a moment they sat all alone in their car, in the empty roadway, as Nathan seemed to search for the name of some thing he didn’t know or had until now never quite grasped.

“If I was a mutant,” the boy said at last, his gaze falling on the gaudy cover of one of the paperbacks, a novel called More Than Human, “would you and Mom ever tell me?”

Dr. Shapiro gave a sigh that was like a laugh, weary and slight. “No,” he said. He had turned his damp face toward the window, ashamed, unable to preserve his son any longer. “I think we would just have to let you find out for yourself.” He braced himself for the sentence he was about to utter and pushed down on the gas. The car gathered speed and drew relentlessly toward the intersection. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, opened it once more.

“Then I guess I already know,” said Nathan, from whom he had failed to conceal, failed to deflect, failed to ward off all the hazardous radiations of adulthood, of knowledge, of failure itself.

On the day his father moved out, Nathan’s parents sent him and Ricky to the mall with his friend Edward, a decision of which, on the whole, Nathan approved. Although a part of him was curious simply to see what it looked like when one’s father carried his things, his books and records and pipes, out the door — he loved those rare occasions, when Dr. Shapiro, puffing out his bearded cheeks, engaged in some heavy labor — he had caught a glimpse that morning of a liquor box, full of hats, on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, and the sight of a black Russian hat made of fur that was swirled like a brain, which Nathan remembered his father wearing on some black-and-white winter day before Ricky was ever born, had filled him with such longing and anger that he was glad to spend the afternoon eating pizza and wishing for toys in the Huxley Mall, whose air was sweet with candles and soap, and bitter with the chlorine from the fountains.

By the time they got home their father had already gone. Mrs. Shapiro sat alone at the kitchen table. As the boys came in, she stood quickly and, before she hugged them, swept two coffee cups and a plate of crumbs off the table and into the sink, blushing strangely. In their mother’s wet embrace Nathan felt all at once smothered, blind, panicked, as he sometimes did when play required that he climb into a refrigerator carton or a crawl space. He squirmed wildly out of her arms and drew back.

“If you two are just going to cry all day,” he announced, “I don’t want to be around.” He felt very wicked as he said this, and retreated from the kitchen in confusion. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom but was drawn inexorably to his parents’ door. It was ajar and he pushed at it with the tip of his big toe, as though he might startle some animal asleep on the bed. There were indentations in the carpet, he saw, from his father’s dresser, his desk, his creaking armoire, a pattern of twelve little circles like the spots on a domino. It hadn’t occurred to Nathan that Dr. Shapiro would take the furniture, and its absence, curiously, made him feel sorry for his father, who was going to have to make do with so little now. Would there be a bed in this unimaginable apartment? Would there be a soft leather chair that reclined?

He stood in the middle of the half-empty room for a minute or so, until his glance fell on a wastebasket that stood beside the space where his father’s desk had been. It was mostly full of shirt cardboard and the white wrappers of coat hangers, but at the bottom he spied a crumpled yellow ball of legal paper, which he fished out and spread flat on the floor. It was some kind of a list, made by his father, and Nathan knew at once that it was a secret list, and that after he had finished reading it he would probably wish he hadn’t, as he was continually pained by the memory of a love letter he had found in a box in the basement, written to his father by a girl who had once been Nathan’s favorite baby-sitter. He lay on his stomach in the space where there was no longer a great, oaken desk and read what his father had set down. The handwriting was neat and restrained, as though Dr. Shapiro had been angry while he wrote.

“RESOLUTIONS,” Nathan read: “1. I will never again raise my voice with my children, or threaten them with the back of my hand. 2. I will not think ill of any man or woman, for no one could possibly be motivated by more trivial or more venal concerns than I. 3. I will cease calling my father and mother by their first names, and will strive to regain what I lost when they became Milton and Flo to me. That is, I will love my parents. 4. I will not claim to have read books that I have not read, or to have been borne out in predictions that I never made. 5. I will cease to infect Nathan with a debilitating love of facts, nor will I pursue them myself with greed and possessiveness, as I have heretofore. 6. I will be a better father. 7. I will listen to Bartók every morning, and to Mozart before I sleep. 8. I will lay aside all ambitions save the one I have cherished since the age of nineteen, when I made my first list of ten resolutions — to love and understand art, sport, science, literature, and music, and to become, someday, a true Renaissance Man. 9. I will not throw away this list.”

In the midst of feeling sick to his stomach, and faintly horrified as by the glimpses given in his father’s medical texts of the inner human body, the thought that Dr. Shapiro had already broken number nine was of some small comfort to Nathan. He gathered up the paper in his hands and himself crushed it, bit it, tore it in two. The telephone rang, and from the soft, interrogative sound of Ricky’s voice in the kitchen he guessed that it was Dr. Shapiro calling. In a minute he would have to tell his father something, something his father would never forget because it would be the first thing Nathan said to him under these new and remarkable circumstances. Nathan hoped, he prayed very quickly to God, rocking back and forth on his knees, that his father would break all eight of the others as well, that he would continue to spank his sons, fall asleep with the radio playing Harry Belafonte and Doris Day, memorize the altitudes of the mountains of the world. None of these things seemed to Nathan to be of the slightest importance, and yet they had caused Dr. Shapiro to drive himself from the house where he had dwelt for so many years as a kind of adored, only occasionally dangerous giant, an intelligent, dexterous bear with a vast repertoire of tricks. Nathan could see from the list that Dr. Shapiro didn’t know of the constant delight that his sons had taken in him or of the legends and fables that had grown up around his name. How impossible was the life of a father! thought Nathan. The best man in the world could fill a thousand pages with fine resolutions and still feel forced to leave his home in shame.

“Listen, Dad,” said Nathan when he picked up the phone, throwing himself across his father’s abandoned side of the bed, “I’ve been thinking. And really. You could come home any time you want to.”

“I know that,” said Dr. Shapiro.

“You were a good father, Dad,” said Nathan, clutching tight the torn little ball of yellow paper. “You were the best father in the world.”

“Thanks,” said Dr. Shapiro, but he said it abstractedly, a little too fast, as though it were only a reply, as though his mind were on other more difficult, more wondrous things.

Admirals

NATHAN JAMMED HIS SNEAKERS against the back of his father’s seat and listened, eager and miserable, to the opening notes of the song on the car radio. He had no idea. His father had been quizzing him for as long as he could remember, and as a result Nathan knew the presidents of the United States (in order), the capitals of all fifty states, the provinces of Canada and the nations of Europe and their capitals (including Vaduz), the great inventions and their inventors, the major rivers of the world in order of length, famous black and Jewish Americans and their achievements, gods and heroes of ancient Greece, planets and moons of the solar system, as well as two dozen common phobias, including pantophobia, the fear of everything.

Unfortunately, the topic of the day was rock-and-roll music, and the quiz was for the benefit of Anne, Dr. Shapiro’s girlfriend, the play lady from the children’s hospital where Nathan’s father was the psychiatrist. They were on their way to Annapolis (the capital of Maryland), to stay in a motel, even though Annapolis was only half an hour from Ellicott City, where Nathan, his brother, and their mother lived. It had been raining lightly all morning, the air was chilly for May, and Nathan felt a kind of dread of this false vacation. Dr. Shapiro turned up the volume on the radio and glanced over his shoulder at Nathan, then looked at Anne to make sure that she was paying attention.

“O.K.,” said Dr. Shapiro, slowly rolling one hand in the air, as though guiding Nathan into a tight parking space. “Who is this?”

“David Bowie,” said Ricky, Nathan’s little brother. He arched forward to pat Anne on the top of her head, which was just visible to the boys in the backseat. Ricky — seven, affectionate, ill-tempered, and wild — had seen David Bowie once on television, dressed like a Navajo from Jupiter, and had been greatly impressed.

“Quiet, Ricky,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Nathan?”

Since his parents’ divorce, a year and a half ago, Nathan had become interested in rock-and-roll, but aside from songs by the Beatles, which he knew fairly well, and a few by the Rolling Stones, he wasn’t much good at this topic. For a moment, running the names of random bands and singers through his mind, Nathan panicked, and his knees began to ache from the pressure he was exerting against his father’s seat, until it occurred to him that this was a new kind of quiz. This time his father didn’t know the correct answer any more than he did. He could give any name at all.

“Eric Clapton,” said Nathan in an offhand way, watching the back of his father’s head, then, in a burst of fresh alarm, looking to see if Anne was going to call his bluff. She was younger than his father, and he remembered with a start her having told him that the Buffalo Springfield had played at her homecoming in college.

“Eric Clapton?” said his father. “O.K.! That’s amazing, isn’t it, Anne?” She smiled. “Couldn’t have been more than a dozen bars before he got it.”

“That’s great,” said Anne, turning to smile at Nathan. Anne was very nice, Nathan reminded himself, and then felt guilty because he had to remind himself. He’d always liked Anne — had loved her, in fact, when she was just the play lady at his father’s work. He and Ricky had spent entire days down in her playroom, gluing together Popsicle sticks and weaving multicolored pot holders that they brought home to their mother, and Anne would buy them Chinese lunches and comic books. But ever since she was his father’s girlfriend, Nathan had come to suspect all of her former friendliness. He shunned her hugs and sat apart from her.

“It’s David Bowie,” said Ricky. “Ask me, Dad. Ask me.”

“David Bowie,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Get out of here.”

They passed a sign for Annapolis.

“Chuck lives in Annapolis,” said Ricky. “Mom says.”

“Who’s Chuck?” said their father.

Without knowing exactly why, Nathan hit Ricky on the arm, hard — much harder than he had intended to, really — and Ricky began to cry, then stopped and looked at Nathan, his forehead wrinkled and red.

“Um — a doo-doo head,” said Ricky, valiantly turning silly. “Chuck, buck, duck, muck, luck.”

Then the song was over, and Nathan’s heart sank as he realized that the disk jockey in just a moment would identify the singer, and as Ricky arrived, with a gasp, at the end of his incantation. “Fuck,” he whispered behind his hand. He stared blankly at Nathan for an instant, then smiled in horror and delight, his eyes still full of tears. “We’re there,” said Anne, and switched off the radio.

Nathan’s mother had had four boyfriends since the divorce, and, until Chuck, Nathan had liked them all. The first three boyfriends — all of them — wore beards and glasses, like Nathan’s father, and drove calm, square foreign cars. They’d tried very hard to make friends with Nathan, and so he had tried, too; there were ballgames and bats’ jaws and discussions of science. Each time, Nathan felt sad when the boyfriend stopped calling and didn’t come to dinner anymore, though not as sad as his mother. Of the many new spectacles the divorce had created — his mother, in a suit, happily leaving for work in the morning, Nathan fixing their dinner with the radio blaring — the most disturbing was that of their mother crying, which she hadn’t done even at the death of their grandfather but which now they had seen ten times at least.

And now Chuck, a small-plane pilot, was pushing their mother to even greater extremes of emotion. He had an Italian car, with only two seats. On Friday nights when Chuck broke dates, their mother sank into jealous despair, and spent the evening devouring an entire novel or talked on the phone to her friends for hours. She would indulge the boys with popcorn and board games and gin rummy, half-sadly smiling throughout. Very late one evening the past winter, she’d come downstairs in her boots, drawn on her coat, and gone out, returning in tears an hour later. The next morning Nathan found her sitting on the stairs, in her big bathrobe, the rolled Sunday paper lying in her lap. He reached down and took the paper from her and opened it, laughing, as if she were only absent-minded.

“Mom,” he said. “Where did you go last night?”

She told him, crying; the story came out in little bursts as she held her breath between each sob. And over a breakfast at which Nathan drank coffee, and they heard Ricky’s cartoons come on upstairs, as she confided to him other, less desperate tales of checking up on Chuck, he had felt himself, almost physically, growing older.

He felt it even now, with his father. Dr. Shapiro borrowed a dollar’s worth of quarters from Nathan, to feed the parking meter, and Nathan trembled as, for the first time, he made his father a loan. They went into a bookstore, where they ridiculed the romance novels and took turns looking through a history of chess. Dr. Shapiro found a guidebook to the restaurants of Maryland and, having narrowed down the choices to three, allowed Nathan to decide where they would eat lunch. After studying the encapsulated reviews, Nathan settled finally on a waterfront seafood restaurant called the Bonhomme Richard, which specialized in soft-shell crabs, his father’s favorite food. They left the bookstore and headed toward the bay, Anne and Ricky following along behind. The morning clouds had at last begun to scatter, the sun shone; they walked into the lobby of the Bonhomme Richard, and, in the few short moments before they ran into Chuck and some lady, Nathan saw very keenly how soon would come the day when he would be able to walk into a seafood restaurant and anticipate, like a dessert, a pale-brown cocktail. Then he saw Chuck in the lounge, helping a lady with red hair to put on her raincoat.

“It’s like mine,” said Ricky, just before he noticed Chuck. “Hey!”

It was. The lady wore a rubber slicker, the color of a taxicab, with a detachable hood. Chuck held out her empty left sleeve and she smiled at Ricky, as strangers often did. Nathan grabbed his little brother’s arm, as gently as he could bear, and turned him toward their father and Anne, who were already disappearing into the dining room. As the boys followed after, Nathan struggled — like Orpheus and Lot’s wife — against the urge to turn and look back at the handsome, mysterious airplane pilot and the lady in the child’s raincoat. Finally he gave in and was irritated to see that Ricky, too, had turned to look.

“Don’t look,” said Nathan.

“You did,” said Ricky.

They watched Chuck set an extra dollar in the little tray of money, then take the lady’s arm; she looked up brightly into Chuck’s face, and he blew a puff of air, ruffling her red bangs, and then they came at the boys, laughing. They were a happy couple. It was sad. Nathan thought of a time, long ago in Richmond, Virginia, when his parents had stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking into each other’s faces and at little Nathan dancing naked on his bed, their arms around each other’s waists. Nathan’s father had called his mother Rosie, the only time ever, and Nathan had stopped dancing. “Rosie!” he had cried.

“Here’s Dad,” said Ricky.

Their father approached, his hands outspread, one eyebrow lifted in mock annoyance.

“We’re coming,” said Nathan. “Here we come.”

“What did you see?” said Dr. Shapiro.

They sat down and Nathan opened his menu. At first he was too upset to do anything but stare at the descriptions of all the different dishes. Colored drawings of fish swam around the menu’s border — haddock, cod, flat flounder and sole, and the ugly fish that wasn’t a dolphin but was called a dolphin. He felt — as though suddenly and irrevocably he were his mother’s ambassador to Annapolis and to the whole world — as if he were going to cry.

“Look,” said Ricky. “Admirals.”

They’d been seated in a part of the restaurant that stretched out over the water, at a table beside a window. Across the room, along another row of windows, was the bar, just now entirely taken up by naval officers in white uniforms, nearly two dozen, a flock of admirals. Their upside-down hats littered the top of the bar; the lunchtime sun fell across their square shoulders and lit up their dazzling coats. All the men looked handsome and happy, their cocktails flashed in their hands, and Nathan cherished the elegant lime in a gin-and-tonic.

“What are you having, Nathan?” said his father.

“How much can it cost?” he asked, since the only things that sounded good were expensive. Nathan preferred, as a rule, to order the dishes with the most ingredients and with the most adjectives applied to them. His father tossed his head and waved away Nathan’s question.

“You can have whatever you want,” he said. It was what he always said, and it was one of the four thousand things for which Nathan adored him.

The waiter came and did his waiter’s tricks for Ricky, snapping out a napkin, mixing Ricky’s chocolate milk right at the table, pouring milk into the glass at first from just above it, then from a great height, then dipping and rising again, as though the milk were a white rubber band. Dr. Shapiro ordered soft-shell crabs, then rose from the table and went to find a pay telephone.

This was another recent and disturbing phenomenon. Nathan knew that his father liked to listen to the boys’ orders, to express his ceremonial approval or surprise. But in the past couple of months Dr. Shapiro had begun to disappear suddenly — to go off looking for pay phones in restaurants and department stores, preoccupied by “keeping in touch” with his patients’ parents, with the hospital, with his Pakistani colleagues. He telephoned so regularly and resignedly that Nathan came to associate these dutiful calls with the twice-weekly ones the boys got from him, which Ricky seemed to enjoy but which Nathan (and, he suspected, his father) found both difficult and somehow unjust.

Anne and Nathan looked at each other and shared a sarcastic smile, as though Dr. Shapiro’s new telephone mania were only ridiculous. Then the sarcasm went out of Anne’s face. She looked after her boyfriend with a furrowed brow, then turned to Nathan and tried to smile again. It was as though, for a moment, she had laid down her mask and told him that it was O.K. to worry, that, indeed, something abnormal was happening around them. In that moment Nathan felt that he loved her. But then she smiled.

Ricky, ordering the fried jumbo shrimps (he was in the throes of a mad shrimp phase), knocked over the entire glass of chocolate milk. His apologies were so irritable and sincere that a few of the shining admirals across the room looked over and laughed, grandly; the glass, after all, had not broken. Ricky smiled and calmed down. When their father came back, pulling at his beard, Ricky leaned toward him.

“Dad, the admirals laughed at me,” he said. “All the way from across the room.”

Anne took Nathan’s hand and whispered into his ear.

“It wasn’t Eric Clapton,” she told him, blushing.

“Oh,” said Nathan, watching his father look out emptily and awestruck over the platinum water, as though a great, gay ocean liner were passing by.

“It was the Rolling Stones,” she said. “It was ‘We Love You.’”

As they left the restaurant, it began to sprinkle again, and they hurried through the streets from shop to shop. One, full of old tables and chairs, stood beside another that was full of artistic toys — painted clowns, dancers on cords, wooden trains in the shapes of ducks and ducklings. So they split up. Lately Dr. Shapiro and Anne had become interested in old furniture, and although Nathan had tried for a little while to share their interest, as an adult would — to examine the splinters of wear in a wicker seat, to see how tables could be important — it was not easy to do, so when Ricky failed to spot the toyshop immediately, Nathan pointed it out to him. He waited for Ricky’s shouts of discovery, then feigned acquiescence when his father ordered him to escort his brother into the shop.

They quickly discovered that most of the artistic toys were in the windows, and that it was really just an ordinary toy store, with fine, ordinary toys. Ricky was overjoyed. He shot at Nathan with a ray gun that threw sparks and whined, put on a small diving mask and hooted through the snorkel, got all the battery-powered toys to crawl and beep across the table on which they were displayed, exclaiming happily when they crashed into each other. Whenever Nathan went into toy stores these days, a confusion of feelings came over him, and now he stood, hands in pockets, beside a glass case of miniature knights, soldiers, and farm animals, absently watching his brother cause toy disaster.

At home, with their mother, Ricky did little harm to fixtures or vases, but his mood was black, and he kicked and shrieked; with their father he was festive and wily, and full of comments, but he couldn’t be trusted near anything valuable, and sometimes the sturdiest appliances came to pieces under his hand. Their mother’s nerves were shattered, like their father’s pipes and tumblers. When Ricky was not around, he was discussed in a manner that made Nathan uneasy, because the assumption seemed to be that Ricky had some kind of problem, or would soon be a problem — which, when Nathan thought about it for a minute, almost certainly meant that he, too, was a problem, only older.

“Nate! Nate!” said Ricky, from somewhere at the front of the toy store. Nathan looked one last time at the toy horse and crusader, reared up on their swath of metal turf — the only thing in the store that he even faintly coveted — then went to find his brother. Ricky stood on tiptoe, clutching the top of the low wood partition that protected the display of untouchable toys in the front window; he was looking past all the duckies and dancers to something in the street outside.

First Nathan saw the fabulous car, It was like a color-plate in the cumbersome book he’d been given for his eleventh birthday, The History of the Motor Car—a Cord, or a Duesenberg, or a Daimler, or one of those other extinct breeds of car that looked like small, wheeled mansions, with curtains, doorknobs, tiny lamps, the running boards like long verandas. And, as in the illustrations Nathan had gazed at, on the toilet or under the covers of his bed for hours at a time, there was something airless and artificial about the car — something as dead and impossible as the reconstructed skeletons of Allosaurus and Triceratops in a museum. There was a story, famous in their family — even Anne knew it — about Nathan at age four asking his parents which had come first, the dinosaurs or the old-fashioned cars. It still sometimes seemed to him that the things that had happened before he was born — Pearl Harbor, hieroglyphics, catapults, the day his parents fell in love — were equally ancient and interesting, cryptic and gone.

“It’s a millionaire,” said Ricky.

“It’s a playboy,” said Nathan.

The man stood in the light rain with one foot on the running board of his car, staring off toward the distant bay. He wore a blue blazer with a coat of arms on the breast pocket, white trousers, no socks, blue sailor’s sneakers. In one hand he casually held a briar, and in the other a gold lighter. He neither slouched nor stood erect, and Nathan immediately adjusted his own posture to match the playboy’s, but it was the man’s short silver hair that Nathan admired most, and the perfect wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his slight smile.

“See that silver hair?” said Nathan. “When I’m old I want to have hair like that.”

“It’s gray,” said Ricky. “Can that car go a hundred miles an hour?”

“Any car can go a hundred miles an hour,” said Nathan the older brother. “You’re just supposed to look at that car. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

Their father appeared on the sidewalk in front of the toy store, and he and the playboy said hello.

“Dad’s talking to him,” said Ricky.

“You’re allowed to talk to guys like that when they stand there with their cars,” said Nathan. “They like it.”

Dr. Shapiro walked over to the man with silver hair and gestured at his car. The man nodded politely but didn’t smile. Beside him their father looked small, wet, bald, and faintly sloppy, and the fluttery hand he held out toward the vaulting fender of the car seemed to try — and fail — to grasp, to clutch. The playboy said something and then looked away again. Nathan saw in that instant that his father was a man whom a playboy would shun. Then a woman carrying shopping bags came toward the men — a television blonde, wearing an ash-gray trenchcoat and lots of makeup; she was very tall, with beautiful teeth. She twirled her umbrella over her head and it shot drops around her like a firework of water.

“An actress,” said Ricky, pinching Nathan’s arm.

The playboy nodded again to Dr. Shapiro, then went around to open the door for the actress, who gave the playboy a look that Nathan recognized. He had seen his mother give this look to Chuck, and she had no doubt once given it to his father — this look which, now that he recognized it, seemed to convey everything that, Nathan imagined, constituted sexual desire, a look of soft, distrustful frankness, wide- and wet-eyed. And then they got in and drove away, the car sweeping out of the parking space and into the street without a sound, without a squeal, like a sailboat.

“You lied,” said Ricky. “It does go.”

“Look at Dad,” said Nathan.

Dr. Shapiro stood watching the fabulous car disappear for a moment, wiping the rain from his glasses, his head slightly turned away, as though he were listening to the couple’s dwindling laughter.

“He’s only a psychiatrist,” said Ricky.

“Here he comes,” said Nathan. He grabbed Ricky and pulled him into the board-game aisle. When their father came in, he was soaking wet, and he bought his sons several bright things that they had not asked for.

That night in the motel room, as he lay beside his brother, Nathan listened to the people sleeping around him; Ricky snored delicately. Nathan could hear the hum of the ice machine in the corridor, could hear his father’s wristwatch ticking on the night table, and the general, half-imaginary murmur that all motels emit at night. Anne had drawn the curtains; the room was so completely black that Nathan began to see bright colors, luminous Persian rugs. Lately he suffered from night anxieties, and although he would think and think about everything in his life that might be upsetting him — library fines, his recent failure to pass the parallel-bars exam, his fear of high school — he couldn’t determine what it was that kept him awake, with a stomach ache, night after night. It was as though he were trying to remember the answer to one of his father’s questions. He rolled onto his back, the motel sheets crackled, and, after a while, he began to drift, and the colors faded from his eyes. Ricky coughed in his sleep once, angrily. Then, in the instant before Nathan went under, a picture came into his mind. He lay like Moses in a little basket, floating among the bulrushes, and his parents stood on the bank above him, their arms around each other’s waists, looking down. They were singing to him. “We love you,” they sang.

The Halloween Party

WHENEVER NATHAN SHAPIRO REGARDED Eleanor Parnell, it was like looking at a transparent overlay in the World Book Encyclopedia. In his mind he would flip back and forth from today’s deep-voiced, black-haired, chain-smoking, heavy-breasted woman in a red sheath dress or tight dungarees, gracefully working the cork from another bottle of pink California wine, to the vague, large, friendly woman in plaids who had fed him year after year on Cokes and deviled-ham sandwiches, whose leaves he had raked for seven autumns now, and who still lay somewhere underneath the new Eleanor, like the skeleton of a frog beneath the bright chaos of its circulatory system.

It was only since Nathan had turned fourteen and found himself privy to the reckless conversation of divorcées — of those half-dozen funny, sad women with whom his mother had surrounded herself — that he had discovered Eleanor Parnell to be a woman of bad habits and of enterprises that ended in disaster. They said that she baked and consumed marijuana desserts, and that she liked to spend Christmas Eye playing blackjack in Las Vegas, alone. She drove her scarlet Alfa Romeo with the abandon of someone who, as Mrs. Shapiro pointed out, had always been very unlucky.

When she was hardly older than Nathan was now, Eleanor had spent two triumphant years on the L.P.G.A. tour; then she’d fallen from a horse and broken her left elbow. Nathan had seen her trophies once, in a glass cabinet up in Eleanor and Major Ray’s bedroom. Her real-estate company went down under a hailstorm of lawsuits and threats of criminal prosecution, which Nathan and his mother had read about in the Huxley New Idea and even, eventually, in The Washington Post. Cayenne, her New Orleans — style restaurant in Huxley Mall, closed after only a few months. And there had been a pale little baby, a redhead named Sullivan, who lived so briefly that Ricky, Nathan’s little brother, did not even remember him.

All these tales of misfortune, all the melancholy under Eleanor’s eyes and around her mouth, had the surprising — to Nathan — effect of causing him to fall helplessly in love. It began one August when, after a hiatus of several years, he resumed his ancient habit of visiting the Parnells’ house every day, for soft drinks and conversation with Eleanor. He was driven to her, at first, simply by loneliness and by the sadness of boredom. Ricky was gone — he had gone to live in Boston with their father the previous spring — and during the tedious, spectacular afternoons of August the house was distressingly empty. All month, Mrs. Shapiro, who was a nurse, had to work late on the ward, so Nathan ate dinner with his friend Edward St. John and Edward’s bohemian family more often than usual, and he was glad to spend the last afternoons of the summer down the street at the Parnells’. Major Ray — Major Raymond Parnell, of Galveston, Texas — did not get home from the base until seven o’clock, and Nathan would sit in the kitchen until Major Ray’s boisterous arrival, watching Eleanor smoke cigarettes and squeeze lemons into her diet Coke, of which she drank sixty ounces a day — enough, as Major Ray often declared, to reanimate a dead body. She would ask Nathan for his opinions on hair styles, decorating, ecology, religion, and music, and he would offer them only after a good deal of consideration, in an airy, humorous, pedantic tone of voice, which he borrowed, without knowing it, from his father. Eleanor had treated him without condescension when he was a little boy, and she now listened to him with an intentness that was both respectful and amused, as though she half expected him to tell her something new.

Nathan’s love for Eleanor followed hard on the heels of his long-awaited and disastrous growth spurt, and it wrenched him every bit as much, until his chest ached from the sudden and irregular expansion of his feelings. In the mirror the sight of his heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and unfortunate complexion; of the new, irregular largeness of his body, of his suddenly big — his fat — stomach, would send him off on giddy binges of anxiety. He ate sweet snacks and slept badly and jumped at loud sounds. The sight of Eleanor’s red Alfa Romeo — the sight of any red car — disturbed him. He was filled with deep compassion for animals and children, in particular for Nickel Boy, the Parnells’ dog, a sensitive, courtly old beagle. In fact, Nathan spoke at length to Nickel Boy about his feelings for Eleanor, even though he knew that talking to a dog was not really talking but, as he had read in Psychology Today, simply making a lot of comforting sounds in order to secrete some enzyme that would lower his own blood pressure and slow his pulse.

Every night before he switched off the lamp, and every morning when he awoke, he took out the collection of photographs of Eleanor Parnell he had pilfered from his mother’s album and looked deeply into each of them, trying to speak to Eleanor with the telepathy of love. In his freshman-English class they arrived at the writing of poetry, and Nathan, startled into action, composed haiku, limericks, odes, and cinquains to Eleanor, as well as an acrostic sonnet, the first letters of whose lines daringly spelled out E-L-E-A-N-O-R P-A-R-N-E-L–L; whenever, in these poems, he referred to her directly, he called her Jennifer — like “Eleanor” a dactyl.

On the Saturday before the start of his freshman year of high school, as Nathan wandered home through the woods from Edward’s house, trying to walk erect, he saw Eleanor under the tulip poplars, in a battered pith helmet, wildly shooting down wasps’ nests with the pistol nozzle of a garden hose. Great golden, malevolent wasps had been something of a problem all summer, but after all the rain in July they proliferated and flew into the houses at suppertime.

“Is it working?” called Nathan, trotting toward her. One of the things he loved about Eleanor was her inventiveness, however doomed.

“Oh, no,” Eleanor said. As soon as she glimpsed Nathan she began to laugh, and the stream of water shivered and fell to the ground. Her laugh, which was the first thing Nathan remembered noticing about Eleanor, had always been odd — raucous and dark, like a cartoon magpie’s or spider’s — but lately it had come for Nathan to be invested with the darkness of sex and the raucousness of having survived misfortune. She had been in the sun too long, and her face was bright red. “No one was supposed to see me doing this. Do you think this is a bad idea? They look pretty pissed off. Major Ray thought this wasn’t a good idea.” Major Ray did not appreciate Eleanor.

“I disagree,” said Nathan, gazing up at the treetops, where the wasps had hung their cities of paper. A dense golden cloud of wasps wavered around them. “There’s a lot less of them now.”

“Do you think so?” said Eleanor. She took off her hat and stared upward. Her bangs clung to her damp, sunburned forehead.

“Yes,” said Nathan. “I guess you drowned them. Or maybe the impact kills them. Of the water.” The cloud of wasps widened and descended. “Uh, Eleanor. Could I — Maybe I should try it.”

“All right,” said Eleanor. She handed him the squirting, hissing nozzle and then, solemnly, the pith helmet, all the while keeping an eye on the insects and biting her lip. Almost immediately Nathan got the feeling that a blanket, or a net, was about to fall on him. Eleanor jumped backward with a cry, and Nathan was left to fight off the wasps with his lunatic weapon, which he did for fifteen valiant seconds. Then he ran, with Eleanor behind him. He tore around the front of the Parnells’ house, crossed the front lawn, and ran out onto Les Adieux Circle. At the center of the cul-de-sac lay a round patch of grass, planted with a single, frail oak tree. No one on the street knew who was supposed to mow this island and so it generally went unmown, and, according to the local children’s legend, it harbored a family of field rats. He and Eleanor fell into the weeds, and Nathan’s eyeglasses, which were photosensitive and had darkened in the afternoon sunshine, flew from his face. Dazzled, frightened, he rolled laughing in her rosy arms, and they embraced like a couple of fortunate castaways. Then, his heart pounding, he scrambled to his knees and sought the comforting weight, the protection of his glasses.

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.

Nathan had been prey, of course, to night fantasies of Eleanor Parnell. He concocted these happy narratives of seduction with the same thoroughness he brought to all his imaginary projects, such as Davor, the Golden Planet, and the vast turnpike, each of its rest stops and motor courts carefully named, that he had once mapped across two hundred pages of his loose-leaf notebook. He had envisioned Mrs. Parnell in all manner of empty rooms, and on desert beaches, and under a remote lean-to in the Far West, but during these trysts she remained demurely clothed. (At those crucial moments when Eleanor began to remove her garments, Nathan’s vision tended to falter.) But he had never imagined her in a black leather bikini, black cape, black boots, and black visor with a great pointed pair of black leather ears.

“I’m Batman,” Eleanor said, giving Nathan a dry kiss on the cheek. “You look wonderful,” she said to Mrs. Shapiro. She stepped back to examine Nathan, and her eyes narrowed within their moon-shaped black windows. “Nathan, you’re a — You’re a lamp. You’re a lamppost.”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

“That’s right,” said Nathan the Lamppost. “Ha, ha.” He could not say whether it was desire he felt for her or total, irredeemable embarrassment.

“Nathan,” said his mother. “You are not a lamp. Tell her.”

“Come in,” said Eleanor. “We’re in the Yellow Room. So what are you, Nathan?”

She drew them into the house, taking their hands in her own, as was her habit. The Yellow Room was filled, as Nathan had known it would be, with alcohol and disco music and adulthood in its most intimidating aspect. Two dozen men and women in costume — Nathan spotted a knight, a baseball player, and some sort of witch or hag — held their drinks and shouted mildly at each other over the agitated music, and five or six couples were dancing in the middle of the room. Ever since his mother had become a single woman she had increasingly involved herself, it seemed, with adults who liked to dance — a sight that for Nathan had not lost its novelty. He especially enjoyed watching the diligent men as they jogged in place.

“O.K., I give up,” Eleanor said. She turned to face him and Nathan stopped dead. “No, I don’t.” A pinched look crossed her face as she scanned his body, and she seemed to take in for the first time the poverty of Nathan’s lamentable concept. Nathan blushed and looked away, though this was partly because he feared he had already looked too many times at her breasts and at her radiant stomach.

“Are you supposed to be Thomas Edison? Is that it? Are you Thomas Alva Edison?”

Nathan forced himself to meet the humiliation of her sympathetic gaze. He opened his mouth to explain, to tell her that he was indeed the Wizard of Menlo Park, on the verge of stealing fire.

“He’s a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume,” said Mrs. Shapiro, crossing her arms and shrugging her tattooed shoulders. “What do you think of that?”

“Nathan,” said Eleanor, smiling at Nathan and taking his chin between the long fingers of her hand. “You’re such a strange young man.”

She laughed her magpie’s laugh, and in her hooded eyes Nathan read both pain and amusement, as though she already knew that he loved her. Then she turned away from him, and the two women put their arms around one another — a habit his mother had picked up from Eleanor, who had learned it from Major Ray, who put his arm around everybody. They went to the long table, draped by a black paper tablecloth, that served as the bar. Major Ray, wearing his Bruce Wayne smoking jacket, came over to hug Mrs. Shapiro. He said something to her, she laughed, and then he led her off to one side, so that Eleanor was left momentarily alone. For a moment Nathan, suffused with the careless, wild-haired courage of an inventor, contemplated Eleanor in her racy suit. He took a step toward her, then another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance — that was all. In the few seconds before he reached her bat-winged side he searched his memory for a suave line or smooth invitation from some movie, but all he could think of at that moment was Young Mr. Lincoln. “Eleanor,” he said, “I would like to dance with you in the worst way.”

Eleanor smiled, then leaned close to him and put her hand on his shoulder, her lips to his ear. For a long time she hesitated. “I know a couple of very bad ways,” she said at last, “but you’re too young for them, Nathan.”

“I suppose so,” he said, almost happily. He doffed his wire hat and set it down on the bar. There was now nothing on his face or his temples, and he felt light, almost headless, as he imagined he would feel on the brilliant evening he tried liquor for the first time. He took her hand, peacefully, and put it over his eyes, then covered her visor with his own damp palm. They stood a moment in this darkness. Then he said, “Guess who I am now.”

The Lost World

ONE SUMMER NIGHT NOT long after he turned sixteen, Nathan Shapiro drank four tall cans of Old English 800 and very soon found himself sitting in the front seat of a huge, banana-colored Ford LTD, with his friends Buster, Felix, and Tiger Montaine. They had swallowed the malt liquor while bathing in Buster French’s hot tub (the Frenches were from Los Angeles) and, as a result, were driving around boiled, steaming drunk, and in various stages of undress. Buster and Felix E. still had on their scant Speedo bathing suits, Tiger Montaine wore only a black mesh tank top and one sanitary sock, and Nathan, through some combination of glee and desperation, was naked from head to toe.

Two weeks before this, his mother, in a modest and homemade little ceremony, had married a man named Ed, a kindly, balding geologist from Idaho whom she had been dating for six months. And then just this evening, an hour before Nathan went over to Buster French’s house, Dr. Shapiro had telephoned jubilantly from Boston to announce the first pregnancy of his wife, Anne. Ricky, Nathan’s brother, had been living in Boston for a year now, and he went on and on over the phone about the little bubble of life that had blossomed in the vial of Anne’s home pregnancy test, which Ricky had taken to his room and placed between his soccer trophy and a photograph of his mother and father and Nathan standing in the wind at Nag’s Head.

All of these developments, though he did his best to welcome them, had left Nathan somewhat more than normally confused. He liked his new stepfather, who had been to Antarctica and Peru and Novaya Zemlya and returned with all sorts of hair-raising tales and queer stones; in his own way he was genuinely as excited as Ricky by the prospect of a new baby; and he was old enough to regard these changes as the inevitable outward expansion, as of an empire or a galaxy, of what once had been his family. He was happy for his parents in their new lives, the way he had always been happy for them, all along, as step by step they had dismantled their marriage; and so he was looking for a reason, an excuse to feel so unmoored, at once so angry and nostalgic; and alcohol seemed to be doing the job. He had no idea of where he and his friends were going, and it was not until they had been lurching aimlessly along the empty, fragrant streets of Huxley for what seemed like hours that he understood that they were headed — as Buster French put it — to the crib of Chaya Feldman.

Buster, driving Mrs. French’s car, made this declaration just as the drink, the deep velour seats, and the sweet smell of lawns flowing in through the open windows had begun to lull Nathan to sleep, and at the mention of Chaya’s name Nathan sat bolt upright. Buster then called Chaya a “skeezer,” which meant, as far as Nathan had been able to determine, that she was certain to permit them — all four of them — those dark liberties of which he was still very much ignorant, a notion which filled him only with wonder, and with solicitude for Chaya, whom he had known since he was six years old. She was a quiet girl, with a serious brown face and tangled hair, and her parents dressed her like a doll. He remembered her as someone who was always coming upon orphaned puppies and sparrow chicks with broken wings, in meadows and along roads where anyone else would have found nothing at all, and then trying imperfectly and with an eyedropper full of milk or sugar water to nurse them back to health. Her chief social art — until recently, at least — had been that, upon request, she could draw you an extremely realistic picture of an eyeball, with a sparkle on the iris, and fathomless pupils, and the finest tracery of veins.

They had never really been friends, but from time to time Nathan still thought about one distant afternoon when he and Chaya had somehow ended up playing together, in the fields behind the Huxley Interfaith Plexus. In the tall grass and the weeds they had played a game of Chaya’s own invention, called Planet of the Birds. Nathan had been an intergalactic castaway trying to survive in a windy, grassy world, and Chaya’s hair had tossed like a crest of feathers as she sang to him in a variety of cries. Chaya even claimed that when she grew up she was going to write a book set on this imaginary planet, whose name, she said, was Jadis; in the dust she scratched a map of its oceans and aeries. As with all of those blissful Sunday afternoons he had ever passed with some child with whom he never played again — every childhood has a dozen or so — his memory of this vanished afternoon was luminous and clear. In the three years since his liberation from Hebrew school he had seen Chaya twice, from a distance, coming out of a movie with her parents and her sister, Mara. Now Nathan was suddenly afraid for her, and he was afraid, for the first time ever, of the raucous bodies of his friends.

“Hey, Buster,” said Felix E. Scott, leaning forward so that for an instant his thigh lay smooth and cool against Nathan’s, “what you going to do to Chaya Feldman?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t already know, Felix E.,” said Buster, heaving the LTD into a small cul-de-sac which Nathan recognized, from some long-ago car pool, as Chaya’s street.

“Gut the engine,” suggested Tiger Montaine, who excelled in stealthy behavior. He ran his battered little Fiat on siphoned gasoline, filched cigarettes from the supermarket, and had for several months, with Nathan’s shocked connivance, been replacing Mrs. Shapiro’s codeine pills with extra-strength Tylenol, one at a time. “Don’t be waking up that mean Israelite daddy.” Chaya’s father, Moshe, an oncologist, had been born and raised in Israel, and was, in fact, the most humorless and stern of the one hundred and five fathers Nathan had known in his life. He had a dense black beard and crazy eyebrows, and it was widely half-believed that he kept an Uzi submachine gun, from his days in the army of Israel, hidden under his bed.

Buster turned off the ignition and the car began to glide silently toward Chaya’s house. The sudden calm cast a pall over the party and no one spoke; perhaps they were only being careful. Nathan pictured Chaya, asleep, her legs tangled under a light summer blanket; a skeezer! Then, because the ignition had been cut, the steering wheel locked, automatically, and before Buster could do anything they had hopped up over the curb, and came to a stop halfway across somebody’s front lawn.

“We’re there,” said Buster, and everyone laughed. “Now who’s going to go knocking on that skeezer’s window?”

“I’ll go,” said Nathan. “I know her.”

All of the other boys turned to regard him. Although Nathan felt fairly confident that his friends held him in a certain esteem — his naked presence among them was testimony to that — he had never distinguished himself for his daring, and in fact generally had to be persuaded even to perform minor feats such as dancing with Twanda Woods, or wearing his sneakers without any laces, an affectation which drove his mother out of her mind. And all of the boys knew, for Nathan had been unable, despite himself, to conceal it, that he had never made love to a girl. Emboldened by the malt liquor, he reached out and pushed Felix E. and Tiger in their faces, so that they fell backward into each other.

“I went to Hebrew school with her,” he explained.

Perhaps it was only their shock at this uncharacteristic display of fearlessness, but as Nathan stepped out of the car, he noticed a strange look in the eyes of his friends. It was a kind of blank, blinking puzzlement, as though the game had gone awry. Nathan wondered if the whole thing was a lie, if Chaya was not a skeezer at all, and the boys were all of them virgins, and none of them knew what fate awaited him as he began to make his way, naked, barefoot as a child, across the soft grass. He glanced toward the car, toward the three shadowy heads now drawn together in what looked like anxious parley, and almost turned back.

The next moment, however, he felt an entirely new kind of drunkenness; the air was warm against his skin, his lips, his forearms, and — incredibly — moonlight fell upon his penis. He wished that it were a mile to Chaya’s house, and not a few short steps, so that he might walk this way a little longer, like a fairy on a moonlit heath. Just this summer — just this month — his body had begun to grow lean, and he strode across the grass with the jangling gait of a young man, delighting in the purpose of his legs. He came to the Feldmans’ driveway and zigzagged quickly around to the left side of the house, where he was confronted with a gated, wooden fence. He stopped and contemplated the latticed gate. His breath came quickly now and there was sweat in his eyebrows; a drop spattered against his cheek. Just when he felt the water on his face he saw, through the spaces in the lattice, that a swimming pool, long and unusually narrow, lay beyond. It was not a pool for a pleasure swim; it was a lap pool, no wider than a pair of racing freestylers. Nathan remembered hearing that Dr. Feldman required himself and his family to swim a mile every day.

Pretending for the moment that he was tricksy Tiger Montaine, Nathan held his breath, eased up the steel latch, and slowly let open the gate, without a sound. He walked to the railroad ties that formed the near end of the lap pool and curled his toes over their edge. Thus perched he stood a moment, looking at the reflected moon on the black water and trying to force the tumult in his stomach to abate. He was so nervous that he forgot why he was nervous, and simply hovered at the edge of Chaya’s swimming pool, shaking. What was he doing here? Where were his clothes? He crouched and then slipped, like a deer fleeing a forest fire, into the cool water. He swam across the pool with a light and leisurely stroke. The exercise of his arms and heart in the cold water cleared his thoughts, and left him with a pleasant chlorine sting in his eyes, and when he arrived at the far side of the lap pool, he felt a greater trust in himself and in the general benevolence of a Tuesday night in July. He pulled himself from the pool and tiptoed around to the back of the Feldmans’ house. There were some bed-sheets, striped pillowcases, and a pair of bath towels hanging from a revolving clothesline in the backyard, and he considered taking a towel and tying it around his waist. But he felt, obscurely, that there was some advantage in his nakedness, an almost magical advantage that Tiger Montaine, for example, would never have surrendered, and he went over to the windows of the daylight basement in which Chaya had always had her room and stood a moment, with his hands on his wet hips, looking into the dark windows, preparing to wake her. The pool water streamed down his chest to his thighs, raising goosebumps along his legs and arms as Nathan drummed lightly on the glass, attempting a sort of suave seductive rhythm that came out, inexorably, as shave-and-a-hair-cut, two-bits.

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-radio,” 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.

His friends clambered upright when Nathan climbed back into the car; they were sober and embarrassed, and slapped Nathan constantly on the side of his head. They demanded to know what had happened to Nathan in Chaya’s room, and as they drove slowly home he made up a story, filled with sophisticated orgasms, and accurate anatomical impressions, and some bits of sexual dialog in half-remembered Hebrew. The other boys seemed on the whole to believe him, although they were surprised, and blamed malt liquor and hormonal agitation, when halfway through the tale Nathan suddenly burst into tears — then stopped, and resumed his lying account.

The next night Nathan sneaked out of the house after his mother and Ed had gone to sleep. He rode half an hour on his bicycle, through the darkness, to retrieve the letter from Jerusalem. There was no moon, and black shapes seemed to dart and loom across his path. He pulled up in front of the Feldmans’ house and contemplated it for a moment, straddling the hard bar of his bike. There was no sign of the towel he had dropped. He hated it that Chaya was not there in her house anymore, that she could so quickly be gone. He had a great curiosity to read what she had written him, but when he crept across to open up the little bird feeder, past the two long scars in the lawn from the wheels of the LTD, he found there was nothing inside it anymore but birdseed. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he whirled, half expecting to see Chaya, with the letter in her hand, laughing at him from behind the curtain in the low side window of her bedroom. He looked around on the grass, in the row of low shrubs, in the branches of the maple, but the letter was nowhere to be found, and after a few more minutes of baffled searching he got back on his bicycle and pedaled home. As he lay in bed that night he tried to imagine what she might have set down in her letter, what professions of love, what unhappiness, what nonsense, what shame, what news of the planet of her childhood. Then he fell asleep.

One Saturday a few weeks afterward, Nathan and his stepfather were in the kitchen, trying to work their way out of an incipient argument about whether or not tuna salad ought to be made with chopped gherkins, the way Ed’s grandmother had always made it. The dispute was merely the latest and perhaps the most trivial in what was becoming a disheartening routine for Nathan and Ed, and this particular volley of intransigent politeness had just begun to make Nathan’s stomach hurt — without inclining him to capitulate — when Mrs. Shapiro-Knipper entered the kitchen, carrying the Saturday mail.

“Two things,” she said, handing Nathan two envelopes, one of them tricolor and heartstopping.

“I’m going to put pickles,” said Ed. “You’ll see. It’s an acquired taste.”

This time, though everything Ed liked to eat, from raw oysters to pizza with pineapple and ham, seemed to be an acquired taste, Nathan let it pass. He rose from the kitchen table and carried the two letters out into the hallway and down to his bedroom. The second, in a plain business envelope, was evidently from his father, who had never before sent a letter to Nathan, and Nathan sat on his bed for a long time without opening them, just thinking about mailmen, and sealed envelopes, and the mysteries of the post.

He supposed that the neighbor had found Chaya’s letter hidden in the bird feeder before Nathan could retrieve it, and had finally gotten around to affixing a stamp to it and sending it along. Since, in the past weeks, Nathan had decided that he was in love with Chaya, and had been busy erecting all the necessary buttresses and towers and fluttering pennants in his imagination, the surprise arrival of her letter, which he had presumed lost, was a delicious addition to the structure, and he delayed as long as he could stand before finally tearing open the envelope.

Dear Nathan,

Sometimes it is very hot here. I have a thousand boyfriends. It is scary if a gun goes off in the night.

You made me laugh a lot of times in class I remember.

“Take it easy.”

Love,

Chaya

He was sharply disappointed. He hated the fact that he had made her laugh, for one; and it angered him, unreasonably, he knew, that all of the other things — and there were so few of them — she had written were hypothetical, as insubstantial as her Planet of the Birds, or as his parents’ marriage, or as the baby that was growing in his stepmother’s belly. He stuffed the bogus letter back into the envelope and tore it to pieces.

He was still feeling bad when at last he brought himself to open the letter from his father. It was a brief, barely legible note, on a sheet of legal paper. After some facetious chitchat about the Red Sox and Ricky’s karate lessons, Nathan’s father had written, “Your mother tells me that you have made some new friends and she is a little worried because you’re going around with your shoes untied. Tie your shoelaces. Don’t be angry with us, Nate. I know that everything seems different now but you have to get used to it. I will always love you as much as I will love any new Shapiros that come along.”

“Nathan?” his mother called to him through the door of his room. “Come on and eat.”

“I hate it with gherkins,” said Nathan, but his heart had gone out of the argument, and he stood up to join his mother and Ed for lunch. Hastily he dried his eyes, and scrambled to gather up the letter from his father and the scraps of Chaya’s letter that were scattered across his bed. It was as he laid them carefully in the Roi-Tan cigar box in which he kept his most important papers that he noticed the strange and beautiful postage stamp in the torn corner of the airmail envelope, and the postmark, printed in an alien script.