Read Online A Model World And Other Stories by Michael Chabon - Free Book Online Page A

T-shirt and, after I gave him the money for a croissant, became my friend. Though he looks kind of intellectual and severe—big forehead, pointy chin, rimless glasses, and a crew cut—it turns out that he has no interests other than the usual nonintellectual ones. He loves to laugh and to swear in English—the only English he knows. He and Roksana don’t like each other very much, although neither would ever say so. They can barely speak to each other, anyway. Hervé is arrogant, callous, and I often feel myself getting on his nerves, but he knows his garage bands of the late sixties, and he knows the city, and sometimes he drives me around Paris on the back of his motor scooter, his thin scarf flapping in my face. I think that if I met someone like Hervé in America, I wouldn’t make friends with him, but there are no people like him in America. And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn’t have to understand what you feel, and I don’t expect it. It’s enough if he understands what you just said.
    We can smell the sea now, and I look around eagerly at the tiny cars, the embracing families, the ancient candy machine rusting next to the men’s room, and at the low brown houses and scrub fields that surround the train station.
    “She is there,” says Hervé. He pushes his stern little glasses up his nose, drops his Adidas duffel. When his mother reaches us, he takes her in his arms, gets it on both cheeks, and then presents us. His mother is short, a bit wrinkled but fine-featured, with motionless hair.
    “Ah, the little Americans,” she says uncertainly. “Brine.”
    “Brian. Brian Blumenthal,” says Hervé, fairly well. “And—Roksana—Khairzada.”
    “Brine,” says Madame Heugel, and she takes my hand, a complex expression on her face—a smile-frown, or a polite sneer. Or just a face that is uncomfortable with our names, and with our presence, and with my wife, and with her own son. whom, I know, she considers lazy, sly, and overly fond of Americans, particularly of American girls.
    She asks her son if we speak French; I answer for both of us. “I do, my wife regrets that she doesn’t.” Then Hervé takes her arm and off they go, speaking French, and we follow.
    “She hates me,” Roksana says quietly.
    “No, she doesn’t. Why do you say that?”
    “It’s all right, I don’t care. She can hate me.”
    I try to pull her to me, and I’m about to say again those three helpless words when she stops short.
    “Look,” she says.
    Behind the scratched display window of the candy machine is a brand of chocolate bar with an English name: Big Nuts. Roksana laughs. I buy one and put it in my pocket, and when we reach the Heugel Renault, I am still smiling.
    “Oh, what beautiful teeth,” says Madame Heugel.
    “Yes, they’re like that—American teeth,” says Hervé.
    We eat outside, at a long table, and lunch is a mountain of steamed shrimp, a stacked cord of fresh asparagus, cider, and bread. Hervé’s father, who looks like Hervé—thin with a large head and a sharp nose—tells us in French about his trip to New York City in 1968. I am delighted by his account of a misadventure in “les Bronx,” and everything goes well until I notice that my plate is the only one on which mounts a pile of tails, shells, rosy filaments, and shrimp heads; Hervé and his parents are eating the entire shrimp, unpeeled. Roksana will not eat shrimp.
    “No one told me what kind of a neighborhood I would have to walk through to get to the Cloisters,” says Monsieur Heugel, struggling with the word. He has shot five small fowl that morning and seems to be in fine spirits; I saw the brown and iridescent-green pile of birds on the kitchen table. “Harlem! Think of that! Full of blacks! Did I care?”
    “Yes,” Hervé says.
    “No, I did not. I walked right through. On my way home I had an appetite, I stopped at a little coffee shop, I bought a sandwich, I sat right down on the