A Model World And Other Stories by Michael Chabon Page B

other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.
    “I slept in my hat,” I said. “As usual. Don’t ever let your life get to the point where you have to sleep with your hat on.”
    “Come on in. It’s nice and warm.”
    “I know it is.”
    I followed her into the house and down her long front hallway to the kitchen, where the radio played and there was a smell of bay leaf, onion, and fresh dirt.
    “I’m making lentil soup,” she said, turning to the stove and peering into a cast-iron pot. In the bulky sweater Kim looked plump and wifely; she who was so thin that Harry would sometimes clean and jerk her over his head and spin around calling, “Choppers! Incoming wounded!” At the time she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds. “This’ll be the last lentil soup of the winter, I guess.”
    “Looks like it.”
    “You can have some when it’s ready.”
    “Thanks.”
    “If you promise not to mention Harry.”
    “I can promise that,” I said.
    The old pink radio on the kitchen table emitted a familiar promo. Two bars of the psycho-kazoo opening to “Crosstown Traffic,” followed by the synthesized effect of a starship’s landing, and then my own voice, filtered and phased, sounding as though I were a twenty-seven-foot black man about to get very angry. “WDAN!” said my disturbing voice. “Huge Music!”
    “ You’re the one who listens,” I said. In general I pretended that it did not trouble me to labor in the ratings cellar, but at the discovery that Kim tuned in to that doomed little station, I was moved and took it as incontestable proof of her rightness for me.
    “Harry makes me,” she said.
    She carefully straddled a kitchen chair and motioned for me to do the same. I sat. I looked at the ashtray between us, in which there were fifteen or sixteen bent butts. Kim smoked far too much, even for a waitress. Now she lit another.
    “I’m going to have to stop,” she said, in a sad little voice, as though it had never occurred to her before.
    “Sure you are.”
    “You’ll see,” she said. “Was he trashed when you got home?”
    “Oh, no, not really,” I said.
    “Don’t lie.”
    “He was breaking my mother’s dishes in the basement.”
    “Oh, boy.”
    “And he had the heat on.”
    She put down her cigarette, and her brown eyes got very wide and surprised.
    Then she laughed, without sarcasm, with a happiness so genuine that I was taken aback. It was deep and caroling laughter, and it seemed to invite me to turn Harry, the idea of Harry, into a risible fool, to flatten him into a cartoon character and laugh him right out of her affections. This was the simple task before me.
    “What’s so funny?” I said; the question sounded more harsh than I had intended.
    “Nothing,” said Kim. She looked down at the coal of her cigarette and bit her lip.
    “Kimberly Ellen Donna Marie Trilby,” I said. I went over to her chair and knelt on the floor beside her. She sat, looking at her cigarette and calmly crying. I didn’t know why she was crying, whether because Harry was gone or because I was still there, but I felt very sorry for her. Once in a while you will see a waitress like that, crying at the back of a restaurant or in the hallway by the phone, staring down at a monogrammed matchbook in her fingers, and consider for a second or two the untold hardness of a waitress’s life. I reached around and pulled her to me. There followed the briefest of struggles before she fell sprawling into my arms.
    “Come with me,” she said, after a minute or two. She stood and led me down the hallway and into her bedroom. Her gait was too brisk to be seductive; she had some business to attend to. I had been in her bedroom many times before, had felt the thrill of seeing her white bedclothes and rows of empty shoes, but never with this acute a sense of being suffered, like a smelly old dog on a miserable night, just this once allowed to sleep indoors, on the