A Model World

OCEAN AVENUE (#ulink_9a5ee2f4-7c66-5bef-bc74-1be75ca6581c)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was a little irritated himself now. The memory of their last few days together had returned to him, despite all his heroic efforts over the past months to repress it utterly. He thought of the weekend following that bad review of their restaurant in the Times (they’d had a Balearic restaurant called Ibiza in San Clemente)—a review in which the critic had singled out his distressed-stucco interior and Suzette’s Majorcan paella, in particular, for censure. Since these were precisely the two points around which, in the course of opening the restaurant, they had constructed their most idiotic and horrible arguments, the unfavorable notice hit their already shaky relationship like a dumdum bullet, and Suzette went a little nuts. She didn’t show up at home or at Ibiza all the next day—so that poor hypersensitive little José had to do all the cooking—but instead disappeared into the haunts of physical culture. She worked out at the gym, went to Zahava’s class, had her body waxed, and then, to top it all off, rode her bicycle all the way to El Toro and back. When she finally came home she was in a mighty hormonal rage and suffered under the delusion that she could lift a thousand pounds and chew her way through vanadium steel. She claimed that Lazar had bankrupted her, among other outrageous and untrue assertions, and he went out for a beer to escape from her. By the time he returned, several hours later, she had moved out, taking with her only his belongings, as though she had come to see some fundamental inequity in their relationship—such as their having been switched at birth—and were attempting in this way to rectify it.

This loss, though painful, he would have been willing to suffer if it hadn’t included his collection of William Powelliana, which was then at its peak and contained everything from the checkered wingtips Powell wore in The Kennel Club Murder Case to Powell’s personal copy of the shooting script for Life with Father to a 1934 letter from Dashiell Hammett congratulating Powell on his interpretation of Nick Charles, which Lazar had managed to obtain from a Powell grand-nephew only minutes before the epistolary buzzards from the University of Texas tried to snap it up. Suzette sold the entire collection, at far less than its value, to that awful Kelso McNair up in Lawndale, who only annexed it to his vast empire of Myrna Loy memorabilia and locked it away in his vault. In retaliation Lazar went down the next morning to their safe-deposit box at Dana Point, removed all six of Suzette’s 1958 and ’59 Barbie Dolls, and sold them to a collectibles store up in Orange for not quite four thousand dollars, at which point she brought the first suit against him.

“Why is your face turning so red, Bobby?” said Dawn, who must have been all of twenty-two.

“Oh!” he said, not bothering even to sound sincere. “I just remembered. I have an appointment.”

“See you, Bobby,” said Al.

“See you,” he said, but he did not stand up.

“You don’t have to keep looking at her, anyway,” Al continued reasonably. “You can just look out at Ocean Avenue here, or at my lovely new wife—hi, sweetie—and act as though Suzette’s not there.”

“I know,” Lazar said, smiling at Dawn, then returning his eyes immediately to Suzette. “But I’d like to talk to her. No, really.”

So saying, he rose from his chair and walked, as nonchalantly as he could, toward her. He had always been awkward about crossing public space, and could not do it without feeling somehow cheesy and hucksterish, as though he were crossing a makeshift dais in a Legion Hall to accept a diploma from a bogus school of real estate; he worried that his pants were too tight across the seat, that his gait was hitched and dorky, that his hands swung chimpishly at his sides. Suzette was next in line now and studying the menu, even though he could have predicted, still, exactly what she would order: a decaf au lait and a wedge of frittata with two little cups of cucumber salsa. He came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder; the taps were intended to be devil-may-care and friendly, but of course he overdid them and they came off as the brusque importunities of a man with a bone to pick. Suzette turned around looking more irritated than ever, and when she saw who it was her dazzling green eyes grew tight little furrows at their corners.

“How are you?” said Lazar, daring to leave his hand on her shoulder, where, as though it were approaching c, very quickly it seemed to acquire a great deal of mass. He was so conscious of his hand on her damp, solid shoulder that he missed her first few words and finally had to withdraw it, blushing.

“… great. Everything’s really swell,” Suzette was saying, looking down at the place on her shoulder where his hand had just been. Had he laid a freshly boned breast of raw chicken there and then taken it away her expression could not have been more bemused. She turned away. “Hi, Norris,” she said to the lesbian woman behind the counter. “Just an espresso.”

“On a diet?” Lazar said, feeling his smile tighten.

“Not hungry,” she said. “You’ve gained a few pounds.”

“You could be right,” he said, and patted his stomach. Since he had thrown Suzette’s Borg bathroom scale onto the scrap heap along with her other belongings (thus leaving the apartment all but empty), he had no idea of how much he weighed, and, frankly, as he put it to himself, smiling all the while at his ex-lover, he did not give a rat’s ass. “I probably did. You look thinner than ever, really, Suze.”

“Here’s your espresso,” said Norris, smiling oddly at Lazar, as though they were old friends, and he was confused until he remembered that right after Suzette left him he’d run into this Norris at a party in Bluebird Canyon, and they had a short, bitter, drunken conversation about what it felt like when a woman left you, and Lazar impressed her by declaring, sagely, that it felt as though you’d arrived home to find that your dearest and most precious belongings in the world had been sold to a man from Lawndale.

“What about that money you owe me?” he said. The question was halfway out of his mouth before he realized it, and although he appended a hasty ha-ha at the finish, his jaw was clenched and he must have looked as if he was about to slug her.

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

“Wait!” he said. “Suzette!”

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

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

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

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

“Are you going?” he said.

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

“Albert!” said Dawn.

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

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

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

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

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

“Shush,” said Suzette.

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