A Model World And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

call him a pig with delicacy and tenderness, this did not immediately alarm Lazar. “You sold my dolls,” she said, dreamily, though of course she knew this perfectly well, and had known it for quite some time. Only now, he could see, it was all coming back to her, the memory of the cruel things they had said, of the tired, leering faces of the lawyers, of the acerbic envoi of the county judge dismissing all their suits and countersuits, of the day they had met for the last time in the empty building that had been their restaurant, amid the bare fixtures, the exposed wires, the crumbs of plaster on the floor; of the rancor that from the first had been the constant flower of their love. “You sold their things, too,” she remembered. “All of their gowns and pumps and little swimwear.”
    “I was just trying to get back at you.”
    “For what? For making sure I at least got something out of all the time I wasted on you?”
    “Take it easy, Suze.”
    “And then to lie about how much you got for them? Four thousand dollars!”
    “At first my lawyers instructed me to lie about it,” he lied.
    “Kravitz! Di Martino! Those sleazy, lizardy, shystery old fat guys! Oh, you pigs!”
    Now she was on her feet, and everyone out on the patio had turned with great interest to regard them. He realized, or rather remembered, that he had strayed into dangerous territory here, that Suzette had a passion for making scenes in restaurants. This is how it was, said a voice within Lazar—a gloomy, condemnatory voice—this is what you’ve been missing. He saw the odd angle at which she was holding her cup of coffee, and he hoped against hope that she did not intend to splash his face with espresso. She was one of those women who like to hurl beverages.
    “Don’t tell me,” he said, despite himself, his voice coated with the most unctuous sarcasm, “you’re reckoning with me again.”
    You could see her consulting with herself about trajectories and wind shear and beverage velocity and other such technical considerations—collecting all the necessary data, and courage—and then she let fly. The cup sailed past Lazar’s head, and he just had time to begin a tolerant, superior smile, and to uncurl partially the middle finger of his right hand, before the cup bounced off the low wall beside him and ricocheted into his face.
    Suzette looked startled for a moment, registering this as one registers an ace in tennis or golf, and then laughed the happy laugh of a lucky shot. As the unmerciful people on the patio applauded—oh, but that made Lazar angry—Suzette turned on her heel and, wearing a maddening smile, strode balletically off the patio of the café, out into the middle of Ocean Avenue. Lazar scrambled up from his chair and went after her, cold coffee running in thin fingers down his cheeks. Neither of them bothered to look where they were going; they trusted, in those last couple of seconds before he caught her and kissed her hollow cheek, that they would not be met by some hurtling bus or other accident.

A Model World
    M Y FRIEND LEVINE HAD only a few months to go on his doctoral dissertation, but when, one Sunday afternoon at Acres or Books, he came upon the little black paperback by Dr. Frank J. Kemp, he decided almost immediately to plagiarize it. It was lying at the bottom of a whiskey crate full of old numbers of the Evergreen Review , which he had been examining intently because he was trying to get a woman named Betty, who liked the poetry of Gregory Corso, to fall in love with him; he was overexuberant and unlucky in love and had just resolved—for example—to grow some beatnik facial hair. The little book was marked on the outside neither front nor back; it was a plain, black square. Levine picked it up only because he had been lonely for a long time and he idly hoped, on the basis of its anonymous cover, that it might contain salacious material. When he opened it to its title page, he received an indelible shock.