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

took me to his messy room at the Kon-Tiki Motor Lodge, but he showed not the faintest recognition now, and in fact ignored both Levine and me completely. After five minutes we looked at each other and rose simultaneously to our feet.
    “Just tell Professor Baldwin I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Levine.
    “Sure thing,” said Mehmet Monsour, waving us brightly away.
    We went to the door and were about to go out when Professor Baldwin came to retrieve us. His hands were in the pockets of his gray cardigan, and he was wearing the cool, bored demeanor someone in a store attempts to adopt when he has just broken an expensive item. He looked as though he were going to whistle a little song.
    “Where are you going?” he said mildly.
    “Oh,” said Levine. “Nowhere.”
    “We just got here,” I said. “Just this minute. How are you, Professor Baldwin?”
    “We don’t have to stay for dinner,” said Levine. “We can leave right now.” Faced with the substance and strife-haunted eyes of his chairman, and not just his disembodied voice on the phone, Levine felt his feet begin to grow a little cold.
    “Nonsense. Julia’s just getting dressed. Have you met Mehmet? Met Mehmet. I bet you haven’t met Mehmet yet.” He gave a small laugh, and I could see that he mistakenly felt the rift in his marriage to have been opened and occupied by Mehmet Monsour, and that he consequently liked to make fun of his visiting, untenured colleague. I felt sorry for Baldwin all at once and wished that I hadn’t come. He brought us back into the living room, and then we four sat and watched the television, wondering what it might be like to become a woman. No one spoke. I waited for Jewel to emerge, trying to guess which outfit she would wear. She had a pair of old Levi’s I liked, with a rip in the seat which showed bare skin when she bent forward.
    “Mr. Smith!” she cried when she appeared at last, in a purple sarong, and took my hand. “Mr. Levine! It’s so good to see you!” She attempted, as had her husband, to seem as though she had never in her life raised her voice, let alone in the past quarter of an hour, but her cordiality was brittle, sarcastic, and even a little frightening, as though she were doing Shaw.
    “Now, if you gentlemen will just give me twenty minutes,” she said, going around to Mehmet Monsour’s chair to give his gray head a fond pat. “Everything’s almost done.”
    “Let me help you, Mrs. Baldwin,” I said.
    “Good,” said Professor Baldwin. “Levine, let’s you and I sit in my office for a few minutes and talk.”
    Levine stood instantly, as though summoned to the bench, and followed Professor Baldwin down the hall and into the small room at the back of the house where Baldwin did his revolutionary work on the so-called greenhouse effect. The room looked out over the canyon, toward the mountains, and was furnished with a single cinder-block-and-plank bookcase on which were massed perhaps a hundred books. A much wider plank spanned two sawhorses to make the professor’s desk, at which he sat in a Barcelona chair that had belonged to his father-in-law, an architect. There was only a kitchen step stool in the corner for Levine. Although relatively young for a full professor and a laureate of atmospheric science, Baldwin possessed the hard-won virtues of an older man: caution, resignation, frugality. The few strands of black hair on his prematurely lunar head seemed, like his spare office, like his marriage, to be the conscious result of an effort to get by with as little as possible, as though he were preparing for the imminent decline of the biosphere. His only indulgence, aside from a small framed photograph of his wife in a parka on a Falkland island, was his computer—an expensive machine capable of animating color images in three dimensions, which he had bought with some of the money from his MacArthur Fellowship, and which was now running a long, slow simulation of worldwide ozone