Free A Model World And Other Stories by Michael Chabon

as empty and quiet as a dark theater.
    “I want to leave,” she says, coming into the room and slamming the door behind her. “I’m not welcome here. You stay. They like you.”
    “You’re as welcome as you choose to be.”
    “No. Bullshit. They were laughing. They were laughing at me. I could tell. You were laughing at me, you bastard.”
    “You bitch.”
    I’m still sitting down, and Roksana steps so close to me now that the tips of her pointed black shoes come down, hard, on my toes. She throws a shadow across me.
    “Please, don’t,” I say.
    “I don’t know why I’m here.”
    “You’re here because it’s Bastille Day. You’re here to have fun. Ouch! Can’t you ever have fun?”
    Roksana looks down upon me, her eyes perfectly dry and black, and says that she hates fun more than anything else in this world, and I see that I misunderstood her when she said she didn’t know why she was here, because I thought that by “here” she just meant in Brittany.
    “You sound like Khomeini,” I say, trying to slide my pinched feet out from under her shoes, and reeling somehow offended, as though I were responsible for all of us, and for the fireworks and feast days and surfeits of the entire fun hemisphere. I manage to free my feet, but now she grabs me by the ears and pulls, and it hurts.
    “What do you know about Khomeini? What do you know about me? I am not fun. Do you think to run away from Iran was fun? From my mother? From the bodies of my family?”
    “I’m sorry,” I say, still angry. “Fine. Go. Go back. All I have to do is say the word to Mr. Immigration and you can go right back to the land of seriousness.”
    “You won’t.”
    “I might,” I say, and think, well, I could. But I can’t stand the frightened, stubborn way she has narrowed her eyes or the way the room and the air between us seems filled with the cheesy smell of blackmail. I look down and my gaze falls upon the blue on my shirt collar. “You said I should have charged you. I’m charging you now.”
    There is no human sound from downstairs, which means, I suppose, that the Heugels have been listening to our raised foreign voices. Roksana sits down beside me, rubbing softly now at the sides of my head. Her shoulders droop, and her little pink earrings swing back and forth like the clappers of two invisible bells.
    “What is Bastille Day, anyway?”
    “It’s like the Fourth of July.”
    “Beer and noise,” says my wife, the ayatollah of love, remembering last year in Texas with an unanswerable frown. This year, for us, there was no Fourth of July. I woke up on the fifth, feeling guilty and strange for having forgotten, and went alone to the Burger King on the Champs-Elysées.
    “I’m sorry, Brian Blumenthal,” she says at last. “I can’t do it.”
    Dinner, from discussion to drinks to preparation, from further drinks to further discussion to eating, from the time we passed around five kinds of cheese for dessert to the time we wearily threw down our napkins and drank a bit more, took five hours, and now, stunned by food, I’m drifting with Hervé and his family along the heights of the cliff town of Kerguen, where we’ve come to see the fireworks. Roksana has stayed behind. The last orange light of the day flows across the houses and across the faces of the Heugels, and in the coolness, the clouds of gnats and fireflies and the smell of the nearby farms grow denser. I’ve drunk too much brandy, understood too little talk, and, as night falls around us, I feel deaf and blind. Only my nose is alive, with mown fields, livestock, low tide.
    The townspeople are all out-of-doors, strolling from the place to the cliff’s edge and back, shaking hands, waiting for the display to begin; and the children and careful fathers fill the wait with match flares, loud firecracker pops and whistles and laughter, just as in the United States. But there’s that difference I always feel in French crowds, a lack of excitement that is