Free A Model World And Other Stories by Michael Chabon Page A

not exactly boredom, but like an air of age, of deep habit, even among the children, as though these same five hundred people have been coming to stand and talk together forever and ever. A platform for dancing has been built, and it stands empty and brightly lighted at one end of the place , surrounded by loudspeakers and tricolors.
    We hear the first commanding bang from across the inlet and lift our eyes. The fireworks are fireworks; they spray and glitter and lightly move me like every display of fireworks I have seen in every July I remember, and lingering octopi of smoke float over our heads. During the applause and cries after the long last outburst, Hervé takes my arm and pulls me down along the cliffs, where we kick stones out into the water, and he surprises me by asking if there is anything wrong. I try to find the French for it; I tell him about all the useless gold in her downturned mouth.
    Hervé says, “Oh la la,” which I didn’t think Frenchmen ever really said; and in a language that is always wistful, it is the most wistful phrase that I have heard, and I start to cry.
    And then he says, “Why did you marry her?,” although he already knows the practical and bureaucratic answer to this question.
    We walk farther and stand high above the water on the last two feet of Kerguen. “She is not pretty. Elle a une drôle de tête . And she is so gloomy, it must be said. No, it’s a good thing you did, perhaps. I see that. But it’s an arrangement. No? And she understands. You are the one who makes the mess.”
    There are a few stray firecrackers, then a loud whomp, then laughter.
    “Sometimes,” he says, “it irritates me to see you made a fool.”
    “Thank you,” I say.
    “But then I remember that you’re an American.”
    They start the music down in the place , and before I can say anything, Hervé moves slowly back away from the edge, and looks down on the town. I go to stand beside him, and we watch the distant dancing to a French song that sounds like it’s from the fifties, a ballad about a girl named Aline. The kids hold each other and rock, barely, from foot to foot.
    “ Ah, le slow ,” says Hervé, tying the sleeves of his sweater more firmly around his neck. “This is an ancient song. It gives me nostalgia, this music.”
    “Me, too,” I say.
    “Do you dance with your wife?”
    “I could never get my arms all the way around her,” I say.
    We laugh. I sniffle and wipe my nose, and I’m on the point of asking him for advice, for the cool, sober shrug of French counsel that will brace me for the act of surrendering up my wife, when the wind shifts, and the reckless note of the saxophone is carried off to the east. In the sudden absence of music, it comes to me that Hervé has already told me what to do, and that I must follow, until the finish, the foolish policy of all my hopeless race.

Smoke
    I T WAS A FRIGID May morning at the end of a freak cold snap that killed all the daffodils on the lawns of the churches of Pittsburgh. Matt Magee sat in the front seat of his old red Metropolitan, struggling with the French cuffs of his best shirt. This was a deliberate and calm struggle. He did not relish the prospect of Drinkwater’s funeral, and he was in no hurry to go in. He had already sat and fiddled and listened to the radio and rubbed lovingly at his left shoulder for ten minutes in the parking lot of St. Stephen’s, watching the other mourners and the media arrive. Magee was not all that young anymore, and it seemed to him that he had been to a lot of funerals.
    On the evening that Eli Drinkwater wrecked his Fleetwood out on Mt. Nebo Road, Magee had been sent down to Buffalo after losing his third consecutive start, in the second inning, when he got a fastball up to a good right-handed hitter with the bases loaded and nobody out. He’d walked two batters and hit a third on the elbow, and then he had thrown the bad pitch after shaking off Drinkwater’s sign for a slider, because