Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [102]
“I don’t know. He said he wanted to talk to you. Grady, are you coming home?”
The back door rattled and slammed, and a moment later Emily came into the kitchen, reeking of tobacco, makeup smeared into a Pierrot mask, moving stiff-jointed and half sideways like a spooked cat. As she brushed past me our eyes met, and looking into those two blurred dark circles, I felt like one of August Van Zorn’s heroes, in the instant before his hapless narrative broke off with a final terrible dash. There was nothing in them. It was an empty gaze, a hole in the fabric of the world.
“Get out,” she said.
I hefted James’s knapsack and slung the stolen jacket over my shoulder. I lifted the receiver to my lips.
“I was just leaving,” I said.
AS I MADE MY WAY along the avenue of elm trees I felt the wheels of the Galaxie bump abruptly up and over something big. There was a sickening instant of slippage when I hit the brakes. I clambered out of the car and went around to the back, where, in the bloody glow of the taillights, I found a kind of distended loop of cable stretched across the roadbed, frayed badly at one end. I had run over Grossman. At first I panicked and got back into the car, intending just to drive away and never come back and keep on driving until I hit Wood Buffalo or Uranium City. I put the car in gear, but ten yards farther along the road I stopped again and went back to gather up the surprisingly heavy remainder of Grossman. Nobody in that house, I thought, would ever miss this ruinous and unreliable member of the family. So I carried him over to the car, opened the trunk, and pitched him in there with the tuba and Doctor Dee.
OF THE DRIVE BACK to Pittsburgh I remember only the struggle to roll three joints one-handed and the intermittent companionship of a radio station, playing a tribute to Lennie Tristano, that turned out to be WABI, the low-watt voice of old Coxley College, drifting in on some ghostly undertow in the ether. Around two o’clock I pulled off the deserted parkway and headed up toward Squirrel Hill. I was going home, but I didn’t intend to stay there longer than it would take me to retrieve Crabtree—assuming he was still operative. I had decided to try something reckless, senseless, and stupid, and in any such attempt there could be no more useful companion than Terry Crabtree.
My house was ablaze in the middle of our slumbering street, lit up like a landing strip. As I came up the front walk I heard the racy laughter of a saxophone, and the glass in the windows hummed a walking bass line. My house was crawling with writers. There were writers in the living room, with their shoes kicked off, watching one another dance. There were writers in the kitchen, making conversation that whip-sawed wildly between comely falsehood and foul-smelling truths, flicking their cigarette ash into the mouths of beer cans. There were a half dozen more of them stretched out on the floor of the television room, arranged in a worshipful manner around a small grocery bag filled with ragweed marijuana, watching Ghidrah take apart Tokyo. On the sofa behind them a pair of my students, young writers of the Angry School who pierced their lips and favored iron-buckled storm-trooper footwear, had welded themselves into a kind of impromptu David Smith. On the stairs leading up to my bedroom sat three New York agents, better dressed and less drunk than the writers, exchanging among themselves delicate constructions of confidentiality and disinformation. And there were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworks and the Bessemer converter of love.
There was only one writer in my office. She was sitting alone on the Honor Bilt, with the door closed, her knees pulled up under her sweater so that the pointy tips of her boots peeked out from under the