Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [107]
“Jesus,” I said, keeping my voice low. “There must be fifty or sixty windows on that thing, Crabtree. How are we going to find his?”
“They keep him chained up in the basement, remember? We just have to find the cellar door.”
“If he was telling the truth,” I reminded him. “About anything.”
“If he wasn’t telling the truth about anything,” said Crabtree, “then what the fuck are we doing here?”
“Good point,” I said.
We started up the drive to the house, and as we drew closer I saw a long, thin ribbon of light stretched across the trees off to the left. Somewhere upstairs, on the far side of the house, a lamp was burning in a window.
“They’re still awake,” I said, pointing. “His parents.”
“They’re probably up filing their teeth,” said Crabtree, whose genuine sympathy and mounting desire for James Leer were characteristically tempered with ridicule. “Come on.”
I followed him around the near end of the house and we went into the backyard. He seemed to think that he knew where he was going. The gravel crunched loudly under my feet and I tried to get that toe-heel, toe-heel Indian stealth walk going, but it was too painful, and in the end I just tried to be quick about it.
There was no cellar door, or evidence of anything like a cellar, but there was a ground floor, an exposed cement foundation at the back of the house with two windows let into it, on either side of a glass-paned door. The windows were neatly curtained with dotted swiss, brightly lit from within. On the other side of the door a woman was singing, in a soft low rueful voice.
Why should I care
Though he gave me the air?
Why should I cry, heave a sigh, and wonder why?
And wonder why?
“Doris Day,” said Crabtree.
I smiled at him; he nodded.
“James Leer,” we said.
I drummed lightly on the glass, and after a few seconds’ delay James Leer opened the door. He was wearing a pair of red pajamas, too short in the leg and cuff, sagging in the seat, shot through with holes, ink-stained. His hair was mussed and his eyes were bright and somehow he didn’t seem very surprised to see us. At first, actually, he didn’t appear even to recognize us. He scratched at the back of his neck with the sharpened end of a pencil and blinked his eyes.
“Hey,” he said, tossing his head as if shaking off the remnants of a dream. “What are you guys doing here?”
“We’re springing you, Leer,” said Crabtree. “Get some pants on.”
“I can’t believe you made fun of my bathrobe,” I said.
We pushed past him, into a room that I’d been picturing to myself as a punitive cell: naked lightbulbs, an iron cot in one corner draped with a tattered coverlet, Sheetrock walls unadorned except for a thin splotchy coat of white paint. Instead we found ourselves standing in a large old cellar, more or less finished and as wide as the house itself, inhaling a comforting, subterranean smell of river mud, secondhand books, and moldering blankets. The low ceiling was held up by massive oak beams, and the floor had been painted, in the era when this was a fashionable effect for servants’ quarters, to look as though it were covered by a red Persian rug. This false carpet had been worn down to gray floorboard for the most part, but in the corners and along the edges of the room there were still bright patches of geometry and blood. The room was lit by a dozen antique electric candelabras, some of them as tall as James, a grove of gilded and iron black trees connected to a pair of wall outlets by an elf knot of extension cords. The walls, not Sheetrock but some kind of heavy gray masonry, were lined with books, piled high into twisting stairways, sagging arches, spindly Gaudí steeples, and above the spires of this paper city hung the still photographs, posters, and other movie ephemera James and his obsession had managed to amass. To the right of the door, under a black velvet canopy that sagged, baroque, enormous, and rotten with wormholes, stood James’s bed, like a foundered galleon. Beside the giant bed there was a nightstand, with a top of pink marble