Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [112]
I switched off the light and hobbled back out to James’s room. As I was about to switch off the light in there, as well, and take my leave of the haunted house of Leer, my gaze fell on the old manual Underwood parked on the desk, its black bulk ornamented, like an old-fashioned hearse, with a ribbon of acanthus leaves. I went over to the desk and yanked open the drawer into which James had stuffed the piece he’d been working on when we arrived. It consisted of ten or eleven tries at a first paragraph, each of them a sentence longer than the previous one, all of them heavily marked up and rearranged with arrows. The uppermost sheet went something like
ANGEL
She went wearing dark glasses to eat the Passover meal with his family, her pale famous hair tied up in a scarf patterned with cherries. They quarrelled in the cab on the way to his parents apartment and made up in the elevator. Her marriage had failed and his was failing. She wasn’t at all sure the time had come for her to meet his family and neither she knew was he. They had dared one another into taking this leap like children balanced on the railing of a bridge. The good things in her life had often proved illusory and she didn’t know if there was really deep water flowing down there below them or only a painted blue screen.
He told her that on this night in Egypt three thousand years ago the Angel of Death had passed over the homes of the Jews. On this night ten years ago his brother had killed himself and he warned her a candle would be burning on the table in the kitchen. She had never considered the idea of death as an angel and it appealed to her. It would be a workmanlike angel with a leather apron, shirtsleeves rolled, forearms rippling with tendon and muscle. Six years later just before she killed herself she would remember
By now the moaning of the elevator had sharpened to a regular rusted squeak, like the sound of an ancient iron water pump, and it was growing louder every second. The house shuddered and sighed and ticked like a heart. I didn’t have much time. I replaced the manuscript, closed the desk drawer, and headed for the door. As I went past the bed I happened to look over at the empty glass I’d noticed before on James’s nightstand, and saw now that it had an orange price sticker on its side that said 79¢. He’d stolen Sam’s memorial from the Warshaws’ kitchen. I went over to the nightstand and picked up the empty glass. Sometime during its twenty-four-hour career, I saw, a moth had flown down into the yahrzeit candle and been drowned in the pool of wax. I reached in and pried away the body of the errant moth and laid it in my palm. It was a small, unremarkable, dust-colored moth with tattered wings.
“Poor little fucker,” I said.
The elevator landed like the blow of a hammer on the ground floor of the house. There was a rattle of cagework and the squeal of hinges. I dropped the dead moth into the pocket of my shirt, turned out the light, and then ran out into the deep, silent, Episcopalian darkness, solemn and sweet-smelling as night on a golf course.
When I was safely in the car again I gunned the engine and rolled us away from the gates with their sober pair of pineapples.
“James,” I said, when we were halfway down the block and gaining speed. I checked the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see a wraithlike nightgown dancing in anger at the foot of the Leers’ driveway. There was nothing but moonlight, dark hedgerows, and a distant black vanishing point. “Are you Jewish?”
“Sort of he said. He was sitting in the backseat, reunited with his knapsack, looking wide awake. “I mean, yes, I am, but my grandparents—they kind of, I don’t know. Got rid of it, I guess.”
“I always thought—all that Catholicism in your stories—”
“Nah. I just like how twisted that Catholic stuff can get.”
“And then tonight I had you figured, for Episcopal