Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [119]
“I know you can, Terry, but—”
“We have to, Tripp.” His expression was oddly grave. “I—I don’t—I wouldn’t want anything to—anything bad to happen to James.” He glanced at me, a little sheepishly, then punched me on the arm. “What are you looking at? Fuck you.”
“Nothing,” I said.
“I like him.”
“Yeah, I guess I like him, too,” I said. We started up the walk to the house. “I’ll ask Hannah if we can borrow her car.”
“It seems to me that girl would let you borrow her pancreas,” observed Crabtree. He looked at me, then; it was the first close examination he had given me all morning. He wasn’t, I thought, especially impressed by what he saw. The wind had picked up, and I shivered, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that when Terry Crabtree gazed at me with such an air of cool and unconcerned appraisal he was no longer really seeing me, his oldest friend, in whom all the outlandish promises of life and every chance for glory intimately and anciently inhered. He was seeing only the pot-addled author of a bloated, boneless, half-imaginary two-thousand-page kraken of a novel, a hoax whose trusting and credulous pursuit had cost him tens upon tens of thousands of dollars and, seemingly, his career.
“Oh, hey,” he remembered to ask me, “what’s going on with the two of you, anyway?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve been trying my best to leave her alone.”
“Amazing,” said Crabtree.
The front door was open, and deep in the house I heard the melancholy wheezing of an accordion. Hannah was awake and making breakfast; there was a clamor of pots from the kitchen. I was suddenly afraid of having to face her, and I wondered at this; and then in the next instant I realized that what I feared was not Hannah but her opinion of Wonder Boys. I felt intimations of disaster there; my book was at last going forth into the world, not, as I’d always imagined, like a great black streamlined locomotive, fittings aglint, trailing tri-colored bunting, its steel wheels throwing sparks; but rather by accident, and at the wrong time, a half-ton pickup with no brakes, abruptly jarred loose from its blocks in the garage and rolling backward down a long steep hill.
“Crabtree,” I said, stopping him at the threshold. “We don’t even know Vernon’s real name. ‘Vernon Hardapple’—we just made that up.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Crabtree looked bemused. I could see he was trying to assemble the things we did know about the roostery high-haired man with the terrible purple scar on his face. “You know,” he said, after a moment, “if you think about it, we kind of made the whole guy up.”
“No wonder he fucked us over, then,” I said.
HANNAH GREEN AND THE inevitable Jeff were cracking eggs into a crockery bowl and peeling strips of bacon from the package. Heartbroken Argentine music came blowing up the stairs from the basement, and as we walked into the kitchen we found Jeff lecturing a skeptical Hannah on the origins of the tango in the death grip and knife play of latent homosexual love, an argument which I recognized as cribbed from old George Borges. Maybe, I thought, this Jeff character had something to recommend him; there was a certain thematic aptness, after all, in trying to make a girl through the plagiarism of Borges.
“I mean, look at the way they dance—it’s all about sodomy,” he was saying, charmingly.
“Get out of here,” said Hannah, picking large fragments of eggshell out of the bowl.
“I’m serious.”
“Jeff,” said Crabtree, shaking his head sadly. “Jeff, we have to have a talk.”
“Oh, hi!” said Hannah, looking up. She gave me an awkward, oddly formal wave. She had on a long purple nightshirt over her cracked red boots. Her index finger wore a smart eggshell hat. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks pink, and when she spoke she sounded well-rested and strong and a bit over-eager, like someone whose fever has just broken. “You fellas want some eggs?”
I shook my head and then pointed toward the basement door.
“Can I talk to you a sec, Hannah?” I said.
“Was that you snoring, man?” I heard Jeff say to Crabtree as we started