Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [121]
I pretended to become indignant. “It wouldn’t read half as well,” I said, sounding more dishonest to myself than ever. “I’m sure of that.”
Hannah nodded, but she didn’t meet my eyes, and the tips of her ears turned red. She was embarrassed for me.
“Wait till you finish it,” I said. “You’ll see.”
Again she didn’t reply, but now she managed to bring herself to look at me, and her face was the face of a woman who, having at the last moment discovered that all of her fiancé’s claims and bona fides were false, all of his credentials forged, has unpacked her trunks and cashed in her ticket and now must tell him quickly that she will not sail away. There was pity there, and resentment, and a Daughter-of-Utah hardness that said, Enough’s enough. However far she’d gotten in her reading last night and this morning, the thought of pressing onward to the end was obviously too onerous for her even to contemplate.
“Anyway,” I said, glancing away. I cleared my throat. It was my turn to be embarrassed. “Is it all right about the car?”
“Of course,” she said, with cruel charity and a backward wave of her hand. “Keys are on the dresser.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. You guys take good care of James, now.”
“We will.” I turned away. “You betcha.”
“Grady,” she said.
I looked back, and she held out the manuscript to me as though returning a ring. I took it, grabbed the keys, and started back up the stairs.
SO CRABTREE AND I undertook a final pilgrimage to the Hi-Hat, provincial capital of the empire of our friendship throughout the long period of its decline. It was the only place we could think of to go looking for the Shadow, that implacable high-haired hobgoblin we’d invented and set loose on Friday night. At his own insistence Crabtree was behind the wheel, and going too fast. He drove Hannah’s rattling old Renault like a Frenchman, upshifting and downshifting as though linked in an intimate horsemanlike, relationship to the engine. In his hands and eyes and in the cant of his thin shoulders there was a cool, expectant agitation I hadn’t seen in years. For the moment, at least, he seemed to have managed to pole his own raft out of the fog of failure, and other such bad habits, in whose midst we’d been floating now for so long. As he drove, drumming on the dash, sucking on a Kool, I could see that he was going over all the accidents, likelihoods, and possible outcomes of this expedition, considering alternate strategies and tactics. Ordinarily it would have made me glad to see him thus alive with all the narrative possibilities of our trouble. It was like old times; he was writing his name in water. But whenever we stopped for a red light he would glance over at me, and his expression would go blank, incredulous, faintly pitying, as if I were only a bedraggled hitchhiker picked up in a rainstorm on the road between Zilchburg and Palookaville: a nobody headed nowhere, smelling vaguely of wet wool. I had the feeling that if our present venture failed I would not play a central role in his next attempt to rescue James Leer.
I rode shotgun, watching the stolid brick houses of Pittsburgh go past, feeling stunned and useless in the wake of Hannah’s criticism, and hoping nevertheless to retrieve the Baggie of dope I’d left in the glove compartment of the Galaxie. We were halfway to the Hill before I became aware that I was still clutching the manuscript of Wonder Boys in my hands, crinkling its tide page with my fingers. No wonder I looked so pathetic to Crabtree, a broken down old illusionist carrying his moth-eaten scarves, greasy tarot cards, and amazed testimonials from defunct czars and countesses in a paper suitcase on his lap. I’d never intended to bring the thing along, and I had a feeling that it was probably a mistake to have done so; but I hadn’t intended not to bring it along, either, and although I felt embarrassed there was, as always, something reassuring about the watermelon weight of it on my thighs. Neither of us said a word.
The storefronts