Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [135]
I DIDN’T WANT TO attract attention, slipping into the auditorium of Thaw Hall, and so I climbed the stairs to the balcony and took a seat at the back. There were fewer people here to listen to Walter Gaskell deliver his customary valedictory, however, than there’d been two nights earlier for Q.’s lecture, and after a few minutes I was able to move all the way down to the loge, to the very last seat on the left. Pinned by an arabesque button to the wall beside my head hung one end of a deep velour swag, heavy with dust. I pressed myself against it, inhaling its thick smell of mildewed flag, and gazed out over the five hundred heads below, trying to pick out Sara’s.
Crabtree I spotted right away, in the front row, slouched, in shirtsleeves, watching Walter with a very sleepy and complacent look on his face. If he were a cat he would have been licking the blood and feathers from his whiskers. He had dressed James for the assembly, I saw, in his own mushroom-colored sport jacket, worn over my old flannel shirt. James was sitting right there beside him, spine erect, hands folded politely in his lap, his earnest Adam’s apple working its way up and down as he drank in the urbane good counsel of his queer old dean—the standard Walter Gaskell homily, in that room full of agents and editors, to go forth and work hard at one’s craft, always without regard to such vulgar concerns as finding an agent or an editor.
When someone at the end of their row coughed, James turned, and happened to look up, and spotted me in my corner. I was startled: I’d felt almost safe, lurking there like John Wilkes Booth behind the dusty velour drape and the scrim of my own loneliness. James’s eyes got very wide, and he was about to turn and give Crabtree a poke in the ribs, but I put a finger to my lips and drew a pleat of dusty velour sideways across my face. Although he looked doubtful, he nodded, solemnly, and turned back to the stage. At the sight of James in Crabtree’s jacket I experienced a sharp pang of abandonment, out of all proportion to the unremarkable circumstance of male lovers sharing clothes. I felt suddenly bereft not only of Crabtree and his love but of my earliest bright image of myself, of my trajectory across the world. It’s not fashionable, I know, in this unromantic age, for a reasonably straight man to think of finding his destiny in the love of another man, but that was how I’d always thought of Crabtree. I guess you could say that in a strange sort of way I’d always believed that Crabtree was my man, and I was his. It was only proper, I supposed, for the first thing in my life that had ever felt right to be the last one to be proven wrong.
In any case, I hadn’t come here to find Crabtree. I sat forward in my seat and resumed my inspection of the people in the endless rows below me, looking for Sara Gaskell. I had managed for the moment to forget about my breathing, but the drug was still at work in my brain and now I seemed to have become overconscious of the muscles and machinery of my throat. I was thinking so intently about the swallowing reflex that it became impossible for me to swallow. I couldn’t find Sara, and all that scanning of the shifting mass of heads down there below me made me feel sick.
“Looking for someone?”
It was Carrie McWhirty, the long-suffering author of Liza and the Cat People. She was a prematurely motherly girl, with steel-rimmed glasses through which she scowled at me, looking more than a little revolted. I wondered if there were already stories going around.
“Carrie,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I know,” she said, sounding sad as a bassoon. “Were you looking for Hannah?” She pointed. “She’s over there.”
I knew that I shouldn’t have, but—so—I looked. Hannah was sitting several rows from the stage, off to the right-hand side of the orchestra, on the aisle. She was nodding her head, every so often, and smirking into her cupped hand, and I could see