Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [14]
“I’m so sorry,” she said, blushing all the way down to the backs of her freckled arms. “It’s these goddamned shoes. I don’t know how anyone can walk on these things.”
“Practice,” said Miss Sloviak.
“I need to talk to you,” I told Sara, under my breath. “Now.”
“That’s funny,” said Sara, in her everyday, bantering tone. She didn’t look at me, but instead aimed a sardonic smile at Crabtree, whom she knew to be in on our secret. “I need to talk to you, too.”
“I think he needs to talk to you more,” said Crabtree, handing her his coat and Miss Sloviak’s.
“I doubt it,” said Sara. The dress—a fairly amorphous black rayon number with a boxy bodice and cap sleeves—rode up a little behind and clung to the fabric of her panty hose and as she clattered around the foyer, arms and throat bare, ankles wobbling, hair piled atop her head with the relative haphazardness she reserved for festive occasions, there was an awkward grandeur to her movements, an unconscious headlong career, that I found very appealing. Sara hadn’t the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man. Balanced atop those modest two-inch spikes of hers she projected a certain air of calculated daring, like one of those inverted skyscrapers you see from time to time, sixty-three stories of glass and light set down on a point of steel.
“Tripp, what did you do to this dog?” said Crabtree. “He can’t seem to take his eyes off your larynx.”
“He’s blind,” I said. “He can’t even see my larynx.”
“I bet he knows how to find it, though.”
“Oh, now, hush you, Doctor Dee,” said Sara. “Honestly.”
Miss Sloviak looked uneasily at the dog, who had assumed his favorite stance, directly between me and Sara, teeth bared, paws planted, barking operatically.
“Why doesn’t he like you?” Miss Sloviak said.
I shrugged, and I felt myself blushing. There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
“I owe him some money,” I said.
“Grady, dear,” said Sara, passing the overcoats along to me. There was a patent note of stratagem in her voice. “Will you go and toss these on the bed in the guest room?”
“I don’t think I know how to find the guest room,” I said, although I had on several occasions tossed Sara herself down onto that very bed.
“Well, then,” said Sara, her voice alight now with panic. “I’d better show you.”
“I guess you’d better,” I said.
“We’ll just make ourselves at home,” said Crabtree. “How about that? Okay, now, old Doctor. Okay, old puppy dog.” He knelt to pet Doctor Dee, pressing his forehead against the dog’s tormented brow, murmuring secret editorial endearments. Doctor Dee stopped barking at once, and began to sniff at Crabtree’s long hair.
“Could you find my husband, Terry, and ask him to lock Doctor Dee up in the laundry room for the rest of the party? Thanks, you can’t miss him. He has eyes just like Doctor Dee’s, and he’s the handsomest man in the room.” This was true. Walter Gaskell was a tall, silver-haired Manhattanite with a narrow waist and broad shoulders, and his blue eyes had the luminous, emptied-out look of a reformed alcoholic’s. “That’s a lovely dress, Miss Sloviak,” she said as we started up the stairs.
“She’s a man,” I told Sara as I followed up after her, carrying an armful of topcoats.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1958 it was reported in the Pittsburgh newspapers that Joseph Tedesco, a native of Naples and an assistant groundskeeper at Forbes Field, had been suspended from his job for keeping an illegal vegetable garden on a scrap of vacant land that lay just beyond the wall in center right. It was his third summer at the ballpark; in the years before this he had failed at several modest enterprises, among them a domestic gardening business, an apple orchard, and a nursery. He was careful in his work but terrible with money, and he lost two of his businesses through disorderly bookkeeping. The rest of them he lost through drink. His well-tended but rather overexuberant patch of tomatoes, zucchini, and