Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [140]
“Don’t forget your snare drum, Mr. Tripp,” said the nurse. “Or whatever that thing is.”
It was, of course, that black, hulking shadow, that brass Alecto, the Tuba of August Van Zorn. It rode down in the elevator with me, and followed me across the lobby to the doors of the hospital, and watched while I stood there reckoning the walking distance to Sara’s house and struggling with the unfamiliar exercise of forming a resolve. If my repaired ankle held up, I could make it in half an hour, but then what was I going to say to her when I got there? The past weekend had made two things clear to me: first, that as I presently lived it, mine was not a life into which a baby ought responsibly to be introduced, and second, that when this pregnancy was terminated, my relationship with Sara would not survive the procedure. She had—understandably, I guessed—chosen to view this as a definitive moment in the hitherto imprecise history of our love: from this point on we would be either the conjoint parents of our child, or else a couple of embittered ex-lovers, looking back on five wasted years. It was awful luck that my pot-hobbled spermatozoa had managed to rally themselves for one last mad fallopian adventure, and that five years’ worth of love, good companionship, and the exhilaration of sneaking around should come in the end to a referendum on my fitness as a father, but there it was.
I switched the tuba to my other hand. I tried to picture myself eight months hence, holding to my shaggy breast that sweet freakling, that tiny chimera, part Sara, part Grady, part some random efflorescence of the genes. I pictured a big-headed, hollow-eyed Edward Gorey baby, in an antique nightdress, with tight-clenched little fists and a vandalistic nature. Let’s say, I said to myself, just for the sake of argument, that bringing another beastly mutant Tripp into the world was not by definition a bad idea. How did one generally know if one wanted a baby or not? In all the time Emily and I had supposedly been trying to knock her up, it had never occurred to me to ask myself if I wanted our effort to succeed—maybe because in my heart I’d never believed that any relationship long exposed to the malign radiations of my character was actually capable of bearing any such fruit. Did one really feel the need for a child—as a craving in the nerves, a spiritual yearning, the haunting prickle of a lost limb?
I dragged the tuba back into the lobby and over to the information booth, which was staffed this evening by an elegant old volunteer in a striped smock. Her hair was silver and her nails were French-polished and she was wearing an emerald brooch. She was reading Q.’s third novel—the one about the sex-mad coroner—with a look of distasteful absorption.
“Do you have any babies in this hospital, by any chance?” I said, when she looked up. “You know, where you can look at them behind the glass?”
“Well,” she said, laying down the book, “yes, we have a nursery, but I don’t know—”
“It’s for a book I’m writing.”
“Oh? Are you a writer?” she said, interested now but eyeing the tuba suspiciously.
“I’m trying,” I said. I hoisted the tuba. “The symphony keeps me awfully busy.”
“Really! My husband and I went just last Friday night, how do you like that? Harold in Italy. Oh, we have regular tickets, I’m sure we must have seen—”
“Actually, it’s an orchestra in Ohio,” I said. “The, uh, Steubenville Philharmonic.”
“Oh.”
“We’re very small. We play a lot of weddings.”
She looked me over more carefully now. I gripped the front of my shirt where the button was missing and tried to look like I had a musical soul.
“Fifth floor,” she said at last.
So the tuba and I went to take a look at the babies. There were only two on display at the moment, lying there in their glass crates like a couple of large squirming turnips. A man I presumed to be the father of one of them was leaning against the observation window, an old guy like me, sawdust on his trousers, hair Brylcreemed, his shop foreman’s face beefy and half asleep.