Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [142]
“Sara?” I said.
The murmuring of flowers seemed to grow louder as I went deeper into the greenhouse, but when I went into the central atrium I discovered that it was not some heady perfume working on my nerves—only the ironic and elliptical snoring of a modern master of the short-story form. On the old purple davenport, under the potted date palm, Q. lay unconscious. His shirttails had come untucked, his fly was unbuttoned, and on his feet he wore only a pair of red-toed sock-monkey socks, caked with mud. Those were his shoes, then, abandoned in the living room. Even in his dreams, apparently, Q. and his doppelgänger were still going at it, because although his brow was knotted in anguish, the rest of his face looked peaceful, even self-satisfied, as if he were enjoying some well-deserved rest. In addition to the mud on his stocking feet there was a goldfish of dried blood on the pocket of his shirt and a telephone number or message to himself scrawled across the back of his left hand. I leaned over to try to read what it said. It was too smeared to make out, but appeared to begin with a C. CROATOAN, I thought, might not have been inappropriate. I switched on an overhead light.
Q.’s eyes snapped open.
“No!” he said, reaching out, his fingers outspread, as if to ward me off.
“Easy, man,” I said. “You’ll be all right.”
He sat up.
“Where am I? What is that smell?”
“That’s plant breath,” I said. “You’re in Sara’s greenhouse.”
He sat up and rubbed his face and gave his jowls a shake. Then he looked around, up at the spiky leaves of the palm tree, down at his muddy socks. He shook his head.
“Nope,” he said.
“No idea how you got here, eh?”
“None.”
I gave his shoulder a little squeeze.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Try this one. All the people at that party. Any idea where they might have gone to?” I nodded in the direction of the house. “Place is empty. Looked like people must have cleared out in a hurry. Left all their cups and cigarettes and whatnot lying around.” I looked at my watch. It was not quite nine o’clock. “Seems like things broke up kind of early.”
“Yeah, uh, right—” he began, tentatively. “Sara.” He nodded. “She cleared them all out.”
“She what?” I couldn’t believe Sara would do anything so indecorous in public—such behavior would not become the vision of sound and gracious chancellorhood she had so carefully elaborated for herself. My heart sank. “That’s not like Sara.” There was only one explanation: she had decided, once and for all, to rid her aging womb of the spawn of Grady. I was gripped by a sudden irrational certainty that she had, in fact, already done so—that she’d chased everyone out of her house and then driven off, alone and hysterical, to the office of some night doctor, in a tragic part of town. “Why did she do that?”
“I don’t remember” Q. said, and then he remembered. He looked up at me, his eyes wide and pleading, as though I’d been sent out here to punish him for whatever it was he’d done. He lowered his head.
“I think I broke Walter Gaskell’s nose,” he said into his collar.
“You’re kidding. Oh, my God.”
He looked defensive. “Maybe not.” He pinched the spherical tip of his nose. “I just barely clipped him with the thing.” He nodded reassuringly to himself as the details started to come back to him. “It wasn’t like I got him with the sweet spot.”
“The sweet spot?”
“I was swinging one of his bats. A big one, thirty-six ounces, all yellow and stained. Like a kind of an old