Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [143]
“I know the one,” I said.
“Still a lot of tension in it, somehow. When you swung it. Like there was still something powerful in there trying to get out.”
“I guess there must have been,” I said. “I guess it kind of got out and broke Walter’s nose.”
“Uh huh,” he said. He cocked his head a little to the side, and his voice was sharp. “At least I didn’t steal it, though.”
“Good point,” I said. “So then, what, did she take him to the hospital? Sara, I mean.” Here I had come all this way looking for her, and she’d probably been in the emergency room at the hospital the whole time.
“I don’t know. He was bleeding and shouting and I was probably shouting a little, too. Sara came in, at some point, and they shouted at each other for a while. Sorry, I don’t remember what about. Then she chased everyone out of the house. If she’s not there now, I don’t know where she went.”
“And Walter?” I said.
Q. lifted an eyebrow, and sort of pointed with the unshaven tip of his chin in the general direction of the door to the greenhouse. He smiled. I looked at him for a moment, not understanding. Then I caught the doppelgänger glint of mischief in his eye. He wanted me to turn around. I turned around, half-expecting to see the tuba standing there behind me.
“Hello, Grady,” Walter said.
He was looming in the shadows of the greenhouse, dangling the tar-stained old DiMaggio bat at his side. This was an item he had acquired last fall, in the grip of a frenzy of acquisition so intense that he’d forgotten all about Sara’s birthday, and had subsequently tried to make a lame and insincere sort of present out of the brittle stick of ash wood itself. That proved to be a fatal insult to the health of their marriage, as far as Sara was concerned, and if she ever found herself able to leave him once and for all, this bat, nominally hers, would be one of the reasons. It was one of a small number of bats purporting to be that swung by Joe D. all during his famous streak of 1947, and therefore worthy of a certain amount of devotion, as I had tried to explain to Sara at the time. In his other hand, Walter was holding a plaid ice bag, pressed against the bridge of his nose. There was blood on his white oxford shirt.
“Hey, Walter,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your nose, Walter,” said Q. “I must have been pretty drunk.”
Walter nodded. “I’ll be all right.”
“And,” I said, “I, uh, I know this is going to sound pretty fatuous, right about now, Walter, but I want you to know that I’m really sorry, too. About everything. I feel really, really bad.” I paused and licked my lips. The truth was that I didn’t actually feel so bad. I just didn’t want Walter trying to doctor me up with that bat. “I—I wish I could make it up to you.”
“I really don’t think you ever could, Grady,” Walter said. He rolled the bat back and forth against his thigh, and his fingers worried the worn old tape on the handle. I remember he didn’t look angry, or especially retributive, or happy in that way people look in the movies when the revenge of which they’ve been dreaming curls up the wicked corners of the lips. His eyes were ringed with fatigue, he had an ice bag over his nose, and he wore, more than anything, the harried air of a dean after a night of quarreling with the accounting firm and contemplating painful cuts in his budget for next year. “The department is going to have to place you on a disciplinary leave, of course.”
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“For an indefinite term, I’m afraid. You may well lose your position. I’ll certainly do my best to see that you do.”
I looked at Q. He was glancing back and forth from me to Walter, calmly but with a certain air of frustration I thought I recognized. He was wishing he had a pen so that he could make a few notes.
“You’re a goddamn fraud, Grady. You’ve produced nothing at all since you’ve been here,” Walter went on, softly. “That’s seven years. Close to eight.” He named two of my writing colleagues in the department.