Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [144]
These were the very words, the charges I had been dreading and anticipating for so long, but in all that time I had never managed to come up with an adequate response. I hung my head.
Q. cleared his throat. “Besides sleeping with your wife, you mean,” he said, helpfully.
Walter lowered the ice bag and dropped it to the ground. The bat shot up from his side and began to describe tight little arcs in the air between us. He was clutching it in both hands now, waggling his fingers on its shaft, his face bloodied and swollen but his Doctor Dee eyes remarkably blue and calm.
“Are you going to use that on me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I might.”
“Go for it,” I told him.
So he did. And I believe that most of the violence that occurs between men is the product, in one way or another, of flippancy and smart remarks. I told him to go for it, and he came at me and swung the historic bat. I got my arm up but he still managed to land a glancing blow on my left temple. My glasses went flying. A large rock rang out against a taut sheet of metal, and a flashbulb blew, and a luminous retinal rose bloomed and withered in the innards of my eye. It hurt, but not as much as I might have predicted. After blinking experimentally a few times I picked up my glasses, set them on my nose, drew myself erect, and, with the same over-elaborate display of dignity, like a drunk’s, walked out. Unfortunately for my brave show of imperviousness and self-possession I went the wrong way, and ended up somewhere in the rearmost wing of the greenhouse, where my legs got tangled in a bale of chicken wire, and I fell over.
“Grady?” Walter called, sounding genuinely concerned.
“I’m fine.” I found my feet, extricated myself from the jingling haystack of wire, and set a course for where I remembered the door to be. On my way back across the atrium I went past the purple davenport and stopped.
“Did you get all that?” I said to Q.
He nodded. I thought he looked a little pale.
“I have a question for you,” I said, pointing. “What’s it say there on your hand?”
He looked down at the smear of blue ink on the back of his left hand and frowned. It took him a few seconds to remember.
“It says, ‘Frank Capra,’” he said. He shrugged. “Something I saw tonight. I think there might be a book in it.”
I nodded, and held out my hand to him, and we shook. On my way out I brushed past Walter Gaskell and stumbled a little, and he put a hand out as if to steady me. For an instant I could have collapsed into his arms. But I knocked his proffered arm away and strode across the whirling yard to the house.
I climbed the back steps and walked through the house, feeling a little less woozy with every step. When I got to the front porch the tuba was there waiting for me. I was almost glad to see it. I stood in the light spilling out through the open door behind me, rain on the lenses of my eyeglasses, rain running down the sides of my nose, trying to work up the nerve to walk back to the empty house on Denniston Street. I looked into the foyer to see if by any chance someone had left behind an umbrella, or if there was something I could use to cover my head. There was nothing. I turned, and took a deep breath, and heaved the tuba up over my head, to give me a little shelter. Then I started for home. The thing was too heavy to carry in this way for very long, however, and after a while I lowered it and just went ahead and got wet. My clothes grew heavy, and my shoes squeaked, and the pockets of my jacket filled with rain. Finally I sat down on top of the tuba and waited there, like a man clinging to an empty barrel, for the flood to carry me off.
The flood, I thought. This was the true, original ending I’d always planned for Wonder Boys. One April day, after a heavy winter, the Miskahannock River would overflow its banks and wash away the entire troubled town of Wonderburg, PA. For that very last paragraph I had always envisioned