Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [145]
“Well?” I said to the tuba. “What do you say we finish this thing right?”
I took hold of the sheaf of paper and folded it over. I bent down the uppermost corners, lifted the lowermost couple of flaps, and tucked and pleated those last seven pages until I had worked them into a soft and waterlogged little boat. Then I set this unlikely craft in the gutter at my feet, and watched it pitch and careen away down the street toward the Monongahela River and the open sea. And thus, as it was foretold in the prophecies of witch women and in a nine-page outline I’d made on an April afternoon five years earlier, wild water came and carried off the remnant of the Wonders. I stood up, and found that my head was remarkably clear, and that all its former lightness seemed to have passed, like an electrical current, into my limbs. My hands were dizzy, my feet reeled, my heart weighed nothing at all. I wasn’t happy—I’d poured too many years of my life, too many thousands of hard-won images and episodes and elegant turns of phrase, into that book not to part with it in utter sorrow. Still, I felt light. I felt as if I had been raised in the crushing precincts of the planet Jupiter, and then set free, massive and buoyant, to bound along the streets of Point Breeze, covering nine feet at a stride, with only the tuba to keep me from floating entirely off the earth.
After I’d been walking along for a while in the general direction of home, shivering, thinking the circular thoughts of a man who’s been clocked with a Louisville Slugger, a car pulled up alongside me and sat burbling by the curb, lighting up the rain in a broad glittery fan outspread before it. It was a red Citroën DS23. The rain spattered against its black canvas top.
I carried the tuba over to the curb, bent down, and looked into the car. It was warm inside there, and everything was lit by the soft amber light of the dash. There was a smell of damp ash and the wet wool of Sara’s topcoat, and a faint trickle of advertising from the radio. She made a face at me as I leaned in, bugging out her eyes a little, so that I would know she was angry but not entirely without humor. Her hair was slicked back with rainwater and her face was flushed and someone had kissed her on the cheek with orange lipstick.
“Need a lift?” she said, with mock smoothness. She affected not to be surprised to have come upon me thus but I could tell by the way that she held her mouth so perfectly straight, and by a certain telltale dilation of her nostrils, that she had been panicking for hours and might be panicking still.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. “I went back to the hospital, I went by your house—Jesus, Grady, what happened to your head?”
“Nothing,” I said, touching a hand to my left temple. Yes, it was swelling nicely. “Okay, Walter hit me with a baseball bat.” Also, it seemed to me, now that I had something to focus my vision on, I could not quite get my left eye to come into true with my right. “I’m all right. God knows I had it coming.”
“Are you sure?” She narrowed her eyes and studied me. She was trying to determine if I was stoned. “Why are you squinting like that?”
“What squinting, I’m fine, I’m not stoned,” I said, and to my amazement I discovered that this was the truth. “Honest.”
“Honest,” she repeated doubtfully.
“I feel great.” This was also the truth, except insofar as my actual body was concerned. “I’m so glad to see you, Sara. There’s so much I want to