Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [146]
“I have my suitcase in the trunk,” said Sara, cutting me off, as usual, before I could muddy the waters of an important discussion with any of my Mercutian prattle. “Is Emily coming home?”
“I don’t think so.”
Her eyes narrowed again.
“No,” I said. “Nuh-uh. She isn’t coming home.”
“Could I stay with you, then? Just for a little while. A couple of days. Just until I find someplace else to go. If,” she added quickly, “that’s what you want me to do.”
I didn’t say anything. The rain redoubled in force, and the tuba was dislocating my elbow, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it down, and Sara hadn’t asked me to get into the car yet. I had a feeling my answer might have a lot to do with whether she ever would. I stood there, getting rained on, remembering the promise I had made to Dr. Greenhut.
“Okay, fine,” said Sara, putting the car in gear. She started to roll slowly forward.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Hold on.”
The taillights on the roof of the car lit up.
“Okay,” I said, hurrying to catch up to her. “Of course you can stay with me. Please. I’d love it.”
After that I waited for her to smile, and ask me into the car, and drive me home and lay me down on the Honor Bilt to sleep for the next three days. But Sara wasn’t ready to end the negotiations.
“I’ve decided I’m going to keep it,” she informed me, watching my face for the effect of this announcement. “In case you were wondering.”
“I was.”
She took her hands off the wheel for the first time and turned them outward, fingers spread, a nameless gesture more eloquent and wondering than a shrug.
“It’s just started to seem like a good thing to have,” she said. “If I’m not going to have anything else.”
“Think so?”
“At the moment”
I stood upright, stepped away from the curb, and took a last look up, through the rain, at the empty sky over my head. Then I put down the last of my burdens and reached for the passenger door.
“I guess there’s no point in hanging on to this tuba, then,” I said.
ONE OF THE STRANGEST BITS of jetsam to wash up in the aftermath of the flood that carried me, eventually, all the way back to the town where I was born was a black satin jacket, with an ermine collar, slightly worn at the elbows and missing a button. Although she was, by law, entitled to ask Walter to sell off his whole precious collection and let her take half the proceeds out of the marriage with her, Sara offered to waive her rights to all the rest of it—the flannel jerseys, the three thousand bubble-gum cards, and above all that tar-stained bat—if he would let her keep the jacket. I would have been more than willing never to see the thing again, but to her it was a reminder, at once ironic and cherished, of the weekend that had sealed our fate. Everything else they owned she conceded to Walter, who proved willing to exchange a small if significant principality in order to hold on to the rest of his mighty empire. When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of my grandmother, and for the ceremony, almost but not quite as a joke, Sara wore the jacket. I didn’t think this was a very favorable omen, but it was my fourth marriage and any talk of omens was, to a certain extent, beside the point.
For more than a year after Wonder Boys blew apart in that alley behind Kravnik’s Sporting Goods I was unable to do any writing at all. I dumped the whole exploded clockwork of draft chapters and character sketches and uninsertable inserts into a liquor box and stuck them under the bed. My life was in turmoil, and, maybe because I couldn’t see very well out of my left eye anymore, it took me a long time to get back my sense of narrative balance and my writerly perception of depth. I got to know my lawyer and a number of other Pittsburgh attorneys,