Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [17]
“Is your friend Terry’s friend really a man?” said Sara.
“I believe so,” I said. “Knowing Crabtree as I do.”
“So what did he say to you?”
“He wants to see the book.”
“Are you going to show it to him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My hand had gone numb now, and my left shoulder was starting to tingle and shut down. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Neither do I,” said Sara. A tear pooled at the corner of her eye and then spilled out across the bridge of her nose. She bit her lip and shut her eyes. I was close enough to her to study the cartography of veins printed on her eyelids.
“Sara, honey,” I said, “I’m stuck.” I gave my arm a gentle tug, trying to free it. “You’re lying on my arm.”
She didn’t move; she only opened her eyes, dry once again, and gave me a very hard stare.
“I guess you’re going to have to chew it off, then,” she said.
I DRANK FOR YEARS, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated. I stopped drinking not because I had a drinking problem, although I suppose I may have, but because alcohol had mysteriously become so poisonous to my body that one night half a bottle of George Dickel stopped my heart for almost twenty seconds (it turned out I was allergic to the stuff). But when, after counting off five discreet minutes, I followed Sara and the sparkling pearl of protein lodged in the innermost pleats of her belly back down to the First Party of the Weekend, I found the prospect of navigating the room sober to be more than I could face, and for the first time in months I was tempted to pour myself a drink. I was reintroduced to a shy, elfin man whose prose style is among the most admired in this country, whose company I had enjoyed in the past, and this time found him a leering, self-important old windbag who flirted with young girls to stave off the fear of death; I met a woman whose short stories have broken my heart over and over again for the last fifteen years and saw only the withered neck and hollow stare of a woman who had wasted her life. I shook hands with talented students, eager young staff members, colleagues in the department whom I had good reasons to admire and like, and heard their false laughter, and felt their discomfort with their bodies and their status and their clothes, and smelled the stink of sweet beer and whiskey on their breath. I avoided Crabtree, to whom I felt I had become nothing more than a colossal debit on the balance sheet of his life; and as for Miss Sloviak, that man in his dress and high heels—that was too sad even to think of. I was in no kind of shape to talk to anyone. So I sneaked through the kitchen and slipped out onto the back porch to blow a jay.
Although it wasn’t raining anymore the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze. A fine mist of light hung in a cloud around the Gaskells’ illuminated house. I could see the panes of Sara’s greenhouse glinting black in the distance like wet iron. She had been obsessed for several years now with forcing her forsythias and pinching her hothouse chrysanthemums, but I supposed things might get a little wild in there if she decided to grow herself a baby. This didn’t seem likely, given that the chancellor of a college was among the last people in America required to build a career out of such outmoded materials as probity and temperance and good repute. Through a determined program of sheer dumb luck and liberal applications of THC I had managed never to impregnate a woman before, but I knew that