Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [36]
I was not quite four years old when he killed himself, and most of my memories of him are no more than shards and chance survivals. I remember the reddish blond hairs of his veiny wrist, caught in the links of his expanding watchband; a crumpled package of his Pall Malls, lying red as a ranunculus on the windowsill of his bedroom; the chime of a golf ball rattling into a Belleek teacup as he lined up putts across the broad front parlor of the hotel. And I can remember one time when I heard him come home from work. As I said, he had the night shift, eight to four, and got in at the darkest hour of the morning. Every day my father vanished behind the door to his bedroom as I was waking and reappeared just as I was going to bed; his invisible arrivals and departures were as mysterious to me as snowfall or the sight of my blood. One night, however, I was awake to hear the laughter of the silver bell on the hotel’s front door, the deliberate creaking of the back stairs, my father’s angry cough, and then the next thing I remember I was standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching Little George as he undressed. I used to pretend to myself, and tell my lovers, that in remembering all this I was recalling the night on which my father did himself in. But the truth is that he’d been suspended—with pay—for two weeks when he soul-kissed the blue barrel of his service revolver. So I don’t know which night this must have been, or why its memory should have outlasted any other. Maybe it was the night my father shot David Glucksbringer. Maybe you just never forget the sight of your father taking off all his clothes.
I see myself peering through the half-open door of his bedroom, cheek pressed into a corner of cold oak molding, watching as the great blue man who lived in our hotel, with his high-crowned hat, his broad epaulets, his heavy golden badge, with bullets on his belt and a fat black gun, transformed himself into somebody else. He removed the hat and set it upside down on the dresser. A few strands of thin, sweaty hair stuck to the leather band inside and then remained standing atop his head, wavering like undersea plants. Carelessly he splashed whiskey into a shot glass, and then knocked it back with one hand as he unbuttoned and yanked off his uniform shirt with the other. He sat down on the bed to unlace his coffin black shoes, and kicked them into a corner of the room. When he stood up again, he looked smaller, more frail, and very tired. He stepped out of his trousers, exposing the pale orange prosthesis with its suggestion of discrete toes and its complicated harness work of leather. After that he went to the bedroom window, I think, and stood for a moment, looking at the desert topography of frost on the glass, the empty street, the mannequins posed in their little spring dresses in the luminous windows of Glucksbringer’s. He pulled his sleeveless undershirt up over his belly and head, tugged his boxer shorts down to his ankles, and sat down on the bed again to unbuckle the strange contraption he owned instead of a foot. Then there was nothing left of him to remove. I was at once fascinated and horrified by the act of diminishment he had just performed; it was as though I were being permitted to see the crippled,