Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [45]
“So what are you going to do?” said Hannah, giving my belly a friendly slap.
My reply was something softheaded and mumbled about dancing with her all night.
“About Emily, I mean,” she said, a little impatiently. “I—I guess she isn’t going to be there when you get home.”
“I guess not,” I said. “Try not to look quite so pleased.”
She blushed. “Sorry.”
“I guess that I really don’t know. What I’m going to do.”
“I have an idea,” she said. She fished around in the pocket of her jeans for a moment, and then pressed three warm quarters into my palm.
I steered myself over to the telephone, dropped in the quarters, and unhooked the receiver.
“You’ve got to help me,” I said.
“Who is this?” said the voice of the thousand-year-old lavender-haired Ruthenian woman in cat-eye glasses and an angora sweater who dwelt within the secret heart of Pittsburgh, taking the requests of an ever-dwindling population of drunken and heartbroken lovers. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I said I need to hear, something that’s going to save my life,” I told her, reeling on the end of the telephone cord.
“This is a jukebox, hon,” said the woman, sounding calm and a little distracted, as though wherever she was the television was playing low or she had a copy of Cosmo spread open on her ancient lap. “This isn’t a real telephone you’re talking on.”
“I know that,” I said, unconvincingly. “I just don’t know what to ask you for.”
I looked over at Hannah and tried to flash her the smile of a competent and reasonable smiler, of someone who wasn’t at all worried that he was going to be sick, and going to fall down, and going to hurt yet another young woman in the course of a lifelong career of callous disregard. Judging from the look of dismay that came over her face, I thought I must have failed miserably, but then I saw that Q. had left the table and was making his way across the crowded room toward Hannah, his face grim and determined and haunted, as far as I could see, only by alcohol, the writer’s true secret sharer, the ghost that lived in the dusty, bare corners of Albert Vetch’s and so many other midnight lives. As he approached, however, to ask her for the next dance, Hannah turned on him, simply, and headed straight toward me, head lowered, blushing from her forehead to the nape of her neck at the thought of her own rudeness.
“Just a minute,” I told the Jukebox Crone, wrapping my hand around the mouthpiece of the receiver. “Dance with him, Hannah.” I tried out another of my implausible smiles. “He’s a famous writer.” I raised the telephone to my mouth again. “Are you still there?” I said.
“Where would I go?” said the woman. “I told you, hon, I’m not a real person. This is my job.”
“But I don’t want to dance with him, Grady.” Hannah put her arm through mine and looked up at me through her scattered bangs, searching my face, her eyes so wide and desperate that I was alarmed. I’d never seen Hannah acting anything other than the calm, optimistic Mormon girl she was, eternally polite, capable of stolid acceptance of locusts, misfortunes, and outlandish news about the universe. “I want to keep dancing with you.”
“Please.” I watched as Q. turned and walked with drunken precision back to the table in the far corner of the room, arriving just as the heads of James Leer and Crabtree surfaced into the pink beam of a floodlight from the bottom of a very deep kiss. James’s eyes had gone all blind and his mouth was an empty O.
“I’m sorry,” I said into the telephone, “but I have to hang up now.”
“All right, all right,” said the woman. She gave a curt little sigh and tapped her seven-inch tropical pink fingernails against her headset. “How about ‘Sukiyaki’?”
“Perfect,” I said. “And why don’t you pick another two that