Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [51]
My car wasn’t in the driveway. It seemed to me that I had never seen the driveway looking so empty before. I lived in a nice, big, brick-and-ivy house, built in 1915 in the Prairie style, quadrangular and spacious as a bank. Squat pillars held up its three porches, and it had leaded windows, built-in window seats, cabinets, and bookcases, an office nook under the stairs, a parlor, and enough bedrooms for a family of five. The pantry was larger than apartments I had lived in and certainly better provisioned. The wainscoting and the walls had been repainted in careful tones of candle wax and eggshell. The flower beds along the front walk were dark and animate with primrose, crocus, narcissus. I dragged myself up the five steps to the front door and let myself in. There was a smell of Froot Loops cereal from the vase of freesias on the hat stand. I turned on the hall light and was confronted by the faces of vanished furriers, dry-goods merchants, printers, and chiropodists, in wooden frames, hanging on the wall under the stairs, along with their wives, children and grandchildren, two lavishly bearded brother uncles, a long-dead cocker spaniel named Shlumper, and nine members of a Zionist social club. When I opened the hall closet to hang up my wet jacket, I was enveloped in a cloud of Cristalle. I stood there for a moment, smelling Emily’s coats. The refrigerator hummed to itself in the faraway kitchen. I smelled her mackinaw, and her pea coat, and the cracked black shearling which she had worn all through the winter of our courtship eight years before. She was living in her place on Beacon Street, then, near the park, and I remembered walking her home one night along the Panther Hollow bridge; halfway across we had stopped, and I had backed her up against the frozen rail to kiss her. I remembered the give of shearling between my fingers, soft and rough as the skin of her throat, and the way when I worked open its wooden buttons the coat had emitted a dizzying blast of her bodily perfumes, as if I were lowering myself into the deep black pocket of her bed.
For the first time I understood that I had driven Emily Warshaw from my life.
This was something I’d been trying to do for a long time—not intentionally, I swear, nor with any feeling of satisfaction, but in the automatic, methodical manner of a boy working on a loose tooth. Without reference to doppelgängers and the symptoms of the midnight disease it’s hard to say why, exactly; but certainly a native genius for externalizing self-hatred may have had something to do with it. Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member—if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.
It hadn’t been love at first sight for Emily and me, it was true. We’d met through a friend of hers whose husband taught the nineteenth-century British novel in my department and presided over a weekly professorial poker game that I sometimes frequented during my lonely early days in Pittsburgh. At first sight I found her cold and aloof, if beautiful, and she thought that I was boastful, hyperbolic, alcoholic, and loud. We were right, of course. We saw each other casually a