Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [52]
I believe that I was inspired to marry Emily Warshaw by the artificial hopefulness of sex and by an orphan’s trite desire for a home. The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of them related by blood, seemed to offer me the best chance yet to wire my wandering meteor to the armillary sphere of a family. This was a sincere if not entirely commendable motive for marriage, but I’ve since found that in the efforts of a husband and wife to stay together, a fugitive chaleur and a longing for home are no better guarantees of success than the ozone-blue flash of the Thunderbolt. For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.
I went into my office and found James Leer asleep, on the long green sofa, an unzipped sleeping bag pulled up to his chin. It was an old-fashioned bag that had belonged to Emily’s dad, patterned with mallards and huntsmen and hounds. I could see it was, because the lamp on my desk was still on. I supposed that Hannah had left it burning for James in case he awakened in the middle of the night and didn’t know where he was. His head lay at the end of the sofa nearest my desk, but she had angled the lamp’s neck so that its light wouldn’t shine directly in his eyes. I wondered if she was waiting for me in the basement, in her narrow bed, under a Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, propped up on one elbow, hearing portents in the creaking of the ceiling overhead. For a second I allowed myself to imagine going down. Then I looked over at my desk. She’d turned the lamp, I saw, so that it cast its light squarely on the thick white slab of twenty-pound bond, on the towering pile, on the keep and insurmountable battlements of Wonder Boys. All at once I felt very tired. I set James’s knapsack down on the floor beside the sofa and switched off the lamp. In a last, ill-advised spree of hopefulness I made myself walk all the way down the hall to the guest bedroom to look for Terry Crabtree. Then I forced my body up the stairs, and into the next empty room.
WHEN I WOKE ON Saturday morning in our big sleigh bed there were black sky and stars at the window. It wasn’t quite six o’clock. The pain in my ankle was still there, duller and more feverish than before. My hasty bandage work had come unraveled in the night, and I made out a Japan of dried blood on the sheets. I lay for a moment, riding the swell and roll of my hangover, clinging to the mattress and to the wreckage of my last dream. I’d already lost most of the details, but I could still recall its backdrop or central theme, which was the shadowy kingdom of mystery and spice hidden in the parting of Hannah Green’s thighs. I groaned aloud, gritted my teeth, and took deep yogic breaths. After a few desperate minutes I gave up and went naked and half blind into the bathroom to throw up.
It had been several years since my last alcohol hangover and I found I’d lost the knack: instead of cool submission I fought against it, and after I was done being sick I lay crumpled like a chastened teenager on the floor beside the toilet, for a long time, feeling worthless and alone. Then I got up. I put on my eyeglasses, stepped into my moccasins, and tied on