Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [53]
After a few minutes I felt much better indeed, and I went downstairs to the front door for the paper. As I stepped out onto the porch, I saw the noble fins of Happy’s Galaxie, poking out from behind the hedge that screened the driveway from the rest of the house. So Crabtree had found his way home, and he was all right: I could hear him snoring now, from all the way back in the guest room. Crabtree had a deviated septum that he was afraid to have a surgeon put right; he was well known for the resonance of his leonine snore. Crabtree’s snoring was loud enough to rattle the glass of water on the nightstand, to ruin his love affairs, to cause violent confrontations with neighbors in cheap motels. It was loud enough to kill bacteria and loosen centuries of dirt from the face of a cathedral. When I came back into the house—the newspaper hadn’t arrived yet—I followed the snoring down the hall to Crabtree’s room and stood for a while with my ear to his door, listening to the operation of his lungs. Then I went to the kitchen and started coffee.
While the coffee was brewing I drank a tall glass of orange juice, to which I added two tablespoons of honey, on the theory that an increase in my blood sugar, along with a massive dose of caffeine, would eliminate the last traces of my hangover. Pot for the nausea and the heaviness of heart, vitamin C for the cell structure, sugar for the depleted blood, caffeine to burn off the moral fog; it was starting to come back to me now—the whole praxis of alcoholism and reckless living. When the coffee was ready, I poured it into a thermos pitcher and carried it out to my office at the back of the house, where James Leer lay on the sofa, his head pillowed on his praying hands, like someone pantomiming sleep. The sleeping bag had slid partway to the floor and I saw now that he’d gone to bed naked. His suit, shirt, and tie were draped across the footrest of my old Eames chair, white BVDs folded neatly on top of the pile. I wondered if Hannah had undressed him, or if he’d managed it himself. He had the shrunken look of a tall person asleep, curled up into himself, his knees and elbows and wrists too large, his skin pale and freckled. His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy’s—perhaps over time one’s genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer. I felt sorry for James Leer when I saw his penis. Carefully I redistributed the sleeping bag over his form.
“Thank you,” he said, without waking.
I said, “You’re welcome,” and then carried the pot of coffee over to my desk. It was six-fifteen. I went to work. I had to slap an ending on Wonder Boys by tomorrow evening if I was going to let Crabtree see it. I took a sip of coffee and gave my left cheek an exhortatory smack. For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I’d fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before. As of this fine morning I was halfway through its fourth page, more or less, with another five pages to go. An accidental poisoning, a car crash, a house on fire; the births of three