Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [55]
James Leer nodded, shivered once, and tugged the sleeping bag more snugly around his shoulders. He took a step backward that turned abruptly into a kind of clumsy plié, then steadied himself against the back of my chair.
“I am,” he said. The telephone rang, out in the living room. It was a new phone with all the modern functions—caller fragmentation and speed garbling and so on—and it didn’t so much ring as sound an alarum, like a Porsche being broken into in the middle of the night. “Want me to get that?”
“Sure,” I said, dropping my head back softly to the floor. I was sure that it must be Sara, calling to say not only that her dog was missing but that Walter had been robbed of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar black satin jacket. I closed my eyes, still faintly asparkle with optic fireworks, and wondered if I didn’t have something evil inhabiting my brain, a malignant spider opening out its long black legs like the ribs of an umbrella. I asked myself what I would do if my doctor pronounced some fatal diagnosis over me then sent me back out into the weaselly old world. Would I throw aside my work and concentrate instead on writing my name in water—picking up transvestites on airplanes, seducing sexually ambivalent virgins, driving around Pittsburgh in a borrowed convertible at four o’clock in the morning, looking for trouble? It pleased me for a moment to believe that I would; but in the very next instant I knew that with death in my body my only desire would be to curl up on the Honor Bilt with half a kilo of Afghan Butthair, roll numbers, and watch reruns of The Rockford Files until the girl in the black kimono came to take me away.
“Someone named Irv?” said James Leer, padding back into my office, a crooked smirk on his face. I guessed that he was still drunk enough for his hangover to be making him feel all grown up and dissolute. “I told him you might be a minute.”
“Thanks,” I said. I held out my hand to him, and he helped me to my feet. “Why don’t you get yourself some breakfast? There’s coffee in the fridge.”
He nodded, a little absently, like a boy ignoring his mother’s advice, and sat down on the sofa.
“Maybe in a minute,” he said. He jerked his head toward the bookshelf in the corner, on which sat a small television with a built-in VCR. “That thing work?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. I was always a little embarrassed about having a television in my office, even though I would never have watched it when I was supposed to be working. “I use it to look at ball games, sometimes, if Emily’s trying to work, or sleep.”
“What movies do you have?”
“Movies? Not too many. I don’t really collect movies, James.” I pointed to the scanty assortment of videocassettes stacked beside the TV set. “I think I still have 9½ Weeks over there. Taped it off the cable.”
James made a face. “9½ Weeks” he said. “Please.”
“Sorry,” I said. I started for the phone, gathering the flaps of my lucky bathrobe around me.
“Nice robe, Professor Tripp,” said James.
“It’s Irv, Grady,” said Emily’s father.
“Hello, Irv,” I said. “How are you?”
“I could always be better,” said Irv. “I’m having a little trouble with my right knee, now.”
“What’s the matter with it?” He’d had the left one replaced the year before, with a stainless steel joint of which he was inordinately proud, as though it were a spontaneous physical improvement produced through the cleverness of his own cells.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But it won’t bend until ten o’clock in the morning.”
“That could be a problem.”
“Terrible,” he agreed. “As a matter of fact it just started bending….” There was a pause while he consulted his watch. Irv wore one of those fancy chronometer-style jobs the size of an Oreo cookie, capable not only of telling time, temperature, altitude, and barometric pressure but also of analyzing atmospheric composition and indicating the presence of alien life-forms. He had assembled it himself, out of a kit purchased from the back pages of Popular Science. “Twenty-two minutes ago. So, how are you?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “I could always be better.” I sat