Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [60]
“Look at them,” said James. “They look like replicants.”
A handsome young family was crossing the street in front of us, a slender pair of blond parents in khaki and plaid surrounded by an orderly tangle of cute blond replicant children. Two of the children swung sparkling bags of goldfish. The sun lit the flyaway ends of their hair. Everyone was holding hands. They looked like an advertisement for a brand of mild laxative or the Seventh-Day Adventists. The mother carried a golden-haired baby in her arms and the father was actually smoking a briar pipe. As they passed before the car they all looked at the crater in the hood and then gazed up at James and me in uncomprehending pity.
“The light’s green,” said James.
I had my eye on that baby. Its face was pressed against the woman’s left breast, and it was waving its hands around in the air in a declamatory manner. Its fingers curled and uncurled and struck odd poses like the significant fingers of a stone bodhisattva. For an instant I could feel the weight of it, like an ache, in the hollow of my arm.
“We can go now, Professor.”
The person in the car behind us began to honk. As the family stepped up onto the far sidewalk, just before they glided off away from us, I glimpsed the baby’s face, over the mother’s shoulder. It wore an oddly crooked grin—almost as if a muscle in its cheek were paralyzed—and a little black eye patch over its left eye. I liked that. I wondered if I had it in me to produce a baby with a piratical air.
“Professor?”
I did a one-eighty in the intersection and headed back toward Point Breeze.
AS WE PULLED UP in front of the Gaskells’ house, I looked over at James. The wind had blown back all his sticky black hair so that his bangs stood straight up from his head, which gave him a cartoon air of having just received a piece of shocking news. I saw his eyelids flutter. The doughnut slipped from his fingers. His surprised head tilted backward and lodged in the space between the headrest and the window. I figured he was faking unconsciousness to get out of having to face Chancellor Gaskell, but I didn’t hold that against him. After all, I’d promised—though I doubted if he really believed me—that I would take care of everything.
“Okay, then,” I told James, climbing out of the car. “You wait here.”
There was no answer when I knocked on the front door, so I gave the handle a try. It was unlocked.
“Sara?” I stepped inside. “Walter?”
In the kitchen there was coffee on the stove, and on the table Sara’s huge iron purse, a package of Merits, and a paperback copy of one of Q.’s novels, squashed open over a pink Bic lighter. She was home, all right. I walked back out to the front hall, and started up the stain.
“Sara? It’s Gra-dy! Hello?”
Expecting at any minute to be jumped in a dark corner by an enraged Walter Gaskell swinging one of Joltin’ Joe’s old Hillerich & Bradsbys, I stuck my head into Sara’s office, the guest room, and the other upstairs rooms, and then went at last to the door of the master bedroom, where I had passed an hour just a little too recently and stupidly, I felt, to be visiting again so soon. The door was ajar, and, flinching a little, I gave it a light tap with the toe of my shoe. It swung open with a guilty creak.
“Sara?”
The bed lay buried in its trackless snowdrift of goose-down and linen. A clock ticked on the nightstand. Two pairs of slippers, one plaid, one lavender, sat side by side on the rug. The cork-lined door hung wide open and Walter’s magic closet was