Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [64]
This response seemed unaccountably to worry him. He looked out over his door, then mine, at the tame woods and high fences and pseudo-English chimney pots poking out over the trees, then craned around in his seat and looked behind us. I wondered if he were not still asleep and dreaming. But all at once he seemed very much awake, tapping his foot to the music on the radio, fingertipping out a little 11/4 time on the dash. He adjusted the angle of the remaining side mirror, fiddled with the door handle, rolled up his window, then rolled it down again. He picked up the doughnut, which had fallen into his lap, and brought it to his lips, then without taking a bite replaced it in the neat white ring it had left on the fabric of his overcoat. As far as I’d ever seen, James Leer was not a fidgety person, so I figured he was trying to keep his mind off feeling sick.
“You all right?” I said.
“Sure. Fine.” He looked startled, as though I’d caught him thinking impure thoughts. “Why do you ask?”
“You seem a little jumpy,” I said.
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head, looking innocent of jumpiness at this or any other moment of his life heretofore. He picked up the doughnut, stared at it a moment, set it back down. “I’m feeling really great. I’m feeling, I don’t know. Normal.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. I wondered if perhaps it were all dawning on him at last; if he were beginning to realize that, having engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place, he was now on his way to spend Passover, of all things, with the family of his dissolute professor’s estranged wife, in a dented Ford Galaxie within whose trunk lay the body of a dog he had killed.
“Do you want not to do this, James?” I said, sounding more hopeful than I’d intended. “Do you want us to go back?”
“Do you?”
“Do I? No! Why would I want to go back?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking a little startled.
“Buddy, this was my idea, remember? No, hey, I’m looking forward to this. I mean it. Passover. Really. Do the Ten Plagues. Eat a lot of parsley. Seriously, I’m glad I have to go out there.”
“Why do you have to?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Uh huh,” he said uncertainly. “No, sir, I don’t want to go back, either.” Once again he checked his mirror, angling it one way, then another, as though worried someone might be following us.
“See any police cars?” I said.
He looked at me for a second or two and then decided I was kidding.
“Not yet,” he said weakly.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s all right. I kind of lost my nerve a little back there, with the Chancellor, but, uh, we’ll straighten everything out when we get back to town tonight. I swear. Okay? Anyway, they’re an interesting family, the Warshaws. I think you’re going to like them a lot.”
“Okay,” he said, as if I’d just given him an order. He did look like he was going to be sick.
“It’s all that orange juice you drank,” I told him. “Want me to pull over?”
“No.”
“We’re in Sewickley Heights. We could find you a nice golf course to puke on.”
“No.” He chopped at the dashboard with both hands. The glove compartment popped open and the bag of marijuana tumbled out. He grabbed at it and started to stuff it back inside, but then he must have felt foolish, or unsophisticated, because the next instant he gave up trying to replace it, and just held the Ziploc bag, rolled up, between two fingers, like a fat translucent joint. He was blushing, or at least the skin at his ears and the nape of his neck turned red. “Please,” he said. “I’m fine. Just keep driving.”
“Hey, buddy, if you—”
“I’m sorry, Professor Tripp,” he said. “I just hate this fucking place.” I was surprised to hear him swear. Such language never appeared in his work; in fact it was almost artificially absent, even in the rawest and most twisted of his tales, as if, in the miniature Hollywood of his soul, he felt constrained to pass all his productions before a kind of inner Hays Office.