Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [66]
“Careful,” I said, “Look out, man. That stuff has to last me a long time.” As I reached out to catch the skittering paper bateau I let go of the steering wheel and we bumped up onto the shoulder of the road, then off. “Jesus.”
“Sorry,” he said, retrieving the scattered elements of the joint. He looked at me, then started to roll up the bud, intact, as if it were a little gift he was wrapping up to give to me.
“No, James, you have to break it up, a little, or the thing isn’t going to draw.” I looked at him. “I thought you said you knew how to do it.”
“I do,” said James, sounding so injured that I decided just to leave him alone. I shrugged and stared ahead at the meandering black river of Pennsylvania highway I’d navigated with Emily so many times before, and which was in many ways the principal thoroughfare of her life. Driving past the red, black, and ocher towns, with their muddy baseball fields, their onion domes, their pancake houses and rusting rail yards, she marked the transit of summers and holidays, school years, birthday weekends, anniversaries, flights from the upsets and dissolutions of her romantic life in Pittsburgh. Like most women I’d known, Emily had suffered in the course of her relationships through a remarkable run of what men are pleased to call bad luck. I was not the first betrayer to come chasing after her up Route 79, with questionable intentions.
“Here,” said James, handing me a lumpy but serviceable joint. “How’s that?”
“Perfect,” I said, and he smiled. “Thanks.” I handed him my lighter, and both of us noticed that my fingers were trembling. “Could you fire it up for me, buddy?”
“All right,” he said, uncertainly. “How—how are you feeling, Professor? You seem a little jumpy yourself.” He stuck the joint between his lips and drew on it, then passed it across to me.
“I’m fine,” I said. I took a long slow toke and watched the wind carry it all away when I exhaled. “I guess I might be a little nervous about going up to see my wife.”
“She’s really mad at you?”
“She ought to be.”
He nodded.
“She’s pretty,” he said. “I saw her pictures in your office. Is she, what—Chinese?”
“Korean. She’s adopted. Her folks adopted three Korean kids.”
“Did they have any of their own?”
“One,” I said. “A son. Sam. He died pretty young. Actually today’s the anniversary of his death. Or yesterday. I forget how it works, with the moon, and all. They light a little candle and it burns for twenty-four hours.”
He thought that over for a while, and I smoked the lumpy cigarette he’d rolled me. He’d neglected to comb out the seeds, and every so often one popcorned and spat ash across my vest. We flew past Zelienople and Ellwood City and Slippery Rock. The number of possible exits from the shrinking stretch of highway between Emily and me grew smaller, one by one, and I began seriously to regret having undertaken this journey. However badly I might want to immerse myself in her loud, sloppy, jumbled up, all-surviving family, there was no good reason not to believe that the greatest kindness I could do to Emily right now would be just to leave her alone. I had hurt her badly already and it was going to be worse when she learned that Sara was pregnant. Because she and I, for a couple of years, had tried to have a baby of our own. She was getting older and I was getting older and at the center of our marriage there was a small and all-consuming hole. When our initial efforts failed, we tried doctors and thermometers and an obsessive study of the monthly behavior of Emily’s eggs, visited a special clinic, began looking into adoption. And then one day, almost magically, without ever discussing it, we just gave up. I sighed. I could feel James’s eyes upon me.
“Do you think she’s going to be glad to see you?” he said. “Your wife, I mean.”
“No,” I said. “I do not.”
He nodded.
“Passover,” he said, after a moment. “That’s the one where you don’t get to eat any bread.”
“That’s the one.”
“What about