Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [69]
“Surprise,” I said, thinking I would take it very hard if Irene Warshaw was sorry to see my face.
“Hello, hello!” said Irene, holding out her arms to me, wagging her head disbelievingly from side to side. Irene wasn’t tall but she had a good fifty pounds on me, and when she shook one of her body parts all the rest of them tended to join in. In the country—and since Irv’s retirement, five years earlier, she was nearly always in the country—she modeled her pursuits and her manner of dress as nearly as possible on those of Monet at Giverny, and she had on a broad straw hat and a knee-length blue chambray smock with billowing sleeves. She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.
I kissed her soft cheek. I closed my eyes and she pressed my forehead firmly against her lips. She had a bitter, nutritious smell compounded of cooking oil, castile soap, and the five hundred milligrams of B complex vitamins she swallowed every day.
“Hello, sweetie,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said.
“I knew you’d come.”
“How’d you know that?”
She shrugged. “I knew.”
“Irene, this is James Leer, he’s a student of mine. A very talented writer.”
“How wonderful,” said Irene, extending her arm past me to take hold of James’s pale hand. In the early forties, at Carnegie Tech, Irene had majored in English literature and, in particular considering her long years of exposure to me, esteemed writers far too highly. Her literary taste was more exclusive and refined than Sara’s, and she read with greater deliberateness, rereading and underlining choice phrases and keeping track of the characters with lists and genealogies on the flyleaf. There was a stern photograph of a besweatered, smoke-wreathed Lawrence Durrell, her absolute favorite, hanging on the wall above her secretary desk, and in her wallet she carried around a scrap of crumpled program, rescued from a trash can, on which, during the course of an awards ceremony at the Poetry Forum, a bored John Updike had sketched a carious incisor tooth that was killing him that night. I’d been trading for many years now on the goodwill that my occupation earned for me in Irene’s regard. “How are you, James? A writer? And you’ve come to make the Seder with us?”
“I—I guess so,” said James, drawing himself down deep into his filthy black coat. There was a ring of powdered sugar imprinted on one flap. “I mean, yes, if it’s all right with you. I’ve never, uh, is it—made one? before.”
“Of course! Of course!” She crinkled up her face and smiled her most grandmotherly smile, but I saw that her blue eyes, examining James, were cold as only a grandmother’s can be. James Leer had the kind of pallid and formless good looks that to a woman of Irene’s age might bespeak illness, onanism, defective upbringing, or mental infirmity. I supposed it was not impossible that having grown up during a decade which preferred the colors avocado, burnt orange, and goldenrod might well have injured his brain.
“And this is Marie. My daughter-in-law.”
“What’s up, James?” said Marie. Born—I always got a kick out of this—during an emergency refueling stop on Wake Island, freckled, a bit wide in the hips, Marie had, unlike me, converted on marrying into the Warshaw family, and except for her childlessness she had transformed herself into a peerless Jewish daughter-in-law. Marie was in fact the best Jew in the family, far more observant than her husband or his parents. She pinned a doily to her hair on Friday nights to light the candles, and baked three-cornered cookies when it was annually appropriate, and knew all the words, in Hebrew, to the national anthem of Israel. Like many army brats she had an open and imperturbable character, which served her well in her husband’s family, no two of whose members shared traits of character, or DNA, or otherwise bore any more resemblance to each other than the seventeen states and