Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [71]
“Great,” said James, shrinking deep into his overcoat. “I’d love to.”
“Philly will be happy about that,” said Marie, sounding a little hollow herself.
“All right, then.” I put my hand on James’s shoulder and started for the door. When I got to the laundry room I turned. “Oh,” I said, in a tone I hoped sounded airy and nonchalant and free of any tocsin of marital distress. “And, uh, where is Emily?”
“Oh, she’s out on the dock, too,” said Marie. “With Deb. They’re talking.”
“Talking,” I said. Since Deborah Warshaw had spent most of the previous winter divorcing her third husband I was sure they must have a lot to talk about. “All right. Good.”
“Grady,” said Irene. She set down the spoon she was holding and came over to take both of my hands in hers. She looked up at me hopefully and not without a certain impatience. “I’m glad you’re here.” Then she nodded her head in the direction of the springhouse. “And you know how happy he’s going to be.”
“And Emily?” I said.
“Of course, and Emily. What are you saying? Don’t be stupid.”
I smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
“I didn’t think I was being stupid,” I said, a little dazed by the force of Irene’s optimism. All at once it seemed not impossible that my heart, that mad helmsman lashed to the wheel in the pilothouse of my rib cage, had steered me out to Kinship only to be reconciled to my wife. “I’m not sure she’s going to be all that thrilled.”
Irene rolled her eyes and leaned forward to give me a soft slap on the cheek.
“I hope you don’t listen too closely to the things this man tells you,” she said to James. She reached into her pocket, withdrew another chocolate chick, unwrapped it, and cruelly bit off its head, once again returning the remainder uneaten to her pocket. She must have had a whole pile of mangled little bodies in there.
James and I went back through the laundry room and started out the door into the yard.
“What’s the matter, James?” I said. “You look a little disturbed.”
He turned to me, eyes wide with panic, hands jammed into the pockets of his coat.
“Four questions about what?” he said.
THIS SPRING, AS USUAL, the Warshaws’ pond had overflowed its banks and turned the back garden into an everglades. Irene’s empire of rosebushes had flooded, her stone birdbath lay washed over onto its side, and, buried to his divine nipples in mud, the statuette of Gautama Buddha that she’d set to watch over her flowers looked imperturbably out at us from behind an azalea. I limped with James across the makeshift boardwalk Irv had laid to carry you from the back door of the house, over the drowned garden, to the crooked gray shack the old Utopians built to keep their meat and melons cool in the summertime. The walkway, like all of Irv’s constructions, was at once intricate and ramshackle, a mismatched assemblage of two-by-fours, scrap lumber, and firewood nailed haphazardly together according to a grandiose scheme that provided for pilings, lashed guardrails, even a small bench, halfway along; the structure got more elaborate every year. I supposed that a dike of sandbags strategically placed along the pond would have been more effective, but that was not the way Irv’s mind operated. As we thumped along the boardwalk I could hear coming from the springhouse the shining corners and echoing space of his beloved serial music. In his youth, before switching to metallurgical engineering, Irv had studied composition, at Carnegie Tech, with an émigré pupil of Schoenberg’s, and written a few unlistenable pieces with titles like Molecules I-XXIV, Concerto for Klein Bottle, and Reductio ad Infinitum. That was the way Irv’s mind operated.
Halfway to the springhouse, I stopped and looked out over the