Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [72]
“Grady!” she called, through the trumpet bell of her cupped hands.
Emily turned around in her chair and looked at me. After a moment she raised her hand and weakly waved. She was wearing a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, and it was not quite possible at this distance to read her expression. I figured that Munch’s The Scream was probably a safe bet.
“That’s my wife,” I said.
“Which one?”
“The one having a cardiac arrest. In the blue bathing suit.”
“She’s waving,” James observed. “That’s good, right?”
“I guess so,” I said. “I’ll bet she’s pret-ty fucking surprised.”
“What’s the other one wearing?”
I looked. There were two pale ovals arranged across Deborah’s chest, in the manner of the cups of a bikini bathing suit, ornamented at their centers with tan rosettes.
“She’s wearing her breasts,” I said. Beside her chair on the deck sat a squat, faceted bottle filled with a dark liquid, and a stack of what looked like magazines. These would be comic books, however. Deborah’s reading skills in English were not advanced, and she rarely read anything else. I didn’t really think it was a warm enough day for topless sunbathing, but it would certainly be typical of Deborah to decide that the best possible way of preparing for a family Seder was to drink Manischewitz and lie around half naked reading Betty and Veronica. Deborah was seven years older than Emily, but she had, paradoxically, known their parents for a briefer period of time. She was almost fourteen when she arrived from Korea, and unlike Emily and Phil she’d never quite learned to suit herself to life in the United States, in a household as patched together and ungainly as any of Irving Warshaw’s inventions. She’d missed having a bat mitzvah, and I knew from Passovers past that she considered the Seder to be a kind of unnecessary and infinitely more tedious reduplication of the Thanksgiving meal. She was kind of an antimatter Emily, plain where Emily was pretty, violent where she was placid, given to rages and transports but incapable, where Emily was a master, of arrière-pensée and social calculation. It was, I always imagined, as if the Warshaws had adopted a feral child, a girl raised by wolves.
“Yo, Grady!” She drew a slow circle in the air with one hand. She wanted us to come over and say hello. Emily just sat there, motionless, holding a cigarette, the wind lifting the smooth black hem of her hair. I didn’t feel ready, I realized, to face Emily yet. So I gave them a cheerful, old-slow-witted-Grady wave hello, made a great show of shaking my head, then turned and led James out to the springhouse. I knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” said Irv. When he was in the springhouse, and you knocked on his door, he never just said, “Come in.”
“It’s Grady,” I said.
There was the scrape of a chair against a wooden floor, and then a low oy as Irv tried to get out of his chair.
“Stay where you are,” I said, pushing open the door, stepping from the bright sunshine into the gloom and inextinguishable chill of the springhouse. The spring itself had dried up during the 1920s, but in spite of all the changes Irv had made to it over the years, the interior of the springhouse retained a cool, peppery tingle of artesian water and an air of perpetual twilight, as if it were a kind of cavern and the angular music Irv preferred merely the sound of water dripping from high stalactites into a bottomless black pool.
“Come in, come in,” said Irv, putting down his book, gesturing, from his overstuffed easy chair, with great helicopter whirlings of his arms. As we came into the springhouse he braced his bad knee with his hands and lurched free from his chair. I went over to him and we shook hands, and I introduced him to James. We hadn’t seen each other since January. In