Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [76]
I walked out to the driveway and started down toward Kinship Road, looking up at the mesh of branches overhead for signs of a blighted elm tree against which it would be kosher for me to piss. The air smelled cool and slippery like wet bark, and although my wife’s refusal to let me share her nakedness, however reasonable, had hurt me—even though it made my heart ache to think that I might never get to see my Emily naked again—I was feeling very glad to be out of the house, alone, carrying the happy clenched fist of my bladder inside me. Then I came around a bend in the drive and saw my sister-in-law. She was moping along about fifty feet ahead of me, wrapped in a gauzy purple dress the hem of which dragged in the gravel like a train. She was cutting at the air around her with a lit cigarette and singing softly to herself in a falsetto voice: it sounded like the slow, moaning part of “Whole Lotta Love.” I knew that I ought to leave her to her unimaginable Deborah reveries but I was upset and confused about Emily, and there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law’s counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen. She caught the sound of my tread in the gravel, and turned.
“How weird,” I said by way of greeting.
“Hey, Doc!” she said.
“That’s quite a dress.” There were tiny silver mirrors sewn into the fabric, and the print appeared to be patterned after the psychedelic neon paisley effect you get when you shut your eyes tight and press hard with your knucklebones against them. It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.
“Do you like it? It’s from India or someplace,” said Deborah, smacking me on the cheek, hard, with her compressed lips, in her version of a kiss, and giving my hand a painful squeeze. “What’s weird?”
“I couldn’t get Em to let me come into the bathroom and pee. She was in there taking a bath.”
“She’s fucking pissed at you, Doc,” she said. “She heard you’ve been boinking this other woman.” Doc was Deborah’s nickname for me. She’d started out, years ago, by calling me Gravy, and hence Gravy Boat, and then the latter had metamorphosed, in a way I supposed my physique made inevitable, into Das Boot. At some point she had dropped the Boot, and then after a while Das had slid slowly into Doc, where, finding me always well supplied in any emergency with a certain pharmacological substance, it finally lodged. Deborah had come to English late, as I’ve said, and there was no way of telling what would happen to a phrase like “gravy boat” once it got into her brain. “Bastard.” She drove a fist delicately into my stomach. “Fucking slimebag.”
“Did she?” I said, not taking her abuse of me at all seriously. One of the things I’d always admired about Deborah was the unself-conscious scabrousness of her dealings with men in general and myself in particular. She’d arrived on these shores with little in her luggage besides the seven great Anglo-Saxon imprecations, and to this day she clung to them with touching devotion, as to certain other proofs—a shriveled lei of orchids, an ancient, uneaten Hershey bar the orphanage had provided for the trip—of her passage to America. “And just where did she hear that?”
“You think I told her?”
“I don’t really care,” I said. “How are you, kid?”
I reached to brush a strand of hair from her right eye, and she looked away. She had thick and lovely hair, which she used to conceal her face, a plain face made plainer still by her low regard for it. She hated her nose, believing it to be at once bulbous and too small. She called it—originally, I thought, if pitiably—her pud. Her eyes though expressive were badly crossed, and her teeth wandered across her smile like the kernels at the tip of an ear of corn.
“You don’t know anything about monkeys, do you?”
“Not as much as I