Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [77]
“Do they make good pets? I was just thinking of getting myself a monkey. A squirrel monkey, you know, one of those little jobbers they have, to carry around on my shoulder. Do you know anything about squirrel monkeys?”
“Only that they kill their masters.”
Deborah showed me all her crooked little teeth.
“I still like you, Doc,” she said, in her insincere way. Like many people who have lost all but the ghost of their original foreign accents, nothing she said ever sounded quite true. “I just want you to know that. Everybody else thinks you’re a motherfucker. But not me. I mean, I do, but I still like you anyway.”
“That’s great,” I said. “You’re the worst judge of character I know, Deb.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” she said, and she looked momentarily depressed. Her most recent husband, for example, a half-Korean dentist named Alvin Blumentopf to whom she had been married for all of a year, had been beaten up by loan sharks for nonpayment of racetrack debts and then convicted, two days later, of income-tax evasion, and sent to the federal prison at Marion. That Deborah had fallen in love with him almost guaranteed such a fate. “Thanks for reminding me, you know?”
She dropped her cigarette onto the road; just let go of it, half-smoked, as if it tired her. Deborah came off much tougher than Emily and I remembered that I always forgot—misled by her profane good nature and loopy style—how easy it was to injure her feelings. I stepped on the cigarette for her and ground it out.
“What a gentleman,” she said. “So, okay, she wouldn’t let you into the bathroom.”
“She wouldn’t speak to me.”
“She didn’t say anything?”
“No, but I only waited twenty minutes.”
“And then you came out here to piss?”
“Yeah,” I said. I started toward a nearby tree, which appeared, on close inspection, to be acceptably dead. “Mind?”
“Do I get to see your wiener?”
“You bet.” I stepped behind the tree and unzipped. “Have you got a pen?”
“No, why?”
“I want to draw a little face on it for you.”
“Do worms have faces?”
“Now you’re depressing me,” I said.
“Doc,” said Deborah. “How many times have you been married?”
“Three.”
“Three. Same as me.”
“The same.”
“And I’ll bet you cheated on them, too.”
“Oh, kind of.”
“And I’m the worst judge of character you ever met?”
“Ha,” I said. I finished my work, hitched up my trousers, and stepped back out into the drive. “So, aside from thinking about monkeys, what were you doing out here, Deb? Fleeing Egypt?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I was checking around in the barnyard. Sort of looking around underneath the cow turds.”
“For ’shrooms?” She nodded. “Did you find any?” Another nod. “Did you eat them?” She looked at me levelly, her eyes all pupil in the late afternoon shadow, her face expressionless. “Jesus, Deb, that’s crazy.”
Now she punched me on the arm and grinned broadly.
“Scared you, didn’t I?” She reached into one of the side pockets of her dress and pulled out a dirty handful of skinny gray mushrooms. “I’m just kind of holding on to them for now. In case things get really dull.” She shoved them back into the pocket and from the other took out her cigarettes. When she could get them she smoked a nasty filterless Korean brand called Chan Mei Chong that cost her double the price of a domestic pack and smelled like burning warthog rind.
“When I first saw Emily”—she lit the cigarette, watching the flame with her wild, crossed eyes—“yesterday, I could tell she had some kind of news to tell me. You know how all the parts of her face sort of all smoosh together around her nose?”
“Uh huh.”
“I thought she was going to say that she was pregnant.”
“Funny,” I said, voice a little thick.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
I have to say here that I didn’t quite trust Deborah, and had no reason to believe that she trusted me. Whenever we were alone together like this I felt an awkwardness between us—we punched each other a lot, and called each other names, and rocked from foot to foot watching the smoke leave our mouths—that was partly sexual and partly social but was mostly due to our each knowing all