Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [79]
I put a consolatory hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away and yanked open the back door. She ran into the house, through the kitchen, and went pounding up the stairs. I was dragged by her black crackling slipstream into the kitchen, where Marie stood, all dressed for dinner, stirring the matzoh ball soup in its caldron. She looked at me, an eyebrow raised, holding an interrogative ladle in one hand.
“I’m just getting started,” I told her.
I WENT DOWN INTO the basement to rescue James Leer and found him at the Ping-Pong table, facing Philly Warshaw with a paddle in his hand. They were playing Beer Pong, a hazing ritual to which, in his wild days, Philly had subjected all suitors and young male visitors to the house, myself included. It was the consensus in the Warshaw family that Philly’s wild days had endured for an unreasonably long period of time, but in the end he’d settled down, and it was only when he came out to Kinship, now, and there was no driving to be done that he drank too much; I suppose it gave him something to look forward to in family visits. I sat down on the cellar steps to watch the action.
“Take it easy, there, James,” I said.
“He’s all right,” said Philly, taking an exaggerated swipe at the ball, painting just enough english onto it to send it skittering into the glass of beer that was stationed, on the center line, at James Leer’s end of the table. “He’s doing fine.” He grinned. “Pound it, James.”
Obediently James reached for the full pilsner glass, fished out the ball, raised the glass to his lips, and drained it in a single eternal swallow that seemed to cause him some difficulty. When the beer was gone, he hoisted the glass in my direction, an empty smile frozen on his face, as a child who is trying to seem grown up smiles around an endless salty mouthful of raw oyster.
“Hi, Professor Tripp,” he said.
“How many is that?” I asked him.
“That’s two.”
“Three,” said Philly, coming around to refill James’s glass with a can of Pabst he took from the mini-refrigerator that he kept in the corner of his old clubhouse. Daintily James wiped the beer from the Ping-Pong ball with the tail of my old flannel shirt. His hair had come unfastened from its brilliantine moorings and stood at crazy angles from his head. He was all smirks and grins and his eyes were full of light, as they had been the night before when we burst, heads reeling, into the blazing lobby of Thaw Hall, laughing and out of breath. He was having a great time. I could see that alcohol was going to be a dangerous thing for him.
“So, what happened to your car?” Philly wanted to know. “Who’s butt is that?”
“Guy jumped on it,” I said. I was a little irritated with him for having lured poor James into a game of Beer Pong, but I couldn’t really hold it against him. Phillip Warshaw was a born agent of chaos and a master of backspin in all its many forms. He’d come over from Korea in 1965 with a reputation for being the most willful and uncontrollable toddler in the Soodow Orphanage and had immediately started running headlong and half-intentionally through plate-glass windows and lashing neighborhood children to trees. His career as a teenage vandal was legendary at Allderdice High School; in one four-month period he and a number 12 Magic Marker had covered every flat surface in Squirrel Hill, Greenfield, and parts of South Oakland with an arcane symbology that investigators eventually identified as his birth name, written in the alphabet of his lost mother. He had found a paradise of bad behavior during his tours in Panama and P.I, and it had taken him years to adjust to married life on the base down at Aberdeen.
“A guy? What guy?”
“A guy named, uh”—I looked over at James—“Vernon Hardapple.”
Philly slapped another nasty spin on the ball and just missed plunging it into James’s glass again.
“Hardapple?”
“He was a matador,” said James, without even looking at