Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [90]
“Spiraling rapidly out of control,” I said. “Same as ever.”
“What did he say about the book?”
“He said he wants to see it.”
“So are you going to let him? Did you get it done?”
I hesitated for a moment, and looked around the table. Everyone was waiting to hear my reply. I didn’t blame them for that. For as long as they could remember, I’d been making vague and confident assurances that any day I would finish the thing. If and when I ever did, they would probably feel an almost physical sense of relief. I was like a massively incompetent handyman who’d been up on their roof now for years, trying to take down a gnarled old lightning-struck tree trunk that had fallen against the house, haunting every gathering, all discussions of family business, any attempt they made to sit down together and plan for the future, with the remote but ceaseless whining of my saw.
“I’m just about done,” I said with a smile that morally if not in fact was a first cousin to the gap-toothed, dishonest, and faintly stupid grin of untrustworthy and drunken old Everett Tripp. “I should have it finished in the next couple of weeks.”
There followed a brief silence which might have greeted a man with terminal cancer announcing that he’d just bought himself a ticket to the World Series next fall. Deborah let go a bitter laugh.
“Oh, right,” she said.
Emily’s fork rang out against her plate.
“I really wish you would stop it now, Deborah,” she said.
“Stop what, Em?”
Emily started to speak, then remembered James, glanced at him, and said nothing. She picked up her fork and twirled it in the fingers of her left hand, over and over, as though looking for scratches. It would not have been at all like her to pick a fight at the dinner table and I was relieved (although secretly disappointed) to see her back down. I didn’t like to think what kind of surprising mass revelations a direct challenge might bring from Deborah. But whenever tempers flared you could always count, I thought, on Emily’s astonishing faculty for repression. In our eight years together we’d had exactly one fight: something to do with kirschwasser and a cheese fondue. Above all things Emily hated to draw attention to herself or cause a scene of any kind; that was how she had survived her childhood as the only Jewish girl in Squirrel Hill with an epicanthic fold.
“I wish you would just lay off Grady,” she finally said, in her soft dark Casanova voice. She tried to make a little joke out of it. “Just for tonight.”
Deborah sat for a moment, thinking, that one over. “You’re a fool, Em,” she said.
“Deborah,” said Irv. “That’s enough.”
“I’m a fool? Look at you.”
“What’s that?”
“I said, ‘Look at you,’” said Emily. She clutched the fork more tightly now, the joints of her fingers going white, and it occurred to me that Deborah might be getting more than she had bargained for. On that miraculous evening of the cheese fondue, I suddenly remembered, Emily had come at me with a wicked little fork. “Sitting there in your bathrobe. You didn’t even comb your hair.”
“Deborah, Emily, both of you,” said Irene, setting her own fork down. “Stop fighting. This instant.” The corners of her mouth turned up in a wry smile and she looked at James. “You’re going to give our guest the right impression of our family.”
Obediently and with an air of relief, Emily relaxed her grip on the fork. The tension went out of her shoulders. I was bitterly, crazily disappointed to see Emily fold.
“Sorry,” she said. She smiled at James. “Sorry, James.”
James nodded, looking more baffled than forgiving, and took a long avid swallow of the California zinfandel we were drinking with dinner, as if his throat were parched. For another instant Deborah sat stroking at her unkempt black thatch of hair. Then she stood up, abruptly, tugging the flaps of her bathrobe tightly around her.
“You’re always so fucking sorry,” she said to Emily, her cheeks twitching with pity and contempt. Her chair, one of eight blond, curvaceous tangles of Scandinavian birchwood,