Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [95]
After ten minutes, however, my career as a character in one of my own books was over. I couldn’t dig anymore. I leaned against the horse chestnut tree and tried to catch my breath, looking down into a hole deep enough, I calculated, to hold a largish Pomeranian. So much for my fucking doppelgänger, I thought. I sighed, and my sigh was answered out on the county road, and I turned in time to see a long pale wand of light reach out and shatter against the colonnade of elms. A car was coming fast toward the house, snapping branches, bottoming put in the many potholes with a series of irritable scrapes and drumbeats. I looked back to the house. The light had come on in Sam Warshaw’s old bedroom, now, and there was a shadow at the glass. James Leer watched his parents’ car come up the drive.
It was a late-model Mercedes sedan, its engine percolating as though it ran on soda water. In the moonlight it looked soft and gray and stately as a felt fedora. It pulled up behind my car and sat for a minute, engine idling, headlights blaring, as if its passengers were experiencing a moment of doubt, geographic or moral. Then the driver backed it sharply to the left and executed a neat three-point turn, aiming the car out toward the road before cutting the engine; in case they needed to make a quick getaway, I supposed. A long black shoe emerged from the driver’s side, pointy-toed and glinting in the light of the Passover moon. It was attached, via a dark stocking and several pale inches of calf, to a man wearing evening dress and a white tuxedo scarf that at first I took for a prayer shawl. The man was not quite as tall as James, but his frame was lanky and his shoulders looked as though they were knotted together in the same shy stoop. He held up a pale, somber palm to me, then offered his hand to the woman in the passenger seat. She was tall, too, and wide, a big woman wrapped up in the luminous white pelt of something dead, wobbling in the driveway on high, high heels. They started toward me, smiling as if they were dropping in on old friends, the man’s hand applied like a cha-cha partner’s to the small of the woman’s back. In their somber finery and luminous white stoles they looked something like an advertisement for a French brand of mustard, and something like the couple on top of a wedding cake, and something like a pair of elegant ghosts, killed in a collision of limousines on their way to a fancy-dress ball.
“I’m Fred Leer,” said the man, when he got to the steps where I was waiting. I’d left the shovel stabbed into the grass of the pet cemetery, next to the unfinished grave, and hopped up onto the front steps of the house, as if that was where visitors were always greeted. I stood there, Grady the Jolly Innkeeper, smiling, my hands clasped behind my back. “This is my wife, Amanda.”
“Grady Tripp.” I held out my hand to him, and he gave it a long, hard squeeze. He had a salesman’s handshake, practiced and automatic. “James’s teacher. How are you?”
“Very embarrassed,” said Mrs. Leer. They followed me across the porch, over to the front door, and waited patiently while I fumbled with my keys. It’d been years since I’d had to work the locks of this house. “We want to apologize for James.”
“No need,” I said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.” I fell into the living room, switched on the light, and saw that they were both at least fifteen years older than the silver-haired tycoon and frosted ex-cheerleader I’d seen fox-trotting toward me across the moonlit lawn of my imagination. They were dressed for the ballroom of an ocean liner, all right, but their cheeks were ruined, and the whites of their eyes were yellow, and their hair in both cases was iron gray, although he wore his cut crisp as a sailor’s and hers was done in a neat little Junior League page boy. I figured Fred for sixty-five and Amanda for