Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [96]
“My, this is a charming house,” said Amanda Leer. She took a careful step forward into the room. The heels of her shoes were much too tall for her, considering her height and her age. They were expensive-looking black calfskin things, with black leather bows on the toes. She was wearing a modest but not at all matronly black dress, with sheer black sleeves and three flounces. Her nails were manicured and her lips rouged and she smelled of Chanel No. 5. “Oh, this is an adorable house.”
“Grady, this is a nice place you’ve got out here,” said Fred Leer.
I looked around the living room. All of the furniture had been shoved back into its usual disorder, with none of the chairs oriented toward one another and barely enough room for a person of my size to navigate from the stairs to the fireplace. Instead of being hung with the duck-hunting prints, pastoral landscapes, or yellowed catalog plates of antique farm equipment which seemed called for, the knotty pine walls of the cottage were a jumble of Helen Frankenthaler and Marc Chagall, aerial views of Pittsburgh and Jerusalem, bar mitzvah and graduation portraits of the Warshaw children, a Diane Arbus poster, a framed photograph of Irv posed with some beefy grinning Mellon in the belfry of the Campanile, and a couple of fairly terrible imitation Mirós that Deborah had painted in college. There was a barbed-wire tangle of Israeli sculpture taking up too much room on the lowboy. The Scrabble board was still lying out on the coffee table, abandoned in midgame, offering like a Ouija board such enigmatic counsel as UVULA and SQUIRT, and there was ice melting in a couple of tumblers by the TV.
“It’s my in-laws’,” I said. “I’m just here visiting.”
“And your mother-in-law sounded so kind and concerned when I spoke to her,” said Amanda Leer.
“Well, they wanted to meet you,” I said. “But they got tired. It was kind of a big day around here.”
“Oh, really, listen,” said Fred Leer, “we were late.” He dragged his wristwatch out of the sleeve of his snappy dinner jacket and I recognized it at once. It was the gold Hamilton, with an elongated Art Moderne face, that James would sometimes wear to class and sit loudly winding when opinion in the workshop went against him. “Oh, my word, two hours late!”
“We just couldn’t get away as quickly as we would’ve liked,” Amanda said. “It’s Fred’s birthday today, you see, and we were throwing a party at the golf club. We’ve been planning it all year. It was a lovely party.”
“What golf club is that? Where do you folks live?” But I already knew where they lived. They were a couple of rich bastards.
“St. Andrew’s,” said Fred. “We live in Sewickley Heights.”
So the mystic lightning that tormented the dark skies of James Leer’s fiction, all that sorrowful, cabbages-and-hell Slavic Catholicism, that too was also pure sham.
“Now,” said Amanda Leer, losing her Presbyterian smile. “Where is he?”
“Upstairs,” I said. “Asleep. I don’t think he knows you’re here. I’ll go get him.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll go get him.”
“Well, maybe you’d better let me.” There was a startling implication of violence in her tone. She sounded as though she intended to yank James out of bed by his ear and drag him by this handle down the stairs and out to the car. I wondered now if it had been such a good idea to call his parents in the first place. He wasn’t a child. People his age were allowed to get drunk and pass out. I might even have argued that they ought to be required to do so. “There are an awful lot of doors up there. Ha ha. You might wake up the wrong person.”
“Oh, of course, you’re right, Grady,” she said. The smile was back. “We’ll just wait for him down here.”
“Hate to cause you so much trouble,” said Fred. He shook his head. “I’d like to know what is the matter with our James, I’ll tell you that.”
“I know what’s the matter with him,” said Amanda, darkly, without elaborating. “Oh, boy.”
“He sure likes movies,” I said.
“Don’t get me started,” said Amanda.
“Don’t,” said James