Wonder Boys (18 page)

“The light’s green,” said James.

I had my eye on that baby. Its face was pressed against the woman’s left breast, and it was waving its hands around in the air in a declamatory manner. Its fingers curled and uncurled and struck odd poses like the significant fingers of a stone bodhisattva. For an instant I could feel the weight of it, like an ache, in the hollow of my arm.

“We can go now, Professor.”

The person in the car behind us began to honk. As the family stepped up onto the far sidewalk, just before they glided off away from us, I glimpsed the baby’s face, over the mother’s shoulder. It wore an oddly crooked grin—almost as if a muscle in its cheek were paralyzed—and a little black eye patch over its left eye. I liked that. I wondered if I had it in me to produce a baby with a piratical air.

“Professor?”

I did a one-eighty in the intersection and headed back toward Point Breeze.

A
S WE PULLED UP
in front of the Gaskells’ house, I looked over at James. The wind had blown back all his sticky black hair so that his bangs stood straight up from his head, which gave him a cartoon air of having just received a piece of shocking news. I saw his eyelids flutter. The doughnut slipped from his fingers. His surprised head tilted backward and lodged in the space between the headrest and the window. I figured he was faking unconsciousness to get out of having to face Chancellor Gaskell, but I didn’t hold that against him. After all, I’d promised—though I doubted if he really believed me—that I would take care of everything.

“Okay, then,” I told James, climbing out of the car. “You wait here.”

There was no answer when I knocked on the front door, so I gave the handle a try. It was unlocked.

“Sara?” I stepped inside. “Walter?”

In the kitchen there was coffee on the stove, and on the table Sara’s huge iron purse, a package of Merits, and a paperback copy of one of Q.’s novels, squashed open over a pink Bic lighter. She was home, all right. I walked back out to the front hall, and started up the stain.

“Sara? It’s Gra-dy! Hello?”

Expecting at any minute to be jumped in a dark corner by an enraged Walter Gaskell swinging one of Joltin’ Joe’s old Hillerich & Bradsbys, I stuck my head into Sara’s office, the guest room, and the other upstairs rooms, and then went at last to the door of the master bedroom, where I had passed an hour just a little too recently and stupidly, I felt, to be visiting again so soon. The door was ajar, and, flinching a little, I gave it a light tap with the toe of my shoe. It swung open with a guilty creak.

“Sara?”

The bed lay buried in its trackless snowdrift of goose-down and linen. A clock ticked on the nightstand. Two pairs of slippers, one plaid, one lavender, sat side by side on the rug. The cork-lined door hung wide open and Walter’s magic closet was bare; doubtless his collection had been evacuated to a safe place. Without looking down at the spot where Doctor Dee had met his fate I held my breath and stepped, as if stepping over the corpse of an Alaskan malamute, into the room. A pair of large casement windows overlooked the driveway, and I could see James Leer in the Galaxie, head lolling to one side, eyes closed, mouth open. He looked as if he really were asleep. I crossed the room to a pair of windows in the opposite wall and peered out into the backyard, beyond the ruined railbed where last night James had stood scratching at his temple with the muzzle of his gun, to Sara’s little garden and, beyond that, to the big fancy greenhouse imported three years ago from France. After a moment I could make out a shadow stooping and then rising behind the steamy panes of glass.

As I went out of the bedroom I held my breath and took a look down at the rug under my feet, by the door. There was a small burnt circle as if someone had dropped a cigarette, alongside some dark brownish flecks like gravy spots on a shirtfront. Part of the circle, and no doubt some of the gravy spots, were missing where a sample had been cut from the Berber carpeting, exposing an isosceles triangle of pale green pad underneath. I poked at the blackened spot with the tip of my shoe for a moment, then went down to see Sara, in her garden, to let her know what the Pittsburgh police lab technician was going to report.

Sara’s garden was rather small, some thirty feet by twenty, enclosed on all four sides by a low fence of white pickets backed with chicken wire. There were eight or nine beds, full of rich black humus, bordered by irregular red bricks set in rows half buried in the ground. Among the beds ran paths of the same brick, set into an underlayer of fine gravel, in a herringbone pattern. An uncle of Sara’s, one of her father’s brothers, had salvaged the bricks from the demolition of Forbes Field. The beds had been cleared out and plowed under last fall. The vines on the spindly trellises were thin and skeletal, the spigots had been wrapped with plastic and taped against frost, and the roses that ran along either side of the central alley had been cut back severely. There were a few prunish apples dangling from the apple tree, and I thought I saw the collapsed black remains of a pumpkin in one corner. Although I knew Sara had already done some spring planting, the garden looked empty and dead to me.

I walked along the brick path to the little glass building, swallowing, clearing my throat, my heart ringing hard against my breastbone. I felt certain that when I left Sara’s greenhouse, having told her what I had brought myself here to say, I would never be coming back. The greenhouse was a miniature palace of glass, speckled with dew, fifteen or twenty feet tall. It was built on the plan of a Greek cross and had a high central atrium, with a peaked, hipped roof like a glass steeple. The framework was metal and wood, painted the dark green of an outfield wall. The windows were fogged but I could make out a dozen shades of green within.

I tapped on the door and it rattled under my hand.

“Sara? It’s Grady.”

I heard her say something that after a moment I reconstructed as a terse invitation to enter.

A jet of cool air carried me through the door, as though the greenhouse were breathing me in. The floor was gravel and my footsteps crunched and echoed off the high glass ceiling. It was so warm inside that I immediately began to sweat, and so fragrant as to be almost malodorous. I smelled potting soil and freesias, basil and rainwater, rotten wood, rubber hoses, moss, and a faint chlorine tang like an indoor pool. A thousand plants stretched out into all four arms of the greenhouse, spread across low benches, in orderly rows, sporting all manner of fronds, tendrils, and bracts, from cacti and miniature roses in pots to boxes full of tiny seedlings to a big round gardenia bush in a Mexican urn. The back part of the greenhouse was hung with fluorescent lights that cast their wide spectra over planters filled with zinnia, alyssum, phlox, and over a box of sweet pea vines that Sara had trained to climb through the empty mullions of a salvaged French door. In the central atrium, in a terra-cotta pot the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, stood a six-foot date palm, and beside it a worn purple davenport crowned with a bunch of carved grapes.

“I can’t believe you hung up on me, you dick.”

Sara came in from the cactus room, looking not entirely sorry to see me. She had on her gardening boots, big, steel-toed, motor-head butt kickers, black as stovepipes, scuffed and muddied and beat to shit, and a cracked old leather coat of some indeterminate color between olive and buff. It was creased and split and mud-spattered, had belt loops but no belt, and its fur-trimmed collar looked as though it had been lovingly chewed by a dog. It had belonged to her father. There was a fat paperback peeking out of the jacket’s hip pocket—in case of emergency, I supposed. Underneath the coat she wore a mechanic’s blue jumpsuit. Her hair was tied up in a black and green plaid scarf and as she crossed the atrium toward me she was tugging at the fingers of a pair of canvas gloves.

“Uh oh,” I said, “the gloves are off.”

“I hate you,” she said, putting her arms around me.

“I hate you, too,” I said.

We stood for a moment, holding on to each other, listening to the humming of the exhaust fans and the ticking of the heaters and the restless suspiration of the plants.

“Walter?” I said at last.

“He’s there.” She nodded in the general direction of campus. “But he’s a basket case,” she said. “We were robbed last night, Grady. They took his jacket. Marilyn’s jacket. And Dee’s missing.”

“I heard.”

She stepped away from me. “How did you hear?”

“Oh.” I dropped my hands to my sides and they hung there, feeling empty and boneless. “A policeman came to talk to me this morning.”

“Did you confess?”

I made myself laugh. “Actually,” I said. “That’s why I came to see you.”

“To confess?” She gave me a sharp poke in the belly and then sat down on the purple davenport. I sat down heavily beside her. “Bad Grady.” Lightly she slapped each of my cheeks with the gloves. Bad. Grady. “Your fingerprints were everywhere.”

“They were?” I felt my throat tighten. “That was fast.”

“I’m kidding. Hello? Kidding?”

“Ha,” I said.

“Aren’t I kidding, Grady?”

“Sure you are.”

“What are you doing?” she asked me, looking me over. “You look like you’re going camping.”

“I’m going out to Kinship.”

“Kinship? To see Emily?” She patted at the breast pocket of her jumpsuit, looking for cigarettes, then lowered her hand to her lap. She did not permit herself to smoke in the greenhouse. “Why? Did she call you?”

“Her father did.”

“Her father.”

“He invited me to their Seder. It’s the first night of Passover tonight.”

“Is it. I see.”

“Sara.”

“That’s fine. No, that’s really
nice.
You should be there.”

“Baby—”

“No, I’m serious. They’re your family. They’re like a family to you. You’ve told me that many times.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t, uh, decided anything yet. I’m not going up there to, you know, reconcile with Emily.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Are you going up there
not
to reconcile with her?”

“Well—yeah, yes, sort of. I don’t know.”

“I
want
you to know, Grady.”

“I know.”

“Now. I would like for you to decide.” She patted again at the empty breast pocket. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pressure you, but I need to know. If you’re going to stay with Emily, and her family, and I think you ought to, that’s a very commendable decision, then I want you to tell me that. If you’re planning to go up there to Kinship and tell Emily about you and me and this baby, then I want to know that, too. If you’re planning to leave Emily for me, although I certainly couldn’t advise you to do that, think of the complications all this is going to cause me on my end, then I also would want to know that.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, what?” said Sara.

I licked my lips. “I want to be with you,” I said. I was not in the least certain whether I meant what I said, nor just what the implications of this statement might be, but since I intended to follow it with a tale of dog slaughter, grand theft, and an accounting of the contents of my trunk I figured it was the safest way to start. “Sara—”

“Oh, Grady,” said Sara. She kissed me. We fell backward on the purple davenport, and she pressed herself against me.

“I started this garden right around the same time I fell in love with you,” she said, in an incantatory, almost childish tone of voice, lying crooked against me. “It was in April. There was nothing out here. Just bare ground and dead grass. I was the same way really. Then one day I came out here to find a flower or something to put in a note to you.”

She paused, and I realized she was waiting for me to take my cue. She gave my shoulder an impatient shake.

“The crocuses,” I said.

“I walked out into the yard and there were crocuses everywhere. I still don’t know where they came from, or who planted them. I asked you to drive me out to that equipment rental place on the South Side. It was our second date.”

“It was on Opening Day.”

“You liked it that I let you listen to the ball game. I got that rototiller thing and I plowed under the whole field. Then I had them come in with all that horseshit. The ground steamed for a week. Then I put up the fence. I built the beds. I planted spinach and broccoli and wax beans.”

“I remember” I said.

“You’re going to tell Emily about us,” she said, in the same dreamy voice. She reached for my right hand and laid it atop the modest dome of her belly. “About this.”

I lay on my side, looking up at the tangled iron lace of the roof over our heads. I saw that Sara, alone in a frail canoe, was drifting nearer and nearer to the roaring misty cataract of motherhood, and that she now believed I was right behind her, in the stern, madly paddling. I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house. I was appalled to see, after five years’ exposure to the unstable isotopes of my love, how many of her hopes Sara Gaskell still entrusted to me; how much of her faith there remained for me to shatter. How could I tell her the terrible things I had to tell her? Your dog is dead. You have to get an abortion.

“I’ll tell Emily,” I said. After a moment I took my hand from her belly, kissed her cheek, and then hauled myself to my feet. “I’d better get going. I left James Leer sitting out in the car.”

“James Leer? What’s he doing out in the car? Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s sleeping off a mighty hangover, is all. I told him I’d only be a few minutes. I didn’t know—”

“Are you taking him with you? Out to Kinship?”

“That’s right,” I said. “He’s not too interested in WordFest, I guess, and I felt like I could use the company.”

“Especially for the ride back, eh?” said Sara.

“Especially that,” I said.

I kissed Sara good-bye. Then I let the greenhouse breathe me out.

When I got back to the car James slowly opened one eye and looked at me, as though afraid to expose any more of himself than this moist and bloodshot half inch to the perils of waking life.