Free Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon Page B

the Gaskells’ bed and let his knapsack slide to the floor. He cried silently, covering his face. A tear fell onto his old acetate necktie and spread in a slow ragged circle. I went over to stand beside him. It was now seven fifty-three, according to the clock on the night table, and downstairs I could hear the click of Sara’s heels as she rushed around, switching off lights, gathering up her purse, taking a last look at herself in the pier glass hanging in the foyer. After a moment the front door squealed on its hinges, then slammed, and the bolt turned in the lock. James and I were alone in the Gaskells’ house. I sat down on the bed beside him.
    “I’d really like to take a look at your novel,” I said. “Really, James.”
    “It isn’t that, Professor Tripp,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. There was a pearl of snot in one of his nostrils and he inhaled it. “I’m sorry.”
    “What’s the matter, buddy? Hey, I know the workshop was awfully hard on you, it’s my fault, I—”
    “No,” he said. “It isn’t that.”
    “Well, what is it?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, with a sigh. “Maybe I’m just depressed.” He looked up and turned his red eyes toward the closet. “Maybe it’s seeing that jacket that belonged to her. I guess I think it looks, I don’t know, really sad, just hanging there like that.”
    “It does look sad,” I said. From outside I heard the engine of Sara’s car bubble to life. It was one of the few successful stylish gestures that she had managed to make—a currant red convertible Citroën DS23, in which she liked to tool around campus with a red and white polka-dot scarf on her head.
    “I have an extra hard time with stuff like that,” he said. “Things that used to belong to people. Hanging in a closet.”
    “I know what you mean.” I pictured a row of empty dresses, hanging in an upstairs closet in a soot-faced redbrick house in Carvel, Pennsylvania.
    We sat there for a minute, side by side on that cool white snowbank of a bed, looking over at the scrap of black satin hanging in Walter Gaskell’s closet, listening to the whisper of Sara’s tires in the gravel drive as she pulled away from the house. In another second she would turn out into the street and wonder why Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie was still sitting dark and deserted along the curb.
    “My wife left me today,” I said, as much to myself as to James Leer.
    “I know,” said James Leer. “Hannah told me.”
    “Hannah knows?” Now it was my turn to cover my face with my hands. “I guess she must have seen the note.”
    “I guess so,” said James. “It seemed like she was kind of happy about it, to tell you the truth.”
    “She what?”
    “Not—I mean, Hannah said a couple of things that, well. I never got the impression, you know, that she and your wife actually liked each other. Very much. I mean, actually it sounded to me like your wife kind of hated Hannah.”
    “I guess she did,” I said, remembering the creaking silence that had reached like the arm of a glacier across my marriage, in the days after I’d invited Hannah to rent our basement. “I guess I don’t really know a whole lot about what’s going on in my own house.”
    “That could be,” said James, a certain wryness entering his tone. “Did you know that Hannah Green has a crush on you?”
    “I didn’t know that,” I said, falling backward on the bed. It felt so good to lie back and close my eyes that I was afraid to stay that way. I sat up, too quickly, so that a starry cloud of diamonds condensed around my head. I didn’t know what to say next. I’m glad? So much the worse for her?
    “I think so, anyway,” said James. “Hey, you know who else I forgot? Peg Entwistle. Although she certainly was never a big star. She only made one movie, Thirteen Women , 1932, and she just had a bit part in that. It was the only part she ever