Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online

in a laundry. In raising her half-orphaned daughter, she had brought to bear all of her considerable armaments in a largely successful effort to expunge Joseph Tedesco’s evanescent legacy of failure and excess, and raise a woman who would always go for the sure thing, however modest. Thus Sara had submerged an early love of literature to the study of accounting, following this with a Ph.D. in administration. She’d refused the proposals of the first two great loves of her life in order to pursue her career, and then, having found herself Chancellor of our college at the age of thirty-five, allowed herself to marry.
    She chose the head of the English Department: his affairs were in order, his career well-established, his habits husbandly, and he kept his seven thousand books not simply alphabetized but grouped by period and country of origin. As the eighth child of a poor Greenfield family she was attracted to Walter’s genteel manners, to his Dartmouth education, his knowledge of sailboats, his parents’ penthouse apartment on Central Park West. Her mother approved of him; Sara told herself that he was quite literally the best she could hope for. Nevertheless, in spite of all her mother’s efforts, there remained a wild and sentimental Neapolitan streak in Sara, and this, along with some faint Electral residue she saw crackling in the air around me, may also help to explain her willingness to endanger her stable existence for the doubtful pleasure of my company.
    The other explanation I used to make to myself was that my lover was an addict and I was a manufacturer of her particular drug of choice. Sara would read anything you handed her—Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet—at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly’s for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine. She’d even read my first book, long before she ever met me, and I liked to think that she was the best reader I had. Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.
    “You can toss them in there,” she said, in a stage voice, pointing me like a tour guide into a small, pale blue room with a parquet floor and a bay window, high-ceilinged like all the rooms in the house. I carried the coats in and Sara followed, closing the door behind us. On the left-hand wall, alongside an Empire armoire, hung two large sets of baseball cards in oblong frames. I’d examined them in the past and I knew they represented the championship New York Yankee teams of 1949 and 1950. The opposite wall was covered in framed photographs of Yankee Stadium, taken at various epochs in its history. Against this wall lay the headboard of a bed with newel posts and a frilly white dust ruffle. Its surface was white and smooth and bare of any wraps or other garments. I spread Sara out across it. Crabtree’s and Miss Sloviak’s coats slid to the floor. I climbed onto the bed beside Sara and looked down at her anxious face.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Hi, big guy.”
    I lifted the skirt of her party dress and placed