Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page A

the palm of my hand against the outcropping of her left hip, where the waistband of her panty hose cut into the skin. I slipped my hand under the elastic and reached for the ten thousandth time for the wool of her pussy, automatically, like a luckless man diving for the rabbit’s foot in his pocket. She put her lips against my neck, beneath my earlobe. I felt her trying to relax her body against mine, joint by joint. She worked at the topmost button of my shirt, got a hand inside, and cupped my left breast.
    “This one’s mine,” she said.
    “That’s right,” I said. “All yours.”
    We didn’t say anything for a minute. The guest room was right over the living room and I could hear a flashing ribbon of Oscar Peterson fluttering below us.
    “So?” I said at last.
    “You go first,” she said.
    “All right.” I took off my eyeglasses, stared at the spots on their lenses, put them back on. “This morning—”
    “I’m pregnant.”
    “What? Are you sure?”
    “My period is nine days late.”
    “Still, nine days, that doesn’t—”
    “I’m sure,” she said. “I know I must be pregnant, Grady, because although I gave up all hope of ever having a child a year ago, when I turned forty-five, I really only reconciled myself to the notion a couple of weeks ago. Or, I mean, I realized that I’d reconciled myself to it. You remember we even talked about it.”
    “I remember.”
    “So, naturally.”
    “How do you like that.”
    “How do you like it?”
    I thought about that for a moment.
    “It sort of makes for an interesting complement to my news,” I said. “Which is that Emily left me this morning.” I felt her grow still beside me, as if she were listening for footsteps in the hall. I stopped talking and listened for a moment until I realized that she was only waiting for me to continue. “It’s for real, I think. She went out to Kinship for the weekend, but I don’t think she really plans on coming home.”
    “Huh,” she said, matter-of-factly, trying to sound as if I had just imparted some moderately interesting fact about the manufacture of grout. “So then, I guess what we do is divorce our spouses, marry each other, and have this baby. Is that it?”
    “Simple,” I said. I lay there for a few minutes, with my head thrown back, looking at the wistful, sunstruck faces of ballplayers on the wall behind us. I was so conscious of Sara’s strained and irregular breathing that I was unable to breathe normally myself. My left arm was pinned underneath her and I could feel the first pricklings of trapped blood in my fingertips. I looked into the sad and competent eyes of Johnny Mize. He appeared to me to be the sort of man who would not hesitate to counsel his mistress to abort the first and only child she might ever conceive.
    “Is your friend Terry’s friend really a man?” said Sara.
    “I believe so,” I said. “Knowing Crabtree as I do.”
    “So what did he say to you?”
    “He wants to see the book.”
    “Are you going to show it to him?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. My hand had gone numb now, and my left shoulder was starting to tingle and shut down. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
    “Neither do I,” said Sara. A tear pooled at the corner of her eye and then spilled out across the bridge of her nose. She bit her lip and shut her eyes. I was close enough to her to study the cartography of veins printed on her eyelids.
    “Sara, honey,” I said, “I’m stuck.” I gave my arm a gentle tug, trying to free it. “You’re lying on my arm.”
    She didn’t move; she only opened her eyes, dry once again, and gave me a very hard stare.
    “I guess you’re going to have to chew it off, then,” she said.

I DRANK FOR YEARS , and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any