Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

to lay my cheek against the cool, cool wall.
    When I came to, I was lying on my back, with my head propped up, and Sara Gaskell kneeling over me, one light hand on my brow. The cushion she had fashioned for my head felt soft on the outside, but at its center there was something hard as a brick.
    “Grady?” she said, in a careless voice, as though she were trying only to attract my attention to an interesting item in the newspaper. “Are you still with us?”
    “Hello,” I said. “I think so.”
    “What happened, big guy?” Her eyes darted from one corner of my face to another, and she licked her lips, and I saw that despite her tone of unconcern I had given her a fright. “Not another one of these dizzy-spell things?”
    “Kind of. I don’t know.” Your dog is dead. “I think I’ll be all right.”
    “Do you think I ought to run you over to the E.R.?”
    “Not necessary,” I said. “Is the thing over?”
    “Not yet. I saw you walk out, and I—I thought—” She wrung her hands a little, as if they were cold. “Grady—”
    Before she could say whatever difficult thing she intended to say to me, I sat up and kissed her. Her lips were cracked and slick with lipstick. Our teeth touched. The play of her fingers along the back of my neck was cold as rain. After a moment we parted, and I looked at her face, freckled and pale and alive with the look of disappointment that often haunts the difficult faces of redheaded women. Presently we kissed again, and I shivered as her fingertips ran like raindrops down my neck. I slipped my hands down into the back of her dress.
    “Grady—” She let go of me, and drew back, and shook herself. She took a deep breath. I could feel her physically readopting some resolve she had made, some promise not to let me kiss away her doubts. “I know tonight is a terrible night to try to deal with the kind of things we need to deal with, here, sweetie, but I—”
    “I have something to tell you,” I said. “Something hard.”
    “Stand up,” she said, in her most Chancelloresque voice, reacting immediately to the note of fear that had crept into my voice. “I’m too old for all this rolling around on the floor.” She rose a little unsteadily on her heels, tugged down the hem of her black dress, and held out a hand to me. I let her pull me to my feet. Her wedding ring was like a cold spark against my palm.
    Sara let go of my hand and looked over her shoulder, down the corridor. There was no one coming. She turned back to me, trying to make her face expressionless, as though I were the college comptroller come to deliver some bad financial news. “What is it? No, wait a minute.” She pulled a pack of Merit cigarettes from the purse she sometimes carried on formal occasions. It was a flashy silver beaded thing no bigger than twenty cigarettes and a lipstick, a gift from her father to her mother fifty years before, and utterly unsuited to either woman’s character. Sara’s regular handbag was a sort of leather toolbox, with a brass padlock, filled with spreadsheets and textbooks and a crowded key ring as spiked and heavy as a mace. “I know what you’re going to say.”
    “No, you don’t,” I said. Just before she lit her cigarette I thought I caught a faint whiff of burning bud in the air. Those kids standing out in the lobby, I thought. It smelled awfully good. “Sara—”
    “You love Emily,” she said, looking down at the steady flame of the match. “I know that. You need to stay with her.”
    “I don’t think I really have any choice there,” I said. “Emily left me.”
    “She’ll come back.” She allowed the flame to burn all the way down to the skin of her fingers. “Ow. That’s why I’m going to—not have this baby.”
    “Not have it,” I said, watching her maintain her cool administrator’s gaze, waiting to feel the sense of relief I knew I ought to be feeling.
    “I can’t. There’s no way.” She passed her fingers through her hair and