Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  Or nearly so; as I stopped at the corner of Dwight, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I turned to find Crabtree, his eyes bright, his red cashmere scarf fluttering out behind him.

  “August Van Zorn,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “August Van Zorn,” I said. We shook. “Unbelievable.”

  “I have no talent,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”

  “Desperation. Have you read any of his others?”

  “A lot of them. ‘The Eaters of Men.’ ‘The Case of Edward Angell.’ ‘The House on Polfax Street.’ He’s great. I can’t believe you’ve heard of him.”

  “Listen,” I said, thinking that I had done far more than hear of Albert Vetch. “Do you want to get a beer?”

  “I never drink,” said Crabtree. “Buy me a cup of coffee.”

  I wanted a beer, but coffee was undeniably easier to be had in the purlieus of the University, so we went into a cafe, one that I’d been avoiding for the past couple of weeks, since it was a haunt of that tender and perceptive philosophy major who’d pleaded so sweetly with me not to fritter away my gift. A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.

  “There’s a table under the stairs, at the back,” said Crabtree. “I often sit there. I don’t like to be seen.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I prefer to remain a mystery to my peers.”

  “I see. So why are you talking to me?”

  “‘The Sister of Darkness,’” he said. “It took me a few pages to catch on, you know. It was the line about the angle of his widow’s peak lying ‘slightly out of true with the remainder of his face.’”

  “I must have remembered that one wholesale,” I said. “I was working from memory.”

  “You must have a sick memory, then.”

  “But at least I have talent.”

  “Maybe,” he said, looking down cross-eyed at the flame of a match as he cupped his hand around the end of a filterless cigarette. He smoked Old Gold then. Now he’s changed to something low-tar and aqua-colored; a faggy cigarette, I call it when I want to make him pretend to get mad.

  “If you don’t have talent, how’d you get in?” I asked him. “Didn’t you have to submit a sample of work?”

  “I had talent,” he said, extinguishing the match with an insouciant shake. “One story’s worth. But it’s all right. I’m not planning to be a writer.” He paused a moment after he said that, to let it sink in, and I got the feeling that he’d been waiting to have this conversation for a very long time. I imagined him at home, blowing sophisticated plumes of smoke at the reflection in his bedroom mirror, tying and retying his cashmere scarf. “I’m taking this class to learn about writers as much as writing.” He sat back in his seat and coil by coil unwrapped the scarf from his neck. “I intend to be the Max Perkins of our generation.”

  His expression was grave and earnest but there was still a slight wrinkling of mockery at the corners of his eyes, as though he were daring me to admit that I didn’t know who Maxwell Perkins was.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, determined to match his grandiosity and arrogance with my own. I had spent plenty of time impressing my own mirror with bons mots and intrepid writerly gazes. I had a Greek fisherman’s sweater that I used to put on and flatter myself for having Hemingway’s brow. “Well, then, I intend to be the Bill Faulkner.”

  He smiled. “You have a lot farther to go than I do,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” I said, taking a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt.

  As we drank our espressos I told him about myself and my wanderings over the past few years, embellishing my account with shameless references to wild if vague sexual encounters. I sensed a certain awkwardness on his part around the subject of girls and I asked if he was seeing anyone, but he grew monosyllabic and I quickly backed off. Instead I told him the story of Albert Vetch, and I could see, when I had finished, that it moved him.

  “So,” he said, looking solemn. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a slim hardback book in a buff-colored dust jacket. He passed it to me across the table, two-handed, as though it were an overflowing cup. “You must have seen this,”

  It was a collection, published by Arkham House, of twenty short stories by August Van Zorn.

  “The Abominations of Plunkettsburg and Other Tales,” I said. “When did this come out?”

  “A couple of years ago. They’re a specialty house. You have to go looking for it.”

  I turned the deckled pages of the book Albert Vetch hadn’t lived to hold. There was a laudatory text printed on the jacket flaps, and a startling photograph of the plain, high-browed, bespectacled man who had struggled for years, in his room in the turret of the McClelland Hotel, with unnameable regret, with the emptiness of his external life, with the ravages of the midnight disease. You certainly couldn’t see any of that in the picture. He looked relaxed, even handsome, and his hair was just a bit unkempt, as befitting a scholar of Blake.

  “Keep it,” said Crabtree. “Seeing as how you knew him.”

  “Thanks, Crabtree,” I said, flush once more with a sudden unreasonable affection for this small, skinny person with his scarf and his awkwardness and his studied displays of arrogance and scorn. Later they lost that quality of studiedness, of course, and hardened into automatic mannerisms not universally admired. “Maybe someday you’ll be my editor, huh?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “You need one, that’s for sure.”

  We smiled at each other and shook hands on it, and then the young woman I’d been avoiding came up from behind and poured a pitcher of ice water onto my head, drenching not only me but the book by August Van Zorn, ruining it beyond repair; or at least that’s the way I remember it happening.

  THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS played their endless game of tag as we sat parked on Smithfield Street, smoking a little piece of Humboldt County and waiting for my third wife, Emily, to emerge from the lobby of the Baxter Building, where she worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Richards, Reed & Associates’s major client was a locally popular brand of Polish sausage famous for its generous dimensions, which made writing ad copy a simple but delicate matter. I saw Emily’s secretary come through the revolving door and shake open her umbrella, and then her friends Susan and Ben, and then a man whose name I had forgotten but whom I recognized as the Engorged Kielbasa from an office skit a couple of Christmases earlier. There were all kinds of other people spinning out into the soft gray evening, dentists and podiatrists, certified public accountants, the sad-looking Ethiopian man who sold half-dead flowers from a small kiosk in the lobby; looking skyward, covering their heads with outspread newspapers, laughing at the guttering, rain-slick prospect of a Friday night downtown; but after fifteen minutes Emily had still not appeared, even though she was always downstairs waiting for me on Fridays when I came to pick her up, and eventually I was forced to admit to myself what I had been fervently denying all day: that sometime early this morning, before I awoke, Emily had walked out on our marriage. There’d been a note taped to the coffee machine on the kitchen counter, and a modest void in all the drawers and closets that had been hers.

  “Crabtree,” I said. “She left me, man.”

  “She what?”

  “She left me. This morning. There was a note. I don’t know if she even went to work. I think she might have gone out to her parents’ place. It’s Passover. Tomorrow’s the first night.” I turned around and looked at Miss Sloviak. She was sitting in the backseat, with Crabtree, on the theory that Emily would have been getting into the front with me. They had the tuba back there with them as well, though I wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened. I still didn’t know if it really belonged to Miss Sloviak or not. “There are eight of them. Nights.”

  “Is he kidding?” said Miss Sloviak, all of whose makeup seemed in the course of the ride in from the airport to have been reapplied, very roughly, an inch to the left of her eyes and lips, so that her face had a blurred, double-exposed appeara
nce.

  “Why didn’t you say anything, Tripp? I mean, why did you come down here?”

  “I guess I just…I don’t know.” I turned back around to face the windshield and listened to the commentary of the rain on the roof of my car, a fly-green ’66 Galaxie ragtop I’d been driving for a little less than a month. I’d had to accept it as repayment of a sizable loan I’d been fool enough to make Happy Blackmore, an old drinking buddy who wrote sports for the Post-Gazette and who was now somewhere in the Blue Ridge of Maryland at a rehabilitation center for the compulsively unlucky, playing out the last act of a spectacular emotional and financial collapse. It was a stylish old yacht, that Ford, with a balky transmission, bad wires, and a rear seat of almost infinite potential. I didn’t really want to know what had just been going on back there.

  “I was sort of thinking maybe I’d just imagined it all,” I said. As a lifelong habitué of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy, and all day I had been trying to convince myself that this morning at about six o’clock, while I lay snoring with my legs scissor-forked across the freshly uninhabited regions of the bed, my marriage had not come asunder. “Hoping I had, I mean.”

  “Do you feel all right?” said Miss Sloviak.

  “I feel great,” I said, trying to decide how I did feel. I felt sorry to have driven Emily to leave me, not because I thought that I could have done otherwise, but because she’d tried very hard for many years to avoid an outcome to which she was, in a way that would always remain beyond my understanding, morally opposed. Her own parents had married in 1939 and they were married still, in a manner that approximated happiness, and I knew she regarded divorce as the first refuge of the weak in character and the last of the hopelessly incompetent. I felt as you feel when you’ve forced an honest person to lie for you, or a thrifty person to blow his paycheck on one of your worthless tips. I also felt that I loved Emily, but in the fragmentary, half-narrative way you love people when you’re stoned. I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing “Barefootin’,” of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she’d handed me one windy afternoon as we sat on a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, and I felt that I loved Emily insofar as I loved all of these things—beyond reason, and with a longing that made me want to hang my head—but it was a love that felt an awful lot like nostalgia. I hung my head.

  “Grady, what happened?” said Crabtree, leaning forward to rest his chin on the back of my seat. I could feel the ends of his long hair against my neck. He was giving off a faint whiff of Cristalle himself now, and the dual memory of Emily and Sara it stirred up inside me seemed particularly cruel. “What did you do?”

  “I broke her heart,” I said. “I think she found out about Sara and me.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. She’d been looking a little lost ever since coming home a few days before from a lunch at Ali Baba with her sister, Deborah, who was working as a research assistant in fine arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Deborah must have picked something up on the academic grapevine and sisterly passed it along. “I don’t suppose we’ve really been all that discreet.”

  “Sara?” said Miss Sloviak. “That’s where the party’s going to be?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “That’s where the party’s going to be.”

  IT WAS ABOVE ALL a formal exercise in good behavior, the first staff party of the WordFest weekend, a preliminary shaking of hands before they rang the bell and the assembled guests all came out swinging. It was held early in the evening, for one thing, so that people had to keep dinner plates balanced in their laps; and then at around quarter to eight, just when supper was finished and strangers had grown acquainted and the booze began to flow, it would be time to go off to Thaw Hall for the Friday night lecture by one of the two most distinguished members of that year’s staff. For eleven years now the college, under the direction of Sara Gaskell’s husband, Walter, the chairman of the English Department, had been charging aspiring writers several hundred dollars for the privilege of meeting and receiving the counsel of a staff of more or less well-known writers, along with agents, editors, and assorted other New Yorkers with an astonishing capacity for alcohol and gossip. The conferees were housed in the college dormitories, left vacant over the spring holidays, and guided like passengers on a cruise ship through a tightly scheduled program of lit crit shuffleboard, self-improvement talks, and lessons in the New York publishing cha-cha-cha. The same kind of thing goes on all over the country, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, any more than I find anything amiss in the practice of loading up an enormous floating replica of Las Vegas with a bunch of fearful Americans and whipping them past a dozen tourist-oriented ports of call at thirty knots. I usually had a friend or two among the invited guests, and once, several years ago now, I came across a young man from Moon Township with a short story so amazingly good that on the strength of it alone he was able to sign up an unwritten novel with my agent, a novel long since finished, published to acclaim, sold to the movies, and remaindered; at the time I was on page three hundred or so of my Wonder Boys.

  Because WordFest had been conceived by Walter Gaskell, the first party was always held at the Gaskells’, an eccentric, brick Tudor affair, a crooked witch’s hat of a house set back from the street in a leafy pocket of Point Breeze that had been carved, Sara once told me, from the estate of H. J. Heinz. There were vestiges of a massive old wrought-iron fence along the sidewalk, and in the Gaskells’ backyard, beyond Sara’s greenhouse, lay a pair of rusted rails, buried in the grass, the remnants of a small-gauge railroad that had been the childish hobby of some long-dead Heinz heir. The house was much too large for the Gaskells, who, like Emily and me, never had children, and it was filled from crawl space to attic with the inventory of Walter Gaskell’s collection of baseball memorabilia, so that even on those rare occasions when I went over to see Sara and we had the place to ourselves, we were never alone; the grand, dark spaces of the house were haunted by the presence of her husband and by the fainter ghosts of dead ballplayers and tycoons. I liked Walter Gaskell, and I could never lie in his bed without feeling that there was a coarse thread of shame running through the iridescent silk of my desire for his wife.

  I’m not, however, going to say that it was never my intention to get involved with Sara Gaskell. I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. I’ve run through three marriages now, and each time the dissolution was my own fault, clearly and incontrovertibly. I intended to get involved with Sara Gaskell from the moment I saw her, to get involved with her articulate fingers, with the severe engineering of combs and barrettes that prevented her russet hair from falling to her hips, with her conversation that flowed in unnavigable oxbows between opposing shores of tenderness and ironical invective, with the smoke of her interminable cigarettes. We had an apartment we used, in East Oakland, that belonged to the college; Sara Gaskell was the Chancellor, and I met her on my very first day on the job. Our thing had been going on for almost five years now, according to no discernible progression other than the one leading from the crazed fumbling of two people’s hands with a key in an unfamiliar lock to the installation in the Guest Apartment of cable television so that Sara and I could lie on the bed in our underwear and watch old movies on Wednesday afternoons. Neither of us wanted to leave our spouses, or do anything to disturb the tranquil pattern of what was already an old love.

  “So is she pretty?” whispered Miss Sloviak as we came scraping up the flagstone steps to the Gaskells’ front door.
She gave my belly a poke, reproducing perfectly the condescending but essentially generous manner of a beautiful woman with a homely man. “I think she is,” I was supposed to say.

  “Not as pretty as you,” I told her. Sara wasn’t as pretty as Emily, either, and she had none of Emily’s delicacy of skeleton or skittish grace. She was a big woman—tall and busty, with a large behind—and as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd. Her cheeks and forehead were wild with freckles, and her nose, although cute and retroussé in profile, had a way of looking bulbous when viewed straight on. By the age of twelve she had already reached her present height and bodily dimensions, and I believe it was as a result of this trauma—and the demands of her professional position—that her everyday wardrobe consisted almost entirely of control-top panty hose, plain white cotton blouses, and shapeless tweed suits that spanned a brilliant spectrum from oatmeal to dirt. She imprisoned her glorious hair within its scaffolding of pins, painted a thin copper line across her lips for makeup, and aside from her wedding ring the only jewelry she generally wore was a pair of half-moon reading glasses tied around her neck with a length of athletic shoestring. Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.