Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “Ask me what?” said James, freeing his pale hand at last from Crabtree’s grip. His voice shook a little and I wondered if he was seeing what I saw in Crabtree’s eyes, the mad conquistador glint, looking at James Leer with a wild surmise. “He was in Son of Fury.”

  “Terry was saying how George Sanders killed himself, James, but he didn’t remember how. I told him you’d know.”

  “Pills,” said James Leer. “In 1972.”

  “Very good! The date, too!” Crabtree handed Miss Sloviak, her coat. “Here,” he said.

  “Oh, James is amazing,” said Hannah. “Aren’t you, James? No, really, watch this, watch this.” She turned to James Leer, looking up at him as though she were his adoring little sister and thought him capable of limitless acts of magic. You could see the desire to please her freezing up all the muscles of his face. “James, who else committed suicide? What other movie actors, I mean?”

  “All of them? There are way too many.”

  “Well, then, just a few of the big ones, let’s say.”

  He didn’t even roll back his eyes in his head, or scratch reminiscently at his chin. He just opened his mouth and started counting them off on his fingers.

  “Pier Angeli, 1971 or ’72, also pills. Charles Boyer, 1978, pills again. Charles Butterworth, 1946, I think. In a car. Supposedly it was an accident, but, you know.” He cocked his head sadly to one side. “He was distraught.” There was a trace of irony in his voice but I had the sense it was there for our benefit. It was clear he took his Hollywood suicides—and Hannah Green’s requests—very seriously. “Dorothy Dandridge, she took pills in, like, 1965. Albert Dekker, 1968, he hung himself. He wrote his suicide note in lipstick on his stomach. I know, weird. Alan Ladd, ’64, more pills, Carole Landis, pills again, I forget when. George Reeves, Superman on TV, shot himself. Jean Seberg, pills of course, 1979. Everett Sloane—he was good—pills. Margaret Sullavan, pills, Lupe Velez, a lot of pills. Gig Young. He shot himself and his wife in 1978. There are more but I don’t know if you would have heard of them. Ross Alexander? Clara Blandick? Maggie McNamara? Gia Scala?”

  “I haven’t heard of half of those,” said Hannah.

  “You did them alphabetically,” said Crabtree.

  James shrugged. “That’s just kind of how my brain works,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” said Hannah. “I think your brain works a lot more weirdly than that. Come on. We have to go.”

  On his way out the door, Crabtree shook hands with James yet again. It was not hard to see that Miss Sloviak’s feelings were hurt. Evidently she was not too drunk to remember whatever it was she and Crabtree had been doing upstairs in the guest room, or to feel that this entitled her to dwell within the radius of his attention for at least the remainder of the evening. She refused to let Crabtree take her arm and instead made a point of taking hold of Hannah Green, who said, “What’s that you’re wearing? It smells so familiar.”

  “Why don’t you come out with us after the lecture?” said Crabtree to James Leer. “There’s this place on the Hill I always get Tripp to take me.”

  James’s ears turned red. “Oh, I don’t— I wasn’t—”

  Crabtree gave me a pleading look. “Maybe your teacher can convince you.”

  I shrugged, and Terry Crabtree went out. A few moments later, Miss Sloviak reappeared in the doorway, her cerise lipstick neatly applied, her long black hair glossy and blue as a gun, and reproached James Leer with her eyes.

  “Didn’t you forget someone, wonder boy?” she said.

  WHEN MARILYN MONROE married Joe DiMaggio, on January 14, 1954—a week after I turned three years old—she was wearing, over a plain brown suit, a short black satin jacket, trimmed with an ermine collar. After her death this jacket became just another item in the riotous inventory of cocktail dresses and fox stoles and pearly black stockings she left behind. It was assigned by the executors to an old friend of Marilyn’s, who failed to recognize it from photographs of that happy afternoon in San Francisco years before, and who wore it frequently to the marathon alcoholic luncheons she took every Wednesday at Musso & Frank. In the early seventies, when the old friend—a B-movie actress whose name had long since been forgotten by everyone but James Leer and his kind—herself expired, the ermine-collared jacket, shiny at the elbows now, and missing one of its glass buttons, was sold off, along with rest of the dead starlet’s meager estate, at a public auction in East Hollywood, where it was purchased, and presently identified, by an acute Marilyn Monroe fan. Thus it passed into the kingdom of Memorabilia. It made a circuitous pilgrimage through the reliquaries of several Monroe cultists before it jumped sectarian lines and fell into the hands of a man in Riverside, New York, who owned—for example—nineteen bats once swung by Joe DiMaggio, and seven of the Yankee Clipper’s diamond tie bars, and who then, after suffering some financial reverses, sold the errant jacket to Walter Gaskell, who hung it in a special low-humidity section of his bedroom closet, with a foot of space on either side of it, on a special corrosion-free hanger.

  “Is that really it?” said James Leer, with all the shy reverence in his voice I’d anticipated on first promising to show him the silly thing. He was standing beside me, in the Gaskells’ silent bedroom, on a fan-shaped patch of carpet that had been flattened by the constant passage across it of the heavy, fireproof closet door, in the course of Walter’s periodic visits to his treasures, which he made dressed in Yankee pinstripes, tears streaming down his lean and chiseled cheeks, mourning his Sutton Place childhood. In five years I’d never yet arrived at the foundation of the grudge that Sara Gaskell bore her husband but it was manifold and profound and no secret of his was safe from me. He kept the closet locked, but I knew the combination.

  “That’s really it,” I said. “Go ahead and touch it, James, if you want to.”

  He glanced at me, doubtfully, then turned back to the cork-lined closet. On either side of the satin jacket, on special hangers of their own, hung five pin-striped jerseys, all bearing the number 3 on their backs, ragged and stained at the armpits.

  “Are you sure it’s all right? Are you sure it’s okay for us to be up here?”

  “Sure it is,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at the doorway for the fifth time since we’d come into the room. I had switched on the overhead light and left the bedroom door wide open to suggest that there was no need for skulkery and I had every right to be here with him, but each creaking of the house or last-minute clatter from downstairs made my heart leap in my chest. “Just keep your voice down, all right?”

  He reached out with two tentative fingers and touched them to the yellowed collar, barely, as though afraid that it might crumble to dust.

  “Soft,” he said, his eyes gone all dreamy, his lips parted. He was standing so close that I could smell the old-fashioned brilliantine he used to slick back his hair, a heavy lilac perfume that, combined with the Greyhound-station smell of his overcoat and the waves of camphor emanating from the closet, led me to wonder if throwing up might not feel kind of nice right about now. “How much did he pay for it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, though I’d heard an outlandish figure quoted. The DiMaggio-Monroe union was a significant obsession of Walter’s, and the subject of his own magnum opus, his Wonder Boys, an impenetrable seven-hundred-page critical “reading,” as yet unpublished, of the marriage of Marilyn and Joe and its “function” in what Walter, in his lighter moods, liked to call “American mythopoetics.” In that brief unhappy tale of jealousy, affection, self-deception, and bad luck he claimed to find, as far as I understood it, a typically American narrative of hyperbole and disappointment, “the wedding as spectacular antievent”; an allegory of the Husband as Slugger; and conclusive proof of what he called, in one memorable passage, “the American tendency to view every marriage as a cross between tabooed exogamy and corporate merger.” “He never tells Sara the truth about how much he pays for these things.”

  That interested him. I wished immediately
that I hadn’t said it.

  “You’re really good friends with the Chancellor, aren’t you?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “I’m friends with Dr. Gaskell, too.”

  “I guess you must be, if you know the combination to his closet, and he doesn’t mind your being, you know, here in their bedroom like this.”

  “Right,” I said, watching him closely for signs that he was fucking with me. A door slammed, somewhere downstairs, and both of us started, then grinned at each other. I wondered if the smile on my face looked as false and uneasy as his.

  “It feels so flimsy,” he said, turning back to the closet, lifting the left sleeve of the satin jacket with three fingers, letting it fall. “It doesn’t feel real. More like a costume.”

  “Maybe everything a movie star wears feels like a costume.”

  “Hey, that’s really deep,” said James, teasing me for the first time that I could remember. At least I thought he was teasing me. “You ought to get stoned more often, Professor Tripp.”

  “If you’re going to fuck with me, Mr. Leer, I think that you ought to start calling me Grady,” I said. “Or Tripp.”

  I’d intended just to return the teasing a little but he took me very seriously. He blushed and looked down at the ghostly fan imprinted in the fibers of the carpet.

  “Thank you,” he said. After that he seemed to feel a need to get away from me, and from the closet, and he took a step into the bedroom. I was glad to have a little distance between me and his hair. He looked around at the Gaskells’ bedroom, at the high, molded ceiling, the buttery old Biedermeier dresser, the tall oak armoire with its mirrored door that had lost the better part of its silvering, the thick pillows and linen duvet on the trim bed, looking white and smooth and cold as if it had been buried in snow. “This is a nice house. They must be pretty well off, to have all these things.”

  Walter Gaskell’s grandfather had at one time owned most of Manatee County, Florida, as well as ten newspapers and a winner of the Preakness, but I didn’t tell that to James.

  “They do all right,” I said. “Is your family well off?”

  “Mine?” he said, poking himself in the sternum. “No way. My dad used to work in a mannequin factory. I’m serious. Seitz Plastics. They made mannequins for department stores, and display heads for hats, and those flattened-out sexy legs that they use to sell panty hose. He’s retired now, though. He’s old, my dad. Now he’s trying to raise trout in our backyard. No, we’re really poor. My mom was a fry cook before she died. Sometimes she worked in a gift shop.”

  “Where was this?” I said, surprised, because despite his overcoat that stank of failure and the shabby thrift-shop suits he wore, he had the face and mannerisms of a rich boy, and sometimes he showed up for class wearing a gold Hamilton wristwatch with an alligator band. “I don’t think I ever knew where you’re from.”

  He shook his head. “No place,” he said. “Near Scranton. You haven’t heard of it. It’s called Carvel.”

  “I haven’t heard of it,” I said, though I thought it sounded vaguely familiar.

  “It’s a hellhole,” he said. “It’s an armpit. Everybody hates me there.”

  “But that’s good,” I said, wondering at how young he sounded, regretting that vanished time when I too had believed that I united in my fugitive soul all the greatest fears and petty hatreds of my neighbors in that little river town. How sweet it had felt, in those days, to be the bête noire of other people, and not only of myself! “Now you’ve got good reason to write about them.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I already have.” He hefted the stained canvas knapsack on his shoulder and inclined his head toward it. It was one of those surplus Israeli paratrooper numbers that had caught on among my students about five years before, with the winged red insignia on the flap. “I just finished a novel that’s kind of about all that.”

  “A novel,” I said. “God damn it, James, you’re amazing. You’ve already written five short stories this term! How long did that take you, a week?”

  “Four months,” he said. “I started it at home, over Christmas break. It’s called The Love Parade. In the book I call the town Sylvania. Like in the movie.”

  “What movie is that?”

  “The Love Parade,” he said.

  “I should have known. You ought to let me read it.”

  He shook his head. “No. You’ll hate it. It really isn’t any good. It sucks, Prof— Grady. Tripp. I’d be too ashamed.”

  “All right, then,” I said. As a matter of fact, the prospect of crawling across hundreds of pages of James Leer’s shards-of-glass style was less than appealing, and I was glad that he had let me off the hook of my automatic offer to read his book. “I’ll take your word for it. It sucks.” I smiled at him, but as I said it I saw something swim into his eyes, and I stopped smiling. “Hey, James, hey. I didn’t mean it. Buddy, I was just kidding.”

  But James Leer had started to cry. He sat down on 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 got.”

  “And?”

  “And she jumped off the ‘Hollywoodland’ sign. That’s what it used to say, you know. Off of the second letter d, I think.”

  “That’s a good one.” The cloud of stars had parted, but now I was unable to clear my head of a thick blue smog that had begun to form inside it, and the lilac smell of James’s hair oil was just too much. I felt that if I didn’t stand up at once and get moving I was going to pass out, or vomit, or both. I felt weak in my arms and legs, and tried to remember the last time I’d had something to eat. I’d been forgetting to take my meals lately, which is a dangerous sign in a man of my girth and capacity. “We’d better skedaddle, James,” I said, in a mild panic, taking hold of James’s scarecrow arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Forgetting that I had left wide open the door of Walter Gaskell’s closet, I got up and hurried out of the room. I switched off the bedroom light behind me, leaving James Leer sitting alone in the dark for the second time that day. As I stepped out into the hallway I heard a low rumbling sound that raised all the hairs on the back of my neck. It was Doctor Dee. Sara had freed him from the prison of the laundry room and he crouched in the hall, belly to the ground, paws outspread, his black lip peeled back from his yellow old teeth. His wild eyes were staring fixedly at the empty air beside me, at some distant arctic peak.