Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  The milkweed tufts of a codeine high are easily dispersed; all at once, in the aftermath of Leer’s mad guffaw, I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home. It was a scene that took place immediately before the five ill-fated endings I’d tried out over the last month, in which Johnny Wonder, the youngest of my three doomed and glorious brothers, buys a 1955 Rambler American from a minor character named Bubby Zrzavy, a veteran of U.S. Army LSD experiments. I’d been trying for weeks to imbue this purchase with the organ rumble of finality and a sense of resolution but it was an irremediably pivotal moment in the book: it was to be in this car, rebuilt from the chassis out by mad Bubby Z., over the course of ten years, according to the cryptic auto mechanics of his addled neurons, that Johnny Wonder would set out on the cross-country trip from which he would return with Valerie Sweet, the girl from Palos Verdes, who would lead the Wonder family to its ruin. That I had written so much already, without even having gotten to Valerie Sweet, was one of the things that had been making it so difficult for me to force the book to any kind of conclusion. I was dying for Valerie Sweet. I felt as though I had been writing my entire life just to arrive at the page on which her cheap pink sunglasses made their first appearance. At the thought of forgoing her, as my zoo-monkey brain returned yet again to the insoluble question of how I could get myself out of the seven-year mess I had gotten myself into, it was as if the power flowing into Thaw Hall had suddenly ebbed. Then a dazzling burst of static passed like rain across my eyes, and I caught a bloody whiff of the inside of my nose, and a bitter shaft of acid rose from my belly.

  “I have to get out of here,” I whispered to James Leer. “I’m going to be sick.”

  I got up and pushed through the doors to the lobby. It was deserted, except for a couple of kids—one of whom I recognized vaguely—slouched against the main doors, propping them open with their bodies, smoking and blowing their bored smoke out into the evening. I nodded to them and then hurried toward the men’s room, moving as quickly as I could without looking like a man who had to heave and was trying not to do it on the rug. The whiff of static, the burst of red blood in my nose, the nausea, none of these symptoms was new to me. They had gripped me at odd moments for the past month or so, along with an attendant sense of weird elation, a feeling of weightlessness, of making my way across the shimmering mesh of sunshine in a swimming pool. I looked back at the kids by the door and recognized by his goatee a former student of mine, a stunned-looking, moderately talented young writer of H. S. Thompsonesque paranoid drug jazz who had dropped by my office one afternoon last year to inform me, with the true callousness of an innocent heart, that he felt the college was cheating him by taking his money to put him through writing classes with a pseudo-Faulknerian nobody like me. Then the corridor to the bathrooms turned sideways on me, and I felt so feverish that I had 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 there was the momentary flash of her ring, as if her russet hair itself were flashing. “Don’t you think there’s just no way?”

  “I don’t see any way,” I said. I reached out to give her hand a squeeze. “I know how hard it is—for you to—lose this chance.”

  “No, you don’t.” She jerked her hand away. “And fuck you for saying you do. And fuck you, too, for saying …”

  “What, my girl?” I said, when she did not continue. “Fuck me too for saying what?”

  “For saying that there’s just no way I could have this baby.” She glanced away from me, then back. “Because there is, Grady. Or there could be.” From out in the lobby came a loud squeal of hinges and a burst of human murmuring. “He must be finished,” she said, looking at her watch. She blew a cloud of smoke to hide her face, and reached up to brush away the tear that hung from an eyelash of her left eye. “We should go.” She sniffled, once. “Don’t forget your jacket.”

  Sara knelt down to retrieve my old corduroy blazer, which she had stripped from my body and folded into a pillow for my head. As she peeled it away from the carpet, something tumbled out of one of the pock
ets and clattered to the floor, where it lay shining like the hood ornament of a madman’s Rambler.

  “Whose gun is that?” said Sara.

  “It isn’t real,” I said, stooping to get to it before she did. I was tempted to stuff it into my pocket, but I didn’t want her to think that it was anything important enough to hide. I held it in the palm of my hand for a moment, giving her a good look at it. “It’s a souvenir of Baltimore.”

  She reached for it, and I tried to close my hand around it, but I was too slow.

  “Pretty.” She ran the tip of her index finger across the mother-of-pearl handle. She palmed the little pistol and slipped her finger through the trigger guard. She lifted the muzzle up to her nose. “Hmm,” she said, sniffing. “It really smells like gunpowder.”

  “Caps,” I said, reaching to take it away from her.

  Then she pointed it at my chest. I didn’t know how many bullets it held, but there was no reason to think there might not be one more.

  “Pow,” said Sara.

  “You got me,” I said, and then I fell on her and caught her up in a bouncer’s embrace.

  “I love you, Grady,” she said, after a moment.

  “I love you, too, my monkey,” I said, as with a twist of her thin wrist I disarmed her.

  “Oh!” said a voice behind us. “I’m sorry. I was just—”

  It was Miss Sloviak, standing at the head of the corridor, balanced atop her heels, hand on her hip. Her face was red, but her cheeks were streaked with mascara, and I could see that it was not the flush of embarrassment.

  “It’s all right,” said Sara. “What’s the matter, dear?”

  “It’s your friend, Terry Crabtree,” said Miss Sloviak, looking at me harshly. She took a deep breath and passed her fingertips through her black curls, several times, quickly, in a way that somehow struck me as very masculine. “I’d like for you to take me home, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’d be happy to,” I said, starting toward her. “I’ll meet you all later, Sara, over at the Hat.”

  “I’ll walk you out to the car,” said Sara.

  “Well, it’s kind of a hike,” I said. “I’m parked all the way over on Clive.”

  “I could use the air.”

  We walked out into the lobby. It was completely deserted now, except for a sweet remnant of marijuana smoke in the air.

  “I’m going to need one of my bags,” said Miss Sloviak, as we headed out of Thaw Hall. “From the trunk.”

  “Are you?” I said, looking levelly at Sara. “All right.”

  A pair of doors slam-slammed behind us, and I heard a low, nervous chuckle, like that of someone trying to remain calm on a roller coaster in the last instant before free fall. James Leer emerged from the auditorium with his arms outspread and draped across the shoulders of Crabtree, on his right, and on his left across those of the young man with the goatee who’d dropped by during office hours to let me know that I was a fraud. They each had a grip on one of James’s armpits, as if he might at any point collapse, and they were whispering all the usual platitudes of encouragement and reassurance. Although he looked a little queasy he seemed to be walking steadily enough, and I wondered if he weren’t just enjoying the ride.

  “The doors made so much noise!” he cried. He watched in evident amazement as his feet in their black brogues followed each other across the carpet. “Whoa!”

  As the two men steered their charge toward the men’s room, Crabtree happened to look my way. He raised his eyebrows and winked at me. Although it was only nine o’clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he’d strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.

  “This is so embarrassing! You guys had to carry me out!”

  “Is he all right?” I said, as they maneuvered James past us.

  “He’s fine,” said Crabtree, rolling his eyes. “He’s narrating.”

  “We’re going to the men’s room,” said James. “Only we might not make it in time.”

  “Poor James,” I said, watching as they turned into the hallway.

  “I don’t know what you guys have been giving him,” said Miss Sloviak. “But I don’t think he needs any more of it.”

  Sara shook her head. “Terry Crabtree and James Leer,” she said, punching me on the shoulder, hard. “Leave it to you to make that mistake. Wait here.”

  She went after them, and I stood awkwardly beside Miss Sloviak for half a minute, watching her take irritable puffs on a black Nat Sherman and blow them out in long blue jets.

  “I’m sorry about all this.”

  “Are you?”

  “It’s just pretty much your standard WordFest behavior.”

  “No wonder I’ve never heard of it before.”

  A minor squall of applause gathered and blew through the auditorium. Then the doors burst open again, and five hundred people poured into the lobby. They were all talking about Q. and his rascally double, the latter of whom had apparently ended the lecture with an unflattering remark about the cumulative literary achievement of Pittsburgh, comparing it with Luxembourg’s and Chad’s. I waved to a couple of my offended colleagues and nodded carefully to Franconia Epps, a well-to-do Fox Chapel woman of a certain age who had been attending WordFest for the last six years in the hope of finding a publisher for a novel called Black Flowers, which every year she raveled and unraveled, Penelopelike, according to the contradictory whims and indications of a dozen half-interested editors, but which in each incarnation managed to retain its surprising although not, unfortunately, redeeming number of scenes involving well-to-do Fox Chapel women of a certain age and a variety of leather appliances, artificial male genitalia, and tractable polo ponies with names like Goliath and Big Jacques. A gang of literary young men surrounded Miss Sloviak and me, all talking at once, batting one another with rolled programs, taking out their cigarettes. A few of them were students of mine, and they were about to draw us into their conversation—they had their eyes on Miss Sloviak—when suddenly, as if touched with an electric prod, they drew apart and opened a path for Sara Gaskell.

  “Hello, Chancellor.”

  “Hello, Dr. Gaskell.”

  “Gentlemen,” she said, nodding coolly, and then leveling toward me the same administrative and vaguely condescending green eyes. She had slipped off her wobbly high heels, and the silver beaded purse was nowhere to be seen.

  “He was sick, but I think he’ll be fine,” she said, looking both generally and specifically disgusted. “No thanks to you and your idiot friend.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Go on, take Antonia home. I’ll look after Mr. Leer.”

  “All right.” I leaned against the, door, letting in a blast of cool April air. “Sara,” I said, lowering my voice, almost mouthing the words. “I didn’t get to tell you—”

  “Later,” she said, lightly pushing me out the door with the bare toes of her right foot, “You’ll tell me later.”

  “I’m going to have to,” I said to Miss Sloviak, as we hurried through the rain back to the leafy end of campus where I had left my car. The air was warm and fragrant with lilac and as we ran it was hard not to hear the clatter of Miss Sloviak’s heels as the very signature of romantic haste. When we got back to the car she stood beside me at the trunk, and her eyes grew very large when I lifted the lid:

  “I had a little accident,” I said. “I know this looks pretty bad.”

  “Listen,” said Miss Sloviak, yanking her pony-skin suitcase out from under the stiff brush of Doctor Dee’s tail, “all I—yhew!—all I want to do is get home and never see any of you authors ever again, okay?”

  “I know how you feel,” I said, looking down sadly at what remained of Doctor Dee.

  “Poor thing,” said Miss Sloviak, after a moment. She set her bag on the lip of the trunk, pulled it free from its plastic sleeve,
and unzipped it. “He kind of gave me the creeps, though, with those eyes.”

  “Sara doesn’t know yet,” I said. “I couldn’t tell her.”

  “Well, don’t worry about me,” said Miss Sloviak, as she detached her long black curls and laid them in the valise with a look of affectionate regret, like a violinist retiring her instrument for the night. “I’m not going to say anything.”

  THE STORY GOES THAT I sucked too avidly at my mother’s breast, and caused an abscess to bloom in the tender flesh of her left nipple. My grandmother, less kind in those days than afterward, disapproved strongly when at seventeen my mother had married, and managed to instill her daughter with a powerful sense of ill-equipment for the task of mothering me; the failure of her breast to bear up to the ardor of my infant lips filled my mother with shame. She didn’t go to the doctor as quickly as she ought to have. By the time my father found her, collapsed across the keys of the hotel’s piano, and got her into the county hospital, a staph infection had already taken hold of her blood. She died on February 18, 1951, five weeks after giving birth, and thus, naturally, I’ve no memory of her. I can, however, manage to recall a few things about my father, George Tripp, called Little George to distinguish him from my paternal grandfather, his namesake, from whom I’m supposed to have inherited my Big George body and appetites.

  Little George gained a regrettable measure of fame in our part of the state when he killed the young man who, among other prospective achievements, was to have become the first Jewish graduate of Coxley College in its eighty-year history. My father was a policeman. In killing this bright young man, whose father owned Glucksbringer’s department store on Pickman Street, across and two doors down from the McClelland Hotel, he believed, without much justification as it turned out, that he was defending himself from an armed assailant. He’d returned from Korea missing the lower third of his right leg, along with a few crucial extremities, I believe, of his spiritual frame, and in the aftermath of his murderous error of judgment and subsequent suicide there was much speculation as to whether he ought to have been made a policeman at all. He had gone into the army with a reputation for flakiness and come home amid rumors of psychiatric collapse. But like all small towns, ours necessarily possessed a nearly infinite capacity to forgive its citizens their personal failings, and since Big George had been chief of police for forty years until he suffered a fatal aneurysm at the poker table in the back room of the Alibi Tavern, my father was permitted to carry a .38 and wander the streets at midnight, his peripheral vision tormented by whispering shadows.