Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  I was not quite four years old when he killed himself, and most of my memories of him are no more than shards and chance survivals. I remember the reddish blond hairs of his veiny wrist, caught in the links of his expanding watchband; a crumpled package of his Pall Malls, lying red as a ranunculus on the windowsill of his bedroom; the chime of a golf ball rattling into a Belleek teacup as he lined up putts across the broad front parlor of the hotel. And I can remember one time when I heard him come home from work. As I said, he had the night shift, eight to four, and got in at the darkest hour of the morning. Every day my father vanished behind the door to his bedroom as I was waking and reappeared just as I was going to bed; his invisible arrivals and departures were as mysterious to me as snowfall or the sight of my blood. One night, however, I was awake to hear the laughter of the silver bell on the hotel’s front door, the deliberate creaking of the back stairs, my father’s angry cough, and then the next thing I remember I was standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching Little George as he undressed. I used to pretend to myself, and tell my lovers, that in remembering all this I was recalling the night on which my father did himself in. But the truth is that he’d been suspended—with pay—for two weeks when he soul-kissed the blue barrel of his service revolver. So I don’t know which night this must have been, or why its memory should have outlasted any other. Maybe it was the night my father shot David Glucksbringer. Maybe you just never forget the sight of your father taking off all his clothes.

  I see myself peering through the half-open door of his bedroom, cheek pressed into a corner of cold oak molding, watching as the great blue man who lived in our hotel, with his high-crowned hat, his broad epaulets, his heavy golden badge, with bullets on his belt and a fat black gun, transformed himself into somebody else. He removed the hat and set it upside down on the dresser. A few strands of thin, sweaty hair stuck to the leather band inside and then remained standing atop his head, wavering like undersea plants. Carelessly he splashed whiskey into a shot glass, and then knocked it back with one hand as he unbuttoned and yanked off his uniform shirt with the other. He sat down on the bed to unlace his coffin black shoes, and kicked them into a corner of the room. When he stood up again, he looked smaller, more frail, and very tired. He stepped out of his trousers, exposing the pale orange prosthesis with its suggestion of discrete toes and its complicated harness work of leather. After that he went to the bedroom window, I think, and stood for a moment, looking at the desert topography of frost on the glass, the empty street, the mannequins posed in their little spring dresses in the luminous windows of Glucksbringer’s. He pulled his sleeveless undershirt up over his belly and head, tugged his boxer shorts down to his ankles, and sat down on the bed again to unbuckle the strange contraption he owned instead of a foot. Then there was nothing left of him to remove. I was at once fascinated and horrified by the act of diminishment he had just performed; it was as though I were being permitted to see the crippled, balding, adipose gnome who dwelt within the brazen simulacrum, the lumbering golem I had learned to call my father.

  I was thinking of this as I drove Miss Sloviak home to Bloomfield, as we headed east along Baum Boulevard and she turned herself into a man. She took a jar of cold cream and a bottle of nail polish remover from a black zipper bag in the suitcase on the seat between us, and set them on the lowered door of the glove compartment. With a succession of cotton balls she wiped the makeup from her face and stripped her nails of their pale pink armor. She reached up into her dress for the waistband of her panty hose and dragged them down along her smooth legs to her feet. Then she extracted a pair of pressed Levi’s from the suitcase, unfolded them, and, with some difficulty, slid them up under the skirt of her black dress, which she then tugged up over her head and off. Her brassiere was black Lycra, padded, with a pearled ribbon at the junction of the cups and a neat pair of small protuberances meant to simulate erect female nipples; the chest beneath it was small but muscular, and free from hair. She put on a striped pullover, white socks emblazoned with a polo pony, and a pair of white Stan Smiths. The cold cream and acetone went back into the zipper bag, and the black dress, black pumps, and the airy tangle of panty hose were folded and tucked into the pony-skin valise. I was sorry I had to concentrate on the road, because her performance was impressive. She had assembled her male self with the precision and speed of an assassin in the movies snapping together the parts of his rifle.

  “My name is Tony,” said the former Miss Sloviak as we turned onto Liberty Avenue. “Now that I’m home.”

  “How do you do,” I said.

  “You don’t seem all that surprised.”

  “I’ve been having some trouble with my surprise reflex lately,” I said.

  “Did you know I was drag queen?”

  I thought about the right answer to that one for a minute. I considered the nature of the response that I hoped for in the wake of the deceptions I practiced on the world.

  “No,” I said. “I thought you were a beautiful woman. Tony.”

  Tony smiled. “I’m getting there,” he said. “It’s this next street. Mathilda. Left here. And then another left onto Juniper.”

  We pulled up in front of a small, brick two-story house, set close to but not quite touching its neighbors, with a light on in the upstairs dormer and a statue of the Blessed Virgin standing in the front lawn. Our Lady was sheltered under a kind of arching white band shell, painted on the inside with all the stars in the dome of heaven.

  “I wish I had one of those in my front yard,” I said. “All we have is a Japanese beetle trap.”

  “That’s an old bathtub she’s standing under,” said Tony. “The other half of it’s buried in the ground.”

  “Neat,” I said. The engine dropped down into idle. A shadow drew aside the curtain in the dormer window and pressed itself against the glass. “Well.”

  “Well.”

  “Okay, then, Tony.”

  “Okay, Grady.” He held out his hand to me, and we shook. “Good-bye. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Hey, uh, Tony, I’m sorry if it—if things didn’t—turn out so well. Tonight.”

  “No biggie,” he said. “I just really should have known better. Your friend, Crabtree, he’s just looking for, I don’t know, novelty, or whatever. He’s into collec, like, collecting, you know, weird tricks. Mind?” He angled the rearview mirror toward himself and checked his bare face for makeup, for lingering traces of Miss Antonia Sloviak. Like many transvestites he was far more beautiful as a woman—as a man his nose was hawkish and his eyes were set too close together—and he gazed a moment wonderingly at the plainness of his face. He ran his fingers through his jarhead-short hair. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. “That’s kind of a problem I run into a lot.”

  “He’s writing his name in water,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  It was the half-regretful term—borrowed from the headstone of John Keats—that Crabtree used to describe his own and others’ failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree’s chosen genre—thinking his way into an attractive disaster and then attempting to talk his way out, leaving no record and nothing to show for his efforts but a reckless reputation and a small dossier in the files of the Berkeley and New York City police departments.

  “It’s what he’s always done, you know,” I said. “But now …” I put my hands on the steering wheel and rocked it from side to side. “I get the feeling he’s going through the motions a little bit.”

  “Because his career’s ruined, you mean?”

  “Jesus,” I said. I squeezed the wheel tightly, as if we were about to fishtail on an icy road, and pressed my foot against the brake pedal, although we weren’t going anywhere. “Is that what he told you?”

  “He said he hasn’t had a succes
s in ten years and everyone in New York thinks he’s kind of a loser,” Tony said. He angled the mirror back toward me, and as he fiddled with it I caught a flash of my own swollen, sleepless face. “After that it was hard not to feel sorry for him.”

  “But I guess he helped you there, didn’t he?”

  “He did his best.” Tony lay a hand on the sleeve of my jacket. His fingernails, though bare, were still extravagant and nasty. “I’m sure your book is so good that he’ll be able to keep his job.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s a gem.”

  “Sure it is,” he said. “I have to go, all right?” I nodded. “Are you going to be okay?”

  There was the rattle and slam of a screen door, and we turned toward the house. The porch light had come on, yellow and haloed in the rain, and I saw a small, white-haired man watching us from the top step, a hand raised to his forehead.

  “My pop,” said Tony. “Hey!”

  Something darted down the steps, past the statue of the Virgin, and then there was a scrabbling sound at the passenger door, and a sharp, white grin at the window.

  “Shadow!” He opened the door to admit a fat, charcoal blue poodle who appeared delighted to see Tony Sloviak again. “Hi, girl!” The dog scrambled to get her forepaws, then her hind legs, up onto Tony’s lap, and proceeded to work over his face with her slow pink tongue. Tony turned his head this way, that way, laughing and pushing her down. “My dog,” he said.

  “I gathered that.”

  “Oh,” he said, “who’s my baby? Yes. You. You. Oh, who’s my—hey! Shadow!”

  The dog dropped down from his lap, back out of the car, and cut suddenly away to the right. The next instant we heard her, at the back of the car, whistling a low sad canine tune.

  “She found Doctor Dee,” I said.

  “Grady,” said Tony, putting his hand to his mouth. “My other bags. I’m going to need to get in there.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. I cut the engine. “Just as long as you get back out.”

  We went around to the rear of the car, watched carefully by Shadow and the slender old man on the porch. I popped open the lid of the trunk.

  “Stay down, Shadow,” said Tony, lowering his hand like a harness around the poodle’s shoulders so that she was unable to execute her apparent intention of leaping into the trunk and paying her last respects to Doctor Dee. “Hey, Grady, what, uh, what did happen to that poor husky dog?”

  “James Leer shot him,” I said, pulling out the plaid Gladstone bag and setting it on the ground. “It was kind of a misunderstanding.”

  “That kid’s fucked up,” said Tony. “And when your friend Crabtree gets through with him, he’s going to be even more fucked up.”

  I fished out Crabtree’s empty garment bag and then slammed shut the lid of the trunk.

  “I’m not sure that’s possible,” I said, but I wasn’t being honest. In my heart I believed that James Leer could still be saved, though not by Terry Crabtree; and if he could be saved, then he could always be made more fucked up.

  “So, what, he packs a gun, that kid?”

  “Sort of,” I said. I switched the garment bag to my left hand and reached into the hip. pocket of my jacket for the stainless little pistol. “He was carrying this. Actually, at one point tonight, to tell you the truth, I caught him pointing it at himself.”

  “ ’me see?” Tony held out his hand. “My brothers all have, like, fucking gun collections, if you can believe it.” I handed it over to him. Shadow watched it pass between us with mild interest, holding, as a dog will, to the imperishable belief that anything might possibly be something edible. “Pearl-handled. A twenty-two. This kind only holds one shot, I think.”

  I glanced up to the porch, but the old man appeared to have given up on his inconstant son and gone back inside, turning out the porch light behind him. All the other lights in the house seemed also to have gone out. I thought I could see now why Miss Sloviak had been less than eager all evening to come home. Tony looked up from the pistol in his fingers and shook his head.

  “Figures,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, because this is the kind of a gun that, you know, like, Bette Davis would carry? In her beaded purse?” He grinned. “I bet that kid would be much happier if he could be Bette Davis shooting herself, instead of some big-lipped little boy in a stinky old overcoat.”

  Tony closed his fingers around the gun, and his lids with their long eyelashes fluttered twice and then closed. He brought the pistol delicately to his lips. Though I knew the gun was empty now, I was frightened at the sight of that. For the first time it registered in my weedy old brain that James Leer, my student, had intended to kill himself that evening.

  “I’d better go,” I said. “I think I need to rescue James Leer.”

  Tony lowered the pistol and started to give it back to me. I pushed his hand away.

  “Keep it. I think it suits you.”

  “Thanks.” He looked up at the dark, shuttered face of the house and frowned. “I just might need it myself.”

  “Ha,” I said, fumbling in my jacket pocket for my car keys. I knew I’d been holding them a second or two before.

  “Hey, you know, uh, Grady, maybe I’d just go on home if I were you,” said Tony, as I got back into my car. “You look to me like you need to rescue yourself.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.” I closed my eyes. I saw myself pulling into the driveway of our ivy-clad house on Denniston Street, hanging my coat on the newel post of our stairs, falling down backward into the fragrant riot of coverlets and bedclothes on our never-made bed. Then I remembered that there was nothing, no one, waiting for me at home. Without really wanting to, I opened my eyes and nodded once to Tony. I started to roll up my window, then stopped. “Oh, shit, buddy,” I said. “What about that fucking tuba?”

  “Keep it,” said Tony. He reached out and slapped me three times softly on the cheek, as you might pat the tremulous cheek of a baby. “It suits you.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, and rolled up the window. As I pulled away from the curb, heading back up Juniper Street, I watched in the rearview mirror as Tony Sloviak, carrying his bags, climbed the long stairway up to his father’s house, past the benedictory embrace of Our Lady, his little black dog nipping at his heels with every step he took.

  CRABTREE AND I HAD discovered the Hi-Hat together, in the course of one of his first visits to Pittsburgh, during the period between my second and third marriages—the last great era of our friendship, of our pirate days, before stars were lost from certain constellations, when the woods and railroad wastes and dark street corners of the world still concealed Indians and poetical madmen and razor-sharp women with the eyes of tarot-card queens. I was still a monstrous thing then, a Yeti, a Swamp Thing, the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction. I wore my hair long and tipped the scales at an ungraceful but dirigible two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I exercised my appetites freely, with a young man’s wild discipline. I moved my big frame across the floors of barrooms like a Cuban dancer with a knife in his boot and a hibiscus in the band of his Panama hat.

  We found Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat, or the Hat, as it was known to regulars, on the Hill, stranded in a forlorn block of Centre Avenue between the boarded-up storefront of a Jewish fish wholesaler and a medical supply company whose grimy display windows featured, and had gone on featuring ever since, a miniature family of headless and limbless human torsos dressed up in exact, tiny replicas of hernia trusses. On the avenue side there were only a fire door and a rusted sign that said FRANKLIN’S in looping script; you got in through the alley around back, where you found a small parking lot and a large man named Clement, who was there to look you over, assess your character, and pat you down if he thought you might be packing. He didn’t come off as a very nice person the first time you met him, and he never got any friendlier. The owner, Carl Franklin, was a
local boy—he’d grown up on Conkling Street, a few blocks away—who’d worked as a drummer in big bands and small combos during the fifties and sixties, including a stint in one of the late Ellington configurations, and then come home to open the Hi-Hat as a jazz supper club, aiming to attract a class clientele. There was a beautiful old Steinway grand, a luminous bar of glass brick, and the walls were still hung with photographs of Billy Eckstine, Ben Webster, Erroll Garner, Sarah Vaughan; but the place had long since devolved into a loud R & B joint, lit with pink floodlights, smelling of hair spray, spilt beer, and barbecue sauce, catering to a shadowy, not particularly sociable crowd of middle-aged black men and their ethnically varied but uniformly irritable dates.

  I remember that I had been dangling unhappily from the rope of my new life as an English professor in Pittsburgh for about three months, friendless, bored, and living alone in a cramped flat over a Ukrainian coffee shop on the South Side, when Crabtree showed up, dressed in a knee-length leather policeman’s coat, with a sheet of Mickey Mouse acid and sixty-five hundred dollars in severance pay from a men’s fashion magazine that had just decided to fire its literary editor and get out of the unprofitable fiction business once and for all. I was so glad to see him. We set out immediately to reconnoiter the bars of my new hometown—Danny’s, Jimmy Post’s, the Wheel, all of them gone now—landing in the Hat, on a Saturday night, when the Blue Roosters, the house band at that time, were joined onstage by a visiting Rufus Thomas. We were not only drunk but tripping our brains out, and thus our initial judgment of the welcome the Hat afforded us and of the level of the entertainment was not entirely accurate—we were under the impression that everybody there loved us, and as I recall we also believed that Rufus was singing the French lyrics of “My Way” to the tune of “Walkin’ the Dog.” At a certain point in the evening, furthermore, one of the patrons was badly beaten, out in the alley, and came stumbling back into the Hat with his ear hanging loose; Crabtree and I, having consumed four orders of barbecued ribs, then spent a fiery half hour unconsuming them, taking turns over the toilet in the men’s room. We’d been going back ever since, every time Crabtree came to town.