Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “I thank you,” I said.

  “And I love what you wrote in your inscription, Grady.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Only I’m not quite the downy innocent you think I am.”

  “I hope that isn’t true,” I said, and at that moment I happened to catch a glimpse, in the smoky mirrored wall of the Hi-Hat, of an overweight, hobbled, bespectacled, aging, lank-haired, stoop-shouldered Sasquatch, his furry eye sockets dim, his gait unsteady, His arms enfolded so tightly around the bones of a helpless young angel that it was impossible to say if she was holding him up or if, on the contrary, he was dragging her down. I stopped dancing and let go of Hannah Green, and then Janis Joplin ceased urging us not to turn our backs on love, and the last of Hannah’s requests came to an end. In its aftermath we stood there, suddenly abandoned by the other couples, looking at each other, and all at once, as the pills and the whiskey fell out of balance in my bloodstream, I felt irremediably fucked up.

  “So what are you going to do?” said Hannah, giving my belly a friendly slap.

  My reply was something softheaded and mumbled about dancing with her all night.

  “About Emily, I mean,” she said, a little impatiently. “I—I guess she isn’t going to be there when you get home.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Try not to look quite so pleased.”

  She blushed. “Sorry.”

  “I guess that I really don’t know. What I’m going to do.”

  “I have an idea,” she said. She fished around in the pocket of her jeans for a moment, and then pressed three warm quarters into my palm.

  I steered myself over to the telephone, dropped in the quarters, and unhooked the receiver.

  “You’ve got to help me,” I said.

  “Who is this?” said the voice of the thousand-year-old lavender-haired Ruthenian woman in cat-eye glasses and an angora sweater who dwelt within the secret heart of Pittsburgh, taking the requests of an ever-dwindling population of drunken and heartbroken lovers. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I said I need to hear, something that’s going to save my life,” I told her, reeling on the end of the telephone cord.

  “This is a jukebox, hon,” said the woman, sounding calm and a little distracted, as though wherever she was the television was playing low or she had a copy of Cosmo spread open on her ancient lap. “This isn’t a real telephone you’re talking on.”

  “I know that,” I said, unconvincingly. “I just don’t know what to ask you for.”

  I looked over at Hannah and tried to flash her the smile of a competent and reasonable smiler, of someone who wasn’t at all worried that he was going to be sick, and going to fall down, and going to hurt yet another young woman in the course of a lifelong career of callous disregard. Judging from the look of dismay that came over her face, I thought I must have failed miserably, but then I saw that Q. had left the table and was making his way across the crowded room toward Hannah, his face grim and determined and haunted, as far as I could see, only by alcohol, the writer’s true secret sharer, the ghost that lived in the dusty, bare corners of Albert Vetch’s and so many other midnight lives. As he approached, however, to ask her for the next dance, Hannah turned on him, simply, and headed straight toward me, head lowered, blushing from her forehead to the nape of her neck at the thought of her own rudeness.

  “Just a minute,” I told the Jukebox Crone, wrapping my hand around the mouthpiece of the receiver. “Dance with him, Hannah.” I tried out another of my implausible smiles. “He’s a famous writer.” I raised the telephone to my mouth again. “Are you still there?” I said.

  “Where would I go?” said the woman. “I told you, hon, I’m not a real person. This is my job.”

  “But I don’t want to dance with him, Grady.” Hannah put her arm through mine and looked up at me through her scattered bangs, searching my face, her eyes so wide and desperate that I was alarmed. I’d never seen Hannah acting anything other than the calm, optimistic Mormon girl she was, eternally polite, capable of stolid acceptance of locusts, misfortunes, and outlandish news about the universe. “I want to keep dancing with you.”

  “Please.” I watched as Q. turned and walked with drunken precision back to the table in the far corner of the room, arriving just as the heads of James Leer and Crabtree surfaced into the pink beam of a floodlight from the bottom of a very deep kiss. James’s eyes had gone all blind and his mouth was an empty O.

  “I’m sorry,” I said into the telephone, “but I have to hang up now.”

  “All right, all right,” said the woman. She gave a curt little sigh and tapped her seven-inch tropical pink fingernails against her headset. “How about ‘Sukiyaki’?”

  “Perfect,” I said. “And why don’t you pick another two that you like?”

  I hung up the phone, gave Hannah a sloppy and inarticulate hug, and apologized to her about forty-seven times, until neither of us knew what I was talking about and she said that it was all right. Then I hurried over to the table in the corner, where I laid my cold fingers against James Leer’s feverish neck.

  “In ten seconds,” I told them, as I helped James to his feet, “this dance floor is going to be packed.”

  HANNAH SAID THAT she had never been there but she believed James Leer rented a room from his Aunt Rachel, in the attic of her house in Mt. Lebanon. Since neither of us felt like driving all way the out to the South Hills at two o’clock in the morning, I folded James into Hannah’s beat-to-shit Le Car and sent them on home to my house. Crabtree and Q. would be riding with me. I figured it would be safer that way for all of us.

  As I was about to close the door on him, James stirred and wrinkled up his face.

  “He’s having a bad dream,” I said.

  We watched him for a moment.

  “I’ll bet James’s bad dreams are really bad,” said Hannah. “The way bad movies are.”

  “Xylophones on the soundtrack,” I said. “Lots of Mexican policemen.”

  James lifted a hand to the general vicinity of his right shoulder and patted it a few times, without opening his eyes, then pawed in the same way at his left shoulder, as if he thought he were home in bed and had lost track of his pillow.

  “My knacksap;” he said, as his eyes flew open.

  “His bag,” said Hannah. “You know that ratty green thing of his?”

  James sent his pale hand spidering across his lap, his seat, the space around his long legs, then made a sudden grab for the door handle.

  “You stay right here, little James,” I said, squeezing him back into the car. I waved to Crabtree, busy just then propping Q.’s string-puppet body against the side of my car, and called out that I was going to run in and look for James’s knapsack. Crabtree didn’t bother to look up. Before I could register the fact that he was ignoring me, however, I’d already tossed him my keys. They rang out against his left shoulder and then splashed into a puddle at his feet. He fired a nasty look at me across the parking lot before he knelt down to retrieve them, one restraining hand on Q.’s waist.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  As I limped back into the Hat and headed for our corner, the man we had fictionalized as Vernon Hardapple tried, without much success, to interpose his body between me and our table. His breath blew sour and warm at my face. His tall tsunami of hair had disintegrated into a kind of shivering pom-pom that stuck out all around his head. He was ready to mix it up with me.

  “What were you looking at?” he asked me. His voice was raspy and his speech slow. Standing close to him I could see that his facial scars were the mark of some jagged and not very sharp object. “Something funny about me?”

  “I wasn’t looking at you,” I said, smiling.

  “Whose car you driving?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That 1966 emerald green Ford Galaxie 500, out there, with the license plate that say YAW 332. That your car?”

  I said that it was.

  “Bullshit,”
he said, pushing lightly at my chest. “That’s mine, motherfucker.”

  “I’ve had it for years.”

  “Bullshit.” He brought his scarred face an inch closer to mine.

  “It was my mother’s,” I said. Ordinarily I’m never too busy to get myself into a stupid argument with an angry and potentially dangerous person in an unsavory place. I was in a hurry to get James home and safely put to bed, however, and so I just brushed past him. “Excuse me.”

  He lurched in front of me.

  “What were you fuckers looking at?”

  “We were admiring your hair,” I said.

  He reached out for my chest as if to give me a shove. I took an involuntary step backward, and he stumbled against me. As he tried to regain his feet he tipped himself over sideways, and sprawled across the black Naugahyde seat of an empty booth behind him, which after a moment he found comfortable and appeared unwilling to leave.

  “Sorry about your brother, Vernon,” I said.

  Our table hadn’t been cleared yet. As I came closer I saw, underneath it, not James’s knapsack but what I believed for a heart-stopping instant to be the mangled body of a bird, lying dead on the orange carpet. It turned out to be my wallet. My charge plates and several of the engraved business cards Sara had ordered for me on my last birthday were scattered across the floor around the table. I gathered them up and slipped them back into the wallet, a fat black kidskin number Emily’s parents had brought back for me from their trip to Italy, cut wide to hold continental bills. I returned it to the breast pocket of my jacket, not even bothering to check if all the cash was still there, as if I’d left my elegant Florentine wallet lying on the floor on purpose, where I knew it would be perfectly safe. In any case I couldn’t have said how much cash there ought to have been. I started for the door, feeling perversely pleased, congratulating myself, as I always did at such moments, on not having been born an unlucky drunk. I tapped the comforting bulk of the wallet at my breast.

  “See, now,” I told Vernon, passing by the booth in which he’d taken up residence. “You just have to learn to be lucky like me.”

  Then I rolled on out of the Hat. My car and Hannah’s were idling side by side at the center of the nearly empty parking lot, trailing long plumes of exhaust, their windows misted over. There were two dark shapes sitting in the front seat of my car, the smaller one, on the passenger’s side, pitched a little to the right. For some reason it irritated me that Crabtree had gotten behind the wheel of Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie. I walked over to Hannah’s car and knocked on her window, and then the air around me was filled, an inch at a time, with the radiance of her face and with the wheezing of a tragic accordion. Hannah Green was big on tango music.

  “No knacksap,” I said. “He must have left it back at Thaw.”

  “Are you sure?” she said. “Maybe someone took it.”

  “No. Nobody took it.”

  “How do you know?”

  I shrugged, and bent down to have a look at James. He’d slumped over against Hannah, now, and his head rested on her shoulder with an enviable snugness.

  “Is he all right?” I said.

  “I think so.” She gave the hair over his ear a few unconscious strokes. “I’m just going to get him home and onto the sofa.” She ducked her head and looked at me pleadingly. “The one in your office, all right?”

  “In my office?”

  “Yeah, you know it’s the best one for naps, Grady.” Over the course of the previous winter, as I read student writing or caught up on correspondence at my desk, Hannah had dozed off many times while studying on my old Sears Honor Bilt, her boot heels kicked up on the creaking armrest, her face sheltered under the tent of a sociology text.

  “I don’t think it’s really going to make all that much difference to him right now, Hannah,” I said. “We could probably stand him up out in the garage with the snow shovels.”

  “Grady.”

  “All right. In my office.” I hung a couple of fingers over the edge of her window, and she reached up and took them in her own.

  “See you at home” I said.

  I walked around to the front of the Galaxie and waited for Crabtree to get out. The door swung open. Crabtree looked up at me, his face utterly blank.

  “You shouldn’t drive,” he said.

  “You should? I said. “Get in back.”

  He continued to favor me with the polar expanse of his gaze for another moment, then shrugged, got out of the car, and climbed into the back. I slid in beside Q. and put the engine in gear. As I followed Hannah down the bumpy alley I was aware of a flickering shadow at the limit of my peripheral vision. The next moment there was something caught in my headlights, flagging us down with its wild dark arms. I braked. The arms cutting across the beams of light threw thirty-foot shadows against the screen of rainy air behind them.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Q., in a strangled whisper, “It’s him.”

  “What’s he want?” said Crabtree. It was only Vernon Hardapple again, but Q. seemed to be seeing someone else.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I had a little problem with the guy when I went back inside the Hat.”

  “Go around him, Grady.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” said Q., squeezing his head between his hands, as though to shore it up against collapse.

  “Grady, go around him!”

  “All right!” I tried to tiptoe the car around him, but the alleyway was too narrow. One sidestep and he was standing in front of the car again. “Shit, man, there’s no room.” “Look at those pink scars on his cheek,” said Q., remembering himself. “It looks like he has another set of lips.”

  “Back up, then, idiot!” said Crabtree.

  “All right!” I said, throwing the car into reverse. I rolled us back into the Hi-Hat’s parking lot, then wrenched the wheel around to the left and, ignoring a one-way sign, started off down the alley in the other direction. Vernon was there, a funny, almost happy little smile on his face. I stepped on the brake again.

  “Shit,” I said, just before he rocked back onto his heels, swung his arms forward, backward, forward again. You could see him moving his mouth as he one, two, threw himself onto the hood of my car. He landed on his ass, with a surprisingly gentle report, and then quickly slid down the hood of my car to the grille, legs extended, like a child sliding down a banister. He managed to alight on his feet, turned around, took a deep bow from which he almost didn’t recover, and aimed another blind smile through the windshield, directly at me. Then he disappeared.

  “Who was that?” said Q., grinning with some odd but not unfamiliar combination of terror and delight. “What happened?”

  “I had my car jumped on,” I said, as though this were a service the Hat provided to its very best customers.

  “Is it all right?”

  I hoisted myself up on the steering wheel and tried to see how the hood looked. The light in the alleyway was bad and I couldn’t see much of anything.

  “I think it’s okay I said. “They made these things pretty heavy back then.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Crabtree. “Before he comes back with some friends.”

  I took off down the alley, out onto the empty avenue, then headed down Baum Boulevard, feeling once again that I’d made a narrow but foreordained escape from danger.

  “After we drop Q., here, Crabtree,” I said, “we have to make a stop at Thaw.”

  “Uh huh,” said Crabtree. Now that the crisis was over, he settled back down into his sulk.

  “I think James might’ve left his knapsack in the auditorium.”

  “Great.”

  “Do you remember seeing it when you, uh, escorted him out tonight?” I looked at him in the rearview mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. Crabtree was sitting back, arms folded behind his head, watching dark storefronts and deserted filling stations slide past him, an expression on his face of dumb amusement, as though he were the happiest man in the world, a
nd all that he saw around him only increased the value and hue of his contentment. It was the closest that he ever came to screaming. “Crabtree?”

  “Tripp?”

  “Yes, Crabtree?”

  “Please go fuck yourself.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “Isn’t this the way back to the college?” said Q. as we passed the Electric Banana.

  “That’s right,” I said, impressed that he could recognize the route in the dark, drunk, after having seen it only once before.

  “Well, I don’t know if—that is, I’m not staying at the college, Grady.”

  “No?”

  “No, I’m staying with the Gaskells.”

  “Is that so?” For an instant the sole of my foot slipped free from the gas pedal, and the car drifted for a few hundred feet on momentum, slowing almost to a stop. “Well, it’s the way to their house, too,” I said, after I could breathe again. I replaced my foot on the accelerator and drove us out to Point Breeze.

  “I wonder what happened to them, anyway?” Q. said when I headed down the street that led to the Gaskells’ driveway. The nearer we came to Sara’s house the less inclined I felt to go forward. We crept along the fence of fearsome iron spikes. “They just never showed up.”

  In the end there was nothing more I could do to prevent it, and we turned into the Gaskells’ gravel drive. Sara and Walter garaged their cars at night, and the driveway looked desolate, the house abandoned. A pair of floods set amid the bushes on either side of the narrow front porch searched the face of the house, throwing their light across its bays and shutters and dormers, riddling it with odd shadows. The harsh floodlights seemed to be there not to illuminate so much as to identify, to mark the Gaskells’ house to passersby as one that had an infamous history, or was slated for imminent destruction. The wet wind blew through the branches of the pair of ancient apple trees in the front yard and filled the air with flowing scarves and snowdrifts of white petals. After a moment, I noticed that in an upstairs window a light was still dimly burning, and as I looked up something passed across the window blind. It was the window of Sara and Walter’s bedroom; they were still awake. I could go in with Q., right now, and tell them about the burden I was carrying around in the trunk of my car.