Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “See you tomorrow,” said Q., as he negotiated his way out of his safety belt. He worked the handle, and then pushed open the door with the toe of his Wallabee shoe. Wisely and with an air of long experience he took a moment to locate the ground before he tried to stand on it.

  “Take it easy, now.” Crabtree slid across the backseat and climbed out of the car before Q. could slam the door on him. He shook Q.’s hand, steadying him a little as he did so, then got in beside me.

  “I’m looking forward to your talk tomorrow, Terry.” Q. searched his pockets for a moment, a determined look on his face. His shirt was untucked, and the long thin strands of hair that he combed over his bald scalp were all standing on end, and I saw that in the course of the evening he had somehow managed to lose one of the temple pieces of his eyeglasses. When at last he found the key Sara must have given him, he looked so happy—so pleased with himself—that I had to turn away. I didn’t look back at the house until he was already inside it.

  “His old doppelgänger must be feeling pretty good about things right now,” I said as we drove away. Crabtree said nothing. “What?” I asked him. “Come on, buddy. Don’t do this. Talk. What’s the matter?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “You’re pissed off at me because I wouldn’t let you mess with poor James Leer.”

  “Like it was any of your business.”

  “You’re getting greedy, man,” I told him. “Wasn’t Miss Sloviak enough for one night?”

  Crabtree repeated his earlier, anatomically impossible request of me. He had nothing further to add.

  “Okay, look, I’m sorry,” I said, to no effect. I made a few more halfhearted attempts to apologize, then let it drop, and we drove on in silence. I started thinking all kinds of maudlin thoughts, about things like Doctor Dee’s empty food dish, and his rubber pork chop, and the length of leash chain hanging, forever slack now, from a bent nail in the pantry. Without knowing exactly how, I found myself, ten minutes later, in the service driveway alongside Thaw Hall, putting the car in park.

  “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where would I go?” said Crabtree.

  Yes, it was my lucky night. As I came around the side of the building to the front doors, I saw that the janitor was still at work, getting Thaw Hall ready for tomorrow’s busy schedule of exciting WordFest events. He was a tall, stooped, shaggy-haired white kid, dressed in a blue jumpsuit, dragging a vacuum cleaner back and forth behind him across the carpet of the lobby, with a kind of dazed industriousness, like a paperboy towing a wagon full of newsprint. When I rapped on the glass he seemed to recognize me, and I wondered if he could possibly have been a student of mine.

  “Traxler,” he said, as he let me into the hall. “Sam. I had you in my freshman year. Then I dropped out.”

  “I hope it wasn’t my fault,” I said.

  “It wasn’t,” said Sam Traxler. I hadn’t expected him to take me seriously. I wished I could remember who he was. “Anyway, I’m in this band now. We’re starting to play out a little. We’re starting to make a little cash.”

  “Sam,” I said, jerking a thumb toward the doors of the auditorium. “Did you already clean up in there?”

  “Yep. Hey, did you lose a knapsack, Professor Tripp?”

  He had it in the service closet, on the floor, between a zinc mop bucket and a black leather guitar case plastered over with stickers and decals.

  “I thought that looked like a manuscript in there,” he said.

  “It is. Thanks a lot.” I took the knapsack from him and started for the door.

  “No problem,” he said, accompanying me. I’d obviously provided him with a welcome distraction from his work. “Hey, is all that true about Errol Flynn and how he used to put coke on his dick? To make himself, like, last longer?”

  “Christ, Traxler,” I said. “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Well, jeez,” he said, pointing to the knapsack. He looked a little taken aback. “You’re reading his biography, aren’t you? It was all wrapped up in your sweater or whatever.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Right. Yeah, that’s true. He used to rub all kinds of things on it. Paprika. Iron filings. Ground lamb.”

  “Sick,” said Sam, opening the door and holding it open for me. “Well, take care, Professor.”

  “See you, Sam,” I said. “Hey, what’s your band’s name, anyway? I’ll, uh, I’ll look for you guys.”

  “We don’t have a name,” he said. “We came up with so many names that we just had to give up, you know? Meat Nickels. Bitter Dregs. The Ulnas. We couldn’t agree. People just call us, I don’t know, ‘Sam and those dudes,’ or ‘Greg’s band,’ or whatever.”

  “Clever,” I said, standing half in and half out of the door. As I listened to him I’d been fiddling with the strap on James’s knapsack, and now it came loose. I held on tight to the flap as the knapsack’s weighted-down bottom gaped against my thigh. Inside, tied with binder’s twine to a neatly cut rectangle of shirt cardboard, lay James Leer’s manuscript, two inches thick.

  “That the new one?” said Sam.

  I nodded. There was no title page, no hint of authorship: simply the words THE LOVE PARADE at the top of the first sheet of paper, followed by the numeral 1, and then, to start the thing off,

  On Friday afternoon his daddy handed him a hundred wrinkled one dollar bills and told him to buy himself a sport-jacket for the Homecoming Dance.

  Two characters, an occasion, in the wad of tired money a whisper of some long history of poverty and thrift, and, above all, a quirky human voice to hang a story on. It was hard to do more in a good first sentence. I could have wished the kid would just break down and employ a comma, but at least the thing wasn’t the usual scattering of fragments and chips. One of his short stories actually began with the lines “Ruined. The dinner was. Utterly,” but in his novel he seemed to have left all that behind. Its second sentence read:

  He rode the Greyhound over to Wilkes-Barre and spent the money on a pretty chrome gun.

  “Is it good?” said Sam.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It might be.”

  I stuffed the manuscript back into the knapsack, next to a kind of crude package—the biography of Errol Flynn, I supposed—wrapped hastily in a piece of soft black cloth. There was something familiar about the sheen of this fabric. I peeled back a corner of it, and saw a flash of yellowed ermine, and smelled a faint smoky flavor of cork. All at once the world seemed to draw a sharp breath; it started to rain, streaking the ink of James Leer’s manuscript, spattering the satin jacket Marilyn Monroe wore as she and her sad-faced husband set off in their De Soto to meet their fate as married people.

  “This isn’t my jacket,” I told Sam Traxler.

  “I kind of figured that,” said Sam.

  Walking out of Thaw Hall, I felt myself arrive at the end of my luck. When I got back to the service road, the car and Crabtree were gone.

  IT WAS A MILE AND seven tenths from the campus to my house on Denniston. The intervening streets were broad and straight, lined with maples, chestnuts, and oaks that had been planted just after the First World War. All the houses I passed were dark, with cars arranged in their driveways as neatly as duck decoys on a mantelpiece. I limped right down the middle of certain streets, and stood for an entire minute in the center of a desolate intersection as the lights changed around me and the traffic signals swung from their cables in the wind. I walked for a hundred and sixty-two hours through an uncharitable sobering rain. The pain in my ankle grew worse the longer I walked and the soberer I got. I wished to the point of religious feeling that I had my little bag of Humboldt County with me. There was no marijuana in James Leer’s knapsack; I confirmed this unsurprising fact several times. There were only, in addition to the three objects I already knew about, an otherwise anonymous gold Cross pen inscribed FROM YOUR LOVING PARENTS, half a roll of breath mints, twelve cents, and an autographed postcard of Frances Farmer. I recogniz
ed the looping script as the hand of Hannah Green. When I crested the last hill before my block I caught the echo of some sad vibration, like the lowing of a passing train. It was the bell in the Mellon Campanile, tolling three o’clock.

  My car wasn’t in the driveway. It seemed to me that I had never seen the driveway looking so empty before. I lived in a nice, big, brick-and-ivy house, built in 1915 in the Prairie style, quadrangular and spacious as a bank. Squat pillars held up its three porches, and it had leaded windows, built-in window seats, cabinets, and bookcases, an office nook under the stairs, a parlor, and enough bedrooms for a family of five. The pantry was larger than apartments I had lived in and certainly better provisioned. The wainscoting and the walls had been repainted in careful tones of candle wax and eggshell. The flower beds along the front walk were dark and animate with primrose, crocus, narcissus. I dragged myself up the five steps to the front door and let myself in. There was a smell of Froot Loops cereal from the vase of freesias on the hat stand. I turned on the hall light and was confronted by the faces of vanished furriers, dry-goods merchants, printers, and chiropodists, in wooden frames, hanging on the wall under the stairs, along with their wives, children and grandchildren, two lavishly bearded brother uncles, a long-dead cocker spaniel named Shlumper, and nine members of a Zionist social club. When I opened the hall closet to hang up my wet jacket, I was enveloped in a cloud of Cristalle. I stood there for a moment, smelling Emily’s coats. The refrigerator hummed to itself in the faraway kitchen. I smelled her mackinaw, and her pea coat, and the cracked black shearling which she had worn all through the winter of our courtship eight years before. She was living in her place on Beacon Street, then, near the park, and I remembered walking her home one night along the Panther Hollow bridge; halfway across we had stopped, and I had backed her up against the frozen rail to kiss her. I remembered the give of shearling between my fingers, soft and rough as the skin of her throat, and the way when I worked open its wooden buttons the coat had emitted a dizzying blast of her bodily perfumes, as if I were lowering myself into the deep black pocket of her bed.

  For the first time I understood that I had driven Emily Warshaw from my life.

  This was something I’d been trying to do for a long time—not intentionally, I swear, nor with any feeling of satisfaction, but in the automatic, methodical manner of a boy working on a loose tooth. Without reference to doppelgängers and the symptoms of the midnight disease it’s hard to say why, exactly; but certainly a native genius for externalizing self-hatred may have had something to do with it. Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member—if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

  It hadn’t been love at first sight for Emily and me, it was true. We’d met through a friend of hers whose husband taught the nineteenth-century British novel in my department and presided over a weekly professorial poker game that I sometimes frequented during my lonely early days in Pittsburgh. At first sight I found her cold and aloof, if beautiful, and she thought that I was boastful, hyperbolic, alcoholic, and loud. We were right, of course. We saw each other casually a few times, with no result apart from a few awkward conversations. Then I heard that she had lost her job—photographing ingots and smelters for an ad shop with a lot of steel-industry accounts—and, through my friend the Dickensian, I put her in touch with an acquaintance of mine, a senior copywriter at Richards, Reed. This fellow liked her work and took her on, and Emily asked me to dinner, to thank me. Then she invited me home. A year later we were married. In those days I was tired and suspicious of love at first sight. In each of my first two marriages the come-out roll had turned up seven, and now it seemed reasonable to lay my money on the Don’t Pass line.

  I believe that I was inspired to marry Emily Warshaw by the artificial hopefulness of sex and by an orphan’s trite desire for a home. The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of them related by blood, seemed to offer me the best chance yet to wire my wandering meteor to the armillary sphere of a family. This was a sincere if not entirely commendable motive for marriage, but I’ve since found that in the efforts of a husband and wife to stay together, a fugitive chaleur and a longing for home are no better guarantees of success than the ozone-blue flash of the Thunderbolt. For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.

  I went into my office and found James Leer asleep, on the long green sofa, an unzipped sleeping bag pulled up to his chin. It was an old-fashioned bag that had belonged to Emily’s dad, patterned with mallards and huntsmen and hounds. I could see it was, because the lamp on my desk was still on. I supposed that Hannah had left it burning for James in case he awakened in the middle of the night and didn’t know where he was. His head lay at the end of the sofa nearest my desk, but she had angled the lamp’s neck so that its light wouldn’t shine directly in his eyes. I wondered if she was waiting for me in the basement, in her narrow bed, under a Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, propped up on one elbow, hearing portents in the creaking of the ceiling overhead. For a second I allowed myself to imagine going down. Then I looked over at my desk. She’d turned the lamp, I saw, so that it cast its light squarely on the thick white slab of twenty-pound bond, on the towering pile, on the keep and insurmountable battlements of Wonder Boys. All at once I felt very tired. I set James’s knapsack down on the floor beside the sofa and switched off the lamp. In a last, ill-advised spree of hopefulness I made myself walk all the way down the hall to the guest bedroom to look for Terry Crabtree. Then I forced my body up the stairs, and into the next empty room.

  WHEN I WOKE ON Saturday morning in our big sleigh bed there were black sky and stars at the window. It wasn’t quite six o’clock. The pain in my ankle was still there, duller and more feverish than before. My hasty bandage work had come unraveled in the night, and I made out a Japan of dried blood on the sheets. I lay for a moment, riding the swell and roll of my hangover, clinging to the mattress and to the wreckage of my last dream. I’d already lost most of the details, but I could still recall its backdrop or central theme, which was the shadowy kingdom of mystery and spice hidden in the parting of Hannah Green’s thighs. I groaned aloud, gritted my teeth, and took deep yogic breaths. After a few desperate minutes I gave up and went naked and half blind into the bathroom to throw up.

  It had been several years since my last alcohol hangover and I found I’d lost the knack: instead of cool submission I fought against it, and after I was done being sick I lay crumpled like a chastened teenager on the floor beside the toilet, for a long time, feeling worthless and alone. Then I got up. I put on my eyeglasses, stepped into my moccasins, and tied on my lucky bathrobe, which made me feel somewhat better. Like most beloved items of clothing, this robe had once belonged to somebody else. I’d come upon it years ago, hanging in the upstairs closet of a beach house in Gearhart, Oregon, that Eva B. and I rented for a summer from a Portland family named Knopflmacher. It was an enormous white chenille number, threadbare at the elbows, with pink and red arrangements of embroidered geraniums on the pockets, and I didn’t have too much doubt that it had been Mrs. Knopflmacher’s. It had since become impossible for me to write wearing anything else. In one of its pockets I now found, to my delight, the charred half of a roach and a book of El Producto matches. I stood at the bedroom window, looking east, smoking the roach down to the last particle of ash and watching the sky for a hint of daylight.

  After a few minutes I felt much better indeed, and I went downstairs to the front door for the paper. As I stepped out onto the porch, I saw the noble fins of Happy’s Galaxie, poking out from behind the hedge that screened the driveway from the rest of the house. So Crabtree had found his way home, and he was all right: I could hear him snoring now, from all
the way back in the guest room. Crabtree had a deviated septum that he was afraid to have a surgeon put right; he was well known for the resonance of his leonine snore. Crabtree’s snoring was loud enough to rattle the glass of water on the nightstand, to ruin his love affairs, to cause violent confrontations with neighbors in cheap motels. It was loud enough to kill bacteria and loosen centuries of dirt from the face of a cathedral. When I came back into the house—the newspaper hadn’t arrived yet—I followed the snoring down the hall to Crabtree’s room and stood for a while with my ear to his door, listening to the operation of his lungs. Then I went to the kitchen and started coffee.

  While the coffee was brewing I drank a tall glass of orange juice, to which I added two tablespoons of honey, on the theory that an increase in my blood sugar, along with a massive dose of caffeine, would eliminate the last traces of my hangover. Pot for the nausea and the heaviness of heart, vitamin C for the cell structure, sugar for the depleted blood, caffeine to burn off the moral fog; it was starting to come back to me now—the whole praxis of alcoholism and reckless living. When the coffee was ready, I poured it into a thermos pitcher and carried it out to my office at the back of the house, where James Leer lay on the sofa, his head pillowed on his praying hands, like someone pantomiming sleep. The sleeping bag had slid partway to the floor and I saw now that he’d gone to bed naked. His suit, shirt, and tie were draped across the footrest of my old Eames chair, white BVDs folded neatly on top of the pile. I wondered if Hannah had undressed him, or if he’d managed it himself. He had the shrunken look of a tall person asleep, curled up into himself, his knees and elbows and wrists too large, his skin pale and freckled. His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy’s—perhaps over time one’s genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer. I felt sorry for James Leer when I saw his penis. Carefully I redistributed the sleeping bag over his form.