Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “Uh huh,” I said, closing the door. “Whatever.”

  I went back into the living room and looked at James. There was a sudden swell of accordion music in a distant part of the house, and then, in the next instant, a sharp series of hacks and expostulations as Crabtree coughed his way through the first cigarette of the morning. I had a sudden image of Irv Warshaw, standing by the telephone in the downstairs hall of the farmhouse, scrolling hopelessly through the functions of his watch, and I was seized with a powerful longing to put my arms around him, to brush his rough cheek against mine, to sit down to eat the bread of affliction with him and with Emily and all of the Warshaws. They weren’t my family and it wasn’t my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.

  “What do we do now?” said James.

  The telephone sounded its mad alarm, and I limped slowly out to meet it.

  “It’s me,” said Sara. “Oh, Grady, I’m so glad you’re there. So many bad things are happening at once.”

  “Could you just hold on a minute, honey?” I said, before I hung up the phone. I walked back into my office, and switched off the television.

  “How about we get the fuck out of here?” I said.

  I LOANED JAMES LEER a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans, and pulled on my crusty old back-country boots. I dug my fisherman’s vest out of the back of my closet. There was a stained little twist of weed in one of its nine pockets, which I gratefully consumed. Then I packed a canvas shopping bag with a thermos full of coffee, a bottle of Coke, a box of raisins, four hard-boiled eggs, a green banana, and half a pepperoni pizza, wrapped in foil, that I unearthed at the back of the refrigerator. For good measure I threw in a package of wieners, I suppose in case our journey included campfires, ajar of hot salad peppers, and a pickle spear wrapped in waxed paper left over from some long-ago bag lunch of Emily’s. I filled the pockets of my vest with pens, rolling papers, a cigarette lighter, a ruled notebook, a Swiss Army knife, AAA maps of Idaho and Mexico, and several other potentially useful items that I found in the drawer by the kitchen telephone. I grabbed an old Navajo blanket and a flashlight from the closet in the hall. I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding. I felt as if James and I were setting out together to fish for steelhead in a flashing Idaho stream, and at the same time that we were lighting out for Tampico with a ten-minute head start on the police.

  “See you,” I called out, as I abandoned my troubled house to its inmates.

  It had been raining, it seemed, since February, but on this erev pesach the sun was shining. The sky was so blue that it pealed in my ears like a bell. Steam rose from the lawn and from the long black flower beds that lined the front walk. There were swollen pink buds on the camellia bushes, beaded with rain, and I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox. I put my hand on the Swiss Army knife in my pocket and looked out at the morning with a caffeine quiver of hope in my spine and at the tips of my fingers. Then we went down the walk to the driveway, and I saw a kind of crater in the hood of my car, a lopsided asterisk of wrinkles and pleats. Poor thing.

  “How did that happen?” said James, running a fingertip along the jagged lip of the wound. A long flake of paint peeled away and curled around his finger like a scrap of green ribbon. “Oops.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.” It had completely slipped my mind. I closed my eyes. A shadow danced in a rainy smear of light, then leapt into the air and flew toward my windshield. There was the muffled rumor of a kettledrum.

  “And he landed on his butt,” said James.

  “That’s right,” I said. “How can you tell?”

  James Leer looked at me, then back at the hood of the Galaxie. He shrugged.

  “You can see the outline of a butt,” he said, and then threw his canvas knapsack into the car.

  As I backed us out of the driveway, I narrowly missed destroying Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie once and for all. I’d noticed the white delivery van when we came out of the house, creeping along Denniston as its driver read addresses off the housefronts, but I hadn’t bothered to look for it again before I went barreling down the driveway, doing at least twenty; you had to go fast when the car was in reverse, or she had a tendency to stall out. At the last possible instant I saw the flash of white in my rearview mirror, a pair of airbrushed punching prizefighters, SDOOG GNITROPS S’KINVARK. I hit the brakes. The driver of the van floored it and pulled wildly away.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I’m off to a good start.”

  “Why don’t you put the top down?” James suggested. “Maybe that’ll make it easier to see.”

  I blushed, and reached up to unlatch the roof.

  “I keep forgetting I can do this,” I said.

  On the way out of town we stopped at the Giant Eagle on Murray, and James, having turned up his nose at my stock of provisions, picked up sixty-four ounces of orange juice, a package of powdered industrial doughnuts, and a copy of Entertainment Weekly. It featured an article on the Fonda family of actors and there was a large photograph of handsome Henry on the cover, in a scene taken from what James at once identified as Drums Along the Mohawk.

  “God,” he pronounced, solemnly, holding out the magazine for me to see.

  “He was all right,” I said.

  I picked up a dozen red roses in the flower department, and wrapped the stems carefully in wet paper towels from the bathroom so that they wouldn’t die on the way. There was a condom machine bolted to the wall of the men’s room, and I dropped fifty cents on something called a Luv-O-Pus that promised to entangle my partner in undulating tentacles of pleasure. We got stuck in a long checkout line and to pass the time I was going to show James Leer the Luv-O-Pus, but at the last minute I decided against it; I had a feeling that such an article might frighten him. While we waited to pay he downed the entire bottle of orange juice. He worked his pointy little Adam’s apple up and down.

  “I’m so thirsty,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  I laughed. “Shit, James, you’re hungover.”

  He considered this a moment, then nodded.

  “It feels kind of sad,” he said.

  As we drove out Bigelow I kept my eyes off the ruined hood of Happy’s car and tried to put the damage, and all that it seemed to say about the way I was conducting my life, out of my mind. The top was down and I listened to the hiss of the wheels against the street, the flow of wind over the car, the sound of Stan Getz blowing faintly from the speakers and trailing out into the air behind us like a pearly strand of bubbles from a pipe. It was no use. The outline of a butt rode forever out before me, like an identifying badge.

  “I thought we were going to talk to the Chancellor,” said James, unhopefully, as we headed farther and farther away from Point Breeze.

  “We were,” I said. I looked at the flowers on the seat beside me. A gallant gesture, I thought, was the first expedient of a guilty conscience. Why did I think that Emily would be anything but sorry to see my haggard face and my odorless grocery-store roses? In any event at James’s reminder the flock of guilty feelings that wheels perpetually in the chest of every pothead alighted now on Sara’s roof. Had I actually hung up on her? Was I really leaving town with her dead dog in my trunk? “Yeah, uh, you know, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea, James. Maybe we ought to turn around.”

  James didn’t say anything. He was jammed up against his door, wrapped in his stained overcoat, knees up, elbows in, two quarts of orange juice joggling around inside him, holding on to a still-intact powdered doughnut as if it were the only ballast keeping him pinned to his seat in my car and to the spinning globe beneath us. He was miserable. Every time we went over a bump, his head wavered back and forth like the
needle of a sensitive gauge. I kept heading down Bigelow, but more and more slowly as we got closer to the parkway, thinking now of Sara, now of Emily and her parents, until I reached a point of utter volitional equipoise or collapse, and we came to a red light.

  “Look at them,” said James. “They look like replicants.”

  A handsome young family was crossing the street in front of us, a slender pair of blond parents in khaki and plaid surrounded by an orderly tangle of cute blond replicant children. Two of the children swung sparkling bags of goldfish. The sun lit the flyaway ends of their hair. Everyone was holding hands. They looked like an advertisement for a brand of mild laxative or the Seventh-Day Adventists. The mother carried a golden-haired baby in her arms and the father was actually smoking a briar pipe. As they passed before the car they all looked at the crater in the hood and then gazed up at James and me in uncomprehending pity.

  “The light’s green,” said James.

  I had my eye on that baby. Its face was pressed against the woman’s left breast, and it was waving its hands around in the air in a declamatory manner. Its fingers curled and uncurled and struck odd poses like the significant fingers of a stone bodhisattva. For an instant I could feel the weight of it, like an ache, in the hollow of my arm.

  “We can go now, Professor.”

  The person in the car behind us began to honk. As the family stepped up onto the far sidewalk, just before they glided off away from us, I glimpsed the baby’s face, over the mother’s shoulder. It wore an oddly crooked grin—almost as if a muscle in its cheek were paralyzed—and a little black eye patch over its left eye. I liked that. I wondered if I had it in me to produce a baby with a piratical air.

  “Professor?”

  I did a one-eighty in the intersection and headed back toward Point Breeze.

  AS WE PULLED UP in front of the Gaskells’ house, I looked over at James. The wind had blown back all his sticky black hair so that his bangs stood straight up from his head, which gave him a cartoon air of having just received a piece of shocking news. I saw his eyelids flutter. The doughnut slipped from his fingers. His surprised head tilted backward and lodged in the space between the headrest and the window. I figured he was faking unconsciousness to get out of having to face Chancellor Gaskell, but I didn’t hold that against him. After all, I’d promised—though I doubted if he really believed me—that I would take care of everything.

  “Okay, then,” I told James, climbing out of the car. “You wait here.”

  There was no answer when I knocked on the front door, so I gave the handle a try. It was unlocked.

  “Sara?” I stepped inside. “Walter?”

  In the kitchen there was coffee on the stove, and on the table Sara’s huge iron purse, a package of Merits, and a paperback copy of one of Q.’s novels, squashed open over a pink Bic lighter. She was home, all right. I walked back out to the front hall, and started up the stain.

  “Sara? It’s Gra-dy! Hello?”

  Expecting at any minute to be jumped in a dark corner by an enraged Walter Gaskell swinging one of Joltin’ Joe’s old Hillerich & Bradsbys, I stuck my head into Sara’s office, the guest room, and the other upstairs rooms, and then went at last to the door of the master bedroom, where I had passed an hour just a little too recently and stupidly, I felt, to be visiting again so soon. The door was ajar, and, flinching a little, I gave it a light tap with the toe of my shoe. It swung open with a guilty creak.

  “Sara?”

  The bed lay buried in its trackless snowdrift of goose-down and linen. A clock ticked on the nightstand. Two pairs of slippers, one plaid, one lavender, sat side by side on the rug. The cork-lined door hung wide open and Walter’s magic closet was bare; doubtless his collection had been evacuated to a safe place. Without looking down at the spot where Doctor Dee had met his fate I held my breath and stepped, as if stepping over the corpse of an Alaskan malamute, into the room. A pair of large casement windows overlooked the driveway, and I could see James Leer in the Galaxie, head lolling to one side, eyes closed, mouth open. He looked as if he really were asleep. I crossed the room to a pair of windows in the opposite wall and peered out into the backyard, beyond the ruined railbed where last night James had stood scratching at his temple with the muzzle of his gun, to Sara’s little garden and, beyond that, to the big fancy greenhouse imported three years ago from France. After a moment I could make out a shadow stooping and then rising behind the steamy panes of glass.

  As I went out of the bedroom I held my breath and took a look down at the rug under my feet, by the door. There was a small burnt circle as if someone had dropped a cigarette, alongside some dark brownish flecks like gravy spots on a shirtfront. Part of the circle, and no doubt some of the gravy spots, were missing where a sample had been cut from the Berber carpeting, exposing an isosceles triangle of pale green pad underneath. I poked at the blackened spot with the tip of my shoe for a moment, then went down to see Sara, in her garden, to let her know what the Pittsburgh police lab technician was going to report.

  Sara’s garden was rather small, some thirty feet by twenty, enclosed on all four sides by a low fence of white pickets backed with chicken wire. There were eight or nine beds, full of rich black humus, bordered by irregular red bricks set in rows half buried in the ground. Among the beds ran paths of the same brick, set into an underlayer of fine gravel, in a herringbone pattern. An uncle of Sara’s, one of her father’s brothers, had salvaged the bricks from the demolition of Forbes Field. The beds had been cleared out and plowed under last fall. The vines on the spindly trellises were thin and skeletal, the spigots had been wrapped with plastic and taped against frost, and the roses that ran along either side of the central alley had been cut back severely. There were a few prunish apples dangling from the apple tree, and I thought I saw the collapsed black remains of a pumpkin in one corner. Although I knew Sara had already done some spring planting, the garden looked empty and dead to me.

  I walked along the brick path to the little glass building, swallowing, clearing my throat, my heart ringing hard against my breastbone. I felt certain that when I left Sara’s greenhouse, having told her what I had brought myself here to say, I would never be coming back. The greenhouse was a miniature palace of glass, speckled with dew, fifteen or twenty feet tall. It was built on the plan of a Greek cross and had a high central atrium, with a peaked, hipped roof like a glass steeple. The framework was metal and wood, painted the dark green of an outfield wall. The windows were fogged but I could make out a dozen shades of green within.

  I tapped on the door and it rattled under my hand.

  “Sara? It’s Grady.”

  I heard her say something that after a moment I reconstructed as a terse invitation to enter.

  A jet of cool air carried me through the door, as though the greenhouse were breathing me in. The floor was gravel and my footsteps crunched and echoed off the high glass ceiling. It was so warm inside that I immediately began to sweat, and so fragrant as to be almost malodorous. I smelled potting soil and freesias, basil and rainwater, rotten wood, rubber hoses, moss, and a faint chlorine tang like an indoor pool. A thousand plants stretched out into all four arms of the greenhouse, spread across low benches, in orderly rows, sporting all manner of fronds, tendrils, and bracts, from cacti and miniature roses in pots to boxes full of tiny seedlings to a big round gardenia bush in a Mexican urn. The back part of the greenhouse was hung with fluorescent lights that cast their wide spectra over planters filled with zinnia, alyssum, phlox, and over a box of sweet pea vines that Sara had trained to climb through the empty mullions of a salvaged French door. In the central atrium, in a terra-cotta pot the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, stood a six-foot date palm, and beside it a worn purple davenport crowned with a bunch of carved grapes.

  “I can’t believe you hung up on me, you dick.”

  Sara came in from the cactus room, looking not entirely sorry to see me. She had on her gardening boots, big, steel-toed, motor-head butt kickers, black as
stovepipes, scuffed and muddied and beat to shit, and a cracked old leather coat of some indeterminate color between olive and buff. It was creased and split and mud-spattered, had belt loops but no belt, and its fur-trimmed collar looked as though it had been lovingly chewed by a dog. It had belonged to her father. There was a fat paperback peeking out of the jacket’s hip pocket—in case of emergency, I supposed. Underneath the coat she wore a mechanic’s blue jumpsuit. Her hair was tied up in a black and green plaid scarf and as she crossed the atrium toward me she was tugging at the fingers of a pair of canvas gloves.

  “Uh oh,” I said, “the gloves are off.”

  “I hate you,” she said, putting her arms around me.

  “I hate you, too,” I said.

  We stood for a moment, holding on to each other, listening to the humming of the exhaust fans and the ticking of the heaters and the restless suspiration of the plants.

  “Walter?” I said at last.

  “He’s there.” She nodded in the general direction of campus. “But he’s a basket case,” she said. “We were robbed last night, Grady. They took his jacket. Marilyn’s jacket. And Dee’s missing.”

  “I heard.”

  She stepped away from me. “How did you hear?”

  “Oh.” I dropped my hands to my sides and they hung there, feeling empty and boneless. “A policeman came to talk to me this morning.”

  “Did you confess?”

  I made myself laugh. “Actually,” I said. “That’s why I came to see you.”

  “To confess?” She gave me a sharp poke in the belly and then sat down on the purple davenport. I sat down heavily beside her. “Bad Grady.” Lightly she slapped each of my cheeks with the gloves. Bad. Grady. “Your fingerprints were everywhere.”

  “They were?” I felt my throat tighten. “That was fast.”