Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  I smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

  “I didn’t think I was being stupid,” I said, a little dazed by the force of Irene’s optimism. All at once it seemed not impossible that my heart, that mad helmsman lashed to the wheel in the pilothouse of my rib cage, had steered me out to Kinship only to be reconciled to my wife. “I’m not sure she’s going to be all that thrilled.”

  Irene rolled her eyes and leaned forward to give me a soft slap on the cheek.

  “I hope you don’t listen too closely to the things this man tells you,” she said to James. She reached into her pocket, withdrew another chocolate chick, unwrapped it, and cruelly bit off its head, once again returning the remainder uneaten to her pocket. She must have had a whole pile of mangled little bodies in there.

  James and I went back through the laundry room and started out the door into the yard.

  “What’s the matter, James?” I said. “You look a little disturbed.”

  He turned to me, eyes wide with panic, hands jammed into the pockets of his coat.

  “Four questions about what?” he said.

  THIS SPRING, AS USUAL, the Warshaws’ pond had overflowed its banks and turned the back garden into an everglades. Irene’s empire of rosebushes had flooded, her stone birdbath lay washed over onto its side, and, buried to his divine nipples in mud, the statuette of Gautama Buddha that she’d set to watch over her flowers looked imperturbably out at us from behind an azalea. I limped with James across the makeshift boardwalk Irv had laid to carry you from the back door of the house, over the drowned garden, to the crooked gray shack the old Utopians built to keep their meat and melons cool in the summertime. The walkway, like all of Irv’s constructions, was at once intricate and ramshackle, a mismatched assemblage of two-by-fours, scrap lumber, and firewood nailed haphazardly together according to a grandiose scheme that provided for pilings, lashed guardrails, even a small bench, halfway along; the structure got more elaborate every year. I supposed that a dike of sandbags strategically placed along the pond would have been more effective, but that was not the way Irv’s mind operated. As we thumped along the boardwalk I could hear coming from the springhouse the shining corners and echoing space of his beloved serial music. In his youth, before switching to metallurgical engineering, Irv had studied composition, at Carnegie Tech, with an émigré pupil of Schoenberg’s, and written a few unlistenable pieces with titles like Molecules I-XXIV, Concerto for Klein Bottle, and Reductio ad Infinitum. That was the way Irv’s mind operated.

  Halfway to the springhouse, I stopped and looked out over the pond, blue and mottled as the hood of a Buick, roughly the shape of a sock. At the heel of the sock stood a small gray boathouse, with a miniature jetty, and on this jetty lay Deborah Warshaw and Emily, in chaise longues. Emily’s chair was turned away from us, but Deborah waved and raised her hands to her mouth.

  “Grady!” she called, through the trumpet bell of her cupped hands.

  Emily turned around in her chair and looked at me. After a moment she raised her hand and weakly waved. She was wearing a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, and it was not quite possible at this distance to read her expression. I figured that Munch’s The Scream was probably a safe bet.

  “That’s my wife,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “The one having a cardiac arrest. In the blue bathing suit.”

  “She’s waving,” James observed. “That’s good, right?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I’ll bet she’s pret-ty fucking surprised.”

  “What’s the other one wearing?”

  I looked. There were two pale ovals arranged across Deborah’s chest, in the manner of the cups of a bikini bathing suit, ornamented at their centers with tan rosettes.

  “She’s wearing her breasts,” I said. Beside her chair on the deck sat a squat, faceted bottle filled with a dark liquid, and a stack of what looked like magazines. These would be comic books, however. Deborah’s reading skills in English were not advanced, and she rarely read anything else. I didn’t really think it was a warm enough day for topless sunbathing, but it would certainly be typical of Deborah to decide that the best possible way of preparing for a family Seder was to drink Manischewitz and lie around half naked reading Betty and Veronica. Deborah was seven years older than Emily, but she had, paradoxically, known their parents for a briefer period of time. She was almost fourteen when she arrived from Korea, and unlike Emily and Phil she’d never quite learned to suit herself to life in the United States, in a household as patched together and ungainly as any of Irving Warshaw’s inventions. She’d missed having a bat mitzvah, and I knew from Passovers past that she considered the Seder to be a kind of unnecessary and infinitely more tedious reduplication of the Thanksgiving meal. She was kind of an antimatter Emily, plain where Emily was pretty, violent where she was placid, given to rages and transports but incapable, where Emily was a master, of arrière-pensée and social calculation. It was, I always imagined, as if the Warshaws had adopted a feral child, a girl raised by wolves.

  “Yo, Grady!” She drew a slow circle in the air with one hand. She wanted us to come over and say hello. Emily just sat there, motionless, holding a cigarette, the wind lifting the smooth black hem of her hair. I didn’t feel ready, I realized, to face Emily yet. So I gave them a cheerful, old-slow-witted-Grady wave hello, made a great show of shaking my head, then turned and led James out to the springhouse. I knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” said Irv. When he was in the springhouse, and you knocked on his door, he never just said, “Come in.”

  “It’s Grady,” I said.

  There was the scrape of a chair against a wooden floor, and then a low oy as Irv tried to get out of his chair.

  “Stay where you are,” I said, pushing open the door, stepping from the bright sunshine into the gloom and inextinguishable chill of the springhouse. The spring itself had dried up during the 1920s, but in spite of all the changes Irv had made to it over the years, the interior of the springhouse retained a cool, peppery tingle of artesian water and an air of perpetual twilight, as if it were a kind of cavern and the angular music Irv preferred merely the sound of water dripping from high stalactites into a bottomless black pool.

  “Come in, come in,” said Irv, putting down his book, gesturing, from his overstuffed easy chair, with great helicopter whirlings of his arms. As we came into the springhouse he braced his bad knee with his hands and lurched free from his chair. I went over to him and we shook hands, and I introduced him to James. We hadn’t seen each other since January. In that time, I was surprised to see, his hair had turned entirely gray. He seemed to have taken the sequential breakups of his daughters’ marriages very hard. His eyes were red and the skin beneath them was bruised with sleeplessness. Although he’d dressed, as he always did for family occasions, in suit pants, black brogues, and a tie, his shirt was rumpled and dark at the armpits, and he’d shaved himself as badly as Officer Pupcik, leaving patches of silver stubble and numerous cuts.

  “You look great,” I said.

  “What’s the matter with your foot?” He reached to turn down the stereo. “You’re limping.”

  I looked at James. “I had an accident,” I said. When this did not seem to satisfy Irv, I added, “A dog bit me.”

  “A dog bit you?”

  I shrugged. “Believe it or not.”

  “Let me see.” He pointed to my ankle. “Come by the light.”

  “It’s nothing, Irv. It’s fine. What were you reading?”

  “Nothing. Come, let me see.”

  He took hold of my elbow and tried to steer me away from his chair, toward a neighboring floor lamp with a cracked glass shade. I pulled away from him and went over to see what he’d been looking at when we came in, because I always liked to tease him for favoring such light reading as Gas Perm
eable Structures in Polymer Design and Modal Analysis of Pre-tonal Italian Sacred Compositions of the 17th Century. When he really wanted to unwind he might pull down something by Frege or one of his cracked old George Gamows, and chew on the end of a stinky cigar. He’d left the book facedown, flaps outspread on the arm of his chair; a hardback in plain blue library binding, with the title stamped in white on the spine: The Bottomlands. I felt myself blush, and I looked up to see that Irv’s face had also turned bright red.

  “You had to check it out of the library?” I said.

  “I can’t find my copy. Come.” Irv pulled me over to the floor lamp. Under his regime the springhouse was invisibly but strictly divided into three parts. There was the reading room—the two wing-backed armchairs and pair of lamps, an electric space heater, and a wall lined with bookshelves filled with his metallurgical and music theory texts. In the central portion of the springhouse he had his laboratory—a stationary tub and a pair of workbenches, one cluttered, one spotless, upon which he carried out his mechanical and chemical activities, from toaster repair to the development of a substance that could stick to Teflon coating. On the far side of the room there was an army cot piled with blankets and a refrigerator replete with cans of Iron City Light, one of which—no more or less—he took, medicinally, every afternoon at five. It was an enviable setup; Irv had rediscovered, as surprisingly few men do, that the secret to perfect male happiness is a well-equipped clubhouse. We’d once tried to reckon the amount of hours he had spent out here since his retirement, and had arrived at a conservative estimate of twenty thousand. Irene, I think, would have doubled that figure.

  “Here.” Irv pushed my book aside and patted the arm of his chair, generating a thick cloud of dust. “Put your foot up. James, have a seat.”

  I took hold of his shoulder, to steady myself, and lifted my foot onto the chair. I hiked up the cuff of my jeans and carefully slid the sock down to the collar of my shoe. I hadn’t bothered to rebandage the wound and the sight of it made me wince. The four holes in my ankle were dark and puckered. The flesh all around the bite was pillowy and red, tinged here and there with daubs of yellow. I looked away. For some reason I felt ashamed.

  “That looks nasty,” said James.

  “Its infected,” said Irv, leaning down to examine the wound more closely He gave off an aroma of hair oil and leather wallet and sweat, mingled with the orange-peel-and-Listerine fragrance of his aftershave, Lucky Tiger, which he wore on special occasions. I stood over him, with my eyes closed, inhaling his familiar smell. I wondered if this was the last time I was ever going to smell it.

  “When did the dog bite you?”

  “Last night,” I said, although it seemed like it had to be much longer ago than that. “He had his shots and all,” I added; I figured this was a reasonable assumption. “So, what made you want to read that old thing, anyway?”

  “I saw it in the library yesterday afternoon.” He shrugged. “I was thinking of you.” He clapped me on the knee, firmly, and I felt a sympathetic twinge in my ankle at the impact of his hand. “Stay put,” he said. “I’m just going to clean that up for you.”

  He unbent and went over to his laboratory, and I stayed where I was, looking at a National Geographic map of Mars that Irv had fastened with push pins to the wall above his chair. I had to fight off an urge to burst into tears of thankfulness for his solicitude.

  “So, James,” said Irv. He was banging around in his drawers and cabinets, pulling out bottles, reading the labels, tossing them back. “I take it you admired Frank Capra.”

  I was amazed; I was sure I’d never said anything to him about James Leer and his cinemania. I looked over at James, who was standing beside the armchair, holding the copy of The Bottomlands in his right hand, with his left hand dangling at an odd angle behind the open book.

  “He’s, uh, he’s one of my favorites,” said James. “I mean, he was. He died last fall.”

  “I know he did.” Irv returned with some cotton wool, a bottle of LabChem brand isopropyl alcohol, a bundle of gauze, a roll of adhesive tape, and a crinkled, squeezed-out tube of antibiotic ointment. He lowered himself to the ground a little at a time, and then knelt on his mechanical knee.

  “Ooh,” he said, as he winched himself down. “Wee wow.”

  He uncapped the rubbing alcohol and started to work with the cotton wool, dabbing delicately at my ankle. I flinched.

  “Stings?”

  “A little.”

  “You do that with a knife?” he said to James, over his shoulder.

  James looked trapped. “With a needle,” he said.

  “What are you guys talking about?”

  “His hand,” said Irv. “He’s got ‘Frank Capra’ sort of carved into it. Show him.”

  James hesitated, and slowly withdrew his left hand from behind the book. I saw them now, faint pink marks that might have been letters scratched into the back of his hand. I’d never noticed them before.

  “Does it say ‘Frank Capra’ on your hand, James Leer?” I said.

  He nodded. “I did it the day he died. September third.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I shook my head. I looked down at Irv. “He’s crazy about the movies,” I said.

  Irv squirted a dab of ointment onto the tip of his index finger.

  “One would have to be,” he said. Delicately he worked the ointment into the puncture marks. Thinking it over I decided that those eventual scars on my ankle would not have been acquired in any more reasonable manner than those on James’s hand.

  “So,” I said to Irv, after a minute. “How were you liking it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The book. The Bottomlands.”

  “I’ve read it before.”

  “And this time?”

  “It’s a young man’s book,” he said, not unkindly. “It got me remembering how it felt to be young.”

  “Maybe I should read it again.”

  “You? I’d say you’re in no danger of aging prematurely.” This didn’t sound like a compliment. “So whose dog was it that bit you?”

  “Oh, the Chancellor’s,” I said, looking back at the map of Mars. “There was a party at her place last night.”

  “And aren’t they going to miss you at your Wordsfest?” said Irv, drawing back to squint at my wounds. “All your students?”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said. “Anyway, I brought one of my students with me.”

  “Clever of you,” said Irv. “I remember the Chancellor. Nice lady.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the towering cracked crater of Nix Olympica.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who’s that?” said Irv.

  “Hey, Dad. Hey, Grady.” It was Philly, or rather his head and upper torso, stuck into the door of the springhouse, fingers wrapped around the doorjamb as if to prevent himself from accidentally falling into the room. Although in the past I had seen a few exchanges of genuine affection between them, the Warshaw men were awkward and ill at ease with each other. Irv had his springhouse, and Philly’s domain, when he came home, was the basement, and in general they kept out of each other’s way.

  “That’s James,” I said.

  Philly nodded. “Hey,” he said. “Jesus, Grady, what happened to your leg?”

  “I cut myself shaving.”

  He watched for a moment while Irv unwound a strip of gauze and tore it off with his teeth. “See Deb’s tits?”

  “Yep,” I said. “We saw ’em.”

  He grinned; “So, listen, uh, Mom sent me out here to see if this dude wanted to come and see Grossman.”

  “Do you want to, dude?” I asked James.

  “I don’t know,” said James, watching Philly warily. Philly Warshaw was a good-looking young man, skin the color of tea with milk, straight-jawed and slender, dressed in a spotless white T-shirt and jeans. His airman’s hair was thick and spiky, and the veins stood out on his forearms. “Who is he?”

  “H
e’s a snake, man,” said Philly. “He’s a mongo fucking boa constrictor.”

  “Go ahead,” Irv said. “I can take care of Grady.”

  James shrugged and looked at me. I nodded. He set down the book and followed Philly out the door. We heard their footsteps resound along the boardwalk as they headed toward the house.

  “I certainly hope he can write,” said Irv.

  “He can,” I said. “He’s a good kid. Ouch. Maybe a little messed up.”

  “He’s come to the right place, then” said Irv. “Hold still.”

  “Now, Irv.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with you.” He wrapped one hand around my ankle, holding the bandage fast, and with the other hand brought the roll of adhesive tape to his mouth. The pressure of his fingers was firm enough to be painful. “You and Emily. If this were happening to Deborah,” he said, his words a little garbled, “all right, I could understand. I’d be a little disappointed if it didn’t happen.”

  “Irv, I don’t know, it’s just—”

  “She spoke to her mother.” Angrily he bit off a strip of tape and applied it to the bandage. “She doesn’t seem to want to speak to me.”

  “It’s hard for Emily,” I said. “You know that.”

  “I know. She holds it all in.” He applied a final strip of tape to the bandage, then patted at it with such gentleness that my eyes filled with tears. He looked up and managed a thin smile. “I guess she inherited that from me.” Then he lowered his head and looked down at the bandages and medicines scattered around him on the ground.

  “Irv,” I said. I held out my hand to him and hoisted him to his feet.

  “Families are supposed to get bigger,” he said. “This one just keeps shrinking.”

  Then we went outside, into the last slanted shafts of the April afternoon. There was no one lying out by the pond anymore, and we leaned on each other for a moment, crippled in our various extremities, looking out at the empty chaise longues on the dock, at the sun hanging low over the bare yellow hills of Utopia.

  “I’m not going, anywhere,” I said, just to see how true I could make it sound.