Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  Irv smiled bitterly and clapped me on the shoulder as though I’d got off a clever line.

  “Give me a break, Grady,” he said.

  THERE WAS ONE BATHROOM in the house, upstairs, at the end of the hall, in a wide, lopsided dormer all its own. It was a nice bathroom with grooved wainscoting, brass fixtures, and a big quadruped tub, but given the wild mood swings of Irving’s bowels and a remarkable tendency among the women of the family to lie brooding in their bathwater, it was an overburdened facility and generally occupied when you needed it most. When I came back into the house I went upstairs to take a leak and found the heavy, paneled door shut tight. I knocked softly three times, tapping out the syllables of my name.

  “Yes?”

  I took a step backward.

  “Em?” I said. “Is that you?”

  “No,” said Emily.

  I gave the doorknob a twist. It was unlocked; all I needed to do was give the door a gentle push. Instead I eased the knob back, without a sound, and took my hand away. I stood looking at the closed door.

  “I, uh, I need to pee, kid.” I swallowed, aware of the moment that inhered in the question I was about to ask—the deep, damaged membranes of trust and intimacy I was about to lay bare. “Can I—is it all right if I come in?”

  There was a splash and the faint porcelain echo of a splash.

  “I’m taking a bath.”

  “Okay,” I said to the door, resting my forehead against it. I could hear the scrape of a match and then the low angry sigh of Emily’s exhalation. I counted off thirty seconds. Then I went back downstairs and out into the yard.

  I walked out to the driveway and started down toward Kinship Road, looking up at the mesh of branches overhead for signs of a blighted elm tree against which it would be kosher for me to piss. The air smelled cool and slippery like wet bark, and although my wife’s refusal to let me share her nakedness, however reasonable, had hurt me—even though it made my heart ache to think that I might never get to see my Emily naked again—I was feeling very glad to be out of the house, alone, carrying the happy clenched fist of my bladder inside me. Then I came around a bend in the drive and saw my sister-in-law. She was moping along about fifty feet ahead of me, wrapped in a gauzy purple dress the hem of which dragged in the gravel like a train. She was cutting at the air around her with a lit cigarette and singing softly to herself in a falsetto voice: it sounded like the slow, moaning part of “Whole Lotta Love.” I knew that I ought to leave her to her unimaginable Deborah reveries but I was upset and confused about Emily, and there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law’s counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen. She caught the sound of my tread in the gravel, and turned.

  “How weird,” I said by way of greeting.

  “Hey, Doc!” she said.

  “That’s quite a dress.” There were tiny silver mirrors sewn into the fabric, and the print appeared to be patterned after the psychedelic neon paisley effect you get when you shut your eyes tight and press hard with your knucklebones against them. It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.

  “Do you like it? It’s from India or someplace,” said Deborah, smacking me on the cheek, hard, with her compressed lips, in her version of a kiss, and giving my hand a painful squeeze. “What’s weird?”

  “I couldn’t get Em to let me come into the bathroom and pee. She was in there taking a bath.”

  “She’s fucking pissed at you, Doc,” she said. “She heard you’ve been boinking this other woman.” Doc was Deborah’s nickname for me. She’d started out, years ago, by calling me Gravy, and hence Gravy Boat, and then the latter had metamorphosed, in a way I supposed my physique made inevitable, into Das Boot. At some point she had dropped the Boot, and then after a while Das had slid slowly into Doc, where, finding me always well supplied in any emergency with a certain pharmacological substance, it finally lodged. Deborah had come to English late, as I’ve said, and there was no way of telling what would happen to a phrase like “gravy boat” once it got into her brain. “Bastard.” She drove a fist delicately into my stomach. “Fucking slimebag.”

  “Did she?” I said, not taking her abuse of me at all seriously. One of the things I’d always admired about Deborah was the unself-conscious scabrousness of her dealings with men in general and myself in particular. She’d arrived on these shores with little in her luggage besides the seven great Anglo-Saxon imprecations, and to this day she clung to them with touching devotion, as to certain other proofs—a shriveled lei of orchids, an ancient, uneaten Hershey bar the orphanage had provided for the trip—of her passage to America. “And just where did she hear that?”

  “You think I told her?”

  “I don’t really care,” I said. “How are you, kid?”

  I reached to brush a strand of hair from her right eye, and she looked away. She had thick and lovely hair, which she used to conceal her face, a plain face made plainer still by her low regard for it. She hated her nose, believing it to be at once bulbous and too small. She called it—originally, I thought, if pitiably—her pud. Her eyes though expressive were badly crossed, and her teeth wandered across her smile like the kernels at the tip of an ear of corn.

  “You don’t know anything about monkeys, do you?”

  “Not as much as I ought to.”

  “Do they make good pets? I was just thinking of getting myself a monkey. A squirrel monkey, you know, one of those little jobbers they have, to carry around on my shoulder. Do you know anything about squirrel monkeys?”

  “Only that they kill their masters.”

  Deborah showed me all her crooked little teeth.

  “I still like you, Doc,” she said, in her insincere way. Like many people who have lost all but the ghost of their original foreign accents, nothing she said ever sounded quite true. “I just want you to know that. Everybody else thinks you’re a motherfucker. But not me. I mean, I do, but I still like you anyway.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “You’re the worst judge of character I know, Deb.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” she said, and she looked momentarily depressed. Her most recent husband, for example, a half-Korean dentist named Alvin Blumentopf to whom she had been married for all of a year, had been beaten up by loan sharks for nonpayment of racetrack debts and then convicted, two days later, of income-tax evasion, and sent to the federal prison at Marion. That Deborah had fallen in love with him almost guaranteed such a fate. “Thanks for reminding me, you know?”

  She dropped her cigarette onto the road; just let go of it, half-smoked, as if it tired her. Deborah came off much tougher than Emily and I remembered that I always forgot—misled by her profane good nature and loopy style—how easy it was to injure her feelings. I stepped on the cigarette for her and ground it out.

  “What a gentleman,” she said. “So, okay, she wouldn’t let you into the bathroom.”

  “She wouldn’t speak to me.”

  “She didn’t say anything?”

  “No, but I only waited twenty minutes.”

  “And then you came out here to piss?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I started toward a nearby tree, which appeared, on close inspection, to be acceptably dead. “Mind?”

  “Do I get to see your wiener?”

  “You bet.” I stepped behind the tree and unzipped. “Have you got a pen?”

  “No, why?”

  “I want to draw a little face on it for you.”

  “Do worms have faces?”

  “Now you’re depressing me,” I said.

  “Doc,” said Deborah. “How many times have you been married?”

  “Three.”

  “Three. Same as me.”

  “The same.”

  “And I’ll bet you cheated on them, too.”

  “Oh, kind of.”

  “And I’m the worst judge of character you ever met?”

  “H
a,” I said. I finished my work, hitched up my trousers, and stepped back out into the drive. “So, aside from thinking about monkeys, what were you doing out here, Deb? Fleeing Egypt?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I was checking around in the barnyard. Sort of looking around underneath the cow turds.”

  “For ’shrooms?” She nodded. “Did you find any?” Another nod. “Did you eat them?” She looked at me levelly, her eyes all pupil in the late afternoon shadow, her face expressionless. “Jesus, Deb, that’s crazy.”

  Now she punched me on the arm and grinned broadly.

  “Scared you, didn’t I?” She reached into one of the side pockets of her dress and pulled out a dirty handful of skinny gray mushrooms. “I’m just kind of holding on to them for now. In case things get really dull.” She shoved them back into the pocket and from the other took out her cigarettes. When she could get them she smoked a nasty filterless Korean brand called Chan Mei Chong that cost her double the price of a domestic pack and smelled like burning warthog rind.

  “When I first saw Emily”—she lit the cigarette, watching the flame with her wild, crossed eyes—“yesterday, I could tell she had some kind of news to tell me. You know how all the parts of her face sort of all smoosh together around her nose?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I thought she was going to say that she was pregnant.”

  “Funny,” I said, voice a little thick.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  I have to say here that I didn’t quite trust Deborah, and had no reason to believe that she trusted me. Whenever we were alone together like this I felt an awkwardness between us—we punched each other a lot, and called each other names, and rocked from foot to foot watching the smoke leave our mouths—that was partly sexual and partly social but was mostly due to our each knowing all the other’s most intimate secrets, and knowing we knew them, without ever having shared a single one. She was, in other words, my sister-in-law.

  “The woman in question,” I said, after a moment, slowly letting out a deep breath. “The one you didn’t tell Emily about.”

  She wrinkled her lip and blew a long gray strand of smoke toward Pittsburgh. “The Chancellor.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Holy shit. Does Emily know that?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I just found out myself. That’s kind of why I came up here.”

  “Huh? Are you planning to announce it at the dinner table?”

  “There’s an idea.”

  She shook her head, looked at me for an instant, then away. She picked a flake of tobacco from her lower lip.

  “She’s married, isn’t she, your friend?”

  I nodded. “To my chairman. My boss, more or less.”

  “So is she going to have it?”

  “I don’t think so, no. I hope not.”

  “Don’t tell Emily, then.”

  “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. Not tonight, anyway. Fuck, what difference could it make, Doc? Wait a while. I mean, see what happens, you know? Why should you tell her if there isn’t even going to be a baby? It’ll hurt her feelings so bad.”

  I was impressed. Although I knew she and Emily were fairly close, it was rare to see Deborah actively displaying such concern for her sister. Part of the way she’d learned to deal with being dumped into middle of the Warshaw family was never completely to surrender the pretense that they were all a bunch of relative strangers, well-meaning but ultimately beneath her, a boatful of rude fishermen who had rescued the only survivor of the wreck of an imperial yacht. She put a hand on my arm, softly, and I wondered if perhaps she didn’t have a point. Why should I hurt Emily’s feelings any more than I already had? Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head.

  “I really have to. I promised I would.”

  “Promised who?”

  “Oh,” I said, “myself.”

  Then what’s one more broken, more or less? said her look. “Are you going to stay the night?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not, the way things have been going.”

  “Then let me tell her for you. After you leave.”

  “No!” I regretted now that I had said anything at all to Deborah, who, along with all her genuine affection for Emily, had also acquired, like any good elder sister, a healthy urge to see her younger sibling’s jaw drop in horror. “God, you have to swear to me you won’t say anything to anyone, Deb. Please! I just haven’t figured out what I’m going to do yet, is all.”

  “That’s what you’re waiting for?” she said, looking pointedly unhopeful.

  “Hey, fuck you,” I said, “I’ll figure it out. Now, come on. Do you swear?”

  “Sure,” she said, and her soft Korean accent fluttered in the corners of her voice. “No problem.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, once, firmly, as if I believed her.

  “Jesus, Doc,” she said. “How do you manage to fuck things up so good?”

  I said that I didn’t know. Then I turned and faced the house.

  “I’d better go rescue James from Philly,” I said. “Coming?”

  She looked as if she was about to say something else, but in the end she just nodded and followed after me. We walked back up the driveway toward the house, gravel crunching under our feet. “Who is that kid, anyway?” she said. “That James?”

  “He’s a student of mine.”

  “He’s cute.”

  “Please leave him alone.”

  “He told me he liked my dress.”

  “Did he?” I said, giving the dress a look of mock skepticism. “He’s very polite.”

  “He’s—? Hey, fuck you,” she said, sharply, her tone no longer bantering, and I saw that I had hurt her feelings again.

  She stopped in the middle of the side yard and looked down at herself. “It is ugly, isn’t it?”

  “No, Deb, it’s—”

  “Shit, I can’t believe I bought this thing.” Her voice had grown shrill. “Look at this!”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I told her. “You look gorgeous, Deb.”

  She went past me to the back door and opened the screen but didn’t go immediately inside, and coming up behind her I saw that she was trying to catch her faint reflection in the long rippled pane of the door.

  “I’m going to change,” she announced, frowning. Her voice was shaking. “I look like some kind of fucking hippie tent or something. I look like there should be someone standing underneath me selling bongs.”

  I put a consolatory hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away and yanked open the back door. She ran into the house, through the kitchen, and went pounding up the stairs. I was dragged by her black crackling slipstream into the kitchen, where Marie stood, all dressed for dinner, stirring the matzoh ball soup in its caldron. She looked at me, an eyebrow raised, holding an interrogative ladle in one hand.

  “I’m just getting started,” I told her.

  I WENT DOWN INTO the basement to rescue James Leer and found him at the Ping-Pong table, facing Philly Warshaw with a paddle in his hand. They were playing Beer Pong, a hazing ritual to which, in his wild days, Philly had subjected all suitors and young male visitors to the house, myself included. It was the consensus in the Warshaw family that Philly’s wild days had endured for an unreasonably long period of time, but in the end he’d settled down, and it was only when he came out to Kinship, now, and there was no driving to be done that he drank too much; I suppose it gave him something to look forward to in family visits. I sat down on the cellar steps to watch the action.

  “Take it easy, there, James,” I said.

  “He’s all right,” said Philly, taking an exaggerated swipe at the ball, painting just enough english onto it to send it skittering into the glass of beer that was stationed, on the center line, at James Leer’s end of the table. “He’s doing fine.” He grinned. “Poun
d it, James.”

  Obediently James reached for the full pilsner glass, fished out the ball, raised the glass to his lips, and drained it in a single eternal swallow that seemed to cause him some difficulty. When the beer was gone, he hoisted the glass in my direction, an empty smile frozen on his face, as a child who is trying to seem grown up smiles around an endless salty mouthful of raw oyster.

  “Hi, Professor Tripp,” he said.

  “How many is that?” I asked him.

  “That’s two.”

  “Three,” said Philly, coming around to refill James’s glass with a can of Pabst he took from the mini-refrigerator that he kept in the corner of his old clubhouse. Daintily James wiped the beer from the Ping-Pong ball with the tail of my old flannel shirt. His hair had come unfastened from its brilliantine moorings and stood at crazy angles from his head. He was all smirks and grins and his eyes were full of light, as they had been the night before when we burst, heads reeling, into the blazing lobby of Thaw Hall, laughing and out of breath. He was having a great time. I could see that alcohol was going to be a dangerous thing for him.

  “So, what happened to your car?” Philly wanted to know. “Who’s butt is that?”

  “Guy jumped on it,” I said. I was a little irritated with him for having lured poor James into a game of Beer Pong, but I couldn’t really hold it against him. Phillip Warshaw was a born agent of chaos and a master of backspin in all its many forms. He’d come over from Korea in 1965 with a reputation for being the most willful and uncontrollable toddler in the Soodow Orphanage and had immediately started running headlong and half-intentionally through plate-glass windows and lashing neighborhood children to trees. His career as a teenage vandal was legendary at Allderdice High School; in one four-month period he and a number 12 Magic Marker had covered every flat surface in Squirrel Hill, Greenfield, and parts of South Oakland with an arcane symbology that investigators eventually identified as his birth name, written in the alphabet of his lost mother. He had found a paradise of bad behavior during his tours in Panama and P.I, and it had taken him years to adjust to married life on the base down at Aberdeen.