Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  Stealthily James interred the remainder of his fish in a grave of pink horseradish and then pushed his plate aside. He looked grateful to see the fragrant yellow bowl of matzoh ball soup when it arrived.

  “So what are these a symbol of?” said James, poking at a matzoh ball with his spoon.

  “What’s that?” said Irv.

  “These things, and those gefilte fish things,” he said. “And the eggs, too. How come we’re supposed to eat so many little white balls?”

  “’Cause that’s what Moses had,” said Philly.

  “It’s possible it’s some sort of fertility symbol,” agreed Irv.

  Deborah, said, “Well, it’s obviously not working for this family.” She looked at me, then away. “At least not for some people.”

  “Deb, please,” said Emily, misinterpreting her sister’s remark as a reference to our years of failed attempts to conceive, which in the Warshaw family were generally attributed, I knew, to the effect on my sperm count of my years of pot smoking. If only they knew, I thought; but they would soon enough. “Let’s not—”

  “Let’s not what?”

  “None of this stuff is a symbol of anything, okay?” said Philly, waving an arm over the table, indicating the heaped platters and serving bowls that Irene and Marie were bringing in. “All of this stuff is just, you know, you can just eat it. It’s dinner.”

  Dinner was a roast leg of lamb, crisp and speckled with rosemary, served with new potatoes that had been roasted in the pan of crackling fat. These, along with the matzoh ball soup and a gigantic green salad trimmed with yellow pepper and red onion, had been, we were told, Irene’s responsibility. Marie had provided a casserole of sweet potatoes stewed with onions and prunes, another of zucchini in a sauce of tomato and dill, and two cairns, at either end of the table, of the tasty little hollow puffs of matzoh-meal artifice, at once crusty and moist, called bagelach. Unfortunately, however, Philly’s claim that the menu had no symbolic content was not strictly true, because it also included Emily’s contribution, a kugel or pudding made, in this case, from potatoes. She’d been working on the thing, Irene informed us in a cautionary tone, all morning. As we brought the first forkfuls to our mouths the air around Emily suddenly gathered and took on a strange heaviness.

  “Mmm,” I said. “Great.”

  “Delicious,” said Irene.

  Everyone agreed, chewing very carefully.

  At last Emily took a bite. She managed a brave smile. Then she hung her head and covered her face with her hands. One of the things Emily most disliked about herself was her haplessness in the kitchen. She was an impatient cook, hasty and careless and easily distracted. Most of her efforts arrived at the table with uncooked middles, missing ingredients, and an apology from the mortified chef. In this I think she saw a kind of parable of her life, having started out aspiring to write heart-stopping novels and short stories, and ended up generating ad copy for the biggest kielbasa in the world. It seemed to her that she must have left something out, or taken something too soon off the burner.

  “It tastes like something,” said Deborah, poker-faced. “Something we used to eat in school. Oh, I know.” She nodded. “Paste.”

  I hate you, said Emily to her sister. Fuck you and go to hell.

  “Sorry,” she said. She looked down at her plate.

  “Sweetie pie,” I said, reaching out for the first time to touch her. I cupped her chin in my hand, and stroked her cool hair, and admired for the one thousandth time the surprising planes of her downturned face. Emily was a thoughtful, intense, and complicated woman with an ear for dialogue, a nice sense of the absurd, and a loyal heart, but I may well have had no better reason for falling in love with her than her face. And I don’t care what you will say about me, either. People get married for worse reasons than that. But like all beautiful faces Emily’s made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and for mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs of prose together to make a short story. “I think it tastes fine. I do.”

  She took hold of my hand and gave my fingers a grateful squeeze.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Deborah looked faintly disgusted.

  “The two of you,” she said, giving her head a fatigued shake. “Shit, man.”

  There was more at work here than Deborah’s natural gift for verbal abuse, of course, though only I knew it. I’d hurt her feelings with my earlier remarks about the dress, and doubtless that explained part of her anger, but I had also, I could see, by my confession about Sara, filled her with an as yet directionless, all-encompassing sense of outrage. It was this and her sisterly loyalty, albeit twisted back on itself like a Mobius strip, that had led her to say that Emily’s kugel tasted like library paste.

  “So,” said Irene, in a brave but reckless effort to change the subject, “Grady. How is your book going? Emily said you were going to see your editor this weekend.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Did he show?” said Emily, looking up, her voice all cheery, a tight smile on her face. “How is Terry?”

  “Spiraling rapidly out of control,” I said. “Same as ever.”

  “What did he say about the book?”

  “He said he wants to see it.”

  “So are you going to let him? Did you get it done?”

  I hesitated for a moment, and looked around the table. Everyone was waiting to hear my reply. I didn’t blame them for that. For as long as they could remember, I’d been making vague and confident assurances that any day I would finish the thing. If and when I ever did, they would probably feel an almost physical sense of relief. I was like a massively incompetent handyman who’d been up on their roof now for years, trying to take down a gnarled old lightning-struck tree trunk that had fallen against the house, haunting every gathering, all discussions of family business, any attempt they made to sit down together and plan for the future, with the remote but ceaseless whining of my saw.

  “I’m just about done,” I said with a smile that morally if not in fact was a first cousin to the gap-toothed, dishonest, and faintly stupid grin of untrustworthy and drunken old Everett Tripp. “I should have it finished in the next couple of weeks.”

  There followed a brief silence which might have greeted a man with terminal cancer announcing that he’d just bought himself a ticket to the World Series next fall. Deborah let go a bitter laugh.

  “Oh, right,” she said.

  Emily’s fork rang out against her plate.

  “I really wish you would stop it now, Deborah,” she said.

  “Stop what, Em?”

  Emily started to speak, then remembered James, glanced at him, and said nothing. She picked up her fork and twirled it in the fingers of her left hand, over and over, as though looking for scratches. It would not have been at all like her to pick a fight at the dinner table and I was relieved (although secretly disappointed) to see her back down. I didn’t like to think what kind of surprising mass revelations a direct challenge might bring from Deborah. But whenever tempers flared you could always count, I thought, on Emily’s astonishing faculty for repression. In our eight years together we’d had exactly one fight: something to do with kirschwasser and a cheese fondue. Above all things Emily hated to draw attention to herself or cause a scene of any kind; that was how she had survived her childhood as the only Jewish girl in Squirrel Hill with an epicanthic fold.

  “I wish you would just lay off Grady,” she finally said, in her soft dark Casanova voice. She tried to make a little joke out of it. “Just for tonight.”

  Deborah sat for a moment, thinking, that one over. “You’re a fool, Em,” she said.

  “Deborah,” said Irv. “That’s enough.”

  “I
’m a fool? Look at you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, ‘Look at you,’” said Emily. She clutched the fork more tightly now, the joints of her fingers going white, and it occurred to me that Deborah might be getting more than she had bargained for. On that miraculous evening of the cheese fondue, I suddenly remembered, Emily had come at me with a wicked little fork. “Sitting there in your bathrobe. You didn’t even comb your hair.”

  “Deborah, Emily, both of you,” said Irene, setting her own fork down. “Stop fighting. This instant.” The corners of her mouth turned up in a wry smile and she looked at James. “You’re going to give our guest the right impression of our family.”

  Obediently and with an air of relief, Emily relaxed her grip on the fork. The tension went out of her shoulders. I was bitterly, crazily disappointed to see Emily fold.

  “Sorry,” she said. She smiled at James. “Sorry, James.”

  James nodded, looking more baffled than forgiving, and took a long avid swallow of the California zinfandel we were drinking with dinner, as if his throat were parched. For another instant Deborah sat stroking at her unkempt black thatch of hair. Then she stood up, abruptly, tugging the flaps of her bathrobe tightly around her.

  “You’re always so fucking sorry,” she said to Emily, her cheeks twitching with pity and contempt. Her chair, one of eight blond, curvaceous tangles of Scandinavian birchwood, stood balanced on its hind legs for an instant, then tipped over and hit the floor with a loud bönk. As Deborah spun around, in an unsuccessful effort to catch it, the tie of her robe lashed out and knocked over her wineglass. “I’ve had enough Passover,” she told us, superfluously. Then she opened her mouth again, and I shut my eyes, and braced myself for what she would say next.

  When I heard the kitchen door slam, I opened my eyes and saw that Deborah wasn’t standing there anymore. Marie had also disappeared, but after a moment she reemerged from the kitchen, carrying a damp cloth, which she used to blot the spreading purple stain on the tablecloth. At her sharp request Philly leaned over and righted the upset chair. Irv, employing his usual strategy for dealing with what he called Deborah’s conniption fits, had returned to his food, working with determination on a large thick slab of kugel. James was busy reading the bottle of zinfandel, a concerned expression on his face, as though he’d just found out it was wine he’d been drinking all evening and were searching for the place on the label where they told you how to get it to stop. I looked at Emily; she was looking at her mother, who was looking, I was surprised to find, at me. I considered for one wild instant the possibility that Deborah had spilled the beans not to Emily at all, but to her mother. But then I saw what Irene was thinking. The same optimism that made it possible for her to believe that Emily and I might stay together led her never to abandon the hope that Deborah’s strange behavior was brought about largely by outside forces. She was thinking that I had gotten Deborah stoned.

  “Deborah,” I said, smiling, giving my head a disingenuous shake. There was a rustling sound at my ear and a bright splash of blue appeared on my plate. My yarmulke had fallen into my salad.

  Emily stood up.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, sounding determined. She went into the kitchen and out the back door, and a moment later we could hear their voices rising and falling in the flooded yard. That left six of us to sit in our chairs and stare at the pieces of broken matzoh that littered the table like pages torn out of prayer books. Marie, Irene, and Irv made several valiant attempts to start and sustain a discussion about a documentary they’d seen on PBS the night before about some Jews who were hoping to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, but it was all that anyone could manage to eat the food on our plates without choking and fight off the maddening desire to eavesdrop. I, of course, failed even to manage that. I couldn’t hear what the sisters were saying, but the truth was I didn’t really need to. I could fill in the dialogue myself.

  “How about that farm in Sweden where they’re already breeding all those special red heifers?” Marie said.

  “I have a hard time believing your basic Ken and Janet Abramowitz from Teaneck are really going to cough up five thousand dollars to have their own personal red heifer sacrificed in Jerusalem,” said Irene.

  “I guess I’d better get back our deposit,” Irv said.

  Just then Emily came running back into the house, with an unaccustomed thunderousness, across the kitchen floor and then out into the living room. She made directly for the hall closet, grabbed the long leather coat in which she’d fled Pittsburgh yesterday morning, and then, stopping only briefly to shoot me a tear-streaked and heartbroken look, ran back outside. We sat there, Grady and all the people who were staring at him, for another twenty seconds or so, and then, treading softly, Deborah reappeared, contentedly chewing on a mouthful of gum.

  “Where’s your sister?” said Irv.

  “She’s going for a drive,” Deborah said, with a little shrug.

  “Is she all right?”

  “Fine.”

  From outside there was the irritable two-stroke cough of Emily’s old Bug, and then a scrabbling of gravel as she pulled away. I hoped she would be all right, driving around in a state of shock, with those six-volt headlights, on those dark lanes. It was not unusual for her to take off in her car when she was upset, however. She found solace in traveling the roads around Kinship; down to Barkeyville, out to Nectarine, across the Ohio state line at Sharon.

  Deborah took a long, slow look around the table at the wreckage of dinner and the early high spirits in which the meal had begun.

  “This party sucks,” she said. She walked around behind me, and as she went past I caught a bitter whiff of dirt from the pocket of her bathrobe and realized that she was not chewing on any piece of gum.

  She laid a hand on James’s shoulder.

  “Come on, sport,” she said. “Let’s go hide that matzoh.”

  THE TABLE HAD BEEN cleared, the remnant of our tribe assembled. We hurried through the ragged end of the service. Deborah had disappeared upstairs—to wait for the mushrooms to kick in, I supposed—and Emily did not return. Irv skipped through the grace, mumbling along in tired Hebrew, stopping frequently to rub his eyes. Then it came time to open the door to Elijah the Prophet, and at Irv’s request, James got himself out of his chair and stumbled into the kitchen to admit that longed-for phantom, for whom a glass of wine stood ready and waiting in the middle of the table. Many years earlier, I knew, family tradition had made it the job of Sam Warshaw to open the magical door.

  “No” said Irv, his voice a little hoarse. “The front”

  James looked back at Irv, then nodded slowly and went over to the front door. He had to throw his shoulder against it to get it unlocked, and it produced a suitably eerie creaking of the hinges when he pulled it open. A cool breeze blew into the room and stirred the flames of the candles, and I looked at Irv, who was watching the air around him as if he could see it moving. If Elijah ever did show up to drink his glass of wine, I knew, it would mean that the Messiah himself was on the way, and the night would be as day, and the hills would skip like rams, and fathers would be reunited with their drowned sons.

  James sat back down in his chair, heavily, and gave us all a queasy smile.

  “Thank you, son,” said Irv.

  “Hey, Irv?” I said, deciding, after all this time, to ask the Fifth Question, the one that never got asked. “How come old Yahweh let the Jews wander around in the desert like that for forty years, anyway? How come he didn’t, just, like, show them the right way to go? They could have gotten there in a month.”

  “They weren’t ready to enter the Holy Land,” said Marie. “It took forty years to get the slavery out of them.”

  “That could be,” said Irv, looking over at James, his eyes deep and shadowy. “Or maybe they just got lost.”

  On this word, “lost,” James suddenly tipped back in his chair, hand wrapped around yet another glass of Manischewitz, and closed his eyes. The
glass slipped from his hand and chimed against the edge of the table.

  “Damn,” said Philly, impressed. “He passed out.”

  “James,” said Irene, hurrying around the table to him. “Wake up.” She spoke sharply, in the cool and brusque manner of a mother who fears the worst. His eyes fluttered open, and he smiled at her. “Come on, sweetie, come upstairs and lie down.”

  She helped James out of his chair and guided him up the creaking stairs. Just before she passed from view she turned and looked back at me, her jaw set. What kind of teacher was I? I looked away. Marie got up from the table and ran into the kitchen for another damp cloth.

  Ten minutes later Irene reappeared, wearing a short black satin jacket, trimmed with a white fur collar. It was a tight fit.

  “Look what James gave me,” she said. “He had it in that little bag of his.” She ran a hand along its collar. “Ermine.”

  “Is he all right?” said Philly.

  She shook her head.

  “I just got off the telephone with his mother.” She looked at me with a puzzled expression, as though she couldn’t understand why I’d told her such outrageous lies about that poor young man lying upstairs in Sam Warshaw’s old bed. “They weren’t home, but the housekeeper gave me a number to call. It was a country club, St. Something, they were having a party. They’ll be here in two hours.”

  “In two hours?” I said, trying to connect the words “mother” and “country club” with what I knew about James Leer. “All the way from Carvel?”

  “What Carvel?” said Irene.

  “He’s from a little town called Carvel. Near Scranton,”

  “That was a Pittsburgh number I called,” said Irene. “412.”

  “Just a minute,” said Irv. He got up from the table and brought down an old Rand McNally Road Atlas from the shelf under the stairs. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his flyaway hair, looking relieved to have found a way back into the reasonable land of reference books. We searched the index three times, but there was, naturally, no listing for anyplace called Carvel.