Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  I WAS SITTING BEHIND the wheel of Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie 500, looking up at the sky. I’d rolled myself a big fat gherkin of a joint, a cocktail weenie, a spaniel dick, and I intended to smoke it down to the skin of my lips. I was looking for the seventh star in the constellation of the Pleiades, thinking about Sara and trying not to think of Hannah. It was so quiet in the farmyard that I could hear the bones of the house creaking, and the snoring of the cattle in the barn. Every so often there was the sound of a car passing, out on the Youngstown Road, all tires and slipstream, like a sigh. The downstairs windows of the house were dark, but upstairs the lights were still on in all the rooms except James Leer’s. Emily was still not back, but she had called from a pay phone to tell her mother that we should not wait up for her. I’d passed a couple of hours in front of the television with Philly, watching Edward G. Robinson pad around Pharaonic Memphis in sandals; then let myself be drawn into a sullen game of Scrabble with Irv and Irene. Finally everyone had turned in, tired of waiting for James’s parents to show; they were already almost two hours late.

  I couldn’t help wondering how Hannah would feel when she learned that James had saddened us and won our sympathies with a false autobiography; she knew him much better than I did, which I supposed meant that now she didn’t know him at all. I was still having a hard time abandoning my conception of James Leer as the working-class northeastern Pennsylvania boy damaged by grief for his dead mother. But I supposed that was only the situation of the hero of his Love Parade. How much of what he’d told me about himself would turn out to be the story of his novel’s protagonist?

  I looked up at that dark window and thought of how it was said that acute insomniacs often experienced a kind of queasy blurring of the lines between dreams and wakefulness, their waking lives taking on some of the surprising tedium of a nightmare. Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual worlds; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot. If that was so, I thought that James Leer probably had the worst case I’d ever seen; but then I remembered another lonely fantasist, sitting slumped in his bentwood chair with his pistol in his fingers, slowly, slowly rocking back and forth. Maybe Albert Vetch had also come to think of himself as the protagonist of one of his own stories. His solitary archaeologists and small-town bibliomanes frequently chose to shoot themselves rather than be devoured by the slavering jaws of whatever betentacled terror their unreasonable thirsts set loose upon the world, devoured by those grins as unluminous and empty as cold black space itself.

  The joint had gone out, and I relit it amid the coils of the dashboard lighter. I saw now that with their creatures from beyond the Void—eye sockets vacant, maws desolate and huge—August Van Zorn’s stories were all, at bottom, about the horror of emptiness: the emptiness of a matronly pair of pumps abandoned in the back of an armoire, of a blank sheet of foolscap, of a killed bottle of bourbon on a windowsill at five-thirty A.M. Perhaps Albert Vetch, like his hero Eric Waldensee confronted by the deserted rooms and corridors of “The House on Polfax Street,” put a pistol to his temple because in the end there were too many whistling black holes in his room in the McClelland Hotel. This was the writer’s true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work—Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver—whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life’s very course.

  I thought about my own luckless heroes, that motley troupe of embarrassed and discredited romantics: Danny Fixx, at the end of The Bottomlands, paddling his canoe into the darkness of a New Mexico cavern to hide the body of Big Dog Slaney; Winthrop Pease, in The Arsonist’s Girl, who suffered a heart attack while digging a hole, in his backyard, for the charred remains of the tuxedo he wore to light his last great fire; and Jack Haworth in The Land Downstairs, ruling over and expanding the borders of his basement model-train empire, with its trim, orderly towns named for his children and his wives—while in the town aboveground, in the house over his head, his life and his family fell apart. I’d never noticed it before, but there was a persistent invocation in my work of the subterranean (that other classic theme of the horror writer), a motif of burial and concealment underground. In fact, I’d planned yet another such episode for Wonder Boys, one in which Lowell Wonder, after allowing Valerie Sweet to seduce him, would break into the fallout shelter of his old high school and live there for three weeks, emerging—starving, pale, and half blind—to learn that his father, old Culloden, was dead. My heroes, it seemed, were always trying either to escape from their terrible errors of judgment by crawling into caves and vaults and basements or else to cover them up—dispose of them—by laying them in the ground. In the ground, I thought. I took a deep breath and looked slowly around me, and flicked away the burnt end of the joint. Then I got out of the car, went around to the back, and opened up the trunk.

  The lightbulb in the lid had burned out years before, but in the lunar-holiday radiance of the full moon it was easy to make out the contents. For a moment I stood there, looking down at the corpse and the tuba case nestled companionably against each other in my trunk. It just wasn’t right, I thought, to keep Doctor Dee lying there like that. One of his ears hung twisted at a painful-looking angle to his skull, and the meat on his bones was beginning to spoil. On the back porch of the house, at angles to each other—I could feature them perfectly—stood a pair of shovels, army surplus, crusted over with a rusty oatmeal of dirt. Irv and I had used them a couple of summers ago to dig a posthole, in the front yard, for a birdhouse on a tall birch pole. It was a beautiful piece of handiwork, that birdhouse, in the form of a Russian palace with pied and twisted domes, but unfortunately the all-weather liquid nail compound Irv had formulated to hold it together had dissolved over the winter and left it scattered in particolored pieces on the snow. I looked over at the whitewashed rocks scattered like knucklebones on the grass under the horse chestnut tree. Then I looked back at Doctor Dee. His blank mad eyes seemed to have fixed upon me once again. I shuddered.

  “Have you out of there in a minute,” I said, closing the trunk.

  I went around the house to the back, found the shovels right where I’d remembered them, and carried one back into the front yard, sloshing through the flooded grass. The moonlit headstones threw jagged shadows across the ground. I bit into the earth with the blade of the shovel and started to scoop out the dirt in a vacant spot between the graves of Earmuffs and Whiskers—a long-haired guinea pig, I seemed to remember. When the shovel hit the dirt, because I was stoned and frightened I thought I heard angry voices coming from inside my own ears or from every corner of the farm. Each black ingot of dirt rang out against the shovel, and I was sure that any minute now somebody would come out and ask me what the hell I thought that I was doing, and I would have to tell them that I was laying another dead dog into their lawn.

  After ten minutes, however, my career as a character in one of my own books was over. I couldn’t dig anymore. I leaned against the horse chestnut tree and tried to catch my breath, looking down into a hole deep enough, I calculated, to hold a largish Pomeranian. So much for my fucking doppelgänger, I thought. I sighed, and my sigh was answered out on the county road, and I turned in time to see a long pale wand of light reach out and shatter against the colonnade of elms. A car was coming fast toward the house, snapping branches, bottoming put in the many potholes with a series of irritable scrapes and drumbeats. I looked back to the house. The light had come on in Sam Warshaw’s old bedroom, now, and there was a shadow at the glass. James Leer watched his parents’ car come up the drive.

  It was a late-model Mercedes sedan, its engine percolating as though it ran on soda water. In the moonlight it looked soft and gr
ay and stately as a felt fedora. It pulled up behind my car and sat for a minute, engine idling, headlights blaring, as if its passengers were experiencing a moment of doubt, geographic or moral. Then the driver backed it sharply to the left and executed a neat three-point turn, aiming the car out toward the road before cutting the engine; in case they needed to make a quick getaway, I supposed. A long black shoe emerged from the driver’s side, pointy-toed and glinting in the light of the Passover moon. It was attached, via a dark stocking and several pale inches of calf, to a man wearing evening dress and a white tuxedo scarf that at first I took for a prayer shawl. The man was not quite as tall as James, but his frame was lanky and his shoulders looked as though they were knotted together in the same shy stoop. He held up a pale, somber palm to me, then offered his hand to the woman in the passenger seat. She was tall, too, and wide, a big woman wrapped up in the luminous white pelt of something dead, wobbling in the driveway on high, high heels. They started toward me, smiling as if they were dropping in on old friends, the man’s hand applied like a cha-cha partner’s to the small of the woman’s back. In their somber finery and luminous white stoles they looked something like an advertisement for a French brand of mustard, and something like the couple on top of a wedding cake, and something like a pair of elegant ghosts, killed in a collision of limousines on their way to a fancy-dress ball.

  “I’m Fred Leer,” said the man, when he got to the steps where I was waiting. I’d left the shovel stabbed into the grass of the pet cemetery, next to the unfinished grave, and hopped up onto the front steps of the house, as if that was where visitors were always greeted. I stood there, Grady the Jolly Innkeeper, smiling, my hands clasped behind my back. “This is my wife, Amanda.”

  “Grady Tripp.” I held out my hand to him, and he gave it a long, hard squeeze. He had a salesman’s handshake, practiced and automatic. “James’s teacher. How are you?”

  “Very embarrassed,” said Mrs. Leer. They followed me across the porch, over to the front door, and waited patiently while I fumbled with my keys. It’d been years since I’d had to work the locks of this house. “We want to apologize for James.”

  “No need,” I said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.” I fell into the living room, switched on the light, and saw that they were both at least fifteen years older than the silver-haired tycoon and frosted ex-cheerleader I’d seen fox-trotting toward me across the moonlit lawn of my imagination. They were dressed for the ballroom of an ocean liner, all right, but their cheeks were ruined, and the whites of their eyes were yellow, and their hair in both cases was iron gray, although he wore his cut crisp as a sailor’s and hers was done in a neat little Junior League page boy. I figured Fred for sixty-five and Amanda for a couple of years younger. James must have been a late addition to the household.

  “My, this is a charming house,” said Amanda Leer. She took a careful step forward into the room. The heels of her shoes were much too tall for her, considering her height and her age. They were expensive-looking black calfskin things, with black leather bows on the toes. She was wearing a modest but not at all matronly black dress, with sheer black sleeves and three flounces. Her nails were manicured and her lips rouged and she smelled of Chanel No. 5. “Oh, this is an adorable house.”

  “Grady, this is a nice place you’ve got out here,” said Fred Leer.

  I looked around the living room. All of the furniture had been shoved back into its usual disorder, with none of the chairs oriented toward one another and barely enough room for a person of my size to navigate from the stairs to the fireplace. Instead of being hung with the duck-hunting prints, pastoral landscapes, or yellowed catalog plates of antique farm equipment which seemed called for, the knotty pine walls of the cottage were a jumble of Helen Frankenthaler and Marc Chagall, aerial views of Pittsburgh and Jerusalem, bar mitzvah and graduation portraits of the Warshaw children, a Diane Arbus poster, a framed photograph of Irv posed with some beefy grinning Mellon in the belfry of the Campanile, and a couple of fairly terrible imitation Mirós that Deborah had painted in college. There was a barbed-wire tangle of Israeli sculpture taking up too much room on the lowboy. The Scrabble board was still lying out on the coffee table, abandoned in midgame, offering like a Ouija board such enigmatic counsel as UVULA and SQUIRT, and there was ice melting in a couple of tumblers by the TV.

  “It’s my in-laws’,” I said. “I’m just here visiting.”

  “And your mother-in-law sounded so kind and concerned when I spoke to her,” said Amanda Leer.

  “Well, they wanted to meet you,” I said. “But they got tired. It was kind of a big day around here.”

  “Oh, really, listen,” said Fred Leer, “we were late.” He dragged his wristwatch out of the sleeve of his snappy dinner jacket and I recognized it at once. It was the gold Hamilton, with an elongated Art Moderne face, that James would sometimes wear to class and sit loudly winding when opinion in the workshop went against him. “Oh, my word, two hours late!”

  “We just couldn’t get away as quickly as we would’ve liked,” Amanda said. “It’s Fred’s birthday today, you see, and we were throwing a party at the golf club. We’ve been planning it all year. It was a lovely party.”

  “What golf club is that? Where do you folks live?” But I already knew where they lived. They were a couple of rich bastards.

  “St. Andrew’s,” said Fred. “We live in Sewickley Heights.”

  So the mystic lightning that tormented the dark skies of James Leer’s fiction, all that sorrowful, cabbages-and-hell Slavic Catholicism, that too was also pure sham.

  “Now,” said Amanda Leer, losing her Presbyterian smile. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs,” I said. “Asleep. I don’t think he knows you’re here. I’ll go get him.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll go get him.”

  “Well, maybe you’d better let me.” There was a startling implication of violence in her tone. She sounded as though she intended to yank James out of bed by his ear and drag him by this handle down the stairs and out to the car. I wondered now if it had been such a good idea to call his parents in the first place. He wasn’t a child. People his age were allowed to get drunk and pass out. I might even have argued that they ought to be required to do so. “There are an awful lot of doors up there. Ha ha. You might wake up the wrong person.”

  “Oh, of course, you’re right, Grady,” she said. The smile was back. “We’ll just wait for him down here.”

  “Hate to cause you so much trouble,” said Fred. He shook his head. “I’d like to know what is the matter with our James, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I know what’s the matter with him,” said Amanda, darkly, without elaborating. “Oh, boy.”

  “He sure likes movies,” I said.

  “Don’t get me started,” said Amanda.

  “Don’t,” said James’s father. “Please.” He tried to make it sound humorous, but there was a hint of genteel pleading in his voice.

  “Be right back,” I said. “And happy birthday.”

  “Thank you, Grady,” said Fred.

  I found James not in bed but on the upstairs landing, in his long black coat, looking at me like I was the jailer come to lead him to the gallows tree.

  “I don’t want to go with them,” he said.

  “Look, James.” I kept my voice low. There was a bar of light shining at the bottom of every door. I didn’t want to draw an audience. I steered James into the bathroom and locked us in. “Now, James,” I said, “Listen, buddy, I think you really ought to get on home.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m having a good time.”

  “You were having too good a time, I’d say. I’m clearly not a good person for you to hang around with right now. James?”

  He wouldn’t look at me. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “James,” I said. I could feel myself breaking a critical promise I’d made to him at some point in the last twenty-four hours, and I wished that I could remember what it was
. “Things, listen, things—things are really weird with me these days. I—I’m floundering. Just a little bit. I—see, I have enough blame to take already, okay, without having to take the blame if something bad happened to you. Come on. I’m serious. Go home.”

  “That isn’t my home,” he said coldly.

  “Oh no?” I said. “Where’s your home, then? Carvel?” I withdrew my hand from his shoulder. “Or would that be Sylvania?”

  He looked down at his feet, in their scuffed-up black brogues. We could hear the low murmuring of the two old people downstairs.

  “Why did you tell me all of that, James?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry. Really. Please don’t make me go with them.”

  “James, they’re your parents.”

  “They’re not,” he said, looking up, his eyes wide. “They’re my grandparents. My parents are dead.”

  “Your grandparents?” I closed the lid of the toilet and sat down. My ankle was throbbing from the exertion of digging a grave for Doctor Dee, and the plunge into the stale waters of the backyard had spoiled Irv’s dressing. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I swear. My father had his own airplane. We used to fly up to Quebec in it. He was from there. Really. We had a house in the Laurentians. They were flying up there without me one day. And they crashed. I swear! It was in the newspaper!”

  I looked at him. His eyes were filled with tears and his pale face was printed with the faint blue map of his bloodstream. His tone was utterly sincere.

  “It was in the newspaper” I said, rubbing at my own eyes, trying to work a little keenness of judgment back into them.

  “He was a senior vice president at Dravo. Seriously, he was a friend of Caliguiri and everything. My mother was, like, a big socialite, okay? Her maiden name was Guggenheim.”

  “I remember that,” I said. It had been in the newspaper. “Five or six years ago.”