Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “Baxter’s next,” he said, looking up from the map.

  I took it, guessing left. The numbers started at 230 and went up. I cut the lights, and as we drew closer to 262 I cut the engine, too. Silently we coasted until we pulled up abreast of the Leers’ driveway. There were pillars on either side, topped with stone pineapples. A fence of nasty-looking iron javelins ran off for a hundred feet in either direction and disappeared into the shadows. We got out of the car and gently let the doors fall shut. Then we took a couple of tentative steps into the Leers’ driveway, a rolled-out winding ten-mile river of finest country-club gravel, round as polished hematites and opals, that described a number of lazy meanders across the hundred feet of lawn which separated us from the wide front porch. The porch had to be wide, in order to wrap itself all the way around the Leers’ house, an eccentric pile of fieldstone and shingles, bristling with awnings and trusses and pointy dormers that stuck out in every direction, all jumbled together under a collection of gambreled eaves. The front door and indeed a fair portion of the facade were illuminated by floodlights hidden in the hedge.

  “Jesus,” I said, keeping my voice low. “There must be fifty or sixty windows on that thing, Crabtree. How are we going to find his?”

  “They keep him chained up in the basement, remember? We just have to find the cellar door.”

  “If he was telling the truth,” I reminded him. “About anything.”

  “If he wasn’t telling the truth about anything,” said Crabtree, “then what the fuck are we doing here?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  We started up the drive to the house, and as we drew closer I saw a long, thin ribbon of light stretched across the trees off to the left. Somewhere upstairs, on the far side of the house, a lamp was burning in a window.

  “They’re still awake,” I said, pointing. “His parents.”

  “They’re probably up filing their teeth,” said Crabtree, whose genuine sympathy and mounting desire for James Leer were characteristically tempered with ridicule. “Come on.”

  I followed him around the near end of the house and we went into the backyard. He seemed to think that he knew where he was going. The gravel crunched loudly under my feet and I tried to get that toe-heel, toe-heel Indian stealth walk going, but it was too painful, and in the end I just tried to be quick about it.

  There was no cellar door, or evidence of anything like a cellar, but there was a ground floor, an exposed cement foundation at the back of the house with two windows let into it, on either side of a glass-paned door. The windows were neatly curtained with dotted swiss, brightly lit from within. On the other side of the door a woman was singing, in a soft low rueful voice.

  Why should I care

  Though he gave me the air?

  Why should I cry, heave a sigh, and wonder why?

  And wonder why?

  “Doris Day,” said Crabtree.

  I smiled at him; he nodded.

  “James Leer,” we said.

  I drummed lightly on the glass, and after a few seconds’ delay James Leer opened the door. He was wearing a pair of red pajamas, too short in the leg and cuff, sagging in the seat, shot through with holes, ink-stained. His hair was mussed and his eyes were bright and somehow he didn’t seem very surprised to see us. At first, actually, he didn’t appear even to recognize us. He scratched at the back of his neck with the sharpened end of a pencil and blinked his eyes.

  “Hey,” he said, tossing his head as if shaking off the remnants of a dream. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “We’re springing you, Leer,” said Crabtree. “Get some pants on.”

  “I can’t believe you made fun of my bathrobe,” I said.

  We pushed past him, into a room that I’d been picturing to myself as a punitive cell: naked lightbulbs, an iron cot in one corner draped with a tattered coverlet, Sheetrock walls unadorned except for a thin splotchy coat of white paint. Instead we found ourselves standing in a large old cellar, more or less finished and as wide as the house itself, inhaling a comforting, subterranean smell of river mud, secondhand books, and moldering blankets. The low ceiling was held up by massive oak beams, and the floor had been painted, in the era when this was a fashionable effect for servants’ quarters, to look as though it were covered by a red Persian rug. This false carpet had been worn down to gray floorboard for the most part, but in the corners and along the edges of the room there were still bright patches of geometry and blood. The room was lit by a dozen antique electric candelabras, some of them as tall as James, a grove of gilded and iron black trees connected to a pair of wall outlets by an elf knot of extension cords. The walls, not Sheetrock but some kind of heavy gray masonry, were lined with books, piled high into twisting stairways, sagging arches, spindly Gaudí steeples, and above the spires of this paper city hung the still photographs, posters, and other movie ephemera James and his obsession had managed to amass. To the right of the door, under a black velvet canopy that sagged, baroque, enormous, and rotten with wormholes, stood James’s bed, like a foundered galleon. Beside the giant bed there was a nightstand, with a top of pink marble enclosed in a tiny gilt balustrade, on which he had a box of Kleenex, an empty juice glass, and a masturbatory jar of Vaseline. The bed was still made, and James had neatly folded the old clothes I’d lent him and stacked them neatly at its foot. There was no sign of the black overcoat.

  “I like what you’ve done with it,” said Crabtree, sidestepping one of the iron trees, looking around the room. Some of the bulbs in the candelabras’ branches were the kind that pretend to be flickering flames. “When’s Captain Nemo moving in?”

  James blushed, though whether at the question or at the sudden proximity of Crabtree I couldn’t say. He seemed to be a little frightened of Crabtree, which was not necessarily unwise of him.

  “It’s just a bunch of my gran’s old stuff,” he said, taking a step away from Crabtree. “She was going to throw it out.”

  “Your gran?” I said. “That’s who I met tonight?”

  James didn’t say anything.

  “Hey, I heard all about all of it, the parents, the grandparents, and I believe you, okay?” said Crabtree with patent but, as ever, somehow credible insincerity. “That’s why we’re here.” He glanced over toward James’s desk, beside the television, an elaborate rolltop number with gilt handles and a matching oak swivel chair. On the desktop there was an old manual Underwood with a piece of paper rolled into the carriage, a paragraph arrested in midphrase, and beside the typewriter a neat pile of paper, the uppermost sheet half covered in single-spaced text. “What were you writing?”

  James looked taken aback by the question. He hurried over to the desk, gathered up the typescript, and stuffed it into one of the drawers.

  “Just another story,” he said. He slammed the drawer closed. “It sucks.”

  “Bring it,” said Crabtree, beckoning to James with one hand. “I want to read it.”

  “What? You mean now?” He looked over at an electric office clock that hung from the wall beside his bed. He’d replaced the standard face with a black-and-white photograph of a plump, wild-eyed movie actor with a pair of mad mustaches whose face was familiar to me—he was a character actor from the thirties. “But it’s so late.”

  “It’s not late, man, it’s early,” said Crabtree, making an argument and fixing James with a look I myself had succumbed to many times at three-thirty in the morning when Crabtree felt persuaded that there were hours more of fun to be had. “I thought Grady said you didn’t want to be here anyway.”

  “I didn’t,” said James, succumbing. “I don’t.”

  “So all right, then.”

  James grinned. “All right,” he said. “Let me get dressed.”

  “Wait,” I said. They both turned to look at me. “I don’t know about this.”

  “What’s the matter?” said Crabtree.

  “I have to tell you, James,” I said. “I’m feeling like you’ve been fucking with me agai
n.”

  “Why?” He looked alarmed. “What did I do now?”

  “You made it sound like they were going to bring you home and throw you into a weasel pit,” I said. “You live in a fucking castle, here, buddy.”

  James looked down at his hands.

  “James,” said Crabtree, “did you tell Grady that your parents—”

  “They’re my grandparents.” He looked up at me defiantly. “They are.”

  “Sure they are.” Crabtree smiled thinly. “Did you tell him that your grandparents were going to bring you home, James, and throw you into a weasel pit?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” ‘

  “Well, then.” Crabtree punched me on the arm, as if to say, There now, you see? “Go get dressed.”

  “All right.” He went over to the bed and scooped up the pile of clothes I’d lent him that morning. “Can I—could I wear these again, Professor Tripp?” he said.

  I looked at him and then shrugged.

  “Ah, what the fuck,” I said.

  He flinched, and I saw that somehow I’d hurt his feelings. He nodded, slowly, and stood there for a minute, fiddling with the collar of my flannel shirt. Then he turned and walked away, dragging his feet a little. He disappeared through one of a pair of doors at the back of the room. After a second we could hear the whirring of a bathroom fan.

  “So modest,” said Crabtree with admiration or mock admiration.

  “Huh.”

  “Oh, come on, Tripp. Why’re you so mad at him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not really mad at him, I guess. It’s just all that crap about his parents not being his parents, you know? I mean, what is that?” I shook my head. “I guess I just want to know once and for all what the truth is about the little bastard.”

  “The truth,” said Crabtree. He went over to a nearby pile of books and hefted the three uppermost tides. They were hardcovers, in plain, dark bindings. “That’s always been real important to you, I know.”

  I held up my right hand to him and showed him my fist.

  “Imagine a finger,” I suggested.

  “I think you ought to go easy on the kid.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because yesterday you left him sitting all by himself in the dark.”

  I lowered my fist and said, “Oh.”

  I didn’t know what else to say to that. I took a closer look at James’s movie memorabilia and saw that it was no mere act of dark teenaged whimsy that had led him to cut the dead director’s name into the back of his hand. The kid was a Capra fanatic. All along the wall behind the desk, above piles of videocassettes labeled MR. DEEDS, LOST HORIZON, et cetera, above stacks of screenplays bound in black vinyl with some of the same titles printed in block letters on their fore edges, were lobby posters from fifteen or sixteen of Capra’s films, some of them familiar to me, some of them bearing outlandish titles such as Dirigible or American Madness, and dozens of still photographs and lobby cards—most of them drawn, it seemed to me, from It’s a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe. This wall comprised the capital of James’s moviemania, so to speak, from which the empire had then spread upward, across the heavy beams of the ceiling, and down onto the other walls of his room, settling in large prosperous colonies that were dedicated to some of Capra’s great stars: Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, in framed photos, posters, and lobby cards representing much of their other work, great and obscure, from Annie Oakley to Ziegfeld Girl. In the farthest corners of the room the empire of James’s obsession seemed to disintegrate into a kind of vague borderland of Hollywoodiana, where it had established a few remote outposts—Henry Fonda, Grace Kelly, James Mason.

  Then, picking my way carefully among the candelabras and piles of books and videocassettes, I stepped around to the great black shipwreck of his bed and found on the wall behind it a group of about forty glossy photographs of movie actors whose common theme, or link to Frank Capra, eluded me. There was Charles Boyer, and a delicate woman I thought might have been Margaret Sullavan, and, once again, the grinning, plump-cheeked, mustachioed face of the man in James Leer’s clock. As with this fellow, many of the actors in the photographs had familiar faces that I couldn’t quite place; several meant nothing to me at all. At the center of the group, however, there were a number of well-known photographs of Marilyn Monroe—naked and aswim in red velvet, reading Ulysses, holding down her skirt against a blast of subterranean air—and looking at these, I realized what I was seeing. This was a rival empire, I thought, setting out to conquer the walls of James’s room: the upstart Kingdom of Hollywood Suicide. I supposed the satin jacket would have fit right in.

  “Did Herman Bing off himself?” I said, pointing to the man with the flying mustaches. “Would you know Herman Bing if you saw his picture?”

  “Check this out,” said Crabtree, ignoring my question. He waved a couple of heavy handfuls of books. “These are library books.”

  “So?”

  “So, they were due”—he looked up at me, waggling his eyebrows—“two years ago. This one’s three years overdue.” He reached for another book and checked the scrap of paper pasted onto its fly. He whistled. “This one’s five.” He picked up another. “This one was never even checked out.”

  “He stole it?”

  Crabtree was scrabbling through all the books now, knocking over towers, upsetting arches.

  “They’re all library books,” he said, crab-walking in a crouch along the foot of the wall. “Every single one of them.”

  “Hey,” said James, emerging dressed in my too-large dungarees, rolling up the vast sleeves of my flannel shirt.

  “Looks like you’re going to have some monster fines, here, Mr. Leer,” said Crabtree.

  “Oh,” said James. “Ha. I—uh, see, I never—”

  “It’s cool,” said Crabtree. Abruptly he snapped shut one of the stolen books and handed it to me. “Here.” He stood up and took James by the arm. “Let’s blow.”

  “Uh, there’s only one problem,” said James, unhooking himself from Crabtree. “The old lady’s been coming down here, like, every half hour, I swear, to check on me.” He glanced over at the face of Herman Bing. “She’ll probably be down in like five minutes.”

  “‘The old lady,’” said Crabtree, winking at me. “Why’s she keep checking on you? What’s she think you’re going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said James, coloring. “Run away, I guess.”

  I looked at James, remembering the sight of him in the Gaskells’ backyard, the trembling flash of silver in his hand. Then I looked down at the spine of the book Crabtree had handed me and saw, to my amazement, that it was a rebound copy of The Abominations of Plunkettsburg, by August Van Zorn, property of the Sewickley Public Library. According to the circulation label it had been checked out three times, most recently in September of 1974. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head of this proof of the uselessness of Albert Vetch’s art, of all art and energy and human life in general. There was a sudden rumble of nausea in my belly and the familiar spray of white noise across the inside of my skull. I waved my hand in front of my face, as though shooing away a cloud of bees. I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.

  “We need a decoy,” said Crabtree, “is what we need. To be in your bed and look like you.”

  “Yeah, like a couple of big hams,” said James. “They do that in Against All Flags.”

  “No,” I said, opening my eyes. “Not a couple of hams.” They looked at me. “Have you got some kind of a tarp, down here, or something? An extra blanket? Something heavy?”

  James thought about it for an instant, then jerked his head toward the doors at the back of his room. “Through there. The one on the left. In the closet, there’re some blankets. What are you going to do?”

 
“I’m going to empty my trunk,” I said.

  I walked back to the door next to the bathroom and came into a dark room that smelled less musty and riverine than James’s. I flipped on the lights and saw that it was a kind of informal recreation room, with unvarnished fir walls and Berber carpeting on the floor. There was a wet bar at one end, and a large old Philco television, and in the very center stood a billiards table. The bar top was bare and the television unplugged and there was not a cue stick in sight. The closet James had mentioned was just beside the door, and in it, on a lower shelf, I found a pile of tattered coverlets and blankets. None of them looked quite large enough for the purpose I had in mind, but there was a striped Hudson Bay, just like the one old Albert Vetch used to spread across his lap against the chill winds blowing in from the Void. I threw this one over my shoulder and went back into James’s room. James and Crabtree were sitting on the bed. Crabtree’s hand had vanished inside James’s shirt—my shirt—and he was moving it around in there with an air of calm and scientific rapture. James was looking down, watching through the window of his open collar as Crabtree felt him up. As I came into the room he looked at me and smiled, a sleepy, vulnerable expression on his face, like someone caught without his glasses on.