“I’m ready,” I said softly.
“Uh huh,” said Crabtree. “So are we.”
I RAISED THE LID of the trunk very slowly, to keep it from squeaking. Doctor Dee, Grossman, and the orphaned tuba lay there, in the moonlight, sleeping their various sleeps. I tossed the blanket around Doctor Dee, tucked its corners under his pelvis and withers, and then hoisted his stiff body into my arms. He seemed to have grown lighter since last night, as though the matter of his body were leaking away in the form of an ill-smelling gas.
“You’re next,” I promised Grossman. I didn’t know what I was going to do about the tuba.
“All right if we stay here?” whispered Crabtree, through his open window, as I came around the car. I heard the rattle of the little vial of mollies in his hand.
“I’d prefer it,” I said.
I looked in at James, sitting in the backseat beside Crabtree. He had the glassy eyes and gelid smile of someone bearing up under a mild irritation of the bowels. I could see that he was trying very hard not to be afraid.
“You all right with this, James?” I said, with a toss of my head that encompassed the body of Doctor Dee in my arms, the immense and shadowy backseat of my car, the Leer estate, moonlight, disaster.
He nodded. “If you hear a weird sound like an elevator,” he said, “run.”
“What will that be?”
“It’ll be an elevator.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I carried Doctor Dee along the gravel drive, around the back of the house, to James’s room. To free one hand I rested the dog’s body against the door, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Holding Doctor Dee in the crook of one straining arm I yanked back the covers on James’s bed and dropped his dead body onto the mattress. The springs of the mattress rang like a bell. I pulled the covers up over his head and left a black tuft of fur protruding from the top. This is such a stupid thing to do, I thought; but it looked so convincing that I couldn’t keep from smiling.
When I went back into the billiards room to put away the Hudson Bay blanket, I noticed another array of photographs on the wall over the Philco. These were not movie stills, however. They were old family pictures, none more recent than a shot of a five-year-old but unmistakable James Leer, dressed in a red-and-black cowboy getup, gravely brandishing a pair of chrome six-shooters. There was one of an unknown handsome man holding baby James in his arms, with the Duquesne Incline train cars rising and falling on the wintry hillside behind them, and another of James wearing a tiny red bow tie and sitting on the lap of a much younger Amanda Leer. The rest of the pictures were standard studio portraits from prewar Europe and America, brilliantined men, lard-cheeked babies in frilly gowns, sepia-toned women with marcelled curls. I probably wouldn’t have remarked them at all if one were not the exact duplicate of a photograph that was hanging from a wall in my own house, in the long downstairs hallway where Emily had carefully framed and nailed up a history for herself.
It was a photograph of nine serious men, young to middle-aged, dressed in dark suits and posed in stiff chairs behind a glossy velvet banner. The man in the center of the group, small and dapper and looking faintly angry, I knew for Isidore Warshaw, Emily’s grandfather, who’d owned a candy store on the Hill not far from the present location of Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat. ZION CLUB OF PITTSBURGH, read the appliquéd letters on the banner, in an arc over a large Star of David. There was a second motto sewn on underneath the star, in shiny Hebrew characters. I was so surprised to find this photograph on the wall of someone else’s house that it took me a minute to realize I wasn’t looking at the same photograph. Then I noticed the tall, thin fellow sitting off to one side of the picture, legs crossed at the knee, staring away to his right while all of the other men faced the camera. He’d always been there; I’d noticed him, without ever quite seeing him, a thousand times before. He was thin, dark-haired, and handsome, but his features had an unformed, blurred appearance, as if he’d moved his head at the instant the shutter opened and closed.
I heard a sound, a low, sorrowful half-human moan like the call of a lighthouse in a fog. For a weird instant I thought that I was hearing the sound of my own voice, but then I could feel it resounding deep in the house, rattling all the hidden joists and rafters and the glass in the picture frames on the wall. The elevator. Amanda Leer was on her way down, perhaps to make certain that her son hadn’t followed George Sanders and Herman Bing into the Great Dissolve.
I switched off the light and hobbled back out to James’s room. As I was about to switch off the light in there, as well, and take my leave of the haunted house of Leer, my gaze fell on the old manual Underwood parked on the desk, its black bulk ornamented, like an old-fashioned hearse, with a ribbon of acanthus leaves. I went over to the desk and yanked open the drawer into which James had stuffed the piece he’d been working on when we arrived. It consisted of ten or eleven tries at a first paragraph, each of them a sentence longer than the previous one, all of them heavily marked up and rearranged with arrows. The uppermost sheet went something like
ANGEL
She went wearing dark glasses to eat the Passover meal with his family, her pale famous hair tied up in a scarf patterned with cherries. They quarrelled in the cab on the way to his parents apartment and made up in the elevator. Her marriage had failed and his was failing. She wasn’t at all sure the time had come for her to meet his family and neither she knew was he. They had dared one another into taking this leap like children balanced on the railing of a bridge. The good things in her life had often proved illusory and she didn’t know if there was really deep water flowing down there below them or only a painted blue screen.
He told her that on this night in Egypt three thousand years ago the Angel of Death had passed over the homes of the Jews. On this night ten years ago his brother had killed himself and he warned her a candle would be burning on the table in the kitchen. She had never considered the idea of death as an angel and it appealed to her. It would be a workmanlike angel with a leather apron, shirtsleeves rolled, forearms rippling with tendon and muscle. Six years later just before she killed herself she would remember
By now the moaning of the elevator had sharpened to a regular rusted squeak, like the sound of an ancient iron water pump, and it was growing louder every second. The house shuddered and sighed and ticked like a heart. I didn’t have much time. I replaced the manuscript, closed the desk drawer, and headed for the door. As I went past the bed I happened to look over at the empty glass I’d noticed before on James’s nightstand, and saw now that it had an orange price sticker on its side that said 79¢. He’d stolen Sam’s memorial from the Warshaws’ kitchen. I went over to the nightstand and picked up the empty glass. Sometime during its twenty-four-hour career, I saw, a moth had flown down into the yahrzeit candle and been drowned in the pool of wax. I reached in and pried away the body of the errant moth and laid it in my palm. It was a small, unremarkable, dust-colored moth with tattered wings.
“Poor little fucker,” I said.
The elevator landed like the blow of a hammer on the ground floor of the house. There was a rattle of cagework and the squeal of hinges. I dropped the dead moth into the pocket of my shirt, turned out the light, and then ran out into the deep, silent, Episcopalian darkness, solemn and sweet-smelling as night on a golf course.
When I was safely in the car again I gunned the engine and rolled us away from the gates with their sober pair of pineapples.
“James,” I said, when we were halfway down the block and gaining speed. I checked the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see a wraithlike nightgown dancing in anger at the foot of the Leers’ driveway. There was nothing but moonlight, dark hedgerows, and a distant black vanishing point. “Are you Jewish?”
“Sort of he said. He was sitting in the backseat, reunited with his knapsack, looking wide awake. “I mean, yes, I am, but my grandparents—they kind of, I don’t know. Got rid of it, I guess.”
“I always thought
—all that Catholicism in your stories—”
“Nah. I just like how twisted that Catholic stuff can get.”
“And then tonight I had you figured, for Episcopal for sure. At least Presbyterian.”
“We go to the Presbyterian church, actually,” said James. “They do. At Christmas. Shoot, I remember one time we went to this restaurant, in Mt. Lebanon, and I ordered a cream soda? And they yelled at me. They said it was too Jewish, Cream soda, that’s about as Jewish as I ever got.”
“Dangerously close,” said Crabtree, solemnly. “Next thing you know you would have been strapping that little box onto your forehead.”
I said, “So what did you think of Passover, then? Of the Seder? Of the Warshaws?”
“It was interesting,” said James. “They were nice.”
“Did it make you feel Jewish?” I said, thinking that perhaps this was the reason he’d stolen the burnt-out candle from the Warshaws’ kitchen. “Being with them?”
“Not really.” He sat back and tipped his head backward, looking up at the cold stars through the bare canopy of tree limbs overhead. “It made me feel like I wasn’t anything.” He said something more after that, but with his head tilted back his voice emerged pinched from his larynx, and the wind passing over the car carried his words away.
“I didn’t catch that last part,” I told him.
“I said, ‘Like I’m nothing,’” he said.
WHEN WE GOT BACK to my house the front door was wide open and all the lights were on. The stereo was playing softly in the living room.
“Hello?” I called. I went into the living room. It was deserted. There were crushed tortilla chips on the rug, cassettes and album jackets scattered everywhere; a giant Texas-shaped ashtray, which someone had left balanced on the arm of a wing-backed chair, had since tipped over onto the seat cushion, spilling butts and ashes all over the pale striped fabric. I went through the dining room, into the kitchen, and then checked out the laundry room, looking for survivors, collecting empty beer cans and turning off the lights as I went.
“There’s nobody here,” I said, circling back out into the hallway, where I’d left Crabtree and James; they too had vanished. I started down the hall after them, to see if I could interest anyone in blowing a joint with me and then searching the late-night dial for a good infomercial or a Hercules movie, but I didn’t get far before I heard the tongue of Crabtree’s door latch click discreetly against the jamb.
“Crabtree,” I called, in a panicked whisper.
There was a pause, and then his head emerged into the hall.
“Ye-es?” he said. He looked a little exasperated. I’d caught him just as he was tucking his napkin into the collar of his shirt, licking his lupine chops. “What, Tripp?”
I stuck my hands into the pockets of my jacket. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask him to pull an all-nighter with me, the way we’d used to do, sitting on opposite sides of a nine-pack of Old Milwaukee, inveighing against our enemies, smoking black cigars, speculating for hours on the meaning of a certain enigmatic question in the lyrics of “Any Major Dude.” I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think I could face another night in the emptiness of my bed. I wanted to ask him if there was anything in my life that was real and coherent and likely to remain the same way tomorrow.
“Here,” I said. From one of the hip pockets of my jacket I produced the fabled Lov-O-Pus I’d bought this morning at the Giant Eagle, on the way out to Kinship. I tossed it at him, and he caught it in one hand. “Wear it in good health.”
He read the tentacular promises made in wiggly green letters on the label of the Lov-O-Pus condom. He smiled.
“Thanks,” he said. He started to close the door.
“Crabtree!”
He stuck his head back out into the hall.
“What am I going to do now?”
He shrugged. “Why don’t you go finish your book?” he said. There was a nasty and unmistakable gleam in his eye, and I saw that he had taken a look at the manuscript of Wonder Boys; there was no question about it. “Aren’t you just about done?”
“Just about,” I said.
“There you go,” he said. “Why don’t you give it a good hour and wrap the whole thing up?”
Then he drew back into the bedroom and firmly shut the door.
I went into the kitchen again, pressed my ear against the door to the basement, and listened for a few minutes without hearing anything but the slow deep breathing of the old house itself. The wood felt cool against my cheek. My ankle was throbbing, and I realized that it had been hurting for the last hour without my having noticed. All at once it was killing me, and I told myself that I really ought to drive to the E.R. at Shadyside and have someone take a look at it. Instead I went over to the wreckage of bottles, tumblers, and plastic wineglasses on the kitchen table and administered a tall dose of Kentucky anesthesia. Then I carried the glass of bourbon down the front hall and into my office. The manuscript was gone from its accustomed resting place on my desk, and I panicked for an instant before remembering that Hannah had taken it down into her bedroom to read.
“Hey.”
I turned. There was a man sitting on the Honor Bilt, watching the television with the sound off. It was my old student, the one who’d dropped my class after coming to the conclusion that I was only a cheap Faulkner imitator with nothing of value to impart. He sat slumped backward on the sofa with a forty-ounce bottle of beer pressed between the ripped knees of his jeans, smiling at me as if we were the oldest of friends and he’d been waiting all night for me to show up. A copy of The Land Downstairs lay open on his lap but he was not giving it his close attention. In fact I thought he had it upside down.
“How are you?” I said. “Is it Jim?”
“Jeff,” he said.
“Welcome,” I said with mock solemnity, trying to let him see that I thought he had a lot of nerve but that it was nonetheless cool for him to be there. “What are you watching?”
“The news,” he said. “The news from Bulgaria.”
It was a wildly colored, out-of-focus program, streaked and pitted by the ionosphere. The newsreader had on a blazer the color of a taxicab and wore a vast hairdo like a thick sable hat. According to the reference date in the corner of the picture the transmission was already a few days old, but I didn’t suppose that mattered when the whole thing was in Bulgarian and turned all the way down. I sat down on the sofa and watched with Jeff for five minutes.
“Well,” I said, standing up. “Good night.”
“Ciao,” said Jeff without looking up.
I went down to Hannah’s room. All the lights were on, and she was lying on her bed, surrounded by the scattered pages of Wonder Boys, asleep. She was dressed in a white nightgown, lace at the bodice. Her feet were bare. They were thick, wide, ordinary feet, with long crooked toes. I sat down on the edge of her bed and hung my head. From this vantage I could see the little moth lying in my pocket. I fished him out and stared at him for a while.
“What are you holding in your hand?” said Hannah.
I started. She was looking at me through half-closed lids, not really awake. I uncurled my fingers, revealing the moth, embalmed in a thin white coating of wax.
“Just a moth,” I said.
“I fell asleep,” she told me, her voice cobwebbed with sleep. “I was reading.”
“That good, huh?” I said. There was no reply. “How far did you get?”
But her eyes had fluttered closed again. I looked at the clock. It was four thirty-two in the morning. I collected the parts of my manuscript, slapped them together, and set them on the nightstand beside her bed. Her bedclothes were all knotted and twisted, so I shook them out and let them fall billowing over her like parachute silks. I covered her feet, kissed her cheek, and wished her good night. Then I turned out the lights and went back upstairs to my office. Jeff had fallen asleep, too, stretched out shoeless on the Honor Bilt. I switched off the television, went over to my desk, and sat down
to work.
I was still typing away and Jeff was still sleeping at nine o’clock, when the policeman came to take James Leer away.
PALE, PINK TERRY CRABTREE was sitting, propped up by two feather pillows and a throw cushion, in the wreckage of the bedclothes, naked except for a pair of pin-striped blue boxers, his legs drawn up to his chest. His body hair ran more to blond than I remembered, and the light of a Sunday morning, coming in through the window behind him, discovered a faint golden aura around his thighs and his shins and at the backs of his hands. He held the typescript of The Love Parade balanced against the tops of his knees with one hand, and with the other he was stroking at his bedmate’s hair. This was the sole part of James Leer visible when I came into the bedroom: the rest of him could only be inferred amid the heap of blankets and twisted sheets at Crabtree’s side, from which the hair of his head emerged, in the vicinity of his pillow, exactly like the great black shock of Doctor Dee’s fur. Discarded shirts and trousers struck poses on the floor around the bed. There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent. I swung halfway into the room, hanging on the doorknob. Crabtree looked up at me and smiled. It was a kindly smile, lacking in all irony. I hadn’t seen its like on his face in years. I was sorry to have to wipe it away.
“Is he awake?” I said, relieved not to have interrupted them in the act of exploring each other’s lunar surfaces, or engaging in some other Crabtreevian activity that would have obliged James to speak to Officer Pupcik whilst dangling by his ankles from the ceiling, dressed as an owl. “He has a visitor.”
Crabtree raised an eyebrow and studied my face, trying to read in it the identity of James’s visitor. After a fruitless few seconds he leaned across the bed and peeled back the walls of James’s cocoon, exposing the whole of his head, his downy neck, the pale smooth expanse of his back. James Leer lay curled up like a child, his face to the window, immobile. Crabtree pursed his lips, then looked up at me and shook his head. Sound asleep. The smile on his face was indulgent and almost sweet, and the thought crossed my mind that Crabtree might be in love. That was too disturbing a notion to entertain for very long, however, and I dismissed it from my mind. I’d always counted on and found comfort in Terry Crabtree’s unique ability to regard all romantic love with genuine and pitiless scorn.
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