Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “He’s pretty worn out, I imagine, poor kid,” he said, pulling the covers back over James’s head.

  “Regardless,” I said. “He’s going to have to wake up.”

  “Why?” said Crabtree. “Who is it? Old Fred?” He grinned and made a sweeping gesture with one hand to encompass all the odors and disorders of the room. “Send him on in.”

  I said, “A policeman.”

  Crabtree opened his mouth, then closed it. For an unprecedented instant he could think of nothing to say. Then he set the typescript of The Love Parade on the night table beside him, lowered his lips to James’s ear, and whispered, too low for me to hear what he was saying. After a moment James moaned, softly, then got his head up off the mattress. He craned it around toward me, squinting, newly hatched, his brilliantined hair sticking up at all angles from his head.

  “Hey, Grady,” he said.

  “Good morning, James.”

  “A policeman.”

  “Afraid so.”

  After another moment he managed to roll himself all the way over, onto his back. He sat up on one elbow, blinking one eye and then the other, working his jaw in circles, as if experimenting with the functions of a brand-new body. The blankets slid from his shoulders, leaving him naked to the waist. The skin on his belly was mottled with sleep. On his shoulder he wore red traces of Crabtree’s lips and incisors.

  “What does he want?”

  “Well, I guess he wants to ask you about what happened at the Chancellor’s house on Friday night.”

  James didn’t say anything. He lay there, without moving, his left temple resting companionably against the upper part of Crabtree’s right arm.

  “You snore,” he told Crabtree.

  “So I hear,” said Crabtree, nudging James lightly with his shoulder. “Go on, Jimmy,” he added. “Just tell them what I told you to tell them.”

  James nodded, slowly, looking down with longing at the deep declivity growing cold in the center of his pillow. Then his eyes opened wide, and he looked up at me.

  “Okay,” he said. He gave his head a determined nod, then swung his legs around, stood up, and went bare-assed to the foot of the bed, where he found his BVDs. He dressed himself deliberately and quickly. As he pulled on his shirt he noticed the long archipelago of hickeys on his shoulder. He ran his fingers softly across them, and looked over at Crabtree with a smile that was crooked and half grateful. He didn’t seem particularly distressed or bewildered, I thought, on awakening to his first morning as a lover of men. While he worked his way up the buttons of my old flannel shirt, he kept glancing over at Crabtree, not in any mawkish way but with deliberateness and an air of wonder, as if studying Crabtree, memorizing the geometry of his knees and elbows.

  “So,” I said. “What did you tell him to tell them?”

  “Oh, that he’s very, very sorry for shooting the Chancellor’s dog, and that he’s willing to do anything to make it up.”

  James nodded, and bent to pick up his socks.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” I said.

  James stood up. “I left my shoes in the hall,” he said.

  “I don’t really think you’re going to need shoes,” said Crabtree. “The guy’s not going to arrest you.”

  A floorboard creaked, and there was a jingle of metal from down the hall. We all looked at one another.

  “Mr. Tripp?” called Officer Pupcik. “Everything all right back there?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we’re coming.” I put my hand on James’s shoulder and steered him toward the door. “Come on, Jimmy.”

  As he started out of the bedroom, James turned to Crabtree and nodded toward the manuscript on the bedside table.

  “So,” he said. “How is it?”

  Crabtree raised his chin, tipping his head back until the ends of his hair brushed his shoulders, and looked at James through narrowed eyelids. It occurred to me that an editor was a kind of artistic Oppenheimer, careful to view the terrible flash of an author’s ego only through a thick protective lens.

  “It’s not bad” he said, not quite tonelessly. “Not bad at all.”

  James grinned, and he ducked his head once in childish delight. Then he grabbed his shoes and brushed past me and went skipping down the hall toward the front door, where I’d left Officer Pupcik waiting for him out on the porch.

  Crabtree sat up and opened his eyes wide again.

  “I want to publish this,” he said, picking up the manuscript and thumping it once with the heel of his hand. “I hope they’ll let me. I’ve got to think they will. It’s brilliant.”

  “Great,” I said, feeling a little twinge. “A little more help from you and Officer Pupcik, there, and he can be the next Jean Genet. It’s been a while since somebody wrote a good book in jail.”

  He wrinkled up his nose. “I don’t think killing someone’s dog’s all that big a deal, Tripp. Isn’t it basically just a kind of vandalism?”

  “Didn’t he tell you about the jacket, Crabtree?”

  Crabtree shook his head, and his expression got a little vague; I had him worried now. And that was a disturbing notion, too.

  “Look at it this way,” I told him. “You won’t have any trouble getting him off the book page.”

  JAMES AND THE POLICEMAN stood on the porch, side by side, looking in through the front door like a couple of paperboys come to collect. I was relieved to see that the handcuffs were still dangling from Officer Pupcik’s utility belt.

  “I’m real sorry, Mr. Tripp,” the policeman said, “but I have to run James here on over to the campus. Dr. Gaskell wants to talk to him.”

  I nodded, and shrugged my shoulders at James, palms upraised, consigning him yet again to the custody and judgment of others. For once there was no concomitant look of reproach in his eyes. He only smiled, and followed his captor down the porch steps, going lightly.

  “Just a minute, James,” I said, grabbing for the car keys on the deal table by the door. The two men stopped and turned back. I dangled the keys before me and jerked my head toward the side of the house. “There’s something you’d better take with you, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said James, blushing a little—but only a little. He was feeling all tender and well-fucked and strange, you could see, crepey and delicate as the unfurling petal of a flower. It was hard for him to be embarrassed about anything. He’d forgotten all about the jacket, I supposed, and he couldn’t have cared less what dire fate lay in store for him that morning in the office of his department chair. He was just going along with things now, waiting to see what happened next. “I think I saw it on the back seat.”

  “What’s that?” said Officer Pupcik.

  “Walter’s jacket,” I said. “Dr. Gaskell’s, uh, his property. It was all a misunderstanding. It was really all my fault. I said I would show him something upstairs, and he didn’t understand that it wasn’t mine, and—” I stopped. I could see Officer Pupcik’s eyes starting to glaze over. No explanation is ever concise or truthful enough to suit a policeman. “Anyway, James would like to give it back.”

  “Oh,” said Officer Pupcik, “and that’s a problem, then, isn’t it?” He nodded, once, looking pleased with himself for having figured it out. “You’ve got her in the shop.” He hoisted a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the driveway. “Couldn’t stand seeing her with that nasty ding in the hood, huh?”

  “What’s that?” I said. “I don’t—Jesus.”

  I had followed them down the porch steps, and now I looked, past the flower beds, over to the driveway. There was nothing in it but a bloody black oil stain on the cement.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” said Officer Pupcik.

  “Grady?” said James.

  “It’ll be all right, James,” I said, temporizing, trying to think where I could have left the car last night. I’d walked all the way home from campus after the lecture, yes, and—no, that had been two nights ago. “Just t
ry to explain everything to Dr. Gaskell as well as you can. I’ll be along with the jacket as soon as I get it back.”

  “So, where is she?” said Officer Pupcik.

  “What’s that? Oh, she’s at the body shop, uh huh. That’s right. Damn, I wish I’d thought to get that jacket out of her before I dropped her off.”

  “Wull, hey, you’ns want me to drive you over there?”

  “Yes, sure, uh, well, no,” I said, cleverly. “That’s all right. I don’t think I’m quite ready to leave the house yet.” I gave what I hoped would pass for a humorous pull on the flap of Mrs. Knopflmacher’s bathrobe. “I have to get dressed. I’ll have Crabtree—my editor, Terry Crabtree—drive me over there. Go on ahead, James. We’ll catch up with you.”

  James nodded, appearing somewhat less certain now of the serendipitous drift of things. Officer Pupcik laid a custodial hand on his elbow and guided him over to the squad car. I followed them down to the foot of the driveway, my hands thrust with utmost cool into the geranium pockets of my big chenille robe. As they climbed in on their opposite sides the two young men looked back at me wearing nearly identical expressions of distrust.

  Just before he started the car Officer Pupcik rolled down his window. He was holding a pair of aviator sunglasses in his hand but didn’t seem quite ready to slip them onto his face.

  “So, let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re saying, you have Dr. Gaskell’s property, or you know where it is, is that it?”

  “That’s right. Safe and sound.”

  “And as soon as you get it from your car, which you left at a body shop, you’ll be bringing it right on over to him.”

  “You betcha.”

  He nodded, slowly, made one last furtive examination of Mrs. Knopflmacher’s bathrobe, and put on his sunglasses. Then he rolled up his window and drove away with James. I gave a weak little wave, and I was still there, waving at the empty street like a mad queen on a parade float, when Crabtree appeared at my shoulder a minute later.

  “Where are they taking him?” he said. He’d pulled on one of my old T-shirts over his boxer shorts, and he was wearing a pair of Birkenstock sandals I had at some point years ago pilfered from his closet. The shirt, come to think of it, was one of his, too; it was a promotional pocket-T, acquired from a pharmacist lover, which claimed, in lavender script, that Ativan chased the clouds away. I wondered if he were planning now to reclaim everything I’d ever taken from him. “What’s this about a jacket? What did he do?”

  “I think I told you about it once,” I said. “A black satin jacket. With a fur collar? Marilyn Monroe wore it when she married Joe DiMaggio.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Crabtree, wrapping his arms around himself. It was a breezy morning, with a chill hint of rain in the air. “I always wanted to get a look at that thing.”

  “I took James upstairs to show it to him. I guess James felt sorry for it.”

  “And?”

  “And so while I was out in the hallway, you know, wrestling with Doctor Dee—he boosted it.”

  “How like him,” said Crabtree. The tungsten glint of irony had returned to his voice. “So? I don’t see why that’s a problem.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “He can just give it back.”

  “Uh huh. That’s awfully good thinking, Crabs.”

  He squinted at me, trying to determine why I sounded like I was fucking with him.

  “Well, so where is it?” he said.

  “Lying on the backseat of the car.”

  Crabtree looked over his shoulder toward the driveway.

  “I see,” he said, after a moment. “And where did we leave the car last night? I can’t quite seem to remember.”

  “I feel reasonably certain that we left it right about where you’re looking.”

  “Huh? Holy shit, Tripp, what, the car’s been stolen?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I think it sort of got repossessed.”

  “Repossessed? How could it be? I thought you said the fucking thing was some kind of a payoff from Happy Blackmore. I thought he owed you money.”

  “It was,” I said. “He did. Only I’m starting to think the car wasn’t exactly Happy’s to give me, if you know what I mean. He never did bring me any pink slip for it. I haven’t been able to register it yet.” I felt myself blush. “Happy kept saying he had the title in his files.”

  “In his files,” said Crabtree, looking arch. “Happy Blackmore.”

  “I know,” I said. “Sounds pretty stupid, now.”

  Several years before, Crabtree had advanced Hap several thousand dollars to ghost the autobiography of a catcher, a rising star who played for Pittsburgh and hit the sort of home runs that linger in the memory for years. Old Happy had spent months engaged in what he called—straight-faced—his preliminary researches before delivering an outline so poorly constructed and filled with inaccuracies that Crabtree and his bosses had immediately moved to cancel the contract. Not long afterward the power-hitting subject himself had died in a car wreck, out on Mt. Nebo Road, leaving nothing in Happy’s notorious “files” but the fragments and scribblings of a ghost.

  “Maybe it’s around here somewhere,” I said, hopelessly.

  “Sure. Maybe you parked in someone else’s driveway by mistake.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past me,” I said. “Ha ha.”

  “Ha,” said Crabtree. “Neither would I.”

  We went into the house and pulled on shoes and pants, and then took a walk around the block to look for the Galaxie. The morning felt cold and inauspicious, and I was sorry to see that after yesterday’s sunshine the usual heavy clouds had returned, low and threatening and so brilliant they hurt the eyes. As we walked I told Crabtree about my exchange with Vernon Hardapple at the Hi-Hat.

  “How did he find you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Happy—oh.”

  We’d almost made it back to the house, now, and as we approached the foot of my driveway I spotted a twisted white scrap of paper lying in the grass. I knelt down to pick it up, shook the dew from it, and handed it over to Crabtree.

  “I think I might’ve lost a bunch of these that night” I said. “I dropped my wallet”

  “‘Grady Tripp, Novelist’?” said Crabtree, reading the soiled business card on which, over my address and telephone number, this dubious legend was engraved.

  “Sara gave them to me, for my last birthday,” I said, trying to keep from blushing. “I think she was trying to cheer me up.

  “Sweet,” said Crabtree. He slipped the card into the pocket of his T-shirt. “All right, then. Clearly Vernon came and took his car back.”

  “Clearly.”

  “So.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re just going to have to find him, and the car, and get the coat back from him.” He nodded, encouraging himself. “I can talk to the guy. I can talk to anyone.”

  “I know you can, Terry, but—”

  “We have to, Tripp.” His expression was oddly grave. “I—I don’t—I wouldn’t want anything to—anything bad to happen to James.” He glanced at me, a little sheepishly, then punched me on the arm. “What are you looking at? Fuck you.”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I like him.”

  “Yeah, I guess I like him, too,” I said. We started up the walk to the house. “I’ll ask Hannah if we can borrow her car.”

  “It seems to me that girl would let you borrow her pancreas,” observed Crabtree. He looked at me, then; it was the first close examination he had given me all morning. He wasn’t, I thought, especially impressed by what he saw. The wind had picked up, and I shivered, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that when Terry Crabtree gazed at me with such an air of cool and unconcerned appraisal he was no longer really seeing me, his oldest friend, in whom all the outlandish promises of life and every chance for glory intimately and anciently inhered. He was seeing only the pot-addled author of a bloated, boneless, half-imaginary two-thousand-page kraken of
a novel, a hoax whose trusting and credulous pursuit had cost him tens upon tens of thousands of dollars and, seemingly, his career.

  “Oh, hey,” he remembered to ask me, “what’s going on with the two of you, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ve been trying my best to leave her alone.”

  “Amazing,” said Crabtree.

  The front door was open, and deep in the house I heard the melancholy wheezing of an accordion. Hannah was awake and making breakfast; there was a clamor of pots from the kitchen. I was suddenly afraid of having to face her, and I wondered at this; and then in the next instant I realized that what I feared was not Hannah but her opinion of Wonder Boys. I felt intimations of disaster there; my book was at last going forth into the world, not, as I’d always imagined, like a great black streamlined locomotive, fittings aglint, trailing tri-colored bunting, its steel wheels throwing sparks; but rather by accident, and at the wrong time, a half-ton pickup with no brakes, abruptly jarred loose from its blocks in the garage and rolling backward down a long steep hill.

  “Crabtree,” I said, stopping him at the threshold. “We don’t even know Vernon’s real name. ‘Vernon Hardapple’—we just made that up.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Crabtree looked bemused. I could see he was trying to assemble the things we did know about the roostery high-haired man with the terrible purple scar on his face. “You know,” he said, after a moment, “if you think about it, we kind of made the whole guy up.”

  “No wonder he fucked us over, then,” I said.

  HANNAH GREEN AND THE inevitable Jeff were cracking eggs into a crockery bowl and peeling strips of bacon from the package. Heartbroken Argentine music came blowing up the stairs from the basement, and as we walked into the kitchen we found Jeff lecturing a skeptical Hannah on the origins of the tango in the death grip and knife play of latent homosexual love, an argument which I recognized as cribbed from old George Borges. Maybe, I thought, this Jeff character had something to recommend him; there was a certain thematic aptness, after all, in trying to make a girl through the plagiarism of Borges.