Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “Sara?” I said.

  The murmuring of flowers seemed to grow louder as I went deeper into the greenhouse, but when I went into the central atrium I discovered that it was not some heady perfume working on my nerves—only the ironic and elliptical snoring of a modern master of the short-story form. On the old purple davenport, under the potted date palm, Q. lay unconscious. His shirttails had come untucked, his fly was unbuttoned, and on his feet he wore only a pair of red-toed sock-monkey socks, caked with mud. Those were his shoes, then, abandoned in the living room. Even in his dreams, apparently, Q. and his doppelgänger were still going at it, because although his brow was knotted in anguish, the rest of his face looked peaceful, even self-satisfied, as if he were enjoying some well-deserved rest. In addition to the mud on his stocking feet there was a goldfish of dried blood on the pocket of his shirt and a telephone number or message to himself scrawled across the back of his left hand. I leaned over to try to read what it said. It was too smeared to make out, but appeared to begin with a C. CROATOAN, I thought, might not have been inappropriate. I switched on an overhead light.

  Q.’s eyes snapped open.

  “No!” he said, reaching out, his fingers outspread, as if to ward me off.

  “Easy, man,” I said. “You’ll be all right.”

  He sat up.

  “Where am I? What is that smell?”

  “That’s plant breath,” I said. “You’re in Sara’s greenhouse.”

  He sat up and rubbed his face and gave his jowls a shake. Then he looked around, up at the spiky leaves of the palm tree, down at his muddy socks. He shook his head.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “No idea how you got here, eh?”

  “None.”

  I gave his shoulder a little squeeze.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Try this one. All the people at that party. Any idea where they might have gone to?” I nodded in the direction of the house. “Place is empty. Looked like people must have cleared out in a hurry. Left all their cups and cigarettes and whatnot lying around.” I looked at my watch. It was not quite nine o’clock. “Seems like things broke up kind of early.”

  “Yeah, uh, right—” he began, tentatively. “Sara.” He nodded. “She cleared them all out.”

  “She what?” I couldn’t believe Sara would do anything so indecorous in public—such behavior would not become the vision of sound and gracious chancellorhood she had so carefully elaborated for herself. My heart sank. “That’s not like Sara.” There was only one explanation: she had decided, once and for all, to rid her aging womb of the spawn of Grady. I was gripped by a sudden irrational certainty that she had, in fact, already done so—that she’d chased everyone out of her house and then driven off, alone and hysterical, to the office of some night doctor, in a tragic part of town. “Why did she do that?”

  “I don’t remember” Q. said, and then he remembered. He looked up at me, his eyes wide and pleading, as though I’d been sent out here to punish him for whatever it was he’d done. He lowered his head.

  “I think I broke Walter Gaskell’s nose,” he said into his collar.

  “You’re kidding. Oh, my God.”

  He looked defensive. “Maybe not.” He pinched the spherical tip of his nose. “I just barely clipped him with the thing.” He nodded reassuringly to himself as the details started to come back to him. “It wasn’t like I got him with the sweet spot.”

  “The sweet spot?”

  “I was swinging one of his bats. A big one, thirty-six ounces, all yellow and stained. Like a kind of an old tusk. It used to belong to Joe DiMaggio.” His lined face softened a little as he remembered. “A beautiful thing.”

  “I know the one,” I said.

  “Still a lot of tension in it, somehow. When you swung it. Like there was still something powerful in there trying to get out.”

  “I guess there must have been,” I said. “I guess it kind of got out and broke Walter’s nose.”

  “Uh huh,” he said. He cocked his head a little to the side, and his voice was sharp. “At least I didn’t steal it, though.”

  “Good point,” I said. “So then, what, did she take him to the hospital? Sara, I mean.” Here I had come all this way looking for her, and she’d probably been in the emergency room at the hospital the whole time.

  “I don’t know. He was bleeding and shouting and I was probably shouting a little, too. Sara came in, at some point, and they shouted at each other for a while. Sorry, I don’t remember what about. Then she chased everyone out of the house. If she’s not there now, I don’t know where she went.”

  “And Walter?” I said.

  Q. lifted an eyebrow, and sort of pointed with the unshaven tip of his chin in the general direction of the door to the greenhouse. He smiled. I looked at him for a moment, not understanding. Then I caught the doppelgänger glint of mischief in his eye. He wanted me to turn around. I turned around, half-expecting to see the tuba standing there behind me.

  “Hello, Grady,” Walter said.

  He was looming in the shadows of the greenhouse, dangling the tar-stained old DiMaggio bat at his side. This was an item he had acquired last fall, in the grip of a frenzy of acquisition so intense that he’d forgotten all about Sara’s birthday, and had subsequently tried to make a lame and insincere sort of present out of the brittle stick of ash wood itself. That proved to be a fatal insult to the health of their marriage, as far as Sara was concerned, and if she ever found herself able to leave him once and for all, this bat, nominally hers, would be one of the reasons. It was one of a small number of bats purporting to be that swung by Joe D. all during his famous streak of 1947, and therefore worthy of a certain amount of devotion, as I had tried to explain to Sara at the time. In his other hand, Walter was holding a plaid ice bag, pressed against the bridge of his nose. There was blood on his white oxford shirt.

  “Hey, Walter,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about your nose, Walter,” said Q. “I must have been pretty drunk.”

  Walter nodded. “I’ll be all right.”

  “And,” I said, “I, uh, I know this is going to sound pretty fatuous, right about now, Walter, but I want you to know that I’m really sorry, too. About everything. I feel really, really bad.” I paused and licked my lips. The truth was that I didn’t actually feel so bad. I just didn’t want Walter trying to doctor me up with that bat. “I—I wish I could make it up to you.”

  “I really don’t think you ever could, Grady,” Walter said. He rolled the bat back and forth against his thigh, and his fingers worried the worn old tape on the handle. I remember he didn’t look angry, or especially retributive, or happy in that way people look in the movies when the revenge of which they’ve been dreaming curls up the wicked corners of the lips. His eyes were ringed with fatigue, he had an ice bag over his nose, and he wore, more than anything, the harried air of a dean after a night of quarreling with the accounting firm and contemplating painful cuts in his budget for next year. “The department is going to have to place you on a disciplinary leave, of course.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

  “For an indefinite term, I’m afraid. You may well lose your position. I’ll certainly do my best to see that you do.”

  I looked at Q. He was glancing back and forth from me to Walter, calmly but with a certain air of frustration I thought I recognized. He was wishing he had a pen so that he could make a few notes.

  “You’re a goddamn fraud, Grady. You’ve produced nothing at all since you’ve been here,” Walter went on, softly. “That’s seven years. Close to eight.” He named two of my writing colleagues in the department. “In the past seven years they’ve brought out nine books between them. One of hers won a national award, as I’m sure you know. What have you done, Grady?”

  These were the very words, the charges I had been dreading and anticipating for so long, but in all that time I had never managed to come up with an adequate response. I hung my head.


  Q. cleared his throat. “Besides sleeping with your wife, you mean,” he said, helpfully.

  Walter lowered the ice bag and dropped it to the ground. The bat shot up from his side and began to describe tight little arcs in the air between us. He was clutching it in both hands now, waggling his fingers on its shaft, his face bloodied and swollen but his Doctor Dee eyes remarkably blue and calm.

  “Are you going to use that on me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I might.”

  “Go for it,” I told him.

  So he did. And I believe that most of the violence that occurs between men is the product, in one way or another, of flippancy and smart remarks. I told him to go for it, and he came at me and swung the historic bat. I got my arm up but he still managed to land a glancing blow on my left temple. My glasses went flying. A large rock rang out against a taut sheet of metal, and a flashbulb blew, and a luminous retinal rose bloomed and withered in the innards of my eye. It hurt, but not as much as I might have predicted. After blinking experimentally a few times I picked up my glasses, set them on my nose, drew myself erect, and, with the same over-elaborate display of dignity, like a drunk’s, walked out. Unfortunately for my brave show of imperviousness and self-possession I went the wrong way, and ended up somewhere in the rearmost wing of the greenhouse, where my legs got tangled in a bale of chicken wire, and I fell over.

  “Grady?” Walter called, sounding genuinely concerned.

  “I’m fine.” I found my feet, extricated myself from the jingling haystack of wire, and set a course for where I remembered the door to be. On my way back across the atrium I went past the purple davenport and stopped.

  “Did you get all that?” I said to Q.

  He nodded. I thought he looked a little pale.

  “I have a question for you,” I said, pointing. “What’s it say there on your hand?”

  He looked down at the smear of blue ink on the back of his left hand and frowned. It took him a few seconds to remember.

  “It says, ‘Frank Capra,’” he said. He shrugged. “Something I saw tonight. I think there might be a book in it.”

  I nodded, and held out my hand to him, and we shook. On my way out I brushed past Walter Gaskell and stumbled a little, and he put a hand out as if to steady me. For an instant I could have collapsed into his arms. But I knocked his proffered arm away and strode across the whirling yard to the house.

  I climbed the back steps and walked through the house, feeling a little less woozy with every step. When I got to the front porch the tuba was there waiting for me. I was almost glad to see it. I stood in the light spilling out through the open door behind me, rain on the lenses of my eyeglasses, rain running down the sides of my nose, trying to work up the nerve to walk back to the empty house on Denniston Street. I looked into the foyer to see if by any chance someone had left behind an umbrella, or if there was something I could use to cover my head. There was nothing. I turned, and took a deep breath, and heaved the tuba up over my head, to give me a little shelter. Then I started for home. The thing was too heavy to carry in this way for very long, however, and after a while I lowered it and just went ahead and got wet. My clothes grew heavy, and my shoes squeaked, and the pockets of my jacket filled with rain. Finally I sat down on top of the tuba and waited there, like a man clinging to an empty barrel, for the flood to carry me off.

  The flood, I thought. This was the true, original ending I’d always planned for Wonder Boys. One April day, after a heavy winter, the Miskahannock River would overflow its banks and wash away the entire troubled town of Wonderburg, PA. For that very last paragraph I had always envisioned the image of a young girl and a crookbacked old woman, poling a skiff down the long main hall of the Wonder house. There was something in this vision of the tiny boat in which all that remained of the Wonders went spinning out the front door of the house, to be lost amid the debris and flotsam of the world, that moved me to the point of tears. Automatically I patted my pockets for a pen and a sheet of paper to make some notes. There was something in the hip pocket of my jacket. It was the seven surviving pages of Wonder Boys, folded and porous with rain. I laid them against my thigh and carefully spread them flat.

  “Well?” I said to the tuba. “What do you say we finish this thing right?”

  I took hold of the sheaf of paper and folded it over. I bent down the uppermost corners, lifted the lowermost couple of flaps, and tucked and pleated those last seven pages until I had worked them into a soft and waterlogged little boat. Then I set this unlikely craft in the gutter at my feet, and watched it pitch and careen away down the street toward the Monongahela River and the open sea. And thus, as it was foretold in the prophecies of witch women and in a nine-page outline I’d made on an April afternoon five years earlier, wild water came and carried off the remnant of the Wonders. I stood up, and found that my head was remarkably clear, and that all its former lightness seemed to have passed, like an electrical current, into my limbs. My hands were dizzy, my feet reeled, my heart weighed nothing at all. I wasn’t happy—I’d poured too many years of my life, too many thousands of hard-won images and episodes and elegant turns of phrase, into that book not to part with it in utter sorrow. Still, I felt light. I felt as if I had been raised in the crushing precincts of the planet Jupiter, and then set free, massive and buoyant, to bound along the streets of Point Breeze, covering nine feet at a stride, with only the tuba to keep me from floating entirely off the earth.

  After I’d been walking along for a while in the general direction of home, shivering, thinking the circular thoughts of a man who’s been clocked with a Louisville Slugger, a car pulled up alongside me and sat burbling by the curb, lighting up the rain in a broad glittery fan outspread before it. It was a red Citroën DS23. The rain spattered against its black canvas top.

  I carried the tuba over to the curb, bent down, and looked into the car. It was warm inside there, and everything was lit by the soft amber light of the dash. There was a smell of damp ash and the wet wool of Sara’s topcoat, and a faint trickle of advertising from the radio. She made a face at me as I leaned in, bugging out her eyes a little, so that I would know she was angry but not entirely without humor. Her hair was slicked back with rainwater and her face was flushed and someone had kissed her on the cheek with orange lipstick.

  “Need a lift?” she said, with mock smoothness. She affected not to be surprised to have come upon me thus but I could tell by the way that she held her mouth so perfectly straight, and by a certain telltale dilation of her nostrils, that she had been panicking for hours and might be panicking still.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. “I went back to the hospital, I went by your house—Jesus, Grady, what happened to your head?”

  “Nothing,” I said, touching a hand to my left temple. Yes, it was swelling nicely. “Okay, Walter hit me with a baseball bat.” Also, it seemed to me, now that I had something to focus my vision on, I could not quite get my left eye to come into true with my right. “I’m all right. God knows I had it coming.”

  “Are you sure?” She narrowed her eyes and studied me. She was trying to determine if I was stoned. “Why are you squinting like that?”

  “What squinting, I’m fine, I’m not stoned,” I said, and to my amazement I discovered that this was the truth. “Honest.”

  “Honest,” she repeated doubtfully.

  “I feel great.” This was also the truth, except insofar as my actual body was concerned. “I’m so glad to see you, Sara. There’s so much I want to tell you—I feel—I feel so light—” I began to tell her about the way I had died, and the last voyage of the good ship Wonder Boys, and the sudden magical weightlessness of my old Jovian frame.

  “I have my suitcase in the trunk,” said Sara, cutting me off, as usual, before I could muddy the waters of an important discussion with any of my Mercutian prattle. “Is Emily coming home?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her eyes narrowed again.

&n
bsp; “No,” I said. “Nuh-uh. She isn’t coming home.”

  “Could I stay with you, then? Just for a little while. A couple of days. Just until I find someplace else to go. If,” she added quickly, “that’s what you want me to do.”

  I didn’t say anything. The rain redoubled in force, and the tuba was dislocating my elbow, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it down, and Sara hadn’t asked me to get into the car yet. I had a feeling my answer might have a lot to do with whether she ever would. I stood there, getting rained on, remembering the promise I had made to Dr. Greenhut.

  “Okay, fine,” said Sara, putting the car in gear. She started to roll slowly forward.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Hold on.”

  The taillights on the roof of the car lit up.

  “Okay,” I said, hurrying to catch up to her. “Of course you can stay with me. Please. I’d love it.”

  After that I waited for her to smile, and ask me into the car, and drive me home and lay me down on the Honor Bilt to sleep for the next three days. But Sara wasn’t ready to end the negotiations.

  “I’ve decided I’m going to keep it,” she informed me, watching my face for the effect of this announcement. “In case you were wondering.”

  “I was.”

  She took her hands off the wheel for the first time and turned them outward, fingers spread, a nameless gesture more eloquent and wondering than a shrug.