“It’s just started to seem like a good thing to have,” she said. “If I’m not going to have anything else.”
“Think so?”
“At the moment”
I stood upright, stepped away from the curb, and took a last look up, through the rain, at the empty sky over my head. Then I put down the last of my burdens and reached for the passenger door.
“I guess there’s no point in hanging on to this tuba, then,” I said.
ONE OF THE STRANGEST BITS of jetsam to wash up in the aftermath of the flood that carried me, eventually, all the way back to the town where I was born was a black satin jacket, with an ermine collar, slightly worn at the elbows and missing a button. Although she was, by law, entitled to ask Walter to sell off his whole precious collection and let her take half the proceeds out of the marriage with her, Sara offered to waive her rights to all the rest of it—the flannel jerseys, the three thousand bubble-gum cards, and above all that tar-stained bat—if he would let her keep the jacket. I would have been more than willing never to see the thing again, but to her it was a reminder, at once ironic and cherished, of the weekend that had sealed our fate. Everything else they owned she conceded to Walter, who proved willing to exchange a small if significant principality in order to hold on to the rest of his mighty empire. When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of my grandmother, and for the ceremony, almost but not quite as a joke, Sara wore the jacket. I didn’t think this was a very favorable omen, but it was my fourth marriage and any talk of omens was, to a certain extent, beside the point.
For more than a year after Wonder Boys blew apart in that alley behind Kravnik’s Sporting Goods I was unable to do any writing at all. I dumped the whole exploded clockwork of draft chapters and character sketches and uninsertable inserts into a liquor box and stuck them under the bed. My life was in turmoil, and, maybe because I couldn’t see very well out of my left eye anymore, it took me a long time to get back my sense of narrative balance and my writerly perception of depth. I got to know my lawyer and a number of other Pittsburgh attorneys, quit smoking pot, and did my best to be a husband, and a father to my son. Sara landed the position of dean of students at Coxley College and arranged for me to be hired, part-time, by the department to which Albert Vetch had devoted so much of his life, and we moved back to this old hill town, with its houses the colors of dead leaves, where a neon sign burns on a cold night with an aching clearness and it is always football season. And then, one Sunday afternoon after we had been living on Whateley Street for a couple of weeks, in a rented house a block from the corner of Pickman where the old McClelland Hotel still stands, I brought the liquor box out from under the bed, took it into the backyard, and, under a tangle of wisteria, buried it in the cold black , ground.
I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern. On a day when my work hasn’t gone well, I like to spend a couple of hours at the Alibi’s dented steel bar, and you will find me there on Tuesday nights after the advanced workshop lets out. You can look for the half-blind minotaur with the corduroy sport coat and the battered horsehide briefcase, at the far end of the bar by the jukebox, holding on to a mug of Iron City cut, for the sake of his health, with thin, sweet lemonade. If you sit long enough on the neighboring stool he will probably mention that he is working hard on a novel about baseball and the Civil War, or a memoir of Berkeley in the early seventies, or a screenplay, called Sister of Darkness, based on a number of interlinked stories penned by another obscure local man of letters, who wrote under the name of August Van Zorn. Usually he sits with one or two much younger men, students of his, wonder boys whose hearts are filled with the dread and mystery of the books they believe themselves destined to write. He has known a number of famous and admired authors in his time, and he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters. The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for the parts that sound true.
A Biography of Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon is an acclaimed and bestselling author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). One of America’s most distinctive voices, Chabon has been called “a magical prose stylist” by the New York Times Book Review, and is known for his lively writing, nostalgia for bygone modes of storytelling, and deep empathy for the human predicament.
Born to two lawyers, Robert and Sharon, in Washington, DC, in 1963, Chabon was raised in Columbia, Maryland. As a young boy, he became interested in writing and storytelling through the encouragement of his teachers. His parents divorced when he was eleven, and his father moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Until Chabon graduated high school, he would spend nine months a year with his mother in Maryland and summers with his father in Pittsburgh. He then moved to Pittsburgh fulltime to attend Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh universities.
After receiving his undergraduate degree, Chabon sought an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. His master’s thesis attracted the attention of professor Donald Heiney, an award-winning author, who sent the manuscript to his agent without telling Chabon beforehand. The book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), set off a bidding war among publishers and earned Chabon a large advance and bestselling success at the age of twenty-four. The experience was gratifying but disorienting. Chabon worked for the next five years on a novel called Fountain City, a sprawling manuscript that he never completed.
After abandoning work on his would-be second novel, and ending his first marriage to poet Lollie Groth, Chabon poured his frustrations into a new manuscript, about a writer struggling to complete a 2,611-page book after a string of previous successes. The novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was another bestseller and became a film of the same name in 2000, starring Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, and Robert Downey, Jr. His story collections A Model World and Other Stories (1991) and Werewolves in Their Youth (1999) further displayed Chabon’s literary talents, but he cemented his place among the country’s foremost novelists with the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The book, which chronicles the adventures of two Jewish cousins in New York City against the backdrop of World War II, earned Chabon a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. His subsequent novels include The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), which also met with critical and commercial success and won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards for science fiction, among other honors.
Chabon married the novelist Ayelet Waldman in 1993, and the couple has four children. Aside from narrative fiction, Chabon has worked as a screenwriter, helping with adaptations of his work and with movie projects such as Spider-Man 2. He has also contributed essays to magazines such as Harper’s and the New Yorker. An outspoken proponent of genre fiction, Chabon published Maps and Legends, a collection of critical essays defending literature as a vehicle for entertainment, in 2008.
Chabon lives in Berkeley, California.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Na
mes, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1995 by Michael Chabon
cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4532-3410-5
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY MICHAEL CHABON
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
follow us: @openroadmedia and Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
SIGN UP NOW at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
Wonder Boys Page 34