Wonder Boys

  “Thank you,” he said, without waking.

  I said, “You’re welcome,” and then carried the pot of coffee over to my desk. It was six-fifteen. I went to work. I had to slap an ending on Wonder Boys by tomorrow evening if I was going to let Crabtree see it. I took a sip of coffee and gave my left cheek an exhortatory smack. For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I’d fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before. As of this fine morning I was halfway through its fourth page, more or less, with another five pages to go. An accidental poisoning, a car crash, a house on fire; the births of three children and a miraculous trotter named Faithless; a theft, an arrest, a trial, an electrocution; a wedding, two funerals, a cross-country trip; two dances, a seduction in a fallout shelter, and a deer hunt; all these scenes and a dozen others I had yet to write, according to the neat headings of my stupid fucking outline: nine central characters’ and a lifetime’s worth of destiny that I had, for the last month, been attempting to compress into fifty-odd pages of terse and lambent prose. I reread with scorn the confident, pompous annotations I’d made on that distant day: Take your time with this, and This has to be very very big, and, worst of all, This scene should read as a single vast Interstate of Language, three thousand miles long. How I hated the asshole who had written that note!

  Once again and with the usual pleasure I entertained the notion of tossing the whole thing out. With this swollen monster out of the way I’d be at liberty to undertake The Snake Handler, or the story of the washed-up astronaut who marooned himself in Disney World, or the story of the two doomed baseball teams, blue and gray, playing nine on the eve of Chancellorsville, or The King of Freestyle, or any of the dozen other imaginary novels that had fluttered past like admirals and lyrebirds while I labored with my shovel in the ostrich pen of Wonder Boys. Then I indulged the equally usual, not quite as pleasurable fantasy of taking Crabtree into my confidence, telling him that I was still years away from finishing Wonder Boys, and throwing myself on his mercy. Then I thought of Joe Fahey and, as always, rolled a blank sheet of paper into the machine.

  I worked for four hours, typing steadily, lowering myself on a very thin cord into the dank and worm-ridden hole of an ending I’d already tried three times before. This one would oblige me to go back through the previous two-thousand-odd pages to flatten out and marginalize one of the present main characters and to eliminate another entirely, but I thought that of the five false conclusions to the novel I’d come up with in the last month, it was probably my best shot. While I worked I told myself lies. Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone. Ending the book this way, I told myself, would work out for the best; this was in fact the very ending my book had been straining toward all along. Crabtree’s visit, viewed properly, was a kind of creative accident, a gift from God, a hammer blow to loosen all the windows my imagination had long since painted shut. I would finish it sometime tomorrow, hand it over to Crabtree, and thus save both our careers.

  Every so often I would look up from my humming Selectric with its smell of hot dust and burnt wire—tried to work on a computer but hated the way it turned writing into a kind of cartoon you sat back and watched—to see James Leer twisting on the spit of his unimaginable dreams. The sound of my typing didn’t wake him, or did not, at least, disturb him enough to make him want to get off the couch and move into a quieter part of the house.

  Then, as I strapped my family of Wonders into the twin-engine Piper that, on its way to Lowell Wonder’s rock-and-roll funeral in New York City, would slam into the impassive face of Weathertop Mountain—such was the ostrich shit I had obliged myself to shovel—I heard a whisper in my ears, like the crackling of soap suds, and a spray of bright static passed across my eyes.

  “James!” I said. I clutched at the manuscript of Wonder Boys as if grabbing for a baluster, about to tumble headlong down an infinite flight of stairs. When I awakened, no more than a few seconds later, I was lying on the floor, with James Leer frowning over me, wrapped up in his sleeping bag like a B-movie Indian in a buffalo robe.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just lost my balance.”

  “I put you on the floor,” he said. “I was afraid you might, I don’t know, swallow your tongue, or something. Are you still drunk?”

  I sat up on one elbow and watched as a last yellow meteor streaked across the dome of my skull.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  James Leer nodded, shivered once, and tugged the sleeping bag more snugly around his shoulders. He took a step backward that turned abruptly into a kind of clumsy plié, then steadied himself against the back of my chair.

  “I am,” he said. The telephone rang, out in the living room. It was a new phone with all the modern functions—caller fragmentation and speed garbling and so on—and it didn’t so much ring as sound an alarum, like a Porsche being broken into in the middle of the night. “Want me to get that?”

  “Sure,” I said, dropping my head back softly to the floor. I was sure that it must be Sara, calling to say not only that her dog was missing but that Walter had been robbed of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar black satin jacket. I closed my eyes, still faintly asparkle with optic fireworks, and wondered if I didn’t have something evil inhabiting my brain, a malignant spider opening out its long black legs like the ribs of an umbrella. I asked myself what I would do if my doctor pronounced some fatal diagnosis over me then sent me back out into the weaselly old world. Would I throw aside my work and concentrate instead on writing my name in water—picking up transvestites on airplanes, seducing sexually ambivalent virgins, driving around Pittsburgh in a borrowed convertible at four o’clock in the morning, looking for trouble? It pleased me for a moment to believe that I would; but in the very next instant I knew that with death in my body my only desire would be to curl up on the Honor Bilt with half a kilo of Afghan Butthair, roll numbers, and watch reruns of The Rockford Files until the girl in the black kimono came to take me away.

  “Someone named Irv?” said James Leer, padding back into my office, a crooked smirk on his face. I guessed that he was still drunk enough for his hangover to be making him feel all grown up and dissolute. “I told him you might be a minute.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I held out my hand to him, and he helped me to my feet. “Why don’t you get yourself some breakfast? There’s coffee in the fridge.”

  He nodded, a little absently, like a boy ignoring his mother’s advice, and sat down on the sofa.

  “Maybe in a minute,” he said. He jerked his head toward the bookshelf in the corner, on which sat a small television with a built-in VCR. “That thing work?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. I was always a little embarrassed about having a television in my office, even though I would never have watched it when I was supposed to be working. “I use it to look at ball games, sometimes, if Emily’s trying to work, or sleep.”

  “What movies do you have?”

  “Movies? Not too many. I don’t really collect movies, James.” I pointed to the scanty assortment of videocassettes stacked beside the TV set. “I think I still have 9½ Weeks over there. Taped it off the cable.”

  James made a face. “9½ Weeks” he said. “Please.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I started for the phone, gathering the flaps of my lucky bathrobe around me.

  “Nice robe, Professor Tripp,” said James.

  “It’s Irv, Grady,” said Emily’s father.

  “Hello, Irv,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I could always be better,” said Irv. “I’m having a little trouble with my right knee, now.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” He’d had the left one replaced the year before, with a stainless steel joint of which he was inordinately proud, as though it were a spontaneous physical improvement produced through the cleverness of his own cells.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But it won’t bend until ten o’clock in
the morning.”

  “That could be a problem.”

  “Terrible,” he agreed. “As a matter of fact it just started bending….” There was a pause while he consulted his watch. Irv wore one of those fancy chronometer-style jobs the size of an Oreo cookie, capable not only of telling time, temperature, altitude, and barometric pressure but also of analyzing atmospheric composition and indicating the presence of alien life-forms. He had assembled it himself, out of a kit purchased from the back pages of Popular Science. “Twenty-two minutes ago. So, how are you?”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I could always be better.” I sat down on the pale yellow chintz love seat, patterned with a trellis of climbing red roses, that had forced the old green Honor Bilt into exile in my office. “How’s Emily?”

  “She’s fine. I’d let you speak to her but she isn’t here. She’s in town with her mother. Doing a little last-minute shopping. Listen, Grady, you know what today is.”

  “Saturday?”

  “Today is erev pesach. First night of Passover.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Happy Passover.”

  “Grady, we’re making the Seder tonight.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Deborah’s here, she got here last night. Phil and Marie are driving up from Aberdeen.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “We’ll be starting at sundown, of course, which today falls at—just a second.” Another pause while, I supposed, he checked his trusty Chronotron 5000. “Six-eighteen.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “Irv, listen. I—I have this WordFest thing, you know?” I’d spent a thousand hours in conversation with Irving Warshaw, on subjects that ranged from Mose Allison to dog racing to the tectonic plates underlying the state of Israel, but I’d never said a single word to him about the secret geologic forces that deformed the state of my marriage to his daughter. Irv saw no point in the discussion of human feelings: he was sad at funerals, proud of Israel, disappointed in his children, happy on the Fourth of July. He had no idea how crazy I was about him. “We do it every year.”

  “I know what it is,” he said.

  “Right, so anyway I have, you know, a lot of seminars to attend, and lectures, and all that.” I was on the point of telling him that I had a lecture to deliver, but I stopped myself. Although I certainly didn’t always tell him the truth, I’d never lied to Emily’s father about anything, either. “I just don’t think I’m going to be able to get away.”

  “No,” he said. “That makes sense.”

  His voice sounded a little hollow.

  “You okay, Irv?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “You know. Pesach. It always falls on the day after the—the anniversary—of Sam. Of his death.”

  I had forgotten this unfortunate coincidence of lunar dates, though of course it recurred every year in spite of the fact that Sam had drowned sometime at the very end of April.

  “Aw,” I said. I clucked my tongue. “His yahrzeit. Isn’t that it?”

  “That’s it,” said Irv. “We lit the candle last night.”

  “I’m sorry, Irv,” I said.

  In response Irv made a kind of interrogative half grunt that sounded like the equivalent of an irritated shrug, as if to say, What are you sorry for?

  “So,” he said, after a moment, letting out the word like a sigh. “All right.”

  “All right, Irv,” I said. Suddenly I felt that I might never speak to him again.

  “Grady, my friend,” said Irv. I caught the tiny fissure of grief that had opened in his voice.

  “Buddy,” I said, “did Emily know that you were going to be calling me?”

  “Yes. She didn’t want me to.”

  “Well, I’m glad that you did.”

  “Yes, I—well. I really hoped to see you at our table this evening.”

  “I’d love to be there,” I said. “I wish that I could. I just don’t think that it would be right.”

  “You have your conference.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I understand.”

  “Love to everyone,” I said.

  When I went back into my office, I found James Leer sitting on the sofa, his legs drawn up into the tent of his sleeping bag, watching something black-and-white on TV; the sound was turned all the way down. When I walked in, he looked at me for a moment without seeming to know who I was. The blood had drained from his cheeks, his jaw hung slack, and his eyes were bleary with something that looked almost like sorrow. He was feeling his hangover now.

  “You have 9½ Weeks and Year of the Dragon,” he said, as if these were not movies but scabies and mange. “And that’s it.”

  “I like that Mickey Rourke,” I said. “So what’s this you’re watching?”

  “Lured,” he said automatically. “1947. Douglas Sirk.”

  “How come you have the sound down?”

  He shrugged. “I know what they’re saying,” he said.

  I squinted at the screen.

  “That wouldn’t be poor old George Sanders, again, would it?”

  He nodded, and swallowed, hard.

  “Are you all right, James?”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did I get here?”

  “We brought you here last night. None of us was in good enough shape to get you all the way to Mt. Lebanon.”

  We watched for a moment while George Sanders lit himself a long white cigarette. I looked over at the imperturbable stack of paper on my desk, at the six new sheets lying scattered beside it, covered in useless black words.

  “Did I do anything last night?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything bad.”

  “Well, James,” I said. “You stole Marilyn Monroe’s nuptial jacket out of Dr. Gaskell’s closet. How about that?”

  There was a knock at the door, three deliberate taps, like someone testing the wood for evidence of dry rot. I looked at James. George Sanders raised a flashing monocle to his eye.

  “Someone’s at the door,” I said.

  It was a policeman, bearing an apologetic smile and the morning’s rolled-up Post-Gazette. He was a young guy, not much older than James Leer. Like James he was tall and pale, with a sharp, mobile Adam’s apple. His cheeks were a mass of tiny nicks and missed whiskers, and he was wearing some kind of sugary, varsity-halfback aftershave. His hat was a quarter size too large for his head. He had the young cop’s way of standing with his chest poked out, speaking too quickly, as though rattling off, to a mock civilian, sample dialogue memorized from the training manual, at the threshold of a simulated house. His name tag said PUPCIK. I didn’t ask him in.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Professor Tripp,” he said. “I’m investigating a break-in at the Gaskells’ house last night, and I have a couple of questions.”

  “Surely,” I said, filling up the doorway with my frame. “What can I do for you?”

  “There was a break-in at the Gaskells’ house last night.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “They’re friends of yours.”

  “Good friends,” I said.

  “Anyway, I understand there was some kind of party-type event at their house last night? And that you were one of the last to leave?”

  “I guess I was.”

  “Okay, good.” Officer Pupcik looked pleased with himself. Things were starting to add up. “And did you see anything? Anyone hanging around, or something, that maybe you didn’t really know them?”

  “I don’t believe so.” I looked up at the sky and bit my lip. I was thinking it over. I wanted him to know that. “No, uh-uh.”

  Officer Pupcik’s eyebrows gathered in disappointment over his nose.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “What’d they get?”

  “What’s that? Oh. They got into Dr. Gaskell’s collection.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yeah. Damn,” he said, deviating somewhat from his script, “he has
some pretty cool stuff.” I agreed with this assessment. “Anyway, looks like they picked the lock on his vault.” He shrugged. “Oh, and the dog’s missing.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I know it. We figure he must have let him out. The perpetrator, I mean. He’s blind and we figure he just wandered off and maybe got run over.”

  “The perpetrator.”

  “No, the dog.”

  “Just kidding,” I said.

  He nodded, then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policemanlike look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes.

  “Well,” I said. “I hope you find him. Them. Good luck.”

  “Well, thanks. Okay.” Officer Pupcik simulated a smile. “That’s all, then. I won’t trouble you anymore.”

  “If I think of anything—”

  “Yes, that’s right. If you think of anything, give us a call. Here.” He reached into the pocket of his shirt and handed me a business card. He started to turn away, then stopped and looked back at me. “Oh,” he said, “about this kid, this, uh, Leer. James Leer.”

  “He’s a student of mine.”

  “That’s what I understand. Do you know how I could get in touch with him, by any chance?”

  “I think he lives with his aunt, out in Mt. Lebanon,” I said. “I might have his number in my office on campus, if you need it.”

  He watched me for a few seconds, pulling at the lobe of his right ear as if trying to hear all over again all the things I’d just told him.

  “That’s all right,” he said at last. “It can wait until Monday.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  He went down the steps to his car.

  “That’s a nice one,” he said, nodding toward the Galaxie in the drive. There was an odd look of pain on his face as he gazed over there, and he shook his big angular head. “Poor thing.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. You would have thought he’d seen through the steel of my trunk to the body of Doctor Dee lying within.