Wonder Boys

  OF THE DRIVE BACK to Pittsburgh I remember only the struggle to roll three joints one-handed and the intermittent companionship of a radio station, playing a tribute to Lennie Tristano, that turned out to be WABI, the low-watt voice of old Coxley College, drifting in on some ghostly undertow in the ether. Around two o’clock I pulled off the deserted parkway and headed up toward Squirrel Hill. I was going home, but I didn’t intend to stay there longer than it would take me to retrieve Crabtree—assuming he was still operative. I had decided to try something reckless, senseless, and stupid, and in any such attempt there could be no more useful companion than Terry Crabtree.

  My house was ablaze in the middle of our slumbering street, lit up like a landing strip. As I came up the front walk I heard the racy laughter of a saxophone, and the glass in the windows hummed a walking bass line. My house was crawling with writers. There were writers in the living room, with their shoes kicked off, watching one another dance. There were writers in the kitchen, making conversation that whip-sawed wildly between comely falsehood and foul-smelling truths, flicking their cigarette ash into the mouths of beer cans. There were a half dozen more of them stretched out on the floor of the television room, arranged in a worshipful manner around a small grocery bag filled with ragweed marijuana, watching Ghidrah take apart Tokyo. On the sofa behind them a pair of my students, young writers of the Angry School who pierced their lips and favored iron-buckled storm-trooper footwear, had welded themselves into a kind of impromptu David Smith. On the stairs leading up to my bedroom sat three New York agents, better dressed and less drunk than the writers, exchanging among themselves delicate constructions of confidentiality and disinformation. And there were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworks and the Bessemer converter of love.

  There was only one writer in my office. She was sitting alone on the Honor Bilt, with the door closed, her knees pulled up under her sweater so that the pointy tips of her boots peeked out from under the hem. Her head was bowed, and she was concentrating on a thick manuscript stacked on the sofa beside her, twisting a long yellow strand of hair around one finger and then untwisting it again,

  “Hey,” I said, coming into the room, closing the door behind me. I looked over at my desk. It was only then I realized that I’d left the house that morning with Wonder Boys lying out in the open where anyone—where Crabtree—could get at it.

  “Oh!” said Hannah, slapping back onto the stack the page she’d been about to set to one side, covering it with both hands, as though it were something she herself had written and didn’t want me to see. “Grady! Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed. I hope you don’t mind. It was just sort of lying out.” She wrinkled up her nose at the thought of her own misbehavior. “I suck.”

  “You suck not,” I said. “I don’t mind at all.”

  She reassembled the scattered slices of the Grady’s Wheel of Cheese, upended it, carefully tapped it against the sofa cushion, and set the thing down on an arm of the sofa. Then she got up and came over to get her arms around me.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “We tried to find you everywhere. We were worried.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just had to deal with a little outbreak of Cetusian fever.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Nothing.” I nodded toward the manuscript balanced on the edge of the sofa. “Did, uh, did Crabtree happen to see any of that, do you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” said Hannah. “I mean, I wouldn’t think so. We were gone all day, over at WordFest. We didn’t get back until late.” She grinned. “And he was pretty busy after that.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” I said, reluctantly disentangling myself from her. “So, listen, where is the old Crab, anyway?”

  “Who knows? I’ve been in here for a couple of hours. I don’t even know if he’s here or—oh, no, don’t go!” She redoubled her hold on me. “Stay, where are you going?”

  “I really need to talk to him,” I said, though all of a sudden the prospect of getting back into my car, and driving all the way out to Sewickley Heights on my unreasonable errand, struck me as less than appealing. I could just stay here with Hannah, and forget all about Deborah and Emily, and Sara and the pale smiling tadpole in her belly, and above all that poor lost liar Jimmy Leer. She was holding me and I closed my eyes and in my mind I followed her downstairs to her apartment, and lay beside her on her sateen comforter, under the Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, and plunged my hand down into the mouth of her cowgirl boots, and ran my fingers along the damp slender arches of her feet. “I really need—”

  “The Horse” came on, out in the living room, and Hannah grabbed hold of my hand.

  “Come on,” she said. “You need to dance.”

  “I can’t. My ankles.”

  “Your ankles? Come on.”

  “I can’t.” She got me to the door and pulled it open, letting in a bright blast of horn charts. She rocked her skinny cowgirl hips a couple of times around. “Look, Hannah, James got himself—he got himself into a little bit of trouble tonight. I need Crabtree to help me go get him out.”

  “What kind of trouble? Let me come.”

  “No, I can’t say, it’s nothing. Look, he and I’ll go get James, okay, it won’t take long, we’ll bring him back, and then I’ll dance with you. All right? I promise?”

  “He shot the Chancellor’s dog, didn’t he?”

  “He did?” I said, pushing the door closed again. “Shot what?”

  “Somebody shot their dog last night. The blind one. That’s what the police think, anyway. The dog’s missing, and they found some spots of blood on the carpet. And then I heard Dr. Gaskell dug a bullet out of the floor.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That’s terrible.”

  “Crabtree thought that it sounded like something James would do.”

  “He doesn’t even know James,” I said.

  “Who does?” said Hannah.

  You don’t, I thought. I gave her hand a squeeze.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told her.

  “Can’t I come with you?”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “I know savate.”

  “Hannah.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. Back home in Provo, Hannah had nine older brothers, and she was accustomed to the abandonment of boys. “Can I at least keep reading Wonder Boys until you come back?”

  It hadn’t really sunk in until now that someone had actually been reading my book. It was a painful and exhilarating thought.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Sure.”

  Hannah poked a finger between my belly and my belt buckle and tugged until I nearly fell against her.

  “Can I take it down into my room and be alone with it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, taking a step backward. I was always, I thought, taking a step away from Hannah Green. “How are you liking it?”

  “I think I’m loving it.”

  “Really?” I said. Hannah’s praise, though lightly given, struck me with unexpected force, and I felt my throat constrict. I saw how lonely a pursuit the writing of Wonder Boys had become, how sequestered and directionless and blind. I’d shown some early chapters to Emily, and her only memorable comment at the time had been “It seems awfully male.” I’d laughed this off, but ever since then I’d been the book’s only reader, the prophet, founder, and sole inhabitant of my own failed little Pennsylvanian utopia. “All right, then. Sure you can.”

  She brought her face very close to mine. Her lips were chapped and she’d daubed them with balm that smelled of vanilla.

  “I kind of think I’m loving you,” she said. “Too.”

  Oh, what the hell, I thought. Maybe I’d better just stay.

  “Tripp’s here?” said Crabtree from somewhere out in the hall. His voice sounded plaintive and so reliev
ed that I felt a pang of guilt at the sound of it. “Where is he? Tripp?”

  I started, and pulled away from her.

  “Don’t let him see that thing, okay?” I said. “Hide it till we leave.” I gave her a peck on the cheek and stepped out into the hall. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Be careful,” she said, brushing at a strand of hair that had gotten caught in the lip balm at the corner of her mouth.

  “I will,” I said.

  As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn’t intend to keep.

  I FOUND CRABTREE OUT in the hallway, all by himself, watching the people in the living room attempt to re-create the Horse. He had one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around a bottle of sparkling water. It seemed that in my absence he was willing to surrender the pretense that he was still Crabtree the Tricksy Spirit, the artist as mischief maker, and to stand slouched against the wall, alone in the middle of his own party, looking sober, lonely, and bored. He was wearing another of his double-breasted metallic suits, of a soft, almost imperceptible blue like the light given off by a black-and-white television. His eyes behind his round glasses were lusterless, his cheeks puffy and splotched. As he watched the dancers he reminded me of James Leer, lingering last night in the Gaskells’ backyard, a friendless and envious boy in the dark, gazing up at a radiant window.

  When he saw me his face resumed its usual calm smirk, however, and he nodded, once, and looked back into the living room.

  “There he is,” he said, as if all unaffected by my abrupt reappearance, as if he hadn’t been wandering the house seconds before like a revenant, crying out my name. “Where’d you get to?”

  “I went up to Kinship.”

  “I heard.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m dying.” He rolled his eyes. “This WordFest gig is without question the most tedious exercise you have ever put me through, Tripp.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Look at those people.” He shook his head.

  “They’re writers,” I said. “Poets are not bad dancers as a rule. But we’re a little light on poets this year.”

  “Those are fiction people.”

  “Most of them.” I shrugged my shoulders a few times quick. “We like to do that Snoopy kind of thing with our shoulders.”

  “And everyone’s straight at this thing. Don’t you have any queers in Pittsburgh?”

  “Sure we do,” I said. “I’ll call them.”

  “And then you fucking drive off this morning with the rest of my little medicines in your car.”

  “I did? They are?”

  “Uh huh. At least I hope so. I think they’re in your trunk. You must have knocked them loose last night when you were ransacking my bags.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really. Listen, buddy, come outside with me.”

  He folded his arms and affected a prim expression. “I don’t want to get off now.”

  “We’re not going to get off,” I said.

  He glanced over at me, then away. “You’re already stoned.”

  “I know it.”

  “You look like hell, Tripp.”

  “I know, I know, Crabtree, come on. I need you, man. I need you to come with me.”

  “Come with you where?”

  “Buddy.” Without intending to I found myself imitating Hannah’s manner with me. I hooked my finger over his belt buckle and gave it a sharp tug, and pulled him toward me and the front door. Crabtree dug in his heels and stayed where he was. “Won’t you just come with me if I ask you to?” I said. “Do I have to tell you where?”

  “No, you don’t.” He unhooked my hand from his belt, turned it palm up, looked at it, and then tossed it back at me, as if refusing a corsage. He was bored enough to have forgotten that he was only pretending to be petulant. “You didn’t tell me where you were going this morning.”

  “I know, I know, all right, I’m an asshole.” I didn’t blame him for being angry with me. I’d gotten him invited to WordFest, promising him our first chance to be together in months—years—then vanished, leaving him to attend dull seminars and oversimplistic lectures and to throw himself his own party with a bunch of woolen and funkless straight people. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “So how was everything up there, anyway?”

  “Nice. Awful.”

  “Emily still leaving you?”

  “I would think so.” I shook my head. “To tell you the truth, it was a disaster. James—”

  “My James?” Crabtree brightened, and touched his fingertips possessively to his breastbone. “Did he go with you? Is he here now?”

  “No, and that’s why I need you, buddy.” I lowered my voice and brought my lips very close to his ear. “He kind of got himself—”

  “Arrested?” he cried.

  “Hush. No, kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped? Who by?”

  I paused a moment for effect. “His parents,” I said.

  Crabtree’s father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. “She can make you anything,” went a favorite line of his. “She made me a queer.” He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn’t seen them in years.

  “His parents?” It must have sounded to his ears like the direst of fates.

  “He has ‘Frank Capra’ carved into the back of his hand.”

  “Let me get my coat,” said Crabtree.

  Launching himself like a swimmer from the wall, he dashed into the kitchen, retrieved his trench coat from the back of a chair, filched a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam from the kitchen table, and knocked back a swallow. Then he lit a cigarette and tied the belt of his overcoat around him. He slipped the Jim Beam into the left pocket of his coat, and on his way past the refrigerator stopped to fill the other pocket with a couple of little bottles of Mickey’s malt liquor. When he came back into the hall he was grinning and wide awake.

  “Let’s buy a gun!” he said happily.

  We went out to my car, and I was about to get in when Crabtree said, “Hey!”

  He was standing at the back of the car, tapping on the lid of the trunk with the fingers of one hand.

  “What?” I said, though I knew at once. “Oh.” I walked slowly around to the back. “I thought you said you didn’t want any.”

  “I was lying.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  “Open the trunk.”

  “How about we wait—”

  “Open it.”

  “I’m serious, Crabs, I—”

  “Now.”

  I opened the trunk.

  “Holy Jesus,” said Crabtree. “You offed the husky dog.”

  “No, wait a minute, Crab—”

  “Phew!” The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood—sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire. “What is that?” Drawing the rest of his body away from the car, he extended his neck and poked his head out over the trunk, maneuvering it back and forth, over and back, as though it were a camera on a very long pole. Gingerly he withdrew his head and turned his wondering lens on me. “Is that a snake?” he said.

  “Part of one,” I said. I put my hands on the lid of the trunk and started to slam it. “Come on. I’ll explain on the way out.”

  “Not so fast.” He grabbed hold of my wrist. “I want my medicines.” After a brief struggle he wrested the trunk lid away from me and raised it once more. “I don’t care if you have a dead cassowary in there.” Carefully he reached into a far comer of the trunk and, wrinkling up his nose, started to feel his way around.

  “Ick,” he said.

  WE PULLED INTO SEWICKLEY Heights around three A.M. and rolled with the top down through its sinuous dark streets. The sidewalks were overarched with
immense sycamores and lined with high hedges that hid the grand houses behind them. Crabtree was holding a Greater Pittsburgh street map and, pressed between his lips, an overdue notice from the college library, which had been mailed two weeks before to a James Selwyn Leer at 262 Baxter Drive. The Leers were unlisted, as we’d discovered in a Shell station telephone booth, but the ever-resourceful Crabtree had dug around in James’s knapsack and found the notice, stuck between two pages of the Errol Flynn biography. He had the knapsack balanced on his lap.

  “The address on the manuscript?” said Crabtree, angling the street map, the better to catch the dim glow of the glove compartment light. “5225 Harrington?”

  “His aunt’s house. In Mt. Lebanon.”

  “I’m looking at the index, here. There’s no such street.”

  “How surprising.”

  Driving out to the suburbs I’d filled Crabtree in on most of what had happened to James Leer and me since I’d taken his shiny little pistol away from him the night before; the things I had learned and unlearned about him. I skipped the part about Marilyn Monroe’s jacket, though. I told myself I had the thing all nice and folded up into a neat little bundle on the backseat, so I ought just to leave it like that until tomorrow, when I would drive James over to the Gaskells’ and finally set everything straight; but the truth was that I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to have to try to explain to Crabtree what James and I were doing up there in the Gaskells’ bedroom in the first place. So I said that it was just a crazy accident that James had shot Doctor Dee. As I talked about James and his book, Crabtree seemed to grow convinced not only that the young man must be a good writer—he gave The Love Parade a quick editorial flip-through on the way out, reading by the light from the glove box—but that he, Terry Crabtree, Agent of Chaos, was the switch failure on the tracks toward which James Leer’s train was inexorably hurtling. I offered him a little account of my sad dealings with Emily and the Warshaws, too, but he didn’t seem all that interested, frankly, in my problems, or at least that was what he wanted me to think. He was still angry with me for having abandoned him that morning. As for Wonder Boys, he made no mention of it, and I was afraid to ask. If he’d looked at it and had nothing to say to me, then that told me plenty right there.