“I’m so sorry, man” he said. He made a leaping grab for one high-flying page but missed by an inch, and it sailed away. “I didn’t notice.”
“How many pages did you lose?”
“Not too many.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “Crabtree, it looks like a fucking blizzard out here.”
There was a small explosion behind us. We turned and saw Walker crouching on one knee by the white van, the nine held out at the end of a wavering arm.
“Shit!” said Booger, clutching at the sudden bright blossom on the sleeve of his right arm.
“Jesus Christ,” said Crabtree, grabbing hold of me, dragging me toward the car. “Come on!”
I threw the tuba into the backseat, handed Crabtree Marilyn’s jacket, and climbed in beside him, and then we abandoned my novel to the parking lot of Kravnik’s Sporting Goods, leaving it to stream out behind us like the foamy white wake of a boat.
BREATHLESS WITH SUCCESS, Crabtree immediately set about recapitulating the events of the last twenty minutes, fixing the least details of our escapade in place with the narrative equivalent of watchmaker’s tweezers and embellishing the overall contours of the plot with the rhetorical equivalent of a fire hose.
“Did you see that Booger’s tattoo? On the back of his hand? It was the ace of hearts, but the heart was black. I could smell his breath, Tripp, he’d been drinking a Yoo-Hoo, I swear to God. I thought he was going to kiss me. Christ, he was ugly. Both of them were. How about that gun, huh? Was that a nine millimeter? It was, wasn’t it? Jesus. Those bullets sounded like fucking hummingbirds.”
There was already a short chapter in Crabtree’s hypothetical autobiography entitled “People Who Have Shot at Me,” and now as he drove us out to the college he painstakingly revised it, commencing with an episode that had befallen both of us some eleven years earlier, when I’d helped him try to sneak his lover at the time, the painter Stanley Feld, into the East Hampton home of an art-collecting lawyer who’d reneged on a promise to let Feld visit the painting he considered his best work; like all our greatest escapades this was a noble enterprise in theory rendered hopelessly foolish from the first moments of execution, in this case by Feld’s having neglected to mention that the collector in question was an art-loving Mafia lawyer, and that not only his collection but his entire walled estate was guarded by heavily armed half-men whose aim, fortunately, was less than perfect. From this incident, in which a round of automatic weapons fire tore the branch off a spruce tree several feet over our heads, Crabtree made the natural transition to the two angry shots fired at him, six months later, by Stanley Feld, one of which lodged in his left buttock.
Now he had a new section to add to this favorite hypothetical chapter, and I could see that he was delighted to do the work.
“Chaos,” he said, rolling his window down, breathing it in like the smell of cut grass or the ocean. He shook his head admiringly. “What a mess.”
“No kidding,” I said, looking down at the pathetic remnant of Wonder Boys in my lap. I ought to have been pounding on the dashboard, I thought, and eulogizing sweet chaos, the opposite and the inhibitor of death, and stating, for the record, that Vernon Hardapple’s breath had carried an anise whiff of Italian sausage and a rusty tang of beer. Ever since the day, nearly twenty-five years before, that I’d first fallen under the spell of Jack Kerouac and his free-form Arthurian hobo jazz, with all its dangerous softheartedness and poor punctuation, I had always, consciously and by some unthinking reflex of my heart, taken it as an article of faith that escapades like the rescue of James Leer from his Sewickley Heights dungeon, or the retrieval of the missing jacket, were intrinsically good: good for the production of literature, good for barroom conversation, good for the soul. Chaos! I ought to have been gulping it down the way Knut Hamsun, perched atop a locomotive as it hurtled across the American heartland, swallowed a thousand miles of icy air in a successful attempt to rid his body of tubercles. I ought to have been welcoming the bright angel of disorder into my life like the prickling flow of blood into a limb that had fallen asleep.
Instead, I spent the whole trip out to the college trying to assess and come to grips with the fatal blow that had been dealt to the manuscript of Wonder Boys. Crabtree, as it turned out, had managed to prevent exactly seven pages from blowing out of the car. They were all impressed with the watermark of his Vibram soles, or pebbled like the surface of a basketball with a relief of asphalt; part of one page had been torn away. Two thousand six hundred and four pages—seven years of my life!—abandoned in the alley behind Kravnik’s Sporting Goods, with a run-down Ford and three quarters of a dead snake. I shuffled through the remains, numb, wondering, a busted shareholder in the aftermath of a crash, clutching the sheaf of ink and rag paper that only an hour before had been all my fortune. It was a completely random sample from the novel, pages bearing no relation to one another except for two which coincidentally both dealt with the birthmark on Helena Wonder’s behind that was shaped like her native state of Indiana. I allowed my head to fall backward against the headrest. I closed my eyes.
“Seven pages,” I said. “Six and a half.”
“Naturally you have copies,” said Crabtree.
I didn’t say anything.
“Tripp?”
“I have earlier drafts,” I said. “I have alternate versions.”
“You’ll be all right, then,” he said.
“Sure, I will. It’ll probably come out better next time.”
“That’s what they say,” he said. “Look at Carlyle, when he lost his luggage.”
“That was Macaulay.”
“Or Hemingway, when Hadley lost all those stories.”
“He was never able to reproduce them.”
“Bad example,” said Crabtree. “Here we are.”
He turned into the long avenue of tulip trees that led up Founder’s Hill to the center of campus, and I directed him toward Arning Hall, where the English faculty kept office hours. We parked in the tiny faculty lot, in the space reserved for our Miltonist. Crabtree checked his watch and ran a cocksure hand through his long hair. There was still half an hour until the Farewell, the closing ceremonies of WordFest, was scheduled to begin—thirty minutes to set up his monte table and his trick manacles and his box with the hidden chamber, and tie a few balloon animals for Walter Gaskell. He reached into the backseat for the black satin skeleton key that would spring James Leer. Then he got out of the car and pulled on his own suit jacket. He shot his cuffs and worked a stiffness out of the muscles of his neck. He lit another Kool Mild.
“Wanna come?”
“Not particularly.”
Crabtree ducked his head back into the car and gave me a quick once-over, more for his benefit than my own, the way an actor about to go onstage will nervously check the costume of a fellow cast member whose cue is still two scenes off. He slid my eyeglasses up the bridge of my nose with his index finger.
“You going to be all right?”
“You bet. Uh, Crabtree,” I said. “Tell me if I’m wrong. It sounded to me like you aren’t going to do this book at all. Am I wrong about that?”
“Yes. Look, Grady, I don’t want you to think …” He let the sentence go. It was hard seeing Crabtree unable to choose among all the different unthinkable things he didn’t want me to think. “But—perhaps—in a sense—perhaps this”—he nodded toward the little puddle of Wonder Boys in my lap—“is for the best.”
“Kind of a sign, you’re saying.”
“In a sense.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “In my experience signs are usually a lot more subtle.”
“Uh huh. All right.” He stood up again and tugged on the lapels of his jacket. “Wish me luck.”
“Luck.”
He slammed the door.
“So you still want to be my editor?” I said, staring straight ahead, my voice deadpan and, I hoped, self-mocking.
“Of course. Give me a break.” His voice cracked wit
h impatience or mock impatience. “What do you think?”
“I think that you do,” I said.
“I do.”
“I believe you.” I didn’t believe him.
“All right,” he said. He looked in through the car window at me again, his face suddenly the pale, bony country-boy countenance of twenty years earlier. “I guess it’s probably better if you don’t come with me.”
“I guess it is,” I said. It hurt me to have to say it. All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure. Not once, in twenty years, had I declined to second Crabtree, to share the blame for and to bear witness to his latest exploit. I wanted to go with him. But I was afraid—and not only of having to confess to Walter Gaskell my role in the killing of Doctor Dee and the ignominious means by which I’d come to know the combination of the lock on the secret closet. At least I knew what needed to be said to Walter, more or less. But if there was the question of expelling James Leer to be decided, then the Chancellor was the one to make that decision—Sara was going to be at this meeting, too. And I had no idea what I wanted to say to her, or to the quickening little packet of cells in her belly. I looked down at a page I had designated as 765b and spoke into the collar of my shirt.
“Next time,” I said.
He nodded, and coughed into his fist, and set off across the parking lot toward Arning Hall, leaving me with the tuba, which seemed so intent on following me everywhere that I now began to regard it with some uneasiness. I watched Crabtree bounce up the worn granite steps of Arning Hall. He held the satin jacket by the shoulders and gently shook it out, as though shaking crumbs from a tablecloth. Then he disappeared into the building.
Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn’t particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up.
INTERVIEWER: So then, would you say, perhaps, that it was a kind of, and I know it’s an overused phrase, but, a catharsis for you, then, revealing, or discovering, if you like, in your story “The Real Story”—to use the word “discover” in its original sense, of course, of “lifting the cover from”—the depths to which a man—a man perhaps in some ways very much like you, although naturally not, of course, you—in his hopeless and even, I daresay, oddly heroic quest for what he calls “the real story”—will sink? I’m referring now to the scene in the Laundromat where he steals the nonprescription antihistamines out of the old woman’s handbag.
Q.: Yes, right. [Embarrassed laugh] Some of those babies pack a real wallop.
I switched over to AM and spun the radio dial until I hit polka music. I opened and closed my window a few times, fiddled with the rearview mirror, adjusted my seat, opened and closed the glove compartment. Hannah kept hers very neat, and well stocked with the road maps that had gotten her from Provo to Pittsburgh two years before. There was a flashlight, and a small box of tampons, and a flat tin of Wintermans little cigars. This, I thought, looked vaguely familiar.
I snapped it open and found that it contained, of all things, a sheaf of tight little marijuana cigarettes, expertly rolled. I wasn’t at all surprised by their precision because I had rolled them myself, and given the box to Hannah on her birthday last October. At the time I’d rolled her a dozen; there were still twelve of them in the can. I ran one under my nose and inhaled its corky, hybrid smell of marijuana and cheroot. The stuff I’d rolled, I remembered, was pharmaceutical quality, the most powerful Afghan Butthair ever to make its way into the Ohio River Valley. I jabbed the dashboard cigarette lighter, sat back, and waited. In the mirror I caught a glimpse of the tuba that had been stalking me all weekend, and shuddered. I thought of one of the last stories August Van Zorn wrote before he gave up his mastery of a minor literary form in favor of suburban humor and shaggy dog stories. It was a story called “Black Gloves.” It concerned a man, a failed poet, who had committed some unspecified but horrible crime, and who kept finding—in a bar, on the platform bedside him while he waited for a train, in one room of every house he visited, in his study draped over a bust of Hesiod, in the very blankets of his bed—a pair of black ladies’ evening gloves. He threw them in the ash can, tossed them into the river, set them on fire, buried them in the ground. They reappeared. One night he awakened with their empty fingers wrapped around his throat.
The cigarette lighter popped out, and I jumped. The pages of Wonder Boys spilled onto the floor at my feet and pooled around my ankles. I took one hit off the terrible joint and clutched the skunky green smoke in my lungs. I exhaled. In that tiny interval, between inhalation and blowing out, I became disgusted with myself. I squeezed the tip of the joint, tucked the remainder back into the Winterman’s tin, snapped shut the lid, and set the tin back into the glove compartment. Then, trying to refrain from any sudden movements that might alarm the tuba, I crept out of the car, mounted my donkey, and set off on the crooked road after Terry Crabtree.
THE DISPOSITION OF James Leer was debated not in the Benedictine gloom of Walter’s office on the third floor of Arning Hall but in the cool, aseptic terrarium of the Administration Building—a late modernist structure built by a pupil of a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright’s son—in the bright desolation of charcoal carpeting and steel furniture that was the Office of the Chancellor. I’d caught up to Crabtree halfway between Arning and Admin, and we went in to face the Gaskells together. The door to the anteroom was a single thick pane of glass, and as we walked off the elevator we could see James Leer slumped on a low couch inside, legs thrust out and hooked at the ankles, hands folded in his lap, looking very bored. When he saw us coming with Marilyn’s jacket he sat up and waved, a little uncertainly, as if he couldn’t decide whether our appearance portended bad news or good. I was not too sure myself. One hit of that fabled marijuana had been enough to trouble the edges of everything with a woozy shimmer of indeterminacy. I was sorry I’d smoked it. Sooner or later I was always sorry I’d smoked it.
“Why, look who it is,” said Crabtree. “Our Lady of the Flowers himself”
“I’m hosed,” James said, not entirely regretfully, as we came in.
“Kicked out?” I said.
He nodded. “Yes, I think so. I’m not completely sure. They’ve been in there for a while.” He lowered his voice. “Actually, I think they were having a fight or something.”
“Jesus,” said Crabtree, working a last anticipatory kink out of his neck.
We listened; there was a man’s voice, an unintelligible but reasoned murmur. I didn’t hear Sara.
“They aren’t fighting now,” I said.
“Here goes,” said Crabtree. He knocked.
“They stopped fighting when Fred and Amanda showed up,” said James.
Crabtree’s hand froze in midknock.
“Are they in there, too?”
“Yup,” said James. “I told you, I’m hosed.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“They brought the dog with them.”
“We’re hosed,” I told Crabtree.
“Maybe you are.”
“I don’t look stoned?” My heart began to pound. The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight—and if possible operate complicated machinery—while immense shrieking nebulae are coming asunder in his brain. To fail at this—to be found out—carries a mysterious burden of anxiety and shame. “How are my eyes?”
“You look like you’ve been gassed,” he snapped. In my sudden paranoia I was no longer certain he was so glad to have me along. “Just get my back, all right? Let me do the talking.”
“Oh, of course,” I said.
Sara opened the door. To her credit both as an administrator and as
the lover of an irregular man, she did not look particularly surprised to see either of us.
“Come in,” she said, rolling her tired eyes. Then she saw the jacket. That surprised her. “You got it? Walter, they got it!”
Walter Gaskell unfolded himself from his chair and hurried toward us. For a moment I thought that he had aimed himself at my head, and I took a step backward, but he didn’t even look at me. He went straight for the black satin prize. Crabtree stood erect, the jacket draped across one arm, presenting it for Walter’s inspection with pride and a refined air of concern, like a sommelier with a bottle of very old claret. Walter took it from him with equal delicacy and then looked it over carefully for signs of damage.
“It seems to be all right,” he announced.
“Oh, thank heavens. Well, James Leer! You are very lucky!” said Mrs. Leer, appending, with her eyes, “to be alive.” She and her husband had risen from their chairs when we came in, and now Mr. Leer wrapped his bony arm around her in a way that was at once reassuring and triumphant, as if to say, There, I told you everything would work out fine. I imagined that he was always telling her something like this, in the vain hope that such lessons in grace had a cumulative force and that one day she would see that, for the most part, everything did. It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world. She was dressed for a funeral in a belted black dress, black stockings, and a pair of black pumps, and her pale hair sat atop her head as motionless as a nurse’s hat. Fred had evidently been dragged into town from the golf links. He was fond, it appeared, of pistachio plaid. Amanda Leer shook herself free from her husband’s reassuring arm and walked right up to me.
“Now listen, everyone,” Crabtree began, trying to interpose himself between Mrs. Leer and me. She skirted him and got up into my face. Her dress gave off a sour tang of cedar.