Wonder Boys

  “You have a lot of nerve, mister,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Her sharp tone caught Walter’s attention and he looked up from the jacket.

  “Yes,” he said, still without quite meeting my gaze, not so much afraid to look at me, I thought, as embarrassed for my sake. My cannabinolic paranoia shot up another notch. Could all of them tell that I wasn’t straight? “You and I need to talk.”

  “I guess we do,” I said. I wondered how much Sara had told him. The safest assumption, I decided, was, probably, all of it.

  Crabtree gave Walter’s arm a reassuring squeeze.

  “Walter, if we could just—”

  “I don’t think you’ll find anyone in this room who’s very happy with you right now, Grady,” said Sara, ominously. She looked over to a corner of her office where there was an immense nylon duffel of the sort used by skiers to carry their gear. I didn’t have too many doubts about what was inside. The image of Doctor Dee lying dead and zippered in a nylon bag struck me at that moment as incredibly poignant. I suddenly recalled his penchant for arranging sticks into almost intelligible hieroglyphic patterns in the grass of the Gaskells’ backyard. He had spent his entire life feverishly trying to communicate some important message that no one had understood and that had now died with him, undelivered. At the thought of this I did a surprising thing. I was surprised by it, anyway. I sat down, with a loud creak, in one of the cowhide-and-chrome office chairs, covered my face in my hands, and started to cry.

  “Grady.” Sara came over and stood beside my chair, near enough to touch me. She didn’t touch me. “Terry?” she said, her voice half pleading, half accusatory. She thought Crabtree must have given me something from his fabled pharmacopoeia. I was a drinker when we met, of course, but it had been several years since she’d last seen me in tears, and never when there were other people around. I should add here that when I say that I sat down and started to cry I don’t intend to convey an impression of copious tears aflow and lusty Pucciniesque sobbing. I was capable of only the most trite display of macho grief, choked, all but silent, a slight dampness around my eyes, like someone trying to stifle a yawn.

  “Yes.” At last Crabtree, having watched me steer the entire operation off the road and into the brambly shoulder, slid over and took control of the wheel. “Mrs. Leer, Mr. Leer, how do you do. My name is Terry Crabtree, I’m a senior editor at Bartizan. I’ve been reading James’s work this weekend, and I’ve discovered for myself what a brilliant young talent he is. You must be very proud of him.”

  Oh—well …” Fred Leer watched his wife’s expression for a cue. She nodded. “Of course we are. But—”

  “Walter, if you and James and the Leers would like to come with me—Sara, is there someplace we could talk? Walter, I have a number of things I need to discuss with you. I had a chance to read your book.”

  “Did you? But I—I feel I ought to—”

  “I was very impressed.”

  “Walter,” said Sara, her tone crisp and administrative. “Why don’t you show Mr. Crabtree and the Leers into the Hurley Room? I’ll look after Professor Tripp.”

  Walter hesitated a moment, looking at his wife. His craggy face was pinned up at the corners in a hard smile that might have been angry or merely tolerant. I could still feel him deliberately not looking at me. Of all the ways he could have chosen to react to my presence, I figured a disgusted hauteur was neither the least desirable nor the least deserved. He held the jacket over one arm and petted its collar with soft automatic strokes. His emptied-out gaze was fixed on the face of his wife. He was giving her one last chance, I thought. She put her hand on my shoulder. He nodded and followed Crabtree and the Leers out of the office.

  “What’s gotten into you, Professor Tripp?” said Sara.

  At first I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

  “I lost my book,” I managed to say, finally identifying the source of my tears. The thought of old Doctor Dee vainly arranging his sticks in the grass had made me feel terrible pity, and not—naturally—for him. “I lost Wonder Boys.”

  “All of it?”

  “Except for seven pages.”

  “Oh, Grady.” She knelt down on the floor beside my chair and pulled to her bosom the addled head in which vast shrieking universes were flying apart. She lay her cool palm against my forehead as if checking for fever. Her tone was acerbic but tender. “You’re such a putz.”

  “I know.”

  She began to search my temples for gray hairs. When she found one she gave it a ruthless yank.

  “Ouch. How many?”

  “Dozens. It’s very sad.”

  “I’m old.”

  “Very old.” She yanked another one, and held it out before her with a philosophic air like a conventional Hamlet with his skull. “So I told Walter everything.”

  “I figured. Ow. He already knew, right?”

  “He said not.”

  I lifted my head and looked at her.

  “Does he still love you?”

  She considered this question. She poked her tongue in her cheek and thought it over. She rocked back on her heels and rolled her eyes, trying to recollect their conversation.

  “It didn’t come up,” she said. “Do you—still love Emily? Don’t answer that. What did she say when you told her about us?”

  Had I told Emily about Sara and me? All at once I couldn’t remember. I could still feel the cool imprint of Sara’s hand on my forehead.

  “No,” she said, when she saw that an answer was not going to emerge anytime soon from my spavined brain. “Don’t answer that either. Just—just tell me what you’re going to do.”

  I was suddenly aware of my lungs, of their inexplicable and regular functioning, of the rhythm of my breath that was always there, audible, visible, palpable. Why didn’t my lungs just stop? What would happen if they did? What if the only thing that had kept my lungs working all these years was the simple fact that I never gave them a moment’s thought?

  “Grady?”

  “I can’t breathe,” I said.

  That good academician Sara Gaskell read something more into this statement than I had intended. She scrambled to her feet and jumped back, away from me, as if I had taken a swing at her. I was saying, she thought, that I felt smothered by her and by the spawn of Grady. Perhaps I was.

  “Okay,” she said, waving me to the door. “Out. Goodbye.”

  “No. I’m sorry.” I extended a conciliatory hand to her. “I didn’t mean it, I—I’m just so tired.”

  “Just so stoned, you mean.”

  “No! I only had one hit! Truthfully! Then I put it back!”

  “What a breakthrough!” she said. She checked her watch. “Quarter to two! Jesus. The Farewell.” When she looked up at me again her eyes were narrow and cold and not entirely devoid of hatred. I had been wasting her time, and that was the worst thing you could have done to Sara Gaskell.

  “All right, Grady, you stay, I’ll go. I have to take care of this whole James Leer thing before the Farewell. You can just sit here and breathe, all right? Do a lot of breathing. Breathe, and smoke pot, and sit here, and see if you can squeeze out a few more of those absurd little tears of yours.”

  “Sara—”

  I stood up, took a step toward her, and made the cynical and pathetic last attempt those who knew me well would have learned by now to expect.

  “Sara,” I said, “what if I told you that I wanted to marry you?”

  She flattened her left hand against my stomach and held it there a moment, keeping me literally at arm’s length. Then, as if I were teetering on a narrow shelf of rock, high above a canyon, with my back to the blue abyss, she gave me the gentlest of shoves. Before I fell I noticed, with a pang, the pale glint of her wedding band. Then I hit the floor, hard.

  She stepped over me, into the outer office, and then strode off toward the Hurley Room, her heels knocking marble, the hem of her pleated skirt flicking at
the air behind her like the tooth of a lash. After a moment I heard voices echoing in the hall and the chime of the elevator. Then I heard nothing at all. And that, those who knew me well would unquestionably have concluded, was exactly the response I deserved.

  I DIDN’T WANT TO attract attention, slipping into the auditorium of Thaw Hall, and so I climbed the stairs to the balcony and took a seat at the back. There were fewer people here to listen to Walter Gaskell deliver his customary valedictory, however, than there’d been two nights earlier for Q.’s lecture, and after a few minutes I was able to move all the way down to the loge, to the very last seat on the left. Pinned by an arabesque button to the wall beside my head hung one end of a deep velour swag, heavy with dust. I pressed myself against it, inhaling its thick smell of mildewed flag, and gazed out over the five hundred heads below, trying to pick out Sara’s.

  Crabtree I spotted right away, in the front row, slouched, in shirtsleeves, watching Walter with a very sleepy and complacent look on his face. If he were a cat he would have been licking the blood and feathers from his whiskers. He had dressed James for the assembly, I saw, in his own mushroom-colored sport jacket, worn over my old flannel shirt. James was sitting right there beside him, spine erect, hands folded politely in his lap, his earnest Adam’s apple working its way up and down as he drank in the urbane good counsel of his queer old dean—the standard Walter Gaskell homily, in that room full of agents and editors, to go forth and work hard at one’s craft, always without regard to such vulgar concerns as finding an agent or an editor.

  When someone at the end of their row coughed, James turned, and happened to look up, and spotted me in my corner. I was startled: I’d felt almost safe, lurking there like John Wilkes Booth behind the dusty velour drape and the scrim of my own loneliness. James’s eyes got very wide, and he was about to turn and give Crabtree a poke in the ribs, but I put a finger to my lips and drew a pleat of dusty velour sideways across my face. Although he looked doubtful, he nodded, solemnly, and turned back to the stage. At the sight of James in Crabtree’s jacket I experienced a sharp pang of abandonment, out of all proportion to the unremarkable circumstance of male lovers sharing clothes. I felt suddenly bereft not only of Crabtree and his love but of my earliest bright image of myself, of my trajectory across the world. It’s not fashionable, I know, in this unromantic age, for a reasonably straight man to think of finding his destiny in the love of another man, but that was how I’d always thought of Crabtree. I guess you could say that in a strange sort of way I’d always believed that Crabtree was my man, and I was his. It was only proper, I supposed, for the first thing in my life that had ever felt right to be the last one to be proven wrong.

  In any case, I hadn’t come here to find Crabtree. I sat forward in my seat and resumed my inspection of the people in the endless rows below me, looking for Sara Gaskell. I had managed for the moment to forget about my breathing, but the drug was still at work in my brain and now I seemed to have become overconscious of the muscles and machinery of my throat. I was thinking so intently about the swallowing reflex that it became impossible for me to swallow. I couldn’t find Sara, and all that scanning of the shifting mass of heads down there below me made me feel sick.

  “Looking for someone?”

  It was Carrie McWhirty, the long-suffering author of Liza and the Cat People. She was a prematurely motherly girl, with steel-rimmed glasses through which she scowled at me, looking more than a little revolted. I wondered if there were already stories going around.

  “Carrie,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I know,” she said, sounding sad as a bassoon. “Were you looking for Hannah?” She pointed. “She’s over there.”

  I knew that I shouldn’t have, but—so—I looked. Hannah was sitting several rows from the stage, off to the right-hand side of the orchestra, on the aisle. She was nodding her head, every so often, and smirking into her cupped hand, and I could see that the person on the other side of her was entertaining her more than Walter Gaskell—doubtless at the latter’s expense. Her hair was pulled back in a clip, exposing her neck. A hand appeared around the back of her head and settled lightly on her left shoulder, and she suffered it. She kicked her long legs in their bright red boots. The printed program slid from her lap, and when she leaned down to retrieve it I saw beside her a cheerful pink face framed in long hair even fairer than hers. I sat back and closed my eyes.

  “Who is that guy?” said Carrie. “Do you know him?”

  “His name’s Jeff,” I said.

  For a long time after that, I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. I sat there, listening to Walter’s soft voice, with its faint granite echo of New York. He seemed to be winding down, now; he related a few purportedly amusing incidents of the last few days, none of which concerned the murder of a dog, the theft of a sacred garment, or a wife who was carrying another man’s child in her womb.

  “And now,” he said, “I have some good news. A round of congratulations is in order.” He paused. He had come, at last, to the Plums. Someone at WordFest had found a publisher for her children’s book, Blood on a Bustier. Another participant, a fellow I knew who wrote features for the Post-Gazette, had landed his crime novel, The Loneliest Prawn, at Doubleday. I may, thinking back on it, have those titles reversed. There was applause, which, I imagined, the people in question rose to their feet and acknowledged.

  “It’s especially exciting,” Walter went on, “to announce that our own James Leer, a student here, has found a publisher for his first novel, which I believe is called The Lovely Parade.”

  I opened my eyes in time to see Walter nodding genially to James in the front row, a look on his face of amazing warmth and benevolence. People were clapping and calling out to James but he just sat there, with his hands in his lap, staring straight ahead, at nothing, at the dust of Thaw Hall hanging in the lights of the stage. When Crabtree gave him a jab in the rib cage, James rose to his feet as if jerked by a cord. Carrie McWhirty pointed at him and whispered to the person on the other side of her, “I had a class with him.” James turned to face the five hundred people behind him, and the fifty above him, standing there looking lost and alarmed as a child caught in the midst of a startled flock of pigeons. On his lanky frame Crabtree’s jacket fit remarkably badly. It gaped at the collar and showed an inch of pale wrist. His shoes were the same old pair of dented black Packards, and the red plaid work shirt lent him a rubish air. He stood there like that, looking like a scarecrow hung from a nail, until the applause first slowed, then sputtered, and then died out altogether. The entire hall was silent, and James just stood, shifting from foot to foot, swallowing, looking as though he might be about to throw up. I saw that it was not the delicious moment described by cinema and fiction when the butt of jokes and resentment, when the mad boy, was applauded. The admiration of his tormentors was itself a kind of torment.

  “The guy’s kind of an alien probe,” said Carrie. “If you know what I mean.”

  “Take a bow, James,” called Hannah Green, loud enough for everyone in the auditorium to hear. There was laughter. James looked at her. He had gone bright red in the face. After one last innocent moment of feeling like an alien probe, he spread out his hands and hung his head and, as he must, took his first sweet bow as a wonder boy. Then he tumbled back into his seat like a blown umbrella and covered his face with both hands.

  Walter Gaskell cleared his throat.

  “Finally, and perhaps not least importantly,” he went on, sounding impatient, “Terry Crabtree, of Bartizan, has also decided to publish my own book, The Last American Marriage, parts of which some of you are already familiar with.”

  Wild, wholehearted, obsequious applause. Crabtree smacked James on the shoulder and then gave it a fond squeeze; another successful narrative from the quick aquiferous pen of Terry Crabtree. Walter took a rapid, dignified bow of his own, thanked the secretaries and volunteers, quoted Kafka on the subject of axes and ice, wished us all a productive year,
and then, with a Vincent Price cackle, unleashed the fledgling writers like a tattered flock of bats. The lights came up. People started to file out.

  “Are you coming, Professor Tripp? Mr. Q. is throwing one last party at the Gaskells’,” said Carrie. “He asked me to come,” she added.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. I watched Jeff follow Hannah up the aisle, his hand at the small of her back. They stopped to congratulate James, who stood pulling at the cuffs of his jacket in a ring of well-wishers.

  “Okay, then,” said Carrie, sounding doubtful. “I’ll see you, Professor Tripp.”

  “You betcha,” I said, and then I saw Sara, at the other end of the auditorium, by the side exit. She was looking right at me, I thought. I stood up to go after her and raised a hand, but as I was in the act of wildly waving she turned and walked, without a sign, out of Thaw Hall.

  I offered Carrie McWhirty a gelid little smile, and when she had left me alone I sat down, heavily, like someone burdened with a fever. I put my hand to my forehead and thought I detected a febrile sheen. The clamor of parting conversation down in the lobby swelled briefly, then died. Sam Traxler came in, carrying a vacuum cleaner and a milk crate filled with cleaning supplies, and walked the aisles and rows of the auditorium, gathering up the larger pieces of trash and stuffing them into a plastic bag. After a while he disappeared, and I was alone. I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all the fruit of the past decade of my life. I had no family, no friends, no car, and probably, after this weekend, no job. I sat back in my chair, and as I did so I heard the unmistakable crinkle of a plastic bag. I reached into the torn hip pocket of my jacket and passed my hand through the hole, into the lining, where I found my little piece of Humboldt County, warm from the heat of my body.

  There was a creaking of hinges below me. Sam Traxler came back into the auditorium and started for his shiny chrome vacuum cleaner. Just as he was about to switch it on, I called out to him. “Yo, Sam.”