Wonder Boys (28 page)

“I’m Fred Leer,” said the man, when he got to the steps where I was waiting. I’d left the shovel stabbed into the grass of the pet cemetery, next to the unfinished grave, and hopped up onto the front steps of the house, as if that was where visitors were always greeted. I stood there, Grady the Jolly Innkeeper, smiling, my hands clasped behind my back. “This is my wife, Amanda.”

“Grady Tripp.” I held out my hand to him, and he gave it a long, hard squeeze. He had a salesman’s handshake, practiced and automatic. “James’s teacher. How are you?”

“
Very
embarrassed,” said Mrs. Leer. They followed me across the porch, over to the front door, and waited patiently while I fumbled with my keys. It’d been years since I’d had to work the locks of this house. “We want to apologize for James.”

“No need,” I said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.” I fell into the living room, switched on the light, and saw that they were both at least fifteen years older than the silver-haired tycoon and frosted ex-cheerleader I’d seen fox-trotting toward me across the moonlit lawn of my imagination. They were dressed for the ballroom of an ocean liner, all right, but their cheeks were ruined, and the whites of their eyes were yellow, and their hair in both cases was iron gray, although he wore his cut crisp as a sailor’s and hers was done in a neat little Junior League page boy. I figured Fred for sixty-five and Amanda for a couple of years younger. James must have been a late addition to the household.

“My, this is a charming house,” said Amanda Leer. She took a careful step forward into the room. The heels of her shoes were much too tall for her, considering her height and her age. They were expensive-looking black calfskin things, with black leather bows on the toes. She was wearing a modest but not at all matronly black dress, with sheer black sleeves and three flounces. Her nails were manicured and her lips rouged and she smelled of Chanel No. 5. “Oh, this is an
adorable
house.”

“Grady, this is a nice place you’ve got out here,” said Fred Leer.

I looked around the living room. All of the furniture had been shoved back into its usual disorder, with none of the chairs oriented toward one another and barely enough room for a person of my size to navigate from the stairs to the fireplace. Instead of being hung with the duck-hunting prints, pastoral landscapes, or yellowed catalog plates of antique farm equipment which seemed called for, the knotty pine walls of the cottage were a jumble of Helen Frankenthaler and Marc Chagall, aerial views of Pittsburgh and Jerusalem, bar mitzvah and graduation portraits of the Warshaw children, a Diane Arbus poster, a framed photograph of Irv posed with some beefy grinning Mellon in the belfry of the Campanile, and a couple of fairly terrible imitation Mirós that Deborah had painted in college. There was a barbed-wire tangle of Israeli sculpture taking up too much room on the lowboy. The Scrabble board was still lying out on the coffee table, abandoned in midgame, offering like a Ouija board such enigmatic counsel as
UVULA
and
SQUIRT
, and there was ice melting in a couple of tumblers by the TV.

“It’s my in-laws’,” I said. “I’m just here visiting.”

“And your mother-in-law sounded
so
kind and concerned when I spoke to her,” said Amanda Leer.

“Well, they wanted to meet you,” I said. “But they got tired. It was kind of a big day around here.”

“Oh, really, listen,” said Fred Leer, “we were
late
.” He dragged his wristwatch out of the sleeve of his snappy dinner jacket and I recognized it at once. It was the gold Hamilton, with an elongated Art Moderne face, that James would sometimes wear to class and sit loudly winding when opinion in the workshop went against him. “Oh, my word, two
hours
late!”

“We just couldn’t get away as quickly as we would’ve
liked
,” Amanda said. “It’s Fred’s birthday today, you see, and we were throwing a party at the golf club. We’ve been planning it all year. It was a lovely party.”

“What golf club is that? Where do you folks live?” But I already knew where they lived. They were a couple of rich bastards.

“St. Andrew’s,” said Fred. “We live in Sewickley Heights.”

So the mystic lightning that tormented the dark skies of James Leer’s fiction, all that sorrowful, cabbages-and-hell Slavic Catholicism, that too was also pure sham.

“Now,” said Amanda Leer, losing her Presbyterian smile. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs,” I said. “Asleep. I don’t think he knows you’re here. I’ll go get him.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “
I’ll
go get him.”

“Well, maybe you’d better let me.” There was a startling implication of violence in her tone. She sounded as though she intended to yank James out of bed by his ear and drag him by this handle down the stairs and out to the car. I wondered now if it had been such a good idea to call his parents in the first place. He wasn’t a child. People his age were allowed to get drunk and pass out. I might even have argued that they ought to be required to do so. “There are an awful lot of doors up there. Ha ha. You might wake up the wrong person.”

“Oh, of course, you’re right, Grady,” she said. The smile was back. “We’ll just wait for him down here.”

“Hate to cause you so much trouble,” said Fred. He shook his head. “I’d
like
to know what is the matter with our James, I’ll tell you that.”

“I know what’s the matter with him,” said Amanda, darkly, without elaborating. “Oh, boy.”

“He sure likes movies,” I said.

“Don’t get me started,” said Amanda.

“Don’t,” said James’s father. “Please.” He tried to make it sound humorous, but there was a hint of genteel pleading in his voice.

“Be right back,” I said. “And happy birthday.”

“Thank you, Grady,” said Fred.

I found James not in bed but on the upstairs landing, in his long black coat, looking at me like I was the jailer come to lead him to the gallows tree.

“I don’t want to go with them,” he said.

“Look, James.” I kept my voice low. There was a bar of light shining at the bottom of every door. I didn’t want to draw an audience. I steered James into the bathroom and locked us in. “Now, James,” I said, “Listen, buddy, I think you really ought to get on home.”

“I’m
fine
,” he said. “I’m having a good time.”

“You were having
too
good a time, I’d say. I’m clearly not a good person for you to hang around with right now. James?”

He wouldn’t look at me. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“James,” I said. I could feel myself breaking a critical promise I’d made to him at some point in the last twenty-four hours, and I wished that I could remember what it was. “Things, listen, things—things are really weird with me these days. I—I’m floundering. Just a little bit. I—see, I have enough
blame
to take already, okay, without having to take the blame if something bad happened to
you.
Come on. I’m serious. Go home.”

“That isn’t my home,” he said coldly.

“Oh no?” I said. “Where’s your home, then? Carvel?” I withdrew my hand from his shoulder. “Or would that be Sylvania?”

He looked down at his feet, in their scuffed-up black brogues. We could hear the low murmuring of the two old people downstairs.

“Why did you tell me all of that, James?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry. Really. Please don’t make me go with them.”

“James, they’re your parents.”

“They’re not,” he said, looking up, his eyes wide. “They’re my
grand
parents. My parents are
dead
.”

“Your grandparents?” I closed the lid of the toilet and sat down. My ankle was throbbing from the exertion of digging a grave for Doctor Dee, and the plunge into the stale waters of the backyard had spoiled Irv’s dressing. “I don’t believe you.”

“I swear. My father had his own airplane. We used to fly up to Quebec in it. He was from there. Really. We had a house in the Laurentians. They were flying up there without me one day. And they crashed. I swear! It was in the newspaper!”

I looked at him. His eyes were filled with tears and his pale face was printed with the faint blue map of his bloodstream. His tone was utterly sincere.

“It was in the newspaper” I said, rubbing at my own eyes, trying to work a little keenness of judgment back into them.

“He was a senior vice president at Dravo. Seriously, he was a friend of Caliguiri and everything. My mother was, like, a big socialite, okay? Her maiden name was Guggenheim.”

“I remember that,” I said. It had been in the newspaper. “Five or six years ago.”

He nodded. “Their plane went down right outside of Scranton,” he said.

I couldn’t resist. “Near Carvel?” I said.

He shrugged and looked embarrassed. “I guess so,” he said. “Please don’t make me go with them, okay?” He could see that I was wavering. “Go down and tell them you just couldn’t wake me. Please? They’ll
leave
. They don’t really
care
.”

“James, they care a lot,” I said, although in truth they’d seemed far more concerned with my opinion of them, I thought, than with the welfare of their son. Or grandson, as the case might be.

“They treat me like a freak,” he said. “She makes me sleep in the basement of my own house! It’s
my
house, Professor Tripp. My parents left it to
me
.”

“But why would they
say
they were your parents if they aren’t, James? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Did they say that?” he said, looking surprised.

I screwed up my eyes and bit my lip, and tried to reconstruct the conversation in the living room.

“I think they did,” I said. “I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth.”

“That would be a new one. God, they’re so
twisted
. I don’t know why I even gave Mrs. Warshaw their phone number. I must have been drunk.” He shivered, although it was quite warm, even stuffy, in the bathroom. “They’re so
cold
.”

I sat up straight and studied his pale, blurred, handsome young face, trying to believe him.

“James,” I said. “Come on. That man is obviously your father. You look just like him.”

He blinked and looked away. After a moment he took a deep breath, swallowed, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his hard-luck overcoat. Then he looked at me, his gaze steady, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded husky and uncomfortable.

“There’s a reason for that,” he said.

I thought about that for a second or two.

“Get out of here,” I said at last.

“That’s why
she
hates me. That’s why she makes me sleep in the basement.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “In the
crawl
space!”

“In the crawl space,” I said, and just like that I knew he was lying again, “With the rats, and the casks of Amontillado.”

“I swear,” he said, but he’d gone too far, and he knew it. His eyes darted away from my face, and this time they remained averted. Those two people waiting downstairs could only be his natural parents; if she hadn’t said so to me, Amanda had certainly identified herself to Irene as James’s mother. I stood up and shook my head.

“That’s enough, now, James,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

I took hold of his elbow and guided him out of the bathroom. He went quietly. In the living room I turned him over to the custody of the Leers.

“Look at you,” said Amanda, as we came down the stairs. “Shame on you.”

James said, “Let’s just go.”

“What did you
do
?” She looked him up and down, horrified. “I threw that coat in the
garbage
, James.”

He shrugged. “I dug it back out,” he said.

She turned to me, looking, for the first time, truly grave. “He doesn’t wear that thing to
class
, does he, Professor Tripp?”

“Never,” I said. “No, I’ve never seen it before tonight.”

“Come on, Jimmy,” said Fred, wrapping his fingers around the thin upper stalk of James’s arm. “Let’s leave these good people alone. Good night, then, Grady.”

“Good night. Nice to have met you both,” I said. “Take care of him,” I added, and immediately regretted it.

“Don’t you worry about
that
,” said Amanda Leer. “We’ll take care of him, all right.”

“Let
go
of me,” said James. He tried to pull free, but the old man’s grip on him was humiliating and firm. As he was dragged out the front door into the night, James turned back to look at me, his mouth twisted and sarcastic, his eyes reproachful.

“The Wonder brothers,” he said.

Then his parents hustled him across the front yard and, like a couple of kidnappers in a low-budget thriller, stuffed him without ceremony into the back of their beautiful car.

A
FTER
J
AMES WAS GONE
, I went to stand in the doorway of Sam’s old room. The moon was shining in through the window and I could see the unmade bed, empty, admirably bare and cool. I felt myself drawn toward it. I went in and switched on the light. A few years after his death the bedroom that was Sam’s in the house on Inverness Avenue had been converted into a kind of sewing room or study for Irene, but this room in the country remained his, and the decor and furnishings were those of a long-ago boy. Threadbare cowpokes on horseback tossed their curling lariats across the bedspread. The books on the shelf above the three-quarter-size desk bore titles such as
The Real Book of the Canadian Mounties, Touchdown!, The Story of the Naval Academy,
and
Lem Walker, Space Surgeon.
The headboard and dresser and the aforementioned desk formed a matched set, vaguely nautical in design, trimmed with rope and mock-iron grommets. Everything was faded and frayed, speckled with mildew and the industry of termites. Irene and Irv never articulated any conscious desire to make it a shrine or museum to their dead—their irremediably biological—son, but the fact remained that they hadn’t changed a thing here, and some of his old belongings from Pittsburgh—a box turtle shell, a statue of Kali, a Reisenstein Junior High banner—had even found their way like finger bones to the reliquary, out to Sam’s bedroom at Kinship.