Wonder Boys (32 page)

Then, picking my way carefully among the candelabras and piles of books and videocassettes, I stepped around to the great black shipwreck of his bed and found on the wall behind it a group of about forty glossy photographs of movie actors whose common theme, or link to Frank Capra, eluded me. There was Charles Boyer, and a delicate woman I thought might have been Margaret Sullavan, and, once again, the grinning, plump-cheeked, mustachioed face of the man in James Leer’s clock. As with this fellow, many of the actors in the photographs had familiar faces that I couldn’t quite place; several meant nothing to me at all. At the center of the group, however, there were a number of well-known photographs of Marilyn Monroe—naked and aswim in red velvet, reading
Ulysses
, holding down her skirt against a blast of subterranean air—and looking at these, I realized what I was seeing. This was a rival empire, I thought, setting out to conquer the walls of James’s room: the upstart Kingdom of Hollywood Suicide. I supposed the satin jacket would have fit right in.

“Did Herman Bing off himself?” I said, pointing to the man with the flying mustaches. “Would you know Herman Bing if you saw his picture?”

“Check this out,” said Crabtree, ignoring my question. He waved a couple of heavy handfuls of books. “These are
library
books.”

“So?”

“So, they were due”—he looked up at me, waggling his eyebrows—“two years ago. This one’s three years overdue.” He reached for another book and checked the scrap of paper pasted onto its fly. He whistled. “This one’s
five
.” He picked up another. “This one was never even checked
out
.”

“He stole it?”

Crabtree was scrabbling through all the books now, knocking over towers, upsetting arches.

“They’re
all
library books,” he said, crab-walking in a crouch along the foot of the wall. “Every single one of them.”

“Hey,” said James, emerging dressed in my too-large dungarees, rolling up the vast sleeves of my flannel shirt.

“Looks like you’re going to have some
monster
fines, here, Mr. Leer,” said Crabtree.

“Oh,” said James. “Ha. I—uh, see, I never—”

“It’s cool,” said Crabtree. Abruptly he snapped shut one of the stolen books and handed it to me. “Here.” He stood up and took James by the arm. “Let’s blow.”

“Uh, there’s only one problem,” said James, unhooking himself from Crabtree. “The old lady’s been coming down here, like, every half hour, I swear, to check on me.” He glanced over at the face of Herman Bing. “She’ll probably be down in like five minutes.”

“‘The old lady,’” said Crabtree, winking at me. “Why’s she keep checking on you? What’s she think you’re going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said James, coloring. “Run away, I guess.”

I looked at James, remembering the sight of him in the Gaskells’ backyard, the trembling flash of silver in his hand. Then I looked down at the spine of the book Crabtree had handed me and saw, to my amazement, that it was a rebound copy of
The Abominations of Plunkettsburg
, by August Van Zorn, property of the Sewickley Public Library. According to the circulation label it had been checked out three times, most recently in September of 1974. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head of this proof of the uselessness of Albert Vetch’s art, of all art and energy and human life in general. There was a sudden rumble of nausea in my belly and the familiar spray of white noise across the inside of my skull. I waved my hand in front of my face, as though shooing away a cloud of bees. I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.

“We need a decoy,” said Crabtree, “is what we need. To be in your bed and look like you.”

“Yeah, like a couple of big hams,” said James. “They do that in
Against All Flags
.”

“No,” I said, opening my eyes. “Not a couple of hams.” They looked at me. “Have you got some kind of a tarp, down here, or something? An extra blanket? Something heavy?”

James thought about it for an instant, then jerked his head toward the doors at the back of his room. “Through there. The one on the left. In the closet, there’re some blankets. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to empty my trunk,” I said.

I walked back to the door next to the bathroom and came into a dark room that smelled less musty and riverine than James’s. I flipped on the lights and saw that it was a kind of informal recreation room, with unvarnished fir walls and Berber carpeting on the floor. There was a wet bar at one end, and a large old Philco television, and in the very center stood a billiards table. The bar top was bare and the television unplugged and there was not a cue stick in sight. The closet James had mentioned was just beside the door, and in it, on a lower shelf, I found a pile of tattered coverlets and blankets. None of them looked quite large enough for the purpose I had in mind, but there was a striped Hudson Bay, just like the one old Albert Vetch used to spread across his lap against the chill winds blowing in from the Void. I threw this one over my shoulder and went back into James’s room. James and Crabtree were sitting on the bed. Crabtree’s hand had vanished inside James’s shirt—my shirt—and he was moving it around in there with an air of calm and scientific rapture. James was looking down, watching through the window of his open collar as Crabtree felt him up. As I came into the room he looked at me and smiled, a sleepy, vulnerable expression on his face, like someone caught without his glasses on.

“I’m ready,” I said softly.

“Uh huh,” said Crabtree. “So are we.”

I
RAISED THE LID
of the trunk very slowly, to keep it from squeaking. Doctor Dee, Grossman, and the orphaned tuba lay there, in the moonlight, sleeping their various sleeps. I tossed the blanket around Doctor Dee, tucked its corners under his pelvis and withers, and then hoisted his stiff body into my arms. He seemed to have grown lighter since last night, as though the matter of his body were leaking away in the form of an ill-smelling gas.

“You’re next,” I promised Grossman. I didn’t know what I was going to do about the tuba.

“All right if we stay here?” whispered Crabtree, through his open window, as I came around the car. I heard the rattle of the little vial of mollies in his hand.

“I’d prefer it,” I said.

I looked in at James, sitting in the backseat beside Crabtree. He had the glassy eyes and gelid smile of someone bearing up under a mild irritation of the bowels. I could see that he was trying very hard not to be afraid.

“You all right with this, James?” I said, with a toss of my head that encompassed the body of Doctor Dee in my arms, the immense and shadowy backseat of my car, the Leer estate, moonlight, disaster.

He nodded. “If you hear a weird sound like an elevator,” he said, “run.”

“What will that be?”

“It’ll be an elevator.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I carried Doctor Dee along the gravel drive, around the back of the house, to James’s room. To free one hand I rested the dog’s body against the door, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Holding Doctor Dee in the crook of one straining arm I yanked back the covers on James’s bed and dropped his dead body onto the mattress. The springs of the mattress rang like a bell. I pulled the covers up over his head and left a black tuft of fur protruding from the top. This is such a stupid thing to do, I thought; but it looked so convincing that I couldn’t keep from smiling.

When I went back into the billiards room to put away the Hudson Bay blanket, I noticed another array of photographs on the wall over the Philco. These were not movie stills, however. They were old family pictures, none more recent than a shot of a five-year-old but unmistakable James Leer, dressed in a red-and-black cowboy getup, gravely brandishing a pair of chrome six-shooters. There was one of an unknown handsome man holding baby James in his arms, with the Duquesne Incline train cars rising and falling on the wintry hillside behind them, and another of James wearing a tiny red bow tie and sitting on the lap of a much younger Amanda Leer. The rest of the pictures were standard studio portraits from prewar Europe and America, brilliantined men, lard-cheeked babies in frilly gowns, sepia-toned women with marcelled curls. I probably wouldn’t have remarked them at all if one were not the exact duplicate of a photograph that was hanging from a wall in my own house, in the long downstairs hallway where Emily had carefully framed and nailed up a history for herself.

It was a photograph of nine serious men, young to middle-aged, dressed in dark suits and posed in stiff chairs behind a glossy velvet banner. The man in the center of the group, small and dapper and looking faintly angry, I knew for Isidore Warshaw, Emily’s grandfather, who’d owned a candy store on the Hill not far from the present location of Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat.
ZION CLUB OF PITTSBURGH
, read the appliquéd letters on the banner, in an arc over a large Star of David. There was a second motto sewn on underneath the star, in shiny Hebrew characters. I was so surprised to find this photograph on the wall of someone else’s house that it took me a minute to realize I wasn’t looking at the
same
photograph. Then I noticed the tall, thin fellow sitting off to one side of the picture, legs crossed at the knee, staring away to his right while all of the other men faced the camera. He’d always been there; I’d noticed him, without ever quite seeing him, a thousand times before. He was thin, dark-haired, and handsome, but his features had an unformed, blurred appearance, as if he’d moved his head at the instant the shutter opened and closed.

I heard a sound, a low, sorrowful half-human moan like the call of a lighthouse in a fog. For a weird instant I thought that I was hearing the sound of my own voice, but then I could feel it resounding deep in the house, rattling all the hidden joists and rafters and the glass in the picture frames on the wall. The elevator. Amanda Leer was on her way down, perhaps to make certain that her son hadn’t followed George Sanders and Herman Bing into the Great Dissolve.

I switched off the light and hobbled back out to James’s room. As I was about to switch off the light in there, as well, and take my leave of the haunted house of Leer, my gaze fell on the old manual Underwood parked on the desk, its black bulk ornamented, like an old-fashioned hearse, with a ribbon of acanthus leaves. I went over to the desk and yanked open the drawer into which James had stuffed the piece he’d been working on when we arrived. It consisted of ten or eleven tries at a first paragraph, each of them a sentence longer than the previous one, all of them heavily marked up and rearranged with arrows. The uppermost sheet went something like

ANGEL

She went wearing dark glasses to eat the Passover meal with his family, her pale famous hair tied up in a scarf patterned with cherries. They quarrelled in the cab on the way to his parents apartment and made up in the elevator. Her marriage had failed and his was failing. She wasn’t at all sure the time had come for her to meet his family and neither she knew was he. They had dared one another into taking this leap like children balanced on the railing of a bridge. The good things in her life had often proved illusory and she didn’t know if there was really deep water flowing down there below them or only a painted blue screen.

He told her that on this night in Egypt three thousand years ago the Angel of Death had passed over the homes of the Jews. On this night ten years ago his brother had killed himself and he warned her a candle would be burning on the table in the kitchen. She had never considered the idea of death as an angel and it appealed to her. It would be a workmanlike angel with a leather apron, shirtsleeves rolled, forearms rippling with tendon and muscle. Six years later just before she killed herself she would remember

By now the moaning of the elevator had sharpened to a regular rusted squeak, like the sound of an ancient iron water pump, and it was growing louder every second. The house shuddered and sighed and ticked like a heart. I didn’t have much time. I replaced the manuscript, closed the desk drawer, and headed for the door. As I went past the bed I happened to look over at the empty glass I’d noticed before on James’s nightstand, and saw now that it had an orange price sticker on its side that said 79¢. He’d stolen Sam’s memorial from the Warshaws’ kitchen. I went over to the nightstand and picked up the empty glass. Sometime during its twenty-four-hour career, I saw, a moth had flown down into the
yahrzeit
candle and been drowned in the pool of wax. I reached in and pried away the body of the errant moth and laid it in my palm. It was a small, unremarkable, dust-colored moth with tattered wings.

“Poor little fucker,” I said.

The elevator landed like the blow of a hammer on the ground floor of the house. There was a rattle of cagework and the squeal of hinges. I dropped the dead moth into the pocket of my shirt, turned out the light, and then ran out into the deep, silent, Episcopalian darkness, solemn and sweet-smelling as night on a golf course.

When I was safely in the car again I gunned the engine and rolled us away from the gates with their sober pair of pineapples.

“James,” I said, when we were halfway down the block and gaining speed. I checked the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see a wraithlike nightgown dancing in anger at the foot of the Leers’ driveway. There was nothing but moonlight, dark hedgerows, and a distant black vanishing point. “Are you
Jewish
?”

“Sort of he said. He was sitting in the backseat, reunited with his knapsack, looking wide awake. “I mean, yes, I am, but my grandparents—they kind of, I don’t know. Got rid of it, I guess.”

“I always thought—all that Catholicism in your stories—”

“Nah. I just like how twisted that Catholic stuff can get.”

“And then tonight I had you figured, for Episcopal for sure. At least Presbyterian.”

“We go to the Presbyterian church, actually,” said James. “
They
do. At Christmas. Shoot, I remember one time we went to this restaurant, in Mt. Lebanon, and I ordered a cream soda? And they
yelled
at me. They said it was
too Jewish
, Cream soda, that’s about as Jewish as I ever got.”