Wonder Boys (33 page)

“Dangerously close,” said Crabtree, solemnly. “Next thing you know you would have been strapping that little box onto your forehead.”

I said, “So what did you think of Passover, then? Of the Seder? Of the Warshaws?”

“It was interesting,” said James. “They were nice.”

“Did it make you feel Jewish?” I said, thinking that perhaps this was the reason he’d stolen the burnt-out candle from the Warshaws’ kitchen. “Being with them?”

“Not really.” He sat back and tipped his head backward, looking up at the cold stars through the bare canopy of tree limbs overhead. “It made me feel like I wasn’t anything.” He said something more after that, but with his head tilted back his voice emerged pinched from his larynx, and the wind passing over the car carried his words away.

“I didn’t catch that last part,” I told him.

“I said, ‘Like I’m nothing,’” he said.

W
HEN WE GOT BACK
to my house the front door was wide open and all the lights were on. The stereo was playing softly in the living room.

“Hello?” I called. I went into the living room. It was deserted. There were crushed tortilla chips on the rug, cassettes and album jackets scattered everywhere; a giant Texas-shaped ashtray, which someone had left balanced on the arm of a wing-backed chair, had since tipped over onto the seat cushion, spilling butts and ashes all over the pale striped fabric. I went through the dining room, into the kitchen, and then checked out the laundry room, looking for survivors, collecting empty beer cans and turning off the lights as I went.

“There’s nobody here,” I said, circling back out into the hallway, where I’d left Crabtree and James; they too had vanished. I started down the hall after them, to see if I could interest anyone in blowing a joint with me and then searching the late-night dial for a good infomercial or a Hercules movie, but I didn’t get far before I heard the tongue of Crabtree’s door latch click discreetly against the jamb.

“Crabtree,” I called, in a panicked whisper.

There was a pause, and then his head emerged into the hall.

“Ye-es?” he said. He looked a little exasperated. I’d caught him just as he was tucking his napkin into the collar of his shirt, licking his lupine chops. “What, Tripp?”

I stuck my hands into the pockets of my jacket. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask him to pull an all-nighter with me, the way we’d used to do, sitting on opposite sides of a nine-pack of Old Milwaukee, inveighing against our enemies, smoking black cigars, speculating for hours on the meaning of a certain enigmatic question in the lyrics of “Any Major Dude.” I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think I could face another night in the emptiness of my bed. I wanted to ask him if there was anything in my life that was real and coherent and likely to remain the same way tomorrow.

“Here,” I said. From one of the hip pockets of my jacket I produced the fabled Lov-O-Pus I’d bought this morning at the Giant Eagle, on the way out to Kinship. I tossed it at him, and he caught it in one hand. “Wear it in good health.”

He read the tentacular promises made in wiggly green letters on the label of the Lov-O-Pus condom. He smiled.

“Thanks,” he said. He started to close the door.

“Crabtree!”

He stuck his head back out into the hall.

“What am I going to do now?”

He shrugged. “Why don’t you go finish your book?” he said. There was a nasty and unmistakable gleam in his eye, and I saw that he had taken a look at the manuscript of
Wonder Boys
; there was no question about it. “Aren’t you just about done?”

“Just about,” I said.

“There you go,” he said. “Why don’t you give it a good hour and wrap the whole thing up?”

Then he drew back into the bedroom and firmly shut the door.

I went into the kitchen again, pressed my ear against the door to the basement, and listened for a few minutes without hearing anything but the slow deep breathing of the old house itself. The wood felt cool against my cheek. My ankle was throbbing, and I realized that it had been hurting for the last hour without my having noticed. All at once it was killing me, and I told myself that I really ought to drive to the E.R. at Shadyside and have someone take a look at it. Instead I went over to the wreckage of bottles, tumblers, and plastic wineglasses on the kitchen table and administered a tall dose of Kentucky anesthesia. Then I carried the glass of bourbon down the front hall and into my office. The manuscript was gone from its accustomed resting place on my desk, and I panicked for an instant before remembering that Hannah had taken it down into her bedroom to read.

“Hey.”

I turned. There was a man sitting on the Honor Bilt, watching the television with the sound off. It was my old student, the one who’d dropped my class after coming to the conclusion that I was only a cheap Faulkner imitator with nothing of value to impart. He sat slumped backward on the sofa with a forty-ounce bottle of beer pressed between the ripped knees of his jeans, smiling at me as if we were the oldest of friends and he’d been waiting all night for me to show up. A copy of
The Land Downstairs
lay open on his lap but he was not giving it his close attention. In fact I thought he had it upside down.

“How are you?” I said. “Is it Jim?”

“Jeff,” he said.

“Welcome,” I said with mock solemnity, trying to let him see that I thought he had a lot of nerve but that it was nonetheless cool for him to be there. “What are you watching?”

“The news,” he said. “The news from Bulgaria.”

It was a wildly colored, out-of-focus program, streaked and pitted by the ionosphere. The newsreader had on a blazer the color of a taxicab and wore a vast hairdo like a thick sable hat. According to the reference date in the corner of the picture the transmission was already a few days old, but I didn’t suppose that mattered when the whole thing was in Bulgarian and turned all the way down. I sat down on the sofa and watched with Jeff for five minutes.

“Well,” I said, standing up. “Good night.”

“Ciao,” said Jeff without looking up.

I went down to Hannah’s room. All the lights were on, and she was lying on her bed, surrounded by the scattered pages of
Wonder Boys
, asleep. She was dressed in a white nightgown, lace at the bodice. Her feet were bare. They were thick, wide, ordinary feet, with long crooked toes. I sat down on the edge of her bed and hung my head. From this vantage I could see the little moth lying in my pocket. I fished him out and stared at him for a while.

“What are you holding in your hand?” said Hannah.

I started. She was looking at me through half-closed lids, not really awake. I uncurled my fingers, revealing the moth, embalmed in a thin white coating of wax.

“Just a moth,” I said.

“I fell asleep,” she told me, her voice cobwebbed with sleep. “I was reading.”

“That good, huh?” I said. There was no reply. “How far did you get?”

But her eyes had fluttered closed again. I looked at the clock. It was four thirty-two in the morning. I collected the parts of my manuscript, slapped them together, and set them on the nightstand beside her bed. Her bedclothes were all knotted and twisted, so I shook them out and let them fall billowing over her like parachute silks. I covered her feet, kissed her cheek, and wished her good night. Then I turned out the lights and went back upstairs to my office. Jeff had fallen asleep, too, stretched out shoeless on the Honor Bilt. I switched off the television, went over to my desk, and sat down to work.

I was still typing away and Jeff was still sleeping at nine o’clock, when the policeman came to take James Leer away.

P
ALE, PINK
T
ERRY
C
RABTREE
was sitting, propped up by two feather pillows and a throw cushion, in the wreckage of the bedclothes, naked except for a pair of pin-striped blue boxers, his legs drawn up to his chest. His body hair ran more to blond than I remembered, and the light of a Sunday morning, coming in through the window behind him, discovered a faint golden aura around his thighs and his shins and at the backs of his hands. He held the typescript of
The Love Parade
balanced against the tops of his knees with one hand, and with the other he was stroking at his bedmate’s hair. This was the sole part of James Leer visible when I came into the bedroom: the rest of him could only be inferred amid the heap of blankets and twisted sheets at Crabtree’s side, from which the hair of his head emerged, in the vicinity of his pillow, exactly like the great black shock of Doctor Dee’s fur. Discarded shirts and trousers struck poses on the floor around the bed. There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent. I swung halfway into the room, hanging on the doorknob. Crabtree looked up at me and smiled. It was a kindly smile, lacking in all irony. I hadn’t seen its like on his face in years. I was sorry to have to wipe it away.

“Is he awake?” I said, relieved not to have interrupted them in the act of exploring each other’s lunar surfaces, or engaging in some other Crabtreevian activity that would have obliged James to speak to Officer Pupcik whilst dangling by his ankles from the ceiling, dressed as an owl. “He has a visitor.”

Crabtree raised an eyebrow and studied my face, trying to read in it the identity of James’s visitor. After a fruitless few seconds he leaned across the bed and peeled back the walls of James’s cocoon, exposing the whole of his head, his downy neck, the pale smooth expanse of his back. James Leer lay curled up like a child, his face to the window, immobile. Crabtree pursed his lips, then looked up at me and shook his head. Sound asleep. The smile on his face was indulgent and almost
sweet
, and the thought crossed my mind that Crabtree might be in love. That was too disturbing a notion to entertain for very long, however, and I dismissed it from my mind. I’d always counted on and found comfort in Terry Crabtree’s unique ability to regard all romantic love with genuine and pitiless scorn.

“He’s pretty worn out, I imagine, poor kid,” he said, pulling the covers back over James’s head.

“Regardless,” I said. “He’s going to have to wake up.”

“Why?” said Crabtree. “Who is it? Old Fred?” He grinned and made a sweeping gesture with one hand to encompass all the odors and disorders of the room. “Send him on in.”

I said, “A policeman.”

Crabtree opened his mouth, then closed it. For an unprecedented instant he could think of nothing to say. Then he set the typescript of
The Love Parade
on the night table beside him, lowered his lips to James’s ear, and whispered, too low for me to hear what he was saying. After a moment James moaned, softly, then got his head up off the mattress. He craned it around toward me, squinting, newly hatched, his brilliantined hair sticking up at all angles from his head.

“Hey, Grady,” he said.

“Good morning, James.”

“A policeman.”

“Afraid so.”

After another moment he managed to roll himself all the way over, onto his back. He sat up on one elbow, blinking one eye and then the other, working his jaw in circles, as if experimenting with the functions of a brand-new body. The blankets slid from his shoulders, leaving him naked to the waist. The skin on his belly was mottled with sleep. On his shoulder he wore red traces of Crabtree’s lips and incisors.

“What does he want?”

“Well, I guess he wants to ask you about what happened at the Chancellor’s house on Friday night.”

James didn’t say anything. He lay there, without moving, his left temple resting companionably against the upper part of Crabtree’s right arm.

“You
snore
,” he told Crabtree.

“So I hear,” said Crabtree, nudging James lightly with his shoulder. “Go on, Jimmy,” he added. “Just tell them what I told you to tell them.”

James nodded, slowly, looking down with longing at the deep declivity growing cold in the center of his pillow. Then his eyes opened wide, and he looked up at me.

“Okay,” he said. He gave his head a determined nod, then swung his legs around, stood up, and went bare-assed to the foot of the bed, where he found his BVDs. He dressed himself deliberately and quickly. As he pulled on his shirt he noticed the long archipelago of hickeys on his shoulder. He ran his fingers softly across them, and looked over at Crabtree with a smile that was crooked and half grateful. He didn’t seem particularly distressed or bewildered, I thought, on awakening to his first morning as a lover of men. While he worked his way up the buttons of my old flannel shirt, he kept glancing over at Crabtree, not in any mawkish way but with deliberateness and an air of wonder, as if studying Crabtree, memorizing the geometry of his knees and elbows.

“So,” I said. “What did you tell him to tell them?”

“Oh, that he’s very, very sorry for shooting the Chancellor’s dog, and that he’s willing to do anything to make it up.”

James nodded, and bent to pick up his socks.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” I said.

James stood up. “I left my shoes in the hall,” he said.

“I don’t really think you’re going to need
shoes
,” said Crabtree. “The guy’s not going to arrest you.”

A floorboard creaked, and there was a jingle of metal from down the hall. We all looked at one another.

“Mr. Tripp?” called Officer Pupcik. “Everything all right back there?”

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re coming.” I put my hand on James’s shoulder and steered him toward the door. “Come on,
Jimmy
.”

As he started out of the bedroom, James turned to Crabtree and nodded toward the manuscript on the bedside table.

“So,” he said. “How is it?”

Crabtree raised his chin, tipping his head back until the ends of his hair brushed his shoulders, and looked at James through narrowed eyelids. It occurred to me that an editor was a kind of artistic Oppenheimer, careful to view the terrible flash of an author’s ego only through a thick protective lens.

“It’s not bad” he said, not quite tonelessly. “Not bad at all.”