Wonder Boys (38 page)

“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 with 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.

T
HE 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.

“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.