Wonder Boys (41 page)

“Boy,” I said, “would I like to have me one of those.” The man caught the irony in my tone but misunderstood it. He looked at me, then jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby that must not have been his. His lips made a tight little smile.

“I got news for you, buddy,” he said. “You already do.”

S
OMEWHAT MORE THAN
half an hour later, I turned into the leafy street at the heart of Point Breeze where in vanished days the heirs to great fortunes in steel and condiments had disported in the grass, knocking balls through silver wickets with gold mallets. I walked down to the Gaskells’ house along the sinister iron fence. It was a cool spring evening in a river town at the foot of the mountains. A fine mist hung in the air. All the lights in the street looked haloed and soft, as if rubbed up by the thumb of a sentimental pastelist. I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That’s another way of saying it was all I had. The Gaskells’ house was lit from every window, and as I came up the walk I heard the suave tinkling of a vibraphone. I didn’t hear any raised voices or other sounds of human merrymaking, but this didn’t surprise me, because the last party of the WordFest weekend, wherever it was held, was generally a survivors’ ball, low-key and hungover and poorly attended. I set the tuba down beside me and rang the doorbell.

I waited. All the leaves in the trees began to clatter and shake. Two seconds later it was pouring down rain. I knocked. I tried the heavy latch with my thumb, and it gave. I pushed through the door, feeling a sharp thrill of dread.

“Hello?” I said.

The place was deserted. I circled the ground floor from the living room, into the kitchen, and through the swinging saloon doors into the dining room. Everywhere I saw the signs of recent habitation: plastic cups kissed by women, cigarette butts in ashtrays, abandoned hats and sweatshirts, even an empty pair of shoes. An air of eerie, postdisaster calm hung over the whole scene, as in the wake of a death ray or sparkling toxic cloud.

“Anybody home?” I called out to the second floor, then started to follow the tentative course of my voice up the stairs. There was no reply. A drop of rain ran down the back of my neck and produced a vibraphone shiver along my spine. The front door was still open and the whispery laughter of the rain in the trees and puddles outside harmonized weirdly with the skeleton tap dance of the vibes. An empty house, a reckless and foolish man climbing to his doom, the ghostly music of an orchestra of imps and bonedaddies: I had become the hero of a story by August Van Zorn. Maybe, I thought, I had never been anything else. At this, there was a loud thump right behind me, as of a body hitting the floor, and I jumped, whirled around, prepared to be swallowed by the slavering maw of the Eldest Black Nothingness itself; but it was only the tuba. It had fallen over sideways onto the porch—either that, or it was attempting to locomote.

“I can’t turn my back on you for a second,” I told it, not quite not joking.

I backed quickly down the stairs and stood very still in the foyer, keeping an eye on the tuba and trying to think what could have happened, and where everyone had gone. I had a view down the hallway into the kitchen, and I could see through the back windows that there was a light burning out in the yard. So I went into the kitchen again and pressed my face against the glass. Inside Sara’s greenhouse one of the cool violet GroLites was aglow. There was no reason not to suppose that she must sometimes leave a light burning out there, and it was hard to believe she would have chosen this moment to see how her sweet peas were coming along. Nevertheless I pulled the collar of my jacket up over my head and ran splashing across the yard. I knocked on the door a couple of times, then pulled it open and allowed myself to be inhaled into that strange glass house with its stink of fish emulsion and flowers and rot. I’d never been inside at night before. There was only the one light on, off in one of the other rooms, and I stood there, trying to adjust to the dim light and the heavy air, wild with a smell of rank vanilla and sweet decay that I presently identified as narcissus. It was overpowering; you could almost hear it humming in your ears like bees.

“Sara?” I said.

The murmuring of flowers seemed to grow louder as I went deeper into the greenhouse, but when I went into the central atrium I discovered that it was not some heady perfume working on my nerves—only the ironic and elliptical snoring of a modern master of the short-story form. On the old purple davenport, under the potted date palm, Q. lay unconscious. His shirttails had come untucked, his fly was unbuttoned, and on his feet he wore only a pair of red-toed sock-monkey socks, caked with mud. Those were his shoes, then, abandoned in the living room. Even in his dreams, apparently, Q. and his doppelgänger were still going at it, because although his brow was knotted in anguish, the rest of his face looked peaceful, even self-satisfied, as if he were enjoying some well-deserved rest. In addition to the mud on his stocking feet there was a goldfish of dried blood on the pocket of his shirt and a telephone number or message to himself scrawled across the back of his left hand. I leaned over to try to read what it said. It was too smeared to make out, but appeared to begin with a
C
.
CROATOAN
, I thought, might not have been inappropriate. I switched on an overhead light.

Q.’s eyes snapped open.

“No!” he said, reaching out, his fingers outspread, as if to ward me off.

“Easy, man,” I said. “You’ll be all right.”

He sat up.

“Where am I? What is that smell?”

“That’s plant breath,” I said. “You’re in Sara’s greenhouse.”

He sat up and rubbed his face and gave his jowls a shake. Then he looked around, up at the spiky leaves of the palm tree, down at his muddy socks. He shook his head.

“Nope,” he said.

“No idea how you got here, eh?”

“None.”

I gave his shoulder a little squeeze.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Try this one. All the people at that party. Any idea where they might have gone to?” I nodded in the direction of the house. “Place is empty. Looked like people must have cleared out in a hurry. Left all their cups and cigarettes and whatnot lying around.” I looked at my watch. It was not quite nine o’clock. “Seems like things broke up kind of early.”

“Yeah, uh, right—” he began, tentatively. “Sara.” He nodded. “She cleared them all out.”

“She what?” I couldn’t believe Sara would do anything so indecorous in public—such behavior would not become the vision of sound and gracious chancellorhood she had so carefully elaborated for herself. My heart sank. “That’s not like Sara.” There was only one explanation: she had decided, once and for all, to rid her aging womb of the spawn of Grady. I was gripped by a sudden irrational certainty that she had, in fact, already done so—that she’d chased everyone out of her house and then driven off, alone and hysterical, to the office of some night doctor, in a tragic part of town. “Why did she do that?”

“I don’t remember” Q. said, and then he remembered. He looked up at me, his eyes wide and pleading, as though I’d been sent out here to punish him for whatever it was he’d done. He lowered his head.

“I think I broke Walter Gaskell’s nose,” he said into his collar.

“You’re kidding. Oh, my God.”

He looked defensive. “Maybe not.” He pinched the spherical tip of his nose. “I just barely clipped him with the thing.” He nodded reassuringly to himself as the details started to come back to him. “It wasn’t like I got him with the sweet spot.”

“The sweet spot?”

“I was swinging one of his bats. A big one, thirty-six ounces, all yellow and stained. Like a kind of an old tusk. It used to belong to Joe DiMaggio.” His lined face softened a little as he remembered. “A beautiful thing.”

“I know the one,” I said.

“Still a lot of tension in it, somehow. When you swung it. Like there was still something powerful in there trying to get out.”

“I guess there must have been,” I said. “I guess it kind of got out and broke Walter’s nose.”

“Uh huh,” he said. He cocked his head a little to the side, and his voice was sharp. “At least I didn’t
steal
it, though.”

“Good point,” I said. “So then, what, did she take him to the hospital? Sara, I mean.” Here I had come all this way looking for her, and she’d probably been in the emergency room at the hospital the whole time.

“I don’t know. He was bleeding and shouting and I was probably shouting a little, too. Sara came in, at some point, and they shouted at each
other
for a while. Sorry, I don’t remember what about. Then she chased everyone out of the house. If she’s not there now, I don’t know where she went.”

“And Walter?” I said.

Q. lifted an eyebrow, and sort of pointed with the unshaven tip of his chin in the general direction of the door to the greenhouse. He smiled. I looked at him for a moment, not understanding. Then I caught the doppelgänger glint of mischief in his eye. He wanted me to turn around. I turned around, half-expecting to see the tuba standing there behind me.

“Hello, Grady,” Walter said.

He was looming in the shadows of the greenhouse, dangling the tar-stained old DiMaggio bat at his side. This was an item he had acquired last fall, in the grip of a frenzy of acquisition so intense that he’d forgotten all about Sara’s birthday, and had subsequently tried to make a lame and insincere sort of present out of the brittle stick of ash wood itself. That proved to be a fatal insult to the health of their marriage, as far as Sara was concerned, and if she ever found herself able to leave him once and for all, this bat, nominally hers, would be one of the reasons. It was one of a small number of bats purporting to be that swung by Joe D. all during his famous streak of 1947, and therefore worthy of a certain amount of devotion, as I had tried to explain to Sara at the time. In his other hand, Walter was holding a plaid ice bag, pressed against the bridge of his nose. There was blood on his white oxford shirt.

“Hey, Walter,” I said.

“I’m sorry about your nose, Walter,” said Q. “I must have been pretty drunk.”

Walter nodded. “I’ll be all right.”

“And,” I said, “I, uh, I know this is going to sound pretty fatuous, right about now, Walter, but I want you to know that I’m really sorry, too. About everything. I feel really, really bad.” I paused and licked my lips. The truth was that I didn’t actually feel so bad. I just didn’t want Walter trying to doctor me up with that bat. “I—I wish I could make it up to you.”

“I really don’t think you ever could, Grady,” Walter said. He rolled the bat back and forth against his thigh, and his fingers worried the worn old tape on the handle. I remember he didn’t look angry, or especially retributive, or happy in that way people look in the movies when the revenge of which they’ve been dreaming curls up the wicked corners of the lips. His eyes were ringed with fatigue, he had an ice bag over his nose, and he wore, more than anything, the harried air of a dean after a night of quarreling with the accounting firm and contemplating painful cuts in his budget for next year. “The department is going to have to place you on a disciplinary leave, of course.”

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“For an indefinite term, I’m afraid. You may well lose your position. I’ll certainly do my best to see that you do.”

I looked at Q. He was glancing back and forth from me to Walter, calmly but with a certain air of frustration I thought I recognized. He was wishing he had a pen so that he could make a few notes.

“You’re a goddamn fraud, Grady. You’ve produced nothing at all since you’ve been here,” Walter went on, softly. “That’s seven years. Close to eight.” He named two of my writing colleagues in the department. “In the past seven years they’ve brought out nine books between them. One of
hers
won a national award, as I’m sure you know. What have
you
done, Grady?”

These were the very words, the charges I had been dreading and anticipating for so long, but in all that time I had never managed to come up with an adequate response. I hung my head.

Q. cleared his throat. “
Besides
sleeping with your wife, you mean,” he said, helpfully.

Walter lowered the ice bag and dropped it to the ground. The bat shot up from his side and began to describe tight little arcs in the air between us. He was clutching it in both hands now, waggling his fingers on its shaft, his face bloodied and swollen but his Doctor Dee eyes remarkably blue and calm.

“Are you going to use that on me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I might.”

“Go for it,” I told him.

So he did. And I believe that most of the violence that occurs between men is the product, in one way or another, of flippancy and smart remarks. I told him to go for it, and he came at me and swung the historic bat. I got my arm up but he still managed to land a glancing blow on my left temple. My glasses went flying. A large rock rang out against a taut sheet of metal, and a flashbulb blew, and a luminous retinal rose bloomed and withered in the innards of my eye. It hurt, but not as much as I might have predicted. After blinking experimentally a few times I picked up my glasses, set them on my nose, drew myself erect, and, with the same over-elaborate display of dignity, like a drunk’s, walked out. Unfortunately for my brave show of imperviousness and self-possession I went the wrong way, and ended up somewhere in the rearmost wing of the greenhouse, where my legs got tangled in a bale of chicken wire, and I fell over.

“Grady?” Walter called, sounding genuinely concerned.

“I’m fine.” I found my feet, extricated myself from the jingling haystack of wire, and set a course for where I remembered the door to be. On my way back across the atrium I went past the purple davenport and stopped.

“Did you get all that?” I said to Q.

He nodded. I thought he looked a little pale.

“I have a question for you,” I said, pointing. “What’s it say there on your hand?”

He looked down at the smear of blue ink on the back of his left hand and frowned. It took him a few seconds to remember.