Wonder Boys (42 page)

“It says, ‘Frank Capra,’” he said. He shrugged. “Something I saw tonight. I think there might be a book in it.”

I nodded, and held out my hand to him, and we shook. On my way out I brushed past Walter Gaskell and stumbled a little, and he put a hand out as if to steady me. For an instant I could have collapsed into his arms. But I knocked his proffered arm away and strode across the whirling yard to the house.

I climbed the back steps and walked through the house, feeling a little less woozy with every step. When I got to the front porch the tuba was there waiting for me. I was almost glad to see it. I stood in the light spilling out through the open door behind me, rain on the lenses of my eyeglasses, rain running down the sides of my nose, trying to work up the nerve to walk back to the empty house on Denniston Street. I looked into the foyer to see if by any chance someone had left behind an umbrella, or if there was something I could use to cover my head. There was nothing. I turned, and took a deep breath, and heaved the tuba up over my head, to give me a little shelter. Then I started for home. The thing was too heavy to carry in this way for very long, however, and after a while I lowered it and just went ahead and got wet. My clothes grew heavy, and my shoes squeaked, and the pockets of my jacket filled with rain. Finally I sat down on top of the tuba and waited there, like a man clinging to an empty barrel, for the flood to carry me off.

The flood, I thought. This was the true, original ending I’d always planned for
Wonder Boys
. One April day, after a heavy winter, the Miskahannock River would overflow its banks and wash away the entire troubled town of Wonderburg, PA. For that very last paragraph I had always envisioned the image of a young girl and a crookbacked old woman, poling a skiff down the long main hall of the Wonder house. There was something in this vision of the tiny boat in which all that remained of the Wonders went spinning out the front door of the house, to be lost amid the debris and flotsam of the world, that moved me to the point of tears. Automatically I patted my pockets for a pen and a sheet of paper to make some notes. There was something in the hip pocket of my jacket. It was the seven surviving pages of
Wonder Boys
, folded and porous with rain. I laid them against my thigh and carefully spread them flat.

“Well?” I said to the tuba. “What do you say we finish this thing right?”

I took hold of the sheaf of paper and folded it over. I bent down the uppermost corners, lifted the lowermost couple of flaps, and tucked and pleated those last seven pages until I had worked them into a soft and waterlogged little boat. Then I set this unlikely craft in the gutter at my feet, and watched it pitch and careen away down the street toward the Monongahela River and the open sea. And thus, as it was foretold in the prophecies of witch women and in a nine-page outline I’d made on an April afternoon five years earlier, wild water came and carried off the remnant of the Wonders. I stood up, and found that my head was remarkably clear, and that all its former lightness seemed to have passed, like an electrical current, into my limbs. My hands were dizzy, my feet reeled, my heart weighed nothing at all. I wasn’t happy—I’d poured too many years of my life, too many thousands of hard-won images and episodes and elegant turns of phrase, into that book not to part with it in utter sorrow. Still, I felt light. I felt as if I had been raised in the crushing precincts of the planet Jupiter, and then set free, massive and buoyant, to bound along the streets of Point Breeze, covering nine feet at a stride, with only the tuba to keep me from floating entirely off the earth.

After I’d been walking along for a while in the general direction of home, shivering, thinking the circular thoughts of a man who’s been clocked with a Louisville Slugger, a car pulled up alongside me and sat burbling by the curb, lighting up the rain in a broad glittery fan outspread before it. It was a red Citroën DS23. The rain spattered against its black canvas top.

I carried the tuba over to the curb, bent down, and looked into the car. It was warm inside there, and everything was lit by the soft amber light of the dash. There was a smell of damp ash and the wet wool of Sara’s topcoat, and a faint trickle of advertising from the radio. She made a face at me as I leaned in, bugging out her eyes a little, so that I would know she was angry but not entirely without humor. Her hair was slicked back with rainwater and her face was flushed and someone had kissed her on the cheek with orange lipstick.

“Need a lift?” she said, with mock smoothness. She affected not to be surprised to have come upon me thus but I could tell by the way that she held her mouth so perfectly straight, and by a certain telltale dilation of her nostrils, that she had been panicking for hours and might be panicking still.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. “I went back to the hospital, I went by your house—Jesus, Grady, what happened to your head?”

“Nothing,” I said, touching a hand to my left temple. Yes, it was swelling nicely. “Okay, Walter hit me with a baseball bat.” Also, it seemed to me, now that I had something to focus my vision on, I could not quite get my left eye to come into true with my right. “I’m all right. God knows I had it coming.”

“Are you sure?” She narrowed her eyes and studied me. She was trying to determine if I was stoned. “Why are you squinting like that?”

“What squinting, I’m fine, I’m not stoned,” I said, and to my amazement I discovered that this was the truth. “Honest.”

“Honest,” she repeated doubtfully.

“I feel great.” This was also the truth, except insofar as my actual body was concerned. “I’m so glad to see you, Sara. There’s so much I want to tell you—I feel—I feel so
light
—” I began to tell her about the way I had died, and the last voyage of the good ship
Wonder Boys
, and the sudden magical weightlessness of my old Jovian frame.

“I have my suitcase in the trunk,” said Sara, cutting me off, as usual, before I could muddy the waters of an important discussion with any of my Mercutian prattle. “Is Emily coming home?”

“I don’t think so.”

Her eyes narrowed again.

“No,” I said. “Nuh-uh. She isn’t coming home.”

“Could I stay with you, then? Just for a little while. A couple of days. Just until I find someplace else to go. If,” she added quickly, “that’s what you want me to do.”

I didn’t say anything. The rain redoubled in force, and the tuba was dislocating my elbow, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it down, and Sara hadn’t asked me to get into the car yet. I had a feeling my answer might have a lot to do with whether she ever would. I stood there, getting rained on, remembering the promise I had made to Dr. Greenhut.

“Okay, fine,” said Sara, putting the car in gear. She started to roll slowly forward.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Hold on.”

The taillights on the roof of the car lit up.

“Okay,” I said, hurrying to catch up to her. “Of course you can stay with me. Please. I’d love it.”

After that I waited for her to smile, and ask me into the car, and drive me home and lay me down on the Honor Bilt to sleep for the next three days. But Sara wasn’t ready to end the negotiations.

“I’ve decided I’m going to keep it,” she informed me, watching my face for the effect of this announcement. “In case you were wondering.”

“I was.”

She took her hands off the wheel for the first time and turned them outward, fingers spread, a nameless gesture more eloquent and wondering than a shrug.

“It’s just started to seem like a good thing to have,” she said. “If I’m not going to have anything else.”

“Think so?”

“At the moment”

I stood upright, stepped away from the curb, and took a last look up, through the rain, at the empty sky over my head. Then I put down the last of my burdens and reached for the passenger door.

“I guess there’s no point in hanging on to this tuba, then,” I said.

O
NE OF THE STRANGEST BITS
of jetsam to wash up in the aftermath of the flood that carried me, eventually, all the way back to the town where I was born was a black satin jacket, with an ermine collar, slightly worn at the elbows and missing a button. Although she was, by law, entitled to ask Walter to sell off his whole precious collection and let her take half the proceeds out of the marriage with her, Sara offered to waive her rights to all the rest of it—the flannel jerseys, the three thousand bubble-gum cards, and above all that tar-stained bat—if he would let her keep the jacket. I would have been more than willing never to see the thing again, but to her it was a reminder, at once ironic and cherished, of the weekend that had sealed our fate. Everything else they owned she conceded to Walter, who proved willing to exchange a small if significant principality in order to hold on to the rest of his mighty empire. When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of my grandmother, and for the ceremony, almost but not quite as a joke, Sara wore the jacket. I didn’t think this was a very favorable omen, but it was my fourth marriage and any talk of omens was, to a certain extent, beside the point.

For more than a year after
Wonder Boys
blew apart in that alley behind Kravnik’s Sporting Goods I was unable to do any writing at all. I dumped the whole exploded clockwork of draft chapters and character sketches and uninsertable inserts into a liquor box and stuck them under the bed. My life was in turmoil, and, maybe because I couldn’t see very well out of my left eye anymore, it took me a long time to get back my sense of narrative balance and my writerly perception of depth. I got to know my lawyer and a number of other Pittsburgh attorneys, quit smoking pot, and did my best to be a husband, and a father to my son. Sara landed the position of dean of students at Coxley College and arranged for me to be hired, part-time, by the department to which Albert Vetch had devoted so much of his life, and we moved back to this old hill town, with its houses the colors of dead leaves, where a neon sign burns on a cold night with an aching clearness and it is always football season. And then, one Sunday afternoon after we had been living on Whateley Street for a couple of weeks, in a rented house a block from the corner of Pickman where the old McClelland Hotel still stands, I brought the liquor box out from under the bed, took it into the backyard, and, under a tangle of wisteria, buried it in the cold black , ground.

I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern. On a day when my work hasn’t gone well, I like to spend a couple of hours at the Alibi’s dented steel bar, and you will find me there on Tuesday nights after the advanced workshop lets out. You can look for the half-blind minotaur with the corduroy sport coat and the battered horsehide briefcase, at the far end of the bar by the jukebox, holding on to a mug of Iron City cut, for the sake of his health, with thin, sweet lemonade. If you sit long enough on the neighboring stool he will probably mention that he is working hard on a novel about baseball and the Civil War, or a memoir of Berkeley in the early seventies, or a screenplay, called
Sister of Darkness
, based on a number of interlinked stories penned by another obscure local man of letters, who wrote under the name of August Van Zorn. Usually he sits with one or two much younger men, students of his, wonder boys whose hearts are filled with the dread and mystery of the books they believe themselves destined to write. He has known a number of famous and admired authors in his time, and he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters. The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for the parts that sound true.

Michael Chabon is an acclaimed and bestselling author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
(2000). One of America’s most distinctive voices, Chabon has been called “a magical prose stylist” by the
New York Times Book Review
, and is known for his lively writing, nostalgia for bygone modes of storytelling, and deep empathy for the human predicament.

Born to two lawyers, Robert and Sharon, in Washington, DC, in 1963, Chabon was raised in Columbia, Maryland. As a young boy, he became interested in writing and storytelling through the encouragement of his teachers. His parents divorced when he was eleven, and his father moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Until Chabon graduated high school, he would spend nine months a year with his mother in Maryland and summers with his father in Pittsburgh. He then moved to Pittsburgh fulltime to attend Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh universities.

After receiving his undergraduate degree, Chabon sought an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. His master’s thesis attracted the attention of professor Donald Heiney, an award-winning author, who sent the manuscript to his agent without telling Chabon beforehand. The book,
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
(1988), set off a bidding war among publishers and earned Chabon a large advance and bestselling success at the age of twenty-four. The experience was gratifying but disorienting. Chabon worked for the next five years on a novel called
Fountain City
, a sprawling manuscript that he never completed.

After abandoning work on his would-be second novel, and ending his first marriage to poet Lollie Groth, Chabon poured his frustrations into a new manuscript, about a writer struggling to complete a 2,611-page book after a string of previous successes. The novel,
Wonder Boys
(1995), was another bestseller and became a film of the same name in 2000, starring Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, and Robert Downey, Jr. His story collections
A Model World and Other Stories
(1991) and
Werewolves in Their Youth
(1999) further displayed Chabon’s literary talents, but he cemented his place among the country’s foremost novelists with the publication of
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
. The book, which chronicles the adventures of two Jewish cousins in New York City against the backdrop of World War II, earned Chabon a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. His subsequent novels include
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(2007), which also met with critical and commercial success and won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards for science fiction, among other honors.