Wonder Boys (2 page)

“Not too far.”

“Great, then,” said Crabtree, and with that, he took Miss Sloviak’s elbow and started off toward Baggage Claim, working his skinny legs to keep up with her. “Come on, Tripp,” he called over his shoulder.

The luggage from their flight was a long time in rolling out and Miss Sloviak took advantage of the delay to go to the bathroom—the ladies’ room, naturally. Crabtree and I stood there, grinning at each other.

“Stoned again,” he said.

“You bastard,” I said. “How are you?”

“Unemployed,” he said, looking no less delighted with himself.

I started to smile, but then something, a ripple in the muscle of his jaw, told me that he wasn’t joking.

“You got
fired
?” I said.

“Not yet,” he said. “But it looks like it’s coming. I’ll be all right. I spent most of the week calling around town. I had lunch with a couple of people.” He continued to waggle his eyebrows and grin, as though his predicament only amused him—there was a thick streak of self-contempt in Terry Crabtree—and to a certain extent, no doubt, it did. “They weren’t exactly lining up.”

“But, Jesus, Terry, why? What happened?”

“Restructuring,” he said.

Two months earlier my publisher, Bartizan, had been bought out by Blicero Verlag, a big German media conglomerate, and subsequent rumors of a ruthless housecleaning by the new owners had managed to penetrate as far into the outback as Pittsburgh.

“I guess I don’t fit the new corporate profile.”

“Which is?”

“Competence.”

“Where will you go?”

He shook his head, and shrugged.

“So, how do you like her?” he said. “Miss Sloviak. She was in the seat beside me.” An alarm clamored somewhere, to tell us that the carousel of suitcases was about to start up. I think that both of us jumped. “Do you know how many airplanes I’ve boarded with the hope in my heart that my ticket would get me a seat next to someone like her? Particularly while I’m on my way to
Pittsburgh
? Don’t you think it says a lot for Pittsburgh that it could have produced a Miss Sloviak?”

“She’s a transvestite.”

“Oh, my God,” he said, looking shocked.

“Isn’t she?”

“I’ll just
bet
that’s hers,” he said. He pointed to a large rectangular suitcase of spotted pony hide, zipped into what looked like the plastic covering for a sofa cushion, that was emerging through the rubber flaps on the carousel. “I guess she doesn’t want to have it soiled.”

“Terry, what’s going to happen to you?” I said. I felt as though the alarm bell were still reverberating within my chest. What’s going to happen to me? I thought. What’s going to happen to my book? “How many years have you been with Bartizan, now anyway? Ten?”

“It’s only ten if you don’t count the last five,” he said, turning toward me. “Which I guess you weren’t.” He looked at me, his expression mild, his eyes alight with that combination of malice and affection expressed so neatly by his own last name. I knew before he opened his mouth exactly what he was going to ask me.

“How’s the book?” he said.

I reached out to grab the pony-skin valise before it passed us by.

“It’s fine,” I said.

He was talking about my fourth novel, or what purported to be my fourth novel,
Wonder Boys
, which I had promised to Bartizan during the early stages of the previous presidential administration. My third novel,
The Land Downstairs
, had won a PEN award and, at twelve thousand copies, sold twice as well as both its predecessors combined, and in its aftermath Crabtree and his bosses at Bartizan had felt sanguine enough about my imminent attainment to the status of, at the least, cult favorite to advance me a ridiculous sum of money in exchange for nothing more than a fatuous smile from the thunderstruck author and a title invented out of air and brain-sparkle while pissing into the aluminum trough of a men’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed—three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town are born, grow up, and die—and I’d started to work on it at once, and had been diligently hacking away at the thing ever since. Motivation, inspiration were not the problem; on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it.

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half dozen times. And yet for all of those years, and all of those words expended in charting the eccentric paths of my characters through the violent blue heavens I had set them to cross, they had not even reached their zeniths. I was nowhere near the end.

“It’s done,” I said. “It’s basically done. I’m just sort of, you know, tinkering with it now, buddy.”

“Great. I was hoping I could get a look at it sometime this weekend. Oh, here’s another one, I bet.” He pointed to a neat little plaid-and-red-leather number, also zipped into a plastic sleeve, that came trundling toward us now along the belt. “Think that might be possible?”

I grabbed the second suitcase—it was more what you’d call a Gladstone bag, a squat little half moon hinged at the sides—and set it on the ground beside the first.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Look what happened to Joe Fahey.”

“Yeah, he got famous,” said Crabtree. “And on his fourth book.”

John Jose Fahey, another real writer I’d known, had only
written
four books—
Sad Tidings, Kind of Blue, Fans and Fadeaways,
and
Eight Solid Light-years of Lead.
Joe and I became friends during the semester I spent in residence, almost a dozen years ago now, at the Tennessee college where he ran the writing program. Joe was a disciplined writer, when I met him, with an admirable gift for narrative digression he claimed to have inherited from his Mexican mother, and very few bad or unmanageable habits. He was a courtly fellow, even smooth, with hair that had turned white by the time he was thirty-two years old. After the moderate success of his third book, Joe’s publishers had advanced him a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in order to encourage him to write them a fourth. His first attempt at it went awry almost instantly. He gamely started a second; this novel he pursued for over two years before giving it up as fucked. The next try his publisher rejected before Joe was even finished writing it, on the grounds that it was already too long, and at any rate not the kind of book they were interested in publishing.

After that John Jose Fahey disappeared into the fastness of an impregnable failure. He pulled off the difficult trick of losing his tenured job at the Tennessee college, when he started showing up drunk for work, spoke with unpardonable cruelty to the talentless element of his classes, and one day waved a loaded a pistol from the lectern and instructed his pupils to write about Fear. He sealed himself off from his wife, as well, and she left him, unwillingly, taking with her half of the proceeds from his fabulous contract. After a while he moved back to Nevada, where he’d been born, and lived in a succession of motels. A few years later, changing planes at the Reno airport, I ran into him. He wasn’t going anywhere; he was just making the scene at McCarran. At first he affected not to recognize me. He’d lost his hearing in one ear and his manner was inattentive and cool. Over several margaritas in the airport bar, however, he eventually told me that at last, after seven tries, he’d sent his publisher what he believed to be an acceptable final manuscript of a novel. I asked him how he felt about it. “It’s acceptable,” he said coldly. Then I asked him if finishing the book hadn’t made him feel very happy. I had to repeat myself twice.

“Happy as a fucking clam,” he said.

After that I’d started hearing rumors. I heard that soon after our meeting, Joe tried to
withdraw
his seventh submission, an effort he abandoned only when his publisher, patience exhausted, had threatened him with legal action. I heard that entire sections had needed to be excised, due to aimlessness and illogic and an unseemly bitterness of tone. I heard all kinds of inauspicious things. In the end, however,
Lead
turned out to be a pretty good book, and with the added publicity value of Joe’s untimely and absurdist death—he was hit, remember, on Virginia Street, by an armored car filled with casino takings—it did fairly well in the stores. His publishers recouped most of their advance, and everybody said that it was too bad Joe Fahey didn’t live to see his success, but I was never quite sure that I agreed. Eight solid light-years of lead, if you haven’t read the book, is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.

“Okay, sure, Crabtree,” I said. “I’ll let you read, I don’t know, a dozen pages or so.”

“Any dozen pages I want?”

“Sure. You name ’em.” I laughed, but I was afraid I knew which twelve pages he would choose: the last twelve. This was going to be a problem, because over the past month, knowing that Crabtree was coming to town, I had actually written five different “final chapters,” subjecting my poor half-grown characters to a variety of biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths and happy little accidents of life, in a desperate attempt to bring in for a premature landing the immense careering zeppelin of which I was the mad commander. There were no “last twelve pages”; or rather, there were sixty of them, all absurdly sudden and random and violent, the literary equivalents of that windblown, flaming airfield in Lakehurst, New Jersey. I aimed a cheesy smile at Crabtree and held it, for just a minute too long. Crabtree took pity on me and looked away.

“Check this out,” he said.

I looked. Wrapped, like the two suitcases, in heavy, clear sheeting that was held in place by strips of duct tape, a strange, black leather case was coming toward us, big as a trash can, molded according to a fanciful geometry, as though it had been designed to transport intact the heart, valves, and ventricles of an elephant.

“That would be a tuba,” I said. I sucked my cheek in and looked at him through a half-closed eye. “Do you suppose—?”

“I think it has to be,” said Crabtree. “It’s wrapped in plastic.”

I hoisted it from the carousel—it was even heavier than it looked—and set it beside the other two, and then we turned toward the ladies’ room and waited for Miss Sloviak to rejoin us. When, after a few more minutes, Miss Sloviak didn’t come back, we decided that I ought to rent a cart. I borrowed a dollar from Crabtree and after a brief struggle with the cart dispenser we managed to get the cart loaded, and wheeled it across the carpet to the bathroom.

“Miss Sloviak?” called Crabtree, knocking like a gentleman on the ladies’ room door.

“I’ll be right out,” said Miss Sloviak.

“Probably putting the plastic wrapper back onto her johnson,” I said.

“Tripp,” said Crabtree. He looked straight at me now and held my eyes with his for as long as he could manage, given the agitated state of his pleasure receptors. “Is it really almost done?”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course it is. Crabtree, are you still going to be my editor?”

“Sure,” he said. He broke eye contact with me and turned back to watch the dwindling parade of suitcases drifting along the baggage carousel. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Then Miss Sloviak emerged from the ladies’ room, hair reestablished, cheeks rouged, eyelids freshly painted a soft viridian, smelling of what I recognized as Cristalle, the fragrance worn both by my wife, Emily, and also by my lover, Sara Gaskell. It smelled a little bitter to me, as you might imagine. Miss Sloviak looked down at the luggage on the cart, and then at Crabtree, and broke out into a broad, toothy, almost intolerably flirtatious lipsticked grin.

“Why, Mr. Crabtree,” said Miss Sloviak, in a creditable Mae West, “is that a tuba on your luggage cart, or are you just glad to see me?”

When I looked at Crabtree I saw, to my amazement, that he had turned bright red in the face. It had been a long time since I’d seen him do that.

C
RABTREE AND
I
MET
in college, a place in which I’d never intended to meet anyone. After graduating from high school I took great pains to avoid having to go to college at all, and in particular to Coxley, which had offered me the annual townie scholarship, along with a place as tight end on the starting eleven. I was and remain a big old bastard, six-three, fat now and I know it, and while at the time I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field, I wore quadrangular black-rimmed eyeglasses and the patent-leather shoes, serge high-waters, and sober, V-necked sweater-vests my grandmother required of me, so it must have taken a kind of imaginative faith to see me as a football star with a four-year free ride; but in any case I had no desire to play for Coxley—or for anyone else—and one day in late June, 1968, I left my poor grandmother a rather smart-assed note and ran away from the somber hills, towns, and crooked spires of western Pennsylvania that had so haunted August Van Zorn. I didn’t come back for twenty-five years.

I’ll skip over a lot of what followed my cowardly departure from home. Let’s just say that I’d read Kerouac the year before, and had conceived the usual picture of myself as an outlaw-poet-pathfinder, a kind of Zen-masterly John C. Frémont on amphetamines with a marbled dime-store pad of lined paper in the back pocket of my denim pants. I still see myself that way, I suppose, and I’m probably none the better for it. Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the jobs as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn’t, I might as well have. I worked for part of a summer in a hellish Texarkanan carnival as the contumelious clown you get to drop into a tank of water after he calls you pencil-dick. I was shot in the meat of my left hand in a bar outside La Crosse, Wisconsin. All of this rich material I made good use of in my first novel,
The Bottomlands
, 1976, which was well reviewed, and which sometimes, at desperate instants, I consider to be my truest work. After a few years of unhappy and often depraved existence, I landed, again in the classic manner, in California, where I fell in love with a philosophy major at Berkeley who persuaded me not to waste in wandering what she called, with an air of utter, soul-enveloping conviction that has since led to great misery and that I have never for one instant forgotten, my gift. I was pinned to the spot by this touching tribute to my genius, and stayed put long enough to get together an application to Cal. I was just about ready to blow town—alone—when the letter of acceptance arrived.