Wonder Boys (23 page)

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

I have to say here that I didn’t quite trust Deborah, and had no reason to believe that she trusted me. Whenever we were alone together like this I felt an awkwardness between us—we punched each other a lot, and called each other names, and rocked from foot to foot watching the smoke leave our mouths—that was partly sexual and partly social but was mostly due to our each knowing all the other’s most intimate secrets, and knowing we knew them, without ever having shared a single one. She was, in other words, my sister-in-law.

“The woman in question,” I said, after a moment, slowly letting out a deep breath. “The one you didn’t tell Emily about.”

She wrinkled her lip and blew a long gray strand of smoke toward Pittsburgh. “The Chancellor.”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Holy shit. Does Emily know that?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I just found out myself. That’s kind of why I came up here.”

“Huh? Are you planning to announce it at the dinner table?”

“There’s an idea.”

She shook her head, looked at me for an instant, then away. She picked a flake of tobacco from her lower lip.

“She’s married, isn’t she, your friend?”

I nodded. “To my chairman. My boss, more or less.”

“So is she going to
have
it?”

“I don’t think so, no. I hope not.”

“Don’t tell Emily, then.”

“I have to.”

“No, you don’t. Not tonight, anyway. Fuck, what difference could it make, Doc?
Wait
a while. I mean, see what happens, you know? Why should you tell her if there isn’t even going to
be
a baby? It’ll hurt her feelings so
bad
.”

I was impressed. Although I knew she and Emily were fairly close, it was rare to see Deborah actively displaying such concern for her sister. Part of the way she’d learned to deal with being dumped into middle of the Warshaw family was never completely to surrender the pretense that they were all a bunch of relative strangers, well-meaning but ultimately beneath her, a boatful of rude fishermen who had rescued the only survivor of the wreck of an imperial yacht. She put a hand on my arm, softly, and I wondered if perhaps she didn’t have a point. Why should I hurt Emily’s feelings any more than I already had? Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head.

“I really have to. I promised I would.”

“Promised who?”

“Oh,” I said, “myself.”

Then what’s one more broken, more or less? said her look. “Are you going to stay the night?”

“I don’t know. Probably not, the way things have been going.”

“Then let me tell her for you. After you leave.”

“No!” I regretted now that I had said anything at all to Deborah, who, along with all her genuine affection for Emily, had also acquired, like any good elder sister, a healthy urge to see her younger sibling’s jaw drop in horror. “God, you have to swear to me you won’t say anything to
anyone
, Deb. Please! I just haven’t figured out what I’m going to do yet, is all.”

“
That’s
what you’re waiting for?” she said, looking pointedly unhopeful.

“Hey, fuck you,” I said, “I’ll figure it out. Now, come on. Do you swear?”

“Sure,” she said, and her soft Korean accent fluttered in the corners of her voice. “No problem.”

“Okay.” I nodded, once, firmly, as if I believed her.

“Jesus, Doc,” she said. “How do you manage to fuck things up so good?”

I said that I didn’t know. Then I turned and faced the house.

“I’d better go rescue James from Philly,” I said. “Coming?”

She looked as if she was about to say something else, but in the end she just nodded and followed after me. We walked back up the driveway toward the house, gravel crunching under our feet. “Who is that kid, anyway?” she said. “That James?”

“He’s a student of mine.”

“He’s cute.”

“Please leave him alone.”

“He told me he liked my dress.”

“Did he?” I said, giving the dress a look of mock skepticism. “He’s
very
polite.”

“He’s—? Hey, fuck you,” she said, sharply, her tone no longer bantering, and I saw that I had hurt her feelings again.

She stopped in the middle of the side yard and looked down at herself. “It is ugly, isn’t it?”

“No, Deb, it’s—”

“Shit, I can’t believe I
bought
this thing.” Her voice had grown shrill. “
Look
at this!”

“I think it’s beautiful,” I told her. “You look gorgeous, Deb.”

She went past me to the back door and opened the screen but didn’t go immediately inside, and coming up behind her I saw that she was trying to catch her faint reflection in the long rippled pane of the door.

“I’m going to change,” she announced, frowning. Her voice was shaking. “I look like some kind of fucking hippie tent or something. I look like there should be someone standing underneath me selling bongs.”

I put a consolatory hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away and yanked open the back door. She ran into the house, through the kitchen, and went pounding up the stairs. I was dragged by her black crackling slipstream into the kitchen, where Marie stood, all dressed for dinner, stirring the matzoh ball soup in its caldron. She looked at me, an eyebrow raised, holding an interrogative ladle in one hand.

“I’m just getting started,” I told her.

I
WENT DOWN INTO
the basement to rescue James Leer and found him at the Ping-Pong table, facing Philly Warshaw with a paddle in his hand. They were playing Beer Pong, a hazing ritual to which, in his wild days, Philly had subjected all suitors and young male visitors to the house, myself included. It was the consensus in the Warshaw family that Philly’s wild days had endured for an unreasonably long period of time, but in the end he’d settled down, and it was only when he came out to Kinship, now, and there was no driving to be done that he drank too much; I suppose it gave him something to look forward to in family visits. I sat down on the cellar steps to watch the action.

“Take it easy, there, James,” I said.

“He’s all right,” said Philly, taking an exaggerated swipe at the ball, painting just enough english onto it to send it skittering into the glass of beer that was stationed, on the center line, at James Leer’s end of the table. “He’s doing fine.” He grinned. “Pound it, James.”

Obediently James reached for the full pilsner glass, fished out the ball, raised the glass to his lips, and drained it in a single eternal swallow that seemed to cause him some difficulty. When the beer was gone, he hoisted the glass in my direction, an empty smile frozen on his face, as a child who is trying to seem grown up smiles around an endless salty mouthful of raw oyster.

“Hi, Professor Tripp,” he said.

“How many is that?” I asked him.

“That’s two.”

“Three,” said Philly, coming around to refill James’s glass with a can of Pabst he took from the mini-refrigerator that he kept in the corner of
his
old clubhouse. Daintily James wiped the beer from the Ping-Pong ball with the tail of my old flannel shirt. His hair had come unfastened from its brilliantine moorings and stood at crazy angles from his head. He was all smirks and grins and his eyes were full of light, as they had been the night before when we burst, heads reeling, into the blazing lobby of Thaw Hall, laughing and out of breath. He was having a great time. I could see that alcohol was going to be a dangerous thing for him.

“So, what happened to your car?” Philly wanted to know. “Who’s butt is that?”

“Guy jumped on it,” I said. I was a little irritated with him for having lured poor James into a game of Beer Pong, but I couldn’t really hold it against him. Phillip Warshaw was a born agent of chaos and a master of backspin in all its many forms. He’d come over from Korea in 1965 with a reputation for being the most willful and uncontrollable toddler in the Soodow Orphanage and had immediately started running headlong and half-intentionally through plate-glass windows and lashing neighborhood children to trees. His career as a teenage vandal was legendary at Allderdice High School; in one four-month period he and a number 12 Magic Marker had covered every flat surface in Squirrel Hill, Greenfield, and parts of South Oakland with an arcane symbology that investigators eventually identified as his birth name, written in the alphabet of his lost mother. He had found a paradise of bad behavior during his tours in Panama and P.I, and it had taken him years to adjust to married life on the base down at Aberdeen.

“A guy? What guy?”

“A guy named, uh”—I looked over at James—“Vernon Hardapple.”

Philly slapped another nasty spin on the ball and just missed plunging it into James’s glass again.

“
Hard
apple?”

“He was a matador,” said James, without even looking at me. He readied his next serve. “Love–nine.” With a flourish he put the ball in play.

“A matador. Named Vernon Hardapple.”

“He was married to a Mexican,” I said. “He learned it down there.”

“But she left him.” James slapped one back at Philly, and the ball sailed across the basement and landed in a box of old issues of
Commentary.
“Love–ten. And I guess he got a little careless in the ring.”

I couldn’t keep myself from smiling, but James’s face remained perfectly straight, and his eyes were focused on the Ping-Pong ball.

“He got bored?” said Philly.

“Just knocked over,” I said, “Broke his hip. End of his career.”

“So now he fights cars in the Hi-Hat parking lot,” said James. “Your serve.”

“The old Hi-Hat,” said Philly, spinning his first serve across the net, off the table, and then skittering around the rim of James’s glass. It just missed falling in. Philly Warshaw was death at Beer Pong. “Eleven-zip. Still going there?”

“Now and then.” All of a sudden I felt a little uneasy. There was something about the incident with Vernon at the Hi-Hat last night that troubled me. Why had he said the car belonged to him, quoting the letters of its license plate, eulogizing as emerald green what I’d always thought of as an unsightly shade of fly butt? I supposed, on reflection, that the car could very well have been his; Happy Blackmore had claimed to have won it in a poker game, but I’d always found this a little hard to believe, given the cosmic extent of the losing streak that Happy’d been on. I’d waited a week for him to bring the certificate of title around before learning through a colleague of his at the
Post-Gazette
that he was down in the Catoctin Mountains playing out the last foot of thread on his bobbin. “That dude with the big arms still standing there at the door? Cleon? Clement?”

“He’s still there.”

“That guy has twenty-two-inch biceps,” he said. “I measured them one time.”

“Clement let you measure his biceps?”

Philly shrugged. “I won a bet with him,” he said. He glanced quickly over toward me, then blew another shot past James. “So, Grady, I hear—twelve-zip—I hear you brought us a very special kind of parsley for our Passover dipping tonight.”

“Uh huh,” I said, looking at James, who blushed. I imagined that he’d felt flattered by Philly’s attentions; no doubt before I showed up he’d been boasting to Philly about what a big dope stud he was. “I’ve got a little bud in the car.”

“So?”

“So?” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

Philly grinned, and then cried out in mock alarm as James succeeded in spattering a lucky shot into his beer. He raised the glass and waggled his eyebrows at me over the rim.

“Oh. Sure, okay,“ I said, affecting, in classic pothead fashion, a breezy unconcern with the prospect of getting stoned. “If you want.” I was dying for a nice big fatty. I got up and started for the basement door. Philly sent his paddle clattering across the table.

“Are we
stop
ping?” said James, distressed.

“Gotta take a leak,” said Philly, starting for the stairs. “I’ll meet you’ns outside.”

“Come with me, James,” I said, throwing open the creaking cellar doors and starting up the stairs through the cobwebs. Before I could climb out, James gave a tug on the cuff of my trousers.

“Grady,” he said. “Grady, look.” I ducked back into the basement. He grinned at me and pulled me by my sleeve over to a large, foul-smelling wooden complex of crate lumber and chicken wire that sprawled across the far corner of the basement. He pointed.

“Snake,” he said;

Inside the huge pen there was a chunk of dead elm, from which hung a long perfect strand of muscle, draped in decorous pleats, like a streamer. This was Grossman, the nine-foot boa constrictor who, to their considerable regret, had been rooming with the Warshaws for the last twelve years. Philly Warshaw had won Grossman in a Liberty Avenue pool hall during his senior year at Allderdice, then abandoned him to his parents’ care the following fall when he enlisted. Even then, Grossman was not a young snake, and his imminent death had been foretold by veterinarians, and happily anticipated by Irene Warshaw, for as long as Philly had been promising one day to take him back. Still Grossman lived on, in his heated cage, escaping regularly, by means of various herpetical stratagems, to prey on Irene’s ragged tribe of chickens and to leave incredibly foul smelling sculptures of snake dung in artistic locations all over the house.

I clapped James on the shoulder. “That’s a snake, all right,” I said’

James knelt down and poked a finger through a hexagon of chicken wire. He made kissing sounds.

“I think he really likes me,” said James.

“He does,” I agreed. I tried to remember if I had ever actually seen Grossman move. “I can tell.”

James followed me up out of the basement and we went around the house to my car, brushing the spider silk from our eyebrows and lips. Evening was coming on. A paisley scarf of purple clouds and sunlight trailed across Ohio to the west. The air was dewy and the grass squeaked under our shoes. There was a smell of horseshit and onions fried in chicken fat. One of the cows out in the barnyard made a mournful comment on the burdensomeness of life. When we had nearly reached the Galaxie, to my surprise James gave a pirate cry and bolted across the last ten feet. He sprang into the air, then, with his arms pressed down against the top of the door, launched himself, as if to vault into the front seat of the open car. He had enough height, I thought, and his trajectory looked good. But at the very last instant he stopped himself and made an emergency two-point landing in the grass. He turned around, his face very serious.