Wonder Boys (27 page)

“Where’s your sister?” said Irv.

“She’s going for a drive,” Deborah said, with a little shrug.

“Is she all right?”

“Fine.”

From outside there was the irritable two-stroke cough of Emily’s old Bug, and then a scrabbling of gravel as she pulled away. I hoped she would be all right, driving around in a state of shock, with those six-volt headlights, on those dark lanes. It was not unusual for her to take off in her car when she was upset, however. She found solace in traveling the roads around Kinship; down to Barkeyville, out to Nectarine, across the Ohio state line at Sharon.

Deborah took a long, slow look around the table at the wreckage of dinner and the early high spirits in which the meal had begun.

“This party sucks,” she said. She walked around behind me, and as she went past I caught a bitter whiff of dirt from the pocket of her bathrobe and realized that she was not chewing on any piece of gum.

She laid a hand on James’s shoulder.

“Come on, sport,” she said. “Let’s go hide that matzoh.”

T
HE TABLE HAD BEEN
cleared, the remnant of our tribe assembled. We hurried through the ragged end of the service. Deborah had disappeared upstairs—to wait for the mushrooms to kick in, I supposed—and Emily did not return. Irv skipped through the grace, mumbling along in tired Hebrew, stopping frequently to rub his eyes. Then it came time to open the door to Elijah the Prophet, and at Irv’s request, James got himself out of his chair and stumbled into the kitchen to admit that longed-for phantom, for whom a glass of wine stood ready and waiting in the middle of the table. Many years earlier, I knew, family tradition had made it the job of Sam Warshaw to open the magical door.

“No” said Irv, his voice a little hoarse. “The front”

James looked back at Irv, then nodded slowly and went over to the front door. He had to throw his shoulder against it to get it unlocked, and it produced a suitably eerie creaking of the hinges when he pulled it open. A cool breeze blew into the room and stirred the flames of the candles, and I looked at Irv, who was watching the air around him as if he could see it moving. If Elijah ever did show up to drink his glass of wine, I knew, it would mean that the Messiah himself was on the way, and the night would be as day, and the hills would skip like rams, and fathers would be reunited with their drowned sons.

James sat back down in his chair, heavily, and gave us all a queasy smile.

“Thank you, son,” said Irv.

“Hey, Irv?” I said, deciding, after all this time, to ask the Fifth Question, the one that never got asked. “How come old Yahweh let the Jews wander around in the desert like that for forty years, anyway? How come he didn’t, just, like, show them the right way to go? They could have gotten there in a month.”

“They weren’t ready to enter the Holy Land,” said Marie. “It took forty years to get the slavery out of them.”

“That could be,” said Irv, looking over at James, his eyes deep and shadowy. “Or maybe they just got lost.”

On this word, “lost,” James suddenly tipped back in his chair, hand wrapped around yet another glass of Manischewitz, and closed his eyes. The glass slipped from his hand and chimed against the edge of the table.

“Damn,” said Philly, impressed. “He passed out.”

“James,” said Irene, hurrying around the table to him. “Wake up.” She spoke sharply, in the cool and brusque manner of a mother who fears the worst. His eyes fluttered open, and he smiled at her. “Come on, sweetie, come upstairs and lie down.”

She helped James out of his chair and guided him up the creaking stairs. Just before she passed from view she turned and looked back at me, her jaw set. What kind of teacher was I? I looked away. Marie got up from the table and ran into the kitchen for another damp cloth.

Ten minutes later Irene reappeared, wearing a short black satin jacket, trimmed with a white fur collar. It was a tight fit.

“Look what James gave me,” she said. “He had it in that little bag of his.” She ran a hand along its collar. “Ermine.”

“Is he all right?” said Philly.

She shook her head.

“I just got off the telephone with his mother.” She looked at me with a puzzled expression, as though she couldn’t understand why I’d told her such outrageous lies about that poor young man lying upstairs in Sam Warshaw’s old bed. “They weren’t home, but the housekeeper gave me a number to call. It was a country club, St. Something, they were having a party. They’ll be here in two hours.”

“In two hours?” I said, trying to connect the words “mother” and “country club” with what I knew about James Leer. “All the way from Carvel?”

“What Carvel?” said Irene.

“He’s from a little town called Carvel. Near Scranton,”

“That was a Pittsburgh number I called,” said Irene. “412.”

“Just a minute,” said Irv. He got up from the table and brought down an old
Rand McNally Road Atlas
from the shelf under the stairs. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his flyaway hair, looking relieved to have found a way back into the reasonable land of reference books. We searched the index three times, but there was, naturally, no listing for anyplace called Carvel.

I
WAS SITTING BEHIND
the wheel of Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie 500, looking up at the sky. I’d rolled myself a big fat gherkin of a joint, a cocktail weenie, a spaniel dick, and I intended to smoke it down to the skin of my lips. I was looking for the seventh star in the constellation of the Pleiades, thinking about Sara and trying not to think of Hannah. It was so quiet in the farmyard that I could hear the bones of the house creaking, and the snoring of the cattle in the barn. Every so often there was the sound of a car passing, out on the Youngstown Road, all tires and slipstream, like a sigh. The downstairs windows of the house were dark, but upstairs the lights were still on in all the rooms except James Leer’s. Emily was still not back, but she had called from a pay phone to tell her mother that we should not wait up for her. I’d passed a couple of hours in front of the television with Philly, watching Edward G. Robinson pad around Pharaonic Memphis in sandals; then let myself be drawn into a sullen game of Scrabble with Irv and Irene. Finally everyone had turned in, tired of waiting for James’s parents to show; they were already almost two hours late.

I couldn’t help wondering how Hannah would feel when she learned that James had saddened us and won our sympathies with a false autobiography; she knew him much better than I did, which I supposed meant that now she didn’t know him at all. I was still having a hard time abandoning my conception of James Leer as the working-class northeastern Pennsylvania boy damaged by grief for his dead mother. But I supposed that was only the situation of the hero of his
Love Parade.
How much of what he’d told me about himself would turn out to be the story of his novel’s protagonist?

I looked up at that dark window and thought of how it was said that acute insomniacs often experienced a kind of queasy blurring of the lines between dreams and wakefulness, their waking lives taking on some of the surprising tedium of a nightmare. Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual worlds; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot. If that was so, I thought that James Leer probably had the worst case I’d ever seen; but then I remembered another lonely fantasist, sitting slumped in his bentwood chair with his pistol in his fingers, slowly, slowly rocking back and forth. Maybe Albert Vetch had also come to think of himself as the protagonist of one of his own stories. His solitary archaeologists and small-town bibliomanes frequently chose to shoot themselves rather than be devoured by the slavering jaws of whatever betentacled terror their unreasonable thirsts set loose upon the world, devoured by those grins as unluminous and empty as cold black space itself.

The joint had gone out, and I relit it amid the coils of the dashboard lighter. I saw now that with their creatures from beyond the Void—eye sockets vacant, maws desolate and huge—August Van Zorn’s stories were all, at bottom, about the horror of emptiness: the emptiness of a matronly pair of pumps abandoned in the back of an armoire, of a blank sheet of foolscap, of a killed bottle of bourbon on a windowsill at five-thirty
A.M.
Perhaps Albert Vetch, like his hero Eric Waldensee confronted by the deserted rooms and corridors of “The House on Polfax Street,” put a pistol to his temple because in the end there were too many whistling black holes in his room in the McClelland Hotel. This was the writer’s true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work—Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver—whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life’s very course.

I thought about my own luckless heroes, that motley troupe of embarrassed and discredited romantics: Danny Fixx, at the end of
The Bottomlands
, paddling his canoe into the darkness of a New Mexico cavern to hide the body of Big Dog Slaney; Winthrop Pease, in
The Arsonist’s Girl
, who suffered a heart attack while digging a hole, in his backyard, for the charred remains of the tuxedo he wore to light his last great fire; and Jack Haworth in
The Land Downstairs
, ruling over and expanding the borders of his basement model-train empire, with its trim, orderly towns named for his children and his wives—while in the town aboveground, in the house over his head, his life and his family fell apart. I’d never noticed it before, but there was a persistent invocation in my work of the subterranean (that other classic theme of the horror writer), a motif of burial and concealment underground. In fact, I’d planned yet another such episode for
Wonder Boys
, one in which Lowell Wonder, after allowing Valerie Sweet to seduce him, would break into the fallout shelter of his old high school and live there for three weeks, emerging—starving, pale, and half blind—to learn that his father, old Culloden, was dead. My heroes, it seemed, were always trying either to escape from their terrible errors of judgment by crawling into caves and vaults and basements or else to cover them up—dispose of them—by laying them in the ground. In the ground, I thought. I took a deep breath and looked slowly around me, and flicked away the burnt end of the joint. Then I got out of the car, went around to the back, and opened up the trunk.

The lightbulb in the lid had burned out years before, but in the lunar-holiday radiance of the full moon it was easy to make out the contents. For a moment I stood there, looking down at the corpse and the tuba case nestled companionably against each other in my trunk. It just wasn’t right, I thought, to keep Doctor Dee lying there like that. One of his ears hung twisted at a painful-looking angle to his skull, and the meat on his bones was beginning to spoil. On the back porch of the house, at angles to each other—I could feature them perfectly—stood a pair of shovels, army surplus, crusted over with a rusty oatmeal of dirt. Irv and I had used them a couple of summers ago to dig a posthole, in the front yard, for a birdhouse on a tall birch pole. It was a beautiful piece of handiwork, that birdhouse, in the form of a Russian palace with pied and twisted domes, but unfortunately the all-weather liquid nail compound Irv had formulated to hold it together had dissolved over the winter and left it scattered in particolored pieces on the snow. I looked over at the whitewashed rocks scattered like knucklebones on the grass under the horse chestnut tree. Then I looked back at Doctor Dee. His blank mad eyes seemed to have fixed upon me once again. I shuddered.

“Have you out of there in a minute,” I said, closing the trunk.

I went around the house to the back, found the shovels right where I’d remembered them, and carried one back into the front yard, sloshing through the flooded grass. The moonlit headstones threw jagged shadows across the ground. I bit into the earth with the blade of the shovel and started to scoop out the dirt in a vacant spot between the graves of Earmuffs and Whiskers—a long-haired guinea pig, I seemed to remember. When the shovel hit the dirt, because I was stoned and frightened I thought I heard angry voices coming from inside my own ears or from every corner of the farm. Each black ingot of dirt rang out against the shovel, and I was sure that any minute now somebody would come out and ask me what the hell I thought that I was doing, and I would have to tell them that I was laying another dead dog into their lawn.

After ten minutes, however, my career as a character in one of my own books was over. I couldn’t dig anymore. I leaned against the horse chestnut tree and tried to catch my breath, looking down into a hole deep enough, I calculated, to hold a largish Pomeranian. So much for my fucking doppelgänger, I thought. I sighed, and my sigh was answered out on the county road, and I turned in time to see a long pale wand of light reach out and shatter against the colonnade of elms. A car was coming fast toward the house, snapping branches, bottoming put in the many potholes with a series of irritable scrapes and drumbeats. I looked back to the house. The light had come on in Sam Warshaw’s old bedroom, now, and there was a shadow at the glass. James Leer watched his parents’ car come up the drive.

It was a late-model Mercedes sedan, its engine percolating as though it ran on soda water. In the moonlight it looked soft and gray and stately as a felt fedora. It pulled up behind my car and sat for a minute, engine idling, headlights blaring, as if its passengers were experiencing a moment of doubt, geographic or moral. Then the driver backed it sharply to the left and executed a neat three-point turn, aiming the car out toward the road before cutting the engine; in case they needed to make a quick getaway, I supposed. A long black shoe emerged from the driver’s side, pointy-toed and glinting in the light of the Passover moon. It was attached, via a dark stocking and several pale inches of calf, to a man wearing evening dress and a white tuxedo scarf that at first I took for a prayer shawl. The man was not quite as tall as James, but his frame was lanky and his shoulders looked as though they were knotted together in the same shy stoop. He held up a pale, somber palm to me, then offered his hand to the woman in the passenger seat. She was tall, too, and wide, a big woman wrapped up in the luminous white pelt of something dead, wobbling in the driveway on high, high heels. They started toward me, smiling as if they were dropping in on old friends, the man’s hand applied like a cha-cha partner’s to the small of the woman’s back. In their somber finery and luminous white stoles they looked something like an advertisement for a French brand of mustard, and something like the couple on top of a wedding cake, and something like a pair of elegant ghosts, killed in a collision of limousines on their way to a fancy-dress ball.