Wonder Boys (31 page)

“Part of one,” I said. I put my hands on the lid of the trunk and started to slam it. “Come on. I’ll explain on the way out.”

“Not so fast.” He grabbed hold of my wrist. “I want my medicines.” After a brief struggle he wrested the trunk lid away from me and raised it once more. “I don’t care if you have a dead cassowary in there.” Carefully he reached into a far comer of the trunk and, wrinkling up his nose, started to feel his way around.

“Ick,” he said.

W
E PULLED INTO
S
EWICKLEY
Heights around three
A.M.
and rolled with the top down through its sinuous dark streets. The sidewalks were overarched with immense sycamores and lined with high hedges that hid the grand houses behind them. Crabtree was holding a Greater Pittsburgh street map and, pressed between his lips, an overdue notice from the college library, which had been mailed two weeks before to a James Selwyn Leer at 262 Baxter Drive. The Leers were unlisted, as we’d discovered in a Shell station telephone booth, but the ever-resourceful Crabtree had dug around in James’s knapsack and found the notice, stuck between two pages of the Errol Flynn biography. He had the knapsack balanced on his lap.

“The address on the manuscript?” said Crabtree, angling the street map, the better to catch the dim glow of the glove compartment light. “5225 Harrington?”

“His aunt’s house. In Mt. Lebanon.”

“I’m looking at the index, here. There’s no such street.”

“How surprising.”

Driving out to the suburbs I’d filled Crabtree in on most of what had happened to James Leer and me since I’d taken his shiny little pistol away from him the night before; the things I had learned and unlearned about him. I skipped the part about Marilyn Monroe’s jacket, though. I told myself I had the thing all nice and folded up into a neat little bundle on the backseat, so I ought just to leave it like that until tomorrow, when I would drive James over to the Gaskells’ and finally set everything straight; but the truth was that I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to have to try to explain to Crabtree what James and I were doing up there in the Gaskells’ bedroom in the first place. So I said that it was just a crazy accident that James had shot Doctor Dee. As I talked about James and his book, Crabtree seemed to grow convinced not only that the young man must be a good writer—he gave
The Love Parade
a quick editorial flip-through on the way out, reading by the light from the glove box—but that he, Terry Crabtree, Agent of Chaos, was the switch failure on the tracks toward which James Leer’s train was inexorably hurtling. I offered him a little account of my sad dealings with Emily and the Warshaws, too, but he didn’t seem all that interested, frankly, in my problems, or at least that was what he wanted me to think. He was still angry with me for having abandoned him that morning. As for
Wonder Boys
, he made no mention of it, and I was afraid to ask. If he’d looked at it and had nothing to say to me, then that told me plenty right there.

“Baxter’s next,” he said, looking up from the map.

I took it, guessing left. The numbers started at 230 and went up. I cut the lights, and as we drew closer to 262 I cut the engine, too. Silently we coasted until we pulled up abreast of the Leers’ driveway. There were pillars on either side, topped with stone pineapples. A fence of nasty-looking iron javelins ran off for a hundred feet in either direction and disappeared into the shadows. We got out of the car and gently let the doors fall shut. Then we took a couple of tentative steps into the Leers’ driveway, a rolled-out winding ten-mile river of finest country-club gravel, round as polished hematites and opals, that described a number of lazy meanders across the hundred feet of lawn which separated us from the wide front porch. The porch had to be wide, in order to wrap itself all the way around the Leers’ house, an eccentric pile of fieldstone and shingles, bristling with awnings and trusses and pointy dormers that stuck out in every direction, all jumbled together under a collection of gambreled eaves. The front door and indeed a fair portion of the facade were illuminated by floodlights hidden in the hedge.

“Jesus,” I said, keeping my voice low. “There must be fifty or sixty windows on that thing, Crabtree. How are we going to find
his
?”

“They keep him chained up in the basement, remember? We just have to find the cellar door.”

“If he was telling the truth,” I reminded him. “About anything.”

“If he wasn’t telling the truth about anything,” said Crabtree, “then what the fuck are we doing here?”

“Good point,” I said.

We started up the drive to the house, and as we drew closer I saw a long, thin ribbon of light stretched across the trees off to the left. Somewhere upstairs, on the far side of the house, a lamp was burning in a window.

“They’re still awake,” I said, pointing. “His parents.”

“They’re probably up filing their teeth,” said Crabtree, whose genuine sympathy and mounting desire for James Leer were characteristically tempered with ridicule. “Come on.”

I followed him around the near end of the house and we went into the backyard. He seemed to think that he knew where he was going. The gravel crunched loudly under my feet and I tried to get that toe-heel, toe-heel Indian stealth walk going, but it was too painful, and in the end I just tried to be quick about it.

There was no cellar door, or evidence of anything like a cellar, but there was a ground floor, an exposed cement foundation at the back of the house with two windows let into it, on either side of a glass-paned door. The windows were neatly curtained with dotted swiss, brightly lit from within. On the other side of the door a woman was singing, in a soft low rueful voice.

Why should I care

Though he gave me the air?

Why should I cry, heave a sigh, and wonder why?

And wonder why?

“Doris Day,” said Crabtree.

I smiled at him; he nodded.

“James Leer,” we said.

I drummed lightly on the glass, and after a few seconds’ delay James Leer opened the door. He was wearing a pair of red pajamas, too short in the leg and cuff, sagging in the seat, shot through with holes, ink-stained. His hair was mussed and his eyes were bright and somehow he didn’t seem very surprised to see us. At first, actually, he didn’t appear even to recognize us. He scratched at the back of his neck with the sharpened end of a pencil and blinked his eyes.

“Hey,” he said, tossing his head as if shaking off the remnants of a dream. “What are you guys doing here?”

“We’re springing you, Leer,” said Crabtree. “Get some pants on.”

“I can’t believe you made fun of my bathrobe,” I said.

We pushed past him, into a room that I’d been picturing to myself as a punitive cell: naked lightbulbs, an iron cot in one corner draped with a tattered coverlet, Sheetrock walls unadorned except for a thin splotchy coat of white paint. Instead we found ourselves standing in a large old cellar, more or less finished and as wide as the house itself, inhaling a comforting, subterranean smell of river mud, secondhand books, and moldering blankets. The low ceiling was held up by massive oak beams, and the floor had been painted, in the era when this was a fashionable effect for servants’ quarters, to look as though it were covered by a red Persian rug. This false carpet had been worn down to gray floorboard for the most part, but in the corners and along the edges of the room there were still bright patches of geometry and blood. The room was lit by a dozen antique electric candelabras, some of them as tall as James, a grove of gilded and iron black trees connected to a pair of wall outlets by an elf knot of extension cords. The walls, not Sheetrock but some kind of heavy gray masonry, were lined with books, piled high into twisting stairways, sagging arches, spindly Gaudí steeples, and above the spires of this paper city hung the still photographs, posters, and other movie ephemera James and his obsession had managed to amass. To the right of the door, under a black velvet canopy that sagged, baroque, enormous, and rotten with wormholes, stood James’s bed, like a foundered galleon. Beside the giant bed there was a nightstand, with a top of pink marble enclosed in a tiny gilt balustrade, on which he had a box of Kleenex, an empty juice glass, and a masturbatory jar of Vaseline. The bed was still made, and James had neatly folded the old clothes I’d lent him and stacked them neatly at its foot. There was no sign of the black overcoat.

“I like what you’ve done with it,” said Crabtree, sidestepping one of the iron trees, looking around the room. Some of the bulbs in the candelabras’ branches were the kind that pretend to be flickering flames. “When’s Captain Nemo moving in?”

James blushed, though whether at the question or at the sudden proximity of Crabtree I couldn’t say. He seemed to be a little frightened of Crabtree, which was not necessarily unwise of him.

“It’s just a bunch of my gran’s old stuff,” he said, taking a step away from Crabtree. “She was going to throw it out.”

“Your gran?” I said. “That’s who I met tonight?”

James didn’t say anything.

“Hey, I heard all about all of it, the parents, the grandparents, and I believe you, okay?” said Crabtree with patent but, as ever, somehow credible insincerity. “That’s why we’re here.” He glanced over toward James’s desk, beside the television, an elaborate rolltop number with gilt handles and a matching oak swivel chair. On the desktop there was an old manual Underwood with a piece of paper rolled into the carriage, a paragraph arrested in midphrase, and beside the typewriter a neat pile of paper, the uppermost sheet half covered in single-spaced text. “What were you writing?”

James looked taken aback by the question. He hurried over to the desk, gathered up the typescript, and stuffed it into one of the drawers.

“Just another story,” he said. He slammed the drawer closed. “It sucks.”

“Bring it,” said Crabtree, beckoning to James with one hand. “I want to read it.”

“What? You mean now?” He looked over at an electric office clock that hung from the wall beside his bed. He’d replaced the standard face with a black-and-white photograph of a plump, wild-eyed movie actor with a pair of mad mustaches whose face was familiar to me—he was a character actor from the thirties. “But it’s so
late
.”

“It’s not late, man, it’s
early
,” said Crabtree, making an argument and fixing James with a look I myself had succumbed to many times at three-thirty in the morning when Crabtree felt persuaded that there were hours more of fun to be had. “I thought Grady said you didn’t want to be here anyway.”

“I didn’t,” said James, succumbing. “I don’t.”

“So all right, then.”

James grinned. “All right,” he said. “Let me get dressed.”

“Wait,” I said. They both turned to look at me. “I don’t know about this.”

“What’s the matter?” said Crabtree.

“I have to tell you, James,” I said. “I’m feeling like you’ve been fucking with me again.”

“Why?” He looked alarmed. “What did I do now?”

“You made it sound like they were going to bring you home and throw you into a weasel pit,” I said. “You live in a fucking castle, here, buddy.”

James looked down at his hands.

“James,” said Crabtree, “did you tell Grady that your parents—”

“They’re my grandparents.” He looked up at me defiantly. “They are.”

“Sure they are.” Crabtree smiled thinly. “Did you tell him that your
grandparents
were going to bring you home, James, and throw you into a weasel pit?”

“No, I don’t think so.” ‘

“Well, then.” Crabtree punched me on the arm, as if to say, There now, you see? “Go get dressed.”

“All right.” He went over to the bed and scooped up the pile of clothes I’d lent him that morning. “Can I—could I wear these again, Professor Tripp?” he said.

I looked at him and then shrugged.

“Ah, what the fuck,” I said.

He flinched, and I saw that somehow I’d hurt his feelings. He nodded, slowly, and stood there for a minute, fiddling with the collar of my flannel shirt. Then he turned and walked away, dragging his feet a little. He disappeared through one of a pair of doors at the back of the room. After a second we could hear the whirring of a bathroom fan.

“So modest,” said Crabtree with admiration or mock admiration.

“Huh.”

“Oh, come on, Tripp. Why’re you so mad at him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not really mad at him, I guess. It’s just all that crap about his parents not being his parents, you know? I mean, what is that?” I shook my head. “I guess I just want to know once and for all what the truth is about the little bastard.”

“The truth,” said Crabtree. He went over to a nearby pile of books and hefted the three uppermost tides. They were hardcovers, in plain, dark bindings. “That’s always been real important to you, I know.”

I held up my right hand to him and showed him my fist.

“Imagine a finger,” I suggested.

“I think you ought to go easy on the kid.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because yesterday you left him sitting all by himself in the dark.”

I lowered my fist and said, “Oh.”

I didn’t know what else to say to that. I took a closer look at James’s movie memorabilia and saw that it was no mere act of dark teenaged whimsy that had led him to cut the dead director’s name into the back of his hand. The kid was a Capra fanatic. All along the wall behind the desk, above piles of videocassettes labeled
MR. DEEDS
, LOST HORIZON
, et cetera, above stacks of screenplays bound in black vinyl with some of the same titles printed in block letters on their fore edges, were lobby posters from fifteen or sixteen of Capra’s films, some of them familiar to me, some of them bearing outlandish titles such as
Dirigible
or
American Madness
, and dozens of still photographs and lobby cards—most of them drawn, it seemed to me, from
It’s a Wonderful Life
and
Meet John Doe.
This wall comprised the capital of James’s moviemania, so to speak, from which the empire had then spread upward, across the heavy beams of the ceiling, and down onto the other walls of his room, settling in large prosperous colonies that were dedicated to some of Capra’s great stars: Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, in framed photos, posters, and lobby cards representing much of their other work, great and obscure, from
Annie Oakley
to
Ziegfeld Girl
. In the farthest corners of the room the empire of James’s obsession seemed to disintegrate into a kind of vague borderland of Hollywoodiana, where it had established a few remote outposts—Henry Fonda, Grace Kelly, James Mason.