Wonder Boys (8 page)

Walter Gaskell’s grandfather had at one time owned most of Manatee County, Florida, as well as ten newspapers and a winner of the Preakness, but I didn’t tell that to James.

“They do all right,” I said. “Is your family well off?”

“Mine?” he said, poking himself in the sternum. “No way. My dad used to work in a mannequin factory. I’m serious. Seitz Plastics. They made mannequins for department stores, and display heads for hats, and those flattened-out sexy legs that they use to sell panty hose. He’s retired now, though. He’s old, my dad. Now he’s trying to raise trout in our backyard. No, we’re really poor. My mom was a fry cook before she died. Sometimes she worked in a gift shop.”

“Where was this?” I said, surprised, because despite his overcoat that stank of failure and the shabby thrift-shop suits he wore, he had the face and mannerisms of a rich boy, and sometimes he showed up for class wearing a gold Hamilton wristwatch with an alligator band. “I don’t think I ever knew where you’re from.”

He shook his head. “No place,” he said. “Near Scranton. You haven’t heard of it. It’s called Carvel.”

“I haven’t heard of it,” I said, though I thought it sounded vaguely familiar.

“It’s a hellhole,” he said. “It’s an armpit. Everybody hates me there.”

“But that’s good,” I said, wondering at how young he sounded, regretting that vanished time when I too had believed that I united in my fugitive soul all the greatest fears and petty hatreds of my neighbors in that little river town. How sweet it had felt, in those days, to be the bête noire of other people, and not only of myself! “Now you’ve got good reason to write about them.”

“Actually,” he said, “I already have.” He hefted the stained canvas knapsack on his shoulder and inclined his head toward it. It was one of those surplus Israeli paratrooper numbers that had caught on among my students about five years before, with the winged red insignia on the flap. “I just finished a novel that’s kind of about all that.”

“A novel,” I said. “God damn it, James, you’re amazing. You’ve already written five short stories this term! How long did
that
take you, a week?”

“Four months,” he said. “I started it at home, over Christmas break. It’s called
The Love Parade.
In the book I call the town Sylvania. Like in the movie.”

“What movie is that?”

“
The Love Parade
,” he said.

“I should have known. You ought to let me read it.”

He shook his head. “No. You’ll hate it. It really isn’t any good. It sucks, Prof— Grady. Tripp. I’d be too ashamed.”

“All right, then,” I said. As a matter of fact, the prospect of crawling across hundreds of pages of James Leer’s shards-of-glass style was less than appealing, and I was glad that he had let me off the hook of my automatic offer to read his book. “I’ll take your word for it. It sucks.” I smiled at him, but as I said it I saw something swim into his eyes, and I stopped smiling. “Hey, James, hey. I didn’t mean it. Buddy, I was just kidding.”

But James Leer had started to cry. He sat down on the Gaskells’ bed and let his knapsack slide to the floor. He cried silently, covering his face. A tear fell onto his old acetate necktie and spread in a slow ragged circle. I went over to stand beside him. It was now seven fifty-three, according to the clock on the night table, and downstairs I could hear the click of Sara’s heels as she rushed around, switching off lights, gathering up her purse, taking a last look at herself in the pier glass hanging in the foyer. After a moment the front door squealed on its hinges, then slammed, and the bolt turned in the lock. James and I were alone in the Gaskells’ house. I sat down on the bed beside him.

“I’d really like to take a look at your novel,” I said. “Really, James.”

“It isn’t that, Professor Tripp,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. There was a pearl of snot in one of his nostrils and he inhaled it. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s the matter, buddy? Hey, I know the workshop was awfully hard on you, it’s my fault, I—”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t that.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with a sigh. “Maybe I’m just depressed.” He looked up and turned his red eyes toward the closet. “Maybe it’s seeing that jacket that belonged to her. I guess I think it looks, I don’t know, really sad, just hanging there like that.”

“It does look sad,” I said. From outside I heard the engine of Sara’s car bubble to life. It was one of the few successful stylish gestures that she had managed to make—a currant red convertible Citroën DS23, in which she liked to tool around campus with a red and white polka-dot scarf on her head.

“I have an extra hard time with stuff like that,” he said. “Things that used to belong to people. Hanging in a closet.”

“I know what you mean.” I pictured a row of empty dresses, hanging in an upstairs closet in a soot-faced redbrick house in Carvel, Pennsylvania.

We sat there for a minute, side by side on that cool white snowbank of a bed, looking over at the scrap of black satin hanging in Walter Gaskell’s closet, listening to the whisper of Sara’s tires in the gravel drive as she pulled away from the house. In another second she would turn out into the street and wonder why Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie was still sitting dark and deserted along the curb.

“My wife left me today,” I said, as much to myself as to James Leer.

“I know,” said James Leer. “Hannah told me.”

“Hannah knows?” Now it was my turn to cover my face with my hands. “I guess she must have seen the note.”

“I guess so,” said James. “It seemed like she was kind of happy about it, to tell you the truth.”

“She what?”

“Not—I mean, Hannah said a couple of things that, well. I never got the impression, you know, that she and your wife actually
liked
each other. Very much. I mean, actually it sounded to me like your wife kind of
hated
Hannah.”

“I guess she did,” I said, remembering the creaking silence that had reached like the arm of a glacier across my marriage, in the days after I’d invited Hannah to rent our basement. “I guess I don’t really know a whole lot about what’s going on in my own house.”

“That could be,” said James, a certain wryness entering his tone. “Did you know that Hannah Green has a crush on you?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, falling backward on the bed. It felt so good to lie back and close my eyes that I was afraid to stay that way. I sat up, too quickly, so that a starry cloud of diamonds condensed around my head. I didn’t know what to say next. I’m glad? So much the worse for her?

“I think so, anyway,” said James. “Hey, you know who else I forgot? Peg Entwistle. Although she certainly was never a big star. She only made one movie,
Thirteen Women
, 1932, and she just had a bit part in that. It was the only part she ever got.”

“And?”

“And she jumped off the ‘Hollywoodland’ sign. That’s what it used to say, you know. Off of the second letter
d
, I think.”

“That’s a good one.” The cloud of stars had parted, but now I was unable to clear my head of a thick blue smog that had begun to form inside it, and the lilac smell of James’s hair oil was just too much. I felt that if I didn’t stand up at once and get moving I was going to pass out, or vomit, or both. I felt weak in my arms and legs, and tried to remember the last time I’d had something to eat. I’d been forgetting to take my meals lately, which is a dangerous sign in a man of my girth and capacity. “We’d better skedaddle, James,” I said, in a mild panic, taking hold of James’s scarecrow arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

Forgetting that I had left wide open the door of Walter Gaskell’s closet, I got up and hurried out of the room. I switched off the bedroom light behind me, leaving James Leer sitting alone in the dark for the second time that day. As I stepped out into the hallway I heard a low rumbling sound that raised all the hairs on the back of my neck. It was Doctor Dee. Sara had freed him from the prison of the laundry room and he crouched in the hall, belly to the ground, paws outspread, his black lip peeled back from his yellow old teeth. His wild eyes were staring fixedly at the empty air beside me, at some distant arctic peak.

“James?” I said. “Guess who’s here? Hello, Doctor Dee. Hello, you old bastard.”

I flattened myself against the right-hand wall of the hallway and tried to brush past him, but he came at me. I panicked and lost my balance, stumbling over Doctor Dee, accidentally giving him a sharp kick in the ribs. The next instant I felt a stab of pain in my foot, somewhere in the vicinity of my ankle, and then I fell to the floor, hard. Doctor Dee scrambled to his feet and stood over me, his throat filled with a single long rolling syllable.

“Get away from me,” I said. I was afraid, but not too afraid for it to occur to me that dying torn to pieces by blind, mad dogs had a certain mythic quality that might work well in the section of
Wonder Boys
in which I planned to have Curtis Wonder, the oldest of the three brothers who were the central characters of my book, meet the fate that his colossal pride and his lurid misdeeds had earned for him. I raised my fist, as Curtis might, and tried actually to punch Doctor Dee, as you would slug a man, but he caught the blow in his teeth, as it were, and worked his jaw around the meat of my hand.

There was a sudden sharp crack! as of a rock against the windshield of a car. Doctor Dee yelped. His tail jerked straight up into the air like an exclamation point and ratcheted around a few times on its hinge. Then he toppled over onto my legs. I looked up, my ears ringing, and saw James Leer, standing half in the shadow of the doorway, the pretty little pearl-handled pistol in his hand. I yanked my legs out from under Doctor Dee and the dog landed with a soft thud against the floor. I rolled down my sock. There were four bright red holes in my foot, on either side of my Achilles tendon.

“I thought you said that was a cap gun,” I said.

“Is he dead? Did he bite you bad?”

“Not so bad.” I pulled my sock up and scrambled up onto my knees. Carefully I passed my hand around Doctor Dee’s head and cupped the moist tip of his snout in my fingers. There was no trace of his breath against them. “He’s dead,” I said, climbing slowly to my feet. I could feel the first delicate tickle of pain in my ankle. “Shit, James. You killed the Chancellor’s dog.”

“I had to,” he said miserably. “Didn’t I?”

“Couldn’t you have just pulled him off me?”

“No! He was biting you! I didn’t—I thought he—”

“Easy,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Okay. Don’t freak out on me.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to go find Sara and tell her, I guess,” I said, feeling the desire for a sweet poisonous glass of bourbon steal over me like a fog. “But first I’m going to get cleaned up. No. First you’re going to give me that cap gun of yours.”

I held out my hand, palm up, and he obediently set the pistol on it. It was warm, and heavier than it looked.

“Thanks,” I said. I slipped it into the hip pocket of my blazer, and then he helped me into the bathroom, where I washed out the puncture holes with foaming hydrogen peroxide and found a pair of Band-Aids to cover them up. Then I rolled up my sock again and tugged down the leg of my trousers, and we went back out into the hall, where the handsome old dog lay dead.

“I don’t think we should leave him lying there,” I said.

James said nothing. He was so lost in working out the ramifications of what he had done that I don’t think he was capable of speech at that moment.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that I did it. That it was self-defense. Come on.”

I knelt down beside Doctor Dee and wrapped my arms around his heavy head. A dark red smear was turning to purple in the fur around the base of the right earflap, and there was a smell of burnt hair. James knelt and took hold of the dog’s hindquarters, a dazed, almost sweet expression on his smooth face.

“A little curl of smoke came out of the bullet hole,” said James.

“Wow,” I said. “I wish I could have seen that.”

Then we carried Doctor Dee down the stairs and along the endless driveway to the street, where we laid him out in the back of my car, on the seat, beside the tuba.

B
Y THE TIME WE
arrived for the lecture, both of the school’s main lots were full, and we ended up parking in one of the quiet residential streets at the other end of campus from Thaw Hall, under an old stand of beech trees, at the foot of some happy professor’s driveway. I cut the engine and we sat for a moment, listening to the rain drop like beechnuts from the trees and scatter across the canvas top of the car.

“That sounds nice,” said James Leer. “It’s like being in a tent.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said, filled with a sudden longing to be lying on my back in a little tent, peering up through the silk mesh window at Orion.

“You don’t have to. It’s dumb for you to tell her you did it, Professor Tripp. I mean, it’s a lie.” He picked at the threads fraying along the hem of his long black coat. “I don’t care what she does to me, to tell you the truth. She probably
should
kick me out.”

“James,” I said, shaking my head. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have sneaked you up there in the first place.”

“But,” said James, looking confused, “you knew the combination.”

“True,” I said. “Think about that one for a minute or two.” I looked at my watch. “Only you can’t, ’cause we’re late.” I grabbed hold of the handle and leaned against the door. “Come on, help me get him into the trunk.”

“The trunk?”

“Yeah, well, I’m probably going to have to drive a bunch of people over to the Hi-Hat after the lecture, buddy. There isn’t going to be a whole lot of room for
people
with a tuba and a dead dog in the backseat.”

I climbed out of the car and tilted my seat forward. My fingers were cold and I could feel a very faint envelope of heat around the body of Doctor Dee as I passed my arms beneath it. I lifted without crouching first to gain leverage, and felt a sharp twinge in the small of my back. There was a vinegar tang of blood in my nose. James had gotten out of the car by now, and he came around to help me pitch the stiffening old pup into the trunk, alongside Miss Sloviak’s bags. We slid the body as far back as we could, under the rear dash, until there was a sound like a pencil snapping in two, and we jerked our hands away.