Wonder Boys (9 page)

“Yuck,” said James, wiping his hands against the flaps of his overcoat. That garment bore the stains of all manner of hell, bad weather, and misfortune, but I wondered if it had ever before been used to wipe away the invisible effluvium of a dead dog. Quite possibly so, I imagined.

“Now the tuba,” I said.

“That’s a big trunk,” James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. “It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly.”

“That’s just what they used to say in the ads,” I said, reaching for Crabtree’s garment bag. I palpated its pockets for a moment, then zipped open the largest of them. To my surprise I found that it was empty. I felt around in the next largest pocket, and then in a third, and found that they were empty, too. Laying the bag open across the other luggage, I unzipped its main compartment. Inside there were a pair of white dress shirts, a couple of paisley neckties, and two suits, glinting faintly in the streetlight.

“They’re the same,” said James, lifting the uppermost suit and peering underneath.

“What’s that?”

“His suits. They look just like the one he has on now.”

He was right: the suits were both double-breasted, with peaked lapels, cut from the same kind of sleek metallic silk. Although it was difficult to tell their color, you could see that they matched each other and the suit he was wearing. I thought of Superman’s closet at the North Pole, a row of shining suits hanging on vibranium hooks.

“I find that odd,” I said, finding it somehow pathetic. I’d always thought there was something a little pathetic about Superman, too, way up there in his Fortress of Solitude.

“I guess he doesn’t like to have to worry about what he’s going to wear,” James said.

“I guess he doesn’t like having to
remember
to worry.” I zipped the garment bag closed and stuffed it back into the trunk. “Come on, Crabtree,” I said, “I know you’re holding.” I pulled on the handles of the canvas grip, and it weighed so little that when it came free it nearly flew out of my hand.

“Whose tuba
is
that, anyway?” said James.

“Miss Sloviak’s,” I said, plunging my hand into the grip, hoping, with an odd foretaste of horror, that it did not contain nothing at all. To my relief I discovered three pairs of boxer shorts, bundled into little balls, rolling around like marbles inside the bag. Wrapped up in one of these bundles I felt something hard, and my fingers curled around it. “Actually, no, it isn’t. I don’t know who it belongs to.”

“Can I ask you something about her?” said James.

“She’s a transvestite,” I said, pulling out what proved to be an airline bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Hey. How do you like that?”

“I don’t like whiskey,” said James. “Oh. So. Is—is your friend Crabtree—is he—gay?”

“I don’t like whiskey, either,” I said, handing him the bottle. “Open that. Most of the time he is, James. Bear with me now. I’m going to make another dive down to the wreck.” I stuck my hand back into the grip and fished out another rolled-up pair of boxers. “Some of the time he isn’t. Oh, my goodness. What have we here?”

Inside the second roll of underwear there was a small prescription vial of pills.

“No label,” I said, examining the outside of the vial.

“What do you think they are?”

“Looks like my old friend Mr. Codeine. That’ll be good for my ankle,” I said, shaking out a pair of thick white pills into my palm, each of them marked with a tiny numeral 3. “Have one.”

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m fine without them.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s why you were standing out there in the Gaskells’ backyard trying to decide whether or not to kill yourself. Right, buddy?”

He didn’t say anything. A gust of wind blew a handful of rain from the trees and it splashed against our faces. The bell over in the Mellon Campanile rang out the quarter hour, and I thought of Emily, whose father, Irving Warshaw, had been a young metallurgist assigned to the casting of the steel bell back in the late forties. An experimental and later discredited method had been employed in the bell’s manufacture, leaving it to toll in a voice that was off-key and faintly mournful and that usually reminded me of old Irv, to whom I had been a constant source of disappointment.

“I’m sorry I said what I said, James.” I took the bottle from him and unscrewed the lid. I tossed one of the codeine pills into my mouth like an M & M, and downed it with a swallow of Jack Daniel’s. The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good. “I haven’t had any of this stuff in four years,” I said.

“Give me,” said James, biting his lip in anger and trepidation and a childish desire to force himself into being a man. I handed him the pill and the dark little bottle. I knew it was irresponsible of me but that was as far as my thinking on the subject went. I told myself that he could hardly feel worse than he already did, and I suppose that I told myself that I didn’t really care. He took a long, careless pull from the bottle, and half a second later spat out the whole mouthful.

“Take it easy,” I said. I peeled the soggy pill from the lapel of my jacket and returned it to him. “Here, Why don’t you try that again?”

This time he was more successful. He frowned.

“It tastes like cordovan shoe polish,” he said, reaching for the bottle again. “Another sip.”

“There isn’t any more,” I said, giving the bottle a demonstrative shake. “These things don’t hold a whole lot.”

“Look inside the other ball of underpants.”

“Good thinking.” In the remaining pair of boxers was another little bottle of bourbon. “Hello,” I said. “We’re going to have to confiscate this, too, I’m afraid.”

James smiled. “I’m afraid so,” he said.

We ran splashing through puddles all the way to Thaw Hall, passing the little bottle back and forth between us, avoiding a group of young ladies who glared at us, and when we got to the hall and came laughing into the high, gilt lobby, James Leer looked thrilled. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were full of water from the bite of the wind on his face. As I stood, doubled over, at the closed doors to the auditorium, trying to catch my breath, I felt him place a steadying hand on my back.

“Was I running funny?” I said.

“A little. Does your ankle hurt bad?”

I nodded. “It’ll be all right in a few minutes, though. How are you feeling?”

“All right,” he said. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and I saw that he was trying to keep himself from smiling. “I guess I’m feeling sort of glad I didn’t kill myself tonight.”

I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder, and reached out with my other hand to open the door.

“What more could you ask for?” I said.

T
HAW
H
ALL HAD SERVED
as a preliminary exercise for the architects who later went on to build the old Syria Mosque. The exterior was trimmed with sphinxes and cartouches and scarabs, and the lobby and auditorium were all pointed arches, slender pillars, a tangled vegetation of arabesques. The seats and the loges were arranged around the stage in a kind of lazy oval, just as in that late, lamented concert hall, only there were far fewer of them—seats, I mean—and the stage itself was smaller than that of the Mosque. The place held about five hundred in the orchestra and another fifty up above, and by the time we got in there every one of the blood red velvet seats was taken, and at the creaking of the door hinges every one of those five hundred heads turned around. Some folding chairs had been set up at the back, in the standing aisle, and James Leer and I took a couple and sat down.

We hadn’t missed much; the elfin old novelist, I later discovered, had commenced his lecture by reading a lengthy extract from
The Secret Sharer
, and it didn’t take long for me to pick up the thread of his argument, which was that over the course of his life as a writer he—you know the man I mean, but let’s just call him Q.—had become his own doppelgänger, a malignant shadow who lived in the mirrors and under the floorboards and behind the drapes of his own existence, haunting all of Q.’s personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world; a being unmoved by tragedy, unconcerned with the feelings of others, disinclined to any human business but surveillance and recollection. Only every once in a while, Q. said, did his secret sharer act—overpowering his unwilling captor, so to speak, assuming his double’s place long enough to say or do something unwise or reprehensible, and thus to ensure that human misfortune, the constant object of the Other Qs surveillance and the theme of all his recollections, continued unabated in Q.’s life. Otherwise, of course, there would be nothing to write about. “I blame it all on him,” the dapper little man declared, to the apparent delight of his audience, “the terrible mess I have made of my life.”

It seemed to me that Q. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to “fit in” by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze.

There was a lot I could agree with in Q.’s argument—but I soon found myself having a tough time concentrating on his words. The mark of Doctor Dee’s teeth on my ankle had dulled with the codeine to a faint pulse of pain, but things had also gone smeary at their edges. I could feel the machinery of my heart laboring in my chest, and there was a jagged codeine cramp in my belly. I was drunk on five swallows of Jack Daniel’s and a heavy dose of oxygen from our run across the campus, and all the radiant things around me, the stage lights, the gilt wall sconces, the back of Hannah Green’s golden head seven rows away from me, the massive crystal chandelier suspended above the audience by the thinnest of chains, seemed to be wrapped, like streetlights in a mist, in pale, wavering halos. As soon as I managed to focus my eyes on them, however, the halos would vanish. I smelled something dank and somehow nostalgic in the air of Thaw Hall, dust and silk and the work of some devouring organism—rotten ball gowns, ancient baby clothes, the faded flag with forty-eight stars that my grandmother kept in a steamer trunk under the back stairs and flew from the porch of the McClelland Hotel on the Fourth of July. I sat back in my chair and folded my hands across my stomach. The warm ache of codeine there felt sad and appropriate. I wasn’t worrying about the tiny zygote rolling like a satellite through the starry dome of Sara’s womb, or about the marriage that was falling apart around me, or about the derailment of Crabtree’s career, or about the dead animal turning hard in the trunk of my car; and most of all I was not thinking about
Wonder Boys.
I watched Hannah Green nod her head, tuck a strand of hair behind her right ear, and, in a gesture I knew well, raise her knee to her forehead and slip her hands down into her boot to give a sharp upward tug on her sock. I passed ten blissful minutes without a thought in my head.

Then James Leer laughed, out loud, at some private witticism that had bubbled up from the bottom of his brain. People turned around to glare at him. He covered his mouth, ducked his head, and looked up at me, his face as red as Hannah Green’s boots. I shrugged. All the people who had turned to look at James now returned their gazes to the podium; all except one. Terry Crabtree was sitting three seats away from Hannah, with Miss Sloviak and Walter Gaskell between them, and he kept his eyes on James Leer for just a second or two longer. Then he looked toward me, winked once, and arranged his studious little face into a playful expression that was supposed to mean something like What are you two up to back there? and without really meaning to I gave him back an irritable frown that meant something like Leave us alone. Crabtree looked startled, and quickly turned away.

The milkweed tufts of a codeine high are easily dispersed; all at once, in the aftermath of Leer’s mad guffaw, I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home. It was a scene that took place immediately before the five ill-fated endings I’d tried out over the last month, in which Johnny Wonder, the youngest of my three doomed and glorious brothers, buys a 1955 Rambler American from a minor character named Bubby Zrzavy, a veteran of U.S. Army LSD experiments. I’d been trying for weeks to imbue this purchase with the organ rumble of finality and a sense of resolution but it was an irremediably pivotal moment in the book: it was to be in this car, rebuilt from the chassis out by mad Bubby Z., over the course of ten years, according to the cryptic auto mechanics of his addled neurons, that Johnny Wonder would set out on the cross-country trip from which he would return with Valerie Sweet, the girl from Palos Verdes, who would lead the Wonder family to its ruin. That I had written so much already, without even having gotten to Valerie Sweet, was one of the things that had been making it so difficult for me to force the book to any kind of conclusion. I was dying for Valerie Sweet. I felt as though I had been writing my entire life just to arrive at the page on which her cheap pink sunglasses made their first appearance. At the thought of forgoing her, as my zoo-monkey brain returned yet again to the insoluble question of how I could get myself out of the seven-year mess I had gotten myself into, it was as if the power flowing into Thaw Hall had suddenly ebbed. Then a dazzling burst of static passed like rain across my eyes, and I caught a bloody whiff of the inside of my nose, and a bitter shaft of acid rose from my belly.

“I have to get out of here,” I whispered to James Leer. “I’m going to be sick.”