Wonder Boys

“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.

Chapter 10

THAW Hall 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 Q.’s 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.”

I got up and pushed through the doors to the lobby. It was deserted, except for a couple of kids—one of whom I recognized vaguely—slouched against the main doors, propping them open with their bodies, smoking and blowing their bored smoke out into the evening. I nodded to them and then hurried toward the men’s room, moving as quickly as I could without looking like a man who had to heave and was trying not to do it on the rug. The whiff of static, the burst of red blood in my nose, the nausea, none of these symptoms was new to me. They had gripped me at odd moments for the past month or so, along with an attendant sense of weird elation, a feeling of weightlessness, of making my way across the shimmering mesh of sunshine in a swimming pool. I looked back at the kids by the door and recognized by his goatee a former student of mine, a stunned-looking, moderately talented young writer of H. S. Thompsonesque paranoid drug jazz who had dropped by my office one afternoon last year to inform me, with the true callousness of an innocent heart, that he felt the college was cheating him by taking his money to put him through writing classes with a pseudo-Faulknerian nobody like me. Then the corridor to the bathrooms turned sideways on me, and I felt so feverish that I had to lay my cheek against the cool, cool wall.

When I came to, I was lying on my back, with my head propped up, and Sara Gaskell kneeling over me, one light hand on my brow. The cushion she had fashioned for my head felt soft on the outside, but at its center there was something hard as a brick.

“Grady?” she said, in a careless voice, as though she were trying only to attract my attention to an interesting item in the newspaper. “Are you still with us?”

“Hello,” I said. “I think so.”

“What happened, big guy?” Her eyes darted from one corner of my face to another, and she licked her lips, and I saw that despite her tone of unconcern I had given her a fright. “Not another one of these dizzy-spell things?”

“Kind of. I don’t know.” Your dog is dead. “I think I’ll be all right.”

“Do you think I ought to run you over to the E.R.?”

“Not necessary,” I said. “Is the thing over?”

“Not yet. I saw you walk out, and I—I thought—” She wrung her hands a little, as if they were cold. “Grady—”

Before she could say whatever difficult thing she intended to say to me, I sat up and kissed her. Her lips were cracked and slick with lipstick. Our teeth touched. The play of her fingers along the back of my neck was cold as rain. After a moment we parted, and I looked at her face, freckled and pale and alive with the look of disappointment that often haunts the difficult faces of redheaded women. Presently we kissed again, and I shivered as her fingertips ran like raindrops down my neck. I slipped my hands down into the back of her dress.

“Grady—” She let go of me, and drew back, and shook herself. She took a deep breath. I could feel her physically readopting some resolve she had made, some promise not to let me kiss away her doubts. “I know tonight is a terrible night to try to deal with the kind of things we need to deal with, here, sweetie, but I—”

“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Something hard.”

“Stand up,” she said, in her most Chancelloresque voice, reacting immediately to the note of fear that had crept into my voice. “I’m too old for all this rolling around on the floor.” She rose a little unsteadily on her heels, tugged down the hem of her black dress, and held out a hand to me. I let her pull me to my feet. Her wedding ring was like a cold spark against my palm.

Sara let go of my hand and looked over her shoulder, down the corridor. There was no one coming. She turned back to me, trying to make her face expressionless, as though I were the college comptroller come to deliver some bad financial news. “What is it? No, wait a minute.” She pulled a pack of Merit cigarettes from the purse she sometimes carried on formal occasions. It was a flashy silver beaded thing no bigger than twenty cigarettes and a lipstick, a gift from her father to her mother fifty years before, and utterly unsuited to either woman’s character. Sara’s regular handbag was a sort of leather toolbox, with a brass padlock, filled with spreadsheets and textbooks and a crowded key ring as spiked and heavy as a mace. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. Just before she lit her cigarette I thought I caught a faint whiff of burning bud in the air. Those kids standing out in the lobby, I thought. It smelled awfully good. “Sara—”

“You love Emily,” she said, looking down at the steady flame of the match. “I know that. You need to stay with her.”

“I don’t think I really have any choice there,” I said. “Emily left me.”

“She’ll come back.” She allowed the flame to burn all the way down to the skin of her fingers. “Ow. That’s why I’m going to—not have this baby.”

“Not have it,” I said, watching her maintain her cool administrator’s gaze, waiting to feel the sense of relief I knew I ought to be feeling.

“I can’t. There’s no way.” She passed her fingers through her hair and there was the momentary flash of her ring, as if her russet hair itself were flashing. “Don’t you think there’s just no way?”

“I don’t see any way,” I said. I reached out to give her hand a squeeze. “I know how hard it is—for you to—lose this chance.”

“No, you don’t.” She jerked her hand away. “And fuck you for saying you do. And fuck you, too, for saying …”

“What, my girl?” I said, when she did not continue. “Fuck me too for saying what?”

“For saying that there’s just no way I could have this baby.” She glanced away from me, then back. “Because there is, Grady. Or there could be.” From out in the lobby came a loud squeal of hinges and a burst of human murmuring. “He must be finished,” she said, looking at her watch. She blew a cloud of smoke to hide her face, and reached up to brush away the tear that hung from an eyelash of her left eye. “We should go.” She sniffled, once. “Don’t forget your jacket.”

Sara knelt down to retrieve my old corduroy blazer, which she had stripped from my body and folded into a pillow for my head. As she peeled it away from the carpet, something tumbled out of one of the pockets and clattered to the floor, where it lay shining like the hood ornament of a madman’s Rambler.

“Whose gun is that?” said Sara.

“It isn’t real,” I said, stooping to get to it before she did. I was tempted to stuff it into my pocket, but I didn’t want her to think that it was anything important enough to hide. I held it in the palm of my hand for a moment, giving her a good look at it. “It’s a souvenir of Baltimore.”

She reached for it, and I tried to close my hand around it, but I was too slow.

“Pretty.” She ran the tip of her index finger across the mother-of-pearl handle. She palmed the little pistol and slipped her finger through the trigger guard. She lifted the muzzle up to her nose. “Hmm,” she said, sniffing. “It really smells like gunpowder.”

“Caps,” I said, reaching to take it away from her.

Then she pointed it at my chest. I didn’t know how many bullets it held, but there was no reason to think there might not be one more.

“Pow,” said Sara.

“You got me,” I said, and then I fell on her and caught her up in a bouncer’s embrace.

“I love you, Grady,” she said, after a moment.

“I love you, too, my monkey,” I said, as with a twist of her thin wrist I disarmed her.

“Oh!” said a voice behind us. “I’m sorry. I was just—”

It was Miss Sloviak, standing at the head of the corridor, balanced atop her heels, hand on her hip. Her face was red, but her cheeks were streaked with mascara, and I could see that it was not the flush of embarrassment.

“It’s all right,” said Sara. “What’s the matter, dear?”

“It’s your friend, Terry Crabtree,” said Miss Sloviak, looking at me harshly. She took a deep breath and passed her fingertips through her black curls, several times, quickly, in a way that somehow struck me as very masculine. “I’d like for you to take me home, if you don’t mind.”

“I’d be happy to,” I said, starting toward her. “I’ll meet you all later, Sara, over at the Hat.”

“I’ll walk you out to the car,” said Sara.

“Well, it’s kind of a hike,” I said. “I’m parked all the way over on Clive.”

“I could use the air.”

We walked out into the lobby. It was completely deserted now, except for a sweet remnant of marijuana smoke in the air.

“I’m going to need one of my bags,” said Miss Sloviak, as we headed out of Thaw Hall. “From the trunk.”

“Are you?” I said, looking levelly at Sara. “All right.”

A pair of doors slam-slammed behind us, and I heard a low, nervous chuckle, like that of someone trying to remain calm on a roller coaster in the last instant before free fall. James Leer emerged from the auditorium with his arms outspread and draped across the shoulders of Crabtree, on his right, and on his left across those of the young man with the goatee who’d dropped by during office hours to let me know that I was a fraud. They each had a grip on one of James’s armpits, as if he might at any point collapse, and they were whispering all the usual platitudes of encouragement and reassurance. Although he looked a little queasy he seemed to be walking steadily enough, and I wondered if he weren’t just enjoying the ride.

“The doors made so much noise!” he cried. He watched in evident amazement as his feet in their black brogues followed each other across the carpet. “Whoa!”

As the two men steered their charge toward the men’s room, Crabtree happened to look my way. He raised his eyebrows and winked at me. Although it was only nine o’clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he’d strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.

“This is so embarrassing! You guys had to carry me out!”

“Is he all right?” I said, as they maneuvered James past us.

“He’s fine,” said Crabtree, rolling his eyes. “He’s narrating.”

“We’re going to the men’s room,” said James. “Only we might not make it in time.”

“Poor James,” I said, watching as they turned into the hallway.

“I don’t know what you guys have been giving him,” said Miss Sloviak. “But I don’t think he needs any more of it.”

Sara shook her head. “Terry Crabtree and James Leer,” she said, punching me on the shoulder, hard. “Leave it to you to make that mistake. Wait here.”

She went after them, and I stood awkwardly beside Miss Sloviak for half a minute, watching her take irritable puffs on a black Nat Sherman and blow them out in long blue jets.

“I’m sorry about all this.”

“Are you?”

“It’s just pretty much your standard WordFest behavior.”

“No wonder I’ve never heard of it before.”

A minor squall of applause gathered and blew through the auditorium. Then the doors burst open again, and five hundred people poured into the lobby. They were all talking about Q. and his rascally double, the latter of whom had apparently ended the lecture with an unflattering remark about the cumulative literary achievement of Pittsburgh, comparing it with Luxembourg’s and Chad’s. I waved to a couple of my offended colleagues and nodded carefully to Franconia Epps, a well-to-do Fox Chapel woman of a certain age who had been attending WordFest for the last six years in the hope of finding a publisher for a novel called Black Flowers

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