Wonder Boys (17 page)

“
Lured
,” he said automatically. “1947. Douglas Sirk.”

“How come you have the sound down?”

He shrugged. “I know what they’re saying,” he said.

I squinted at the screen.

“That wouldn’t be poor old George Sanders, again, would it?”

He nodded, and swallowed, hard.

“Are you all right, James?”

“What am I doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did I get here?”

“We brought you here last night. None of us was in good enough shape to get you all the way to Mt. Lebanon.”

We watched for a moment while George Sanders lit himself a long white cigarette. I looked over at the imperturbable stack of paper on my desk, at the six new sheets lying scattered beside it, covered in useless black words.

“Did I do anything last night?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Anything bad.”

“Well, James,” I said. “You stole Marilyn Monroe’s nuptial jacket out of Dr. Gaskell’s closet. How about that?”

There was a knock at the door, three deliberate taps, like someone testing the wood for evidence of dry rot. I looked at James. George Sanders raised a flashing monocle to his eye.

“Someone’s at the door,” I said.

It was a policeman, bearing an apologetic smile and the morning’s rolled-up
Post-Gazette.
He was a young guy, not much older than James Leer. Like James he was tall and pale, with a sharp, mobile Adam’s apple. His cheeks were a mass of tiny nicks and missed whiskers, and he was wearing some kind of sugary, varsity-halfback aftershave. His hat was a quarter size too large for his head. He had the young cop’s way of standing with his chest poked out, speaking too quickly, as though rattling off, to a mock civilian, sample dialogue memorized from the training manual, at the threshold of a simulated house. His name tag said
PUPCIK
. I didn’t ask him in.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Professor Tripp,” he said. “I’m investigating a break-in at the Gaskells’ house last night, and I have a couple of questions.”

“Surely,” I said, filling up the doorway with my frame. “What can I do for you?”

“There was a break-in at the Gaskells’ house last night.”

“Uh huh.”

“They’re friends of yours.”

“Good friends,” I said.

“Anyway, I understand there was some kind of party-type event at their house last night? And that you were one of the last to leave?”

“I guess I was.”

“Okay, good.” Officer Pupcik looked pleased with himself. Things were starting to add up. “And did you see anything? Anyone hanging around, or something, that maybe you didn’t really know them?”

“I don’t believe so.” I looked up at the sky and bit my lip. I was thinking it over. I wanted him to know that. “No, uh-uh.”

Officer Pupcik’s eyebrows gathered in disappointment over his nose.

“Oh,” he said.

“What’d they get?”

“What’s that? Oh. They got into Dr. Gaskell’s collection.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah. Damn,” he said, deviating somewhat from his script, “he has some pretty cool stuff.” I agreed with this assessment. “Anyway, looks like they picked the lock on his vault.” He shrugged. “Oh, and the dog’s missing.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know it. We figure he must have let him out. The perpetrator, I mean. He’s blind and we figure he just wandered off and maybe got run over.”

“The perpetrator.”

“No, the dog.”

“Just kidding,” I said.

He nodded, then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policemanlike look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes.

“Well,” I said. “I hope you find him. Them. Good luck.”

“Well, thanks. Okay.” Officer Pupcik simulated a smile. “That’s all, then. I won’t trouble you anymore.”

“If I think of anything—”

“Yes, that’s right. If you think of anything, give us a call. Here.” He reached into the pocket of his shirt and handed me a business card. He started to turn away, then stopped and looked back at me. “Oh,” he said, “about this kid, this, uh, Leer. James Leer.”

“He’s a student of mine.”

“That’s what I understand. Do you know how I could get in touch with him, by any chance?”

“I think he lives with his aunt, out in Mt. Lebanon,” I said. “I might have his number in my office on campus, if you need it.”

He watched me for a few seconds, pulling at the lobe of his right ear as if trying to hear all over again all the things I’d just told him.

“That’s all right,” he said at last. “It can wait until Monday.”

“Whatever you say.”

He went down the steps to his car.

“That’s a nice one,” he said, nodding toward the Galaxie in the drive. There was an odd look of pain on his face as he gazed over there, and he shook his big angular head. “Poor thing.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. You would have thought he’d seen through the steel of my trunk to the body of Doctor Dee lying within.

“Uh huh,” I said, closing the door. “Whatever.”

I went back into the living room and looked at James. There was a sudden swell of accordion music in a distant part of the house, and then, in the next instant, a sharp series of hacks and expostulations as Crabtree coughed his way through the first cigarette of the morning. I had a sudden image of Irv Warshaw, standing by the telephone in the downstairs hall of the farmhouse, scrolling hopelessly through the functions of his watch, and I was seized with a powerful longing to put my arms around him, to brush his rough cheek against mine, to sit down to eat the bread of affliction with him and with Emily and all of the Warshaws. They weren’t my family and it wasn’t my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.

“What do we do now?” said James.

The telephone sounded its mad alarm, and I limped slowly out to meet it.

“It’s me,” said Sara. “Oh, Grady, I’m so glad you’re there. So many bad things are happening at once.”

“Could you just hold on a minute, honey?” I said, before I hung up the phone. I walked back into my office, and switched off the television.

“How about we get the fuck out of here?” I said.

I
LOANED
J
AMES
L
EER
a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans, and pulled on my crusty old back-country boots. I dug my fisherman’s vest out of the back of my closet. There was a stained little twist of weed in one of its nine pockets, which I gratefully consumed. Then I packed a canvas shopping bag with a thermos full of coffee, a bottle of Coke, a box of raisins, four hard-boiled eggs, a green banana, and half a pepperoni pizza, wrapped in foil, that I unearthed at the back of the refrigerator. For good measure I threw in a package of wieners, I suppose in case our journey included campfires, ajar of hot salad peppers, and a pickle spear wrapped in waxed paper left over from some long-ago bag lunch of Emily’s. I filled the pockets of my vest with pens, rolling papers, a cigarette lighter, a ruled notebook, a Swiss Army knife, AAA maps of Idaho and Mexico, and several other potentially useful items that I found in the drawer by the kitchen telephone. I grabbed an old Navajo blanket and a flashlight from the closet in the hall. I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding. I felt as if James and I were setting out together to fish for steelhead in a flashing Idaho stream, and at the same time that we were lighting out for Tampico with a ten-minute head start on the police.

“See you,” I called out, as I abandoned my troubled house to its inmates.

It had been raining, it seemed, since February, but on this
erev pesach
the sun was shining. The sky was so blue that it pealed in my ears like a bell. Steam rose from the lawn and from the long black flower beds that lined the front walk. There were swollen pink buds on the camellia bushes, beaded with rain, and I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox. I put my hand on the Swiss Army knife in my pocket and looked out at the morning with a caffeine quiver of hope in my spine and at the tips of my fingers. Then we went down the walk to the driveway, and I saw a kind of crater in the hood of my car, a lopsided asterisk of wrinkles and pleats.
Poor thing.

“How did that happen?” said James, running a fingertip along the jagged lip of the wound. A long flake of paint peeled away and curled around his finger like a scrap of green ribbon. “Oops.”

“Shit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.” It had completely slipped my mind. I closed my eyes. A shadow danced in a rainy smear of light, then leapt into the air and flew toward my windshield. There was the muffled rumor of a kettledrum.

“And he landed on his butt,” said James.

“That’s right,” I said. “How can you tell?”

James Leer looked at me, then back at the hood of the Galaxie. He shrugged.

“You can see the outline of a butt,” he said, and then threw his canvas knapsack into the car.

As I backed us out of the driveway, I narrowly missed destroying Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie once and for all. I’d noticed the white delivery van when we came out of the house, creeping along Denniston as its driver read addresses off the housefronts, but I hadn’t bothered to look for it again before I went barreling down the driveway, doing at least twenty; you had to go fast when the car was in reverse, or she had a tendency to stall out. At the last possible instant I saw the flash of white in my rearview mirror, a pair of airbrushed punching prizefighters, SDOOG GNITROPS S’KINVARK. I hit the brakes. The driver of the van floored it and pulled wildly away.

“Jesus,” I said. “
I’m
off to a good start.”

“Why don’t you put the top down?” James suggested. “Maybe that’ll make it easier to see.”

I blushed, and reached up to unlatch the roof.

“I keep forgetting I can do this,” I said.

On the way out of town we stopped at the Giant Eagle on Murray, and James, having turned up his nose at my stock of provisions, picked up sixty-four ounces of orange juice, a package of powdered industrial doughnuts, and a copy of
Entertainment Weekly.
It featured an article on the Fonda family of actors and there was a large photograph of handsome Henry on the cover, in a scene taken from what James at once identified as
Drums Along the Mohawk.

“God,” he pronounced, solemnly, holding out the magazine for me to see.

“He was all right,” I said.

I picked up a dozen red roses in the flower department, and wrapped the stems carefully in wet paper towels from the bathroom so that they wouldn’t die on the way. There was a condom machine bolted to the wall of the men’s room, and I dropped fifty cents on something called a Luv-O-Pus that promised to entangle my partner in undulating tentacles of pleasure. We got stuck in a long checkout line and to pass the time I was going to show James Leer the Luv-O-Pus, but at the last minute I decided against it; I had a feeling that such an article might frighten him. While we waited to pay he downed the entire bottle of orange juice. He worked his pointy little Adam’s apple up and down.

“I’m so thirsty,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

I laughed. “Shit, James, you’re hungover.”

He considered this a moment, then nodded.

“It feels kind of sad,” he said.

As we drove out Bigelow I kept my eyes off the ruined hood of Happy’s car and tried to put the damage, and all that it seemed to say about the way I was conducting my life, out of my mind. The top was down and I listened to the hiss of the wheels against the street, the flow of wind over the car, the sound of Stan Getz blowing faintly from the speakers and trailing out into the air behind us like a pearly strand of bubbles from a pipe. It was no use. The outline of a butt rode forever out before me, like an identifying badge.

“I thought we were going to talk to the Chancellor,” said James, unhopefully, as we headed farther and farther away from Point Breeze.

“We were,” I said. I looked at the flowers on the seat beside me. A gallant gesture, I thought, was the first expedient of a guilty conscience. Why did I think that Emily would be anything but sorry to see my haggard face and my odorless grocery-store roses? In any event at James’s reminder the flock of guilty feelings that wheels perpetually in the chest of every pothead alighted now on Sara’s roof. Had I actually
hung up
on her? Was I really leaving town with her dead dog in my trunk? “Yeah, uh, you know, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea, James. Maybe we ought to turn around.”

James didn’t say anything. He was jammed up against his door, wrapped in his stained overcoat, knees up, elbows in, two quarts of orange juice joggling around inside him, holding on to a still-intact powdered doughnut as if it were the only ballast keeping him pinned to his seat in my car and to the spinning globe beneath us. He was miserable. Every time we went over a bump, his head wavered back and forth like the needle of a sensitive gauge. I kept heading down Bigelow, but more and more slowly as we got closer to the parkway, thinking now of Sara, now of Emily and her parents, until I reached a point of utter volitional equipoise or collapse, and we came to a red light.

“Look at them,” said James. “They look like replicants.”

A handsome young family was crossing the street in front of us, a slender pair of blond parents in khaki and plaid surrounded by an orderly tangle of cute blond replicant children. Two of the children swung sparkling bags of goldfish. The sun lit the flyaway ends of their hair. Everyone was holding hands. They looked like an advertisement for a brand of mild laxative or the Seventh-Day Adventists. The mother carried a golden-haired baby in her arms and the father was actually smoking a briar pipe. As they passed before the car they all looked at the crater in the hood and then gazed up at James and me in uncomprehending pity.