Wonder Boys (29 page)

I sat down on the little bed and fell back. As I tried to swing my legs up onto the mattress my good ankle got caught on a cord of some sort. I sat up again, and found myself entangled in the straps of James’s knapsack. When I saw that he had left it behind I felt a sharp pang of guilt. I should never, I thought, have allowed him to be stolen by those phantoms in their ghostly gray car.

“I’m sorry, James,” I said. I reached into the knapsack and took out the manuscript of
The Love Parade
. I peeled off the cover page, sat back against the headboard of Sam’s bed. The house slumbered around me. I was encased, sealed off, in the light coming from the bedside lamp. I started to read.

It was a period piece, I found, set during the mid-forties. It opened in some anthracite black town in the barren Pennsylvania hinterlands of James Leer’s innermost soul. The protagonist, John Eager, eighteen years old, lived in a tumbledown house along the banks of a fouled river with his father, a forklift operator at the Seitz mannequin factory, and his paternal grandfather, a fearsome old bastard named Hamilton Eager who was first encountered on page 3, in the act of poisoning the boy’s Chinese pug. John Eager’s mother, a sickly woman who cooked in the mannequin factory lunchroom, had died the previous spring, of pneumonia, her last words to her son “You’re a good-looking boy.”

He was so good-looking that he was invisible, the passage went on.

He had the face of one of the Seitz company hat-forms. Nose like a shark fin. Lips red as a stop sign. Black eyes long-lashed and glassy like the eyes in the head of a deer on a wall. Nothing about his face lingered in the memory of people who saw it. Only a vague impression of handsomeness. In photographs it always looked like his head moved at the instant the picture was snapped.

The book’s first hundred and fifty pages consisted of John Eager’s autobiographical reverie as he rode a Greyhound bus to Wilkes-Barre to buy the gun with which, on page 163, he shot Hamilton Eager between the eyes, in payment for the poisoning of his beloved dog Warner Oland. It was a disturbing and poetic reverie that lingered overlong but at times convincingly on episodes of sexual abuse, rape, incest, deer hunting, arson, the usual James Leer brand of mock-tortured Catholicism, suicide attempts, and the young hero’s moments of ecstasy in the first row of the town’s grand movie house, the Marquis. The reader was not surprised to see John Eager evolve into a lonely young man who told fabulous lies to everyone and nursed a deep devout hatred of himself.

After murdering his grandfather, John Eager put in a surprise appearance at the Homecoming Dance, where he shot and killed a classmate, a bully named Nelson McCool who had been terrorizing the hero all his life, in such various and ever-crueler ways that the reader was relieved to see him finally get his reward. In the wake of these crimes, with blood pooled in the cuffs of his trousers, John Eager knelt to confess his sins, in the church of St. John Nepomuk. Then he fled, climbing onto another Greyhound that took him, in considerably fewer pages than the previous bus journey, to Los Angeles, where he tried unsuccessfully to walk onto the Fox lot, got mugged on the porch of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, and, in a scene at once tender and grim, came to the very brink of turning a trick with a washed-up hero of the silent screen before finally surrendering his unhappy soul to the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach. In the penultimate scene, on his way out to Venice on the Red Line car, he met a rather pathetic young bottle blonde named Norma Jean Mortensen, in whom he recognized a kindred spirit—a formless aggregate of longing, lies, and self-contempt, hollow at the core—whose cheap, tight sweater, laddered stockings, and naked ambition to become the biggest star in the world helped him, in some way I didn’t quite understand, make up his mind to drown himself.

I read without stopping and finished the book, which came in at two hundred and fifty pages on the dot, in just under two hours. I didn’t know quite how to feel about it. The narrative had drive and sureness of tone, and like most good first novels it possessed an imperturbable, mistaken confidence that all the shocking incidents and extremes of human behavior it dished up would strike new chords of outrage and amazement in the reader. It was a brazen, ridiculous, thrilling performance, with a ballast of genuine sadness that kept the whole thing from keeling over in the gale-force winds of melodrama. Whether because he had outgrown them, forgotten them, or finally tired of hearing me and his peers complain about them, James had largely abandoned his silly experiments with syntax and punctuation, and the prose throughout, although quirky and clotted with similes, did a good job of persuading, at least for the duration of each sentence and paragraph, that the events therein described really had come to pass.

And yet when I closed the book I could not help feeling that in some way much of it was irremediably false. The impressive use of period details, never misplaced or anachronistic, nonetheless felt dutiful and deliberate—there were dozens of references to hat fashions and big bands and great chrome automobiles—and had clearly been derived secondhand from old movies. Apart from certain disturbing recollections of childhood and early adolescence, and the strange episode with the powdered and ascoted old star,
most
of
The Love Parade
seemed to have been crafted out of echoes and fragments and secondhand threads. The people spoke, amused themselves, and reacted to one another like people in movies. The things that happened were kinds of things that happened in movies. Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions,
The Tempest
as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father’s library.

I set the manuscript on the nightstand beside me. Maybe, I thought, I was not the fairest possible judge of what James Leer had done. In my heart, I knew, I was jealous of the kid: of his talent, although I had talent of my own; of his youth and energy, although there was no point in regretting the loss of those; but mostly of his simply having
finished
his book. For all its flaws, he could be proud of it. The dynamic of ostracism and imagination and the malfunctioning of a broken family were well presented, and the scene on the streetcar with the inchoate Marilyn, if not entirely convincing, was imagined with a fan’s ardor, and came as a genuine and pleasant surprise. And there was one scene, early on, which had haunted me all through the reading of the rest of the book and which, I found, troubled me still. I reached for the manuscript and opened it to page 52, to the scene in which the narrator recounted, in brutal terms, the August day in 1928 on which old Ham Eager raped his son’s new wife.

So the old man caught her like a pigeon by the neck. He forced her face into the dusty yellow mattress of his bed. All the breath went out of her. He had been down by the road picking blackberries and the ink was on his fingers.

John Eager, the narrator went on, in the same dispassionate tone, was born nine months afterward. The passage as I read it had raised the hairs on my neck, and now I found I was no longer quite sure that James Leer had lied to me, even though I knew that the best liars keep on lying successfully long after they’ve been discovered. I didn’t really believe that Fred Leer was James’s father as well as his grandfather, but still I couldn’t suppress the sudden swell of guilt in my chest for having allowed those two elegant spooks to cart him off. Setting the manuscript aside again, I stood up, and paced around the room, and thought about James Leer.

Why
The Love Parade
? James seemed to have chosen it, as usual, more for its status
as a title
than for any evident connection to the plot or characters of his story. There was a kind of sympathetic magic in the way James titled his fictions, as if by producing works called
Stagecoach
and
Greed
he hoped to make of himself not simply a writer but an entire studio; to raise, on the patch of vacant scrub that was his life, a teeming city of costumers, soundmen, hoplites, buccaneers, and Kickapoo Indians, where he could be producer and director, screenwriter and gaffer and makeup artist, the walk-on destined for stardom and the leading lady at the peak of her career. I had known plenty of movie lovers in my life, from imaginary drag queens who idolized the great female faces to nostalgia addicts who climbed into a movie as into a time machine or a bottle of whiskey and set the dial for “never come back”; and to one degree or another the obsession, like all obsessions, implied a certain windy emptiness within. For James, I thought, the attraction must be to the fluid identities of the actors and actresses: the press-office biographies, the stage names, the roles and characters constantly adopted and shed. And—it was clear from his novel—he’d been powerfully affected by the image of community, of small-town life, that was fostered in so much classic Hollywood product.

He was intelligent enough to know, however, that this image was an illusion—his ambivalence about that illusion was reflected in
The Love Parade
—and damaged enough to be fascinated by the dark reverse of the Hollywood medallion, by the starlet in the corner of a party scene in
The Bad and the Beautiful
who later took ninety-two Nembutals and fell from her veranda, by the sorrow of a blacklisted screenwriter, by the sad pathology of a screen lover’s sex life, by the fate of Sal Mineo, Jayne Mansfield, Thelma Todd. For all of this the perfect figure, I thought, may have been the inscribing of the two words “Frank Capra” into his hand. Capra was always thought of as a great sentimentalist, but the world of his films was filled with shadows—only one man’s life, remember, separated Bedford Falls from the garish nightmare of Pottersville—in which there often lurked the specter of ruin and suicide and shame. In his sorrow over his hero’s death James had taken the whole idea of small-town America implied and romanticized by the name Frank Capra, and carved it with a needle into his flesh.

I sat down on the bed, hugged myself, stood up again. I picked up
Lem Walker, Space Surgeon
and read that throughout the graduation ceremonies at the Academy of Medicine on Altair IV, the skies were troubled with positron storms. I opened the drawers in Sam’s old desk and found them bare except for a Pez candy and a 1964 penny. I tried to shake the feeling that of all the people I had broken faith with in my life, James Leer was the one least able to withstand the betrayal.

“All right,” I said aloud, looking with regret at James’s knapsack, wishing with my wizened, selfish, black little raisin of a soul that I could just He there in Sam Warshaw’s bed, smoking dope and reading about a nasty little outbreak of Cetusian fever among the Hive People of Betelgeuse V. But my black little heart was trapped in the backseat of a gray Mercedes, making the long, silent trip back to Pittsburgh. “I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

I picked up the manuscript and the knapsack and went downstairs. At the bottom of the staircase I lost my balance and did something bad to my other ankle. I hopped into the kitchen and picked up the phone. I dialed my house. Hannah answered. I told her where I was.

“We miss you,” she said loudly. In the background I could hear Wilson Pickett, Hannibal’s elephants, gunplay, hysterical women, and something that might have been the rattle of dice.

“Crabtree’s there,” I said. It was hard to keep my voice down.

“He’s having a party.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s a terrifying thought.” I slid James’s manuscript back into the knapsack, and fastened the clasp. “Try to make sure he doesn’t leave, all right?”

“Uh huh. Listen, Grady!” She was shouting now. “Listen, I have to tell you something. There was a policeman here, Grady. Earlier tonight. Something like Popnik.”

“Pupcik. I know him.” Irene had left the black satin jacket draped over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. I picked it up and held it to my face. The fur collar gave off a faint bitter whiff of vitamin B. “What’d he want?”

“I don’t know. He said he wanted to talk to you. Grady, are you coming home?”

The back door rattled and slammed, and a moment later Emily came into the kitchen, reeking of tobacco, makeup smeared into a Pierrot mask, moving stiff-jointed and half sideways like a spooked cat. As she brushed past me our eyes met, and looking into those two blurred dark circles, I felt like one of August Van Zorn’s heroes, in the instant before his hapless narrative broke off with a final terrible dash. There was nothing in them. It was an empty gaze, a hole in the fabric of the world.

“Get out,” she said.

I hefted James’s knapsack and slung the stolen jacket over my shoulder. I lifted the receiver to my lips.

“I was just leaving,” I said.

A
S
I
MADE MY WAY
along the avenue of elm trees I felt the wheels of the Galaxie bump abruptly up and over something big. There was a sickening instant of slippage when I hit the brakes. I clambered out of the car and went around to the back, where, in the bloody glow of the taillights, I found a kind of distended loop of cable stretched across the roadbed, frayed badly at one end. I had run over Grossman. At first I panicked and got back into the car, intending just to drive away and never come back and keep on driving until I hit Wood Buffalo or Uranium City. I put the car in gear, but ten yards farther along the road I stopped again and went back to gather up the surprisingly heavy remainder of Grossman. Nobody in that house, I thought, would ever miss this ruinous and unreliable member of the family. So I carried him over to the car, opened the trunk, and pitched him in there with the tuba and Doctor Dee.

O
F THE DRIVE BACK
to Pittsburgh I remember only the struggle to roll three joints one-handed and the intermittent companionship of a radio station, playing a tribute to Lennie Tristano, that turned out to be WABI, the low-watt voice of old Coxley College, drifting in on some ghostly undertow in the ether. Around two o’clock I pulled off the deserted parkway and headed up toward Squirrel Hill. I was going home, but I didn’t intend to stay there longer than it would take me to retrieve Crabtree—assuming he was still operative. I had decided to try something reckless, senseless, and stupid, and in any such attempt there could be no more useful companion than Terry Crabtree.