Wonder Boys (6 page)

Although it wasn’t raining anymore the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze. A fine mist of light hung in a cloud around the Gaskells’ illuminated house. I could see the panes of Sara’s greenhouse glinting black in the distance like wet iron. She had been obsessed for several years now with forcing her forsythias and pinching her hothouse chrysanthemums, but I supposed things might get a little wild in there if she decided to grow herself a baby. This didn’t seem likely, given that the chancellor of a college was among the last people in America required to build a career out of such outmoded materials as probity and temperance and good repute. Through a determined program of sheer dumb luck and liberal applications of THC I had managed never to impregnate a woman before, but I knew that she and Walter had not made love in several years, and that the child had to be mine. I felt astonished and a little afraid suddenly to find myself lost, after so long, in the elephant-white hills of abortionland.
An awfully simple operation
went the line.
They just let the air in.
I felt pity for Sara and remorse toward Walter, but more than anything I felt a sharp disappointment in myself. I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. Instead here I was, forty-one years old, having left behind dozens of houses, spent a lot of money on vanished possessions and momentary entertainments, fallen desperately in and abruptly out of love with at least seventeen women, lost my mother in infancy and my father to suicide, and everything was about to change once more, with unforeseeable result. And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things. The only part of my world that carried on, inalterable and permanent, was
Wonder Boys.
I had the depressing thought, certainly not for the first time, that my novel might well survive me unfinished. Then I reached into the pocket of my shirt and took out the last inch of the joint Crabtree and I had smoked in the car as we waited for Emily to show up.

I had just lit the ragged end of it, and was staring down at one of Doctor Dee’s cryptic stick arrangements, when I heard the squeak of rubber soles on wet grass. I looked up to see someone step out from the shadows around the back porch and start across the yard, toward the greenhouse, into the light. It was a man, tall and wearing a long coat, his hands thrust into his pockets. He skirted the corner of the greenhouse and kept walking until he came to the pair of long dull shining bands that cut across the Gaskells’ yard from east to west and that once had borne the young empire builder across the breadth of his miniature domain. I started when I saw the man in the Gaskells’ yard, and for an instant I was afraid—Sara and Walter had been robbed a couple of months before—but then I recognized the long coat, and the stooped shoulders, and the slicked-back hair, black and shining like a pane of the greenhouse. It was my student James Leer, standing between the rails, with his face raised to the sky, as though waiting for a hurtling phantom engine to come and cut him down.

I was surprised to see him. The students invited to this First Party at the Chancellor’s house were usually conference interns, the typists and telephone clerks, the program staplers and ad hoc chauffeurs. For a talented young writer you could always bend the rules a little, to give him or her the chance to hobnob with real writers, in their natural habitat, and James Leer was indeed talented, but he was not the kind of young man who inspired people to bend rules for him, and I tried to remember if I could possibly have invited him to come myself. He stood for a moment like that, gazing up at the starless sky, then pulled his right hand out of his pocket. There was a gleam of silver glass or metal, the flash of a mirror, at the end of his crooked arm.

“James?” I said. “Is that you? What are you doing?” I stepped down from the porch, still holding on to the fatty, and started across the grass toward him.

“It’s a fake,” said James Leer, holding out his hand to me, palm upward. Upon it lay a tiny silver pistol, a “ladies’ model” with a pearl handle, no bigger than a deck of cards. “Hello, Professor Tripp.”

“Hello, James,” I said. “I didn’t know what you were doing out here.”

“It’s my mother’s,” he said. “She won it in a penny arcade in Baltimore, in one of those machines with the claw. When she was in Catholic school. It used to shoot these little paper caps, but you can’t find the right kind anymore.”

“Why do you carry it around?” I said, reaching for it.

“I don’t know.” His fingers closed around the little gun and he slipped it back into the pocket of his overcoat. “I found it in a drawer at home and I just started carrying it around. For good luck, I guess.”

The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

“I’m not supposed to be here, in case you were wondering,” he said. He shifted his shoulders under the weight of the knapsack he carried, and looked me in the eye for the first time. James Leer was a handsome kid; he had eyes that were large and dark and always seemed to shine with tears, a straight nose, a clear complexion, red lips; but there was something blurry and indeterminate about his features, as though he were still in the process of deciding what kind of a face he wanted to have. In the soft light radiating from the Gaskells’ house he looked painfully young. “I crashed. I came with Hannah Green.”

“That’s all right,” I said. Hannah Green was the most brilliant writer in the department. She was twenty years old, very pretty, and had already published two stories in
The Paris Review.
Her style was plain and poetic as rain on a daisy—she was particularly gifted at the description of empty land and horses. She lived in the basement of my house for a hundred dollars a month, and I was desperately in love with her. “You can say I invited you. I ought to have, anyway.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“I was about to smoke a joint, as a matter of fact. Would you care to join me?”

“No, thank you,” he said, looking uncomfortable. He unbuttoned his overcoat, and I saw that he was still wearing the tight black suit and skinny tie he had seen fit to wear to the discussion of his story that afternoon, over a faded glen plaid shirt. “I don’t like to lose control of my emotions.”

I thought that he had just diagnosed his entire problem in life, but I let it pass and took a long drag on the joint. It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster. I didn’t think James was all that comfortable standing next to me this way, but at the same time I knew he would have felt much worse inside, on a sofa, with a canapé in his hand. He was a furtive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn’t belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.

“Are you and Hannah seeing each other?” I said after a moment. Lately, I knew, they had been palling around together, going to movies at the Playhouse and Filmmakers’. “Dating?”

“No!” he said immediately. It was too dim to see if he blushed, but he looked down at his feet. “We just came from
Son of Fury
at the Playhouse.” He looked up again and his face grew more animated, as it generally did when he got himself onto his favorite subject. “With Tyrone Power and Frances Farmer.”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“I think Hannah looks like Frances Farmer. That’s why I wanted her to see it.”

“She went crazy, Frances Farmer.”

“So did Gene Tierney. She’s in it, too.”

“Sounds like a good one.”

“It’s not bad.” He smiled. He had a big-toothed, crooked smile that made him look even younger. “I kind of needed a little cheering up, I guess.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “They were hard on you today.”

He shrugged, and looked away again. That afternoon, as we had gone around the room, there was only one member of the workshop with anything good to say about James’s story: Hannah Green, and even her critique had been chiefly constructed out of equal parts equivocation and tact. Insofar as the outlines of its plot could be made out amid the sentence fragments and tics of punctuation that characterized James Leer’s writing, the story concerned a boy who had been molested by a priest and then, when he began to show signs of emotional distress through odd and destructive behavior, was taken by his mother to this same priest to confess his sins. The story ended with the boy watching through the grate of the confessional as his mother walked out of the church into the sunshine, and with the words “Shaft. Of light.” It was called, for no apparent reason, “Blood and Sand.” Like all of his stories, its title was borrowed from Hollywood; he had written stories called “Swing Time,” “Flame of New Orleans,” “Greed,” “Million Dollar Legs.” All of them were opaque and fractured and centered on grave flaws in the relations between children and adults. None of the titles ever seemed to connect to the stories. There was a persistent theme of Catholicism gone badly wrong. My students had a hard time knowing what to think about James Leer’s writing. They could see that he knew what he was doing and that he had been born with the talent to do it; but the results were so puzzling and unfriendly to the reader that they tended to inspire the anger that had flared up in workshop that afternoon.

“They really hated it,” he said. “I think they hated it more than any of the other ones.”

“I know it,” I said. “I’m sorry I let things get a little out of control.”

“That’s all right,” he said, shrugging his shoulders to regain a purchase on the straps of his knapsack. “I guess you didn’t really like it either.”

“Well, James, no, I—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It only took me an hour to write it.”

“An hour? That’s remarkable.” For all its terrible problems, it had been a dense and vivid piece of writing. “That’s hard to believe.”

“I think them all out beforehand. I have trouble sleeping, so that’s what I do while I lie there.” He sighed. “Well,” he said. “I guess you probably have to go back in. It must be almost time to go to that lecture.”

I held up my wristwatch to catch the light. It was nearly twenty-five minutes to eight.

“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Uh, well,” he said. “I—I think I’m just going to go home. I think I can catch the 74.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Come on inside and have a drink before we go to the lecture. You don’t want to miss that lecture. And have you seen the Chancellor’s house? It’s a beautiful house, James. Come on, I’ll introduce you around.” I mentioned the two writers who were this year’s guests of honor.

“I met them,” he said coldly. “What’s with all the baseball cards, anyway?”

“Dr. Gaskell collects them. He has a lot of memora——oh.” The air before my eyes was suddenly filled with spangles, and I felt my knees knock against each other. Reaching out to steady myself, I took hold of James’s arm. It felt weightless and slender as a cardboard tube.

“Professor? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, James. I’m just a little stoned.”

“You didn’t look so well in class today. Hannah didn’t think so, either.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well, myself,” I said. As a matter of fact I had, during the last month, been experiencing spells of dizziness and bewilderment that came over me suddenly, at odd moments of the day, and filled my skull with a glittering afflatus. “I’ll be fine. I’d better get my old fat body inside.”

“Okay, then,” he said, freeing his arm from my grasp. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Aren’t you coming to any of the conference seminars or anything?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I—I have a lot of homework.” He bit his lip and then turned and started back across the lawn, toward the house, hands jammed once more into his pockets, the fingers of his right hand, I imagined, curled around the smooth pearly handle of his imitation gun. The knapsack pounded against his back and the soles of his shoes squeaked as he left me, and I don’t know why, but I was sorry to see him go. I felt as though he were the only person whose company I could possibly have enjoyed at that moment, awkward and isolate and hopeless as he was, disquieted and bewildered by the proliferating symptoms of the midnight disease. Oh, he had it, all right. Just before James started around the corner he looked up, at the back windows of the house, and stopped dead, his face raised to catch the light spilling out from the party. He was looking at Hannah Green, who stood by the dining-room window with her back toward us. Her yellow hair was mussed and scattered in all directions. She was telling a story with her hands. All the people standing in front of her had bared their teeth to laugh.

After a moment James Leer looked away and started off. His head was absorbed into the sharp black shadow that fell from the side of the house.

“Wait a minute, James,” I said. “Don’t leave yet.”

He turned, and his face reemerged from the shadow, and I walked over to him, flicking the burnt end of the joint into the air.

“Come on inside the house for a minute,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper that came out sounding so sinister and friendless that I suddenly felt ashamed. “There’s something upstairs I think you ought to see.”

W
HEN WE WALKED
back into the kitchen, the party was breaking up; Walter Gaskell had already led a large contingent of staff members off to Thaw Hall, among them the shy little elf in the turtleneck sweater who was to address us that evening on the subject of “The Writer as Doppelgänger.” Sara and a young woman in a gray service uniform were busy scraping out bowls into the kitchen trash, stretching plastic wrap across plates of cookies, shoving corks back into half-empty bottles of wine. They had the water running into the sink and didn’t hear us as we slipped past into the living room, where a crew of students was gathering up streaked paper plates and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. I felt very stoned, now that I was inside, light and insubstantial as a ghost, and far less certain than a few minutes earlier of my motives in sneaking James Leer up to the Gaskells’ bedroom to show him what was hanging from a silver hanger in Walter Gaskell’s closet.