Chapter 6

      I drank for years, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated. I stopped drinking not because I had a drinking problem, although I suppose I may have, but because alcohol had mysteriously become so poisonous to my body that one night half a bottle of George Dickel stopped my heart for almost twenty seconds (it turned out I was allergic to the stuff). But when, after counting off five discreet minutes, I followed Sara and the sparkling pearl of protein lodged in the innermost pleats of her belly back down to the First Party of the Weekend, I found the prospect of navigating the room sober to be more than I could face, and for the first time in months I was tempted to pour myself a drink. I was reintroduced to a shy, elfin man whose prose style is among the most admired in this country, whose company I had enjoyed in the past, and this time found him a leering, self-important old windbag who flirted with young girls to stave off the fear of death; I met a woman whose short stories have broken my heart over and over again for the last fifteen years and saw only the withered neck and hollow stare of a woman who had wasted her life. I shook hands with talented students, eager young staff members, colleagues in the department whom I had good reasons to admire and like, and heard their false laughter, and felt their discomfort with their bodies and their status and their clothes, and smelled the stink of sweet beer and whiskey on their breath. I avoided Crabtree, to whom I felt I had become nothing more than a colossal debit on the balance sheet of his life; and as for Miss Sloviak, that man in his dress and high heels—that was too sad even to think of. I was in no kind of shape to talk to anyone. So I sneaked through the kitchen and slipped out onto the back porch to blow a jay.

      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