Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
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looked around at the Gaskells’ bedroom, at the high, molded ceiling, the buttery old Biedermeier dresser, the tall oak armoire with its mirrored door that had lost the better part of its silvering, the thick pillows and linen duvet on the trim bed, looking white and smooth and cold as if it had been buried in snow. “This is a nice house. They must be pretty well off, to have all these things.”
Walter Gaskell’s grandfather had at one time owned most of Manatee County, Florida, as well as ten newspapers and a winner of the Preakness, but I didn’t tell that to James.
“They do all right,” I said. “Is your family well off?”
“Mine?” he said, poking himself in the sternum. “No way. My dad used to work in a mannequin factory. I’m serious. Seitz Plastics. They made mannequins for department stores, and display heads for hats, and those flattened-out sexy legs that they use to sell panty hose. He’s retired now, though. He’s old, my dad. Now he’s trying to raise trout in our backyard. No, we’re really poor. My mom was a fry cook before she died. Sometimes she worked in a gift shop.”
“Where was this?” I said, surprised, because despite his overcoat that stank of failure and the shabby thrift-shop suits he wore, he had the face and mannerisms of a rich boy, and sometimes he showed up for class wearing a gold Hamilton wristwatch with an alligator band. “I don’t think I ever knew where you’re from.”
He shook his head. “No place,” he said. “Near Scranton. You haven’t heard of it. It’s called Carvel.”
“I haven’t heard of it,” I said, though I thought it sounded vaguely familiar.
“It’s a hellhole,” he said. “It’s an armpit. Everybody hates me there.”
“But that’s good,” I said, wondering at how young he sounded, regretting that vanished time when I too had believed that I united in my fugitive soul all the greatest fears and petty hatreds of my neighbors in that little river town. How sweet it had felt, in those days, to be the bête noire of other people, and not only of myself! “Now you’ve got good reason to write about them.”
“Actually,” he said, “I already have.” He hefted the stained canvas knapsack on his shoulder and inclined his head toward it. It was one of those surplus Israeli paratrooper numbers that had caught on among my students about five years before, with the winged red insignia on the flap. “I just finished a novel that’s kind of about all that.”
“A novel,” I said. “God damn it, James, you’re amazing. You’ve already written five short stories this term! How long did that take you, a week?”
“Four months,” he said. “I started it at home, over Christmas break. It’s called The Love Parade. In the book I call the town Sylvania. Like in the movie.”
“What movie is that?”
“The Love Parade,” he said.
“I should have known. You ought to let me read it.”
He shook his head. “No. You’ll hate it. It really isn’t any good. It sucks, Prof—Grady. Tripp. I’d be too ashamed.”
“All right, then,” I said. As a matter of fact, the prospect of crawling across hundreds of pages of James Leer’s shards-of-glass style was less than appealing, and I was glad that he had let me off the hook of my automatic offer to read his book. “I’ll take your word for it. It sucks.” I smiled at him, but as I said it I saw something swim into his eyes, and I stopped smiling. “Hey, James, hey. I didn’t mean it. Buddy, I was just kidding.”
But James Leer had started to cry. He sat down on the Gaskells’ bed and let his knapsack slide to the floor. He cried silently, covering his face. A tear fell onto his old acetate necktie and spread in a slow ragged circle. I went over to stand beside him. It was now seven fifty-three, according to the clock on the night table, and downstairs I could hear the click of Sara’s heels as she rushed around, switching off lights, gathering up her purse, taking a last look at herself in the pier glass hanging in the foyer. After a moment the front door squealed on its hinges, then slammed, and the bolt turned in the lock. James and I were alone in the Gaskells’ house. I sat down on the bed beside him.
“I’d really like to take a look at your novel,” I said. “Really, James.”
“It isn’t that, Professor Tripp,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. There was a pearl of snot in one of his nostrils and he inhaled it. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s the matter, buddy? Hey, I know the workshop was awfully hard on you, it’s my fault, I—”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t that.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with a sigh. “Maybe I’m just depressed.” He looked up and turned his red eyes toward the closet. “Maybe it’s seeing that jacket that belonged to her. I guess I think it looks, I don’t know, really sad, just hanging there like that.”
“It does look sad,” I said. From outside I heard the engine of Sara’s car bubble to life. It was one of the few successful stylish gestures that she had managed to make—a currant red convertible Citroën DS23, in which she liked to tool around campus with a red and white polka-dot scarf on her head.
“I have an extra hard time with stuff like that,” he said. “Things that used to belong to people. Hanging in a closet.”
“I know what you mean.” I pictured a row of empty dresses, hanging in an upstairs closet in a soot-faced redbrick house in Carvel, Pennsylvania.
We sat there for a minute, side by side on that cool white snowbank of a bed, looking over at the scrap of black satin hanging in Walter Gaskell’s closet, listening to the whisper of Sara’s tires in the gravel drive as she pulled away from the house. In another second she would turn out into the street and wonder why Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie was still sitting dark and deserted along the curb.
“My wife left me today,” I said, as much to myself as to James Leer.
“I know,” said James Leer. “Hannah told me.”
“Hannah knows?” Now it was my turn to cover my face with my hands. “I guess she must have seen the note.”
“I guess so,” said James. “It seemed like she was kind of happy about it, to tell you the truth.”
“She what?”
“Not—I mean, Hannah said a couple of things that, well. I never got the impression, you know, that she and your wife actually liked each other. Very much. I mean, actually it sounded to me like your wife kind of hated Hannah.”
“I guess she did,” I said, remembering the creaking silence that had reached like the arm of a glacier across my marriage, in the days after I’d invited Hannah to rent our basement. “I guess I don’t really know a whole lot about what’s going on in my own house.”
“That could be,” said James, a certain wryness entering his tone. “Did you know that Hannah Green has a crush on you?
“I didn’t know that,” I said, falling backward on the bed. It felt so good to lie back and close my eyes that I was afraid to stay that way. I sat up, too quickly, so that a starry cloud of diamonds condensed around my head. I didn’t know what to say next. I’m glad? So much the worse for her?
“I think so, anyway,” said James. “Hey, you know who else I forgot? Peg Entwistle. Although she certainly was never a big star. She only made one movie, Thirteen Women, 1932, and she just had a bit part in that. It was the only part she ever got.”
“And?”
“And she jumped off the ‘Hollywoodland’ sign. That’s what it used to say, you know. Off of the second letter d, I think.”
“That’s a good one.”