Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
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Crabtree’s garment bag. I palpated its pockets for a moment, then zipped open the largest of them. To my surprise I found that it was empty. I felt around in the next largest pocket, and then in a third, and found that they were empty, too. Laying the bag open across the other luggage, I unzipped its main compartment. Inside there were a pair of white dress shirts, a couple of paisley neckties, and two suits, glinting faintly in the streetlight.
“They’re the same,” said James, lifting the uppermost suit and peering underneath.
“What’s that?”
“His suits. They look just like the one he has on now.”
He was right: the suits were both double-breasted, with peaked lapels, cut from the same kind of sleek metallic silk. Although it was difficult to tell their color, you could see that they matched each other and the suit he was wearing. I thought of Superman’s closet at the North Pole, a row of shining suits hanging on vibranium hooks.
“I find that odd,” I said, finding it somehow pathetic. I’d always thought there was something a little pathetic about Superman, too, way up there in his Fortress of Solitude.
“I guess he doesn’t like to have to worry about what he’s going to wear,” James said.
“I guess he doesn’t like having to remember to worry.” I zipped the garment bag closed and stuffed it back into the trunk. “Come on, Crabtree,” I said, “I know you’re holding.” I pulled on the handles of the canvas grip, and it weighed so little that when it came free it nearly flew out of my hand.
“Whose tuba is that, anyway?” said James.
“Miss Sloviak’s,” I said, plunging my hand into the grip, hoping, with an odd foretaste of horror, that it did not contain nothing at all. To my relief I discovered three pairs of boxer shorts, bundled into little balls, rolling around like marbles inside the bag. Wrapped up in one of these bundles I felt something hard, and my fingers curled around it. “Actually, no, it isn’t. I don’t know who it belongs to.”
“Can I ask you something about her?” said James.
“She’s a transvestite,” I said, pulling out what proved to be an airline bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Hey. How do you like that?”
“I don’t like whiskey,” said James. “Oh. So. Is—is your friend Crabtree—is he—gay?”
“I don’t like whiskey, either,” I said, handing him the bottle. “Open that. Most of the time he is, James. Bear with me now. I’m going to make another dive down to the wreck.” I stuck my hand back into the grip and fished out another rolled-up pair of boxers. “Some of the time he isn’t. Oh, my goodness. What have we here?”
Inside the second roll of underwear there was a small prescription vial of pills.
“No label,” I said, examining the outside of the vial.
“What do you think they are?”
“Looks like my old friend Mr. Codeine. That’ll be good for my ankle,” I said, shaking out a pair of thick white pills into my palm, each of them marked with a tiny numeral 3. “Have one.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I’m fine without them.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s why you were standing out there in the Gaskells’ backyard trying to decide whether or not to kill yourself. Right, buddy?”
He didn’t say anything. A gust of wind blew a handful of rain from the trees and it splashed against our faces. The bell over in the Mellon Campanile rang out the quarter hour, and I thought of Emily, whose father, Irving Warshaw, had been a young metallurgist assigned to the casting of the steel bell back in the late forties. An experimental and later discredited method had been employed in the bell’s manufacture, leaving it to toll in a voice that was off-key and faintly mournful and that usually reminded me of old Irv, to whom I had been a constant source of disappointment.
“I’m sorry I said what I said, James.” I took the bottle from him and unscrewed the lid. I tossed one of the codeine pills into my mouth like an M & M, and downed it with a swallow of Dickel. The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good. “I haven’t had any of this stuff in four years,” I said.
“Give me,” said James, biting his lip in anger and trepidation and a childish desire to force himself into being a man. I handed him the pill and the dark little bottle. I knew it was irresponsible of me but that was as far as my thinking on the subject went. I told myself that he could hardly feel worse than he already did, and I suppose that I told myself that I didn’t really care. He took a long, careless pull from the bottle, and half a second later spat out the whole mouthful.
“Take it easy,” I said. I peeled the soggy pill from the lapel of my jacket and returned it to him. “Here. Why don’t you try that again?”
This time he was more successful. He frowned.
“It tastes like cordovan shoe polish,” he said, reaching for the bottle again. “Another sip.”
“There isn’t any more,” I said, giving the bottle a demonstrative shake. “These things don’t hold a whole lot.”
“Look inside the other ball of underpants.”
“Good thinking.” In the remaining pair of boxers was another little bottle of bourbon. “Hello,” I said. “We’re going to have to confiscate this, too, I’m afraid.”
James smiled. “I’m afraid so,” he said.
We ran splashing through puddles all the way to Thaw Hall, passing the little bottle back and forth between us, avoiding a group of young ladies who glared at us, and when we got to the hall and came laughing into the high, gilt lobby, James Leer looked thrilled. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were full of water from the bite of the wind on his face. As I stood, doubled over, at the closed doors to the auditorium, trying to catch my breath, I felt him place a steadying hand on my back.
“Was I running funny?” I said.
“A little. Does your ankle hurt bad?”
I nodded. “It’ll be all right in a few minutes, though. How are you feeling?”
“All right,” he said. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and I saw that he was trying to keep himself from smiling. “I guess I’m feeling sort of glad I didn’t kill myself tonight.”
I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder, and reached out with my other hand to open the door.
“What more could you ask for?” I said.
THAW Hall had served as a preliminary exercise for the architects who later went on to build the old Syria Mosque. The exterior was trimmed with sphinxes and cartouches and scarabs, and the lobby and auditorium were all pointed arches, slender pillars, a tangled vegetation of arabesques. The seats and the loges were arranged around the stage in a kind of lazy oval, just as in that late, lamented concert hall, only there were far fewer of them—seats, I mean—and the stage itself was smaller than that of the Mosque. The place held about five hundred in the orchestra and another fifty up above, and by the time we got in there every one of the blood red velvet seats was taken, and at the creaking of the door hinges every one of those five hundred heads turned around. Some folding chairs had been set up at the back, in the standing aisle, and James Leer and I took a couple and sat down.
We hadn’t missed much; the elfin old novelist, I later discovered, had commenced his lecture by reading a lengthy extract from The Secret Sharer, and it didn’t take long for me to pick up the thread of his argument, which was that over the course of his life as a writer he—you know the man I mean, but let’s just call