Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
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umbrella, and then her friends Susan and Ben, and then a man whose name I had forgotten but whom I recognized as the Engorged Kielbasa from an office skit a couple of Christmases earlier. There were all kinds of other people spinning out into the soft gray evening, dentists and podiatrists, certified public accountants, the sad-looking Ethiopian man who sold half-dead flowers from a small kiosk in the lobby; looking skyward, covering their heads with outspread newspapers, laughing at the glittering, rain-slick prospect of a Friday night downtown; but after fifteen minutes Emily had still not appeared, even though she was always downstairs waiting for me on Fridays when I came to pick her up, and eventually I was forced to admit to myself what I had been fervently denying all day: that sometime early this morning, before I awoke, Emily had walked out on our marriage. There’d been a note taped to the coffee machine on the kitchen counter, and a modest void in all the drawers and closets that had been hers.
“Crabtree,” I said. “She left me, man.”
“She what?”
“She left me. This morning. There was a note. I don’t know if she even went to work. I think she might have gone out to her parents’ place. It’s Passover. Tomorrow’s the first night.” I turned around and looked at Miss Sloviak. She was sitting in the backseat, with Crabtree, on the theory that Emily would have been getting into the front with me. They had the tuba back there with them as well, though I wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened. I still didn’t know if it really belonged to Miss Sloviak or not. “There are eight of them. Nights.”
“Is he kidding?” said Miss Sloviak, all of whose makeup seemed in the course of the ride in from the airport to have been reapplied, very roughly, an inch to the left of her eyes and lips, so that her face had a blurred, double-exposed appearance.
“Why didn’t you say anything, Tripp? I mean, why did you come down here?”
“I guess I just … I don’t know.” I turned back around to face the windshield and listened to the commentary of the rain on the roof of my car, a fly-green ’66 Galaxie ragtop I’d been driving for a little less than a month. I’d had to accept it as repayment of a sizable loan I’d been fool enough to make Happy Blackmore, an old drinking buddy who wrote sports for the Post-Gazette and who was now somewhere in the Blue Ridge of Maryland at a rehabilitation center for the compulsively unlucky, playing out the last act of a spectacular emotional and financial collapse. It was a stylish old yacht, that Ford, with a balky transmission, bad wires, and a rear seat of almost infinite potential. I didn’t really want to know what had just been going on back there.
“I was sort of thinking maybe I’d just imagined it all,” I said. As a lifelong habitué of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy, and all day I had been trying to convince myself that this morning at about six o’clock, while I lay snoring with my legs scissor-forked across the freshly uninhabited regions of the bed, my marriage had not come asunder. “Hoping I had, I mean.”
“Do you feel all right?” said Miss Sloviak.
“I feel great,” I said, trying to decide how I did feel. I felt sorry to have driven Emily to leave me, not because I thought that I could have done otherwise, but because she’d tried very hard for many years to avoid an outcome to which she was, in a way that would always remain beyond my understanding, morally opposed. Her own parents had married in 1939 and they were married still, in a manner that approximated happiness, and I knew she regarded divorce as the first refuge of the weak in character and the last of the hopelessly incompetent. I felt as you feel when you’ve forced an honest person to lie for you, or a thrifty person to blow his paycheck on one of your worthless tips. I also felt that I loved Emily, but in the fragmentary, half-narrative way you love people when you’re stoned. I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing “Barefootin’,” of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she’d handed me one windy afternoon as we sat on a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, and I felt that I loved Emily insofar as I loved all of these things—beyond reason, and with a longing that made me want to hang my head—but it was a love that felt an awful lot like nostalgia. I hung my head.
“Grady, what happened?” said Crabtree, leaning forward to rest his chin on the back of my seat. I could feel the ends of his long hair against my neck. He was giving off a faint whiff of Cristalle himself now, and the dual memory of Emily and Sara it stirred up inside me seemed particularly cruel. “What did you do?”
“I broke her heart,” I said. “I think she found out about Sara and me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I said. She’d been looking a little lost ever since coming home a few days before from a lunch at Ali Baba with her sister, Deborah, who was working as a research assistant in fine arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Deborah must have picked something up on the academic grapevine and sisterly passed it along. “I don’t suppose we’ve really been all that discreet.”
“Sara?” said Miss Sloviak. “That’s where the party’s going to be?”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s where the party’s going to be.”
IT was above all a formal exercise in good behavior, the first staff party of the WordFest weekend, a preliminary shaking of hands before they rang the bell and the assembled guests all came out swinging. It was held early in the evening, for one thing, so that people had to keep dinner plates balanced in their laps; and then at around quarter to eight, just when supper was finished and strangers had grown acquainted and the booze began to flow, it would be time to go off to Thaw Hall for the Friday night lecture by one of the two most distinguished members of that year’s staff. For eleven years now the college, under the direction of Sara Gaskell’s husband, Walter, the chairman of the English Department, had been charging aspiring writers several hundred dollars for the privilege of meeting and receiving the counsel of a staff of more or less well-known writers, along with agents, editors, and assorted other New Yorkers with an astonishing capacity for alcohol and gossip. The conferees were housed in the college dormitories, left vacant over the spring holidays, and guided like passengers on a cruise ship through a tightly scheduled program of lit crit shuffleboard, self-improvement talks, and lessons in the New York publishing cha-cha-cha. The same kind of thing goes on all over the country, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, any more than I find anything amiss in the practice of loading up an enormous floating replica of Las Vegas with a bunch of fearful Americans and whipping them past a dozen tourist-oriented ports of call at thirty knots. I usually had a friend or two among the invited guests, and once, several years ago now, I came across a young man from Moon Township with a short story so amazingly good that on the strength of it alone he was able to sign up an unwritten novel with my agent, a novel long since finished, published to acclaim, sold to the movies, and remaindered; at the time I was on page three hundred or so of my Wonder Boys.
Because WordFest had been conceived by Walter Gaskell, the first party was always held at the Gaskells’, an eccentric, brick Tudor affair, a crooked witch’s hat of a house set back from the street in a leafy pocket of Point Breeze that had been carved, Sara once told me, from the estate of H. J. Heinz. There were vestiges of a massive old wrought-iron fence along the sidewalk, and in the Gaskells’ backyard, beyond Sara’s greenhouse, lay a pair of rusted rails, buried in the grass, the remnants of a small-gauge railroad that had been the childish hobby of some long-dead Heinz heir. The house was much too large for the Gaskells, who, like Emily and me, never had children, and it was filled from crawl space to attic with the inventory of Walter Gaskell’s collection of baseball memorabilia, so that even on those rare occasions when I went over to see Sara and we had the place to ourselves, we were never alone; the grand, dark spaces of the house were haunted