Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

“I’m kidding. Hello? Kidding?”

  “Ha,” I said.

  “Aren’t I kidding, Grady?”

  “Sure you are.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked me, looking me over. “You look like you’re going camping.”

  “I’m going out to Kinship.”

  “Kinship? To see Emily?” She patted at the breast pocket of her jumpsuit, looking for cigarettes, then lowered her hand to her lap. She did not permit herself to smoke in the greenhouse. “Why? Did she call you?”

  “Her father did.”

  “Her father.”

  “He invited me to their Seder. It’s the first night of Passover tonight.”

  “Is it. I see.”

  “Sara.”

  “That’s fine. No, that’s really nice. You should be there.”

  “Baby—”

  “No, I’m serious. They’re your family. They’re like a family to you. You’ve told me that many times.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t, uh, decided anything yet. I’m not going up there to, you know, reconcile with Emily.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going up there not to reconcile with her?”

  “Well—yeah, yes, sort of. I don’t know.”

  “I want you to know, Grady.”

  “I know.”

  “Now. I would like for you to decide.” She patted again at the empty breast pocket. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pressure you, but I need to know. If you’re going to stay with Emily, and her family, and I think you ought to, that’s a very commendable decision, then I want you to tell me that. If you’re planning to go up there to Kinship and tell Emily about you and me and this baby, then I want to know that, too. If you’re planning to leave Emily for me, although I certainly couldn’t advise you to do that, think of the complications all this is going to cause me on my end, then I also would want to know that.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes, what?” said Sara.

  I licked my lips. “I want to be with you,” I said. I was not in the least certain whether I meant what I said, nor just what the implications of this statement might be, but since I intended to follow it with a tale of dog slaughter, grand theft, and an accounting of the contents of my trunk I figured it was the safest way to start. “Sara—”

  “Oh, Grady,” said Sara. She kissed me. We fell backward on the purple davenport, and she pressed herself against me.

  “I started this garden right around the same time I fell in love with you,” she said, in an incantatory, almost childish tone of voice, lying crooked against me. “It was in April. There was nothing out here. Just bare ground and dead grass. I was the same way really. Then one day I came out here to find a flower or something to put in a note to you.”

  She paused, and I realized she was waiting for me to take my cue. She gave my shoulder an impatient shake.

  “The crocuses,” I said.

  “I walked out into the yard and there were crocuses everywhere. I still don’t know where they came from, or who planted them. I asked you to drive me out to that equipment rental place on the South Side. It was our second date.”

  “It was on Opening Day.”

  “You liked it that I let you listen to the ball game. I got that rototiller thing and I plowed under the whole field. Then I had them come in with all that horseshit. The ground steamed for a week. Then I put up the fence. I built the beds. I planted spinach and broccoli and wax beans.”

  “I remember” I said.

  “You’re going to tell Emily about us,” she said, in the same dreamy voice. She reached for my right hand and laid it atop the modest dome of her belly. “About this.”

  I lay on my side, looking up at the tangled iron lace of the roof over our heads. I saw that Sara, alone in a frail canoe, was drifting nearer and nearer to the roaring misty cataract of motherhood, and that she now believed I was right behind her, in the stern, madly paddling. I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house. I was appalled to see, after five years’ exposure to the unstable isotopes of my love, how many of her hopes Sara Gaskell still entrusted to me; how much of her faith there remained for me to shatter. How could I tell her the terrible things I had to tell her? Your dog is dead. You have to get an abortion.

  “I’ll tell Emily,” I said. After a moment I took my hand from her belly, kissed her cheek, and then hauled myself to my feet. “I’d better get going. I left James Leer sitting out in the car.”

  “James Leer? What’s he doing out in the car? Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “He’s sleeping off a mighty hangover, is all. I told him I’d only be a few minutes. I didn’t know—”

  “Are you taking him with you? Out to Kinship?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “He’s not too interested in WordFest, I guess, and I felt like I could use the company.”

  “Especially for the ride back, eh?” said Sara.

  “Especially that,” I said.

  I kissed Sara good-bye. Then I let the greenhouse breathe me out.

  When I got back to the car James slowly opened one eye and looked at me, as though afraid to expose any more of himself than this moist and bloodshot half inch to the perils of waking life.

  “Well?” he mumbled as I climbed in. “Did you tell her?”

  “Tell her what?” I said.

  James nodded and closed the eye again. I settled back against the seat and reached out to adjust the sideview mirror, which stuck for an instant, then snapped off completely. I tossed it into the backseat, along with the roses. Then I gunned the Galaxie’s addled engine, put her in reverse, and we hurtled, backward and blind, up the driveway, at forty miles per hour.

  I INTENDED TO LET James sleep the whole way to Kinship, if he needed it, but about ten minutes out of Pittsburgh I inadvertently dropped us into a deep pothole, and with the ensuing jolt he gasped, sat up, and looked around him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes wide. He sounded very sincere, the way people do before they have fully awakened.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Hey, you have that doughnut in your lap.”

  He looked down at the doughnut and nodded.

  “Where are we? How long was I asleep?”

  “Not very long. We’re still making our way through the ’burbs.”

  This response seemed unaccountably to worry him. He looked out over his door, then mine, at the tame woods and high fences and pseudo-English chimney pots poking out over the trees, then craned around in his seat and looked behind us. I wondered if he were not still asleep and dreaming. But all at once he seemed very much awake, tapping his foot to the music on the radio, fingertipping out a little 11/4 time on the dash. He adjusted the angle of the remaining side mirror, fiddled with the door handle, rolled up his window, then rolled it down again. He picked up the doughnut, which had fallen into his lap, and brought it to his lips, then without taking a bite replaced it in the neat white ring it had left on the fabric of his overcoat. As far as I’d ever seen, James Leer was not a fidgety person, so I figured he was trying to keep his mind off feeling sick.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “Sure. Fine.” He looked startled, as though I’d caught him thinking impure thoughts. “Why do you ask?”

  “You seem a little jumpy,” I said.

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head, looking innocent of jumpiness at this or any other moment of his life heretofore. He picked up the doughnut, stared at it a moment, set it back down. “I’m feeling really great. I’m feeling, I don’t know. Normal.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said. I wondered if perhaps it were all dawning on him at last; if he were beginning to realize that, having engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place, he wa
s now on his way to spend Passover, of all things, with the family of his dissolute professor’s estranged wife, in a dented Ford Galaxie within whose trunk lay the body of a dog he had killed.

  “Do you want not to do this, James?” I said, sounding more hopeful than I’d intended. “Do you want us to go back?”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I? No! Why would I want to go back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking a little startled.

  “Buddy, this was my idea, remember? No, hey, I’m looking forward to this. I mean it. Passover. Really. Do the Ten Plagues. Eat a lot of parsley. Seriously, I’m glad I have to go out there.”

  “Why do you have to?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Uh huh,” he said uncertainly. “No, sir, I don’t want to go back, either.” Once again he checked his mirror, angling it one way, then another, as though worried someone might be following us.

  “See any police cars?” I said.

  He looked at me for a second or two and then decided I was kidding.

  “Not yet,” he said weakly.

  “Listen,” I said. “It’s all right. I kind of lost my nerve a little back there, with the Chancellor, but, uh, we’ll straighten everything out when we get back to town tonight. I swear. Okay? Anyway, they’re an interesting family, the Warshaws. I think you’re going to like them a lot.”

  “Okay,” he said, as if I’d just given him an order. He did look like he was going to be sick.

  “It’s all that orange juice you drank,” I told him. “Want me to pull over?”

  “No.”

  “We’re in Sewickley Heights. We could find you a nice golf course to puke on.”

  “No.” He chopped at the dashboard with both hands. The glove compartment popped open and the bag of marijuana tumbled out. He grabbed at it and started to stuff it back inside, but then he must have felt foolish, or unsophisticated, because the next instant he gave up trying to replace it, and just held the Ziploc bag, rolled up, between two fingers, like a fat translucent joint. He was blushing, or at least the skin at his ears and the nape of his neck turned red. “Please,” he said. “I’m fine. Just keep driving.”

  “Hey, buddy, if you—”

  “I’m sorry, Professor Tripp,” he said. “I just hate this fucking place.” I was surprised to hear him swear. Such language never appeared in his work; in fact it was almost artificially absent, even in the rawest and most twisted of his tales, as if, in the miniature Hollywood of his soul, he felt constrained to pass all his productions before a kind of inner Hays Office. “Seuwickley. What a bunch of, I don’t know, rich—rich bastards.” He looked down at his lap. “I feel sorry for them.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t like to be a rich bastard?” I said.

  “No,” said James, unrolling the Baggie along his right thigh; the left thigh was still occupied by the uneaten doughnut. “Rich people are never happy.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “No,” said James, gravely. “I mean, people with no money haven’t got much of a shot at happiness in life, either, of course. But rich people, I think, have, like, none.”

  “Unless they buy it,” I said, but I marveled, once again, at James’s youngness, appalled and envious, in the manner of a dead-armed old pitcher watching a balky phenom throw wild, terrible smoke, mistake pitches and foolish pitches and pitches that went all over the place. “That’s a pretty original theory you have, I must say. ‘Rich people are never happy.’ I think Citizen Kane would’ve been a lot more interesting, you know, if they could have worked that theme in somehow.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I get your point.”

  “Hey, don’t look now, but I think one of your rich Sewickley Heights bastards likes you.”

  “What?” He stuffed the bag of dope under his thigh. A woman in a green Miata had pulled alongside my car. She was a good-looking blonde, no older than James, in a pair of black skier’s sunglasses. She had her own top down and the wind was doing wild things to the ends of her sporty yellow hair. As she scooted past us she gave James a big smile, raised a hand, and nodded. James looked away.

  “Friend of yours?” I said, watching as the girl, passing us, noticed the outline of Vernon Hardapple’s butt in my hood.

  “I don’t know her,” James said. “I swear.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  We drove on for a time without speaking. After a little while James fished the Baggie out from under his thigh and snapped it open. He lowered his face down into the mouth of the bag, and inhaled.

  “Smells like good stuff,” he said, in a tone of expertise.

  “And how would you know that?” I said. “I thought you didn’t do pot. Didn’t like to lose control of your emotions.”

  He blushed again, I supposed because he was aware that last night, if he’d lost any further control of his emotions, he would have been careering down the middle of Centre Avenue emitting blue nuclear fire from his nostrils and trying to kick over parked cars.

  “It’s ’cause of my father,” he said, after a moment. “He smokes it. He gets it from his doctor.”

  I said, “From his doctor? Is he sick?”

  He nodded. “He has—my father has cancer. Of the colon.”

  “Jesus, James,” I said. “Shit, buddy, that’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, well. So I guess the chemotherapy makes him feel really sick. Too sick to do anything. Too sick to even go out for a walk. His business started failing. The trout pens, you know. Started getting all scummy and stuff.” He shook his head, looking sad and faintly disgusted, as if recollecting the iridescent shimmer of decay on the surface of his father’s fishponds. “So anyway, his doctor prescribed, you know.” He gave the bag a little shake. “Want me to roll you a reefer? I do it for my dad.”

  “You have to roll them? Really? I thought that U.S. government dope was all machined and perfect. Like real cigarettes. That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Not my dad’s,” said James, furrowing his brow. “No. It always comes loose, in a Baggie like this.”

  I shrugged. We drove past the remnants of a collapsed barn, on whose roof there still faded an advertisement for Red Man, and then, immediately afterward, the sign that said we were seventy-five miles from the exit you took for Kinship, PA. I felt my heart squeeze, and something tightened up within me, as though an innermost cinch had been yanked.

  “Well, sure, then,” I said. “Go ahead and roll me one. If you want.” I reached into my vest and fished out the little pack of Zig-Zags. “Here you go. Try not to let it all blow away, though.”

  He lowered the glove compartment lid again, spread a rolling paper flat across it, pinched off a small bud from the bag, dropped it into the pleat. He zipped shut the Baggie and set it under his thigh. An eddy of wind curled around the sheet of rolling paper and sent it sailing across the surface of the glove compartment lid.

  “Careful,” I said, “Look out, man. That stuff has to last me a long time.” As I reached out to catch the skittering paper bateau I let go of the steering wheel and we bumped up onto the shoulder of the road, then off. “Jesus.”

  “Sorry,” he said, retrieving the scattered elements of the joint. He looked at me, then started to roll up the bud, intact, as if it were a little gift he was wrapping up to give to me.

  “No, James, you have to break it up, a little, or the thing isn’t going to draw.” I looked at him. “I thought you said you knew how to do it.”

  “I do,” said James, sounding so injured that I decided just to leave him alone. I shrugged and stared ahead at the meandering black river of Pennsylvania highway I’d navigated with Emily so many times before, and which was in many ways the principal thoroughfare of her life. Driving past the red, black, and ocher towns, with their muddy baseball fields, their onion domes, their pancake houses and rusting rail yards, she marked the transit of summers and holidays, school years, birthday weekends, anniversaries, flights from the upsets and dissolution
s of her romantic life in Pittsburgh. Like most women I’d known, Emily had suffered in the course of her relationships through a remarkable run of what men are pleased to call bad luck. I was not the first betrayer to come chasing after her up Route 79, with questionable intentions.

  “Here,” said James, handing me a lumpy but serviceable joint. “How’s that?”

  “Perfect,” I said, and he smiled. “Thanks.” I handed him my lighter, and both of us noticed that my fingers were trembling. “Could you fire it up for me, buddy?”

  “All right,” he said, uncertainly. “How—how are you feeling, Professor? You seem a little jumpy yourself.” He stuck the joint between his lips and drew on it, then passed it across to me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I took a long slow toke and watched the wind carry it all away when I exhaled. “I guess I might be a little nervous about going up to see my wife.”

  “She’s really mad at you?”

  “She ought to be.”

  He nodded.

  “She’s pretty,” he said. “I saw her pictures in your office. Is she, what—Chinese?”

  “Korean. She’s adopted. Her folks adopted three Korean kids.”

  “Did they have any of their own?”

  “One,” I said. “A son. Sam. He died pretty young. Actually today’s the anniversary of his death. Or yesterday. I forget how it works, with the moon, and all. They light a little candle and it burns for twenty-four hours.”

  He thought that over for a while, and I smoked the lumpy cigarette he’d rolled me. He’d neglected to comb out the seeds, and every so often one popcorned and spat ash across my vest. We flew past Zelienople and Ellwood City and Slippery Rock. The number of possible exits from the shrinking stretch of highway between Emily and me grew smaller, one by one, and I began seriously to regret having undertaken this journey. However badly I might want to immerse myself in her loud, sloppy, jumbled up, all-surviving family, there was no good reason not to believe that the greatest kindness I could do to Emily right now would be just to leave her alone. I had hurt her badly already and it was going to be worse when she learned that Sara was pregnant. Because she and I, for a couple of years, had tried to have a baby of our own. She was getting older and I was getting older and at the center of our marriage there was a small and all-consuming hole. When our initial efforts failed, we tried doctors and thermometers and an obsessive study of the monthly behavior of Emily’s eggs, visited a special clinic, began looking into adoption. And then one day, almost magically, without ever discussing it, we just gave up. I sighed. I could feel James’s eyes upon me.