Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
to catch the light spilling out from the party. He was looking at Hannah Green, who stood by the dining-room window with her back toward us. Her yellow hair was mussed and scattered in all directions. She was telling a story with her hands. All the people standing in front of her had bared their teeth to laugh.
After a moment James Leer looked away and started off. His head was absorbed into the sharp black shadow that fell from the side of the house.
“Wait a minute, James,” I said. “Don’t leave yet.”
He turned, and his face reemerged from the shadow, and I walked over to him, flicking the burnt end of the joint into the air.
“Come on inside the house for a minute,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper that came out sounding so sinister and friendless that I suddenly felt ashamed. “There’s something upstairs I think you ought to see.”
WHEN we walked back into the kitchen, the party was breaking up; Walter Gaskell had already led a large contingent of staff members off to Thaw Hall, among them the shy little elf in the turtleneck sweater who was to address us that evening on the subject of “The Writer as Doppelganger.” Sara and a young woman in a gray service uniform were busy scraping out bowls into the kitchen trash, stretching plastic wrap across plates of cookies, shoving corks back into half-empty bottles of wine. They had the water running into the sink and didn’t hear us as we slipped past into the living room, where a crew of students was gathering up streaked paper plates and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. I felt very stoned, now that I was inside, light and insubstantial as a ghost, and far less certain than a few minutes earlier of my motives in sneaking James Leer up to the Gaskells’ bedroom to show him what was hanging from a silver hanger in Walter Gaskell’s closet.
“Grady,” said one of the students, a young woman named Carrie McWhirty. She had been among James Leer’s most cruel detractors that afternoon, and she was herself a truly terrible writer, but I nevertheless held her in a certain tender and pitying regard, because she had been working on a novel, called Liza and the Cat People, since she was nine years old; almost half her life, longer even than I’d been working on Wonder Boys. “Hannah was looking for you. Hi, James.”
“Hello,” said James, glumly.
“Hannah?” I said. At the thought that she had been looking for me my heart was seized with panic or delight. “Where’d she go?”
“I’m out here, Grady,” called Hannah, from the foyer. She stuck her head into the living room. “I was wondering what happened to you guys.”
“Uh, we were outside,” I said. “We had a few things to discuss.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Hannah, reading the pink calligraphy inked across the whites of my eyes. She had on a man’s plaid flannel shirt, tucked imperfectly into a baggy pair of Levi’s, and the cracked red cowboy boots I’d never once seen her go without, not even when she prowled the house in a terry-cloth bathrobe, or a pair of sweatpants, or running shorts. In idle moments I liked to summon up an image of her naked feet, long and intelligent, aglitter with down, toenails painted red as the leather of her boots. Beyond the mess of her dirty blond hair, however, and a certain heaviness of jaw—she was originally from Provo, Utah, and she had the wide, stubborn face of a Western girl—it was difficult to see much of a resemblance to Frances Farmer; but Hannah Green was very beautiful, and she knew it all too well, and she tried with all her might, I thought, not to let it fuck her up; maybe it was in this doomed struggle that James Leer saw a sad resemblance. “No, but really,” she said. “James, do you need a ride? I’m leaving right now. I was planning to give your friends a ride, too, Grady. Terry and his friend. Who is she, anyw——hey. Grady, what’s the matter? You look kind of wiped.”
She reached out to put a hand on my arm—she was a person who liked to touch you—and I took a step away from her. I was always backing off from Hannah Green, pressing myself against the wall when we passed each other in a wide and empty hallway, hiding behind my newspaper when we found ourselves in the kitchen alone, with an admirable and highly unlikely steadfastness that I had a hard time explaining to myself. I suppose that I derived some kind of comfort from the fact that my relationship with young Hannah Green remained a disaster waiting to happen and not, as would normally have been the case by this time, the usual disaster.
“I’m just fine,” I said. “I think I’m coming down with something. Where are those two?”
“Upstairs. They went to get their coats.”
“Great.” I started to call up to them, but then I remembered James Leer, and the piece of Walter’s collection I had promised I would show him. He was leaning against the front door of the house, looking out at nothing at all through the mist on the sidelights, right hand jiggling in his overcoat pocket. “Hey, uh, Hannah, could you take them for me, and I’ll drive James? We’re not, uh, we’re not quite through here.”
“Sure,” said Hannah. “Only your friends went up there to get their coats, like, ten minutes ago.”
“Here we are,” said Crabtree, holding Miss Sloviak’s upraised fingers in one hand as he followed her down the stairs. She chose her steps with care, and the escort Crabtree was giving her seemed to be not entirely an act of gentlemanliness. Her ankles were wobbling in her tall black pumps, and I saw that it could not be an easy thing to be a drunken transvestite. Crabtree’s metallic green suit showed not a wrinkle, and he was wearing the smug, blank expression he assumed whenever he thought he might be causing a scandal, but as soon as he saw James Leer his eyes got very wide, and he let go of Miss Sloviak’s hand. She took the last three steps all at once, unintentionally, and fell against me, enveloping me in her long smooth arms and a disturbing odor of Cristalle and something else that was rank and spicy.
“I’m so sorry,” she said with a tragic smile.
“Hello there,” said Crabtree, giving James Leer his hand.
“James,” I said, “this is my oldest and best friend, Terry Crabtree, and his friend, Miss Sloviak. My editor, too. Terry, I’ve told you about James, I’m sure.”
“Have you?” said Crabtree. He had yet to let go of James Leer’s hand. “I’m sure I would remember.”
“Oh, listen, Terry,” said Hannah Green, tugging at Crabtree’s elbow as if she had known him all her life. “This is the guy I was telling you about. James Leer. Ask him about George Sanders. James will know.”
“Ask me what?” said James, freeing his pale hand at last from Crabtree’s grip. His voice shook a little and I wondered if he was seeing what I saw in Crabtree’s eyes, the mad conquistador glint, looking at James Leer with a wild surmise. “He was in Son of Fury.”
“Terry was saying how George Sanders killed himself, James, but he didn’t remember how. I told him you’d know.”
“Pills,” said James Leer. “In 1972.”
“Very good! The date, too!” Crabtree handed Miss Sloviak her coat. “Here,” he said.
“Oh, James is amazing,” said Hannah. “Aren’t you, James? No, really, watch this, watch this.” She turned to James Leer, looking up at him as though she were his adoring little sister and thought him capable of limitless acts of magic. You could see the desire to please her freezing up all the muscles of his face. “James, who else committed suicide? What other movie actors, I mean?”
“All of them? There are way too many.”
“Well, then, just a few of the big ones, let’s say.”
He didn’t even roll back his eyes in his head, or scratch reminiscently at his chin. He just opened his mouth and started counting them off on his fingers.
“Pier Angeli, 1971 or ’72, also pills. Charles Boyer, 1978, pills again.