Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
he took his Hollywood suicides—and Hannah Green’s requests—very seriously. “Dorothy Dandridge, she took pills in, like, 1965. Albert Dekker, 1968, he hung himself. He wrote his suicide note in lipstick on his stomach. I know, weird. Alan Ladd, ’64, more pills, Carole Landis, pills again, I forget when. George Reeves, Superman on TV, shot himself. Jean Seberg, pills of course, 1979. Everett Sloane—he was good—pills. Margaret Sullavan, pills, Lupe Velez, a lot of pills. Gig Young. He shot himself and his wife in 1978. There are more but I don’t know if you would have heard of them. Ross Alexander? Clara Blandick? Maggie McNamara? Gia Scala?”
“I haven’t heard of half of those,” said Hannah.
“You did them alphabetically,” said Crabtree.
James shrugged. “That’s just kind of how my brain works,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” said Hannah. “I think your brain works a lot more weirdly than that. Come on. We have to go.”
On his way out the door, Crabtree shook hands with James yet again. It was not hard to see that Miss Sloviak’s feelings were hurt. Evidently she was not too drunk to remember whatever it was she and Crabtree had been doing upstairs in the guest room, or to feel that this entitled her to dwell within the radius of his attention for at least the remainder of the evening. She refused to let Crabtree take her arm and instead made a point of taking hold of Hannah Green, who said, “What’s that you’re wearing? It smells so familiar.”
“Why don’t you come out with us after the lecture?” said Crabtree to James Leer. “There’s this place on the Hill I always get Tripp to take me.”
James’s ears turned red. “Oh, I don’t—I wasn’t—”
Crabtree gave me a pleading look. “Maybe your teacher can convince you.”
I shrugged, and Terry Crabtree went out. A few moments later, Miss Sloviak reappeared in the doorway, her cerise lipstick neatly applied, her long black hair glossy and blue as a gun, and reproached James Leer with her eyes.
“Didn’t you forget someone, wonder boy?” she said.
WHEN Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio, on January 14, 1954—a week after I turned three years old—she was wearing, over a plain brown suit, a short black satin jacket, trimmed with an ermine collar. After her death this jacket became just another item in the riotous inventory of cocktail dresses and fox stoles and pearly black stockings she left behind. It was assigned by the executors to an old friend of Marilyn’s, who failed to recognize it from photographs of that happy afternoon in San Francisco years before, and who wore it frequently to the marathon alcoholic luncheons she took every Wednesday at Musso & Frank. In the early seventies, when the old friend—a B-movie actress whose name had long since been forgotten by everyone but James Leer and his kind—herself expired, the ermine-collared jacket, shiny at the elbows now, and missing one of its glass buttons, was sold off, along with rest of the dead starlet’s meager estate, at a public auction in East Hollywood, where it was purchased, and presently identified, by an acute Marilyn Monroe fan. Thus it passed into the kingdom of Memorabilia. It made a circuitous pilgrimage through the reliquaries of several Monroe cultists before it jumped sectarian lines and fell into the hands of a man in Riverside, New York, who owned—for example—nineteen bats once swung by Joe DiMaggio, and seven of the Yankee Clipper’s diamond tie bars, and who then, after suffering some financial reverses, sold the errant jacket to Walter Gaskell, who hung it in a special low-humidity section of his bedroom closet, with a foot of space on either side of it, on a special corrosion-free hanger.
“Is that really it?” said James Leer, with all the shy reverence in his voice I’d anticipated on first promising to show him the silly thing. He was standing beside me, in the Gaskells’ silent bedroom, on a fan-shaped patch of carpet that had been flattened by the constant passage across it of the heavy, fireproof closet door, in the course of Walter’s periodic visits to his treasures, which he made dressed in Yankee pinstripes, tears streaming down his lean and chiseled cheeks, mourning his Sutton Place childhood. In five years I’d never yet arrived at the foundation of the grudge that Sara Gaskell bore her husband but it was manifold and profound and no secret of his was safe from me. He kept the closet locked, but I knew the combination.
“That’s really it,” I said. “Go ahead and touch it, James, if you want to.”
He glanced at me, doubtfully, then turned back to the cork-lined closet. On either side of the satin jacket, on special hangers of their own, hung five pin-striped jerseys, all bearing the number 3 on their backs, ragged and stained at the armpits.
“Are you sure it’s all right? Are you sure it’s okay for us to be up here?”
“Sure it is,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at the doorway for the fifth time since we’d come into the room. I had switched on the overhead light and left the bedroom door wide open to suggest that there was no need for skulkery and I had every right to be here with him, but each creaking of the house or last-minute clatter from downstairs made my heart leap in my chest. “Just keep your voice down, all right?”
He reached out with two tentative fingers and touched them to the yellowed collar, barely, as though afraid that it might crumble to dust.
“Soft,” he said, his eyes gone all dreamy, his lips parted. He was standing so close that I could smell the old-fashioned brilliantine he used to slick back his hair, a heavy lilac perfume that, combined with the Greyhound-station smell of his overcoat and the waves of camphor emanating from the closet, led me to wonder if throwing up might not feel kind of nice right about now. “How much did he pay for it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, though I’d heard an outlandish figure quoted. The DiMaggio-Monroe union was a significant obsession of Walter’s, and the subject of his own magnum opus, his Wonder Boys, an impenetrable seven-hundred-page critical “reading,” as yet unpublished, of the marriage of Marilyn and Joe and its “function” in what Walter, in his lighter moods, liked to call “American mythopoetics.” In that brief unhappy tale of jealousy, affection, self-deception, and bad luck he claimed to find, as far as I understood it, a typically American narrative of hyperbole and disappointment, “the wedding as spectacular antievent”; an allegory of the Husband as Slugger; and conclusive proof of what he called, in one memorable passage, “the American tendency to view every marriage as a cross between tabooed exogamy and corporate merger.” “He never tells Sara the truth about how much he pays for these things.”
That interested him. I wished immediately that I hadn’t said it.
“You’re really good friends with the Chancellor, aren’t you?”
“Pretty good,” I said. “I’m friends with Dr. Gaskell, too.”
“I guess you must be, if you know the combination to his closet, and he doesn’t mind your being, you know, here in their bedroom like this.”
“Right,” I said, watching him closely for signs that he was fucking with me. A door slammed, somewhere downstairs, and both of us started, then grinned at each other. I wondered if the smile on my face looked as false and uneasy as his.
“It feels so flimsy,” he said, turning back to the closet, lifting the left sleeve of the satin jacket with three fingers, letting it fall. “It doesn’t feel real. More like a costume.”
“Maybe everything a movie star wears feels like a costume.”
“Hey, that’s really deep,” said James, teasing me for the first time that I could remember. At least I thought he was teasing me. “You ought to get stoned more often, Professor Tripp.”
“If you’re going to fuck with me, Mr. Leer, I think that you ought to start calling me Grady,” I said. “Or Tripp.”
I’d intended just to return the teasing a little