Читать книгу Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 13

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 but he took me very seriously. He blushed and looked down at the ghostly fan imprinted in the fibers of the carpet.

“Thank you,” he said. After that he seemed to feel a need to get away from me, and from the closet, and he took a step into the bedroom. I was glad to have a little distance between me and his hair. He looked around at the Gaskells’ bedroom, at the high, molded ceiling, the buttery old Biedermeier dresser, the tall oak armoire with its mirrored door that had lost the better part of its silvering, the thick pillows and linen duvet on the trim bed, looking white and smooth and cold as if it had been buried in snow. “This is a nice house. They must be pretty well off, to have all these things.”

Walter Gaskell’s grandfather had at one time owned most of Manatee County, Florida, as well as ten newspapers and a winner of the Preakness, but I didn’t tell that to James.

“They do all right,” I said. “Is your family well off?”

“Mine?” he said, poking himself in the sternum. “No way. My dad used to work in a mannequin factory. I’m serious. Seitz Plastics. They made mannequins for department stores, and display heads for hats, and those flattened-out sexy legs that they use to sell panty hose. He’s retired now, though. He’s old, my dad. Now he’s trying to raise trout in our backyard. No, we’re really poor. My mom was a fry cook before she died. Sometimes she worked in a gift shop.”

“Where was this?” I said, surprised, because despite his overcoat that stank of failure and the shabby thrift-shop suits he wore, he had the face and mannerisms of a rich boy, and sometimes he showed up for class wearing a gold Hamilton wristwatch with an alligator band. “I don’t think I ever knew where you’re from.”

He shook his head. “No place,” he said. “Near Scranton. You haven’t heard of it. It’s called Carvel.”

“I haven’t heard of it,” I said, though I thought it sounded vaguely familiar.

“It’s a hellhole,” he said. “It’s an armpit. Everybody hates me there.”

“But that’s good,” I said, wondering at how young he sounded, regretting that vanished time when I too had believed that I united in my fugitive soul all the greatest fears and petty hatreds of my neighbors in that little river town. How sweet it had felt, in those days, to be the bête noire of other people, and not only of myself! “Now you’ve got good reason to write about them.”

“Actually,” he said, “I already have.” He hefted the stained canvas knapsack on his shoulder and inclined his head toward it. It was one of those surplus Israeli paratrooper numbers that had caught on among my students about five years before, with the winged red insignia on the flap. “I just finished a novel that’s kind of about all that.”

“A novel,” I said. “God damn it, James, you’re amazing. You’ve already written five short stories this term! How long did that take you, a week?”

“Four months,” he said. “I started it at home, over Christmas break. It’s called The Love Parade. In the book I call the town Sylvania. Like in the movie.”

“What movie is that?”

“The Love Parade,” he said.

“I should have known. You ought to let me read it.”

He shook his head. “No. You’ll hate it. It really isn’t any good. It sucks, Prof—Grady. Tripp. I’d be too ashamed.”

“All right, then,” I said. As a matter of fact, the prospect of crawling across hundreds of pages of James Leer’s shards-of-glass style was less than appealing, and I was glad that he had let me off the hook of my automatic offer to read his book. “I’ll take your word for it. It sucks.” I smiled at him, but as I said it I saw something swim into his eyes, and I stopped smiling. “Hey, James, hey. I didn’t mean it. Buddy, I was just kidding.”

But James Leer had started to cry. He sat down on the Gaskells’ bed and let his knapsack slide to the floor. He cried silently, covering his face. A tear fell onto his old acetate necktie and spread in a slow ragged circle. I went over to stand beside him. It was now seven fifty-three, according to the clock on the night table, and downstairs I could hear the click of Sara’s heels as she rushed around, switching off lights, gathering up her purse, taking a last look at herself in the pier glass hanging in the foyer. After a moment the front door squealed on its hinges, then slammed, and the bolt turned in the lock. James and I were alone in the Gaskells’ house. I sat down on the bed beside him.

“I’d really like to take a look at your novel,” I said. “Really, James.”

“It isn’t that, Professor Tripp,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. There was a pearl of snot in one of his nostrils and he inhaled it. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s the matter, buddy? Hey, I know the workshop was awfully hard on you, it’s my fault, I—”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t that.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with a sigh. “Maybe I’m just depressed.” He looked up and turned his red eyes toward the closet. “Maybe it’s seeing that jacket that belonged to her. I guess I think it looks, I don’t know, really sad, just hanging there like that.”

“It does look sad,” I said. From outside I heard the engine of Sara’s car bubble to life. It was one of the few successful stylish gestures that she had managed to make—a currant red convertible Citroën DS23, in which she liked to tool around campus with a red and white polka-dot scarf on her head.

“I have an extra hard time with stuff like that,” he said. “Things that used to belong to people. Hanging in a closet.”

“I know what you mean.” I pictured a row of empty dresses, hanging in an upstairs closet in a soot-faced redbrick house in Carvel, Pennsylvania.

We sat there for a minute, side by side on that cool white snowbank of a bed, looking over at the scrap of black satin hanging in Walter Gaskell’s closet, listening to the whisper of Sara’s tires in the gravel drive as she pulled away from the house. In another second she would turn out into the street and wonder why Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie was still sitting dark and deserted along the curb.

“My wife left me today,” I said, as much to myself as to James Leer.

“I know,” said James Leer. “Hannah told me.”

“Hannah knows?” Now it was my turn to cover my face with my hands. “I guess she must have seen the note.”

“I guess so,” said James. “It seemed like she was kind of happy about it, to tell you the truth.”

“She what?”

“Not—I mean, Hannah said a couple of things that, well. I never got the impression, you know, that she and your wife actually liked each other. Very much. I mean, actually it sounded to me like your wife kind of hated Hannah.”

“I guess she did,” I said, remembering the creaking silence that had reached like the arm of a glacier across my marriage, in the days after I’d invited Hannah to rent our basement. “I guess I don’t really know a whole lot about what’s going on in my own house.”

“That could be,” said James, a certain wryness entering his tone. “Did you know that Hannah Green has a crush on you?

“I didn’t know that,” I said, falling backward on the bed. It felt so good to lie back and close my eyes that I was afraid to stay that way. I sat up, too quickly, so that a starry cloud of diamonds condensed around my head. I didn’t know what to say next. I’m glad? So much the worse for her?

“I think so, anyway,” said James. “Hey, you know who else I forgot? Peg Entwistle. Although she certainly was never a big star. She only made one movie, Thirteen Women, 1932, and she just had a bit part in that. It was the only part she ever got.”

“And?”

“And she jumped off the ‘Hollywoodland’ sign. That’s what it used to say, you know. Off of the second letter d, I think.”

“That’s a good one.” The cloud of stars had parted, but now I was unable to clear my head of a thick blue smog that had begun to form inside it, and the lilac smell of James’s hair oil was just too much. I felt that if I didn’t stand up at once and get moving I was going to pass out, or vomit, or both. I felt weak in my arms and legs, and tried to remember the last time I’d had something to eat. I’d been forgetting to take my meals lately, which is a dangerous sign in a man of my girth and capacity. “We’d better skedaddle, James,” I said, in a mild panic, taking hold of James’s scarecrow arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

Forgetting that I had left wide open the door of Walter Gaskell’s closet, I got up and hurried out of the room. I switched off the bedroom light behind me, leaving James Leer sitting alone in the dark for the second time that day. As I stepped out into the hallway I heard a low rumbling sound that raised all the hairs on the back of my neck. It was Doctor Dee. Sara had freed him from the prison of the laundry room and he crouched in the hall, belly to the ground, paws outspread, his black lip peeled back from his yellow old teeth. His wild eyes were staring fixedly at the empty air beside me, at some distant arctic peak.

“James?” I said. “Guess who’s here? Hello, Doctor Dee. Hello, you old bastard.”

I flattened myself against the right-hand wall of the hallway and tried to brush past him, but he came at me. I panicked and lost my balance, stumbling over Doctor Dee, accidentally giving him a sharp kick in the ribs. The next instant I felt a stab of pain in my foot, somewhere in the vicinity of my ankle, and then I fell to the floor, hard. Doctor Dee scrambled to his feet and stood over me, his throat filled with a single long rolling syllable.

“Get away from me,” I said. I was afraid, but not too afraid for it to occur to me that dying torn to pieces by blind, mad dogs had a certain mythic quality that might work well in the section of Wonder Boys in which I planned to have Curtis Wonder, the oldest of the three brothers who were the central characters of my book, meet the fate that his colossal pride and his lurid misdeeds had earned for him. I raised my fist, as Curtis might, and tried actually to punch Doctor Dee, as you would slug a man, but he caught the blow in his teeth, as it were, and worked his jaw around the meat of my hand.

There was a sudden sharp crack! as of a rock against the windshield of a car. Doctor Dee yelped. His tail jerked straight up into the air like an exclamation point and ratcheted around a few times on its hinge. Then he toppled over onto my legs. I looked up, my ears ringing, and saw James Leer, standing half in the shadow of the doorway, the pretty little pearl-handled pistol in his hand. I yanked my legs out from under Doctor Dee and the dog landed with a soft thud against the floor. I rolled down my sock. There were four bright red holes in my foot, on either side of my Achilles tendon.

“I thought you said that was a cap gun,” I said.

“Is he dead? Did he bite you bad?”

“Not so bad.” I pulled my sock up and scrambled up onto my knees. Carefully I passed my hand around Doctor Dee’s head and cupped the moist tip of his snout in my fingers. There was no trace of his breath against them. “He’s dead,” I said, climbing slowly to my feet. I could feel the first delicate tickle of pain in my ankle. “Shit, James. You killed the Chancellor’s dog.”

“I had to,” he said miserably. “Didn’t I?”

“Couldn’t you have just pulled him off me?”

“No! He was biting you! I didn’t—I thought he—”

“Easy,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Okay. Don’t freak out on me.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to go find Sara and tell her, I guess,” I said, feeling the desire for a sweet poisonous glass of bourbon steal over me like a fog. “But first I’m going to get cleaned up. No. First you’re going to give me that cap gun of yours.”

I held out my hand, palm up, and he obediently set the pistol on it. It was warm, and heavier than it looked.

“Thanks,” I said. I slipped it into the hip pocket of my blazer, and then he helped me into the bathroom, where I washed out the puncture holes with foaming hydrogen peroxide and found a pair of Band-Aids to cover them up. Then I rolled up my sock again and tugged down the leg of my trousers, and we went back out into the hall, where the handsome old dog lay dead.

“I don’t think we should leave him lying there,” I said.

James said nothing. He was so lost in working out the ramifications of what he had done that I don’t think he was capable of speech at that moment.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that I did it. That it was self-defense. Come on.”

I knelt down beside Doctor Dee and wrapped my arms around his heavy head. A dark red smear was turning to purple in the fur around the base of the right earflap, and there was a smell of burnt hair. James knelt and took hold of the dog’s hindquarters, a dazed, almost sweet expression on his smooth face.

“A little curl of smoke came out of the bullet hole,” said James.

“Wow,” I said. “I wish I could have seen that.”

Then we carried Doctor Dee down the stairs and along the endless driveway to the street, where we laid him out in the back of my car, on the seat, beside the tuba.