Wonder Boys

Chapter 4

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 by the presence of her husband and by the fainter ghosts of dead ballplayers and tycoons. I liked Walter Gaskell, and I could never lie in his bed without feeling that there was a coarse thread of shame running through the iridescent silk of my desire for his wife.

I’m not, however, going to say that it was never my intention to get involved with Sara Gaskell. I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. I’ve run through three marriages now, and each time the dissolution was my own fault, clearly and in-controvertibly. I intended to get involved with Sara Gaskell from the moment I saw her, to get involved with her articulate fingers, with the severe engineering of combs and barrettes that prevented her russet hair from falling to her hips, with her conversation that flowed in unnavigable oxbows between opposing shores of tenderness and ironical invective, with the smoke of her interminable cigarettes. We had an apartment we used, in East Oakland, that belonged to the college; Sara Gaskell was the Chancellor, and I met her on my very first day on the job. Our thing had been going on for almost five years now, according to no discernible progression other than the one leading from the crazed fumbling of two people’s hands with a key in an unfamiliar lock to the installation in the Guest Apartment of cable television so that Sara and I could lie on the bed in our underwear and watch old movies on Wednesday afternoons. Neither of us wanted to leave our spouses, or do anything to disturb the tranquil pattern of what was already an old love.

“So is she pretty?” whispered Miss Sloviak as we came scraping up the flagstone steps to the Gaskells’ front door. She gave my belly a poke, reproducing perfectly the condescending but essentially generous manner of a beautiful woman with a homely man. “I think she is,” I was supposed to say.

“Not as pretty as you,” I told her. Sara wasn’t as pretty as Emily, either, and she had none of Emily’s delicacy of skeleton or skittish grace. She was a big woman—tall and busty, with a large behind—and as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd. Her cheeks and forehead were wild with freckles, and her nose, although cute and retroussé in profile, had a way of looking bulbous when viewed straight on. By the age of twelve she had already reached her present height and bodily dimensions, and I believe it was as a result of this trauma—and the demands of her professional position—that her everyday wardrobe consisted almost entirely of control-top panty hose, plain white cotton blouses, and shapeless tweed suits that spanned a brilliant spectrum from oatmeal to dirt. She imprisoned her glorious hair within its scaffolding of pins, painted a thin copper line across her lips for makeup, and aside from her wedding ring the only jewelry she generally wore was a pair of half-moon reading glasses tied around her neck with a length of athletic shoestring. Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

“I’m so glad to see you,” I told her, whispering into her ear as she stepped aside to let Crabtree and Miss Sloviak into the oaken foyer of her house. I had to whisper rather loudly because the dog, an Alaskan malamute named Doctor Dee, found amusement in greeting every one of my appearances in the Gaskells’ house, regardless of the circumstances, with an astonishing display of savage barking. Doctor Dee had been blinded in puppyhood by a brain fever, and his weird blue eyes had an unnerving tendency to light on you when his head was pointed in some other direction and you thought, or in my case hoped, that he had forgotten all about you. Sara always blamed the hostile reception I got on his fever-addled brain—he was a loony dog to begin with, an obsessive bur-rower, a compulsive arranger of sticks—but he had also been Walter’s dog before he was Sara’s, and I supposed that had something to do with his feelings about me.

“Hush, now, Dee. Just ignore him, dear,” she told Miss Sloviak, taking the newcomer’s hand with the faintest glint of scientific curiosity in her eye. “And Terry, it’s nice to see you again. You look very dashing.”

Sara was good at the handshaking part of her job and she appeared delighted by our arrival, but her gaze was a little unfocused, there was a tense pleat in her voice, and I saw at once that something was bothering her. As she leaned to accept a kiss from Crabtree, she took a false step and lurched suddenly forward. I reached out and caught her by the elbow.

“Easy there,” I said, setting her back on her feet. One of the chief pleasures of the opening party of WordFest, at least for me, was the opportunity it afforded to catch a glimpse of Sara Gaskell in high-heeled shoes and a dress.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, blushing all the way down to the backs of her freckled arms. “It’s these goddamned shoes. I don’t know how anyone can walk on these things.”

“Practice,” said Miss Sloviak.

“I need to talk to you,” I told Sara, under my breath. “Now.”

“That’s funny,” said Sara, in her everyday, bantering tone. She didn’t look at me, but instead aimed a sardonic smile at Crabtree, whom she knew to be in on our secret. “I need to talk to you, too.”

“I think he needs to talk to you more,” said Crabtree, handing her his coat and Miss Sloviak’s.

“I doubt it,” said Sara. The dress—a fairly amorphous black rayon number with a boxy bodice and cap sleeves—rode up a little behind and clung to the fabric of her panty hose, and as she clattered around the foyer, arms and throat bare, ankles wobbling, hair piled atop her head with the relative haphazardness she reserved for festive occasions, there was an awkward grandeur to her movements, an unconscious headlong career, that I found very appealing. Sara hadn’t the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deino-therian body might have on a man. Balanced atop those modest two-inch spikes of hers she projected a certain air of calculated daring, like one of those inverted skyscrapers you see from time to time, sixty-three stories of glass and light set down on a point of steel.

“Tripp, what did you do to this dog?” said Crabtree. “He can’t seem to take his eyes off your larynx.”

“He’s blind,” I said. “He can’t even see my larynx.”

“I bet he knows how to find it, though.”

“Oh, now, hush you, Doctor Dee,” said Sara. “Honestly.”

Miss Sloviak looked uneasily at the dog, who had assumed his favorite stance, directly between me and Sara, teeth bared, paws planted, barking operatically.

“Why doesn’t he like you?” Miss Sloviak said.

I shrugged, and I felt myself blushing. There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

“I owe him some money,” I said.

“Grady, dear,” said Sara, passing the overcoats along to me. There was a patent note of stratagem in her voice. “Will you go and toss these on the bed in the guest room?”

“I don’t think I know how to find the guest room,” I said, although I had on several occasions tossed Sara herself down onto that very bed.

“Well, then,” said Sara, her voice alight now with panic. “I’d better show you.”

“I guess you’d better,” I said.

“We’ll just make ourselves at home,” said Crabtree. “How about that? Okay, now, old Doctor. Okay, old puppy dog.” He knelt to pet Doctor Dee, pressing his forehead against the dog’s tormented brow, murmuring secret editorial endearments. Doctor Dee stopped barking at once, and began to sniff at Crabtree’s long hair.

“Could you find my husband, Terry, and ask him to lock Doctor Dee up in the laundry room for the rest of the party? Thanks, you can’t miss him. He has eyes just like Doctor Dee’s, and he’s the handsomest man in the room.” This was true. Walter Gaskell was a tall, silver-haired Manhattanite with a narrow waist and broad shoulders, and his blue eyes had the luminous, emptied-out look of a reformed alcoholic’s. “That’s a lovely dress, Miss Sloviak,” she said as we started up the stairs.

“She’s a man,” I told Sara as I followed up after her, carrying an armful of topcoats.

Chapter 5

IN the summer of 1958 it was reported in the Pittsburgh newspapers that Joseph Tedesco, a native of Naples and an assistant groundskeeper at Forbes Field, had been suspended from his job for keeping an illegal vegetable garden on a scrap of vacant land that lay just beyond the wall in center right. It was his third summer at the ballpark; in the years before this he had failed at several modest enterprises, among them a domestic gardening business, an apple orchard, and a nursery. He was careful in his work but terrible with money, and he lost two of his businesses through disorderly bookkeeping. The rest of them he lost through drink. His well-tended but rather overexuberant patch of tomatoes, zucchini, and romano beans on tall poles, some four hundred and twenty feet from home plate, had caught the unfavorable notice of a real estate broker who was attempting to close the deal for the sale of the ballpark site to the University of Pittsburgh, and soon afterward Mr. Tedesco found himself sitting, in his vast undershorts, in his living room in Greenfield, while his former crewmates went on chalking foul lines and hosing down the infield dirt. Then his tale of injustice made the papers; there was a public outcry and a protest from the union; and a week after the scandal broke Mr. Tedesco was back on the job, having fulfilled his promise to dig up the offending plants and transplant them to his own postage-stamp backyard on Neeb Avenue. A few weeks later, just after the all-star break, at his youngest child’s and only daughter’s eighth birthday party, Mr. Tedesco had too much to drink, choked on a piece of meat while laughing at a joke, and died, surrounded by his wife and children, his two grandchildren, and his rows of Early Girls and lima beans. With an almost mysterious affection his daughter would afterward remember him as a big, fat, shiftless, and overexuberant minor craftsman, with bad habits, who committed a kind of suicide-by-appetite.

I’m not sure how much of that I’ve got right, but it shows the lengths to which I’ve had to go in order to account for why a woman as sensible and afraid of disorder as Sara Gaskell would ever waste an hour on a man like me. Her mother, whom I’d met on two occasions, was a sad, strong, undemonstrative Polish lady with a black wardrobe and a white mustache who worked in a laundry. In raising her half-orphaned daughter, she had brought to bear all of her considerable armaments in a largely successful effort to expunge Joseph Tedesco’s evanescent legacy of failure and excess, and raise a woman who would always go for the sure thing, however modest. Thus Sara had submerged an early love of literature to the study of accounting, following this with a Ph.D. in administration. She’d refused the proposals of the first two great loves of her life in order to pursue her career, and then, having found herself Chancellor of our college at the age of thirty-five, allowed herself to marry.

She chose the head of the English Department: his affairs were in order, his career well-established, his habits husbandly, and he kept his seven thousand books not simply alphabetized but grouped by period and country of origin. As the eighth child of a poor Greenfield family she was attracted to Walter’s genteel manners, to his Dartmouth education, his knowledge of sailboats, his parents’ penthouse apartment on Central Park West. Her mother approved of him; Sara told herself that he was quite literally the best she could hope for. Nevertheless, in spite of all her mother’s efforts, there remained a wild and sentimental Neapolitan streak in Sara, and this, along with some faint Electral residue she saw crackling in the air around me, may also help to explain her willingness to endanger her stable existence for the doubtful pleasure of my company.

The other explanation I used to make to myself was that my lover was an addict and I was a manufacturer of her particular drug of choice. Sara would read anything you handed her—Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet—at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly’s for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine. She’d even read my first book, long before she ever met me, and I liked to think that she was the best reader I had. Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.

“You can toss them in there,” she said, in a stage voice, pointing me like a tour guide into a small, pale blue room with a parquet floor and a bay window, high-ceilinged like all the rooms in the house. I carried the coats in and Sara followed, closing the door behind us. On the left-hand wall, alongside an Empire armoire, hung two large sets of baseball cards in oblong frames. I’d examined them in the past and I knew they represented the championship New York Yankee teams of 1949 and 1950. The opposite wall was covered in framed photographs of Yankee Stadium, taken at various epochs in its history. Against this wall lay the headboard of a bed with newel posts and a frilly white dust ruffle. Its surface was white and smooth and bare of any wraps or other garments. I spread Sara out across it. Crabtree’s and Miss Sloviak’s coats slid to the floor. I climbed onto the bed beside Sara and looked down at her anxious face.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, big guy.”

I lifted the skirt of her party dress and placed the palm of my hand against the outcropping of her left hip, where the waistband of her panty hose cut into the skin. I slipped my hand under the elastic and reached for the ten thousandth time for the wool of her pussy, automatically, like a luckless man diving for the rabbit’s foot in his pocket. She put her lips against my neck, beneath my earlobe. I felt her trying to relax her body against mine, joint by joint. She worked at the topmost button of my shirt, got a hand inside, and cupped my left breast.

“This one’s mine,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said. “All yours.”

We didn’t say anything for a minute. The guest room was right over the living room and I could hear a flashing ribbon of Oscar Peterson fluttering below us.

“So?” I said at last.

“You go first,” she said.

“All right.” I took off my eyeglasses, stared at the spots on their lenses, put them back on. “This morning—”

“I’m pregnant.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“My period is nine days late.”

“Still, nine days, that doesn’t—”

“I’m sure,” she said. “I know I must be pregnant, Grady, because although I gave up all hope of ever having a child a year ago, when I turned forty-five, I really only reconciled myself to the notion a couple of weeks ago. Or, I mean, I realized that I’d reconciled myself to it. You remember we even talked about it.”

“I remember.”

“So, naturally.”

“How do you like that.”

“How do you like it?”

I thought about that for a moment.

“It sort of makes for an interesting complement to my news,” I said. “Which is that Emily left me this morning.” I felt her grow still beside me, as if she were listening for footsteps in the hall. I stopped talking and listened for a moment until I realized that she was only waiting for me to continue. “It’s for real, I think. She went out to Kinship for the weekend, but I don’t think she really plans on coming home.”

“Huh,” she said, matter-of-factly, trying to sound as if I had just imparted some moderately interesting fact about the manufacture of grout. “So then, I guess what we do is divorce our spouses, marry each other, and have this baby. Is that it?”

“Simple,” I said. I lay there for a few minutes, with my head thrown back, looking at the wistful, sunstruck faces of ballplayers on the wall behind us. I was so conscious of Sara’s strained and irregular breathing that I was unable to breathe normally myself. My left arm was pinned underneath her and I could feel the first pricklings of trapped blood in my fingertips. I looked into the sad and competent eyes of Johnny Mize. He appeared to me to be the sort of man who would not hesitate to counsel his mistress to abort the first and only child she might ever conceive.

“Is your friend Terry’s friend really a man?” said Sara.

“I believe so,” I said. “Knowing Crabtree as I do.”

“So what did he say to you?”

“He wants to see the book.”

“Are you going to show it to him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My hand had gone numb now, and my left shoulder was starting to tingle and shut down. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Neither do I,” said Sara. A tear pooled at the corner of her eye and then spilled out across the bridge of her nose. She bit her lip and shut her eyes. I was close enough to her to study the cartography of veins printed on her eyelids.

“Sara, honey,” I said, “I’m stuck.” I gave my arm a gentle tug, trying to free it. “You’re lying on my arm.”

She didn’t move; she only opened her eyes, dry once again, and gave me a very hard stare.

“I guess you’re going to have to chew it off, then,” she said.

Chapter 6

I drank for years, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated. I stopped drinking not because I had a drinking problem, although I suppose I may have, but because alcohol had mysteriously become so poisonous to my body that one night half a bottle of George Dickel stopped my heart for almost twenty seconds (it turned out I was allergic to the stuff). But when, after counting off five discreet minutes, I followed Sara and the sparkling pearl of protein lodged in the innermost pleats of her belly back down to the First Party of the Weekend, I found the prospect of navigating the room sober to be more than I could face, and for the first time in months I was tempted to pour myself a drink. I was reintroduced to a shy, elfin man whose prose style is among the most admired in this country, whose company I had enjoyed in the past, and this time found him a leering, self-important old windbag who flirted with young girls to stave off the fear of death; I met a woman whose short stories have broken my heart over and over again for the last fifteen years and saw only the withered neck and hollow stare of a woman who had wasted her life. I shook hands with talented students, eager young staff members, colleagues in the department whom I had good reasons to admire and like, and heard their false laughter, and felt their discomfort with their bodies and their status and their clothes, and smelled the stink of sweet beer and whiskey on their breath. I avoided Crabtree, to whom I felt I had become nothing more than a colossal debit on the balance sheet of his life; and as for Miss Sloviak, that man in his dress and high heels—that was too sad even to think of. I was in no kind of shape to talk to anyone. So I sneaked through the kitchen and slipped out onto the back porch to blow a jay.