Wonder Boys (7 page)

“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. Charles Butterworth, 1946, I think. In a car. Supposedly it was an accident, but, you know.” He cocked his head sadly to one side. “He was distraught.” There was a trace of irony in his voice but I had the sense it was there for our benefit. It was clear 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.

W
HEN
M
ARILYN
M
ONROE
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.”