Wonder Boys (22 page)

“Does it say ‘Frank Capra’ on your hand, James Leer?” I said.

He nodded. “I did it the day he died. September third.”

“Jesus Christ.” I shook my head. I looked down at Irv. “He’s crazy about the movies,” I said.

Irv squirted a dab of ointment onto the tip of his index finger.

“One would have to be,” he said. Delicately he worked the ointment into the puncture marks. Thinking it over I decided that those eventual scars on my ankle would not have been acquired in any more reasonable manner than those on James’s hand.

“So,” I said to Irv, after a minute. “How were you liking it?”

“What’s that?”

“The book.
The Bottomlands
.”

“I’ve read it before.”

“And this time?”

“It’s a young man’s book,” he said, not unkindly. “It got me remembering how it felt to be young.”

“Maybe
I
should read it again.”

“You? I’d say you’re in no danger of aging prematurely.” This didn’t sound like a compliment. “So whose dog was it that bit you?”

“Oh, the Chancellor’s,” I said, looking back at the map of Mars. “There was a party at her place last night.”

“And aren’t they going to miss you at your Wordsfest?” said Irv, drawing back to squint at my wounds. “All your students?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said. “Anyway, I brought one of my students with me.”

“Clever of you,” said Irv. “I remember the Chancellor. Nice lady.”

“Uh huh,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the towering cracked crater of Nix Olympica.

There was a knock at the door.

“Who’s that?” said Irv.

“Hey, Dad. Hey, Grady.” It was Philly, or rather his head and upper torso, stuck into the door of the springhouse, fingers wrapped around the doorjamb as if to prevent himself from accidentally falling into the room. Although in the past I had seen a few exchanges of genuine affection between them, the Warshaw men were awkward and ill at ease with each other. Irv had his springhouse, and Philly’s domain, when he came home, was the basement, and in general they kept out of each other’s way.

“That’s James,” I said.

Philly nodded. “Hey,” he said. “Jesus, Grady, what happened to your leg?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

He watched for a moment while Irv unwound a strip of gauze and tore it off with his teeth. “See Deb’s tits?”

“Yep,” I said. “We saw ’em.”

He grinned; “So, listen, uh, Mom sent me out here to see if this dude wanted to come and see Grossman.”

“Do you want to, dude?” I asked James.

“I don’t know,” said James, watching Philly warily. Philly Warshaw was a good-looking young man, skin the color of tea with milk, straight-jawed and slender, dressed in a spotless white T-shirt and jeans. His airman’s hair was thick and spiky, and the veins stood out on his forearms. “Who is he?”

“He’s a snake, man,” said Philly. “He’s a mongo fucking boa constrictor.”

“Go ahead,” Irv said. “I can take care of Grady.”

James shrugged and looked at me. I nodded. He set down the book and followed Philly out the door. We heard their footsteps resound along the boardwalk as they headed toward the house.

“I certainly hope he can write,” said Irv.

“He can,” I said. “He’s a good kid. Ouch. Maybe a little messed up.”

“He’s come to the right place, then” said Irv. “Hold still.”

“Now, Irv.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you.” He wrapped one hand around my ankle, holding the bandage fast, and with the other hand brought the roll of adhesive tape to his mouth. The pressure of his fingers was firm enough to be painful. “You and Emily. If this were happening to Deborah,” he said, his words a little garbled, “all right, I could understand. I’d be a little disappointed if it
didn’t
happen.”

“Irv, I don’t know, it’s just—”

“She spoke to her mother.” Angrily he bit off a strip of tape and applied it to the bandage. “She doesn’t seem to want to speak to me.”

“It’s hard for Emily,” I said. “You know that.”

“I know. She holds it all in.” He applied a final strip of tape to the bandage, then patted at it with such gentleness that my eyes filled with tears. He looked up and managed a thin smile. “I guess she inherited that from me.” Then he lowered his head and looked down at the bandages and medicines scattered around him on the ground.

“Irv,” I said. I held out my hand to him and hoisted him to his feet.

“Families are supposed to get
bigger
,” he said. “This one just keeps shrinking.”

Then we went outside, into the last slanted shafts of the April afternoon. There was no one lying out by the pond anymore, and we leaned on each other for a moment, crippled in our various extremities, looking out at the empty chaise longues on the dock, at the sun hanging low over the bare yellow hills of Utopia.

“I’m not going, anywhere,” I said, just to see how true I could make it sound.

Irv smiled bitterly and clapped me on the shoulder as though I’d got off a clever line.

“Give me a break, Grady,” he said.

T
HERE WAS ONE BATHROOM
in the house, upstairs, at the end of the hall, in a wide, lopsided dormer all its own. It was a nice bathroom with grooved wainscoting, brass fixtures, and a big quadruped tub, but given the wild mood swings of Irving’s bowels and a remarkable tendency among the women of the family to lie brooding in their bathwater, it was an overburdened facility and generally occupied when you needed it most. When I came back into the house I went upstairs to take a leak and found the heavy, paneled door shut tight. I knocked softly three times, tapping out the syllables of my name.

“Yes?”

I took a step backward.

“Em?” I said. “Is that you?”

“No,” said Emily.

I gave the doorknob a twist. It was unlocked; all I needed to do was give the door a gentle push. Instead I eased the knob back, without a sound, and took my hand away. I stood looking at the closed door.

“I, uh, I need to pee, kid.” I swallowed, aware of the moment that inhered in the question I was about to ask—the deep, damaged membranes of trust and intimacy I was about to lay bare. “Can I—is it all right if I come in?”

There was a splash and the faint porcelain echo of a splash.

“I’m taking a bath.”

“Okay,” I said to the door, resting my forehead against it. I could hear the scrape of a match and then the low angry sigh of Emily’s exhalation. I counted off thirty seconds. Then I went back downstairs and out into the yard.

I walked out to the driveway and started down toward Kinship Road, looking up at the mesh of branches overhead for signs of a blighted elm tree against which it would be kosher for me to piss. The air smelled cool and slippery like wet bark, and although my wife’s refusal to let me share her nakedness, however reasonable, had hurt me—even though it made my heart ache to think that I might never get to see my Emily naked again—I was feeling very glad to be out of the house, alone, carrying the happy clenched fist of my bladder inside me. Then I came around a bend in the drive and saw my sister-in-law. She was moping along about fifty feet ahead of me, wrapped in a gauzy purple dress the hem of which dragged in the gravel like a train. She was cutting at the air around her with a lit cigarette and singing softly to herself in a falsetto voice: it sounded like the slow, moaning part of “Whole Lotta Love.” I knew that I ought to leave her to her unimaginable Deborah reveries but I was upset and confused about Emily, and there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law’s counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen. She caught the sound of my tread in the gravel, and turned.

“How weird,” I said by way of greeting.

“Hey, Doc!” she said.

“That’s quite a dress.” There were tiny silver mirrors sewn into the fabric, and the print appeared to be patterned after the psychedelic neon paisley effect you get when you shut your eyes tight and press hard with your knucklebones against them. It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.

“Do you like it? It’s from India or someplace,” said Deborah, smacking me on the cheek, hard, with her compressed lips, in her version of a kiss, and giving my hand a painful squeeze. “What’s weird?”

“I couldn’t get Em to let me come into the bathroom and pee. She was in there taking a bath.”

“She’s fucking pissed at you, Doc,” she said. “She heard you’ve been boinking this other woman.” Doc was Deborah’s nickname for me. She’d started out, years ago, by calling me Gravy, and hence Gravy Boat, and then the latter had metamorphosed, in a way I supposed my physique made inevitable, into Das Boot. At some point she had dropped the Boot, and then after a while Das had slid slowly into Doc, where, finding me always well supplied in any emergency with a certain pharmacological substance, it finally lodged. Deborah had come to English late, as I’ve said, and there was no way of telling what would happen to a phrase like “gravy boat” once it got into her brain. “Bastard.” She drove a fist delicately into my stomach. “Fucking slimebag.”

“Did she?” I said, not taking her abuse of me at all seriously. One of the things I’d always admired about Deborah was the unself-conscious scabrousness of her dealings with men in general and myself in particular. She’d arrived on these shores with little in her luggage besides the seven great Anglo-Saxon imprecations, and to this day she clung to them with touching devotion, as to certain other proofs—a shriveled lei of orchids, an ancient, uneaten Hershey bar the orphanage had provided for the trip—of her passage to America. “And just where did she hear that?”

“You think I told her?”

“I don’t really care,” I said. “How are you, kid?”

I reached to brush a strand of hair from her right eye, and she looked away. She had thick and lovely hair, which she used to conceal her face, a plain face made plainer still by her low regard for it. She hated her nose, believing it to be at once bulbous and too small. She called it—originally, I thought, if pitiably—her pud. Her eyes though expressive were badly crossed, and her teeth wandered across her smile like the kernels at the tip of an ear of corn.

“You don’t know anything about monkeys, do you?”

“Not as much as I ought to.”

“Do they make good pets? I was just thinking of getting myself a monkey. A squirrel monkey, you know, one of those little jobbers they have, to carry around on my shoulder. Do you know anything about squirrel monkeys?”

“Only that they kill their masters.”

Deborah showed me all her crooked little teeth.

“I still like you, Doc,” she said, in her insincere way. Like many people who have lost all but the ghost of their original foreign accents, nothing she said ever sounded quite true. “I just want you to know that. Everybody else thinks you’re a motherfucker. But not me. I mean, I do, but I still like you anyway.”

“That’s great,” I said. “You’re the worst judge of character I know, Deb.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” she said, and she looked momentarily depressed. Her most recent husband, for example, a half-Korean dentist named Alvin Blumentopf to whom she had been married for all of a year, had been beaten up by loan sharks for nonpayment of racetrack debts and then convicted, two days later, of income-tax evasion, and sent to the federal prison at Marion. That Deborah had fallen in love with him almost guaranteed such a fate. “Thanks for reminding me, you know?”

She dropped her cigarette onto the road; just let go of it, half-smoked, as if it tired her. Deborah came off much tougher than Emily and I remembered that I always forgot—misled by her profane good nature and loopy style—how easy it was to injure her feelings. I stepped on the cigarette for her and ground it out.

“What a gentleman,” she said. “So, okay, she wouldn’t let you into the bathroom.”

“She wouldn’t speak to me.”

“She didn’t say
anything
?”

“No, but I only waited twenty minutes.”

“And then you came out here to piss?”

“Yeah,” I said. I started toward a nearby tree, which appeared, on close inspection, to be acceptably dead. “Mind?”

“Do I get to see your wiener?”

“You bet.” I stepped behind the tree and unzipped. “Have you got a pen?”

“No, why?”

“I want to draw a little face on it for you.”

“Do worms have faces?”

“Now you’re depressing me,” I said.

“Doc,” said Deborah. “How many times have you been married?”

“Three.”

“Three. Same as me.”

“The same.”

“And I’ll bet you cheated on them, too.”

“Oh, kind of.”

“And
I’m
the worst judge of character you ever met?”

“Ha,” I said. I finished my work, hitched up my trousers, and stepped back out into the drive. “So, aside from thinking about monkeys, what were
you
doing out here, Deb? Fleeing Egypt?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I was checking around in the barnyard. Sort of looking around underneath the cow turds.”

“For ’shrooms?” She nodded. “Did you find any?” Another nod. “Did you eat them?” She looked at me levelly, her eyes all pupil in the late afternoon shadow, her face expressionless. “Jesus, Deb, that’s crazy.”

Now she punched me on the arm and grinned broadly.

“Scared you, didn’t I?” She reached into one of the side pockets of her dress and pulled out a dirty handful of skinny gray mushrooms. “I’m just kind of holding on to them for now. In case things get really dull.” She shoved them back into the pocket and from the other took out her cigarettes. When she could get them she smoked a nasty filterless Korean brand called Chan Mei Chong that cost her double the price of a domestic pack and smelled like burning warthog rind.

“When I first saw Emily”—she lit the cigarette, watching the flame with her wild, crossed eyes—“yesterday, I could tell she had some kind of news to tell me. You know how all the parts of her face sort of all smoosh together around her nose?”

“Uh huh.”

“I thought she was going to say that she was pregnant.”

“Funny,” I said, voice a little thick.