Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [109]
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not really mad at him, I guess. It’s just all that crap about his parents not being his parents, you know? I mean, what is that?” I shook my head. “I guess I just want to know once and for all what the truth is about the little bastard.”
“The truth,” said Crabtree. He went over to a nearby pile of books and hefted the three uppermost tides. They were hardcovers, in plain, dark bindings. “That’s always been real important to you, I know.”
I held up my right hand to him and showed him my fist.
“Imagine a finger,” I suggested.
“I think you ought to go easy on the kid.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because yesterday you left him sitting all by himself in the dark.”
I lowered my fist and said, “Oh.”
I didn’t know what else to say to that. I took a closer look at James’s movie memorabilia and saw that it was no mere act of dark teenaged whimsy that had led him to cut the dead director’s name into the back of his hand. The kid was a Capra fanatic. All along the wall behind the desk, above piles of videocassettes labeled MR. DEEDS, LOST HORIZON, et cetera, above stacks of screenplays bound in black vinyl with some of the same titles printed in block letters on their fore edges, were lobby posters from fifteen or sixteen of Capra’s films, some of them familiar to me, some of them bearing outlandish titles such as Dirigible or American Madness, and dozens of still photographs and lobby cards—most of them drawn, it seemed to me, from It’s a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe. This wall comprised the capital of James’s moviemania, so to speak, from which the empire had then spread upward, across the heavy beams of the ceiling, and down onto the other walls of his room, settling in large prosperous colonies that were dedicated to some of Capra’s great stars: Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, in framed photos, posters, and lobby cards representing much of their other work, great and obscure, from Annie Oakley to Ziegfeld Girl. In the farthest corners of the room the empire of James’s obsession seemed to disintegrate into a kind of vague borderland of Hollywoodiana, where it had established a few remote outposts—Henry Fonda, Grace Kelly, James Mason.
Then, picking my way carefully among the candelabras and piles of books and videocassettes, I stepped around to the great black shipwreck of his bed and found on the wall behind it a group of about forty glossy photographs of movie actors whose common theme, or link to Frank Capra, eluded me. There was Charles Boyer, and a delicate woman I thought might have been Margaret Sullavan, and, once again, the grinning, plump-cheeked, mustachioed face of the man in James Leer’s clock. As with this fellow, many of the actors in the photographs had familiar faces that I couldn’t quite place; several meant nothing to me at all. At the center of the group, however, there were a number of well-known photographs of Marilyn Monroe—naked and aswim in red velvet, reading Ulysses, holding down her skirt against a blast of subterranean air—and looking at these, I realized what I was seeing. This was a rival empire, I thought, setting out to conquer the walls of James’s room: the upstart Kingdom of Hollywood Suicide. I supposed the satin jacket would have fit right in.
“Did Herman Bing off himself?” I said, pointing to the man with the flying mustaches. “Would you know Herman Bing if you saw his picture?”
“Check this out,” said Crabtree, ignoring my question. He waved a couple of heavy handfuls of books. “These are library books.”
“So?”
“So, they were due”—he looked up at me, waggling his eyebrows—“two years ago. This one’s three years overdue.” He reached for another book and checked the scrap of paper pasted onto its fly. He whistled. “This one’s five.” He picked up another. “This one was never even checked out.”
“He stole it?”
Crabtree was scrabbling through all the books now, knocking over towers, upsetting arches.
“They’re all library books,” he said, crab-walking in a crouch along the foot of the wall. “Every single one of them.”
“Hey,” said James,