Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [120]
“What’s up?” said Hannah, looking concerned.
I told her that James had been taken away by the police, and that rescuing him would be a simple thing, but that in order to rescue him we would need to borrow her car. The sudden disappearance of my own vehicle I explained with a vague but suitably ominous allusion to Happy Blackmore. No, I said, shaking my head in the same vague and ominous but supremely self-possessed manner, it would be better if she herself didn’t come along. She and Jeff should just head on over to WordFest, and in an hour—easy—James, Crabtree, and I would be joining them. That was all I told her—it was all I thought I needed to tell her—but to my surprise she did not immediately agree to let us take her car. She hugged herself, stepped backward toward her bed, and sat heavily down. The manuscript of Wonder Boys stood in a stack on her night table, spotless, smooth-edged, all its corners true. Hannah regarded it for several seconds, then turned her face to me. She was biting her lower lip.
“Grady,” she said. She took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “Are you at all stoned, by any chance?”
I was not, and I swore to her that I was not. The claim sounded completely false to my ears. I could see she didn’t believe me, and, in the way of these things, the more I promised her, the falser I sounded.
“Okay, okay, ease up,” she said. “It’s not really any of my business. I wouldn’t even—I mean, normally—”
I was surprised by how upset she seemed. “What, Hannah? What is it?”
“Sometimes I think you smoke too much of that stuff.”
“Maybe I do,” I said. “Yeah, I do. Why? I mean, what makes you say so?”
“It’s not— I didn’t want to—” She reached for Wonder Boys. Its weight bent her hand at the wrist, and when she dropped it onto her lap it resounded against her knee bones like a watermelon. She looked down at its first page, at the initial run of sentences I’d written and rewritten two hundred times. She shook her head and started to speak, then closed her mouth again.
“Just say it, Hannah. Come on.”
“It starts out great, Grady. Really great. For the first two hundred pages or so I was loving it. I mean, you heard me last night.”
“I heard you,” I said, my heart squeezing itself into a tight fist of dread.
“But then—I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“Well, then it starts—I mean parts of it are still wonderful, amazing, but after a while it just starts—I don’t know—it gets all spread out.”
“Spread out?”
“Okay, not spread out, then, but jammed too full. Like that thing with the Indian ruin? Okay, first you have the Indians come, right, they build the thing, they die out, it falls apart, hundreds of years go by, it gets buried, in the fifties some scientist finds it and digs it out, he kills himself—all that goes on and on and on, for, like forty pages, and, I don’t know—” She paused, and blinked her eyes, and wondered for a moment at the novelty of administering criticism to her teacher. “It doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with your characters. I mean, it’s beautiful writing, amazingly beautiful, but … And all that about the town cemetery? All the headstones, and their inscriptions, and the bones and bodies underneath them? And the part about their different guns in the cabinet in the old house? And the genealogies of their horses? And—”She caught herself devolving into simple litany and broke off.
“Grady,” she said, sounding more than a little horror-struck. “You have whole chapters that go for thirty and forty pages with no characters at all!”
“I know.” I knew, but it had never quite occurred to me to put it to myself this way. There were, I was suddenly certain, a lot of things about Wonder Boys that had never occurred to me. On a certain crucial level—how strange!—I had no idea of what the book was really about, and not the faintest notion of how it would strike a reader. I hung my head. “Jesus.”
“I’m sorry, Grady, really, I just couldn’t help wondering—”
“What?”
“I wondered how it would be—what this book would be like