Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [124]
“Nice to know we’re still skilled at that.”
“Nice,” I said. We pulled back out onto Centre and headed downtown. Unlike Crabtree, who seemed in the last twelve hours to have found a cure for all his heartsickness, I felt clammy, mud-stained, and tired, and I was so desperate for a joint that I could smell from here the burnt spearmint flavor of the Baggie in the Galaxie’s glove compartment.
“What?” said Crabtree.
“What what?”
“You sighed.”
“Did I?” I said. “It’s nothing. I guess I was just wishing I could have been skilled at something else.”
“Like what?”
I hefted the manuscript that I held in my lap.
“Like writing novels, for example,” I said. “Ha ha.”
He nodded and adjusted his lips into a smile to acknowledge my little joke. We came to a stoplight and he slowed. The light turned green and he started off again and we sat there in Hannah’s tiny car that smelled of stale carpet and damp earth, not talking about Wonder Boys.
“Is it really that bad?” I said.
“Oh, no! It really has the makings, Tripp,” said Crabtree mildly. “There’s a lot there to admire.”
“Fuck,” I said. “Oh, my God.”
“Look, Tripp—”
“Please, Terry, spare me the editorial boilerplate, okay?” I bowed my head until my brow hit the dashboard. For a moment I hung there, looking down, suspended like a bridge over the meandering turbid river of Wonder Boys. “Just tell me what you thought. Be honest.”
“Tripp—” he began, then paused, searching for gentle phrasings and diplomatic constructions.
“No,” I said, sitting up, too quickly, so that the blood drained from my head and left a net of winking phosphenes in front of my eyes. I was afraid I might be about to have another one of my episodes and so I started talking, fast, to drown out the white noise of the blood in my veins. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, forget it. Don’t tell me what you thought. I mean, enough of this game. Enough! I admit I’m not done with the damn thing, okay? All right? Shit, that’s obvious. I’m nowhere near being done. I’ve been working on the thing for seven years, and for all I know I’ve got another seven years to go. Okay? But I am going to finish it.”
“Sure you are. Of course.”
“And maybe it has some problems. It wanders. All right. But it’s a great book. That’s fundamental. I know that. That’s one thing I know.”
We were downtown by now; the great sinister bulk of Richardson’s County Jail loomed ahead of us. It’s a famous building and no doubt deservedly so, but with its keeps and turrets, its towers peaked like hangman’s hats, the empty stone eye sockets of its somber face, it always looked to me like a mad castle, filled with poisoners and dwarfs, in which children were baked into cookies and pretty songbirds roasted alive on long spits. This part of town was, if anything, even more deserted than the Hill; there was no one out walking on this blustery Sunday morning, and the streets were all but empty of cars. It would have been easy to spot a fly green Galaxie.
“You still haven’t been honest with me,” I said.
“You said you didn’t want me to.”
“Because I don’t.”
“All right, then.”
“But tell me anyway.”
“It’s a mess.” His voice was soft and not uninflected with pity. “It’s all over the place. There are way too many characters. The style changes every fifty pages or so. You’ve got all this pseudo-García Márquez stuff; with the phosphorescent baby, the oracular hog, and so on, and I don’t think any of that stuff is working too well, and then—”
“How much of it did you read?”
“Enough.”
“You have to keep with it,” I told him. “You have to read on.” I was making the argument I had made to myself, over the years—to the harsh and unremitting editor who lived in the deepest recesses of my gut. It sounded awfully thin, spoken aloud at last. “It’s that kind of a book. Like Ada, you know, or Gravity’s Rainbow. It teaches you how to read it as you go along. Or—Kravnik’s.”
“What’s that, Gombrowicz?” said Crabtree. “I never read that.”
“Kravnik’s Sporting Goods. I just remembered.” I’d seen it a hundred times before, without ever really noticing it, on Third Avenue, near