Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [131]
Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn’t particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up.
INTERVIEWER: So then, would you say, perhaps, that it was a kind of, and I know it’s an overused phrase, but, a catharsis for you, then, revealing, or discovering, if you like, in your story “The Real Story”—to use the word “discover” in its original sense, of course, of “lifting the cover from”—the depths to which a man—a man perhaps in some ways very much like you, although naturally not, of course, you—in his hopeless and even, I daresay, oddly heroic quest for what he calls “the real story”—will sink? I’m referring now to the scene in the Laundromat where he steals the nonprescription antihistamines out of the old woman’s handbag.
Q.: Yes, right. [Embarrassed laugh] Some of those babies pack a real wallop.
I switched over to AM and spun the radio dial until I hit polka music. I opened and closed my window a few times, fiddled with the rearview mirror, adjusted my seat, opened and closed the glove compartment. Hannah kept hers very neat, and well stocked with the road maps that had gotten her from Provo to Pittsburgh two years before. There was a flashlight, and a small box of tampons, and a flat tin of Wintermans little cigars. This, I thought, looked vaguely familiar.
I snapped it open and found that it contained, of all things, a sheaf of tight little marijuana cigarettes, expertly rolled. I wasn’t at all surprised by their precision because I had rolled them myself, and given the box to Hannah on her birthday last October. At the time I’d rolled her a dozen; there were still twelve of them in the can. I ran one under my nose and inhaled its corky, hybrid smell of marijuana and cheroot. The stuff I’d rolled, I remembered, was pharmaceutical quality, the most powerful Afghan Butthair ever to make its way into the Ohio River Valley. I jabbed the dashboard cigarette lighter, sat back, and waited. In the mirror I caught a glimpse of the tuba that had been stalking me all weekend, and shuddered. I thought of one of the last stories August Van Zorn wrote before he gave up his mastery of a minor literary form in favor of suburban humor and shaggy dog stories. It was a story called “Black Gloves.” It concerned a man, a failed poet, who had committed some unspecified but horrible crime, and who kept finding—in a bar, on the platform bedside him while he waited for a train, in one room of every house he visited, in his study draped over a bust of Hesiod, in the very blankets of his bed—a pair of black ladies’ evening gloves. He threw them in the ash can, tossed them into the river, set them on fire, buried them in the ground. They reappeared. One night he awakened with their empty fingers wrapped around his throat.
The cigarette lighter popped out, and I jumped. The pages of Wonder Boys spilled onto the floor at my feet and pooled around my ankles. I took one hit off the terrible joint and clutched the skunky green smoke in my lungs. I exhaled. In that tiny interval, between inhalation and blowing out, I became disgusted with myself. I squeezed the tip of the joint, tucked the remainder back into the Winterman’s tin, snapped shut the lid, and set the tin back into the glove compartment. Then, trying to refrain from any sudden movements that might alarm the tuba, I crept out of the car, mounted my donkey, and set off on the crooked road after Terry Crabtree.
THE DISPOSITION OF James Leer was debated not in the Benedictine gloom of Walter’s office on the third floor of Arning Hall but in the cool, aseptic terrarium of the Administration Building—a late modernist structure built by a pupil of a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright’s son—in the bright desolation of charcoal carpeting and steel furniture