Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [136]
“Who is that guy?” said Carrie. “Do you know him?”
“His name’s Jeff,” I said.
For a long time after that, I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. I sat there, listening to Walter’s soft voice, with its faint granite echo of New York. He seemed to be winding down, now; he related a few purportedly amusing incidents of the last few days, none of which concerned the murder of a dog, the theft of a sacred garment, or a wife who was carrying another man’s child in her womb.
“And now,” he said, “I have some good news. A round of congratulations is in order.” He paused. He had come, at last, to the Plums. Someone at WordFest had found a publisher for her children’s book, Blood on a Bustier. Another participant, a fellow I knew who wrote features for the Post-Gazette, had landed his crime novel, The Loneliest Prawn, at Doubleday. I may, thinking back on it, have those titles reversed. There was applause, which, I imagined, the people in question rose to their feet and acknowledged.
“It’s especially exciting,” Walter went on, “to announce that our own James Leer, a student here, has found a publisher for his first novel, which I believe is called The Lovely Parade.”
I opened my eyes in time to see Walter nodding genially to James in the front row, a look on his face of amazing warmth and benevolence. People were clapping and calling out to James but he just sat there, with his hands in his lap, staring straight ahead, at nothing, at the dust of Thaw Hall hanging in the lights of the stage. When Crabtree gave him a jab in the rib cage, James rose to his feet as if jerked by a cord. Carrie McWhirty pointed at him and whispered to the person on the other side of her, “I had a class with him.” James turned to face the five hundred people behind him, and the fifty above him, standing there looking lost and alarmed as a child caught in the midst of a startled flock of pigeons. On his lanky frame Crabtree’s jacket fit remarkably badly. It gaped at the collar and showed an inch of pale wrist. His shoes were the same old pair of dented black Packards, and the red plaid work shirt lent him a rubish air. He stood there like that, looking like a scarecrow hung from a nail, until the applause first slowed, then sputtered, and then died out altogether. The entire hall was silent, and James just stood, shifting from foot to foot, swallowing, looking as though he might be about to throw up. I saw that it was not the delicious moment described by cinema and fiction when the butt of jokes and resentment, when the mad boy, was applauded. The admiration of his tormentors was itself a kind of torment.
“The guy’s kind of an alien probe,” said Carrie. “If you know what I mean.”
“Take a bow, James,” called Hannah Green, loud enough for everyone in the auditorium to hear. There was laughter. James looked at her. He had gone bright red in the face. After one last innocent moment of feeling like an alien probe, he spread out his hands and hung his head and, as he must, took his first sweet bow as a wonder boy. Then he tumbled back into his seat like a blown umbrella and covered his face with both hands.
Walter Gaskell cleared his throat.
“Finally, and perhaps not least importantly,” he went on, sounding impatient, “Terry Crabtree, of Bartizan, has also decided to publish my own book, The Last American Marriage, parts of which some of you are already familiar with.”
Wild, wholehearted, obsequious applause. Crabtree smacked James on the shoulder and then gave it a fond squeeze; another successful narrative from the quick aquiferous