Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [50]
“I thought that looked like a manuscript in there,” he said.
“It is. Thanks a lot.” I took the knapsack from him and started for the door.
“No problem,” he said, accompanying me. I’d obviously provided him with a welcome distraction from his work. “Hey, is all that true about Errol Flynn and how he used to put coke on his dick? To make himself, like, last longer?”
“Christ, Traxler,” I said. “How the fuck should I know?”
“Well, jeez,” he said, pointing to the knapsack. He looked a little taken aback. “You’re reading his biography, aren’t you? It was all wrapped up in your sweater or whatever.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Right. Yeah, that’s true. He used to rub all kinds of things on it. Paprika. Iron filings. Ground lamb.”
“Sick,” said Sam, opening the door and holding it open for me. “Well, take care, Professor.”
“See you, Sam,” I said. “Hey, what’s your band’s name, anyway? I’ll, uh, I’ll look for you guys.”
“We don’t have a name,” he said. “We came up with so many names that we just had to give up, you know? Meat Nickels. Bitter Dregs. The Ulnas. We couldn’t agree. People just call us, I don’t know, ‘Sam and those dudes,’ or ‘Greg’s band,’ or whatever.”
“Clever,” I said, standing half in and half out of the door. As I listened to him I’d been fiddling with the strap on James’s knapsack, and now it came loose. I held on tight to the flap as the knapsack’s weighted-down bottom gaped against my thigh. Inside, tied with binder’s twine to a neatly cut rectangle of shirt cardboard, lay James Leer’s manuscript, two inches thick.
“That the new one?” said Sam.
I nodded. There was no title page, no hint of authorship: simply the words THE LOVE PARADE at the top of the first sheet of paper, followed by the numeral 1, and then, to start the thing off,
On Friday afternoon his daddy handed him a hundred wrinkled one dollar bills and told him to buy himself a sport-jacket for the Homecoming Dance.
Two characters, an occasion, in the wad of tired money a whisper of some long history of poverty and thrift, and, above all, a quirky human voice to hang a story on. It was hard to do more in a good first sentence. I could have wished the kid would just break down and employ a comma, but at least the thing wasn’t the usual scattering of fragments and chips. One of his short stories actually began with the lines “Ruined. The dinner was. Utterly,” but in his novel he seemed to have left all that behind. Its second sentence read:
He rode the Greyhound over to Wilkes-Barre and spent the money on a pretty chrome gun.
“Is it good?” said Sam.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It might be.”
I stuffed the manuscript back into the knapsack, next to a kind of crude package—the biography of Errol Flynn, I supposed—wrapped hastily in a piece of soft black cloth. There was something familiar about the sheen of this fabric. I peeled back a corner of it, and saw a flash of yellowed ermine, and smelled a faint smoky flavor of cork. All at once the world seemed to draw a sharp breath; it started to rain, streaking the ink of James Leer’s manuscript, spattering the satin jacket Marilyn Monroe wore as she and her sad-faced husband set off in their De Soto to meet their fate as married people.
“This isn’t my jacket,” I told Sam Traxler.
“I kind of figured that,” said Sam.
Walking out of Thaw Hall, I felt myself arrive at the end of my luck. When I got back to the service road, the car and Crabtree were gone.
IT WAS A MILE AND seven tenths from the campus to my house on Denniston. The intervening streets were broad and straight, lined with maples, chestnuts, and oaks that had been planted just after the First World War. All the houses I passed were dark, with cars arranged in their driveways as neatly as duck decoys on a mantelpiece. I limped right down the middle of certain streets, and stood for an entire minute in the center of a desolate intersection as the lights changed around me and the traffic signals swung from