Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [9]
Or nearly so; as I stopped at the corner of Dwight, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I turned to find Crabtree, his eyes bright, his red cashmere scarf fluttering out behind him.
“August Van Zorn,” he said, holding out his hand.
“August Van Zorn,” I said. We shook. “Unbelievable.”
“I have no talent,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
“Desperation. Have you read any of his others?”
“A lot of them. ‘The Eaters of Men.’ ‘The Case of Edward Angell.’ ‘The House on Polfax Street.’ He’s great. I can’t believe you’ve heard of him.”
“Listen,” I said, thinking that I had done far more than hear of Albert Vetch. “Do you want to get a beer?”
“I never drink,” said Crabtree. “Buy me a cup of coffee.”
I wanted a beer, but coffee was undeniably easier to be had in the purlieus of the University, so we went into a cafe, one that I’d been avoiding for the past couple of weeks, since it was a haunt of that tender and perceptive philosophy major who’d pleaded so sweetly with me not to fritter away my gift. A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.
“There’s a table under the stairs, at the back,” said Crabtree. “I often sit there. I don’t like to be seen.”
“Why is that?”
“I prefer to remain a mystery to my peers.”
“I see. So why are you talking to me?”
“‘The Sister of Darkness,’” he said. “It took me a few pages to catch on, you know. It was the line about the angle of his widow’s peak lying ‘slightly out of true with the remainder of his face.’”
“I must have remembered that one wholesale,” I said. “I was working from memory.”
“You must have a sick memory, then.”
“But at least I have talent.”
“Maybe,” he said, looking down cross-eyed at the flame of a match as he cupped his hand around the end of a filterless cigarette. He smoked Old Gold then. Now he’s changed to something low-tar and aqua-colored; a faggy cigarette, I call it when I want to make him pretend to get mad.
“If you don’t have talent, how’d you get in?” I asked him. “Didn’t you have to submit a sample of work?”
“I had talent,” he said, extinguishing the match with an insouciant shake. “One story’s worth. But it’s all right. I’m not planning to be a writer.” He paused a moment after he said that, to let it sink in, and I got the feeling that he’d been waiting to have this conversation for a very long time. I imagined him at home, blowing sophisticated plumes of smoke at the reflection in his bedroom mirror, tying and retying his cashmere scarf. “I’m taking this class to learn about writers as much as writing.” He sat back in his seat and coil by coil unwrapped the scarf from his neck. “I intend to be the Max Perkins of our generation.”
His expression was grave and earnest but there was still a slight wrinkling of mockery at the corners of his eyes, as though he were daring me to admit that I didn’t know who Maxwell Perkins was.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, determined to match his grandiosity and arrogance with my own. I had spent plenty of time impressing my own mirror with bons mots and intrepid writerly gazes. I had a Greek fisherman’s sweater that I used to put on and flatter myself for having Hemingway’s brow. “Well, then, I intend to be the Bill Faulkner.”
He smiled. “You have a lot farther to go than I do,” he said.
“Fuck you,