Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it.

      The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half dozen times. And yet for all of those years, and all of those words expended in charting the eccentric paths of my characters through the violent blue heavens I had set them to cross, they had not even reached their zeniths. I was nowhere near the end.

      “It’s done,” I said. “It’s basically done. I’m just sort of, you know, tinkering with it now, buddy.”

      “Great. I was hoping I could get a look at it sometime this weekend. Oh, here’s another one, I bet.” He pointed to a neat little plaid-and-red-leather number, also zipped into a plastic sleeve, that came trundling toward us now along the belt. “Think that might be possible?”

      I grabbed the second suitcase—it was more what you’d call a Gladstone bag, a squat little half moon hinged at the sides—and set it on the ground beside the first.

      “I don’t know,” I said. “Look what happened to Joe Fahey.”

      “Yeah, he got famous,” said Crabtree. “And on his fourth book.”

      John Jose Fahey, another real writer I’d known, had only written four books—Sad Tidings, Kind of Blue, Fans and Fadeaways, and Eight Solid Light-years of Lead. Joe and I became friends during the semester I spent in residence, almost a dozen years ago now, at the Tennessee college where he ran the writing program. Joe was a disciplined writer, when I met him, with an admirable gift for narrative digression he claimed to have inherited from his Mexican mother, and very few bad or unmanageable habits. He was a courtly fellow, even smooth, with hair that had turned white by the time he was thirty-two years old. After the moderate success of his third book, Joe’s publishers had advanced him a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in order to encourage him to write them a fourth. His first attempt at it went awry almost instantly. He gamely started a second; this novel he pursued for over two years before giving it up as fucked. The next try his publisher rejected before Joe was even finished writing it, on the grounds that it was already too long, and at any rate not the kind of book they were interested in publishing.

      After that John Jose Fahey disappeared into the fastness of an impregnable failure. He pulled off the difficult trick of losing his tenured job at the Tennessee college, when he started showing up drunk for work, spoke with unpardonable cruelty to the talentless element of his classes, and one day waved a loaded a pistol from the lectern and instructed his pupils to write about Fear. He sealed himself off from his wife, as well, and she left him, unwillingly, taking with her half of the proceeds from his fabulous contract. After a while he moved back to Nevada, where he’d been born, and lived in a succession of motels. A few years later, changing planes at the Reno airport, I ran into him. He wasn’t going anywhere; he was just making the scene at McCarran. At first he affected not to recognize me. He’d lost his hearing in one ear and his manner was inattentive and cool. Over several margaritas in the airport bar, however, he eventually told me that at last, after seven tries, he’d sent his publisher what he believed to be an acceptable final manuscript of a novel. I asked him how he felt about it. “It’s acceptable,” he said coldly. Then I asked him if finishing the book hadn’t make him feel very happy. I had to repeat myself twice.

      “Happy as a fucking clam,” he said.

      After that I’d started hearing rumors. I heard that soon after our meeting, Joe tried to withdraw his seventh submission, an effort he abandoned only when his publisher, patience exhausted, had threatened him with legal action. I heard that entire sections had needed to be excised, due to aimlessness and illogic and an unseemly bitterness of tone. I heard all kinds of inauspicious things. In the end, however, Lead turned out to be a pretty good book, and with the added publicity value of Joe’s untimely and absurdist death—he was hit, remember, on Virginia Street, by an armored car filled with casino takings—it did fairly well in the stores. His publishers recouped most of their advance, and everybody said that it was too bad Joe Fahey didn’t live to see his success, but I was never quite sure that I agreed. Eight solid light-years of lead, if you haven’t read the book, is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.

      “Okay, sure, Crabtree,” I said. “I’ll let you read, I don’t know, a dozen pages or so.”

      “Any dozen pages I want?”

      “Sure. You name ’em.” I laughed, but I was afraid I knew which twelve pages he would choose: the last twelve. This was going to be a problem, because over the past month, knowing that Crabtree was coming to town, I had actually written five different “final chapters,” subjecting my poor half-grown characters to a variety of biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths and happy little accidents of life, in a desperate attempt to bring in for a premature landing the immense careering zeppelin of which I was the mad commander. There were no “last twelve pages”; or rather, there were sixty of them, all absurdly sudden and random and violent, the literary equivalents of that windblown, flaming airfield in Lakehurst, New Jersey. I aimed a cheesy smile at Crabtree and held it, for just a minute too long. Crabtree took pity on me and looked away.

      “Check this out,” he said.

      I looked. Wrapped, like the two suitcases, in heavy, clear sheeting that was held in place by strips of duct tape, a strange, black leather case was coming toward us, big as a trash can, molded according to a fanciful geometry, as though it had been designed to transport intact the heart, valves, and ventricles of an elephant.

      “That would be a tuba,” I said. I sucked my cheek in and looked at him through a half-closed eye. “Do you suppose—?”

      “I think it has to be,” said Crabtree. “It’s wrapped in plastic.”

      I hoisted it from the carousel—it was even heavier than it looked—and set it beside the other two, and then we turned toward the ladies’ room and waited for Miss Sloviak to rejoin us. When, after a few more minutes, Miss Sloviak didn’t come back, we decided that I ought to rent a cart. I borrowed a dollar from Crabtree and after a brief struggle with the cart dispenser we managed to get the cart loaded, and wheeled it across the carpet to the bathroom.

      “Miss Sloviak?” called Crabtree, knocking like a gentleman on the ladies’ room door.

      “I’ll be right out,” said Miss Sloviak.

      “Probably putting the plastic wrapper back onto her johnson,” I said.

      “Tripp,” said Crabtree. He looked straight at me now and held my eyes with his for as long as he could manage, given the agitated state of his pleasure receptors. “Is it really almost done?”

      “Sure,” I said. “Of course it is. Crabtree, are you still going to be my editor?”

      “Sure,” he said. He broke eye contact with me and turned back to watch the dwindling parade of suitcases drifting along the baggage carousel. “Everything’s СКАЧАТЬ