Free Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

passage across it of the heavy, fireproof closet door, in the course of Walter’s periodic visits to his treasures, which he made dressed in Yankee pinstripes, tears streaming down his lean and chiseled cheeks, mourning his Sutton Place childhood. In five years I’d never yet arrived at the foundation of the grudge that Sara Gaskell bore her husband but it was manifold and profound and no secret of his was safe from me. He kept the closet locked, but I knew the combination.
    “That’s really it,” I said. “Go ahead and touch it, James, if you want to.”
    He glanced at me, doubtfully, then turned back to the cork-lined closet. On either side of the satin jacket, on special hangers of their own, hung five pin-striped jerseys, all bearing the number 3 on their backs, ragged and stained at the armpits.
    “Are you sure it’s all right? Are you sure it’s okay for us to be up here?”
    “Sure it is,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at the doorway for the fifth time since we’d come into the room. I had switched on the overhead light and left the bedroom door wide open to suggest that there was no need for skulkery and I had every right to be here with him, but each creaking of the house or last-minute clatter from downstairs made my heart leap in my chest. “Just keep your voice down, all right?”
    He reached out with two tentative fingers and touched them to the yellowed collar, barely, as though afraid that it might crumble to dust.
    “Soft,” he said, his eyes gone all dreamy, his lips parted. He was standing so close that I could smell the old-fashioned brilliantine he used to slick back his hair, a heavy lilac perfume that, combined with the Greyhound-station smell of his overcoat and the waves of camphor emanating from the closet, led me to wonder if throwing up might not feel kind of nice right about now. “How much did he pay for it?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, though I’d heard an outlandish figure quoted. The DiMaggio-Monroe union was a significant obsession of Walter’s, and the subject of his own magnum opus, his Wonder Boys , an impenetrable seven-hundred-page critical “reading,” as yet unpublished, of the marriage of Marilyn and Joe and its “function” in what Walter, in his lighter moods, liked to call “American mythopoetics.” In that brief unhappy tale of jealousy, affection, self-deception, and bad luck he claimed to find, as far as I understood it, a typically American narrative of hyperbole and disappointment, “the wedding as spectacular antievent”; an allegory of the Husband as Slugger; and conclusive proof of what he called, in one memorable passage, “the American tendency to view every marriage as a cross between tabooed exogamy and corporate merger.” “He never tells Sara the truth about how much he pays for these things.”
    That interested him. I wished immediately that I hadn’t said it.
    “You’re really good friends with the Chancellor, aren’t you?”
    “Pretty good,” I said. “I’m friends with Dr. Gaskell, too.”
    “I guess you must be, if you know the combination to his closet, and he doesn’t mind your being, you know, here in their bedroom like this.”
    “Right,” I said, watching him closely for signs that he was fucking with me. A door slammed, somewhere downstairs, and both of us started, then grinned at each other. I wondered if the smile on my face looked as false and uneasy as his.
    “It feels so flimsy,” he said, turning back to the closet, lifting the left sleeve of the satin jacket with three fingers, letting it fall. “It doesn’t feel real. More like a costume.”
    “Maybe everything a movie star wears feels like a costume.”
    “Hey, that’s really deep,” said James, teasing me for the first time that I could remember. At least I thought he was teasing me. “You ought to get stoned more often, Professor Tripp.”
    “If you’re going to fuck with me, Mr. Leer, I think that you ought to start calling me