the case with some fashionable men in their forties, in compensation for any incipient baldness, but out of a vanity more pure and unchallengeable: he had beautiful hair, thick and chestnut-colored and falling in a flawless curtain to his shoulders. He was wearing a well-cut, olive-drab belted raincoat over a handsome suit—an Italian number in a metallic silk that was green like the back of a dollar bill—a pair of woven leather loafers without socks, and round schoolboy spectacles I’d never seen before.
“You look great,” I said.
“Grady Tripp, this is Miss Antonia, uh, Miss Antonia—”
“Sloviak,” said the person, in an ordinary pretty woman’s voice. “Nice to meet you.”
“It turns out she lives around the corner from me, on Hudson.”
“Hi,” I said. “That’s my favorite street in New York.” I attempted to make an unobtrusive study of the architecture of Miss Sloviak’s throat, but she’d tied a brightly patterned scarf around her neck. That in itself was a kind of clue, I supposed. “Any luggage?”
Crabtree held on to the blue canvas grip and handed me the garment bag. It was surprisingly light.
“Just this?”
“Just that,” he said. “Any chance we can give Miss Sloviak here a lift?”
“I guess that would be all right,” I said, with a faint twinge of apprehension, for I began to see already what kind of evening it was going to be. I knew the expression in Crabtree’s eye all too well. He was looking at me as though I were a monster he’d created with his own brain and hands, and he were about to throw the switch that would send me reeling spasmodically across the countryside, laying waste to rude farmsteads and despoiling the rural maidenry. Further he had plenty more ideas where that one came from, and if the means of creating another disturbance fell into his hands he would exploit it without mercy on this night. If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one. “What hotel is it?”
“Oh, I live here,” said Miss Sloviak, with a becoming blush. “That is, my parents do. In Bloomfield. But you can just drop me downtown and I’ll get a cab from there.”
“Well, we do have to stop downtown, Crabtree,” I said, trying to demonstrate to all concerned that my traffic was with him and that I considered Miss Sloviak to be merely a temporary addition to our party. “To pick up Emily.”
“Where’s this dinner we’re going to?”
“In Point Breeze.”
“Is that far from Bloomfield?”
“Not too far.”
“Great, then,” said Crabtree, and with that, he took Miss Sloviak’s elbow and started off toward Baggage Claim, working his skinny legs to keep up with her. “Come on, Tripp,” he called over his shoulder.
The luggage from their flight was a long time in rolling out and Miss Sloviak took advantage of the delay to go to the bathroom—the ladies’ room, naturally. Crabtree and I stood there, grinning at each other.
“Stoned again,” he said.
“You bastard,” I said. “How are you?”
“Unemployed,” he said, looking no less delighted with himself.
I started to smile, but then something, a ripple in the muscle of his jaw, told me that he wasn’t joking.
“You got fired?” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “But it looks like it’s coming. I’ll be all right. I spent most of the week calling around town. I had lunch with a couple of people.” He continued to waggle his eyebrows and grin, as though his predicament only amused him—there was a thick streak of self-contempt in Terry Crabtree—and to a certain extent, no doubt, it did. “They weren’t exactly lining up.”
“But, Jesus, Terry, why? What happened?”
“Restructuring,” he said.
Two months earlier my publisher, Bartizan, had been bought out by Blicero Verlag, a big German media conglomerate, and subsequent rumors of a ruthless housecleaning by the new owners had managed to penetrate as far into the outback as Pittsburgh.
“I guess I don’t fit the new corporate profile.”
“Which is?”
“Competence.”
“Where will you go?”
He shook his head, and shrugged.
“So, how do you like her?” he said. “Miss Sloviak. She was in the seat beside me.” An alarm clamored somewhere, to tell us that the carousel of suitcases was about to start up. I think that both of us jumped. “Do you know how many airplanes I’ve boarded with the hope in my heart that my ticket would get me a seat next to someone like her? Particularly while I’m on my way to Pittsburgh? Don’t you think it says a lot for Pittsburgh that it could have produced a Miss Sloviak?”
“She’s a transvestite.”
“Oh, my God,” he said, looking shocked.
“Isn’t she?”
“I’ll just bet that’s hers,” he said. He pointed to a large rectangular suitcase of spotted pony hide, zipped into what looked like the plastic covering for a sofa cushion, that was emerging through the rubber flaps on the carousel. “I guess she doesn’t want to have it soiled.”
“Terry, what’s going to happen to you?” I said. I felt as though the alarm bell were still reverberating within my chest. What’s going to happen to me? I thought. What’s going to happen to my book? “How many years have you been with Bartizan, now anyway? Ten?”
“It’s only ten if you don’t count the last five,” he said, turning toward me. “Which I guess you weren’t.” He looked at me, his expression mild, his eyes alight with that combination of malice and affection expressed so neatly by his own last name. I knew before he opened his mouth exactly what he was going to ask me.
“How’s the book?” he said.
I reached out to grab the pony-skin valise before it passed us by.
“It’s fine,” I said.
He was talking about my fourth novel, or what purported to be my fourth novel, Wonder Boys, which I had promised to Bartizan during the early stages of the previous presidential administration. My third novel, The Land Downstairs, had won a PEN award and, at twelve thousand copies, sold twice as well as both its predecessors combined, and in its aftermath Crabtree and his bosses at Bartizan had felt sanguine enough about my imminent attainment to the status of, at the least, cult favorite to advance me a ridiculous sum of money in exchange for nothing more than a fatuous smile from the thunderstruck author and a title invented out of air and brain-sparkle while pissing into the aluminum trough of a men’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed—three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town are born, grow up, and die—and I’d started to work on it at once, and
