Wonder Boys Read Online Free Page B

the work of poor old Albert Vetch, and in the midst of my mortification, of the dread that stole over my heart as the professor slid each page of the manuscript under the last, I felt the first glow of the flickering love I continue to bear for Terry Crabtree.
    I said nothing during the discussion that followed the reading of Van Zorn’s story; nobody liked it very much—we were all far too serious-minded to enjoy such a piece of black foolery, and too young to catch the undertone of sorrow in its style—but nobody recognized it either. I was the one who was going to get busted. I handed my story to the professor, and he began to read, in his manner that was flat and dry as ranchland and as filled with empty space. I’ve never been able to decide if it was his tedious way of reading, or the turgid unpunctuated labyrinthine sentences of Mocknapatawpha prose with which he was forced to contend, or the total over-the-top incomprehensibility of my demysticized, hot-hot-sexy finale, composed in ten minutes after forty-six hours without sleep, but, in the end, nobody noticed that it was essentially the same story as Crabtree’s. The professor finished, and looked at me with an expression at once sad and benedictory, as though he were envisioning the fine career I was to have as a wire-and-cable salesman. Those who had fallen asleep roused themselves, and a brief, dispirited discussion followed, during which the professor allowed that my writing showed “undeniable energy.” Ten minutes later I was walking down Bancroft Way, headed for home, embarrassed, disappointed, but somehow undiscouraged; the story hadn’t really been mine , after all. I felt oddly buzzed, almost happy, as I considered the undeniable energy of my writing, the torrent of world-altering stories that now poured into my mind demanding to be written, and the simple joyous fact that I had gotten away with my scam.
    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,