The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  On subsequent Thanksgivings, the moment I arrived, Nancy would draft me into chopping something. This time, however, having accepted the bottle of wine I had brought, she instructed Daphne to “keep an eye on the bird,” and took me off on a tour of the house. In terms of detail, I absorbed very little that first visit, though I did notice the toy airplanes, and the piano, and that the furniture in the living room was strikingly “modern.” Nancy introduced me again to Ben, and for the first time to Mark, who was now a sophomore at Wellspring, with a bony, brooding face and a unibrow. They were sitting on the study sofa, thumbing through a book of Krazy Kat cartoons. By way of greeting, Mark looked up and gave me one of those frowns that can be so much more compelling and attractive than a smile. His very straight brown hair was parted in the middle and cut severely just below the ears, while Ben had shaggy, rather dry hair, paler than his brother’, and inclined to wave. Even so, he too had parted it in the middle. Like Mark, he had his left leg crossed manfully over his right, ankle on knee. They wore more or less identical outfits—pale Oxford shirts and flared jeans—but because Ben’ legs were so long in relation to his torso, his didn’t seem to hang on him properly. The jeans rode up, revealing a band of pale flesh just above the sock line.

  We finished up in the bedroom wing. “I won’t subject you to Daphne’ chaos,” Nancy said, bypassing one closed door and opening another to reveal the master bedroom, which was utterly pristine, the enormous bed made up for the occasion with the “dress” bedspread, tailored from heavy slub linen. From here we walked out onto the back porch, which ran the whole length of the house and gave onto a vista of old oaks, red-leafed Japanese maples, and a few exotic fruit trees, including a guava. A very green lawn swept down to the pool, which had been built parallel to the barbecue pit; beyond that I could make out just the edge of the former koi pond, as well as some exuberant rose bushes. For the first but by no means the last time she told me the story of how she and Ernest had come to acquire the house.

  There was a moment of spectacular quiet in which all you could hear was the remote trilling of a lark. “It’ very beautiful,” I said—ineptly, I thought—and Nancy, her breast rising with emotion, gave me a smile to suggest regal forbearance: noblesse oblige.

  “I shall never live anywhere else,” she said. “When they take me out of here, it’ll be feet first in a pine box.” Then she lit a cigarette. “Well, we’d better be getting back to the kitchen, shouldn’t we?” And she walked me across the porch to the back door.

  The kitchen was empty. “Oh, where is Daphne?” Nancy inquired of no one, and ran to open the oven. In those years supermarket turkeys almost always came with a little built-in thermometer that popped up when the meat reached a certain temperature; fortunately, we now discovered, the device remained unejaculated, which meant that even though Daphne had fallen down on the job, the meal’ ruination was not imminent.

  In fact, Daphne was in her room. Through the locked door, Nancy shouted, “Daph! What are you doing? I asked you to keep an eye on the turkey! Do I have to do everything myself around here? And while you’re in there, do something with your hair. It looks like a rat’ nest.”

  We returned to the living room, where she sat me down at the piano. “Let’ start with this,” she said, arranging some music on the desk. “It’ a baby transcription of Beethoven’ Eighth Symphony.”

  The truth was, it had been several years since I’d sat in front of a piano. All through elementary school and high school, in our little town in Florida, my sister and I had taken lessons from Miss Busby, who lived with her own sister in the country and was paralyzed from the waist down. Her house was built from heart pine and had what was known as a “dog trot,” a long corridor through which a cooling breeze blew even on the hottest summer afternoons. But now it was almost a decade since I’d left Miss Busby, and my sister, and our little town. I’d followed a boyfriend to California, where he’d married someone else.

  “Be patient with me,” I said, cracking my fingers. “I may be rusty.”

  “Don’t do that,” Nancy said. “It’ll bring on arthritis.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t. I won’t.”

  “Now—one, two, three—” And we began.

  That day we played for almost an hour. I was dreadful, though not as dreadful as I’d feared I’d be. And Nancy, to her credit, was patient with me, offering gentle pointers when I made a mistake, or lost my way. “Trust me, it’ll sound better next week,” she said as we finished, then closed the music desk, after which we returned to the kitchen, where Daphne, Mark, and Ben were playing Scrabble at the tulip table. This was one Thanksgiving tradition; another, more obscure in origin, was to play Edith Piaf records on the Harmon-Kardon stereo.

  It all rather overwhelmed me. Until then, I had only experienced family life from a great remove—on television, or at the house of a great aunt in Tallahassee, to which my sister and I were sometimes invited out of pity in the years after our father ran away and our mother died. And now here I stood, an old maid in an inappropriately formal suit, while Edith Piaf sang “Je ne regrette rien” and teenagers laughed, and from the upper of the two wall ovens there wafted a smell of meat and onions and sage, and from the lower one a smell of nutmeg and pumpkin. Ernest came in, smoking a pipe. Most of the morning he’d been in his office over the garage. He was wearing a bow tie. With him was Glenn Turner, who had just finished his Ph.D. He too was smoking a pipe; he too was wearing a bow tie.

  “You look like twins,” I said—the first casual remark I’d made all day. It brought a spurt of laughter from Daphne.

  The rest of that day is a blur of yearning and dread: yearning to have had a different life, to have been Daphne, and grown up in that house; dread of the moment when politeness would compel me to make my farewells, and retreat to my dreary little apartment in Springwell. I volunteered to make the gravy, and to my surprise, my offer was accepted. Nancy complimented me on its smoothness. Despite being so skinny, Phil Perry, then already in his third year in the psych department, ate twice as much as anyone else, and was congratulated for it. The girl with the bangs in the plaid skirt told a long, boring story about her father losing his dog.

  As for Ernest—he got drunk, and while everyone else was gathering in the living room for coffee, he cornered me in the kitchen and tried to kiss me. This didn’t surprise me. In those years, men took what opportunities they could get.

  “Such a pretty little thing,” he said, nuzzling my ear.

  “Dr. Wright, please!” I said—more because it was what I thought I should say than because I objected, or even cared particularly.

  “When you typed that article for me last week, what did you think? You know the one I mean—”

  “I just type. I think about typing.”

  “Say the title.”

  “ ‘Female Masturbation and the Electra Complex.’”

  “Do you get excited when you read those words? ‘Female masturbation’? Say it again. Please.”

  Ben came in, and we separated. I don’t know if he saw us. He gave his father a murderous stare.

  Straightening my skirt, I returned to the living room. Ernest and Ben followed. Later, I drove back to my apartment in my new Dodge Dart. I had a lot to think about: not merely Ernest’ come-on, but Nancy’ weird avidity to win me as a friend. Why were they so interested in me? I was just a secretary. True, in other arenas of my life, I could conduct myself with confidence and grace, but back in those early days, interacting with members of the faculty made me shy. After all, these people had doctorates from grand universities—while I had only a high school diploma. Later, I would cease to be so easily impressed—I would learn that Ph.D.’ from Harvard could be blithering idiots, just as secretaries could be geniuses—but back then I was still naive. And so as I opened the door to my apartment, I found myself not only reviewing the events of the evening, but wondering whether behind the kindness the Wrights had shown me there might not lie some nefarious motive; might I perhaps
have been the subject of some psychological experiment, my every action and reaction recorded, analyzed, assessed? Hidden cameras, Dictaphones in the potted plants, Glenn and Phil taking notes: Lying in bed that night, I let paranoia get the better of me. Probably the Wrights simply liked me, I reminded myself. Or felt sorry for me. I would have to get to know them better before I could say for certain.

  Monday I was back at the office. I worried that Ernest might make some reference to our clinch in the kitchen, but he acted as if nothing had happened. “So I’ll be seeing you on Saturday mornings from now on?” he asked.

  “If you’re home,” I said.

  He was home. While Nancy and I played, he puttered around in the study, ostensibly fixing the stereo and alerting us every time one of us hit a wrong note, which was often. This time Nancy was less patient. As I would soon learn, the role into which she had conscripted me was one for which several professors’ wives had already auditioned and been turned down. Why I succeeded where they failed I still don’t know. Perhaps I simply buckled under more willingly to her domination; or perhaps she really did love me in a way she loved few others. Certainly in those early days of our friendship it seemed that her wish was to nurture and cultivate me, to bring me along in the world as if I were another daughter of that house. Nor can it be denied that each week she treated me more like Daphne. “Careful, Denny!” she’d shout, if I accidentally turned two pages at once; or if I had trouble with octaves—"It’ so simple, just look!” she’d say, and grab hold of my hands, smashing them into position against the keys. “I see now,” I’d say, and we’d try again, and again I’d fall apart.

  “You’re just not concentrating. I never had these problems with Anne. We played so perfectly together, the harmonies—they were almost magical.”

  “You must miss her.”

  “We were the same size, we could wear the same clothes.”

  “What did you talk about while you played?”

  “Husbands. Things.”

  There was no way I could have gotten into Nancy’ clothes. Nor could I talk with her about husbands, as I had none.

  As the weeks passed, more and more Anne became the principal topic of our conversations: Anne and, more specifically, my failure to live up to Anne in almost every regard. In Bradford, she and Nancy had played five days a week—Mozart, some Brahms waltzes, a stab at Schubert’ “Grand Duo.” Because I worked, I could only manage Saturday mornings—a source of some annoyance to Nancy, though clearly not enough to induce her to go off in search of a partner with more time on her hands. Soon I began to catch on that my function was not, in fact, to improve. My function was to exalt, by my very incompetence, the true friend, Anne, swindled away by distance and Ernest’ ambitions. The race was fixed. By losing, I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and received as payoff a sense of inclusion that I pocketed as greedily as any bought jockey does the profits of his corruption.

  Sometimes things got contentious between us. Nancy would ask me to help her load the dishwasher and then chastise me for not adequately rinsing the plates beforehand. “How many times do I have to tell you, Denny? If you don’t get every little bit of food off, what’ left will end up caked on. Look at what you missed.”

  I made a remark to the effect that if you ended up having to wash the dishes by hand, what was the point of owning a dishwasher in the first place? This did not go over well.

  “At this rate, I shudder to think what kind of household you’ll keep,” Nancy said, “that is, assuming you ever get married.”

  On another occasion—a propos of nothing—she said, “Anne had such a lovely figure! Slender waist, graceful neck. You should lose a few pounds, Denny. Then you might get a boyfriend.”

  It was the same as with Daphne and her hair—or so I told myself, as I tried to swallow back my hurt. For that was my method of justifying Nancy’ cruelty. If such abuse was simply part of how mothers treated daughters, then I should be grateful for it. This was what I had missed, and longed for. This was what it meant to be a daughter.

  Still, I cannot deny that in my own subtle way, I gave as good as I got. Ernest was the linchpin in this. One Saturday in February, when Nancy had had to run out to deliver Ben to a make-up fliigelhorn lesson, he cornered me a second time, near the percolator.

  “Such a plump little thing,” he muttered in my ear. “With all that filthy stuff you type for me, you must have dirty dreams. Won’t you tell me your dirty dreams?”

  Of course, I could have pushed him away. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to push him away. But I didn’t. Instead I turned, placed my lips against his ear, and whispered, “I dream about you.”

  Three

  ONE OF MY duties as Ernest’ secretary was to edit—in fact, to rewrite—his articles and grant applications under the guise of “typing” them. He would hand me a wad of illiterate notes, and I would transform it into a coherent piece of prose, which I would hand back to him. Then he would praise my “typing” skills. At first his ineptitude as a writer shocked me—I’d always taken it for granted that to get as far as he had in academia, you’d at least have to be able to craft a decent sentence—but then I asked myself why the gift for generating ideas should necessarily go hand in hand with the capacity to express them. If I had a greater facility with English than Ernest did, it was simply further proof that my own talents were of a purely clerical—and therefore limited—sort. Only later did I come to question this assumption, to look back at those books of Ernest’ that I’d edited—no, written—and recognize the degree to which my improvements and refinements had really changed his ideas, making them as much mine as his. At the time, though, it would never have occurred to me to ask for any kind of credit. I was a secretary. “Typing” was my job.

  One Saturday, after Nancy and I had finished playing, Ernest asked me to come up to his office above the garage to look over a manuscript with him. Nancy didn’t object; I suppose she thought me too fat and unattractive to take seriously as a rival. Off she went to the supermarket (a Saturday ritual for her). Ernest led me out of the kitchen and into the garage and up the narrow staircase to the converted attic where he saw his patients. This was a cramped little space under the eaves, with ceilings and walls that bled into each other, so that you could hardly say where one began and the other ended. There was an Eames Case Study daybed upholstered in nubbly red fabric—presumably it was upon this that Ernest’ patients lay while he probed their childhoods—and over it a picture of Freud, and over the desk, which faced the one window, a few model airplanes on strings. Ernest sat at the desk, and I sat on the daybed. Already we had a certain routine down for this sort of work: He would give me a manuscript, and I would read it aloud. (This one concerned Patient X, who refused ever to drink water; she even brushed her teeth with Coca-Cola.) Then I would read, and as I did, he would periodically interrupt me to amplify some thought, or grope toward a clarification—my cue to suggest, ever so delicately, a means of making his point more cleanly. Nor was it only a matter of writing; sometimes I would be emboldened to call attention to some half-baked supposition, or to propose a more persuasive interpretation. And yet between his natural ego and my natural diffidence, we were able to pretend that all I was doing was taking a complicated form of dictation. Whether privately he recognized the true extent of my contribution I’m still not sure.

  After we had finished, Ernest stood up from his chair and sat next to me on the daybed. I said not a word. At this point it had been almost a month since the grope in the kitchen; if anything, I wondered why he had waited so long to make another move. I tried to make it clear, from my expression, that I was ready and willing, but he seemed reluctant to touch me, and finally, out of impatience, I put my hand on the back of his head and pulled his mouth toward mine. Everything happened very quickly then; his lovemaking, on this occasion as it would be on others, seemed to be a kind of payback for the help I had just given him—payback in the sense of vengeance as well as reward, for mixed into
his passion were distinct tones of both gratitude and punishment. I didn’t mind. I’d never had much of an appetite for namby-pamby sex. Then we sat together, half undressed, and he talked a little: about how irritating he found Ben’ food phobias, and about Daphne’ lack of respect for her parents, and about what he called, using the parlance of the day, Nancy’ “frigidity.” This last accusation, I would later learn, is one to which husbands often resort when they feel the need to justify, after the fact, an extramarital dalliance. At the time, though, it was totally new to me. I took it at face value, and felt as sorry for Ernest, whose needs Nancy obviously refused to satisfy, as I did for Nancy, condemned by her own coldness to miss out forever on the wild pleasures of sex.

  I was always rather fond of Ernest’ office above the garage. I liked the way the nubbly red fabric felt against my back, just as I liked the portrait of Freud, gazing down on us like some benevolent saint, and the smell of typewriter ribbons and wood and paper. Indeed, we might have gone on for years like that, our affair confined to those Saturdays and that daybed, had not Nancy decided rather capriciously one Saturday to forego her weekly trip to the supermarket and make lunch instead. Perhaps she suspected something, or perhaps she was starting to feel left out, or perhaps (this seems most likely) her decision had nothing to do with us, and was made in response to some shift in her own cosmos of which we knew nothing. In any case, after that Ernest stopped asking me up to his office, and we took to meeting at my apartment, usually on Sundays. In this way Nancy contributed, albeit unknowingly, to the intensification of our affair.