The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  I suppose at this point I am obliged to offer some detailed explanation of what I felt about my situation at that time, as for most readers the ease with which I alternated between such seemingly incompatible functions—efficient secretary, available mistress, best friend to wife—must seem peculiar. For me, though, it was not peculiar at all. It was natural. Call me immoral, but as I typed out Ernest’ correspondence outside his office each weekday, I felt no need to block from my memory the afternoons we spent making love. Nor when we made love did I feel stabs of guilt in recalling the mornings I played piano with Nancy. I moved easily among these roles. Of course I recognized the risks—among them the certainty that if Nancy ever found out about Ernest and me, I would be banished forever from Florizona Avenue, and have to quit my job—and yet I attributed those risks entirely to the narrowness of other people, and figured that so long as Ernest and I played our cards right, and no one found us out, there would be nothing to worry about. After all, he had as little wish for Nancy to discover our affair as I did. He was not one of those men who uses his mistresses to get back at his wife. He didn’t want to leave her for me, and I didn’t want to marry him. I adored them both. And so we proceeded fairly harmoniously, although I would be dishonest if I did not admit to sometimes experiencing a sense of emptiness in the aftermath of his departures, something akin to what one feels when one arrives home alone after a Thanksgiving dinner. For there was one thing that I would have liked (not that I ever could have had it), and that was to have a bed of my own at that house, if not Daphne’ then some other bed, specifically designated for me. Not a bed I would sleep in every night, and certainly not Nancy’ half of the huge bed with the slub linen spread: I still treasured my independence. Yet was it too much to hope that someday my role within the family might be legitimized?

  Marriage remains, for me, a mysterious institution. For instance, Ernest and Nancy often argued in my presence. If our practice session was going late, and he needed my help with a chapter from his book, he would feel no compunction about striding into the living room and shouting, “When the hell are you two going to be done?” To which Nancy—not missing a measure—would reply, “Hold your horses,” and continue playing. Ernest would storm out again, only to reappear a few minutes later to repeat his demand. She yelled, he left, he returned. With almost blithe disinterest they threatened and rebuffed each other, their voices rising, the level of tension escalating—and then we would finish, and it would be as if nothing had happened. Nancy would announce gaily that she was going to Safeway; Ernest and I would head up to his office. “Like water off a duck’ back,” as my mother used to say, which made me wonder if this was the secret of marriage: to develop—no, not a thick skin; rather, a down at once fragile and light, by means of which you could shake off, in an instant, any unpleasantness and go about your business. Yet it would protect you, too. Marriage protected. I wished I could have known that feeling of safety, a safety so deep it meant you could say anything, and never have to calculate all that you stood to lose.

  Just before Thanksgiving of 1968, Nancy received a letter from Anne Armstrong in which her friend announced that she had left her husband, Clifford, and was living in a rented apartment with a novelist called Jonah Boyd—recently hired as writer-in-residence at Bradford. Nancy took the news hard, and would not say why. Perhaps the casual ease with which Anne had abandoned her marriage made her wonder if staying with Ernest all these years had been a mistake; or perhaps the discovery that Anne was having an affair ignited some fear in her that Ernest might be doing the same thing. All I know for certain is that the Saturday Nancy got the letter, for the first and only time in all the years I knew her, she could not play. Her fingers shook so badly she could barely form them into a chord. At last, pleading a headache, she asked if I’d mind forgoing our weekly session this one time.

  The full story came out over the course of the next several Saturdays—details, background, and Nancy’ mess of a reaction, as Anne kept her abreast of developments through letters and phone calls, and Nancy passed the news on to me. She had no one else in whom she could confide. That Anne’ life, since the Wrights’ departure from Bradford, had taken such an eccentric if not downright self-destructive turn was something for which, it appeared, Nancy blamed herself. Perhaps if she had stayed, Nancy speculated, and thus not deprived Anne of the outlet that their piano playing provided, Anne never would have left Clifford in the first place. For without her, Anne had nothing in Bradford. No children. No friends. Only Clifford, a well-meaning if remote mathematician.

  I learned more about Anne. She was younger than Nancy by five years. Because she came from Brooklyn, she often expressed a longing for concerts and restaurants and galleries—all categories of experience in which Bradford, especially in the sixties, was sadly lacking. All Bradford had was a coffin factory. Anne never fit in easily with the other faculty wives, their malign chitchat, the bridge afternoons over which a cigarette haze hung, as well as a faint stink of gin. Clinking noises: ice against glass, glass against tabletop, engagement ring against wedding ring on fingers the nails of which were lacquered the color of plums. On these occasions, Anne sometimes drank. Too much. She never managed to pick up the finer points of bridge. She was tranquil only with Nancy, who somehow kept her recklessness in check. On her own, without Nancy to supervise, Anne became obstreperous. She had her ears pierced, and started introducing the word “orgasm” into bridge table conversation. (Usually the context was Clifford’ failure to give her any.) Not that there was anything wrong with Clifford to look at, Nancy said. He was big and hirsute and possessed of a sort of blond, bland handsomeness that Nancy, at least, appreciated. And yet the very qualities that had attracted Anne to him when they had married—his even temper, his tactfulness, the reluctance ever to raise his voice that had seemed so refreshing to her, after her loud Brooklyn childhood—began, soon enough, to bore and then to vex her. She had a need for stimulation that Clifford could not fathom. “Entertain me! Amuse me!” she would beg when he came home from school, and he would tell her about the Fibonacci numbers, a sequence in which each entry is the sum of the two that precede it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .) “The Fibonacci numbers,” he would say, “are often repeated in the floral patterns and leaf arrangements of plants.” Then he would show her a fir cone, ask her to examine its spirals. “As if I was one of his goddamn students,” she complained to Nancy, who tried to placate her, telling her that she should be more patient. Clifford meant well. He was trying. But Anne would have none of it. “I keep expecting him to say, ‘There’ll be a quiz on this afterward,’” she said. “I tell you, I cannot bear it anymore. I cannot bear it.”

  Anne and Nancy had this conversation in 1966. Later that year, the Wrights moved west. It was then that things really fell apart. Deprived of Nancy’ cautionary influence, Anne started going braless in public. She took to wearing hoop earrings, satin blouses in hot colors, and wraparound, tie-dyed skirts. Also sandals. She was a protohippie faculty wife at a time when not even the most rebellious female undergraduate would have dared anything more bohemian than tights. Nor did Anne cut a bad figure, according to Nancy, for she had a sort of gypsy prettiness that these outfits accentuated. Her hair fell in waves over her breasts, which were high and ample. To make it more red, she washed it with henna. To make her eyes darker and rounder, she smeared the lids with kohl. She was a graceful dancer, when she got the chance, with agile feet. (Also hands—hence her talent for the piano.) Yet she rarely got the chance. Clifford, “with his big clodhoppers,” got in the way. He was like a bear, and when he danced—which was rarely—it was with the grim, embarrassed dedication of a dancing bear.

  In September 1968, Anne went to a party in Bradford, a regular event hosted by the provost to welcome the year’ crop of new faculty. Clifford, who had a cold, stayed home. Here she was introduced to Jonah Boyd. At this point, Boyd was in his late forties; he had just published his second novel, and it had gone down, in his own words (w
hich Anne quoted), “like a lead balloon.” But then a friend had gotten him a gig teaching creative writing to undergraduates at Bradford—"as if such a thing could be taught,” Anne quoted him as saying. “Creative writing. What would Byron have made of such a term? What would Pope have made of it? Mockery. All ‘creative writing’ means is a chance for the brats to indulge themselves.”

  Anne was fascinated. She had never met a writer before, and told him so. He got her a drink. He himself did not drink, he explained, because he was a drunk. “Huh?” Anne said. This was back in the days when social drinking, far from being frowned upon, was the principal leisure activity of the academic classes, and most people who worked at universities drank like fish. Regenerate alcoholics had not yet become the staple of television talk shows that they are today, and former inebriates who had gone off the sauce were usually as reticent in their newfound sobriety as in the past they had been secretive in their intoxications. Yet Boyd not only admitted that until recently he had been, in his own words, a “boozer,” he seemed to take an almost gustatory satisfaction in describing the depths of wretchedness to which “the bottle” had dragged him. For it was his intention, he said, to write a great novel, and contrary to all the nonsense spouted about Hemingway, you could not write a great novel if you were a drunk. Great writing required an evenness of disposition that the fuzzing haze of alcohol obliterated. Anne listened raptly, and drank. Curiously, he seemed to have no problem with her drinking. He kept fetching her fresh gin and tonics. He was a handsome man, if oddly foppish, with his bow tie and manicured mustache. In certain ways he reminded her of Clifford—who better embodied “evenness of disposition” than Clifford?—and yet in other ways he was so much less restrained, so much easier to talk to, that she found herself wondering what had induced her to marry Clifford in the first place.

  They retreated to a sofa. People were watching them—colleagues, wives of colleagues, women whose husbands might tell Clifford what they had seen. She didn’t care. Boyd’ openness—his obliviousness to convention—had brought her past caring. Such openness, she knew, might have nothing to do with her. It might be a side effect of his having been a drunk, or of his being a novelist. Yet how much more pleasant if it turned out that she herself had inspired this response from him, this intuitive trust that allowed him to speak to her of things about which, with others, he would have stayed silent! If that were the case, then Anne owed it to him to be equally forthcoming.

  She touched his collar. Lightly, just for a fraction of a second. Still, the gesture was noticed. She could feel a prickle of unease leap about the room. They were being watched, which both amused and emboldened her. Was he married? she asked. Sort of, he answered. Sort of? Well, he was in the middle of a divorce. This too, in Anne’ sphere, was a novelty, and she asked for details. He and his wife, Boyd said, had been married straight out of high school. They had three children. For nineteen years they had lived together in a ranch house outside of Dallas, where his wife worked for the company that published the yellow pages, and Boyd cobbled together a living out of odd teaching jobs, while devoting the principal part of his energies to drinking and writing, in that order. The house was never clean, nor were the kids. “Cat scratches on the sofa, holes in the children’ socks. It wasn’t that we were poor. Oh, we were poor—just not to that degree. We could have afforded to buy our son a new pair of socks. The problem was, we couldn’t get our act together. We were drunk all the time.”

  “How awful.”

  “It gets worse,” he said. “I beat her.”

  Anne’ eyes widened.

  “I mean, badly. I put her in the hospital twice. Broke her collarbone. The second time I felt justified, because I’d caught her with someone else.”

  Now this was exciting. Had they been having this conversation thirty years later, Anne might have walked away, frightened or disgusted. According to the standards of Bradford in 1968, though, physical violence was forgivable in men, a natural response to having their virility stifled or thwarted, to the provocations of a shrewish wife. She pushed me over the edge, the hitch. Boyd had not said these words, yet if he had, Anne’ reaction—arousal, combined with surprise that Boyd, now so pinkly sincere, could have ever been capable of taking such decisive action—would only have been enhanced.

  It can sometimes take very little to propel one into a fatal decision, especially when there is nothing—not children, not patience, not a sense of duty—to hold one back. Anne left Clifford the next day, and moved in with Boyd. Until their divorces came through, they shared a cheap one-bedroom apartment, in a complex with cinder-block walls near a highway overpass. Her decampment titillated the faculty wives, and worried Nancy, who seemed uncertain whether her reaction ought to be one of maternal disapproval or sisterly support. In the end, she split the difference—the wrong thing to do, as it turned out—and wrote a letter in which she both warned Anne that she ought to “think twice” and wished her well. Offended (yet she refused to explain why), Anne stopped calling. The flow of letters dwindled to a trickle. This was the thing that hurt Nancy the most. She was not invited to the wedding, which took place in January—an omission not to be taken personally, Anne assured her in a rare, rather cool letter, as in fact no one had been invited to the wedding: not Jonah’ children, nor Anne’ parents, nor any of his colleagues; only another novelist and her husband, new friends, who would act as witnesses. By way of a present, Nancy sent an expensive crystal bowl that in its very lavishness was meant to carry a message of injury and rebuke. By way of reply, she received a cursory thank-you note on lilac-scented paper. And then, for almost a year, Bradford went silent.

  Four

  LATE ONE CLOUDY afternoon in the middle of July, the members of the Wright family, along with a small contingent of friends and neighbors, gathered in the driveway of 302 Florizona Avenue to bid Mark Wright goodbye. Earlier that week, watching the draft lottery on the little television in the kitchen with his mother, Mark had learned that his draft number was four. In the intervening days, all sorts of desperate measures had been proposed and dismissed. Orville Boxer suggested that Ernest ask one of his psychiatrist friends to write a letter asserting that Mark was a homosexual, but Ernest wouldn’t hear of it. Then Ken Longabaugh advised that Mark bite the bullet and enlist, since with his education he’d most likely be given an intelligence post anyway, as Ernest had been during World War II; yet this proposition Mark himself wouldn’t hear of, not because he objected to war per se (otherwise he would have declared himself a conscientious objector) but because in recent weeks he had undergone a crash course in radical politics, and now he understood that the war in Vietnam was merely part of a corrupt imperialistic campaign spearheaded by Henry Kissinger to suppress the will of the Vietnamese people; he would fight gladly, he said, if he could fight on the side of the North Vietnamese. At this Ernest threw up his hands, and Nancy wept, but there was to be no more arguing. And so that July afternoon, along with two friends from Wellspring, both of them hippies with stringy hair and none-too-clean faces, Mark loaded into a battered Datsun with no reverse gear, his eventual destination the Canadian border, and a future the repercussions of which we could only guess at.

  That morning Nancy loaned me her camera and asked me to take some pictures of the assembled, one of which I still have. In it the Wrights and their friends are posed clumsily in the driveway, in front of that famous Datsun that would later play as crucial a role in the family lore as the black Ford Falcon with red interior. In the front, Mark kneels between his scruffy friends. His expression is grave, and there is just a whisper of a beard on his chin. Behind him stands Daphne, holding a tin containing some chocolate chip cookies she had baked that morning as a farewell present, and next to Daphne stands Mark’ girlfriend, Sheila, her hair tied in a single braid that drapes over her shoulder and hangs below her belt, and next to Sheila, the bizarre Boxers, both victims of the McCarthy blacklist, and hence eager to show their support of Mark in this gesture of defiance. Nanc
y is slightly to Bertha Boxer’ right, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, while to her right, Hettie Longabaugh, who always managed to be around at dramatic moments, perches on one foot and casts a solicitous and possibly lewd glance at Ernest, who is hunched at a little distance from the others. From his expression you can see that this theatrical and overly public departure his wife has orchestrated embarrasses him deeply, that given his druthers, he would prefer for Mark to leave furtively, under cover of darkness. But there is nothing to be done about that.

  The only person missing from the picture is Ben, and that is because, just at the moment that I was about to snap it, he separated himself from his parents and ran off toward the garage, against which he put his face. Today I can still feel his presence to the right of the yellowing frame, as remote from the rest of the family as Pluto from the other planets, and with an orbit just as eccentric.

  Oh, what a sad and peculiar ceremony that was! None of us had any clue as to how we should behave. We were like wedding guests at that moment just after the reception when the bride and groom climb into a car dragging tin cans and drive off into some glorious future, leaving us to clean up the rice we have just thrown—only that day there was no rice, there were no tin cans, and the future into which these boys were driving, far from glorious, was possibly tragic. Eyes stern, Mark bade his farewells to the assembled, hugged his mother, kissed his girlfriend, shook his father’ hand. His brother’ hand he tried to shake too, but Ben refused to look at him, so Mark simply patted him on the shoulder, provoking a visible shudder. And then he climbed into the passenger seat of the Datsun, and the dirtier of his two friends, who was driving, started up the engine, and because the car had no reverse gear, he had to circle over the lawn, damaging the border grass, which made Ernest wince. “Goodbye!” Daphne called as the Datsun veered out of the driveway, and then at that instant she realized that she had forgotten to give Mark the cookies. “Wait, wait!” she cried, running after the car, which had turned the curve, and was out of view. Daphne burst into tears, and Nancy said, “Now what good is crying going to do anyone?” and stomped into the house, leaving the rest of us to stare at the space where moments before Mark had stood, and who knew if he would ever again stand there? Dusk was falling. We all trooped inside after Nancy for coffee and the forgotten cookies—everyone except Ben, who had retreated to the barbecue pit, where he remained until well after dark with a flashlight, writing a poem.