The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  After about two hours we gave up. We had a rather late and unhappy lunch at the Pie ‘n Burger, during which Anne said almost nothing and ate with surprising animation, while Boyd ate almost nothing and spent practically the whole time talking with Ben about poetry. I paid the bill, confident that Nancy would want me to, and offer to reimburse me. Then we headed over to the Chinese restaurant, where as luck would have it, the cook was just opening the front door. Because he spoke almost no English, explaining to him what had happened proved to be a frustratingly protracted enterprise, in the course of which Boyd was forced to resort to the tired device of drawing out his misadventures as a kind of comic strip. Fortunately the hostess soon arrived, a snappy and efficient woman who remembered Boyd from the night before and assured him almost before he had asked that he had left nothing behind. Nothing was in the cloak room, or the kitchen. Nor would she and her staff have ever allowed any items so obviously left by customers to be thrown in the trash. It took all the calming influence that Boyd and I could muster to dissuade Anne from forcing the poor woman to unlock the Dumpster so that she could climb into it. Eventually, however, she must have been convinced that there was nothing further to be learned at the Chinese restaurant, for she thanked the hostess, and drifted out the door. Boyd thanked the hostess as well, and tried to give her a tip, which she refused. He left his phone number and asked that she call him if anything should turn up. Then we all turned around and followed Anne to the parking lot.

  We drove in silence back to the Wrights’ house. “Any luck?” Nancy asked eagerly as she opened the kitchen door for us, then—seeing the answer in our faces—tightened her smile into a line and went to make coffee. The Boyds stayed another half hour before heading off to Big Sur in their rented red Chevrolet. Anne was no longer frantic. Waving goodbye, we promised to call if we heard anything from the police, or if anything showed up at the house. But I think at this point we all felt fairly certain that the notebooks were gone for good.

  It was nearly dinnertime. Rather gloomily, Nancy set out bread, mustard, mayonnaise, and lettuce. Ernest sliced leftover turkey. We made sandwiches for ourselves—Ben, to my surprise, did not toast his bread—and then Ernest, Ben, Daphne, and I sat down at the tulip table and watched the evening news, which seemed oddly comforting under the circumstances. Only Nancy could not rest. While we ate, she ricocheted around the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers and peering inside them, until Ernest shouted, “Will you stop that? You’re not going to find his goddamn novel in the cutlery drawer.”

  “I’m not looking for his novel,” Nancy replied. “I’m looking for the blue bowl I use for potato salad.”

  “But we’re not having any potato salad.”

  She turned to the television. More news of the war. “I wonder where the Boyds are now,” she said, as if to herself. “Do you think anyone will ever find the notebooks?”

  “No.”

  “Ernest, don’t be such a pessimist! Anne seemed so sad. To be perfectly honest, I’m worried about her.”

  “If you ask me, she’ been hysterical from the get-go. Leaving Clifford Armstrong like that—not the behavior of a well-adjusted adult woman.”

  “But Ben and Jonah Boyd certainly hit it off. Didn’t you, Ben?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did he read you more of his novel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was it as good as what he read aloud on Thanksgiving?”

  “I guess.”

  “Oh, it seems so awful, to lose something like that. Like losing a child, almost . . . I don’t know what I’d do if it were me. Maybe he can reconstruct it, from memory.”

  “A four-hundred-page novel? I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t be fooled,” Ernest said. “What people get, most of the time, is what they want.”

  The phone rang. Nancy hurried to answer it. “Oh, Mark,” she said, her voice rising with a mixture of pleasure and fear she seemed barely able to contain. “Honey, are you all right? Is something the matter?”

  Suddenly Ben was on his feet. “Let me talk to him,” he begged, grabbing his mother’ arm.

  “Just a second, Ben! Your brother wants to talk to you. Hold on! Honey, what’ wrong? How was the Thanks giving?”

  Daphne and I cleared the table. As he was wont to do when he thought no one was looking, Ernest winked at me. The turkey carcass, from which several meals had already been scraped, lay bony and denuded on its platter, surrounded by trembling flakes of gelatinized juice. Perhaps Nancy would boil it for broth, before throwing it into the trash she had earlier searched so patiently and so fruitlessly. In any case, she would get rid of it. No one wanted to look at the thing anymore. And then she would return to her piano and her crowned heads, and I would pick up my car. Daphne and Glenn would make love in his apartment. Ben would write another poem.

  You see, for most of us, I could envision a future. Even for Ben I could envision a future. And yet for the life of me I could not envision what was going on inside that red Chevrolet.

  I put on my coat. “I’m taking Denny home,” Ernest suddenly announced to his wife, who either didn’t hear him or elected not to answer him, so caught up was she in her conversation with Mark, and in pushing Ben off her arm.

  That is as much as I knew of what happened that Thanksgiving, and as much as I would know—for almost thirty years.

  Nine

  THE NEXT SATURDAY morning I went, as usual, to play with Nancy. She didn’t mention Anne’ name once. During the week the ersatz guest room had been dismantled, Daphne’ frog figurines and stuffed animals and peace sign poster returned to their rightful places.

  Nancy didn’t speak of Anne the Saturday after that, either, which was odd only in that during the months leading up to Thanksgiving she had spoken of little else. She was now preoccupied with Christmas, a holiday from which, at the Wright house, we strays were excluded as vociferously as at Thanksgiving we were welcomed. As Ben later explained to me, Christmas at 302 Florizona Avenue involved a sequence of private rituals in which each member of the family was required to play a specific role (Ben was the “elf"), all leading up to the climactic unwrapping of the presents, after which the rest of the day was pure letdown. Of course, that Christmas was to be like no other due to Mark’ absence, and though Nancy tried to put a brave face on things, I could tell that she was having a hard time. I myself spent Christmas alone. I went to the movies. And then it was New Year’ Eve (I spent most of that holiday in the backseat of a chemistry professor’ car), and the seventies. On Saturdays Nancy and I played, on Sundays Ernest visited me at my apartment. I stopped thinking about the Boyds, who, to the extent that they still existed for me, did so behind a sort of blackout curtain, and not merely because Nancy and Ernest, so far as I could tell, no longer talked to them; also because what had happened—a loss, despite what Nancy had said, not nearly so terrible as that of a child, but terrible enough—placed them outside any realm of experience that I could touch. Of course, I knew they went on in their exile; they had to go on. What I didn’t know was what that going on felt like.

  Sometimes a letter or a birthday card arrived from Anne. Then Nancy would shake her head and say, “Remember that awful Thanksgiving? Afterward, for weeks, I kept hoping I’d find the damn notebooks, even when it became eminently clear that I never would.” From contacts in Bradford, Nancy learned that in the wake of losing his novel, Boyd had stopped writing. “They say he’ put off his tenure vote,” she told me. “No one ever sees him—or Anne.” One afternoon in 1972 he was killed. In the midst of a blinding rainstorm, he crashed his car into the wall of the abandoned coffin factory. He had been on his way to the liquor store. “And is it any wonder?” Nancy asked. “I mean, imagine it. You work and work on something, you hold it close to your heart, and then one day—poof—it’ gone. And to make matters worse, you can’t blame anyone but yourself. No wonder he started drinking again. Oh, I just wish it hadn’t happened in my house.”

  “Dr. Wrigh
t thinks Boyd lost them on purpose,” I reminded her—rather coldly, yet there is consolation to be gained from such knowledge. For those of us on the outside, disaster courted is less threatening than disaster stumbled upon, since pathologies only imply holes in the psyche, whereas accidents . . . well, they imply holes in the universe, and who’ to say you won’t be the next one to fall through?

  After Boyd’ death, for a brief time, Nancy was once again in regular contact with Anne. They spoke several times by telephone; there was even, for a while, talk of Anne flying out for a visit, though this trip never got beyond the planning stages, mostly because Anne refused to be pinned down to a specific date. Eventually Nancy gave up on trying to persuade her, after which the phone conversations became less and less frequent, and then stopped altogether.

  And that, more or less, is everything I knew about Anne and Jonah Boyd, until the day several decades later when, rather out of the blue, Ben Wright called me up to tell me that he was in town, and that he wanted to invite me to dinner.

  This was not something I expected. Although Ben and I had remained on civil terms through the years, we had never become what you would call “friends.” Indeed, since Nancy’ death, I’d seen him exactly once, when he’d given a reading at a Wellspring bookstore: The line for autographs had been so long, I hadn’t bothered to wait. Still, I’d followed the trajectory of his career with interest and some vicarious pride. It was a strange story, as likely to inspire cynicism as hope, depending on your point of view and time of life. At some point after Jonah Boyd’ visit, Ben had stopped writing poems and started writing stories, which he proceeded to send off to The New Yorker with an alacrity to match that of his poetry days. Like the poems, the stories came back unfailingly with rejection forms attached, provoking despondency in Ben and a sort of futile fist-shaking at the universe in Nancy. Still, he kept sending new ones. He was by now a junior in high school, and though he remained an indifferent student, nonetheless I think he took it for granted that he would get into Wellspring, as his more academically minded brother and sister had before him. And in this delusory belief, Nancy, out of the same misplaced impulse that had led her to give him false hope about his writing, backed him up. I shall never forget the black April morning when the rejection letter came—Nancy trying to console him, saying, “It doesn’t matter. Who needs a big-name college? You’re too good for them.” To which Ben replied, “But you were the one who told me I’d get in! You said it was a sure thing! You promised me!” Round and round they went, her efforts to persuade him that the rejection was not a tragedy only fortifying his conviction that it was. A tragedy, moreover, for which she bore ultimate responsibility: Because she had encouraged him, she was easier to blame than that pitiless abstraction, the university.

  Ben went off to college: not to Harvard or Yale (they also turned him down) but to Bradford, where Ernest still had connections in the admissions office. He majored in European history. As in high school, he was an indifferent student. He continued to write, publishing a few stories in undergraduate magazines, and even winning the recently endowed Jonah Boyd Prize for Short Fiction, which brought with it a hundred-dollar gift certificate at the campus bookstore. (Nancy kept note of these achievements in a discreet brown leather scrapbook, which took pride of place on the piano.) Then after graduation he moved to New York City, hoping, like a character in a Willa Cather story, to make a name for himself there before returning triumphant to the home town that had failed to appreciate him. (That Wellspring, with its symphony orchestra and coffee bars, bore not the slightest resemblance to Cather’ windswept Nebraska hamlets seems not to have deterred him in the least in this ambition: further proof of Ernest’ theory that his son lived half in a dream world.) I think he was imagining ticker-tape parades, and speeches during which the university president would hit himself on the head for having undervalued Ben, all the while marveling at the grace, the utter lack of vainglory, that marked his heroic return. The dolts who had bullied him in high school would stare up dumbfounded, his former teachers would claim to have encouraged him when they had not . . . And through it all he would just smile and wave, the very embodiment of generosity, a man so successful he could afford to forgive. Let’ not mince words. Ben, at this stage, had delusions of grandeur. He was avid to explore New York—but his New York, which was the New York of New Yorker covers, foggy and wistful and consisting exclusively of capacious apartments in which well-dressed women drank whole-leaf tea and talked about Tolstoy. The bohemian East Village to which his coevals were flocking held no allure for him. He was too much of a snob for railroad flats. Rather than move in with downtown friends, he sublet a noisy efficiency apartment above a vegetable market on Second Avenue—overpriced, but it was East Seventy-fourth Street. To survive, he took a job shelving at the Strand; still, his mother had to send him money each month, sometimes surreptitiously, as Ernest did not approve of their supporting an adult son in this way. The several girlfriends he went through shared his father’ uneasiness—especially once Ben finished his novel, and was unable to publish it, and set to work on a second novel, and couldn’t publish that one, either. As he told me later, he was too arrogant to condescend to getting a full-time job. “Really, I was a little shit,” he said, smiling at his own callowness as one can only from the vantage point of great success achieved later in life. And when, eventually, he did move back to Wellspring, it was neither in triumph nor by choice. For Ernest had one afternoon been murdered in his office, and Nancy had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and keeping the house on Florizona Avenue for her children was now the driving ambition of her remaining days. She more or less insisted that Ben come home to help her in her campaign, and he came not unwillingly, for as he explained to me, it was a relief to have an excuse to get out of New York, a city which, because it had once been the locus of his hope, was with each day that passed becoming more and more the nexus of his despair. A third novel had now gone untaken. He could no longer abide having to watch, he said, the spectacle of writers younger than himself achieving the very goal—publication—that eluded him. And he was no longer so young himself. He was nearly thirty. The girl he claimed to love was growing exasperated with his indolence, eager to marry him yet wary of taking on the financial burden of an unemployed (and possibly unemployable) husband. Perhaps if he could offer her a house, he reasoned, he might be able to convince her not to look for someone else.

  It was at this point that he reentered my orbit. Except for Daphne and Glenn’ wedding and the occasional Thanksgiving (he did not always come home, often preferring to be a “stray” at the apartment of some New York friend), it had really been quite a few years since I’d spent a sustained chunk of time in his company. And now here he stood on Nancy’ doorstep, a young man. His long hair fell to form a sort of awning over his forehead. His nose reminded me of his father’. All told, he looked alarmingly like his father.

  Since Ernest’ murder, I had been promoted; I was now office manager for the entire psych department, a job that kept me on my toes all week and some weekends. I no longer lived in Eaton Manor, but rented a house of my own, far from the noise of the freeway, and had several lovers, one of whom wanted to leave his wife for me. My life was busy. Even so, I tried to spend as much time as I could with Nancy. It was my fervent hope that the Wrights would succeed in keeping their house, which I, too, simply could not imagine in other hands. Nancy was by now very sick, as much from the radiation and chemotherapy courses she was undergoing as from the tumor itself, though to their credit, Ben and Daphne did everything they could to keep her out of the hospital. She dreaded the hospital, and feared especially the prospect of dying there.

  Although he visited only twice in that period, Mark sent flowers almost daily. He was recently married to a Canadian girl, a lawyer with much disposable income, his house in the Toronto suburbs (of which Nancy showed me pictures) so lavishly bourgeois that I could only think what an odd destination it was for him, given that he had beg
un his journey in a Datsun with no reverse gear. During his visits, Mark stayed at the Ritz-Carlton; in the afternoons he would stop by to interrogate the nurse who made periodic visits, or scrutinize insurance statements in search of small errors on the basis of which he could chastise Ben or Daphne. This atmosphere in which a dying and increasingly demented woman lay propped up in her bed, smelling of roses and disinfectant, her bald head wrapped in a turban that made her look like some sort of antique film actress, must have seemed more than a little bizarre to Daphne’ children, though they were still young at the time, and reeling from the suddenness with which their mother had left their father. I spent a lot of hours at Nancy’ bedside, for she always recognized faces, even if, toward the end, she hardly seemed to know where she was. Where the IV needle entered her hand, she said that a tulip bulb was sprouting. She thought she was a flower bed. One afternoon she confided that a mule got into her bed with her every night. “But he’ a very polite mule,” she added. “He never moves or makes noise.”

  On another occasion she spoke of Jonah Boyd. “Did he ever find that novel?” she asked.

  “No, he didn’t,” I said.

  “Tell him to look in the pantry. You know there was some foie gras Ernest brought back from Paris—a tin of foie gras—and for months, for the life of me, I couldn’t find it. But then it turned up way at the back of the pantry, behind the soup cans.”

  “But Nancy,” I said, “Jonah Boyd is dead. He died years ago, in a car crash.”