The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  It goes without saying that at this stage Susan Boyd’ feelings toward her father were ambivalent, to say the least. On the one hand, his departure wrecked her chances of going to college, as now she had to take care of her brother and sister. On the other hand, she understood his reasons for leaving: “Because it was a dead end, that household,” she told me, “and there was no way, given the environment, that he could have ever finished another book. In retrospect, it’ amazing that he managed to get out the books that he did.” Although, during his Bradford years, Boyd wrote his daughter a score of letters, and called her at least once a week, whenever she hazarded the possibility of a visit, he found an excuse to put her off. Later, when she learned about the lost notebooks and his resulting relapse into alcoholism, she thought she understood at last what had lain behind this seemingly inexplicable standoffishness. And yet at the time his refusal to see her provoked in her only perplexity and hurt—"as if somehow he was ashamed of us, or embarrassed by us, me and Karen and Bradley. Of course, he wouldn’t tell me what was really going on. I guess he couldn’t bear to.”

  Susan met Anne the winter that Boyd died, when she flew to Bradford, with her siblings, for his funeral. Bradley—now a baker in Houston—was chiefly interested in smoking pot, while Karen put most of her energy into the small stakes beauty pageants that she habitually entered but never won because she was fat. Their mother had gone beyond the pale. At first Susan found Anne moody and abrasive—"just another drunk,” she said. “And at that point I was tired of drunks.” (Susan herself never drinks, not even beer.) As the visit wore on, though, a certain rapport bloomed between the widow and the eldest daughter, one that owed, perhaps, to the streak of stubborn independence that ran through both women. After Susan flew back to Dallas, she stayed in touch with Anne, who made a point of keeping her abreast of all developments concerning her father’ estates, both financial and literary. There was very little money, and very little likelihood of any money in the future, given that it was on the new book, the lost book, that Boyd’ publisher had been staking all its bets. Now, without the impetus that Gonesse was supposed to provide, the first two novels lapsed out of print. There were debts. Nonetheless the affection that had sprung up between Anne and Susan intensified. They spoke frequently over the phone; once Anne even came to Dallas for a visit, bringing along Bruce, who had to attend a conference there. When she arrived, Susan was surprised to discover that Anne had quit drinking and smoking, and lost quite a bit of weight. She now had the leathery, weather-beaten aspect—a sort of beauty—that you see in women who have spent too many hours in the sun. Her voice, though it remained raspy, was higher, more girlish. It was during this visit that Anne introduced Susan to Bruce, and told her of her impending remarriage. Neither Bradley nor Karen had any wish to meet her. She also said that she had just lately rewritten her will, naming Susan executor of Jonah Boyd’ estate upon her own death.

  So the bond was established. When the Ridges moved to Florida, Susan—tired of Dallas—decided to follow them. Her mother had recently died. She, too, felt ready for a change, and being an orphan, saw no reason why she shouldn’t, as it were, “adopt” the Ridges as her parents. They were no longer young. Although Bruce had children from an earlier marriage, none of them lived nearby; two were in California and the third, amazingly enough, in Katmandu. Also, through her former husband, Susan had made some lucrative investments in the stock market, and had a little money to spare. So she quit her job, packed up her kids, and bought a house in Tampa, where she found work at a law firm. She tried to visit the Ridges every weekend. Not only was she growing ever closer to Anne, but also to Bruce, whose departure from Kansas, she soon learned, had been hastened by something far less benign than a simple desire for better weather. For it seemed that one of the cloverleafs Bruce had designed had collapsed, due to a structural defect, killing seventeen people. Bruce could not reconcile himself to the idea that what was in essence a mistake in his own calculations had cost these people their lives. He gave up his work, gave up teaching. In Tarpon Springs, he grew increasingly absentminded, and spent as much time as he could sitting on the shores of lakes and sinkholes, painting burnished tropical sunsets and waterscapes in which alligators and manatees figured prominently. He painted flame trees. He painted snarky woodlands. Florida kitsch. So childlike had Bruce allowed himself to become that when Anne was diagnosed with lung cancer, she elected not to tell him, though she told Susan. The cancer, it seemed, was of a particularly pernicious variety; to combat its inevitable spread, her doctors were counseling surgery—removal of one lobe of Anne’ left lung—to be followed by intensive chemotherapy and radiation. But Anne would have none of it. Of late she had been studying alternative therapies: herbal remedies, acupuncture, and Chinese medicine. She started taking ginseng, Echinacea, and vitamin E in quantity. Then one night she had a dream in which a voice speaking from a turtle’ mouth gave her instructions as to how she could cure herself. Following the turtle’ directions, she temporarily left Bruce, and rented a small cottage on stilts on the Atlantic coast, near Saint Augustine. It was July. Every day Anne lay on the beach in her bikini, a wizened woman of sixty-five who would rise from her sun worship once an hour only to wade out into the tide carrying a little plastic telescoping glass, which she would dip into the sea. Then, while the other beachgoers gaped in amazement, she would gulp down eight ounces of seawater. For this was what the turtle had prescribed. Every day for three months Anne lay in the sun, and drank glassfuls of the Atlantic. And at the end of this period, when she returned to Tarpon Springs, what did the skeptical doctors discover? That the cancer had gone into remission. The bizarre cure, for reasons that remain inexplicable, had worked.

  After that Anne lived for five more years—far longer than the six months she had been given when her doctors made their initial prognosis. During that time she never once submitted to any conventional treatment. After she died, Bruce suffered several small strokes. His memory was sketchy: Though he could recognize, for example, the faces of his own children, as well as photographs of his wife, there were many days when he had no idea where he was. After a bizarre accident in which he nearly ran down a poodle, he lost his driver’ license. Susan continued to visit him every weekend. She brought her daughters. Marching into his house on a Saturday morning with her retinue and a bag of groceries, she tried to be a reminder that even for an old man who was responsible for seventeen deaths, life could still contain many pleasures. She would cook him a good meal and then drive him out to the lakes he so loved, and which he could no longer get to on his own. Then he would sit on the shore and work on his paintings. Only when it came to painting had Bruce retained any of his old sharpness; brush in hand, he could at least achieve the clarity that eluded him in the negotiations of ordinary life. A hideous clarity, but a clarity nonetheless. It was during one of these visits—they had just returned from the lake, her daughters outside in the pool—that I called, and Susan answered.

  We have spoken many times since then. On two occasions, she has visited me in Wellspring. I have visited her once in Tampa. Next month we plan to take a vacation together in Hawaii. Susan is a tall, leggy woman inclined to wear bold colors and big hats, the sort of woman often asked to give inspirational speeches to underprivileged girls. (At least, she was asked to give such speeches before the stock market crashed and her fortune shrunk to nearly nothing, obliterating her independence.) In her upright stance, if not in her demeanor, she is the spitting image of her father.

  It was, I suppose, as much for her sake as for the sake of truth, or history, or whatever abstraction you wish to invoke—as much to ensure his daughter’ future as to redeem Jonah Boyd’ past—that I finally decided to confront Ben. By then two months had passed since I’d read The Sky. Ben had moved into his parents’ house, and started teaching. Believe me or not as you choose: My intention, when I went to see him that day, was never to make ultimatums. My intention was merely to learn the truth. For I was not so foolish
as to assume that what I assumed was necessarily what had happened. I only had the roughest sense of things. Nor had I said a word to Susan about my suspicions. I wanted to be sure before I did.

  It was a Saturday morning in October. I didn’t call first. I just showed up. The front door, not the back. When Ben answered, he seemed only mildly surprised to see me. He was wearing jeans and a blue Oxford shirt much like my own, only in his case untucked. He was drinking orange juice. “Denny,” he said with a smile. And then he invited me in.

  To start with, he gave me a tour of the house, as his mother had once done. The carpeting was gone; we walked on yards of oak herringbone parquet, buffed to a high gloss and still faintly redolent of polyurethane. Absent the gold-hued shag of the old days, the rooms seemed at once more elegant and less cushioned than I remembered them being. Otherwise Ben had done a remarkable job of re-creating the decor of his childhood. The black leather sofa in the living room might have been the same one from which Jonah Boyd had held forth thirty years before; likewise the Danish modern chairs were the same, except that neither had cat pee on it. “Most of this stuff I found at auctions,” Ben said, “and it cost a pretty penny. Much more than my parents paid for it when it was new. What fools Daph and I were to have sold it so cheap! Oh, and do you recognize the piano?”

  I observed the fluted legs. Another Knabe. “That’ amazing,” I said. “It’ almost identical.”

  “It’ the same one. I tracked down the people who bought it at the estate sale, and they sold it back to me. And here"—he led me into the kitchen—"although this isn’t the same tulip table, it’ virtually the same. Nostalgia is expensive; this one cost nearly a thousand dollars. I don’t know if you remember that Daphne kept the original. I tried to talk her into sending it back, but she won’t.”

  I sat down. Aside from a new refrigerator and range, the kitchen looked pretty much as it always had, the only difference being that the cabinets, once robin’ egg blue, were now yellow. “The Shoemakers were responsible for that,” Ben said, “but I liked it, so I decided to keep it. Can I make you some coffee? Or would you prefer orange juice? It’ fresh squeezed. I won’t show you the study or the bedrooms because I haven’t done anything there. I have to wait until I’ve got some more cash. Have to finish my book, and for the first time in my life, I’ve got writer’ block. Can’t write a word. Just looking at the screen gives me a headache. So predictable. As for the garden—well, if you look out the window, you’ll see that where the koi pond used to be, there’ this horrible sort of flagstone patio.” He shook his head. “I could throttle Clark for that. . .”

  He handed me a mug of coffee, then sat down across from me. As he did, I laid my copy of The Sky on the polar white surface of the table.

  “I read this,” I said, indicating the book.

  His face remained placid. He looked as if he had been expecting this.

  “I’m surprised you managed to find it,” he said after a moment. “Copies are, to say the least, rather hard to come by.”

  “So I discovered.”

  “You were either lucky or tenacious.”

  “Both, probably. Did you take the copies from the libraries?”

  “Libraries?”

  “The university library and the town library. Both are missing.”

  “Some of my fans can be a little . . . well, overenthusiastic. Where did you get yours?”

  “From the Strand.”

  “Oh, my old place of employment! Isn’t that ironic? It fits, actually. It’ all starting to fit.”

  “How so?”

  “Just. . . the pattern.” He leaned across the table. “So now you’ve got the book, and you’ve read it, even though I asked you not to.”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay . . . So what do you want? Have you come to blackmail me?”

  It had never occurred to me that Ben might think I meant to blackmail him. Now I wondered if I did.

  “But blackmail implies that I’m here to ask you to give me something,” I said, “or do something, in exchange for my keeping quiet. And I’m not.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because I read the novel, and of course, from the first line, I remembered Jonah Boyd.”

  “What business is this of yours?”

  “It’ my business if I’m the only person to recognize the truth.”

  “And what truth would that be, pray tell?”

  “That you stole Boyd’ novel.”

  “Do you have any evidence to prove that?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should I even dignify your charge with a reply?”

  “But if what I’m saying is so ludicrous, then why did you instantly jump to the conclusion that I’d come to blackmail you?”

  Ben turned away. It was a better question than I’d realized, for it silenced him. Suddenly I saw that he had no program, that he was winging it, changing his tactics entirely in response to what he was able to deduce, from what I said, of what I knew. Guesses at how much I had guessed. Which meant that the calm demeanor with which he had greeted my setting the book on the table was a pose. Under the surface he was quaking.

  “No one will believe you. Why should they?”

  “It’ not as if there aren’t other people who were there that night. Glenn Turner, for instance. Or Daphne. From what you’ve told me, you’re not her favorite person right now. And of course, we have no idea who else Boyd read his chapter to.”

  “For someone who claims not to be a blackmailer, you certainly sound like one.”

  “I’m just pointing out that you’re wrong to assume I’d have to have hard evidence to get people to take me seriously.”

  “Okay, fine. But you still haven’t told me what you want. You’ve got to want something.”

  “Just an explanation.”

  “What’ your hunch?”

  “That you stole the notebooks.”

  “I didn’t steal them.”

  “Okay, then that you found them, after the fact, and just . . . failed to give them back.”

  “That’ not what happened, either.”

  “Then what did happen?”

  He slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, all of this is my own fault, my own lunacy! I’ve set the dogs on myself. I must have wanted to, somehow. Otherwise why would I have told you not to read The Sky, which is tantamount to saying, ‘Read it! Read it!’? I guess I was afraid. It all seemed too good to be true. Back in Wellspring, a great job . . . the only trouble was, you were still around. That was the first thing I checked. I found out you’d retired. I hoped you’d moved away. But you hadn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Of course all along I worried about you figuring it out. You, or someone. But as time went by, and nobody said anything, it just seemed less and less likely that anyone was ever going to. And then, fairly quickly, the book faded into obscurity. And now I come back, years and years later, and lo and behold, here you are on my doorstep with the damned thing in your hand . . . Well, it figures you would have found one of the only damn copies floating around. Remember what I said when we had dinner about predestination? About how my getting this job, my getting this house, all seemed like part of some plan? I still believe that—only now I’m not so sure that the force behind the plan was benevolent. Maybe the point was to ruin me, to punish me. I mean, look—here I am, where I’ve always wanted to be, and I can’t write a word. And now here you are, with that book.”

  “You seem to have totally forgotten Jonah Boyd. It could be argued that the loss of his novel was what killed him.”

  “Anne never believed that. We spent a lot of time together, when I was at Bradford. He was dead by then, of course. You know, that was one of the principal draws of Bradford for me, the chance to take a workshop with Boyd, but he died the winter before I started. Still, I hung out with Anne. We talked.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just that he jumped on the bottle so fast, she didn’t believe it w
as only because of the notebooks.”

  “Did you know that Anne is dead? I spoke to Boyd’ daughter.”

  “Oh, you’ve really done your homework! Which one?”

  “Susan.”

  “Yes, Anne was closer to Susan than to the other one.”

  We were silent for a moment, as if to honor Anne’ passing.

  I noticed that Ben’ glass was empty. He was drumming his fingers against its surface. And then, quite suddenly, he got up, in a way that startled me. What was I afraid of, that he was going to pull a pistol out of his pocket, grab a knife from a drawer, and lunge at me with it? Nothing like that happened. “Follow me,” he said, and left the kitchen.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  I rose. We crossed the front hall into the bedroom wing, then walked to the end of the corridor, where he opened the door to the room that had once been Daphne’. It was dark in there; all the shades were drawn. I could make out a clutter of shapes, obstructions that Ben had to navigate as he made his way to the window. He pulled up the blinds, admitting some pretty, dappled fall light.

  Then he beckoned to me. I stepped inside. Surrounding him—piled everywhere, on the bed and on the floor, in boxes in the corners and spilling out of the closet—were copies of The Sky. Thousands of them, all with that familiar cover, the zipper splitting the blue, the rain beneath. Everywhere there were tottering mountains of The Sky, stacks so precarious I wondered that they didn’t collapse, and conical mounds like funeral pyres.

  “You see?” he said. “For years I’ve been collecting them. Every copy I could find. So far, I’ve got about fifteen hundred, and given that the print run was thirty-five hundred, of which another fifteen hundred were returned to the publisher and eventually pulped, that means there are five hundred copies unaccounted for. Some are in libraries. Most are probably moldering on the bookshelves of people who have no idea they’ve got anything of value. And of course the value’ been exaggerated, it’ inflated, as a result of my hoarding. Most of the names on the waiting lists at the used bookstores—they’re mine. Pseudonyms. I try to keep in touch with the major ones. The Strand’ never supposed to sell a copy to anyone else. When you called there, you must have gotten someone new who didn’t know the rules. And yes, I admit, I have stolen a few from libraries, which I don’t feel too good about—but when you think about it, it’ so incredibly easy to steal a book from a library; all you have to do is slice out the security tag . . .”