The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  “But why?”

  “I told you. To teach him a lesson. It’ not enough that he should be saved over and over, and always at the eleventh hour. If he’ going to learn not to do this, he’ got to really think he’ lost them. And for a long time. A decent amount of time. Not just hours, or even days. At least a month.”

  “A month!”

  “Or maybe two months. I’ll decide all that. The point is, you’ll be in charge of them. I couldn’t have them in the house with me. It would be too risky. I’m not good at keeping things secret, the way you are. And so tomorrow Jonah and I will leave as usual, we’ll head north, at some point he’ll realize they’re missing. Maybe we’ll come back, maybe we won’t. And then, when all possibilities have been exhausted, we’ll go on to San Francisco without the notebooks, because he has this reading to give, and the show must go on, mustn’t it? And the show will go on. And then we’ll fly home. I’ll see how he behaves, and if he’ genuinely contrite, if I feel certain that he’ learned his lesson and that from now on he’ll start to act more responsibly, I’ll get in touch with you. I’ll call you or write to you. And that’ when—miraculously—they’ll turn up.”

  “But everyone will think I stole them!”

  “No they won’t. They’ll all be too happy that you’ve found them. You’ll be the hero.”

  “But how can I just find them? Where were they supposed to have been all this time?”

  “That’ immaterial. The point is, no one’ going to think that you took them, because what would be the point of stealing them, keeping them for a couple of months, and then giving them back? On the other hand, finding them, purely by chance, in some corner of the house where no one ever thought of looking . . . that seems perfectly logical . . . Or you can turn them in, anonymously, to the police. I’m sure by that point Nancy will have notified the police.” Anne’ eyes, as she spoke, were glazing over. It was as if the plan itself, even on a hypothetical level, had so besotted her that for the time being the actual present moment had ceased to exist, much as it had ceased to exist for her husband that afternoon in the park, when he was talking about the unwritten final chapters of his novel. Meanwhile, under the weight of the notebooks, my erection was subsiding. Eros had fled the room, only to be replaced by forces less salubrious: greed, and dread, and vengefulness; possibilities of glory and of power, the power to control someone else’ life, to make someone suffer, or flush with relief at your whim; and the power of knowing that the success or failure of a plan hinges upon your role, that you can sabotage it if you choose; and the power that naturally accrues to whoever holds a jewel or ring or amulet that has been endowed with magical properties. For as you may have guessed, Denny, by now I was starting to view the notebooks themselves not merely as bargaining chips in some hideous game between husband and wife, but as objects in themselves capable of altering the course of human lives, for better or worse. Remember that Boyd, since his arrival, had been speaking of them in such hushed and reverent tones—implying, even by his habit of always losing them or leaving them behind, that they possessed some mystic potency by virtue of which he could count on them always flying back to him of their own volition, like magic carpets. He had said, “I trust to the protection of the muse.” If the spirit of the muse inhered, as this remark implied, within the very leather and paper from which the notebooks were made, then it seemed logical that I—that any person who possessed them—would also come under the muse’ benevolent influence.

  My silence amounted to accord. Anne departed, creeping on tiptoe through the bathroom to her snoring husband’ side, the bag that she carried now bereft of its contents, stretched and empty looking, like a condom thrown aside after an act of love. And I, in the meantime, was left with those four notebooks piled atop my groin. As soon as she was gone, I got out of bed and buried them in the chest where I kept the stuffed animals of my childhood. Amid Fatbottom the sheep and Gertrude the bear and the pajama bag in the shape of a turtle that Daphne had made me the Christmas when she had been briefly captivated by sewing, I thrust the notebooks containing Jonah Boyd’ novel. They remained there all through the next day’ search, and the next week, and the week after that, at which point I moved them to the place where they have remained, on and off, for the last thirty years. Have you guessed, Denny, where that is? Would you like me to show you? Come. Follow me.

  Ben stopped talking. Standing from the bed, he went into his parents’ bedroom, then out the door onto the back porch. As instructed, I followed. Down into the garden he led me, past the swimming pool and the flagstone patio where once the koi had swum, and then we made our way down the grassy slope into the barbecue pit. I don’t think that until that afternoon I’d ever bothered to study the barbecue pit closely, not even during my fantasies of playing Dame Carcas. It was made of red brick; a chimney rose from its principal aperture, a sort of charred craw with a spit. Clearly one of the owners who had succeeded the Wrights had attempted at least once (probably a few times) to put the pit to the use for which it was intended, for as we neared it, I caught an unpleasant stench of wet ash. To the left and right of the aperture were two other openings, both much smaller, their blackened iron doors affixed to the brick by means of rather medieval looking hinges. “These must have been meant for storing charcoal or wood,” Ben said, opening the one on the left. “When I was a kid I used to hide things here that I didn’t want my mother to find, that copy of Hustler and my hippie book and . . . other things. Because she had an aversion to the pit, and refused to come down here. She was always bugging my father to fill it in, which he never did, probably just to spite her . . .” Soot blackened Ben’ fingers. He reached inside the aperture, felt about for a moment, and then pulled out a lumpy parcel enclosed within a trash bag. This he handed to me.

  “Open it,” he said.

  I took the parcel from him; untied the bag. Inside, individually wrapped in bubble wrap and carefully taped, were four books.

  “Take one out,” Ben coaxed, almost seductively, almost as if he were instructing me to undress him, one item of clothing at a time.

  Because I keep my nails cut short, I had trouble catching the end of the tape. Finally, though, I got it going. The bubble wrap unfurled, revealing a familiar coffee-colored leather

  cover that still gave off a scent of cloves.

  “Is this the first one?”

  “Look and see.”

  I opened it; the pages had not even yellowed. To make love in a balloon, I read—and then I dropped the notebook onto the grass, my hands were shaking so, the coughs were rising so suddenly and so violently in my throat.

  Twelve

  HYSTERICAL ASTHMA, OR a reaction to breathing in too much soot: Call it what you will. Ben helped me back into the house, this time the living room, where he sat me on the black sofa. My hands were still shaking. After I had dropped the notebook, he had taken all four of them away from me and put them somewhere: I wasn’t sure where. Now he stood near the fireplace, glaring, his face pallid with anxiety and surprise, as if my reaction to touching the notebooks—which was akin to what one might feel upon accidentally touching a corpse—had taken him totally off guard. Yet how could this be? Was it possible that he was recognizing only now, for the first time, the gravity of the crime in which he was implicated?

  Very possible.

  He watched me. He did not appear in the least to be in a state of denial. On the contrary, his eyes were hugely open. His lower lip drooped. He leaned against the mantel as if he required its support, as if otherwise he might fall. And then he almost did fall. I stood to catch him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been feeling well lately. Headaches.”

  We returned to the kitchen, to the tulip table. I was better now, and told him so.

  While he sat with his head in his hands, I made coffee. I found some bread in the refrigerator and toasted it. I found some margarine and some jam. We ate a vespertine breakfast, then, as the sun set outside the kitchen window. It
was close to five-thirty, and still he had more to tell.

  Here is the rest of it.

  You’re probably wondering what happened during the weeks and months after the Boyds left. Well, as I said, after a few days, I took the notebooks out of the chest with the stuffed animals in it and moved them to the place I just showed you, that little wood or charcoal store out in the barbecue pit. Having the notebooks in my room just made me too nervous. Not that my mother habitually went into that chest, or even opened it; and yet every now and then a sort of euphoria of cleaning would claim her, and when that happened, nothing was off-limits; there were no more hiding places; the house was forced to yield up all its secrets to her exhaustive vacuum. The barbecue pit was safer, I decided, both because it was outdoors and because my mother hated it so much she never went near it. She was the one who told everyone that the chimney didn’t draw, yet so far as I’m aware, we never once lit a fire in order to test it, so how could she know? In any case, I was fully prepared to take advantage of her irrational dislike of the pit, for it meant that there was at least one place on the grounds of that house where I could count on her never to venture.

  Of course, I was very careful with the notebooks. First I wrapped them in tissue paper, then in aluminum foil, then in plastic wrap. Almost archival. I was determined that nothing should happen to them, that when or if Jonah Boyd got them back, he should find them as pristine as the day he had lost them. Not that I was entirely sure that I would give them back, once Anne asked me to; for as I said, I was starting to make a cult of the notebooks, to look upon them as talismans possessed of a power by means of which I might get certain things that I wanted more easily or quickly—freedom from my parents, and from the tyranny of their indifference, and success as a writer. I thought of myself as the hero in a fairy tale, the shepherd or goatherd to whose protection some high priest has entrusted a rare treasure. And I was determined to do my duty by that treasure. Perhaps it was the barbecue pit itself that was influencing me, with its resemblance to a medieval keep. We talked about that once, didn’t we?

  Sometimes, though, I took the notebooks out of the pit and brought them back to my room. Then I would unwrap them and pore over them, amazed by the elegance of Boyd’ handwriting, and the—to me—really astounding fact that he appeared to have written Gonesse more or less without ever revising, or reordering the chapters, or even altering the sequence of the paragraphs. He barely ever changed a sentence. My manuscripts, on the other hand, were horrible messes, with lots of rearrangement of the stanzas, and places where words had been erased and rewritten and re-erased so many times that there were holes in the paper. The squalor of writing—which I’ve always thought to be universal—Boyd had somehow managed to bypass. This was how I came actually to read Gonesse—not in one or even two sittings but over a succession of evenings during which I scrutinized the notebooks in an effort to unlock the secret of Boyd’ method. I read each paragraph dozens of times, until I reached a point where I knew the manuscript practically by heart. And I adored it.

  Meanwhile I waited for the promised call or letter to come from Anne, and as the weeks wore on, I wondered what, when she did call or write, I’d say to her. Would I do her bidding and “find” the notebooks? Or would I ignore her, pretend I had no idea what she was talking about—in which case, I knew, she’d have little recourse to take, given that accusing me of theft would mean by necessity implicating herself? Every day I returned from school dreading a message of some sort; every day I was relieved to find that none had come, since silence from Bradford, at the very least, let me off the hook. It meant that I could postpone, day to day, the moment when I would have to make a choice.

  It was very strange. Anne and Jonah Boyd had entered my life so swiftly, and then disappeared from it so completely, that in the wake of their departure my memory of that Thanksgiving weekend itself became unmoored; it took on the drifting unreality of a dream. Had any of it even happened? Had Jonah Boyd really praised my poems, and put his arm around my shoulder, and read to me for hours in the arroyo? And had Anne Boyd tickled my chest, and rested the stolen notebooks upon my crotch? And had those notebooks really remained in my possession? A dash down to the barbecue pit confirmed that they had: Touching them sickened me vaguely, even as it reassured me. At least I wasn’t going mad. Even so, knowing that they were buried out there—these objects in exchange for which a man far away would no doubt have paid a very dear price—troubled me. Recently I had seen a movie on television in which kidnappers buried a girl alive, in a coffin with a limited supply of oxygen. I was very susceptible to horror movies in those days, and from that evening on, the terrible story of the buried girl and the reality of the hidden notebooks became mixed up in my imagination, until I found myself waking in the middle of the night, afraid that somehow the notebooks would suffocate, perish from lack of oxygen, as the rescued girl had not.

  Not only was there no communication with Anne, there was no news of her. If my mother heard anything about or from the Boyds, she never told me. Nor did I ask. I didn’t want to come across as overly curious.

  Still, I thought about them. When I applied to colleges, I included Bradford mostly because, despite everything that had happened, I still rather worshipped Jonah Boyd, and when I didn’t get into any Ivy League schools or even Wellspring, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least this way I could take one of his workshops. I even took the bold step of writing him a letter and including a story I’d just written. And in fact he did write back to me after a few weeks, a very sweet, very sad letter in which he apologized for taking so long to respond, then explained that he’d been depressed of late because of losing his novel. As for the story, it was “marvelous"—that was all he said. There was none of the sort of detailed criticism that he’d given my poems when he’d come to visit. There was no substantive response at all, which annoyed me. Of course, he concluded, when I got to Bradford I would be welcome to take his class; he’d save a spot for me. But that was it. A letter of a paragraph, at most. And then just a month or so later, he was killed in that car crash. I still hadn’t heard from Anne, and now I supposed I never would.

  At first, when I started at Bradford, I made a point of trying to steer clear of Anne. I never went anyplace where it seemed likely I might run into her—supermarkets, for instance. (I suppose I assumed that because my mother spent so much of her life in supermarkets, Anne would too.) Early on I had looked up her address. She lived on Silver Avenue, in a neighborhood of older houses through which, under normal circumstances, I would have bicycled on my way from the dormitory to the history department, where I took most of my classes: It was the most direct route. In my mania not to run into her, however, I used to take a detour around the football stadium that added at least ten minutes to the trip—all so that I would never have to lay eyes upon the house where Jonah Boyd had lived, or upon the woman who lived there still.

  Of course I heard news of her. Boyd’ death was still so fresh that people gossiped about it, other students as well as professors and secretaries. Already rumors swirled of a lost novel. And there was gossip about Anne as well. No sooner was her husband in the ground, people said, than she had quit drinking and smoking. Cold turkey. She was said to have lost forty pounds; to have cut her hair short and stopped dyeing it. Someone saw her at the pool, swimming laps and talking to the lifeguard. What did this mean? Was she glad of her husband’ death? Had she perhaps had a hand in it? And then one day—inevitably, in that small town—I did see her. I was riding past the library on my bike, and she was walking across the lawn that fronted the administration building. At first I barely recognized her, she was so changed. Not only had she lost weight, she was positively slender; you might have even said gaunt. Her hair was short as yours, Denny, and was a sort of glorious silver color. She wore a loose sundress and sandals.

  Fearful in case she should recognize me—but was she even aware that I was now a student at Bradford?—I turned around and rode away from the
history department, circling back only once I was sure she was gone. But the next day, when I biked to class, instead of going around the football stadium I took the more direct route, right down Silver Avenue, right past the house where she lived. From the outside, at least, it appeared to be a rather ordinary house, built in the forties, of red brick with green shutters out of which half-moons had been cut. There were roses in the front yard. The curtains were closed. A blue Buick was parked the driveway. No sign of Anne, though.

  I felt curiously ebullient—as if, merely by bicycling by her house, I had conquered some demon in myself, or made the first step in some process by which I might undo the past. Suddenly I felt I no longer had anything to fear on Silver Avenue, and I gave up my old route round the football stadium. Now I rode boldly by Anne’ house every weekday, every weekday I gazed frankly at the front door, almost willing her to step through it and look me in the eye. This went on for about two weeks—and then one morning, I actually did see her. She was standing on the front lawn in jeans and a man’ oversized T-shirt, pruning her roses. I don’t know what possessed me then: To my own surprise, I found myself slowing down, coasting, stopping. She looked up, and smiled.

  “Well, Ben,” she said without much inflection. “Long time, no see. What made you wait so long to come by?”

  “You mean you knew I was here?”

  “Of course. Your mother wrote and told me.”

  “I didn’t know you were in touch.”

  “Not often, but occasionally.”

  Putting down her secateurs, she wrapped her arms around her waist, under her breasts. “Well, you’ve grown up,” she said. “Every day you look more and more like your father.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”