The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  One editor in particular drove me crazy. She had the extraordinary name of Georgiana Sleep, and she worked for Boyd’ old publisher. Indeed, she seemed kind of impressed that I had known him, and had won a prize named after him. The thing about Georgiana was that she wasn’t just vaguely encouraging without ever making an offer; she actually seemed to go to great lengths to woo me. At first our relationship was strictly epistolary—enthusiastic, witty, occasionally flirty letters from her, to which I would write agonized responses that strove for cleverness—but then one afternoon, rather out of the blue, she telephoned. She had a thin, high voice. I had just sent her my second novel, and she was calling, she said, because she wanted to talk about it with me. She proposed that we have lunch. This was unprecedented. I thought I had it made. Excited by her interest, and in spite of her voice, I created in my own head a Georgiana who was Amazonian and beautiful, as well as hugely powerful; imagined that over the course of the lunch, over white wine and very refined fish, she’d tell me that she and her colleagues had been so bowled over by my novel that they were now prepared to offer me a staggering advance, at which point we’d toast the future, and my career would be made. I even splurged and bought myself a new suit just for the lunch, even though this was something I could ill afford. But then when I showed up at the restaurant, Georgiana turned out to be just this girl, this wisp of a thing, with long blond hair and a freckled nose. She didn’t even drink. She was probably five years younger than I was. And the restaurant to which she had invited me—far from some glamorous haven of luxury like the Four Seasons—was a sort of hip lunch counter, with fifty kinds of soup on the menu. And so we sat there over split pea soup, and she proceeded to tell me, in excruciating detail, everything that in her opinion was wrong with my book, which was pretty much everything, and as she went on, all I could think was what a fool I felt in that suit, and was it too late to return it? What if I spilled soup on it? Molly, my girlfriend, was always nagging at me to get what she called “a real job.” She worked for an advertising firm, and frankly, I think that my idleness—what she perceived as my idleness—embarrassed her. I’d trumpeted this lunch as the beginning of a new stage in my life, promised that after this I’d be able to take her on vacations to Lake Como, Fiji, Kyoto. Now I didn’t want to contemplate how she’d react when I came home and told her that not only had I not sold my novel, I was out three hundred dollars for the suit.

  Still, even as I prayed for the lunch to end, and for Georgiana to ask the waiter for the bill, I was holding out hope that perhaps she was withholding some surprise for the last minute—that as we stood to leave, she’d say, “Despite all of this, you’re so promising we want to give you a contract.” But all she said was, “Despite all of this, you’re so promising that we want to keep in touch with you, and hope you’ll send us more of your work.”

  At least she picked up the tab.

  Those were very difficult days for me. I’m not going to go into it, because it’ all too depressing. Don’t think that I had any illusions about my own writing. Hope and ambition in spades, yes—but if I’m to be perfectly frank, I knew that Georgiana was smart and right. My novels so far lacked some spark of life, that element of vitality that distinguished the work of all the writers I loved to read. It seemed to me in those days that whatever the formula was—whatever combination of literary prowess and instinct for the marketplace brought a writer recognition, and brought pleasure to readers—I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Now, of course, I realize that there is no formula. I see that had I merely written what I wanted to write, instead of constantly trying to second-guess Georgiana and the other editors, I might have gotten further. That’ what I do now—or did, until this damned writer’ block—and people seem to love it. But when I was young, rather than writing for myself, or for some idealized, unseen, perfectly intelligent and perfectly ignorant reader—that retired schoolteacher in Chicago whom we writers are supposed to visualize when we work—I wrote for Georgiana and her mysterious, monolithic “we.” Her editorial board. If I saw her as my one hope, it was because at this point she alone, of all the editors to whom I’d sent stuff, would answer my phone calls. And not only answer them, but answer them gladly. Molly was jealous of her. She referred to Georgiana as my “girlfriend,” or to use a British parlance of which we were both fond (we spent an inordinate amount of time watching British sitcoms) my “bit of fluff.” She might have been right. Today it seems clear that, at the very least, Georgiana had a crush on me. The smartest thing I could have done, I see now, would have been to marry her, or at least screw her. In any case, by the time I got wise she was already married to another writer.

  In the meantime the third novel wasn’t going well at all, probably because I’d banked so much on it. Still, I managed to bring it to some kind of conclusion and rushed it off to Georgiana, who turned it down flat in forty-eight hours. “I just think you’re on the wrong track here,” she told me. Correct, of course—though not what I wanted to hear.

  I decided right then that the problem wasn’t with me. I convinced myself. The problem, I told Molly, was with Georgiana. In her youthful avidity for power, she was teasing me, toying with me, taking advantage of my hunger and inexperience to feed her own vanity. It seemed inconceivable, for instance, that she would treat an established author this way—that she would treat Jonah Boyd this way. But of course Jonah Boyd was dead, and in truth, I had no idea how Georgiana treated established authors. I didn’t even really know whether or not she actually had the power to acquire books. It might have been a bluff. She might have been a glorified secretary, or the tout for a real editor who remained nameless.

  It was around this time that my father was killed, and my mother summoned me back to Wellspring to help her conduct her battle to keep the house. Believe me, Denny, I was eager to go. New York oppressed me. Things with Molly had gone from bad to worse, her disapproval of my joblessness slowly eroding even the affectionate rapport that had grown up between us. I guessed that it would only be a matter of time before she found herself a new boyfriend, some lawyer or banker who owned his own apartment. So I went. Those were strange days—my mother and Daphne and her kids and me, all piled up under one roof, not to mention Phil’ trial. But they were also curiously pleasant days, and if I remember them today with fondness, it is mostly because the campaign to keep the house, and not less than that, the arduous labor of nursing my mother through her final illness, distracted me from the awful chore of writing. I had other things to think about now, and for all the grief that I felt, I was more at peace than I’d been in years.

  We lost the house, of course. My mother died. I thought for a time that perhaps the fact that my father had been murdered by one of his students—and on campus, no less—might dispose the provost to look favorably upon our cause. But it did not. Indeed, I think the provost feared that if he appeared to be offering anything in the way of compensation to Ernest Wright’ widow, we might use that kindness as leverage to ask for more. The thin end of the wedge. So we sifted through all the records and books and furniture, divvied up what we wanted from what we wanted to sell, and got ready to move out. But you know all this.

  It wasn’t until the evening before the closing that I retrieved the notebooks from the barbecue pit. I did it under cover of darkness. No one saw me, though when I got back into the house, Mark, who was reading in the study, did ask me what I’d been doing outside. “Looking at the stars,” I said. By now Mark was married to his Canadian and leading his Canadian life, and we weren’t nearly so close as we’d been in the days when he’d been a draft dodger. He wouldn’t even sleep in the house. He insisted on staying at the Ritz-Carlton, to prove his wealth, I guess. Still, it is the older brother’ prerogative to interrogate the younger.

  Since nothing held me to New York any longer, and since I could now afford, with my portion of the proceeds from the sale, to buy another house, if a smaller one, I asked Molly to marry me. I told her that we could live anywhere she wan
ted. It seemed that during the weeks I’d been away, she too had gotten sick of New York, if not of the hypothetical lawyer or banker who had been my replacement. A junkie had tried, rather ineptly, to hold her up in the foyer of her building, in addition to which there were problems at the ad agency: a new boss who didn’t like her. Also, her mother had been in a car accident. She decided that she wanted to move to Milwaukee, where she came from, and since I had no great desire to live anywhere other than on Florizona Avenue, which was now impossible, I agreed. It was a heady feeling at last to be able to give her something, after so many years during which, every time we’d gone out for dinner, she’d had to pick up the bill. Not that a little house in Milwaukee was in any way going to compensate for the loss of this place—this fantastic place—or for the knowledge that I had failed my mother. And yet it was something: a life. So we moved.

  And of course, when I went to Milwaukee, I brought the notebooks with me. And once there, in that funny little brick house of ours, I had no idea whatsoever what to do with them. There was no barbecue pit in that backyard. I considered various hiding places—a dormant dumb-waiter and a sort of hidden shelf, way up in the back of one of the closets—before I realized that at this point there was really no longer any need to look for a hiding place. Because of course no one who knew about the notebooks, who knew what they were, and might have recognized them, was anywhere near Milwaukee. And so, taking a page from “The Purloined Letter,” I started just leaving them out on my desk. Once Molly strolled in and asked me about them. “Oh, those are the notebooks I wrote poetry in when I was a kid,” I said. “I dug them out of the house in Wellspring before we sold it. I thought I’d read them over.” And she smiled, and said, “That’ nice,” and left the room as obliviously as she had entered it. She had a habit, my first wife, of wandering in and out of rooms for no particular reason that I found vexatious.

  So now I was a husband and a homeowner, and I had to do something. Molly had found a job with an advertising firm most of the clients of which were big Milwaukee breweries. Our house had cost so little, comparatively speaking, that even after buying it I still had quite a bit of money left from the sale of the big house, my mother’ house. I told her that I was going to give myself a year to write a new novel, and that if that didn’t pan out, I’d give up writing and get a job, and since it seemed that now I could afford that year, she gave her assent. Now, every morning, I would sit down in front of the computer—I’d bought myself one of the new Macintoshes, which seemed so astonishing at the time, even though these days we would find them ridiculously slow—and gaze at the little simulacrum of a blank page that the screen offered up. Next to me, on top of my desk, sat the notebooks. It wasn’t my intention at this point to do anything with them. On the contrary, I only kept them out because I hoped they might bring me luck, inspire me to write the book that Georgiana Sleep (who had in the meantime changed jobs, moving to a bigger, more prestigious house) would actually buy.

  And then for two weeks I just sat there. It wasn’t that I didn’t have an idea—I did—I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to depress the keys. My fingers either felt heavy as iron weights, or they felt gummy and rubbery, or they shook so badly I could barely control them. And every one of those days, that awful virtual blank page stared out at me. I hated it. On old computers, when you wrote, you typed pulsing green letters onto a black screen. Somehow that was easier, because it looked less like writing in a book. The Mac’ blank page, because it was more real, was more of a rebuke.

  I remember that on one of those afternoons, just after lunch, I suddenly felt, for the first time in days, that I might actually be able to control my fingers. So I hurried to the computer and switched it on. It took an eternity to boot up, and by the time it had, whatever surge of hopefulness or self-confidence had seized me was gone. Still, my fingers worked. I thought, “Try typing. Just typing. To get yourself back in the mood.”

  And then, more or less on a whim, I typed out the sentence, “To make love in a balloon . . .”

  To make love in a balloon . . .

  I blinked. I looked at the words in front of me. They looked so good to me on the screen, so fresh and—well—so real, that I typed out the second sentence of Boyd’ novel, too.

  I smiled. This was art. This was fun.

  I opened the first notebook. I checked to make sure that I had gotten the sentences down correctly. (I had.) Then I typed out the third sentence—and just went on, until I finished the entire first chapter. And why not? The prose was so good! True, this was typing, not writing—and yet, I reasoned, there was practical benefit to be gained even from that. Because if I ever decided, as Anne had contemplated, to “find” the note books and then to try to arrange for their publication, of course it would be necessary to have a presentable typescript. The very copy that Boyd himself, much to his wife’ chagrin, had resisted making.

  The next several days passed in a trance. I stopped answering the phone. In the evenings I was in such a good mood I think my wife suspected me of doing cocaine. By night I was enthusiastic, appreciative, kind, a superb lover, a terrific cook. I laughed out loud at the television, even at the stupidest sitcoms. We had her parents over for dinner and I charmed them. And then in the mornings I would wake up early, vigorous, alert to the smell of coffee, eager once again to lose myself in Gonesse. If typing out the book was better than writing it or reading it, it was because it allowed for a degree of immersion in an alternative and beautiful world the likes of which, in my own work, I’d never before known. Now I understood why Jonah Boyd had grown so remote from me that afternoon at the arroyo! Why concern yourself with reality, when you had this at your disposal—this better, richer realm?

  Nor did I merely type. Oh, at first I was strict with myself; I kept myself to the role of scribe. But then as I got deeper into the manuscript, I also got bolder. If I were to find what I considered to be a stylistic infelicity, a misplaced “but,” or a repeat of two words within the same paragraph, or (heaven forbid) a dangling modifier, I would make a silent repair. Or if I came to a sentence in which I felt that Boyd had chosen the wrong word or phrase, or brandished a cliche, or if I felt I could come up with a better way of saying whatever it was that needed to be said, I would slip the change in furtively, slyly. Like a shoplifter. The computer made this easy; on a computer screen the labor of rewriting is rendered invisible. One would have had to consult the notebooks themselves to discover any evidence of my tampering. And this chance to clean up, to correct, to improve, to tighten the screws, even on occasion to cut, only amplified the sense of euphoria that had claimed me, much like the one, I see now, that had sometimes claimed my mother when she undertook her massive cleaning details. For by making these changes, I was also putting my mark upon the novel. I was making it, in a small way, my own.

  And meanwhile Georgiana called me at least once a week. “Fantastically,” I’d say when she asked how things were going—and refuse to say more. She kept begging for clues. I think she could tell from the tone of my voice that I was onto something, into something. “Just a description, some hint of what the novel’ about,” she’d plead, and I’d laugh, and tell her nothing. In all honesty, it felt good, for once, to have the shoe on the other foot.

  Now this is very important, and I hope you believe me: Until the very end it was my intention, if I sent out the typescript at all, to send it out as what it was, Jonah Boyd’ lost novel, which I had discovered and completed. But then I reached the last page of the fourth notebook. Now it was time for the most difficult part of the job—completion, the writing of the unwritten last two chapters. Fortunately I remembered everything Boyd had told me, that afternoon at the arroyo. And yet when I settled down to actually do the work, I decided that some of Boyd’ plans weren’t nearly as smart as he’d believed them to be. In all likelihood, I decided, he would have changed his mind too, once he’d reached that stage. And so instead of adhering strictly to the plan he had laid out for me, I went my own way,
and produced, in a matter of days, a pair of chapters that seemed to me in every way worthy of, if not better than, what preceded them, even if at certain key points they diverged from the creator’ master plan.

  Now comes the hard part. The shameful part. The part for which I fear you will never forgive me.

  I printed out and corrected the finished typescript. Then I printed out a fresh copy. Georgiana called. “How’ the novel going?” she asked.

  “I just finished,” I said.

  “You finished!” she said. “Then what are you waiting for? I want to see it!”

  Believe me or not as you choose, but from the morning I changed the title to The Sky and put my name on the title page, to the morning when I handed the package containing the manuscript across the counter at our neighborhood post office, to the morning when Georgiana called to say that not only she but the entirety of her editorial board—that tormenting “we"—had adored my book and that she was preparing to make an offer for it, I thought I was only doing it to teach her a lesson.

  And the lesson was this: Because I was me, I was convinced that upon actually reading the novel, Georgiana would decide to use the occasion, once again, to slap me down, put me in my place; that she would either reject the novel out of hand, or suggest that if I made a thousand changes she might reconsider it, and then once I had made them, reject it; and all this despite the distinct note of enthusiasm I had been hearing in her voice. But now, when she slapped me down, at least I would have the satisfaction of knowing at last that the problem was not with my writing; the problem had never been with my writing; on the contrary, the problem was with the system of submissions itself, which was deeply corrupt, and manned by stooges who would lavish praise upon the works of the already famous with the same Pavlovian predictability with which they would disparage and dismiss the works of the hardworking but little known. And having established, once and for all, that all these years of rejection said nothing about me or about my work, then I could quit writing, and be free. I had seen something similar happen in an episode of The Partridge Family that I remembered from my childhood, in which Laurie goes to work as a substitute teacher in Danny’ class, and because he is her brother, she flunks him on every paper. At last he turns in a story by Hemingway; she still flunks him. He reveals the truth, she is abashed, a lesson is learned.