That was the lesson I wanted to teach Georgiana: She would reject my novel, and I, with glorious composure, would reveal that it was not my novel at all; it was Jonah Boyd’.
Needless to say, the plan had a lot of holes. Indeed, the numerous practical difficulties inherent in it would probably, in the long run, have stopped me from ever putting it into action. (Among other things, I would have had to explain how I had happened upon Jonah Boyd’ manuscript in the first place.) Only, as it turned out, I never had to put it into action, because far from responding with diffidence or disdain, Georgiana bought the book, praising me for having overcome “creative hurdles” to become “the writer I was born to be.” And the whole time, of course, it wasn’t my book at all. Yet how could I tell her that? How could I do otherwise than go along with her, when what she was offering me was the thing I had craved for years, for most of my life, ever since that Thanksgiving when Jonah Boyd had come to visit and awakened in me a sense of possibility to match my ambition? I had meant for her to learn a lesson. Now she turned the tables on me, and proved that all along her responses had been sincere; which meant that all along the problem really had been with me, with what I had written. A completely private humiliation was the price I had to pay for at last getting what I’d always wanted.
Well, you know the rest of the story. I signed a contract and was paid some money, which pleased Molly. But then, in the months before the publication, I got cold feet; I worried that someone I had never heard of, some stranger to whom Jonah Boyd might also have read aloud from his notebooks, might read my novel and recognize its origins. Or that you might remember, or Daphne, or Glenn. None of you did, as it happened. Still, I was afraid, and so, under the guise of revision, I set about making a thousand more changes to the manuscript, all toward the goal of disguising it, rendering it unrecognizable even to that theoretical person. That person who, as it turned out, was you.
The Sky came out. It didn’t do terribly well, which suited me fine. I didn’t want it to circulate too widely. Ironically, even the critics who didn’t like it loved the last two chapters. Still, it served its function, because now I had a contract to write a new novel, and on this novel I set to work in earnest. I got a job teaching at a local college. And really, Denny, it was astonishing. Before, writing for me had been an anguished, agonized, slow procedure, marked by fits of amnesia from which I would emerge not remembering a thing about what I had done, and fits of despair from which I would emerge wanting to drink, and long, blank days when the sentences came out in states of arthritic contortion and I wanted to tear my hair out, or hurl the hated Macintosh out the window. Now that Georgiana had affirmed me, though, I wrote as easily, as fluidly, as Jonah Boyd himself claimed always to have done. The new novel was a joy to write, and perhaps for that reason, a joy to read: It was a huge success.
As for the notebooks, I kept them close by, even though my suspicion was that by bringing me to the point at which I now found myself, they had expended their last gust of magical beneficence. Now they were just leather and paper, paper and leather. They had even lost much of their smell.
Still, I didn’t dare throw them out, or burn them. To do so, it seemed to me, would have been to risk some sort of cosmic retribution. Like desecrating a corpse. Aren’t there rules about what you can and can’t do with talismans? Aren’t they indestructible?
The notebooks traveled with me all over the country. Through two marriages, and three houses, until I made my way back here. And really, regaining this house—that was the final proof that the notebooks were magic. That was the final purpose—I thought—of whatever spirit inhabited them, to restore the house my mother had loved into the hands of one of her children. The message seemed clear: I should now inter them forever in the grave that fate had designated to be theirs. And so the very day I signed the deed and took the keys and came back to this house, I returned them to the little sooty chamber from which I had removed them so many years earlier, on the occasion of our dispossession. And there they have stayed until tonight. Now I give them to you.
Ben opened the file drawer at the bottom of the little desk at which Nancy used to sit when she paid her bills. He took out the notebooks.
“Well, now you have it,” he said, “The truth. That’ what you said you came here for. And you shall also have these.”
He pushed them across the table. I didn’t touch them.
“They’re yours,” he went on. “As is my fate. What you do with them—and it—is up to you. Decide, if you want, purely on the basis of what you believe to be right. And yet I can’t help but think that there must be something that you want.” He leaned in toward me. “Come on, what is it? There must be. Otherwise why would you have come?”
“But there isn’t,” I insisted—and even as I said it, I realized, for the first time, that there was.
It seemed so obvious. So beautifully obvious. What I wanted, and what he alone could give me.
Ben put his hand over mine. It was the first time in our lives he had ever touched me.
“Come on,” he said. “Tell me.”
So I told him.
209
Fourteen
READER —OH, HOW I have looked forward to writing this sentence, hurrying my way toward it with impatience and eagerness!—reader, I married him.
The house is mine. Ben has died, and rules are rules. It doesn’t belong to Daphne. It doesn’t belong to Mark. Despite all Nancy’ efforts, it has ended up not in the hands of her children, or of her children’ children, but of her husband’ secretary. The one who loaded the dishwasher wrong. The one forgotten in the will. The house is mine, and there is not a damn thing any of them can do about it.
I sound petulant, which I don’t want to. I sound as if it was only for the house that I married him, when in truth there was great love between Ben and me. Hadn’t he always longed for the touch of an older woman? I gave it to him, at long last completing the work Anne had started. And Ben—well, despite my lifelong insistence that I would never marry, anyone who ever bothered to look in my linen closet would have found the thirty years worth of back issues of Modern Bride, stacked neatly along with the sheets. I didn’t subscribe; I bought my porn as furtively as any teenager. And like a teenager, I kept it hidden, a shaming late-night pleasure to be pored over while eating ice cream or ramen noodles, when no one was around to see.
Maybe Ben recognized that behind my lifelong avowal never to marry there lay a secret longing. For when I reminded him of the day we met—that day on which I had accidentally eaten half his sandwich at Minnie’—he said, “Well, doesn’t that prove that we were meant for each other, Denny dear? For what was the dividing of that sandwich, if not a foreshadowing of the champagne toast at the wedding, the bride and groom sipping from the same glass?”
It was the sweetest thing any man had ever said to me.
Minnie’, by the way, is gone. In its place on Calibraska Avenue there is now a Ralph Lauren Polo store.
He was diagnosed with a brain tumor only three months after our marriage. By then we had managed to finish furnishing the bedrooms, and were just getting started on the landscaping. His writing block lifted, and he went to work on a new novel. Then one afternoon (and much to my surprise) he asked me if I’d mind giving him piano lessons. Despite being his mother’ son in so many ways, until that day Ben had never once touched a piano. And now, for some reason, he wanted to learn. And though I was hardly qualified as a teacher, I did give him lessons, even managing to bring him to the point where he could play a Bach musette through to the end. Of course, by then the headaches had gotten so bad he could barely focus on the score.
Brain cancer runs in families. What killed Ben was the same type of tumor that had killed his mother, and probably (though no one is certain) his great-grandfather—amazing to him, if not to his doctors—and though the intervening years had brought many advances in treatment, none were adequate to save his life. And so I sat by his bedside as I had sat by Nancy’,
taking notes while he explained to me how he wanted to end his new book.
That book is now finished. After he died, I spent six months cleaning up the typescript, making minor improvements for consistency, and putting the finishing touches on the last chapters, which were incomplete—all in scrupulous keeping with his instructions. The novel tells, after a fashion, the story of my life—everything he left out of The Eucalyptus. I admit, the discovery that he had chosen to narrate it from my point of view startled me at first: Strange to be typing out an account the “I” of which, rather than me, is someone else’ idea of me, and in which for every moment of astonishing accuracy there is another where “I” am made to do or say something I never did or said. Still, I resisted the impulse to change or correct. Much as when I had been obliged to transform Ernest’ incomprehensible notes into coherent English, I looked upon my task as one of ordering, of tying up loose ends. Call it the secretarial impulse, and then decide for yourself how much it differs from the artistic one.
One thing I must admit: Until I read Ben’ last novel, I never guessed that both he and Nancy had known all along about my affair with his father. For this shortsightedness, I am ashamed.
A few weeks before his death, Daphne flew down from Portland to stay with us. She left her children and her husband behind. For the duration of her visit she behaved as if nothing had changed since the days when her mother had ruled at 302 Florizona Avenue, as if I was still Denny the secretary, in the kitchen only because Nancy had summoned me to assist in some domestic crisis. Thus when she emerged from her old bedroom in the mornings, the first question out of her lips was usually: “Is there coffee?” She never made any herself, though intermittently she baked cookies, and then left the mess in the sink for me to clean up. Also, she made a silent point of rearranging the dishes in the dishwasher after I had loaded it. And it was my dishwasher! For Ben’ sake alone I held my tongue.
I don’t know what she fathomed to be at the root of my marriage to her brother—she wouldn’t tell me—only that she must have regarded our union as fundamentally bogus, and me as some sort of predatory interloper who had entrapped Ben solely for the purpose of robbing her of her rightful inheritance. Nor did it matter how valiantly Ben tried to dissuade her from this point of view, to convince her that we really did love each other. She clung to her convictions as stubbornly as Nancy would have.
Of course I kept the notebooks hidden. This was as much Ben’ choice as mine. He said he never wanted to lay eyes or hands on them again. He said it was why he could write now. And I, for my part, from the day he pushed them to me across the tulip table until the day of his death, kept up my end of the bargain, and made sure that they remained out of his sight as well as his reach. Their safekeeping and concealment were my responsibility, just as it was understood that once Ben died, it would be my decision whether or not to reveal that they had never been lost. Whether or not to ruin him in order to do justice to Jonah Boyd.
That was a hard decision to make, but I have made it at last. Like Anne Boyd, I don’t see what good is to be derived from privileging the needs of the dead over those of the living. I am alive. And so I shall prove my loyalty to my husband, and make sure that no one ever finds what he kept hidden all those years in the barbecue pit.
Like his mother, he died at home. At the funeral neither Daphne nor Mark would even look at me. This time they were both staying at the Ritz-Carlton, and when I pressed them to come by the house afterward, they refused. “I just couldn’t,” Daphne said, squeezing my hand in a way that suggested at least a lingering touch of affection. Mark, on the other hand, turned from me without a word. Cold bastard.
That afternoon I had Ben’ colleagues from the English department over, along with some of his students. His students loved him. There was coffee, and pie, and a festive feeling in the house that almost reminded me of Nancy’ Thanksgivings, when I was a stray, and none of those students had even been born.
I guess what Daphne and Mark couldn’t accept, what they couldn’t tolerate, was that even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have given them that house. Even if Nancy’ ghost had come lurching up from the underworld and stuck a red hot poker in my ribs, I couldn’t have done it. It was out of my hands.
Yet here is the great irony: A few months after Ben died—and much to the amazement of every resident of Wellspring—the university got a new president, a fiscal liberal who one day very quietly undid the rule that had been the bane of Nancy Wright’ life. This means that we owners of houses built on university-owned plots are to be given the option of buying those plots for a dollar—a decree that at once puts an end to an old and contentious policy, and also allows the university to take advantage of some lucrative tax breaks.
Who knows what really lies behind the change, or even how the new president managed it? Perhaps some law professor was planning a clever suit. Perhaps the board of trustees got greedy. In any case, I shall soon be the owner of this land as well as the house on which it sits, and could leave them, if I chose, to Daphne’ children. But I think instead that I shall leave them to Susan Boyd’ children. That family ought to get something in compensation for the life out of which her father was swindled. So why not this house, where, after all, the crime was planned and committed?
Besides, she is a secretary.
There was only one thing left to do. I finished writing Ben’ novel in early November—all but the coda you are reading now. Thanksgiving night was clear and brisk that year, illuminated by a mostly full moon. I had no one over. I ate, by myself, part of a turkey breast, and some potatoes reheated in the microwave. Then around ten I stole out to the barbecue pit. I removed the notebooks from their sooty cache, freed them from their swaddling of plastic and foil. In the middle of the hearth, under the spit, there is a sort of charred black grate meant for holding coals or wood, and on this I arranged the notebooks, along with a cradling of crumpled newspaper. Finally I lit a match, and dropped that in, too.
I am pleased to tell you that Nancy was completely wrong about the chimney—it draws marvelously. In the hearth the leather covers of the notebooks yellowed and lifted and crumpled, revealing for a millisecond a few lines of blue prose. Up and up the smoke rose, a gray-black balloon drifting out toward the Pacific, while with a stick I ground into ashes the body of evidence, the body of the work, the body of Jonah Boyd.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
David Leavitt is the author of several novels, including The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, and Equal Affections, as well as the short story collections Family Dancing, A Place I’ve Never Been, and The Marble Quilt, recently brought together as Collected Stories. He wrote the Bloomsbury Writer and the City title Florence: A Delicate Case. A recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Gainesville, Florida, and teaches at the University of Florida.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical form for mechanical hot metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.
Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by Granjon. It was first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
David Leavitt, The Body of Jonah Boyd
The Body of Jonah Boyd Page 19