The Body Of Jonah Boyd

Eleven

I SHALL NOW report, as faithfully as I can, everything Ben told me that afternoon. I shall put the words in his own voice, in an effort to preserve his tone of confession. He called me his blackmailer, and in a sense, I suppose I am. Yet what is a blackmailer if not the very embodiment of conscience? Extracting a price for silence is not really that different from offering to absolve, in exchange for assigned prayers, a sinner’ blemish. The blackmailer is not really that different from the priest. Nor is he necessarily an enemy. He can be a friend, too—the only person in the world in whom his victim can confide. This was certainly true in Ben’ case. As he talked, his face itself seemed to open; the muscles of his brow relaxed. Not that he was proving his own innocence—far from it—but he was telling the truth, and something about that very gesture of honesty, after so many years, seemed to calm him. By the time he was done, Ben was a different man.
Here is what he said.
I’ve often wondered, when or if I ever told his story, how I’d structure it, where I’d begin, whether I’d withhold certain details until the end to build suspense, or spill it all, as it were, from the beginning. This is the usual writer’ dilemma. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, only I know that before I elucidate what actually happened that Thanksgiving, I first have to tell you something about Anne.
She was a very strange woman, in some ways seductive, in others weirdly repellent. Even when I was a little boy back in Bradford—you may remember her mentioning this—she used to give me massages. I mean, here I was, nine years old or something, and every time my parents had a party she’d be sitting down next to me on the couch offering to give me a back rub. Nine years old! And when she gave me those back rubs, I have to say, there was something in her touch that was much more than motherly. That was frankly erotic. Not that she ever touched my dick or anything; she’d just, now and then, run her fingers very lightly over my arms, so lightly that the hairs stood on end; or she’d let her hand dip for a second down to the waistband of my underpants. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. In fact, as I got older, I started to look forward to her coming over, because I hoped that when she did, she’d give me a massage. She didn’t always. It was really a question of her mood, or how drunk she was. Once I hit puberty I even started plotting how I might get her alone, because I was convinced that if we could just be alone together for a while, she’d go the whole nine yards and jerk me off. That was as far as I let my fantasy go. I never imagined her blowing me, or my f*cking her. I had my first orgasm thinking of her giving me a massage, reaching under the waistband of my shorts and touching my prick. Just touching it, very lightly. That’ still such a potent scenario for me I’ve paid prostitutes to enact it. It’ funny, I’ve had a fairly rich sexual life, I’ve had lots of experiences with lots of different kinds of women—and yet even today, nothing excites me more than getting a massage from a woman who’ older than me. And now it’ almost comical, because as / get older, the woman has to get older, too, in order to make the thing work. Which means, what, that when I’m eighty, I’m going to have to find a woman who’ a hundred? And when you think that when all this started, Anne was younger than I am today . . .
Then we moved away from Bradford. I entered puberty. My voice changed.
In Wellspring, I started noticing girls at school. There was no question but that with their firm breasts and flat stomachs, they attracted me much more viscerally than Anne ever had. Still, she’d left her mark on me. For instance, after Mark went away, I was plundering in his closet one day when I found a copy of Hustler, which I started masturbating with. There were naked women with their legs spread, but there was also a sort of tableau vivant, a photo narrative, involving an older woman and a male prostitute. In the last photograph, the prostitute washes his genitals in the sink while the woman lies on the bed in fishnet stockings and garters, smoking a cigarette. I used to gaze at that photograph for hours. Hours. I studied it. I thought about Anne. The woman in the picture—her eyes had that same look as Anne’, a look of dissipation and the temporary abolition of a hunger, but not of any real satisfaction. And also recklessness, as if there were nothing she wouldn’t try once.
I still have the magazine, by the way. I can show it to you any time you like.
And then one day, rather out of the blue, my mother announced that Anne would be coming to visit us over Thanksgiving, with her new husband.
Well, as you can guess, the news of her imminent arrival provoked a violently mixed reaction in me. I was scared and excited at once. I wondered if she’d pull the old massage trick again, and if she did, if I’d still want her to. I was pretty sure I did—and yet a part of me worried that there was something wrong with wanting that, that I ought to be wanting only to get to third base, as we used to say, with Angela Longabaugh. And then when Anne did show up, the fact that she looked so awful—you remember, so sort of blowsy and bloated—only addled me the more. Because even with her looking like that, the fantasy hadn’t lost any of its intensity, and by this point I was so obsessed with the fantasy that Anne’ condition hardly mattered. Or rather, it mattered only to the extent that Anne was the conduit of the fantasy. Does that make sense? She could have weighed three hundred pounds and had boils, and still it would have had to be a massage, it would have had to be Anne. Once it had been lived out, I could forget it, forget her. But I had to get it out of my system first.
And then there was Boyd. I have to be honest, from the get-go, his presence flummoxed me. Whereas Clifford was this big guy, a real football-player type, but also sort of distracted all the time, not quite there—the kind of guy who chronically buttons his shirt wrong—Boyd was so perfectly put together it was scary. Also, he had this way of smiling at you that creeped you out and excited you at the same time—a sort of childlike grimace, inane, yet also hypnotic. I’ll be honest with you, I thought he was a handsome man. Somehow he didn’t look like a writer. For one thing, his posture was perfect. Whereas most of us have bent spines and flabby asses from sitting all these years at desks, his back was as straight as a ruler. And he smelled good—not like cologne, more like spices. Cloves, cinnamon. He smelled just like those goddamn notebooks. Everything about him was clean, even his mustache, which always looked as if he’d just shampooed it. He was so gentlemanly, I think it rather floored my mother. Those weren’t years when it was fashionable to espouse chivalry or decorum. Men were supposed to let it all hang out, while a woman, if a man opened a door for her, she was supposed to belt him in the chops. In this regard, Boyd was totally anachronistic, and if he got away with it, it was because he was something else, too: He radiated this intense virility that women responded to almost without fail. My mother certainly did.
Anyway, you can imagine how stunned I was when he took such an interest in me. I mean, you have to understand, at this point, in terms of my writing, no one, except maybe my brother, had ever given me even the slightest hint of encouragement. I was really on my own. My mother tried, but there was something so automatic about her praise, I couldn’t take it seriously. My father just corrected my grammar. Boyd, though—from the minute he found out that I wrote, he treated me like a real writer. And this was fantastic, addictive. He talked to me about my poems in a way that implied he was actually interested in them, not just humoring me. And when I got to read aloud after him—well, I only wished Mark could have been there, because he would have been glad in a way that the others weren’t. Mark was always good to me in that regard.
Of course, the poem I read was crap. I don’t have to tell you that. Even so, Boyd applauded, and because he applauded, my mother did, and then everyone else. And then after I had finished, it was as if he was so high on the whole thing, he just wanted to keep talking about writing, so we went to my room. He took his shoes off. I remember I put Joni Mitchell’ album Clouds, which I’d just gotten, on the record player and then took it off again immediately, because how could we discuss literature with Joni Mitchell wailing in the background? Also, it had suddenly occurred to me that my fondness for Joni Mitchell might impugn me in his eyes, make me seem less like an authentic poet. So I put on a recording of the Enigma Variations that Mark had given me instead. This was the only classical album I owned.
We sat on the floor and—well—he tore my poem apart. I mean, just tore into it. He exposed everything that was wrong with it, every technical infelicity, every tonal misstep. Nothing got past him. He pointed out where I was bombastic and where I overwrote. And then, after he’d raked me over the coals, he showed me the lines (there were maybe three) that he actually thought were good, that in his opinion suggested I might really be a poet. Of course, coming from anyone else, I would have found that kind of criticism infuriating. I would have rejected it out of hand. But Boyd, because he wasn’t just giving me unmitigated praise, the way my mother did, because he actually seemed to have thought about the poem, I had to listen to. It was really kind of exhilarating. And of course his instincts were unbelievably sharp. It wasn’t at all like being told by my father, “You use lay where you should use lie in the third stanza.” It was more like being told, “This line has life in it, this one doesn’t.” And then, as soon as he’d told me, of course I saw that he was dead on target. And so I took him absolutely at his word. It was the real deal.
There was something exciting about just sitting next to him, something warm and alive and responsive even in his posture. The thing about Boyd—I’ve thought about this so much since!—is that he might have been the most physical human being I’ve ever met. That’ not very precise. What I mean is, in him the whole body/mind duality seemed to melt into irrelevance. Even his name was an anagram for body! And when he wrote, it was as if the prose poured, literally, from his fingers. The notebooks were amazing in that way. He barely ever revised, or deleted anything, or even crossed anything out. The prose just—well—flowed. He wrote the way most of us piss! The way he described it, writing, for him, was akin to going into a trance, and then transcribing what he heard. Yes, he did research—but not nearly so much as you might think! Later, when I read his books carefully, I found mistakes everywhere—factual errors, misquotations and misattributions, a thousand little inaccuracies that seemed so lame I could hardly believe he’d let them slip by. For instance, in Gonesse, he has someone meet Proust at a party three years after Proust died. He mixes up Schubert with Schumann. He even says the Champs-Elysees is on the Left Bank! The problem wasn’t that he wasn’t well informed—he read an enormous amount, and he actually knew much more about European history than I do—but he never took notes. He relied on his memory, which was, to say the least, fallible. And because he radiated such self-confidence, and the package was always so well put together, his editors never questioned him or checked up on him for accuracy. They took it for granted that he knew exactly what he was talking about. We all did.
In any case, to get back to Thanksgiving night—we were sitting there, Boyd and I, he’d just finished reading from his novel and we were listening to “Nimrod” a second time through (he had his eyes closed and he was smiling in that blissed-out, slightly goofy way of his) when suddenly there was a knock on the door. It opened, and Anne walked in. She looked at us, and she said something like, “Come on, Jonah, it’ time to go to bed,” and dragged him up off the floor. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that—on the one hand, the way she just barged in like that reignited the massage fantasy, because it made me wonder if she might come back in the middle of the night when I was alone. But she was also putting an end to an experience that was for me as close to sacred as any I’d ever known. I sensed that Boyd resented her interrupting as much as I did. “Good night, Ben,” he said, “it’ been a pleasure talking with you. Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow.” I said, “Good night, Mr. Boyd. Good night, Mrs. Boyd.” Then they went out, shutting the door behind them.
And here’ the thing: He left the notebooks. I was going to chase after him, but their door shut, and then I heard them talking in what I can only call loud whispers. Arguing, I think. So I decided to wait and give him back the notebooks in the morning. I got into bed. The light in the bathroom came on and someone walked in. I heard water running from the taps, whispering, a toilet flushing—all those intimate sounds of a couple sharing a bathroom, sounds that other people shouldn’t ever hear.
I remember that you stayed at the house that night. You were gone when I woke up the next morning. I suppose my mother must have hustled you out early. When I came into the kitchen, the Boyds were sitting with her at the tulip table, drinking coffee. Anne was in this rumpled housecoat, what my Jewish grandfather would have called a shmata, whereas Boyd—well, you can probably imagine how Boyd would have been dressed: He had on a sort of old-fashioned paisley patterned dressing gown, with a tasseled cord around the waist, slippers, and, if you can believe it, an ascot. I don’t know where my father was—at school, or out in his office, seeing a patient. He saw patients at the oddest times, Sunday evenings, or at six A.M. Daphne must have still been asleep. I poured myself some cereal, and sat down with them, and everyone started asking me if I’d slept well. Then my mother said she had a favor to ask me. Because she and Anne wanted to practice, she wondered if I’d mind “taking care” of Mr. Boyd for the afternoon. That was the phrase she used—"taking care.” And I said that of course I’d be glad to. Why not? I longed for more time with him.
So then my mother and Anne headed off to the piano, and Boyd and I got dressed, and met again in the study. “You left these in my room,” I said, handing him the notebooks.
He looked at them as if he hardly recognized them. “Did I?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Oh, thank you, then,” he said, and took them from me. “But don’t tell Anne. She’d kill me. This will be our little secret.”
We went out onto the back porch and then walked down into the garden. It was a gorgeous morning. You could see almost all the way to the Pacific. You don’t get mornings like that much anymore. Boyd now had his notebooks—it seemed that he carried all four of them with him everywhere—and I had this sort of blank book in which I wrote poems and pasted pictures I’d cut out from magazines—psychedelic drawings, photographs of Joni Mitchell. Sixties shit. I’d bought it at the hippie shop on Connectisota Avenue. And Boyd was very curious about this book of mine, I guess because it reminded him of his own notebooks. So I took him down into the barbecue pit, which was my favorite place in the garden, and we sat together on that sort of built-in brick bench thing and flipped through the pages of my book, looking at the pictures and the poems. He read them and critiqued them. Once again, he was very hard. Two he told me flat out to throw away. But one he really liked. He actually loved it. It was a very simple little poem, about an airplane landing. And this kind of confused me, because the truth was, I didn’t think much of this poem at all—I’d just sort of dashed it off, unlike some of the others which I’d really labored over—but even so, I was absolutely prepared to trust him. The question now was, what more could I ask of him, or expect of him? Would he offer to send my poem off to some editor he knew at a poetry magazine? Would he write me letters of recommendation? If I sent him more poems after he got back to Bradford, would he consider it presumptuous, or let the poems sit on his desk and never read them? Or would he be glad? I had no idea. At that age, you tend to assume—at least I did—that the world is full of codes and systems that everyone but you understands perfectly. And not only that, but that everyone else assumes that you understand those systems just as well as they do. And rather than admit your ignorance, you feel obliged to pretend you’re completely at ease, when in truth you’re completely at sea. What was going on here? What were the rules? Were there rules?
It was nearly noon. Off in the distance I could hear the piano—my mother and Anne hammering away at something, the way they did every Saturday morning. Oh, I’m sorry, that was you. And farther off, Ken Longabaugh raking leaves. And a car rounding the bend. It was odd—every noise that came to me was so much itself that today I can remember precisely what the world sounded like that morning, even though it was thirty years ago. The birds and the dryer tumbling. And then Boyd arrived at the last page of my little book, and closed it, and laid it on my lap. He looked me in the eye. I was too embarrassed to meet his gaze.
Very gently he put his arm over my shoulder.
“So what would you like to do this afternoon, Ben?” he asked.
I had a terror of tests in those days. I’ve never done well on them. Standardized tests especially were a nightmare for me, because they always seemed to represent a roadblock to my getting what I wanted—into the “mentally gifted minor” program, or into Wellspring. And now I was being asked a question for which I was sure I was expected to come up with some correct response, as in a test. And I was afraid that if I failed to come up with the correct response, I would somehow be cast out into the wilderness. Only I had no idea what the correct response should be.
That was when the idea of the arroyo hit me. At the arroyo, there was a lake with boats and nature trails that you could follow, and lining its perimeter were some good examples of thirties architecture. This meant that if Boyd wanted to sightsee, I could show him things. But if he wanted to talk more about my poems, or his novel, we could do that, too. So I suggested the arroyo, and to my relief, his smile broadened, and he said, “What a marvelous idea! We’ll go in my car.” My only clue as to how he hoped to spend his afternoon was that when lunch ended, and we got ready to go, I noticed that in addition to a Coke that my mother had given him, he was carrying the four notebooks.
Around two we drove down to the arroyo. It was one of those beautiful autumn days that are bright but a little brisk, so that you have to wear your jacket but when you turn your face to the sun it warms you. We sat on a wooden bench, and he read some of his novel aloud to me—nearly the entirety of the second notebook. It took close to two hours. I kept waiting for him to stop, and he never did. Then when he got to the last page, he asked me what I thought, and when I told him I liked it, he must have taken this as leave to go on, because he immediately picked up the third notebook and started reading from that. By now I was about to go mad from restlessness. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and we were supposed to meet Anne and my parents for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and I had to go to the bathroom. But he just kept on reading, never getting hoarse or needing water, utterly oblivious to my squirming, until finally he reached some dramatic juncture—the end of the middle section, I think—at which point he announced that he had to take a whiz and hopped up and went to look for a toilet. Even though I had to go too, I didn’t follow him, for fear that I’d be pee-shy around him. Instead I crept into the woods and went against a tree.
When he got back, to keep him from reading even more—which he would have been totally capable of—I asked him how close he was to being finished with the novel. He said that he only had two chapters left to write—and then proceeded to explain to me, in excruciating detail, just what those two chapters were going to consist of, how he intended to tie up the different plot threads, the various denouements for which he’d already been making preparations, scattering little setups all through the book, the importance of which the end would thrillingly illumine. And as he talked, he got more and more excited. He even told me what he planned for his last line, which would be a repeat of the first line: To make love in a balloon . . .
It was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had. The more he talked, the less relevant I became. His interest in me was completely obliterated. He heaved forth all these ideas of his in this way that totally discounted my existence, and I became bored and irritated and, in a curious way, resentful. Not that I could have given him any more of my poems to read—I’d already given him all I had. Still, having been deprived all my life of that kind of attention, and then getting such a massive dose of it from Boyd, I thirsted after it more than ever. I wanted him to tell me again how wonderful my airplane poem was. But he just talked and talked about that goddamn novel of his, and as he did, I could see him gradually disappearing from the arroyo, from the bench, from me, becoming more and more remote from everything that had any physical reality, until it seemed that I could have gotten up and walked away and he wouldn’t have even noticed that I was gone.
He had laid the notebooks down next to him. He seemed so totally unconscious of their presence there that suddenly I understood why Anne had gotten so furious at him upon their arrival. I wondered: When we got up to go to the Chinese restaurant, would he remember to take them with him? And if he didn’t—if he just left them on the park bench —then what would I do? Alert him? Or just say nothing, walk away with him and see how long it took before he realized what he’d done? I have to admit, there was a part of me that was sorely tempted to stay silent. Something about that kind of obliviousness really brings out the sadist in people. Also, watching to see whether he’d forget the note books made for a kind of mesmerizing game: It was like a scene in a Hitchcock movie in which someone has left some crucial note in a hotel room, and the heroine is walking around picking things up and putting them down, and you’re wondering if she’ ever going to notice the note. But in the end, he didn’t forget them. Oh, he did at first—he started to walk away without them—but then, just a few feet from the bench, he stopped in his tracks, stared into space for a minute, and ran back to retrieve them.
About the conversation at dinner that night I recall very little. I was in too bad a mood. I think I made a point of refusing to eat anything. I could be very difficult about food in those days. We were sitting at a round table with a lazy Susan in the middle piled with much more stuff than our group of five could possibly have consumed—kung pao chicken and lovers’ shrimp and lo mein and a whole sweet-and-sour fish. There were a bunch of empty chairs, and Boyd had put his notebooks down on one of them. Now I watched them as I had in the park. Once again I wondered if he would forget them. Boyd himself was very quiet, as was Anne—maybe she’d been drinking—and my mother, in her usual way, was trying to fill up the silence with chitchat. She always felt it was her responsibility to keep the sociability flowing. And then we were finished eating, and the waitress took the masses of leftover food off to the kitchen to pack up. We opened our fortune cookies—mine, I remember, said, “Great things are in store for you"—and my father put his credit card on top of the bill, and my mother went off to the bathroom, presumably to claim a few minutes of tranquility and isolation for herself. Boyd still looked as if he was in another world. There was no more tea to drink.
Soon the waitress came to leave the boxes of leftovers and to take the bill and the credit card: A few minutes later she brought a slip for my father to sign. My mother returned, freshly perfumed. We all stood. And this time—I’ll never forget it, Denny—this time it did happen, just like Anne had warned us: Boyd walked away from the table without the notebooks. And I just watched him. I waited for him to catch himself, as he had at the arroyo. I hoped he would. But he just strolled serenely toward the door. My parents went through, and so did he. Sailed through. The door shut behind them.
I turned around, to verify that the notebooks were still on the chair. They were. I looked at them, and as I did, it dawned on me that someone else was looking at them too: Anne. She raised her head, and our eyes met.
It was all over then. Because, you see, not only had she seen that Boyd had left the notebooks behind, she’d seen that I’d seen that Boyd had left the notebooks behind; and more than that, she’d seen that I hadn’t said anything. Just as I’d seen that she hadn’t said anything.
I think that at that instant a contract was sealed between us—one the repercussions of which, the real repercussions of which, I’m only now beginning to feel. They were all out in the parking lot, Boyd and my parents, and of course those notebooks might as well have been molten, the way they were glowing before us, there on the chair.
That was when she winked at me. It was the first seductive thing she’d done since her arrival. She winked at me, stole back to the table, picked up the notebooks—I was surprised they didn’t burn her fingers—and shoved them into the enormous, shapeless handbag that she was carrying. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered. And then she grabbed me by the arm, and together we walked out to the parking lot, to the cars.
I rode home with my parents. My mother asked how my afternoon with Boyd had gone, and I said that it had gone fine. Then in the front hall she asked Boyd if I’d been a good host, and he said, “Tremendous,” and then she asked what time he and Anne needed to get up in the morning, and if they needed her to wake them. He thanked her but explained that he’d brought a portable alarm clock. Anne was making a drama of stretching her arms and yawning, so we all said “good night” and headed off to our separate rooms. Boyd, so far as I could tell, still hadn’t realized he’d left the notebooks at the restaurant, and Anne hadn’t said a word to him about having grabbed them after the fact. I assumed she would tell him gloatingly, once they were alone.
“Sweet dreams,” she said to me, as I drifted into my room—and then, for the second time, she winked at me.
“Good night,” I said.
“Good night,” Boyd said.
I didn’t brush my teeth. I climbed straight into bed. The light in the bathroom went on, as it had the previous night; I listened to the now familiar sounds of conjugal ablutions. Then the light went off again. Their door to the bathroom closed. I hadn’t locked mine—whether that means anything I leave it for you to decide. Now the house was silent, except for the pipes, which gave out occasional, comforting groans.
About half an hour later I heard a clicking noise. I sat up in bed. Someone had come into my room from the bathroom. This didn’t in and of itself surprise me: On some level I must have expected a visitor from that quarter. The question was who the visitor was going to turn out to be—Anne or her husband.
It was Anne. Finger to lips, she sat down on the edge of my bed. As in the old days of the massages, she rested her hand on my stomach. She was wearing a nightgown as shapeless as her bag, which, strangely enough, she had also brought with her. She smelled of cold cream and cigarettes. Over my face she hovered, her hair pulled back and rubber-banded, smiling at me in that same dewy way that her husband had, and that had so rattled me. Perhaps she’d picked up the habit from him.
In a whisper, she started to talk. She talked almost as much as Boyd had, back at the arroyo. She told me that she was “fed up to here” with him. She told me that she often woke up in tears during the night, wondering if leaving Clifford and marrying Boyd had been a terrible mistake. Because, she said, almost from the day of their wedding he had ceased to treat her with affection. His work consumed him to such a degree that most of the time she felt as if she were merely a drudge, her duty in life to wash his clothes and make his bed and prepare his dinner. “And he can be violent,” she added. “Oh, no one believes it, because in public he’ always the perfect gentleman, not a hair out of place. He would never dream of making a scene in public. But then when we’re alone, the smallest thing sets him off. This morning, for instance—I’d gotten dressed, and was getting ready to go play the piano with your mother, when suddenly he started . . . Well, just staring at me in this awful way that made my heart race. ‘What’ the matter?’ I asked. ‘I can’t believe what a frump you’ve turned into,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘You mean you haven’t noticed?’ he said. And then he laughed in this horrible way and said, ‘If you can’t see it for yourself, I’m not going to tell you.’ I went into the bathroom and peered into the mirror, trying to figure out what was wrong. But I couldn’t. So I went back into the bedroom and said, ‘Please, Jonah, for God’ sake, tell me what’ wrong.’ Then he made this noise of disgust, grabbed me really quite roughly by the arm, and dragged me back to the bathroom. And then he showed me, in the mirror, that there was this stain on my blouse. This really quite tiny little stain. And he explained very calmly that unless I changed my blouse, he wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. No one else would notice, he would do it so subtly; still, I’d feel it.
“I changed my blouse, and the whole time he lectured me about how fat I was, how I’d let myself go. He hated the first blouse I put on because it was wrinkled. He hated the second blouse because it didn’t match my skirt. And on and on, until I didn’t have any blouses left. ‘Well, that last one will have to do,’ he said, ‘but really, Anne, this is absurd. You’re an embarrassment.’ And in the meantime my arm is aching, my right arm, because he’ wrenched it so badly, practically pulled it out of the socket.”
That same arm was now hovering over my diaphragm. Very casually—much as her husband had put his arm around my shoulder down in the barbecue pit—Anne started to touch me. She was talking and talking, and in the meantime her fingers were drumming my chest, darting now and then into the gaps between the buttons on my pajama top, brushing bare skin, once even tweaking a nipple. Of course, as you can imagine, I had a huge hard-on. How couldn’t I, what with all the anticipatory tension of that long day, and now the prospect of Anne finally making the massage fantasy real? And so she went on touching me, and went on about how cruel he was, and how unhappy she was, and how could he have the unmitigated gall to claim that he cared about that novel more than anything in the world—even more than her—and yet be so cavalier as to leave the only copy in the world at a Chinese restaurant? So that on top of everything else, his abuse and his coldness, now she had this anxiety to contend with, feeling that she had to watch out for him every second. And all the while her hand circling, circling, getting closer to my groin. I was so hard my balls had nearly disappeared; I wondered what would happen if—when—she touched my dick, if I’d come right away, and in that case, whether she’d be pleased, or annoyed and frustrated. Once again, it was rules and systems, codes that I assumed everyone else understood perfectly, the outlines of which I could barely make out in the shadows . . . I wanted it all to be over, and at the same time I wanted it to last for hours, this sweetly awful hovering on the edge of an abyss that was somehow also a bridge over an abyss . . . and what was on the other side of the bridge? Part of my not wanting it to end was fear of what was on the other side.
She was careful. She knew what she was doing. She got close, then moved away. Prolonging the pleasure—the first hand other than my own. And in the meantime the monologue never let up. “But tonight decided me,” she said. “What happened at the restaurant decided me. I’ve had it up to here with his recklessness. I’m going to teach him a lesson, Ben. And I need your help.”
Suddenly her hand stopped in its motions. I looked up at her. “Help?” I said.
You may recall that earlier I mentioned her having brought her handbag with her: that huge, shapeless handbag, so typical of its era, offering in its amplitude and ugliness a sharp rebuke to the little decorative pocketbooks of the fifties, those hard-edged patent-leather cylinders and shell-shaped clutches, designed to hold a Kotex and a lighter, that my mother carried with her to weddings. Feminism, in its early years, seemed to be all about refusals—to shave under the arms, to wear makeup, to wear a bra—and that handbag in a certain sense emblemized those refusals . . . Until that moment, when Anne lugged it up from the floor, I hadn’t really registered the fact that she’d brought it with her on a journey that had required her to tiptoe all of twenty feet from her bed. Now, however, she was pulling the four notebooks from its depths; balancing them on my crotch, right on top of my hard-on. I was so close to coming, the weight of them nearly pushed me over the edge.
I looked at the notebooks. Never had they seemed so potent, so pregnant with . . . what? Malevolence? Promise? The very color of the leather seemed to have changed, to have taken on the hue of lava. I looked at them. And then I looked at her.
“I want you to do me a favor,” she said. “I’m not going to give these back to Jonah. I want you to keep them.”
“Keep them?”
“Hide them. And then tomorrow, when he wakes up and realizes that they’re missing—if he realizes that they’re missing—you’re going to pretend you have no idea where they are. No idea at all. Everyone will go mad, your mother will tear the house upside down trying to find them. Still, you won’t say anything. You’ll even help her look. But you won’t find them. No one will, because you’ll have put them away somewhere no one would ever think of checking. Somewhere perfect. I leave it to you to determine the place. Somehow I suspect you already have a place.”
“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.