The Body Of Jonah Boyd

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.”
“Don’t you mean you weren’t sure you’d want to see me}” But then she smiled again, and invited me inside.
I couldn’t go. I was late for class. Still, I let her press me into accepting an invitation to tea that afternoon. “Tea” seemed very unlike Anne. After my classes were finished I returned to the dorm, showered, changed my clothes. For some reason it seemed important that I make myself as presentable as possible. I arrived at her house like a suitor, or the son of an old friend pressed by his mother into service. I had bought flowers. Once again, she was wearing a sundress—a different one, red with large gold poppies on it. To my surprise she kissed me on the cheek, and then she led me inside.
From that day forward, Anne and I were friends—real friends—and during my Bradford years I visited her often. It turned out that the facade of the house—which she and Boyd had bought with the advance for Gonesse, just after their marriage—was deceptive; once you got through the door, depths of space were revealed at which the view from the street barely hinted. There was a big living room with lots of books in it, and also a sort of garden room that opened onto the backyard, with French doors looking onto a rose garden even more exuberant than the one in the front. This was where we would sit and talk on the occasions when I visited her. We’d drink tea, and she’d ask me about my life, if I had any girlfriends, how my writing was going. She never touched me, as in the old days. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed.
It took three of these little teas before the subject of her husband, and the notebooks, even came up. And when it did, she was the one who brought it up. I wasn’t entirely sure that I was glad. After all, to talk about the notebooks was to admit that they were real, and now that Jonah Boyd was dead, the fact that I still had them in my possession, cramped within their brick prison like the kidnapped girl in the movie, made me more uneasy than ever. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have ever said anything about them. But Anne was always braver than I was.
I remember that the weather was glorious that day. In addition to the tea, which was Earl Grey, and headily aromatic, there were cookies that she had baked herself. Oatmeal cookies. I loved oatmeal cookies. Under different circumstances—at home, for instance—I might have scarfed down the whole plate in a minute flat. Yet that afternoon I felt that I should be polite. No doubt this had something to do with Anne’ amazing transformation from slattern into the shimmering, almost haloed creature who now sat before me. I took one cookie, ate it as slowly as I could, and looked her in the eye.
“So have you still got them?” she asked.
I pretended ignorance. “Got what?” I asked.
“The notebooks, of course.”
I returned my attention to the plate of cookies. Nine remained.
For some reason I now felt that I could take a second cookie, and I did.
“Yes, I’ve still got them,” I said after a bite.
“I suppose you’d like to know why I never got in touch with you.”
In fact I didn’t particularly. Still, I couldn’t very well just tell her to cease and desist. So I nodded, and took a third cookie, and arranged myself into a posture of listening.
Though I can’t be sure, my guess today is that I was the first person—perhaps the only person—in whom Anne ever confided any of it, the story of what: had happened in the years between her visit to Wellspring and her husband’ death. “No doubt once I’m dead, I’ll rot in hell,” she said very matter-of-factly, as she sipped that delicious tea in that beautiful garden room on that sunny afternoon, with the roses outside the window and those cookies enticing me from their plate. “But does that mean I shouldn’t enjoy what’ left of my life? I don’t see why. Yes, I destroyed him. I murdered my husband. Not that I meant to. But at least I’m alive.
“I want you to know that it really was my intention, from the very beginning, just to teach him a lesson, to let him think he’d lost the notebooks and then, once he was good and sorry, surprise him with the good news that they’d been found. And then how happy he’d be, how grateful! As I must have told you, we weren’t very happy together. Jonah really was the most selfish of husbands. Whole days would pass sometimes during which he wouldn’t even talk to me—sometimes to punish me, but more often because he was just so lost in his writing that he couldn’t bother to acknowledge the existence of another person’ needs. And this made me sad. And furious. But then once the notebooks were lost—correction, once you and I stole the notebooks—everything changed. His entire personality changed. Back in Bradford he became not only docile, but genuinely affectionate—the way he’d been before we were married, when I was divorcing Clifford and our relationship was still illicit. Don’t get me wrong: The loss made him wretched. He really had adored his novel, and genuinely believed it was going to be his masterpiece. Whether that’ the case or not, I’m not sure. Maybe you can tell me, since no doubt you’ve read it by now.”
She lifted her head, reached into her purse, and extracted what appeared to be a cigarette but turned out to be a little plastic cylinder posing as a cigarette—a faux cigarette. This she placed between her teeth.
“In any case,” she continued, “I encouraged him to rewrite the novel from memory, and to his credit, he did try. In the old days it had been his habit to get up early and go to his office at the university to work, and now he resumed it. Sometimes I’d visit him there. From outside the closed door, I’d hear the pecking of the typewriter. He said he couldn’t bear to write in the notebooks anymore, even though he had a whole stock of blank ones. They reminded him too much of what he’d lost. Instead he typed, and then went instantly to make copies—a vain attempt to compensate for his earlier carelessness, too little too late. But his heart wasn’t in it, and despite his valiant efforts, he just couldn’t replicate the magic of the original novel. I don’t think any writer’ ever succeeded in doing that. Rather, he said, it was like warmed-over meatloaf. Like eating warmed-over meatloaf, day after day after day. But what he had written in the notebooks, what he had lost, was the most divine elixir, nectar of the gods.
“Remembering him saying that makes me miss my husband. Although it annoyed me sometimes, the truth was, I rather adored his crazy, inflated rhetoric. It was part of what made him so appealing—this boy from Texas who talked like Longfellow. In any case, after a month or so he gave up on his effort to rewrite the novel. He said he was just going to rest for a while, focus on teaching. And meanwhile his editor—a new editor, because the old one had been fired—was breathing down his neck to get her the manuscript, because earlier he had promised to be finished by February, and so they had gone ahead and put Gonesse into their fall catalogue. The publisher’ catalogue. He kept putting her off, promising to have it to her the next week, and then the next. I don’t know what he was thinking, only that he was forestalling what he saw as an inevitable and terrible confession, which would be tantamount to admitting to himself that the notebooks, and with them the novel, were gone for good. And of course I think he was also putting off facing the fact that what had happened would have some inevitable fall-out, that he might be asked to return the money he’d been paid, or fail to get tenure.
“Of course, this would have been the logical moment for me to call you, Ben. The pressure was really on—not only from Jonah’ publisher but from Bradford. I should have called you then and told you to do your stuff, to find the notebooks. Then Nancy could have phoned me up joyfully to say she was holding them in her hands, the wayward children ready at last to be returned to their parent. And then I’d have told Jonah, he’d have been overjoyed, and arranged for them to be sent back the fastest way possible. And the old life would have resumed . . . Yes, in retrospect, I see that that’ exactly what I should have done.
“So—why didn’t I? Not a simple question to answer.
“Well, first things first. I was a drunk, and drunks never think clearly. And yet more to the point, in his new state of mourning and contrition Jonah had become, as I said before, loving and affectionate and seemed to need me in a way that he never had. But if he got the novel back, would he continue to? Wasn’t it more likely that he’d revert to his old, ignoring ways? Was there even any guarantee that he’d start taking care with the notebooks? I feared he wouldn’t. It would have been the old life, and I didn’t want the old life. Before, when he was writing, Jonah would bound out of bed early every morning, sometimes as early as five-thirty, to write. I hated that. I was a light sleeper, and even though I’d want to get up with him, usually I’d be too hungover to make it out of the bed. I’d listen to him bustling around in the kitchen, listen to the car pulling out of the garage, and then I’d just lie there in a sort of anxious delirium until nine or so, when I’d stagger out of the bedroom only to find the house so unbearably empty and lonely that I’d have to pour myself some gin and orange juice and watch The Price Is Right. But now, of course, he had nothing to get up for, no reason to bound out of bed, and so he’d stay with me every morning, sleep late with me—and not just lie in the bed, but hold me. We’d spend hours and hours like that. It didn’t matter that we never had sex. The affection, the hugging and the languorous mornings—they more than made up for the lack of sex. Now he never found fault with how I dressed. He hardly mentioned how I dressed!
“I suppose you can guess what all this is leading to. One afternoon I came back from somewhere—the liquor store, probably!—and Jonah was in the living room, just over there, standing by the wet bar. You probably can’t tell, but in that corner over there, that used to be a wet bar. Today I don’t keep any liquor at all in the house, not even a bottle of cooking sherry, but back then we used to have every kind of booze you can imagine. Gin, vermouth, rum, whiskey, vodka, bourbon. And now Jonah, who had been dry for years, was standing at the wet bar, and methodically mixing himself a martini. He was doing it very professionally, too, almost like a bartender.
“He smiled when he saw me in the door. ‘Lovely wife,’ he said, ‘I’m just making myself a wee cocktail. Would you care to partake?’ Or something like that. And I just looked across the furniture at him.
“Something passed between us then. I knew he was considering his options very carefully. He wasn’t a stupid man. He understood that if he had one drink, he’d have another, and then another. He put the gin and the vermouth into a shaker with some ice. And he shook. And the whole time he was gazing at me, cow-eyed, as if he were about to burst into tears. And then he poured the stuff into martini glasses and handed me one. We sat on the sofa. He said, ‘ometimes it’ just too much, you know?’ I nodded. And then we drank.
“There’ not much more to tell. Things got bad very fast. He started showing up drunk to class, and was abusive to his students. One of them complained, and he nearly lost his job. But by then, of course, word of what had happened—the loss of the novel—had leaked out, or he’d confided it in someone, and the chair felt sorry for him. He let Jonah off with a warning.
“The ironic thing is, even though he could get in foul moods when he was drunk—dark, violent moods—still, I remember those last months before he died as among the happiest I’ve ever known. Never before had Jonah seemed so completely, so entirely in love with me. Nor I with him. We were husband and wife, but we were also what we had once been, illicit lovers, and we were also something new. Drinking chums. Drink really forges a bond. That’ why drunks like to hang out together. And we were classy drunks. I remember going out to the bookstore one day and rather jauntily buying a sort of cocktail cookbook. We used to read it together in bed. We’d prepare all sorts of exotic drinks for ourselves, the way other couples cook. Frozen things, things in pineapples with little umbrellas. The most divine bloody Marys. And every day I’d think, ‘Today I’m going to write to Ben and tell him to quote-unquote find the notebooks,’ and every day I’d put it off. And why not? What I was postponing was the end to my own happiness, a weird, dreadful sort of happiness, but a happiness nonetheless.
“Of course it ended anyway. It had to. The day Jonah died, I had a presentiment that something bad was going to happen. The rain was coming down in sheets. We were out of vodka. I’d suggested he not risk driving in that bad weather, but the suggestion was half-hearted, because the truth was, I wanted the vodka as badly as he did. He headed off, and I waited here, in the garden room. I watched the rain falling against the windows, listened to it drumming the roof. He didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back. I got dozy. Abstractly I imagined a car crash. But it was all dreamlike. And then the phone rang. The police.
“The shock of what had happened woke me up to what a freak I’d grown into. I realized that I might die too, if I didn’t change soon. Since that day I haven’t had another drink, or smoked a single cigarette. I feel better than I have since I was a girl.
“Does this seem horribly callous to you? I want something decent for myself. Even though I acknowledge my crime, I’m not prepared to spend the rest of my days on this planet doing penance for it. What good could come of that? Two lives ruined, instead of just one.”
She stood, picked up the tea things as well as the plate on which the cookies had rested. It was empty now except for a few crumbs. She put everything on a tray and carried it into the kitchen and then she came back, and sat down once again across from me.
That was when she said, “So what are we going to do about the notebooks?”