The Body Of Jonah Boyd

Thirteen

ANNE AND I stayed in touch for most of the rest of my time at Bradford. Not that we saw each other every day; on the contrary, sometimes weeks or even months would go by during which I wouldn’t hear so much as a word from her, or think about her—and then one morning, rather out of the blue, an image of her face would pop into my head, and I’d feel compelled to bicycle by her house; knock on her door. She always looked the same: curiously fresh, almost innocent, as if everything she had endured and perpetrated, rather than etching lines of age and corruption into her skin, had somehow renewed her youth. Or perhaps, like Dorian Gray, she had some gruesome portrait of herself hidden away in a cranny of that deceptively big house.
It wasn’t about sex. Sex never happened, or even came up. And though the massage fantasy lingered, at that point I wouldn’t have even considered mentioning it to Anne. She seemed too pure for that now, and anyway, I had by this point imprinted my longing, as it were, upon other women.
Sometimes we talked about the notebooks. Anne was always the one who brought the matter up. It seemed feasible to her, she said, that even at this late date they might be “found” without either of us coming under suspicion—in which case, she proposed, I could perhaps finish the novel myself (hadn’t Boyd told me his plans for the last chapters?) and she could send it to his editor, who could arrange for its posthumous publication. After all—out of kindness, she suspected—the editor had never asked that she return the money Boyd had been paid as an advance. A tax write-off, as well as a write-off to the conscience, saving the poor woman from having to live with knowing that she had forced Anne out of her home. This way, though, the debt could be erased, Anne said, in addition to which there was more money to be paid on acceptance of the manuscript, and even more to be earned from royalties—money, of course, that she would share with me. Divide with me. But I was wary of complying with the plan, not only because I feared, more than she did, being found out or accused of theft; also because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that only so long as I actually held the notebooks in my possession could I be sure of having any leverage with Anne. Yes, she had proposed that I could write the unwritten chapters—but who was to say there wasn’t another writer who could have fulfilled that task just as well? And for all I knew, Boyd might have told her everything he’d told me about the last chapters. So I demurred, changing the subject or putting her off every time the topic came up. And what could she do, when I demurred, but accept it? In a sense neither of us could really afford to make a move without the other’ cooperation—as long, that is, as the notebooks remained under my control. Once I gave them to her, on the other hand, she could easily double-cross me, either by doubting the miraculous coincidence of their suddenly turning up, or by going further and implying that I had stolen them—in which case I would be the one who had no recourse, as of course the notebooks would by then be in her possession. That wasn’t something I was prepared to risk. So I stalled, saying things like, “I’ll have to think about it,” or, “I’m not quite ready yet.” Nor was she pushy. In fact, I suspect that despite her insistent positivity, her determination to make the rest of her life as free of taint as the last years had been marred by it, some terrible guilt still plagued her. In some ways, to forget about the notebooks suited Anne as well as it did me.
Meanwhile, wrapped in foil and paper and plastic, they sat where I had left them, in their little cave. Whenever I went home, for Christmas or during the summer, I would check on them. Once or twice I removed them from their protective casing, examined them to make sure that no damage had been done by smoke or rain or mildew. Their resistance to the elements deepened my conviction that they possessed some sort of magical properties. For it seemed that no matter how many years they sat in that sooty chamber, each time I unwrapped them they still smelled as they had the Thanksgiving when Jonah Boyd had passed them around the table. They smelled like him—just as that Thanksgiving I had thought that he smelled like them.
Then I graduated from college. I moved to New York. Anne and I lost touch.
You must believe me when I say that it was not until many, many years later that the idea of publishing Gonesse as my own work even entered my head, and by then, of course, Anne was dead, and my father was dead, and my mother. I had written three novels of my own, none of which I’d been able to sell. Oh, I’d had bites. Editors are sadists, Denny. They love to say to a young writer, “I can’t buy your book as it is, but maybe if you fix this, or alter that, I’ll reconsider.” And so you fix this, and alter that—you do exactly what the editor has suggested—and what’ the reply? “Well, if it weren’t for this or that, the novel would be perfect, but as it is, it’ impossible, it will never sell.” As you can imagine, after a while that sort of bait-and-switch can become really infuriating. And I got it again and again. Maybe things would have been easier if I’d just met with swift and merciless rejection from the start—then, in all likelihood, I would have gotten the message and given up—but now it seemed that I was doomed to be forever tantalized, to have a remote if real opportunity perpetually dangled before my eyes, only to be withdrawn at the last minute.
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 wanted. 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.
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.
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