The Body Of Jonah Boyd

Two

NANCY WRIGHT “FOUND” me, as she found so many of her friends, at the hairdresser’. This was in November 1967.1 suppose I should say something more about what I was like at that time. I was twenty-eight, and had been working at Wellspring for just over a year. I was fat, with freckled, vigorous cheeks, and most of the time I wore men’ Oxford shirts and denim skirts with elasticized waistbands. I still do. Perhaps because of this, most people assume me to be a sexless spinster, or short of that a lesbian, when in fact I have always had a fairly easy time attracting men. Wives be warned: It is not necessarily the glamorous woman, the woman with the pronounced cheekbones and the red hair piled loosely atop her head, who is the femme fatale. On the contrary, the homely secretary may pose a graver threat to your domestic security. For there is often a great disparity between what men actually want and what they feel, for the sake of appearances, they should pretend to want. Thus, even within the deceptive realm of infidelity, one encounters secondary levels of deception. One of the married men with whom I had an affair, when his wife found a love letter he had written to me, insisted that it was for another woman—a more conventionally “pretty” woman—that the missive was meant. Others were glad to sleep with me, but would not be seen with me at restaurants. This attitude probably would have caused me greater offense had it not fit so well my need for privacy and independence. I was a creature too prone to passionate excess to thrive within the conjugal yoke. Affairs with married men better suited my character and disposition. The married men appreciated that I had no wish to interfere with their domestic stability. I appreciated that they were less likely to importune, to demand total loyalty, than would a conventional suitor. It was a system that worked well through a number of long affairs, including one with Ernest Wright.
And why, I now find myself trying to recall, had I gone to the hairdresser’ in the first place? I wasn’t in the habit of doing so—even then, I preferred to keep my hair short and to the point—only that week one of the other secretaries in my department must have put it into my head that I ought to “do” something with my hair, such as have it set. And so that Saturday, more to appease a sense of youthful insecurity than from any genuine enthusiasm, I went to Minnie’ Beauty Salon on Calibraska Avenue. I endured the ordeal of having my hair washed, cut, and then rolled with curlers, after which I was put to roost under one of the old-fashioned, kettle-shaped dryers. Next to me Nancy knitted. We had only met once before, at a department function.
“Hello,” she said. “Do you play piano?”
I thought I’d misheard her. “Excuse me?” I asked.
“Oh, it’ you,” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you under there. How are things going?”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Wright! Fine, thank you.”
“I hope Ernest hasn’t terrorized you too much.”
“No, not at all.”
“I’m only asking about the piano because I’m looking for a four-hand partner. Do you play?”
“Badly,” I admitted.
“Good, that’ just how I play,” she said, and dropped a stitch.
Ben was with her. I don’t know why. He must have been thirteen at the time. He was sitting near the window, scowling at Robert Graves’ Greek Myths. “Ben, say hello to Daddy’ new secretary, Miss Denham,” Nancy shouted.
Ben mumbled something.
“What was that?” Nancy called, so that people turned. “E-nun-ci-ate.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Ben screamed.
“No need to shout.”
“It’ not my fault that you can’t hear under that thing.” He returned to his book. In those days there was still an old-fashioned drugstore on Calibraska Avenue, with a lunch counter. Those customers who happened to have appointments at Minnie’ over the lunch hour made it their habit to order in cheeseburgers, BLTs, and the like, and eat them under the dryers. Now a delivery boy came through the door, bearing bags of food, and Minnie called out our orders.
“Chicken salad?”
Ben and I raised our hands simultaneously and were each handed a sandwich in wax paper. Already addled by Nancy’ interrogation, I unwrapped mine without ceremony and started gobbling.
Suddenly Ben put his sandwich down.
“What is it?” his mother asked.
“It’ not on toast,” Ben said.
“Well, the drugstore must have forgotten,” Nancy said.
“These things happen.”
“But I ordered it on toast.”
“Now Ben—”
“She has my sandwich!” he cried, pointing at me. I stopped chewing. And it was true; on closer examination, I saw that my sandwich was toasted. Clearly Minnie had mixed up our orders.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Here"—and realized that I had already eaten half.
What I didn’t know—what I wouldn’t learn until a few months later—was that among the many food phobias from which Ben suffered at the time was an irrational aversion to untoasted bread; he simply refused to eat untoasted bread, which he claimed was “germy.” Nor was he remotely gracious during the fretful parrying that followed. I apologized; he sulked. Despite his mother’ remonstrances, he would neither accept the remaining half of my sandwich, nor allow a new one to be ordered for him. “I’m so sorry,” Nancy said. “Go ahead and finish your lunch.” But of course mortification and pride forbade me from taking so much as a bite. Nancy couldn’t finish her grilled cheese, either. I wondered if I’d have to quit my job, or ask to be transferred to a different department.
Afterwards, she tried to make it up to me. “He’ a sensitive boy,” she said. “He writes poetry.”
“How nice,” I answered. In truth, I was thinking only that as soon as I could decently ask to be unplugged from the dryer, I would get out of Minnie’, never to return. Yet Nancy was not about to let me off so easily; she could be assaultive in her generosity, especially if she felt that she had a debt to repay. “Let’ do play together,” she urged. “You could come over on Saturdays, when you’re off work. I’ll make lunch afterward. Where are you from, by the way?”
“North Florida.”
“Do you live alone? Are you going home for Thanksgiving?
Come for Thanksgiving.”
“But—”
“Unless you have other plans. Are you going back East? To your family?”
I didn’t feel like explaining that I had no family, so I just said, “No.”
“Then it’ settled.” She wrote the address down on one of Minnie’ business cards. “Oh, and if you come early, we can try some four-hand. Too-da-loo.”
They left. I thought that I would wait a few days and then call to say I couldn’t come; that I had “forgotten” a previous invitation. But the next day at work, Ernest said, “So happy you’ll be coming to Thanksgiving. Nancy told me about running into you, and she’ tickled pink.” (Such locutions as “tickled pink” often slipped through the veneer of old-world severity that he affected, recalling his Midwestern childhood.)
“Dr. Wright,” I said, “really, it’ very sweet of you, but I wouldn’t want you to feel—from a sense of duty—”
“Do you often feel people ask you places from a sense of duty?”
“Yes. No.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it,” he said. “And perhaps we can talk about it more on Thanksgiving, hmm?”
Thanksgiving was the following Thursday. Per Nancy’ instructions, at eleven o’clock in the morning I made my way down the brick path to the front door, and rang the bell.
Daphne let me in. She was in her nightgown. Her long blond hair—which she rarely bothered to comb—gave her a look of careless prettiness, or pretty carelessness. “Mom, someone’ here,” she said through a yawn. “Come in.” And she led me through to the kitchen.
From the stove, Nancy waved a baster in greeting. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray next to a large pan filled with breadcrumb stuffing. There was a festive, roasting smell. I had dressed carefully—and all wrong, I saw now—in a dark blue suit and cream-colored blouse with a frilly collar: the outfit I had worn when I had gone to interview for my job. Nancy, by contrast, was wearing a muumuu patterned with wild green flowers that looked like they might bite your hand off, and orange flames shooting forth toward jagged peaks: the very embodiment of Florizona.
On subsequent Thanksgivings, the moment I arrived, Nancy would draft me into chopping something. This time, however, having accepted the bottle of wine I had brought, she instructed Daphne to “keep an eye on the bird,” and took me off on a tour of the house. In terms of detail, I absorbed very little that first visit, though I did notice the toy airplanes, and the piano, and that the furniture in the living room was strikingly “modern.” Nancy introduced me again to Ben, and for the first time to Mark, who was now a sophomore at Wellspring, with a bony, brooding face and a unibrow. They were sitting on the study sofa, thumbing through a book of Krazy Kat cartoons. By way of greeting, Mark looked up and gave me one of those frowns that can be so much more compelling and attractive than a smile. His very straight brown hair was parted in the middle and cut severely just below the ears, while Ben had shaggy, rather dry hair, paler than his brother’, and inclined to wave. Even so, he too had parted it in the middle. Like Mark, he had his left leg crossed manfully over his right, ankle on knee. They wore more or less identical outfits—pale Oxford shirts and flared jeans—but because Ben’ legs were so long in relation to his torso, his didn’t seem to hang on him properly. The jeans rode up, revealing a band of pale flesh just above the sock line.
We finished up in the bedroom wing. “I won’t subject you to Daphne’ chaos,” Nancy said, bypassing one closed door and opening another to reveal the master bedroom, which was utterly pristine, the enormous bed made up for the occasion with the “dress” bedspread, tailored from heavy slub linen. From here we walked out onto the back porch, which ran the whole length of the house and gave onto a vista of old oaks, red-leafed Japanese maples, and a few exotic fruit trees, including a guava. A very green lawn swept down to the pool, which had been built parallel to the barbecue pit; beyond that I could make out just the edge of the former koi pond, as well as some exuberant rose bushes. For the first but by no means the last time she told me the story of how she and Ernest had come to acquire the house.
There was a moment of spectacular quiet in which all you could hear was the remote trilling of a lark. “It’ very beauti-ful,” I said—ineptly, I thought—and Nancy, her breast rising with emotion, gave me a smile to suggest regal forbearance: noblesse oblige.
“I shall never live anywhere else,” she said. “When they take me out of here, it’ll be feet first in a pine box.” Then she lit a cigarette. “Well, we’d better be getting back to the kitchen, shouldn’t we?” And she walked me across the porch to the back door.
The kitchen was empty. “Oh, where is Daphne?” Nancy inquired of no one, and ran to open the oven. In those years supermarket turkeys almost always came with a little built-in thermometer that popped up when the meat reached a certain temperature; fortunately, we now discovered, the device remained unejaculated, which meant that even though Daphne had fallen down on the job, the meal’ ruination was not imminent.
In fact, Daphne was in her room. Through the locked door, Nancy shouted, “Daph! What are you doing? I asked you to keep an eye on the turkey! Do I have to do everything myself around here? And while you’re in there, do something with your hair. It looks like a rat’ nest.”
We returned to the living room, where she sat me down at the piano. “Let’ start with this,” she said, arranging some music on the desk. “It’ a baby transcription of Beethoven’ Eighth Symphony.”
The truth was, it had been several years since I’d sat in front of a piano. All through elementary school and high school, in our little town in Florida, my sister and I had taken lessons from Miss Busby, who lived with her own sister in the country and was paralyzed from the waist down. Her house was built from heart pine and had what was known as a “dog trot,” a long corridor through which a cooling breeze blew even on the hottest summer afternoons. But now it was almost a decade since I’d left Miss Busby, and my sister, and our little town. I’d followed a boyfriend to California, where he’d married someone else.
“Be patient with me,” I said, cracking my fingers. “I may be rusty.”
“Don’t do that,” Nancy said. “It’ll bring on arthritis.”
“I know. I shouldn’t. I won’t.”
“Now—one, two, three—” And we began.
That day we played for almost an hour. I was dreadful, though not as dreadful as I’d feared I’d be. And Nancy, to her credit, was patient with me, offering gentle pointers when I made a mistake, or lost my way. “Trust me, it’ll sound better next week,” she said as we finished, then closed the music desk, after which we returned to the kitchen, where Daphne, Mark, and Ben were playing Scrabble at the tulip table. This was one Thanksgiving tradition; another, more obscure in origin, was to play Edith Piaf records on the Harmon-Kardon stereo.
It all rather overwhelmed me. Until then, I had only experienced family life from a great remove—on television, or at the house of a great aunt in Tallahassee, to which my sister and I were sometimes invited out of pity in the years after our father ran away and our mother died. And now here I stood, an old maid in an inappropriately formal suit, while Edith Piaf sang “Je ne regrette rien” and teenagers laughed, and from the upper of the two wall ovens there wafted a smell of meat and onions and sage, and from the lower one a smell of nutmeg and pumpkin. Ernest came in, smoking a pipe. Most of the morning he’d been in his office over the garage. He was wearing a bow tie. With him was Glenn Turner, who had just finished his Ph.D. He too was smoking a pipe; he too was wearing a bow tie.
“You look like twins,” I said—the first casual remark I’d made all day. It brought a spurt of laughter from Daphne.
The rest of that day is a blur of yearning and dread: yearning to have had a different life, to have been Daphne, and grown up in that house; dread of the moment when politeness would compel me to make my farewells, and retreat to my dreary little apartment in Springwell. I volunteered to make the gravy, and to my surprise, my offer was accepted. Nancy complimented me on its smoothness. Despite being so skinny, Phil Perry, then already in his third year in the psych department, ate twice as much as anyone else, and was congratulated for it. The girl with the bangs in the plaid skirt told a long, boring story about her father losing his dog.
As for Ernest—he got drunk, and while everyone else was gathering in the living room for coffee, he cornered me in the kitchen and tried to kiss me. This didn’t surprise me. In those years, men took what opportunities they could get.
“Such a pretty little thing,” he said, nuzzling my ear.
“Dr. Wright, please!” I said—more because it was what I thought I should say than because I objected, or even cared particularly.
“When you typed that article for me last week, what did you think? You know the one I mean—”
“I just type. I think about typing.”
“Say the title.”
“ ‘Female Masturbation and the Electra Complex.’”
“Do you get excited when you read those words? ‘Female masturbation’? Say it again. Please.”
Ben came in, and we separated. I don’t know if he saw us. He gave his father a murderous stare.
Straightening my skirt, I returned to the living room. Ernest and Ben followed. Later, I drove back to my apartment in my new Dodge Dart. I had a lot to think about: not merely Ernest’ come-on, but Nancy’ weird avidity to win me as a friend. Why were they so interested in me? I was just a secretary. True, in other arenas of my life, I could conduct myself with confidence and grace, but back in those early days, interacting with members of the faculty made me shy. After all, these people had doctorates from grand universities—while I had only a high school diploma. Later, I would cease to be so easily impressed—I would learn that Ph.D.’ from Harvard could be blithering idiots, just as secretaries could be geniuses—but back then I was still naive. And so as I opened the door to my apartment, I found myself not only reviewing the events of the evening, but wondering whether behind the kindness the Wrights had shown me there might not lie some nefarious motive; might I perhaps have been the subject of some psychological experiment, my every action and reaction recorded, analyzed, assessed? Hidden cameras, Dictaphones in the potted plants, Glenn and Phil taking notes: Lying in bed that night, I let paranoia get the better of me. Probably the Wrights simply liked me, I reminded myself. Or felt sorry for me. I would have to get to know them better before I could say for certain.
Monday I was back at the office. I worried that Ernest might make some reference to our clinch in the kitchen, but he acted as if nothing had happened. “So I’ll be seeing you on Saturday mornings from now on?” he asked.
“If you’re home,” I said.
He was home. While Nancy and I played, he puttered around in the study, ostensibly fixing the stereo and alerting us every time one of us hit a wrong note, which was often. This time Nancy was less patient. As I would soon learn, the role into which she had conscripted me was one for which several professors’ wives had already auditioned and been turned down. Why I succeeded where they failed I still don’t know. Perhaps I simply buckled under more willingly to her domination; or perhaps she really did love me in a way she loved few others. Certainly in those early days of our friendship it seemed that her wish was to nurture and cultivate me, to bring me along in the world as if I were another daughter of that house. Nor can it be denied that each week she treated me more like Daphne. “Careful, Denny!” she’d shout, if I accidentally turned two pages at once; or if I had trouble with octaves—"It’ so simple, just look!” she’d say, and grab hold of my hands, smashing them into position against the keys. “I see now,” I’d say, and we’d try again, and again I’d fall apart.
“You’re just not concentrating. I never had these problems with Anne. We played so perfectly together, the harmonies—they were almost magical.”
“You must miss her.”
“We were the same size, we could wear the same clothes.”
“What did you talk about while you played?”
“Husbands. Things.”
There was no way I could have gotten into Nancy’ clothes. Nor could I talk with her about husbands, as I had none.
As the weeks passed, more and more Anne became the principal topic of our conversations: Anne and, more specifically, my failure to live up to Anne in almost every regard. In Bradford, she and Nancy had played five days a week—Mozart, some Brahms waltzes, a stab at Schubert’ “Grand Duo.” Because I worked, I could only manage Saturday mornings—a source of some annoyance to Nancy, though clearly not enough to induce her to go off in search of a partner with more time on her hands. Soon I began to catch on that my function was not, in fact, to improve. My function was to exalt, by my very incompetence, the true friend, Anne, swindled away by distance and Ernest’ ambitions. The race was fixed. By losing, I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and received as payoff a sense of inclusion that I pocketed as greedily as any bought jockey does the profits of his corruption.
Sometimes things got contentious between us. Nancy would ask me to help her load the dishwasher and then chastise me for not adequately rinsing the plates beforehand. “How many times do I have to tell you, Denny? If you don’t get every little bit of food off, what’ left will end up caked on. Look at what you missed.”
I made a remark to the effect that if you ended up having to wash the dishes by hand, what was the point of owning a dishwasher in the first place? This did not go over well.
“At this rate, I shudder to think what kind of household you’ll keep,” Nancy said, “that is, assuming you ever get married.”
On another occasion—a propos of nothing—she said, “Anne had such a lovely figure! Slender waist, graceful neck. You should lose a few pounds, Denny. Then you might get a boyfriend.”
It was the same as with Daphne and her hair—or so I told myself, as I tried to swallow back my hurt. For that was my method of justifying Nancy’ cruelty. If such abuse was simply part of how mothers treated daughters, then I should be grateful for it. This was what I had missed, and longed for. This was what it meant to be a daughter.
Still, I cannot deny that in my own subtle way, I gave as good as I got. Ernest was the linchpin in this. One Saturday in February, when Nancy had had to run out to deliver Ben to a make-up fliigelhorn lesson, he cornered me a second time, near the percolator.
“Such a plump little thing,” he muttered in my ear. “With all that filthy stuff you type for me, you must have dirty dreams. Won’t you tell me your dirty dreams?”
Of course, I could have pushed him away. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to push him away. But I didn’t. Instead I turned, placed my lips against his ear, and whispered, “I dream about you.”