The Body Of Jonah Boyd

Six

ANNE’ GRAVY WAS lumpy. I say this out of neither jealousy nor anger, but rather because I am determined to report these events truthfully, and not veer from the perspective of what I witnessed—what I knew at the time. Anne’ gravy was lumpy, yet Nancy made a big fuss over it, saying that it was the best gravy she’d had in years, and asking what was her secret. All the while I sat in my usual place, two seats down from Nancy on the left, between Glenn and Phil Perry, who had arrived, as if by instinct, just as Ernest was cutting the first slice from the turkey breast. (Phil Perry was to me something of a nonentity in those years, which in retrospect I find frightening. That year the girl with the bangs was absent.)
I made no mention of it. I was very good. I even took a ladleful of the gravy myself, letting it dribble over my mashed potatoes, and pushing the little coagulated flour pellets to the side. Too much salt, too. All told, it was appalling gravy. It would have been a kindness if Nancy had said something to me to that effect, even just a few words in private, but she didn’t.
At dinner, the conversation focused once again on Jonah Boyd’ novel. It seemed that Ernest had filled Glenn in on what had happened, and now Glenn, too, was curious to learn more about these mysterious notebooks that Boyd had earlier mislaid—although, as Boyd now informed us, “notebook” wasn’t really the right term. “The Italian word is quaderna,” he explained. “They’re actually blank books, of the most fantastic quality, bound in leather. I’ll show you.” And he leapt out of his chair, returning a few seconds later with an exemplar, which he passed around. “I first found these maybe six years ago, in Verona. It was my Guggenheim year, and I was on my way back to France from Venice, when I happened upon this amazing little shop in the medieval quarter. Leather and paper goods. The owner was a very aristocratic lady, very beautiful and ancient, and wearing a pair of snow-white gloves. She showed these to me, and I really thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Works of art in themselves. So I bought up the stock—there were half a dozen—and ever since then I’ve had a standing order. Now I find I can’t write in anything else.”
“Excuse me,” Glenn said, “but do you mean that literally—that you cant write in anything else—or that you prefer not to?”
“To tell the truth, I’m not absolutely sure. So far, thank heavens, I haven’t found myself in a situation where I’ve had to do without.”
“But what if the stock ran out? Or the notebooks stopped being manufactured?” Ernest asked.
“I pray that shall never happen. But if it does, I suppose I shall have to make do with plain old legal pads, as in the old days.”
“It’ worse than he says,” Anne said. “Now he can only write with one pen. This very particular, very expensive Waterman fountain pen. He’ lost that, too, and had to replace it.”
“Aren’t the ways of writers fascinating?” asked Glenn, and handed me the notebook, which I inspected. The paper was gold-edged; the soft, cappuccino-colored leather gave off a scent of cloves. I passed it to Phil, who passed it to Ben, who opened it.
“Ben!” Nancy said. “Shut that at once! Mr. Boyd didn’t give you permission to read his novel.”
“Oh, but I don’t mind,” Boyd said. “He’ welcome to read it. I love to share work-in-progress. Actually, I was thinking that if you were all amenable, perhaps after dinner I could read some of it aloud.”
“Well, that would be wonderful,” Nancy said—her voice a little hesitant, though, as if she were debating the social suitability of the proposition. “Only please don’t feel that you have to.”
“So long as you speak up if you get bored. It’ important for writers to know when they’ve ceased to provide pleasure to an audience.”
“What is your novel about?” asked Daphne.
“A good question, young lady, though difficult to answer. I suppose,” he said after a moment, “that it’ about the conflict between the Apollonian desire to touch the sun and the forces that seek to suppress it, to push us earthwards—”
“It’ about balloons,” said Ben, who was reading.
Anne laughed. I craned to get a look at the pages in the notebook: creamy in tone, the blue prose unfurling like ribbon, with hardly a blot or crossing out to be seen.
“Now Ben, you’ve held onto that for long enough. Pass it to your sister,” Nancy said. “Besides, it’ rude to read at the dinner table.”
“He’ right, though, it is about balloons,” Anne said in a slur. “About a balloon crash, actually, that happened outside of Paris in the late nineteenth century.”
“How fascinating.” (Was Nancy relieved to learn that there was no way her sheets might enter into such a novel?) “I can promise you, Mr. Boyd—Jonah—we’ll be the first to buy it. I’m an avid reader myself—mostly biographies. I love history. And Ben, my youngest, is a poet. He’ very talented. He won a prize last year.”
“A poet!” said Boyd. “How wonderful.”
“Can I read one of my poems?” Ben asked.
“Oh, now, Ben,” Nancy said, laughing.
“What’ so funny? If he gets to read part of his book, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get to read one of my poems.”
“But Mr. Boyd is a professional writer. I’m sorry,” Nancy added to Boyd. “Sometimes Ben can be a little—”
“It’ no skin off my back,” Boyd said mildly. “If he wants to read, let him.”
“Yes, why not?” Anne agreed. “After all, youth should have its say.”
Ben—who had just handed the notebook, somewhat reluctantly, to his sister—looked imploringly at Nancy, who looked at Ernest, who was looking, rather unhelpfully, at the kitchen door.
Only later would I realize what a difficult moment this was for Nancy. The dilemma was this: Should she allow her child to read aloud his adolescent and sometimes asinine poetry, if by doing so he might bring embarrassment, even opprobrium, upon her? On the one hand, she didn’t want to discourage him. On the other—and despite her newfound penchant for making scenes at the faculty club—she was at heart a woman who believed in subscribing to the public forms; otherwise invisible arbiters might make derogatory notations in immense volumes from which nothing could be erased. And just as earlier she had feared Jonah Boyd mocking her sheets, now she must have envisioned him incorporating into one of his novels some humiliating sequence in which a boy read bad poetry while his lamebrain mother smiled on.
It was all too much for her, and she answered, I am sorry to say, with a muddle. “Oh, Mr. Boyd—Jonah—that’ so kind of you,” she said. “But Ben’ poetry . . . well, of course his father and I think it’ very good . . . Still, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to impose—”
“Yes I would,” Ben said.
Anne laughed, sputtering a little wine.
“I assure you, Nancy, it would be no imposition at all,” Boyd said. “Poetry comes as such a relief when you’re mired in prose. Besides, there can be something so—refreshing—about a young voice.”
Nancy looked doubtfully toward Ernest. “Well?”
“I don’t see what harm it would do.”
She smiled tightly. “All right, in that case, I guess there’ no problem, is there? Thank you, Jonah. Ben, say ‘thank you’ to Mr. Boyd.”
“Thank you. Can I go now and decide which poems to read?”
“But we haven’t had dessert. And you said ‘poem,’ not ‘poems.’”
“I don’t want dessert.”
“Just wait until after dessert. Denny?”
Nancy got up and went into the kitchen. I followed.
“Oh, I just don’t know about this,” she said as she arranged the pumpkin pie on its plate. “I mean, do you think his poetry’ any good? I hope Boyd’ not expecting some little genius. It’ not that I’m not supportive of Ben, it’ just—well, you don’t follow up a dinner of beef Wellington with Twinkies, do you?”
“I wouldn’t worry. It’ just a casual thing. And who knows? Maybe Boyd will think Ben is a genius, and take him under his wing, and the next thing we know, he’ll be the toast of New York.”
“Dear Denny, so young and so idealistic,” Nancy said, plunging a spoon into a gallon of vanilla ice cream. That shut me up.
The desserts were now ready—in addition to pumpkin pie, banana cream pie, apple pie, and a chocolate pecan pie that Daphne had made. We returned to the dining room, bearing trays piled high with plates as well as the tub of ice cream. Nancy sliced. I scooped.
No one talked much, except to compliment the pies.
“Can I go now?” Ben asked after a few minutes.
“May I go now,” Nancy corrected. “And yes, you can.”
He dashed from the table.
“Well, who’ for coffee?” Various hands shot up. Nancy hustled off to make the coffee—Boyd said he would help her—and the rest of us retreated to the study, where Phil went to work arranging chairs, and Ernest set up a makeshift lectern, using a plant stand and a dictionary holder. I sat on the sofa, next to Daphne and Glenn. Anne, holding a fresh glass of wine, had claimed a spot next to Ben, who was sitting on a sort of daybed pushed up against the bookshelves, going through his sheaf of poems. “How you’ve grown!” she said, tousling his hair. “Remember when you were just a little tyke? I used to give you back rubs.”
He didn’t answer.
“You used to squirm around and say it tickled, but then you’d relax into it,” Anne said, her fingers moving to his shoulders.
“Stop, I’m trying to concentrate.”
She laughed. As the evening wore on, her laugh had grown harsher, with an almost granular edge. And now Nancy came in, apronless, and bearing a tray with cups, saucers, and spoons piled on it, followed by Boyd with his four notebooks, the coffee pot, the cream, and the sugar: an accident waiting to happen that, fortunately, didn’t. Nancy poured and handed out cups. “Might I just squeeze in?” she asked when she was done, insinuating herself into the narrow space that separated Anne from Ben.
“Be my guest,” Anne said. “By the way, Nancy, I love those sheets.”
“Oh, thanks.”
Daphne rolled her eyes.
“Well, shall we begin?” Ernest ejected Little Hans from the leather rocker and claimed it for himself. “Who goes first?”
“Oh, you, of course, Jonah,” Nancy said.
“I don’t know, I think my wife is right, we should let youth have its say.”
“Or perhaps it should be age before beauty,” Anne said, this time laughing so loudly that her laugh turned into a coughing fit.
Giving her a look that might not have been affectionate, Boyd stepped to the lectern, and opened one of his notebooks. “I think I’ll simplify matters by reading from the first chapter. That way I won’t have to go through all the rigmarole of explaining who everyone is and what’ already happened and so on.” He cleared his throat. “By the way, the novel is called Gonesse. As our young poet so astutely noted, it is about ballooning. I got the idea from some wallpaper I saw in Paris once—a ballooning toile de Jouy.” He gazed hard at the notebook. “Oh, and the hero—Agostinelli—was a real person. He was Proust’ chauffeur, and probably his lover.”
“Interesting,” Nancy said.
“All right, Chapter One.” Again, Boyd cleared his throat. And then, in that soothing if slightly cracked baritone, he read:
“To make love in a balloon . . .”
For all sorts of reasons that will later become obvious, I wish today that I could remember more about that reading. Many years have passed, though, and all that remains with me—aside from a general recollection of the story—is that line. To make love in a balloon . . . Already it was clear to me that Boyd, for all his foppishness, was a man who knew how to give pleasure to a woman. Anne had said as much in her letters, and I had seen it for myself, in the ease with which, when Nancy had reached to shake his hand, he had swept her into an embrace. And now here he stood, in the study, a room that had heretofore, for me, held not the slightest erotic connotations, reading aloud a description of his hero, Agos-tinelli, making love to a French noblewoman in the basket of a balloon five hundred feet above Paris: a splendid and literally panoramic set piece, in which the complex undoing of hasps and petticoats, the arranging of limbs within a confining and in no sense stable space, and the gymnastic difficulties involved in simultaneously keeping the balloon aloft and the woman in ecstasy, are juxtaposed with what seemed to me at the time to be fabulous descriptions of Paris as seen from the air, its waterways and churches, its towers and gargoyles and green patches of park swirling as the balloon gyrates in cold gusts of wind. As he read, Nancy blushed, while over Ernest’ face there stole a flush of amusement that intensified whenever our eyes met. I don’t think anyone had expected anything like this from Jonah Boyd, and later, I wondered if he had chosen to read that particular scene in order to shock us. To make love in a balloon . . . He read for a long time, for what seemed like hours. I didn’t get bored. I don’t think anyone got bored. Nancy’ face was responsive and alert. Ben, too, appeared rapt, as well as oblivious to Anne’ fingers, which were now stroking his neck. And then the balloon landed, and the noblewoman, rearranging her layered motley of undergarments, stepped out of the basket and into a waiting caleche, and Agostinelli, rather dispiritedly, went off to meet Proust.
Boyd closed the notebook. We applauded. “Oh, that was wonderful, thank you,” Nancy said. “You made it all seem so . . . real.”
“He did a lot of research,” Anne said with more than a touch of pride. “During his Guggenheim year. That was just before we met.”
“I hope it doesn’t seem—I don’t know—too historical novel-ly. You know, with that arid, over-researched, museumish kind of air.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Ernest. “In fact, if it hadn’t been for the sex, and the language, and the present tense, and I hadn’t known it was yours, I probably would have assumed that this was written at the same time that it took place.”
“Oh, I’m so glad! That’ a real compliment. Thank you.” Boyd sat down. Then there was a moment of uneasy silence, during which it seemed that something had been forgotten. And of course, what had been forgotten was Ben, who now coughed to remind the assembled of his place in the program. It did the trick. “Well, shall we hear from our young poet now?” Boyd asked.
“Here, here,” Phil Perry seconded.
Ben stepped up to the lectern. There was in his eyes a mixture of vitality and anxiety the likes of which I’d never before seen him exhibit. Little did I know how much that moment meant to him!
As for Nancy, from the instant Ben ascended, her back went rigid, and all pleasure drained from her face. She arranged her hands carefully in her lap. “He looks so handsome,” Anne whispered too loudly. “But he needs to work on his posture! Tennis would help.”
In imitation of Boyd, Ben cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m now going to read to you a poem called ‘Vancouver.’ It is dedicated to my brother, Mark Allen Wright.”
Nancy blanched. I could almost hear the words “Oh no” escape her lips.
Today I have the poem in front of me. Ben gave me a copy a few months before he died, at my request. It is a long poem, loosely based on “The Waste Land,” which at the time he was in the process of memorizing. It begins (and Ben began, that Thanksgiving):

April is not the cruellest month.
The cruellest month is July—

There was a sound, I thought, of stifled laughter, though I couldn’t tell where it came from. Ben glanced up. Then he returned his attention to the page. It seemed he had lost his place, so he started again.

April is not the cruellest month.
The cruellest month is July,
Bringer of drought or deluge,
Gray rainy afternoons when brothers leave.

A startled look crossed Ernest’ face. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that during all those weeks, the long drama of Mark’ exile, his younger son might actually have been listening; taking in every word.
Ben read on. The poem is very long, and divided into four sections, the first concerning (mostly) Southern California summer, and rainlessness, and “my father’ hose nosing soil / The thirst of which is never slaked.” Much metaphorical fuss is made, in the second section, over the Datsun’ lack of a reverse gear:

As if in kidnapping him
It was promising a one-way journey
From which he would never come back.

In another line, Ben writes that “Assuming there were no delays / They would arrive in Vancouver on time.” (That sort of redundancy, I am sorry to say, was typical of his poetry.) Part three brings the travelers to San Francisco, where they stop for the night, and encounter some rather ill-tempered mermen off of Aquatic Park. It turns out that they are suicides who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge:

We are the dead, we are the lost,
We are the mer-people of San Francisco Bay!
Entwined by seaweed, scales climb up our arms.
We watch for the next body to fall, always eager
To add another to our tribe!

At last, in part four, the travelers arrive in Vancouver. That Ben had at this point never visited the city, and knew nothing of its geography, seems not to have been any kind of deterrent to him in describing a rather fantastic landscape of hills and lakes and bridges, the sole occupants of which, apparently, are draft dodgers who spend their days staring through telescopes across the border at an America going about its business without regard to the suffering of its exiled sons:

In the supermarket, the housewives
Load their carts with canned cranberry sauce,
Canned pumpkin, canned gravy, frozen turkeys,
At school the children cut turkeys
Out of construction paper,
Make turkeys from clay,
Turkeys from papier-mache . . .

The poem concludes with a scene of such bathos that even the memory of its being read makes me grimace: In a bizarre ceremony that defies all laws of realism, brothers shake hands across a national frontier as clearly demarcated as a child’ drawing of the Berlin wall:

Ignoring the frowning guards,
He holds out his arm
And I take his hand, and in that squeeze there is Defiance of unjust laws, and a refusal to weaken.
I wish I could pull him across to me, but I know
That if I did, he would be shot.
And so I stay where I am,
Until he lets go, and walks
Sadly back into Vancouver.
Behind me Mother weeps.
We stay until he is out of sight,
And then we go home.

Ben stepped back. “Thank you,” he said. I looked around myself. To my amazement, Jonah Boyd began to applaud. And then Nancy applauded too, furiously, and Ernest, and Daphne, and then everyone else. I don’t know whether they were simply following Boyd’ lead, or responding to some imaginative vigor that the poem revealed, a vigor of which, curiously enough, its imprecision and ragged sentimentality and obliviousness to all rules of structure and concerns about accuracy might have been the ultimate proof. For there is this to be said about “Vancouver": Bombastic though it is, there is life in the thing. Alas Ben’ refusal, as always, to accept (much less contend with) the interfering laws imposed by logic, form, and the real world in the end shipwrecks him, rendering the poem, like all his poems, unpublishable and probably unreadable. But that didn’t matter to his audience on Thanksgiving eve 1969. After all, he was only fifteen. What they saw was an unsuspected promise, albeit one which it would take him many long years to fulfill.
The applause died out—and then, to my surprise, Anne was the first to stand. “Ben, that was wonderful, just wonderful,” she said, stumbling up to him and taking him in an embrace that opened Nancy’ mouth, as there was in it more than a touch of salaciousness. Anne’ breasts were squashed flat against his chest; she might have been grinding her hips. I wasn’t sure. In any case, Boyd saved the day. “Yes, wasn’t it?” he echoed, taking his wife’ hand and leading her back to the daybed, away from Ben. “Very exciting. Have you sent it to your brother?”
“No.”
“I think you should,” Nancy said. “Mark will be thrilled.
Moved.”
“I don’t want him to read it until it’ published,” Ben said. “I’ve sent it to The New Yorker.”
“Oh, The New Yorkerl If there’ one thing I admire in a young writer, it’ gumption. I myself stopped sending stories to The New Yorker fifteen years ago. I figured, after Bill Maxwell had turned down thirty-five of them, what was the point in wasting any more postage?”
“Oh, Jonah, don’t worry, Ben doesn’t really expect The New Yorker to publish his poem,” Nancy said.
“Yes, I do.”
“No matter . . . If they do, it’ll be wonderful, and if they don’t, it’ll be even more wonderful.” She clapped her hands together, apparently unfazed by the utter pointlessness of this remark. “Well, hasn’t this been a wonderful evening? And now who’ ready for more pie?”
“I thought maybe I could read a second poem,” Ben said.
“Now, Ben, one’ enough. We don’t want to tire Mr. Boyd. After all, he and Anne have had a very long day. They had to get up very early in the morning on the East Coast, which is the middle of the night here.”
“But I only want to read one more!”
Unfortunately for Ben the crowd was already dispersing, moving back toward the kitchen. “Sorry, honey,” Nancy said, and rested her hand on her son’ head.
He flinched it away. “It’ not fair,” he said.
“What’ not? You had your chance.”
“But I only read half as long as he did.”
“Well, Mr. Boyd’ a famous novelist. When you’re a famous poet, you can read twice as long, how about that?”
“I’ll tell you what, Ben,” Boyd interjected. “How about if we go off somewhere and I listen to some more of your poems?”
“Oh, Jonah, you don’t have to do that . . .”
“But I want to. Really, I think it’ my duty, as an old gorgon of a writer, to impart what wisdom I possess to this young acolyte.”
“But you must be tired . . .”
“I’m not.”
“Let them,” Anne said.
Ben looked pleadingly into Nancy’ eyes. She hesitated. “Are you sure?”
Boyd rested a hand on Ben’ shoulder. “I’m absolutely sure.”
“Okay . . . But Ben, you have to promise not to keep Mr. Boyd longer than he feels like listening.”
“Let’ go to your room.”
“What about your room?”
“Ben, you have to promise.”
“I promise, okay?” And he led Boyd off. Chin cupped in hand, Nancy watched them recede, until Anne touched her on the shoulder. She turned. Anne smiled at her friend, for the first time that evening, with what looked like affection.
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” she said.
“Have you? I’m so glad!”
Anne leaned in closer, so close that Nancy must have been able to smell the gin on her breath. “Listen, I know it’ late . . . but what would you say to a little Mozart?”
Nancy’ eyes brightened. “Really?”
“Really.”
“May we listen?” asked Phil Perry.
“You will hear in any case,” Anne said. “Whether you choose to listen is up to you.”
Phil took the cue, and followed them into the living room, where he sat down on the sofa. I sat next to him. And so the reading was followed by a recital the decided mediocrity and unmusicality of which, I was gratified to hear, was not to be explained away by mere lack of practice. Magical harmonies indeed! Another small, if private, victory for me, on that night that was to be marked by so many losses.
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