The Body Of Jonah Boyd

Nine

THE NEXT SATURDAY morning I went, as usual, to play with Nancy. She didn’t mention Anne’ name once. During the week the ersatz guest room had been dismantled, Daphne’ frog figurines and stuffed animals and peace sign poster returned to their rightful places.
Nancy didn’t speak of Anne the Saturday after that, either, which was odd only in that during the months leading up to Thanksgiving she had spoken of little else. She was now preoccupied with Christmas, a holiday from which, at the Wright house, we strays were excluded as vociferously as at Thanksgiving we were welcomed. As Ben later explained to me, Christmas at 302 Florizona Avenue involved a sequence of private rituals in which each member of the family was required to play a specific role (Ben was the “elf"), all leading up to the climactic unwrapping of the presents, after which the rest of the day was pure letdown. Of course, that Christmas was to be like no other due to Mark’ absence, and though Nancy tried to put a brave face on things, I could tell that she was having a hard time. I myself spent Christmas alone. I went to the movies. And then it was New Year’ Eve (I spent most of that holiday in the backseat of a chemistry professor’ car), and the seventies. On Saturdays Nancy and I played, on Sundays Ernest visited me at my apartment. I stopped thinking about the Boyds, who, to the extent that they still existed for me, did so behind a sort of blackout curtain, and not merely because Nancy and Ernest, so far as I could tell, no longer talked to them; also because what had happened—a loss, despite what Nancy had said, not nearly so terrible as that of a child, but terrible enough—placed them outside any realm of experience that I could touch. Of course, I knew they went on in their exile; they had to go on. What I didn’t know was what that going on felt like.
Sometimes a letter or a birthday card arrived from Anne. Then Nancy would shake her head and say, “Remember that awful Thanksgiving? Afterward, for weeks, I kept hoping I’d find the damn notebooks, even when it became eminently clear that I never would.” From contacts in Bradford, Nancy learned that in the wake of losing his novel, Boyd had stopped writing. “They say he’ put off his tenure vote,” she told me. “No one ever sees him—or Anne.” One afternoon in 1972 he was killed. In the midst of a blinding rainstorm, he crashed his car into the wall of the abandoned coffin factory. He had been on his way to the liquor store. “And is it any wonder?” Nancy asked. “I mean, imagine it. You work and work on something, you hold it close to your heart, and then one day—poof—it’ gone. And to make matters worse, you can’t blame anyone but yourself. No wonder he started drinking again. Oh, I just wish it hadn’t happened in my house.”
“Dr. Wright thinks Boyd lost them on purpose,” I reminded her—rather coldly, yet there is consolation to be gained from such knowledge. For those of us on the outside, disaster courted is less threatening than disaster stumbled upon, since pathologies only imply holes in the psyche, whereas accidents . . . well, they imply holes in the universe, and who’ to say you won’t be the next one to fall through?
After Boyd’ death, for a brief time, Nancy was once again in regular contact with Anne. They spoke several times by telephone; there was even, for a while, talk of Anne flying out for a visit, though this trip never got beyond the planning stages, mostly because Anne refused to be pinned down to a specific date. Eventually Nancy gave up on trying to persuade her, after which the phone conversations became less and less frequent, and then stopped altogether.
And that, more or less, is everything I knew about Anne and Jonah Boyd, until the day several decades later when, rather out of the blue, Ben Wright called me up to tell me that he was in town, and that he wanted to invite me to dinner.
This was not something I expected. Although Ben and I had remained on civil terms through the years, we had never become what you would call “friends.” Indeed, since Nancy’ death, I’d seen him exactly once, when he’d given a reading at a Wellspring bookstore: The line for autographs had been so long, I hadn’t bothered to wait. Still, I’d followed the trajectory of his career with interest and some vicarious pride. It was a strange story, as likely to inspire cynicism as hope, depending on your point of view and time of life. At some point after Jonah Boyd’ visit, Ben had stopped writing poems and started writing stories, which he proceeded to send off to The New Yorker with an alacrity to match that of his poetry days. Like the poems, the stories came back unfailingly with rejection forms attached, provoking despondency in Ben and a sort of futile fist-shaking at the universe in Nancy. Still, he kept sending new ones. He was by now a junior in high school, and though he remained an indifferent student, nonetheless I think he took it for granted that he would get into Wellspring, as his more academically minded brother and sister had before him. And in this delusory belief, Nancy, out of the same misplaced impulse that had led her to give him false hope about his writing, backed him up. I shall never forget the black April morning when the rejection letter came—Nancy trying to console him, saying, “It doesn’t matter. Who needs a big-name college? You’re too good for them.” To which Ben replied, “But you were the one who told me I’d get in! You said it was a sure thing! You promised me!” Round and round they went, her efforts to persuade him that the rejection was not a tragedy only fortifying his conviction that it was. A tragedy, moreover, for which she bore ultimate responsibility: Because she had encouraged him, she was easier to blame than that pitiless abstraction, the university.
Ben went off to college: not to Harvard or Yale (they also turned him down) but to Bradford, where Ernest still had connections in the admissions office. He majored in European history. As in high school, he was an indifferent student. He continued to write, publishing a few stories in undergraduate magazines, and even winning the recently endowed Jonah Boyd Prize for Short Fiction, which brought with it a hundred-dollar gift certificate at the campus bookstore. (Nancy kept note of these achievements in a discreet brown leather scrapbook, which took pride of place on the piano.) Then after graduation he moved to New York City, hoping, like a character in a Willa Cather story, to make a name for himself there before returning triumphant to the home town that had failed to appreciate him. (That Wellspring, with its symphony orchestra and coffee bars, bore not the slightest resemblance to Cather’ windswept Nebraska hamlets seems not to have deterred him in the least in this ambition: further proof of Ernest’ theory that his son lived half in a dream world.) I think he was imagining ticker-tape parades, and speeches during which the university president would hit himself on the head for having undervalued Ben, all the while marveling at the grace, the utter lack of vainglory, that marked his heroic return. The dolts who had bullied him in high school would stare up dumbfounded, his former teachers would claim to have encouraged him when they had not . . . And through it all he would just smile and wave, the very embodiment of generosity, a man so successful he could afford to forgive. Let’ not mince words. Ben, at this stage, had delusions of grandeur. He was avid to explore New York—but his New York, which was the New York of New Yorker covers, foggy and wistful and consisting exclusively of capacious apartments in which well-dressed women drank whole-leaf tea and talked about Tolstoy. The bohemian East Village to which his coevals were flocking held no allure for him. He was too much of a snob for railroad flats. Rather than move in with downtown friends, he sublet a noisy efficiency apartment above a vegetable market on Second Avenue—overpriced, but it was East Seventy-fourth Street. To survive, he took a job shelving at the Strand; still, his mother had to send him money each month, sometimes surreptitiously, as Ernest did not approve of their supporting an adult son in this way. The several girlfriends he went through shared his father’ uneasiness—especially once Ben finished his novel, and was unable to publish it, and set to work on a second novel, and couldn’t publish that one, either. As he told me later, he was too arrogant to condescend to getting a full-time job. “Really, I was a little shit,” he said, smiling at his own callowness as one can only from the vantage point of great success achieved later in life. And when, eventually, he did move back to Wellspring, it was neither in triumph nor by choice. For Ernest had one afternoon been murdered in his office, and Nancy had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and keeping the house on Florizona Avenue for her children was now the driving ambition of her remaining days. She more or less insisted that Ben come home to help her in her campaign, and he came not unwillingly, for as he explained to me, it was a relief to have an excuse to get out of New York, a city which, because it had once been the locus of his hope, was with each day that passed becoming more and more the nexus of his despair. A third novel had now gone untaken. He could no longer abide having to watch, he said, the spectacle of writers younger than himself achieving the very goal—publication—that eluded him. And he was no longer so young himself. He was nearly thirty. The girl he claimed to love was growing exasperated with his indolence, eager to marry him yet wary of taking on the financial burden of an unemployed (and possibly unemployable) husband. Perhaps if he could offer her a house, he reasoned, he might be able to convince her not to look for someone else.
It was at this point that he reentered my orbit. Except for Daphne and Glenn’ wedding and the occasional Thanksgiving (he did not always come home, often preferring to be a “stray” at the apartment of some New York friend), it had really been quite a few years since I’d spent a sustained chunk of time in his company. And now here he stood on Nancy’ doorstep, a young man. His long hair fell to form a sort of awning over his forehead. His nose reminded me of his father’. All told, he looked alarmingly like his father.
Since Ernest’ murder, I had been promoted; I was now office manager for the entire psych department, a job that kept me on my toes all week and some weekends. I no longer lived in Eaton Manor, but rented a house of my own, far from the noise of the freeway, and had several lovers, one of whom wanted to leave his wife for me. My life was busy. Even so, I tried to spend as much time as I could with Nancy. It was my fervent hope that the Wrights would succeed in keeping their house, which I, too, simply could not imagine in other hands. Nancy was by now very sick, as much from the radiation and chemotherapy courses she was undergoing as from the tumor itself, though to their credit, Ben and Daphne did everything they could to keep her out of the hospital. She dreaded the hospital, and feared especially the prospect of dying there.
Although he visited only twice in that period, Mark sent flowers almost daily. He was recently married to a Canadian girl, a lawyer with much disposable income, his house in the Toronto suburbs (of which Nancy showed me pictures) so lavishly bourgeois that I could only think what an odd destination it was for him, given that he had begun his journey in a Datsun with no reverse gear. During his visits, Mark stayed at the Ritz-Carlton; in the afternoons he would stop by to interrogate the nurse who made periodic visits, or scrutinize insurance statements in search of small errors on the basis of which he could chastise Ben or Daphne. This atmosphere in which a dying and increasingly demented woman lay propped up in her bed, smelling of roses and disinfectant, her bald head wrapped in a turban that made her look like some sort of antique film actress, must have seemed more than a little bizarre to Daphne’ children, though they were still young at the time, and reeling from the suddenness with which their mother had left their father. I spent a lot of hours at Nancy’ bedside, for she always recognized faces, even if, toward the end, she hardly seemed to know where she was. Where the IV needle entered her hand, she said that a tulip bulb was sprouting. She thought she was a flower bed. One afternoon she confided that a mule got into her bed with her every night. “But he’ a very polite mule,” she added. “He never moves or makes noise.”
On another occasion she spoke of Jonah Boyd. “Did he ever find that novel?” she asked.
“No, he didn’t,” I said.
“Tell him to look in the pantry. You know there was some foie gras Ernest brought back from Paris—a tin of foie gras—and for months, for the life of me, I couldn’t find it. But then it turned up way at the back of the pantry, behind the soup cans.”
“But Nancy,” I said, “Jonah Boyd is dead. He died years ago, in a car crash.”
“Anne should never have married him. Clifford was a decent man. Boring, but decent. But she wanted adventure, and I suppose she got it.”
“Yes.”
“She comes over every Saturday. We play four-hand pia-no.”
“No, Nancy. I come over every Saturday. We play four-hand piano.”
“Next week we’re trying the Grand Duo.”
“Do you think you’re up for it?”
“Well, you know what my husband says. You never can tell till you try.”
Ernest had never once in his life said anything so optimistic.
“No, you never can,” I agreed. I suppose it was as good a principle to follow as any.
After Nancy’s death, I lost touch with Ben once more. With his third of the money from the sale of the house, he moved to Milwaukee, and bought a small house of his own. Milwaukee was where the girlfriend came from. Her name was Molly. They got married, and, so far as I knew, he returned to writing.
By way of an inheritance from Nancy, I received all of her music and the scrapbook in which she kept the stories Ben had published. I think she must have figured that I could be counted on to keep up the scrapbook, and so when Ben at long last did publish a novel, about four years after her death, out of a sense of duty, I kept my eyes peeled for mentions of him in newspapers and magazines. As it happened, there were none that I could find. The novel, which was called The Sky, got very little attention, and went quickly out of print. Later, Ben renounced it. And yet with his next novel, Backwards, he won for himself not only accolades from critics and an important prize, but a youthful following that remained devoted to him until his death, buying his books as soon as they appeared and filling the lecture halls and bookstores in which he gave readings. This second published novel of Ben’ was a road novel, and its subject, not surprisingly, was the fate of the draft dodgers; as it opens, the sixteen-year-old narrator is on his way to Vancouver in a Toyota with no reverse gear, intent on finding and moving in with his brother. Backwards was optioned for a film and sat for about six weeks near the bottom of the New York Times best-seller list. Each Sunday I dutifully scissored the list out of the newspaper and pasted it into Nancy’ scrapbook, which was now running out of pages. I would have to buy another one, I realized, preferably covered in the same restrained brown leather—yet I could find nothing even remotely like it anywhere in Wellspring. Or Pasadena. Sifting through the supply of blank scrapbooks at Vroman’ one Saturday, I found myself wondering what had become of the little shop in Verona where Jonah Boyd had bought his notebooks. Was it still in business? Were the notebooks even made anymore? Of course, in trying to envision the shop, I had only his description to go on; even if I did make it to Verona someday, even if the shop still existed, the likelihood of my nosing it out was slim. That Thanksgiving, Ernest had asked Boyd what he would do if his notebooks ever ceased to be manufactured, and Boyd had barely been able to answer (not that this mattered very much, in the end). It seemed to me, that day at Vroman’, that Ernest had been wise to decry such a mystic dependency on things and houses as both Boyd and Nancy were susceptible to, and in silent support of him, I picked out the scrapbook that was the least like Nancy’ I could find—indeed, the one most likely to offend her sensibilities, all hot pink and yellow daisies, with a huge Hello Kitty rising up in the background like some grotesque parade float. In this, I continued the record of her son’ career.
It was now 1997. Ben was no longer living in Milwaukee. He had divorced Molly, and taken a job teaching in the Creative Writing program at the University of Maryland. He had remarried—Amy, also a writer. Another book appeared, not a novel this time, but a memoir of his California childhood, The Eucalyptus, which of course I read with avidity, since it was also, in some sense, the story of my life. I must admit, Ben’ descriptive prowess impressed me. He captured vividly the flavor of that house on Florizona Avenue, devoting particular attention to the Thanksgivings, and interweaving into his story that of Phil, the least noticeable of the strays, who one spring afternoon, his Ph.D. thesis having just been rejected for the fourth time, knocked on the door of Ernest’ office, and when Ernest opened it, shot him in the face. He would have shot Glenn, too, but Glenn happened to be in the bathroom. Ernest died before he could say a word. In the memoir, Ben writes at length of the yellow tape sealing off the crime scene, not to mention the phalanx of news reporters and squad cars that surrounded his parents’ house, and that seemed so out of place on Florizona Avenue. All of this I, too, remembered. I was there, in the office, when Ernest died. I held him as he died. And then afterward, without saying anything of my own grief, I held Nancy while she wept in disbelief at the idea that for so many Thanksgivings she had nursed a viper at her table. And all that time Phil had seemed so benign—so boring, even—that skinny boy with his big appetite! Curiously, this discordance between appearance and reality seemed to preoccupy her much more than the fact that her husband had been murdered. Might there have been warning signs? A picture of Daphne had disappeared one Thanksgiving from the mantel; someone had left some poisoned meat in the backyard that Little Hans had eaten. (He’d survived.) Now she wondered if Jonah Boyd’ notebooks had really been lost, or if perhaps Phil, for mysterious reasons of his own, had stolen them. “If only we’d seen,” Nancy lamented. “If only we’d noticed.”
I tried to remind her that Ernest himself had liked and trusted Phil. Given that he had harbored no suspicions, there was no reason for Nancy to beat herself up now. “I just wonder,” she answered. But soon enough the brain tumor put an end even to wondering.
Both the local and the national media pounced on the story of Ernest’ murder. Glenn was interviewed by Dan Rather—not just because he was Ernest’ protege and Phil’ nemesis but as an authority on psychosis. His diagnosis was that under the pressure of seeing his career about to collapse, and after so many years of watching his contemporaries move ahead of him, Phil had just snapped. “There is in all of us,” Glenn told Dan Rather, “the potential to do something unspeakable. What fascinates psychologists is the question of what restrains some, while others are suddenly propelled to make fateful decisions.”
All of this is in Ben’ memoir, and much more—the “real” story behind Mark’ flight to Canada (as opposed to Ben’ fictional account), and the struggle to keep the house, and Daphne’ divorce, and Nancy’ death—and yet, curiously, there is not a single mention of Jonah or Anne Boyd, and less curiously, no mention of me. I do not appear even once. I am left out wholesale. Later I asked him why this was. “Oh, Denny,” he said, “writers always have to make choices. You can’t put everything in a book. Besides, you were never really involved in any of it, were you? You were just—I don’t know—there. On the sidelines.”
The memoir, for Ben, was the biggest success of all. He went on talk shows. To promote the book, which had been translated into something like twenty languages, he made a European tour. Back in College Park, he threatened to quit his job at the university, and in exchange for a promise to stay on, he got a reduction of his teaching load along with a substantial pay raise. Amy, unhappy that her career was not matching his, left him for a heart surgeon. Seeing no reason to stay in Maryland, now that his ex-wife was living down the street in a much grander style than he could afford, Ben put out the word that he would entertain offers from other schools, on the condition that they be willing to pay him twice what he was earning at Maryland in exchange for only one semester of teaching a year. And he could get away with that. He had become famous enough that he could write his own ticket.
It was then, to his own amazement, that he got the letter from the provost at Wellspring—the same provost to whom Nancy had made her appeal, not so long before, to keep the house, and who had rebuffed her. It seemed that a rich alumnus, a dabbler in fiction himself, had of late given the university a substantial sum of money for the purpose of endowing a chair for a writer-in-residence: For this position, Ben was now quietly encouraged to apply. He did so eagerly. A few weeks later, in Wellspring to be interviewed, he telephoned me. As it happened, I had taken early retirement a year earlier. I now owned my own house—a two-bedroom, concrete-block affair in a modest neighborhood of Springwell. The last thing I expected in those unbusy days was for Ben Wright to call, and not only to call, but to invite me to dinner.
We met at the faculty club. Amazingly, even though I had worked at the university for more than thirty years, and knew its ins and outs better than anyone alive, until that evening I had never once been to the faculty club, the scene of Nancy’ raging at poor Bess Dalrymple. Ernest had disdained the place as stuffy, and after he had been killed . . . well, who else but her boss would invite a secretary to eat dinner in a gloomy, formal room where the food was expensive and bad? For my retirement party, I’d had the choice of the faculty club or a restaurant, and had opted for a rather festive Mexican place, with sangria and flirty waiters. La Pifiata was more my speed, just as a nice, comfortable denim skirt with an elastic waist band was more my style . . . And now here I sat, waiting for Ben in a dining room hushed by heavy draperies that smelled of boiled cabbage, while around me faculty widows I recognized from Nancy’ long-ago tea parties sipped white wine and gossiped in low voices. The suit I wore was as uncomfortable as the one I’d put on decades before, that first Thanksgiving I’d spent with the Wrights.
After a while Ben came in. He now had the belly that comes after forty, and a heavy beard, white speckling the brown. Still, I had no trouble recognizing him. “Denny, what a pleasure,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek.
“You look so much like your father I almost fell out of my chair,” I said.
“So I’ve been told about fifty times today.”
He sat down. A waiter approached, a man older than me, whom I recognized from the staff parking lot. Ben demanded wine, and the waiter withdrew. “Listen, I have some news,” he said. “It’ not official yet, so you’ll have to keep this to yourself for the time being. They’ve offered me the job. Writer-in-residence in the English department, one semester a year.”
“Wow,” I said. “Congratulations.”
The waiter brought the wine, as well as menus. “Kind of incredible, isn’t it, when you consider that back in the dark ages, the damn place didn’t even see fit to admit me? But that’ neither here nor there. The point is, now that I’ve got the job, I can buy it back.”
“Buy what back?”
He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “The house, of course.”
“Oh, the house,” I said; and then, as my train of thought caught up with his: “You mean your parents’ house?”
“What other house would I be talking about?” he asked, laughing. And he was right to laugh: Clearly I was an idiot to have imagined that just because, over the years, I had more or less stopped thinking about the house, he would have also.
“But is it even on the market? I remember Nancy sold it to a couple of law professors.”
“Yes, Travis and Eleanor Ault. But then they split up and sold it to a Dr. Clark from the medical school. He kept it a few years, made some horrible quote-unquote improvements in the garden—they tore out the old fish pond, can you believe it?—and then he sold it to the people who own it now. Their name is Shoemaker. She’ in zoology and he’ some sort of higher-up on the development council. Anyway, it’ not for sale, at least officially, but when I went in for my interview with the provost, he basically said, ‘What can we do to get you to come?’ So I mentioned the house, and he made a few phone calls, and the long and the short of it is, they’re willing to sell if the price is right. They’re asking a lot—close to two million—much more than the appraised value, so I’ll probably have to do a deal on my new book before I write it, just to have the cash for the down payment. And to think that my father paid thirty thousand dollars for that place, and now it’ worth . . . But there’ no point in going into the numbers. Wellspring owes this to me, after what they did to my mother. Of course I’ll have to take out a huge mortgage. Luckily I can manage it. Barely. Thank God I don’t have kids!”
“Congratulations,” I repeated—rather weakly, for the figure of two million dollars had left me dumbfounded.
“I’m glad you’re happy,” Ben said, even though I had said nothing to suggest that I was. “You see, I was thinking it all over this afternoon, in my room over at the Ritz-Carlton, and I realized that you were the only person around who would understand why this mattered so much to me. I haven’t told my sister yet. I’ve been putting it off. I suppose I’m frightened how she’ll react.”
“Why?”
“Well, we never talked about it then—it was too important to present a united front—but when we were trying to persuade the provost to let us keep the place, in the back of both our minds, and my mother’, too, I suppose, there was always this lingering question: In the event that we won, which of us would actually live there? We could hardly have shared the house. We would have driven each other crazy. And of course Mark would have insisted that we buy him out of his share, and then would the one who did stay have to buy out the other one? At that stage, neither of us could have afforded to. I know Daphne would have tried to trump me with her kids—you know, I have children, and you don’t, and therefore I need the house more than you do, so the kids can trample the flowers and clog up the pool with their toys.”
“But why should any of it matter now? Daphne doesn’t even live in Wellspring anymore. She lives in Portland. She has a house of her own.”
“My feelings exactly. Nor should we allow ourselves to forget that she’ not the one who’ just been offered a plum position thanks to a reputation she worked very hard and many years to attain. She tried to get a job herself here, remember, and failed. Still, I’d be foolish to assume she’ll react rationally. These things are so personal. And anyway, she never understood my mother’ spiritual attachment to that house. For her it was just plain greed. She wanted all the space. She wanted the pool.”
“Well, maybe if you approach her in the right way, she’ll come around,” I said—lame, but as a response, it seemed close to the probable truth.
Ben lifted his glass. “Let’ have a toast. To 302 Florizona Avenue.”
“Cin-cin,” I said.
“That’ funny. Cin-cin was how my father always toasted. I wonder what he’d think of all this—how things have turned out. He never had much faith in me.”
“That’ not true.”
“Oh come on, Denny, you know it as well as I do. He pretty much wrote me off as a loser from the get-go. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see where I’ve landed? A higher salary than he ever pulled in.” He was gazing at his wine as he said this, his expression more introspective than gloating. “You know, I don’t usually think of myself as a religious person, or even a particularly spiritual person, but when you look at how things have turned out—well, how can you help but wonder if it wasn’t all meant to be?”
“In what sense?”
“I mean, consider the coincidences. The very year I decide to look for a new job, Wellspring endows a position for a writer-in-residence. Fifty people must have applied, yet they choose me. I ask about the house, figuring there isn’t a chance in hell it’ll be on the market, and the Shoemakers say they’ll sell. So now, by getting the house back, I’ve fulfilled my mother’ fondest wish. By getting the job, I’ve fulfilled my own. When things work out like that, it’ hard not to think that there’ a pattern, or a purpose, or that you’ve got a guardian angel. Although God knows if I do, he fell down on the job. For years.”
“Well, but you’re discounting your own books. They’re what got you the job. Oh, and by the way, I’m afraid I haven’t read the novels, only the memoir, which I liked very much.”
“Don’t even bother with the first one. The first one is pathetic. Since my stuff started selling, my publishers have been trying to convince me to let them bring it out in paperback, but I won’t allow it.”
Our food arrived—a depressing vignette of salmon filets and heartless little vegetables, two carrots, three potato balls, a sprig of parsley: the sort of meal after which you have to go out and get yourself a cheeseburger. I took an unencouraging bite (the salmon was dry); thought suddenly of Jonah Boyd, that last dinner I’d eaten with him and Anne and Ben at the Pie ‘n Burger. Odd that in all the years since, Ben and I had never talked about that Thanksgiving. And now, as if he were reading my mind, he suddenly said, “Remember the Thanksgiving when the Boyds came?”
“Funny, I just was.”
“Very strange, what happened.”
“It still surprises me that the notebooks never turned up. You’d think that eventually someone would have—”
“Well, but Denny, you don’t really believe they were lost, do you? You know what my mother thought.”
“What—that Phil stole them?”
“It would make sense. He did a lot of creepy things—hounding girls in the psych department, stealing things. He hated my father, he hated Glenn. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“But what would the notebooks have to do with any of that?”
“Who knows? Who can penetrate a psychotic mind? Maybe he was jealous because Dad and Glenn were paying so much attention to Jonah Boyd that night. And of course, we’ll never find out, will we, because even if we asked him, Phil wouldn’t tell us. Not where he is.” Ben drank more wine. “And to think that all those years he came to Thanksgiving, and nobody ever guessed . . . You know, since then I’ve read both Boyd’ novels, and I’ve got to tell you, I really don’t see what the big deal was. Does that sound callous? I guess what I mean is that he was one of those writers who looked, in his time, as if he was going to be important, but who if he had lived . . . well, he probably would have ended up right where he is now. Out of print. I hate to sound so brutal, but it’ true. It’ a theory of mine that the destinations we’re supposed to get to—in art, life, relationships—they’re set in advance. It’ just that there are shorter routes and longer routes. Like in novels. In novels I can accept coincidences if the objective is to move the story faster to where it would have gone anvway. It drives me crazy when the only reason for the coincidence is to alter everything, blow the characters’ lives to smithereens.”
“But isn’t that what happened to Boyd, when his notebooks were stolen? His life blown to smithereens?”
“No, that’ my point! It only looked that way. In a cosmic sense, I’m truly convinced, the end would have been the same.”
“Maybe for his books. But he might not have died.”
The waiter took our plates away. I had hardly touched my salmon, eaten only one of the potato balls. Nor did it seem worth the trouble to order dessert. Ben paid our bill, and we went out to the parking lot, where once again he exhorted me not to read his first novel: “Backwards, yes. It’ good. But the first one—embarrassing. An apprentice effort. If I could vaporize every copy, I would.”
Why should a writer be so determined to suppress his own book? Perhaps Ben feared that if this fledgling novel were brought back into print, its very badness would cause readers to reassess the later, more popular works . . . In any case, I promised not to read The Sky. He drove off in his rental car, his destination the Ritz-Carlton, while I drove off in my Dodge Dart, my destination the Pie ‘n Burger. I sat at the counter and wondered where it came from, Ben’ impulse to attribute chance events to mystic intervention; certainly not from Ernest. It was more like Nancy to see patterns and plans everywhere, or think in terms of fixed destinations. After all, believing that a house can be more than an assemblage of bricks and cement and shingles is not so different from believing in a guardian angel, and if Ben did have a protector, no doubt that spirit was incarnate in 302 Florizona Avenue. As for me, I harbored no such illusions—but then again, I hadn’t grown up in that house. The sense of birthright in which Ben, despite everything he’d endured, continued to have faith—I’d never known it.
The necessary cheeseburger arrived. I took a bite. And now, as if to illustrate the very matters Ben had spoken of, the waiter who had served us at the faculty club stepped through the door to the Pie ‘n Burger and took the stool next to mine. We nodded at each other. He ordered a slice of banana cream pie, opened a copy of Field and Stream. So perhaps this was serendipity, and the waiter and I were destined to fall in love. Or perhaps this was misfortune, and when I finished my cheeseburger, he would follow me out to the parking lot and strangle me. Or perhaps nothing would happen—coincidence within which no pattern could be discerned. The last of these hypotheses turned out to be correct. We did not speak, and after I paid my bill, I drove home without incident.
On the way, I took Florizona Avenue. It had been years since I’d had occasion to cruise that memorable thoroughfare. Passing 302,1 noticed that the Shoemakers had lined the path that led from the street to the front door with Malibu lights. Even in the dark you could see what a lovely house it was—harmonious in its proportions, not grand exactly, but not cozy, either—a house that encouraged you to lead a life of large gestures, to leap about and sing and flex your muscles. And soon it would be Ben’. Now that I thought about it, his luck really was extraordinary. Yes, he would have his sister to contend with, as well as the anxiety that accompanies any hefty financial burden. And yet, my hunch was that, despite these troubles, he would be happy. Grief and frustration and loss would leave no indelible marks upon him, and this was good, for a kind of unalloyed happiness has to exist somewhere, a sort of floor model of happiness, if we are to go on thinking that such a thing is worth hoping for.
Needless to say, when I got home that night, my own little house seemed flimsy and trivial. I could not sleep for the traffic noise, the glare of the streetlamp through sheer curtains. And then in the morning, the prospect of another day without work—another day to try to fill up with activity, now that I was retired—depressed me, and made me eager for a project. Already I had reorganized the pantry and cleaned out my file cabinet. Now I set to work alphabetizing the books. I started with Jane Austen, and after a few hours arrived at W, Benjamin Wright coming just before Ernest. Of course I only had the second two of Ben’, Backwards and The Eucalyptus. And really, his adamance that I not read that first novel was peculiar; could it really be as bad as all that? Despite my promise, I was curious to see what the fuss was about. So I got in the car and drove to campus, to the library; I looked up The Sky on the computer, wrote down the call number, and rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the stacks: twentieth-century American fiction. But the book wasn’t there. Downstairs, I asked a librarian. She looked on her screen. “It’ missing,” she said with a frown. “Very strange. Not checked out, just . . . missing. You might try the municipal library.”
I did as she suggested. At the municipal library, once again, I looked up The Sky; located the right shelf. And once again, the book wasn’t there. “It disappeared months ago,” the municipal librarian told me. “Happens sometimes. People pry off the security tags. Or some weirdo who doesn’t like the writer tears it up and flushes it down the toilet. The plumbing disasters we’ve had!”
Now this was really strange. Why should two copies have gone missing? The novel was indeed out of print—a phone call to Vroman’ verified that—so I drove to Bartram’, Wellspring’ premier used bookstore, and asked after it. The clerk laughed in my face. “It’ the rarest of the rare!” he said, and recommended that I try Booksource, in Pasadena, the owner of which became briefly animated when I mentioned the title only, it turned out, because she hoped I had one to sell. “I’ve got a list of ten people waiting to grab up a copy as soon as one comes in,” she said.
“Really? Is it that hard to come by?”
“He’ very popular. And everyone wants the complete works. By the way, have you heard the rumor that he’ coming to teach at Wellspring?”
“Anywhere else I might try?”
“The Library of Congress.”
“Very funny,” I said, and left.
As you have probably already determined, I am not a woman who backs away from a challenge. Indeed, the bookstore owner’ insistence that I would never find a copy of The Sky now fortified my determination to do so. And so that afternoon I got out the Los Angeles County Yellow Pages and called used bookstores in Glendale, Los Feliz, Hollywood, North Hollywood, Arcadia, Santa Monica, Venice, and Long Beach. Nothing. I called Van Nuys, Ventura, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. Still nothing. Unfazed, I went farther afield. I called San Francisco, Seattle. I called Powell’ in Portland. I called Denver. Finally I called the Strand in New York, where Ben had once worked, and there, at last, I hit pay dirt: a copy had just come in, first edition with dust jacket. Slightly foxed. Two hundred dollars. I bought it on the spot and arranged to have it sent.
The book arrived five days later. Rather impatiently, I pulled it from its envelope. (What was “foxing,” anyway?) The cover image struck me as curious: a zipper bisecting a serene cloud, revealing blackness and rain underneath. And how youthful Ben’ face looked, gazing out at me from the back of the jacket, his hair parted in the middle in imitation of his brother! I read the dedication—"For my mother"— thought of Nancy, then turned to the first page.
“To make love in a balloon . . .”
My neck jerked upward; there was no mistaking the cracked baritone voice that uttered these words—the voice in my head—though it had been almost thirty years since I’d heard it.