The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  “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 piano.”

  “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 f
ew 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 sal
mon 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.”