The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  “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.

  Ten

  LITERATURE HAS FOR too long ignored the perspective of the secretary. Overworked and underpaid, never given anything close to adequate credit for her labors (for example, as I said earlier, I wrote most of Ernest’ books), praised—when she is praised—only for such stalwart attributes as efficiency, reliability, and maternal understanding, she goes through her career generally unthanked except in a photocopying crisis, very occasionally mentioned in the fourth paragraph of a long acknowledgments page, never the object of a book dedication, never named in the memoirs, never left anything in the will. Do not assume, though, that just because she is invisible, she is anyone’ fool. On the contrary, either because her employer confides in her, or because she is his mistress, or because, as part of her daily routine, she books his plane tickets and files his credit card bill
s and takes his messages, she often ends up knowing more about him than anyone else does, even his wife. Even the word secretary contains a secret. Trustworthiness is her watchword. Still, there is in her one allegiance that supersedes even that which she pledges, implicitly, to her boss, and for the sake of which, if necessary, she would betray him. And that is her allegiance to other secretaries.

  After I read The Sky, I didn’t know what to do. My first thought was that Ben must have stolen Jonah Boyd’ notebooks, finished the novel they contained, and published it as his own. Yet how could I be sure of this? Three decades had passed since that Thanksgiving, and my memory of Boyd’ reading was hazy. It was equally possible that Ben had stolen only the first chapter of the novel—the only part with which I was familiar—or that he had stolen just the idea, the germ of Gonesse, and the first line. But if that were the case, wouldn’t someone have noticed? Boyd must have read aloud from the manuscript to others besides us. And Anne certainly would have seen—assuming Anne was still alive. A quick call to directory assistance in Bradford yielded no listing under her name. What was her maiden name, then? Or had she remarried?

  We secretaries can always recognize each other, even over the phone. Something in the lilt of the “hello,” a certain crispness of tone when picking up . . . I heard it immediately in the voice of Marjorie Armstrong, Clifford Armstrong’ second wife, when I called to ask if he might have any information as to his first wife’ whereabouts. “Armstrong residence,” she said, and somehow at that moment I knew not only that she had once been a secretary, but that she had been his secretary, and that he had married her after Anne had left him.

  That morning Marjorie and I talked for more than an hour. As soon as she realized that I, too, was a secretary, she dropped her veneer of implacability and became intimate, confiding. She told me that Clifford had Parkinson’ disease, and could no longer speak. She told me that of course she remembered Anne, and had even liked her, sort of—Anne, whose tie-dyed skirts and hennaed hair had implied possibilities of liberation never before considered by the women of Bradford. She told me that the coffin factory had of late been made over into a sort of arts and crafts mall with a cafe where you could get the best pecan chicken salad. In fact, the only thing she didn’t tell me—because she couldn’t—was what had become of Anne. Although she recalled that after Boyd’ death, Anne had remarried—an engineering professor, Marjorie thought—beyond that, the trail went cold. She’d stopped seeing Anne in the supermarket. She’d stopped thinking about Anne, who was, after all, not a secretary.

  It didn’t matter. I was on the scent. Marjorie gave me the number of her friend Pat, who, like me, was retired, but had for many years been secretary to the chair of Bradford’ engineering department. I called Pat, and she told me that she, too, remembered Anne, who had married Bruce Ridge, an expert in highway cloverleaf design. A few years after the marriage, Bruce had been wooed away from Bradford with an offer to be chair of the engineering department at the University of Kansas. At Kansas, I spoke to Loretta, who said that yes, the Ridges had lived in Lawrence in the mid-eighties, but that after a few years the midwestern winters had gotten to be too much for them. So Bruce had taken early retirement, and they’d moved to Florida. Tarpon Springs. This was in 1989. Loretta gave me a number in Tarpon Springs, which I called. A woman answered.

  “May I speak to Anne Ridge?” I asked.

  “What’ this in reference to?” the woman said.

  A secretary.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I’m trying to locate some information about Anne Ridge, formerly Anne Boyd. The widow of the novelist Jonah Boyd.”

  “Jonah Boyd!”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I should say I know him,” the woman said. “I’m his daughter.”

  Her name—Jonah Boyd’ eldest daughter’ name—is Susan. She is now forty-eight years old, and lives in Tampa, where she works as a legal secretary. Long divorced; the mother of two teenage daughters. From her, I learned much more about Jonah Boyd, and about Anne.

  Biography is a funny thing. Why some people get them and others don’t is beyond me. For instance, as I write this, two academics—two!—are preparing biographies of Ernest. (Why either thinks anyone is going to shell out thirty-five bucks for the life of an obscure Freudian is beyond me.) And yet there is no biography, and never has been, and probably never will be, of Jonah Boyd. Even on the Internet, only a few mentions of him come up, mostly paraphrases from an old entry in Contemporary Authors. The abyss of obscurity into which he has fallen is so deep that even the spindly arm of biography will not reach there: evidence, perhaps, that Ben’ assessment of his work was correct.

  I have managed, in the intervening years, to learn more about him. He was born in 1924 in Abilene, Texas. He was the middle of three sons. In Abilene, he married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Burrows, straight out of high school. She was pregnant, as it happens, and gave birth to Susan on her nineteenth birthday. A few years later she had Bradley, and then Karen. Mary worked in a supermarket while Jonah went to college—Texas Tech. He did not graduate. The Korean War interrupted his studies. After he got back, he started writing, and was bold in his ambitions: Like Ben, he sent his stories only to the most prestigious magazines, to The New Yorker and Esquire and The Paris Review. Unlike Ben, he received encouraging replies. His career only really got started, though, when he attended a sort of literary conference in Dallas at which he met a famous New York editor, like him a drunk. They went out drinking together, and at the end of the evening, the editor offered Boyd a contract for a novel on the basis of a single sentence. (Susan can’t remember what the sentence was, only that it never made it into the final draft.) Boyd feared that when he got back to New York, the editor would renege on his drunken promise, but he didn’t, and a contract came through. In due course the novel, Dog Bone Soup, was published. This was in 1959.

  Dog Bone Soup is based on Boyd’ experiences in Korea. It is a hard, grotesque, funny book, and it gained Boyd a modicum of admiration, if little money. To earn his keep, he was teaching composition at a junior college in Dallas. Mary had gone to work for the company that published the yellow pages. Both drank. Boyd slept in the afternoons, and stayed up until dawn writing. The novel on which he was at work was the one that he would later describe to Anne as having “gone down like a lead balloon.” It was titled The World in Miniature, and it took place in England and Italy during the Great War; let me assure you that, contrary to what Boyd himself believed, it is not by any stretch of the imagination a “lead balloon.” Yes, it is long and arcane and in some parts boring (this is probably why it wasn’t very successful); yes, in its juxtaposition of bloody battle scenes and moments of romantic proto-homosexual pathos, its weird tonal hybridizing of Louis L’Amour and Somerset Maugham, it jars the ear and the mind; yet for me it succeeds—mostly, I think, because this strange admixture of Texas swagger and bookish refinement embodies perfectly the spirit of Jonah Boyd, as I briefly knew him. He was a paradox in many ways. Thus Susan remembers that even though he often drank until he vomited in the kitchen sink, and beat his wife, he was always immensely careful with his mustache, which he modeled on Proust’ own. She recalls him letting her hold his mustache brush, run the bristles through the thicket of hair.

  After The World in Miniature, Boyd went through a period of severe writer’ block, one that his drinking and the four/ four teaching load imposed on him by the junior college only worsened. He managed to get himself together enough to apply for some grants, though, and in the spring of 1967, much to his surprise, he won a Guggenheim fellowship—enough money to allow him, at last, to take a leave of absence from his job, and travel, for one blessed spring, in Europe. This was the trip during which he happened upon the leather and paper goods shop in Verona where he found the notebooks. As he told Susan in a letter, he had just arrived in Verona, it was late afternoon, and he had left the legal pad he was carrying with him on the train (a foretaste of future
absent-mindedness). In a bit of stupor he’d wandered into the shop, and been captivated both by its owner and her merchandise. Even today Susan can quote much of that letter from memory, especially the part about the white gloves.

  In April, he returned to Dallas. It was a painful reentry. After Provence and Venice and Rome, Texas seemed to him cheesy and insular. Having gotten habituated to eating tar-tares and salads with gesiers, he could no longer bear the food Mary cooked him. When she served him a TV dinner, he threw it at the TV. Nor could he bear his job, the bored students in whom it was his thankless task to instill some respect for literature. One evening at a party he picked a fight with the chairman of his department, and bloodied his nose. He was fired after that. You might think the nose incident would have spelled the end of Boyd’ academic career, but in fact, in literary circles, it rather enhanced his reputation; after all, this was the age when Norman Mailer was lionized for trying to kill his wife. And so when the chance to teach at Bradford arose—brokered by a mutual friend, another drunken novelist whose brother happened to be the chairman of the Bradford English department—he jumped at it as a sort of lifeline. Not that Bradford was any paradise—it was merely an industrial New England town in which most of the factories were closed—but at least it was east, and, as such, in the same general direction as Europe. Boyd didn’t even tell his family where he was going; he just packed a suitcase, kissed them good-bye, and drove off, promising to call in a few days. That was the last Susan ever saw of him, because when he finally did call—six months later—it was to tell Mary that he would not contest a divorce. She could keep the shitty house and the crappy car. He felt bad for the children, but could see no way at this point to be of any use to them; once he finished his new novel, and got rich, he would try to make up to them for his cruelty, at least by sending some cash.