The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  “How long have you been . . . doing this?”

  “Oh, for years. Since I published my second book. I really hoped that someday I’d manage to get them all, and then I could have a huge bonfire . . . What luck that you, of all people, should have gotten hold of one of the very few that aren’t here in this room.”

  Clearing a space on the bed, Ben sat down amid his bounty. “You know, I’ve never talked about this with a living soul, except Anne,” he said. “Not with either of my wives, never, God knows, with my parents—and now here we are on this lovely autumn morning talking about it, and you know what’ surprising? It feels completely inevitable. I’m not even nervous. I’m kind of serene. I suppose there’ some relief to be derived from being found out, especially after so many years. And who knows, maybe things would have been better in the long run if I’d been found out earlier on. Of course I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be back in Wellspring. But that might have been a blessing.”

  He lifted his hands from his lap; ran his fingers through his hair. “I tried to write about this once. When I was working on the memoir. Now’ my chance, I thought, I’ll come clean, and people will be so amazed by my honesty, they’ll be so humbled by my willingness to confess entirely for the sake of art, and not just because someone’ found out or started hounding me, that they’ll forgive me completely. Then I’ll really be free. I won’t have this thing nagging at me all the time. So I sat down to write the chapter, and I could only come up with two sentences. Two sentences, and such good ones! And then I lost my nerve. You want to know what the sentences were?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘On Thanksgiving Day, 1969, a woman decided to teach her husband a lesson. She enlisted as her accomplice a boy of fifteen who had ideas of his own.’”

  “I don’t understand. What woman?”

  “Anne, of course. That’ what no one would ever guess, if they tried to put the thing together on the basis of the circumstantial evidence. Yes, I stole Jonah Boyd’ novel, and published it as my own. But I didn’t steal the notebooks. Anne stole the notebooks.”

  “Anne?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am.”

  “I guess I might as well tell you the whole story. It’ll take a little time. Do you want to use the toilet first?”

  I did. As I peed in the bathroom that joined Daphne’ room to Ben’, I wondered if he was sneaking out of the house, going back to the kitchen to fetch that knife. Part of me fully expected, when I emerged, to find him waiting for me, knife in hand.

  Instead he was sitting just where I had left him, on the bed. He had cleared a space for me next to him.

  I sat down, and for about two hours, he talked.

  Eleven

  I SHALL NOW report, as faithfully as I can, everything Ben told me that afternoon. I shall put the words in his own voice, in an effort to preserve his tone of confession. He called me his blackmailer, and in a sense, I suppose I am. Yet what is a blackmailer if not the very embodiment of conscience? Extracting a price for silence is not really that different from offering to absolve, in exchange for assigned prayers, a sinner’ blemish. The blackmailer is not really that different from the priest. Nor is he necessarily an enemy. He can be a friend, too—the only person in the world in whom his victim can confide. This was certainly true in Ben’ case. As he talked, his face itself seemed to open; the muscles of his brow relaxed. Not that he was proving his own innocence—far from it—but he was telling the truth, and something about that very gesture of honesty, after so many years, seemed to calm him. By the time he was done, Ben was a different man.

  Here is what he said.

  I’ve often wondered, when or if I ever told his story, how I’d structure it, where I’d begin, whether I’d withhold certain details until the end to build suspense, or spill it all, as it were, from the beginning. This is the usual writer’ dilemma. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, only I know that before I elucidate what actually happened that Thanksgiving, I first have to tell you something about Anne.

  She was a very strange woman, in some ways seductive, in others weirdly repellent. Even when I was a little boy back in Bradford—you may remember her mentioning this—she used to give me massages. I mean, here I was, nine years old or something, and every time my parents had a party she’d be sitting down next to me on the couch offering to give me a back rub. Nine years old! And when she gave me those back rubs, I have to say, there was something in her touch that was much more than motherly. That was frankly erotic. Not that she ever touched my dick or anything; she’d just, now and then, run her fingers very lightly over my arms, so lightly that the hairs stood on end; or she’d let her hand dip for a second down to the waistband of my underpants. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. In fact, as I got older, I started to look forward to her coming over, because I hoped that when she did, she’d give me a massage. She didn’t always. It was really a question of her mood, or how drunk she was. Once I hit puberty I even started plotting how I might get her alone, because I was convinced that if we could just be alone together for a while, she’d go the whole nine yards and jerk me off. That was as far as I let my fantasy go. I never imagined her blowing me, or my fucking her. I had my first orgasm thinking of her giving me a massage, reaching under the waistband of my shorts and touching my prick. Just touching it, very lightly. That’ still such a potent scenario for me I’ve paid prostitutes to enact it. It’ funny, I’ve had a fairly rich sexual life, I’ve had lots of experiences with lots of different kinds of women—and yet even today, nothing excites me more than getting a massage from a woman who’ older than me. And now it’ almost comical, because as / get older, the woman has to get older, too, in order to make the thing work. Which means, what, that when I’m eighty, I’m going to have to find a woman who’ a hundred? And when you think that when all this started, Anne was younger than I am today . . .

  Then we moved away from Bradford. I entered puberty. My voice changed.

  In Wellspring, I started noticing girls at school. There was no question but that with their firm breasts and flat stomachs, they attracted me much more viscerally than Anne ever had. Still, she’d left her mark on me. For instance, after Mark went away, I was plundering in his closet one day when I found a copy of Hustler, which I started masturbating with. There were naked women with their legs spread, but there was also a sort of tableau vivant, a photo narrative, involving an older woman and a male prostitute. In the last photograph, the prostitute washes his genitals in the sink while the woman lies on the bed in fishnet stockings and garters, smoking a cigarette. I used to gaze at that photograph for hours. Hours. I studied it. I thought about Anne. The woman in the picture—her eyes had that same look as Anne’, a look of dissipation and the temporary abolition of a hunger, but not of any real satisfaction. And also recklessness, as if there were nothing she wouldn’t try once.

  I still have the magazine, by the way. I can show it to you any time you like.

  And then one day, rather out of the blue, my mother announced that Anne would be coming to visit us over Thanksgiving, with her new husband.

  Well, as you can guess, the news of her imminent arrival provoked a violently mixed reaction in me. I was scared and excited at once. I wondered if she’d pull the old massage trick again, and if she did, if I’d still want her to. I was pretty sure I did—and yet a part of me worried that there was something wrong with wanting that, that I ought to be wanting only to get to third base, as we used to say, with Angela Longabaugh. And then when Anne did show up, the fact that she looked so awful—you remember, so sort of blowsy and bloated—only addled me the more. Because even with her looking like that, the fantasy hadn’t lost any of its intensity, and by this point I was so obsessed with the fantasy that Anne’ condition hardly mattered. Or rather, it mattered only to the extent that Anne was the conduit of the fantasy. Does that make sense? She could have weighed three hundred pounds and had boils, and still it would have had to be a massage,
it would have had to be Anne. Once it had been lived out, I could forget it, forget her. But I had to get it out of my system first.

  And then there was Boyd. I have to be honest, from the get-go, his presence flummoxed me. Whereas Clifford was this big guy, a real football-player type, but also sort of distracted all the time, not quite there—the kind of guy who chronically buttons his shirt wrong—Boyd was so perfectly put together it was scary. Also, he had this way of smiling at you that creeped you out and excited you at the same time—a sort of childlike grimace, inane, yet also hypnotic. I’ll be honest with you, I thought he was a handsome man. Somehow he didn’t look like a writer. For one thing, his posture was perfect. Whereas most of us have bent spines and flabby asses from sitting all these years at desks, his back was as straight as a ruler. And he smelled good—not like cologne, more like spices. Cloves, cinnamon. He smelled just like those goddamn notebooks. Everything about him was clean, even his mustache, which always looked as if he’d just shampooed it. He was so gentlemanly, I think it rather floored my mother. Those weren’t years when it was fashionable to espouse chivalry or decorum. Men were supposed to let it all hang out, while a woman, if a man opened a door for her, she was supposed to belt him in the chops. In this regard, Boyd was totally anachronistic, and if he got away with it, it was because he was something else, too: He radiated this intense virility that women responded to almost without fail. My mother certainly did.

  Anyway, you can imagine how stunned I was when he took such an interest in me. I mean, you have to understand, at this point, in terms of my writing, no one, except maybe my brother, had ever given me even the slightest hint of encouragement. I was really on my own. My mother tried, but there was something so automatic about her praise, I couldn’t take it seriously. My father just corrected my grammar. Boyd, though—from the minute he found out that I wrote, he treated me like a real writer. And this was fantastic, addictive. He talked to me about my poems in a way that implied he was actually interested in them, not just humoring me. And when I got to read aloud after him—well, I only wished Mark could have been there, because he would have been glad in a way that the others weren’t. Mark was always good to me in that regard.

  Of course, the poem I read was crap. I don’t have to tell you that. Even so, Boyd applauded, and because he applauded, my mother did, and then everyone else. And then after I had finished, it was as if he was so high on the whole thing, he just wanted to keep talking about writing, so we went to my room. He took his shoes off. I remember I put Joni Mitchell’ album Clouds, which I’d just gotten, on the record player and then took it off again immediately, because how could we discuss literature with Joni Mitchell wailing in the background? Also, it had suddenly occurred to me that my fondness for Joni Mitchell might impugn me in his eyes, make me seem less like an authentic poet. So I put on a recording of the Enigma Variations that Mark had given me instead. This was the only classical album I owned.

  We sat on the floor and—well—he tore my poem apart. I mean, just tore into it. He exposed everything that was wrong with it, every technical infelicity, every tonal misstep. Nothing got past him. He pointed out where I was bombastic and where I overwrote. And then, after he’d raked me over the coals, he showed me the lines (there were maybe three) that he actually thought were good, that in his opinion suggested I might really be a poet. Of course, coming from anyone else, I would have found that kind of criticism infuriating. I would have rejected it out of hand. But Boyd, because he wasn’t just giving me unmitigated praise, the way my mother did, because he actually seemed to have thought about the poem, I had to listen to. It was really kind of exhilarating. And of course his instincts were unbelievably sharp. It wasn’t at all like being told by my father, “You use lay where you should use lie in the third stanza.” It was more like being told, “This line has life in it, this one doesn’t.” And then, as soon as he’d told me, of course I saw that he was dead on target. And so I took him absolutely at his word. It was the real deal.

  There was something exciting about just sitting next to him, something warm and alive and responsive even in his posture. The thing about Boyd—I’ve thought about this so much since!—is that he might have been the most physical human being I’ve ever met. That’ not very precise. What I mean is, in him the whole body/mind duality seemed to melt into irrelevance. Even his name was an anagram for body! And when he wrote, it was as if the prose poured, literally, from his fingers. The notebooks were amazing in that way. He barely ever revised, or deleted anything, or even crossed anything out. The prose just—well—flowed. He wrote the way most of us piss! The way he described it, writing, for him, was akin to going into a trance, and then transcribing what he heard. Yes, he did research—but not nearly so much as you might think! Later, when I read his books carefully, I found mistakes everywhere—factual errors, misquotations and misattributions, a thousand little inaccuracies that seemed so lame I could hardly believe he’d let them slip by. For instance, in Gonesse, he has someone meet Proust at a party three years after Proust died. He mixes up Schubert with Schumann. He even says the Champs-Elysees is on the Left Bank! The problem wasn’t that he wasn’t well informed—he read an enormous amount, and he actually knew much more about European history than I do—but he never took notes. He relied on his memory, which was, to say the least, fallible. And because he radiated such self-confidence, and the package was always so well put together, his editors never questioned him or checked up on him for accuracy. They took it for granted that he knew exactly what he was talking about. We all did.

  In any case, to get back to Thanksgiving night—we were sitting there, Boyd and I, he’d just finished reading from his novel and we were listening to “Nimrod” a second time through (he had his eyes closed and he was smiling in that blissed-out, slightly goofy way of his) when suddenly there was a knock on the door. It opened, and Anne walked in. She looked at us, and she said something like, “Come on, Jonah, it’ time to go to bed,” and dragged him up off the floor. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that—on the one hand, the way she just barged in like that reignited the massage fantasy, because it made me wonder if she might come back in the middle of the night when I was alone. But she was also putting an end to an experience that was for me as close to sacred as any I’d ever known. I sensed that Boyd resented her interrupting as much as I did. “Good night, Ben,” he said, “it’ been a pleasure talking with you. Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow.” I said, “Good night, Mr. Boyd. Good night, Mrs. Boyd.” Then they went out, shutting the door behind them.

  And here’ the thing: He left the notebooks. I was going to chase after him, but their door shut, and then I heard them talking in what I can only call loud whispers. Arguing, I think. So I decided to wait and give him back the notebooks in the morning. I got into bed. The light in the bathroom came on and someone walked in. I heard water running from the taps, whispering, a toilet flushing—all those intimate sounds of a couple sharing a bathroom, sounds that other people shouldn’t ever hear.

  I remember that you stayed at the house that night. You were gone when I woke up the next morning. I suppose my mother must have hustled you out early. When I came into the kitchen, the Boyds were sitting with her at the tulip table, drinking coffee. Anne was in this rumpled housecoat, what my Jewish grandfather would have called a shmata, whereas Boyd—well, you can probably imagine how Boyd would have been dressed: He had on a sort of old-fashioned paisley patterned dressing gown, with a tasseled cord around the waist, slippers, and, if you can believe it, an ascot. I don’t know where my father was—at school, or out in his office, seeing a patient. He saw patients at the oddest times, Sunday evenings, or at six A.M. Daphne must have still been asleep. I poured myself some cereal, and sat down with them, and everyone started asking me if I’d slept well. Then my mother said she had a favor to ask me. Because she and Anne wanted to practice, she wondered if I’d mind “taking care” of Mr. Boyd for the afternoon. That was the phrase she used—"taking car
e.” And I said that of course I’d be glad to. Why not? I longed for more time with him.

  So then my mother and Anne headed off to the piano, and Boyd and I got dressed, and met again in the study. “You left these in my room,” I said, handing him the notebooks.

  He looked at them as if he hardly recognized them. “Did I?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Oh, thank you, then,” he said, and took them from me. “But don’t tell Anne. She’d kill me. This will be our little secret.”

  We went out onto the back porch and then walked down into the garden. It was a gorgeous morning. You could see almost all the way to the Pacific. You don’t get mornings like that much anymore. Boyd now had his notebooks—it seemed that he carried all four of them with him everywhere—and I had this sort of blank book in which I wrote poems and pasted pictures I’d cut out from magazines—psychedelic drawings, photographs of Joni Mitchell. Sixties shit. I’d bought it at the hippie shop on Connectisota Avenue. And Boyd was very curious about this book of mine, I guess because it reminded him of his own notebooks. So I took him down into the barbecue pit, which was my favorite place in the garden, and we sat together on that sort of built-in brick bench thing and flipped through the pages of my book, looking at the pictures and the poems. He read them and critiqued them. Once again, he was very hard. Two he told me flat out to throw away. But one he really liked. He actually loved it. It was a very simple little poem, about an airplane landing. And this kind of confused me, because the truth was, I didn’t think much of this poem at all—I’d just sort of dashed it off, unlike some of the others which I’d really labored over—but even so, I was absolutely prepared to trust him. The question now was, what more could I ask of him, or expect of him? Would he offer to send my poem off to some editor he knew at a poetry magazine? Would he write me letters of recommendation? If I sent him more poems after he got back to Bradford, would he consider it presumptuous, or let the poems sit on his desk and never read them? Or would he be glad? I had no idea. At that age, you tend to assume—at least I did—that the world is full of codes and systems that everyone but you understands perfectly. And not only that, but that everyone else assumes that you understand those systems just as well as they do. And rather than admit your ignorance, you feel obliged to pretend you’re completely at ease, when in truth you’re completely at sea. What was going on here? What were the rules? Were there rules?