The Body of Jonah Boyd

by David Leavitt

  It was nearly noon. Off in the distance I could hear the piano—my mother and Anne hammering away at something, the way they did every Saturday morning. Oh, I’m sorry, that was you. And farther off, Ken Longabaugh raking leaves. And a car rounding the bend. It was odd—every noise that came to me was so much itself that today I can remember precisely what the world sounded like that morning, even though it was thirty years ago. The birds and the dryer tumbling. And then Boyd arrived at the last page of my little book, and closed it, and laid it on my lap. He looked me in the eye. I was too embarrassed to meet his gaze.

  Very gently he put his arm over my shoulder.

  “So what would you like to do this afternoon, Ben?” he asked.

  I had a terror of tests in those days. I’ve never done well on them. Standardized tests especially were a nightmare for me, because they always seemed to represent a roadblock to my getting what I wanted—into the “mentally gifted minor” program, or into Wellspring. And now I was being asked a question for which I was sure I was expected to come up with some correct response, as in a test. And I was afraid that if I failed to come up with the correct response, I would somehow be cast out into the wilderness. Only I had no idea what the correct response should be.

  That was when the idea of the arroyo hit me. At the arroyo, there was a lake with boats and nature trails that you could follow, and lining its perimeter were some good examples of thirties architecture. This meant that if Boyd wanted to sightsee, I could show him things. But if he wanted to talk more about my poems, or his novel, we could do that, too. So I suggested the arroyo, and to my relief, his smile broadened, and he said, “What a marvelous idea! We’ll go in my car.” My only clue as to how he hoped to spend his afternoon was that when lunch ended, and we got ready to go, I noticed that in addition to a Coke that my mother had given him, he was carrying the four notebooks.

  Around two we drove down to the arroyo. It was one of those beautiful autumn days that are bright but a little brisk, so that you have to wear your jacket but when you turn your face to the sun it warms you. We sat on a wooden bench, and he read some of his novel aloud to me—nearly the entirety of the second notebook. It took close to two hours. I kept waiting for him to stop, and he never did. Then when he got to the last page, he asked me what I thought, and when I told him I liked it, he must have taken this as leave to go on, because he immediately picked up the third notebook and started reading from that. By now I was about to go mad from restlessness. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and we were supposed to meet Anne and my parents for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and I had to go to the bathroom. But he just kept on reading, never getting hoarse or needing water, utterly oblivious to my squirming, until finally he reached some dramatic juncture—the end of the middle section, I think—at which point he announced that he had to take a whiz and hopped up and went to look for a toilet. Even though I had to go too, I didn’t follow him, for fear that I’d be pee-shy around him. Instead I crept into the woods and went against a tree.

  When he got back, to keep him from reading even more—which he would have been totally capable of—I asked him how close he was to being finished with the novel. He said that he only had two chapters left to write—and then proceeded to explain to me, in excruciating detail, just what those two chapters were going to consist of, how he intended to tie up the different plot threads, the various denouements for which he’d already been making preparations, scattering little setups all through the book, the importance of which the end would thrillingly illumine. And as he talked, he got more and more excited. He even told me what he planned for his last line, which would be a repeat of the first line: To make love in a balloon . . .

  It was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had. The more he talked, the less relevant I became. His interest in me was completely obliterated. He heaved forth all these ideas of his in this way that totally discounted my existence, and I became bored and irritated and, in a curious way, resentful. Not that I could have given him any more of my poems to read—I’d already given him all I had. Still, having been deprived all my life of that kind of attention, and then getting such a massive dose of it from Boyd, I thirsted after it more than ever. I wanted him to tell me again how wonderful my airplane poem was. But he just talked and talked about that goddamn novel of his, and as he did, I could see him gradually disappearing from the arroyo, from the bench, from me, becoming more and more remote from everything that had any physical reality, until it seemed that I could have gotten up and walked away and he wouldn’t have even noticed that I was gone.

  He had laid the notebooks down next to him. He seemed so totally unconscious of their presence there that suddenly I understood why Anne had gotten so furious at him upon their arrival. I wondered: When we got up to go to the Chinese restaurant, would he remember to take them with him? And if he didn’t—if he just left them on the park bench —then what would I do? Alert him? Or just say nothing, walk away with him and see how long it took before he realized what he’d done? I have to admit, there was a part of me that was sorely tempted to stay silent. Something about that kind of obliviousness really brings out the sadist in people. Also, watching to see whether he’d forget the note books made for a kind of mesmerizing game: It was like a scene in a Hitchcock movie in which someone has left some crucial note in a hotel room, and the heroine is walking around picking things up and putting them down, and you’re wondering if she’ ever going to notice the note. But in the end, he didn’t forget them. Oh, he did at first—he started to walk away without them—but then, just a few feet from the bench, he stopped in his tracks, stared into space for a minute, and ran back to retrieve them.

  About the conversation at dinner that night I recall very little. I was in too bad a mood. I think I made a point of refusing to eat anything. I could be very difficult about food in those days. We were sitting at a round table with a lazy Susan in the middle piled with much more stuff than our group of five could possibly have consumed—kung pao chicken and lovers’ shrimp and lo mein and a whole sweet-and-sour fish. There were a bunch of empty chairs, and Boyd had put his notebooks down on one of them. Now I watched them as I had in the park. Once again I wondered if he would forget them. Boyd himself was very quiet, as was Anne—maybe she’d been drinking—and my mother, in her usual way, was trying to fill up the silence with chitchat. She always felt it was her responsibility to keep the sociability flowing. And then we were finished eating, and the waitress took the masses of leftover food off to the kitchen to pack up. We opened our fortune cookies—mine, I remember, said, “Great things are in store for you"—and my father put his credit card on top of the bill, and my mother went off to the bathroom, presumably to claim a few minutes of tranquility and isolation for herself. Boyd still looked as if he was in another world. There was no more tea to drink.

  Soon the waitress came to leave the boxes of leftovers and to take the bill and the credit card: A few minutes later she brought a slip for my father to sign. My mother returned, freshly perfumed. We all stood. And this time—I’ll never forget it, Denny—this time it did happen, just like Anne had warned us: Boyd walked away from the table without the notebooks. And I just watched him. I waited for him to catch himself, as he had at the arroyo. I hoped he would. But he just strolled serenely toward the door. My parents went through, and so did he. Sailed through. The door shut behind them.

  I turned around, to verify that the notebooks were still on the chair. They were. I looked at them, and as I did, it dawned on me that someone else was looking at them too: Anne. She raised her head, and our eyes met.

  It was all over then. Because, you see, not only had she seen that Boyd had left the notebooks behind, she’d seen that I’d seen that Boyd had left the notebooks behind; and more than that, she’d seen that I hadn’t said anything. Just as I’d seen that she hadn’t said anything.

  I think that at that instant a contract was sealed between us—one the repercussions of which, the re
al repercussions of which, I’m only now beginning to feel. They were all out in the parking lot, Boyd and my parents, and of course those notebooks might as well have been molten, the way they were glowing before us, there on the chair.

  That was when she winked at me. It was the first seductive thing she’d done since her arrival. She winked at me, stole back to the table, picked up the notebooks—I was surprised they didn’t burn her fingers—and shoved them into the enormous, shapeless handbag that she was carrying. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered. And then she grabbed me by the arm, and together we walked out to the parking lot, to the cars.

  I rode home with my parents. My mother asked how my afternoon with Boyd had gone, and I said that it had gone fine. Then in the front hall she asked Boyd if I’d been a good host, and he said, “Tremendous,” and then she asked what time he and Anne needed to get up in the morning, and if they needed her to wake them. He thanked her but explained that he’d brought a portable alarm clock. Anne was making a drama of stretching her arms and yawning, so we all said “good night” and headed off to our separate rooms. Boyd, so far as I could tell, still hadn’t realized he’d left the notebooks at the restaurant, and Anne hadn’t said a word to him about having grabbed them after the fact. I assumed she would tell him gloatingly, once they were alone.

  “Sweet dreams,” she said to me, as I drifted into my room—and then, for the second time, she winked at me.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” Boyd said.

  I didn’t brush my teeth. I climbed straight into bed. The light in the bathroom went on, as it had the previous night; I listened to the now familiar sounds of conjugal ablutions. Then the light went off again. Their door to the bathroom closed. I hadn’t locked mine—whether that means anything I leave it for you to decide. Now the house was silent, except for the pipes, which gave out occasional, comforting groans.

  About half an hour later I heard a clicking noise. I sat up in bed. Someone had come into my room from the bathroom. This didn’t in and of itself surprise me: On some level I must have expected a visitor from that quarter. The question was who the visitor was going to turn out to be—Anne or her husband.

  It was Anne. Finger to lips, she sat down on the edge of my bed. As in the old days of the massages, she rested her hand on my stomach. She was wearing a nightgown as shapeless as her bag, which, strangely enough, she had also brought with her. She smelled of cold cream and cigarettes. Over my face she hovered, her hair pulled back and rubber-banded, smiling at me in that same dewy way that her husband had, and that had so rattled me. Perhaps she’d picked up the habit from him.

  In a whisper, she started to talk. She talked almost as much as Boyd had, back at the arroyo. She told me that she was “fed up to here” with him. She told me that she often woke up in tears during the night, wondering if leaving Clifford and marrying Boyd had been a terrible mistake. Because, she said, almost from the day of their wedding he had ceased to treat her with affection. His work consumed him to such a degree that most of the time she felt as if she were merely a drudge, her duty in life to wash his clothes and make his bed and prepare his dinner. “And he can be violent,” she added. “Oh, no one believes it, because in public he’ always the perfect gentleman, not a hair out of place. He would never dream of making a scene in public. But then when we’re alone, the smallest thing sets him off. This morning, for instance—I’d gotten dressed, and was getting ready to go play the piano with your mother, when suddenly he started . . . Well, just staring at me in this awful way that made my heart race. ‘What’ the matter?’ I asked. ‘I can’t believe what a frump you’ve turned into,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘You mean you haven’t noticed?’ he said. And then he laughed in this horrible way and said, ‘If you can’t see it for yourself, I’m not going to tell you.’ I went into the bathroom and peered into the mirror, trying to figure out what was wrong. But I couldn’t. So I went back into the bedroom and said, ‘Please, Jonah, for God’ sake, tell me what’ wrong.’ Then he made this noise of disgust, grabbed me really quite roughly by the arm, and dragged me back to the bathroom. And then he showed me, in the mirror, that there was this stain on my blouse. This really quite tiny little stain. And he explained very calmly that unless I changed my blouse, he wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. No one else would notice, he would do it so subtly; still, I’d feel it.

  “I changed my blouse, and the whole time he lectured me about how fat I was, how I’d let myself go. He hated the first blouse I put on because it was wrinkled. He hated the second blouse because it didn’t match my skirt. And on and on, until I didn’t have any blouses left. ‘Well, that last one will have to do,’ he said, ‘but really, Anne, this is absurd. You’re an embarrassment.’ And in the meantime my arm is aching, my right arm, because he’ wrenched it so badly, practically pulled it out of the socket.”

  That same arm was now hovering over my diaphragm. Very casually—much as her husband had put his arm around my shoulder down in the barbecue pit—Anne started to touch me. She was talking and talking, and in the meantime her fingers were drumming my chest, darting now and then into the gaps between the buttons on my pajama top, brushing bare skin, once even tweaking a nipple. Of course, as you can imagine, I had a huge hard-on. How couldn’t I, what with all the anticipatory tension of that long day, and now the prospect of Anne finally making the massage fantasy real? And so she went on touching me, and went on about how cruel he was, and how unhappy she was, and how could he have the unmitigated gall to claim that he cared about that novel more than anything in the world—even more than her—and yet be so cavalier as to leave the only copy in the world at a Chinese restaurant? So that on top of everything else, his abuse and his coldness, now she had this anxiety to contend with, feeling that she had to watch out for him every second. And all the while her hand circling, circling, getting closer to my groin. I was so hard my balls had nearly disappeared; I wondered what would happen if—when—she touched my dick, if I’d come right away, and in that case, whether she’d be pleased, or annoyed and frustrated. Once again, it was rules and systems, codes that I assumed everyone else understood perfectly, the outlines of which I could barely make out in the shadows . . . I wanted it all to be over, and at the same time I wanted it to last for hours, this sweetly awful hovering on the edge of an abyss that was somehow also a bridge over an abyss . . . and what was on the other side of the bridge? Part of my not wanting it to end was fear of what was on the other side.

  She was careful. She knew what she was doing. She got close, then moved away. Prolonging the pleasure—the first hand other than my own. And in the meantime the monologue never let up. “But tonight decided me,” she said. “What happened at the restaurant decided me. I’ve had it up to here with his recklessness. I’m going to teach him a lesson, Ben. And I need your help.”

  Suddenly her hand stopped in its motions. I looked up at her. “Help?” I said.

  You may recall that earlier I mentioned her having brought her handbag with her: that huge, shapeless handbag, so typical of its era, offering in its amplitude and ugliness a sharp rebuke to the little decorative pocketbooks of the fifties, those hard-edged patent-leather cylinders and shell-shaped clutches, designed to hold a Kotex and a lighter, that my mother carried with her to weddings. Feminism, in its early years, seemed to be all about refusals—to shave under the arms, to wear makeup, to wear a bra—and that handbag in a certain sense emblemized those refusals . . . Until that moment, when Anne lugged it up from the floor, I hadn’t really registered the fact that she’d brought it with her on a journey that had required her to tiptoe all of twenty feet from her bed. Now, however, she was pulling the four notebooks from its depths; balancing them on my crotch, right on top of my hard-on. I was so close to coming, the weight of them nearly pushed me over the edge.

  I looked at the notebooks. Never had they seemed so potent, so pregnant with . . . what? Malevolence? Promise? The
very color of the leather seemed to have changed, to have taken on the hue of lava. I looked at them. And then I looked at her.

  “I want you to do me a favor,” she said. “I’m not going to give these back to Jonah. I want you to keep them.”

  “Keep them?”

  “Hide them. And then tomorrow, when he wakes up and realizes that they’re missing—if he realizes that they’re missing—you’re going to pretend you have no idea where they are. No idea at all. Everyone will go mad, your mother will tear the house upside down trying to find them. Still, you won’t say anything. You’ll even help her look. But you won’t find them. No one will, because you’ll have put them away somewhere no one would ever think of checking. Somewhere perfect. I leave it to you to determine the place. Somehow I suspect you already have a place.”