“Don’t you mean you weren’t sure you’d want to see me}” But then she smiled again, and invited me inside.
I couldn’t go. I was late for class. Still, I let her press me into accepting an invitation to tea that afternoon. “Tea” seemed very unlike Anne. After my classes were finished I returned to the dorm, showered, changed my clothes. For some reason it seemed important that I make myself as presentable as possible. I arrived at her house like a suitor, or the son of an old friend pressed by his mother into service. I had bought flowers. Once again, she was wearing a sundress—a different one, red with large gold poppies on it. To my surprise she kissed me on the cheek, and then she led me inside.
From that day forward, Anne and I were friends—real friends—and during my Bradford years I visited her often. It turned out that the facade of the house—which she and Boyd had bought with the advance for Gonesse, just after their marriage—was deceptive; once you got through the door, depths of space were revealed at which the view from the street barely hinted. There was a big living room with lots of books in it, and also a sort of garden room that opened onto the backyard, with French doors looking onto a rose garden even more exuberant than the one in the front. This was where we would sit and talk on the occasions when I visited her. We’d drink tea, and she’d ask me about my life, if I had any girlfriends, how my writing was going. She never touched me, as in the old days. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed.
It took three of these little teas before the subject of her husband, and the notebooks, even came up. And when it did, she was the one who brought it up. I wasn’t entirely sure that I was glad. After all, to talk about the notebooks was to admit that they were real, and now that Jonah Boyd was dead, the fact that I still had them in my possession, cramped within their brick prison like the kidnapped girl in the movie, made me more uneasy than ever. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have ever said anything about them. But Anne was always braver than I was.
I remember that the weather was glorious that day. In addition to the tea, which was Earl Grey, and headily aromatic, there were cookies that she had baked herself. Oatmeal cookies. I loved oatmeal cookies. Under different circumstances—at home, for instance—I might have scarfed down the whole plate in a minute flat. Yet that afternoon I felt that I should be polite. No doubt this had something to do with Anne’ amazing transformation from slattern into the shimmering, almost haloed creature who now sat before me. I took one cookie, ate it as slowly as I could, and looked her in the eye.
“So have you still got them?” she asked.
I pretended ignorance. “Got what?” I asked.
“The notebooks, of course.”
I returned my attention to the plate of cookies. Nine remained.
For some reason I now felt that I could take a second cookie, and I did.
“Yes, I’ve still got them,” I said after a bite.
“I suppose you’d like to know why I never got in touch with you.”
In fact I didn’t particularly. Still, I couldn’t very well just tell her to cease and desist. So I nodded, and took a third cookie, and arranged myself into a posture of listening.
Though I can’t be sure, my guess today is that I was the first person—perhaps the only person—in whom Anne ever confided any of it, the story of what: had happened in the years between her visit to Wellspring and her husband’ death. “No doubt once I’m dead, I’ll rot in hell,” she said very matter-of-factly, as she sipped that delicious tea in that beautiful garden room on that sunny afternoon, with the roses outside the window and those cookies enticing me from their plate. “But does that mean I shouldn’t enjoy what’ left of my life? I don’t see why. Yes, I destroyed him. I murdered my husband. Not that I meant to. But at least I’m alive.
“I want you to know that it really was my intention, from the very beginning, just to teach him a lesson, to let him think he’d lost the notebooks and then, once he was good and sorry, surprise him with the good news that they’d been found. And then how happy he’d be, how grateful! As I must have told you, we weren’t very happy together. Jonah really was the most selfish of husbands. Whole days would pass sometimes during which he wouldn’t even talk to me—sometimes to punish me, but more often because he was just so lost in his writing that he couldn’t bother to acknowledge the existence of another person’ needs. And this made me sad. And furious. But then once the notebooks were lost—correction, once you and I stole the notebooks—everything changed. His entire personality changed. Back in Bradford he became not only docile, but genuinely affectionate—the way he’d been before we were married, when I was divorcing Clifford and our relationship was still illicit. Don’t get me wrong: The loss made him wretched. He really had adored his novel, and genuinely believed it was going to be his masterpiece. Whether that’ the case or not, I’m not sure. Maybe you can tell me, since no doubt you’ve read it by now.”
She lifted her head, reached into her purse, and extracted what appeared to be a cigarette but turned out to be a little plastic cylinder posing as a cigarette—a faux cigarette. This she placed between her teeth.
“In any case,” she continued, “I encouraged him to rewrite the novel from memory, and to his credit, he did try. In the old days it had been his habit to get up early and go to his office at the university to work, and now he resumed it. Sometimes I’d visit him there. From outside the closed door, I’d hear the pecking of the typewriter. He said he couldn’t bear to write in the notebooks anymore, even though he had a whole stock of blank ones. They reminded him too much of what he’d lost. Instead he typed, and then went instantly to make copies—a vain attempt to compensate for his earlier carelessness, too little too late. But his heart wasn’t in it, and despite his valiant efforts, he just couldn’t replicate the magic of the original novel. I don’t think any writer’ ever succeeded in doing that. Rather, he said, it was like warmed-over meatloaf. Like eating warmed-over meatloaf, day after day after day. But what he had written in the notebooks, what he had lost, was the most divine elixir, nectar of the gods.
“Remembering him saying that makes me miss my husband. Although it annoyed me sometimes, the truth was, I rather adored his crazy, inflated rhetoric. It was part of what made him so appealing—this boy from Texas who talked like Longfellow. In any case, after a month or so he gave up on his effort to rewrite the novel. He said he was just going to rest for a while, focus on teaching. And meanwhile his editor—a new editor, because the old one had been fired—was breathing down his neck to get her the manuscript, because earlier he had promised to be finished by February, and so they had gone ahead and put Gonesse into their fall catalogue. The publisher’ catalogue. He kept putting her off, promising to have it to her the next week, and then the next. I don’t know what he was thinking, only that he was forestalling what he saw as an inevitable and terrible confession, which would be tantamount to admitting to himself that the notebooks, and with them the novel, were gone for good. And of course I think he was also putting off facing the fact that what had happened would have some inevitable fall-out, that he might be asked to return the money he’d been paid, or fail to get tenure.
“Of course, this would have been the logical moment for me to call you, Ben. The pressure was really on—not only from Jonah’ publisher but from Bradford. I should have called you then and told you to do your stuff, to find the notebooks. Then Nancy could have phoned me up joyfully to say she was holding them in her hands, the wayward children ready at last to be returned to their parent. And then I’d have told Jonah, he’d have been overjoyed, and arranged for them to be sent back the fastest way possible. And the old life would have resumed . . . Yes, in retrospect, I see that that’ exactly what I should have done.
“So—why didn’t I? Not a simple question to answer.
“Well, first things first. I was a drunk, and drunks never think clearly. And yet more to the point, in his new state of mourning and contrition Jonah had become, as I said before, loving
and affectionate and seemed to need me in a way that he never had. But if he got the novel back, would he continue to? Wasn’t it more likely that he’d revert to his old, ignoring ways? Was there even any guarantee that he’d start taking care with the notebooks? I feared he wouldn’t. It would have been the old life, and I didn’t want the old life. Before, when he was writing, Jonah would bound out of bed early every morning, sometimes as early as five-thirty, to write. I hated that. I was a light sleeper, and even though I’d want to get up with him, usually I’d be too hungover to make it out of the bed. I’d listen to him bustling around in the kitchen, listen to the car pulling out of the garage, and then I’d just lie there in a sort of anxious delirium until nine or so, when I’d stagger out of the bedroom only to find the house so unbearably empty and lonely that I’d have to pour myself some gin and orange juice and watch The Price Is Right. But now, of course, he had nothing to get up for, no reason to bound out of bed, and so he’d stay with me every morning, sleep late with me—and not just lie in the bed, but hold me. We’d spend hours and hours like that. It didn’t matter that we never had sex. The affection, the hugging and the languorous mornings—they more than made up for the lack of sex. Now he never found fault with how I dressed. He hardly mentioned how I dressed!
“I suppose you can guess what all this is leading to. One afternoon I came back from somewhere—the liquor store, probably!—and Jonah was in the living room, just over there, standing by the wet bar. You probably can’t tell, but in that corner over there, that used to be a wet bar. Today I don’t keep any liquor at all in the house, not even a bottle of cooking sherry, but back then we used to have every kind of booze you can imagine. Gin, vermouth, rum, whiskey, vodka, bourbon. And now Jonah, who had been dry for years, was standing at the wet bar, and methodically mixing himself a martini. He was doing it very professionally, too, almost like a bartender.
“He smiled when he saw me in the door. ‘Lovely wife,’ he said, ‘I’m just making myself a wee cocktail. Would you care to partake?’ Or something like that. And I just looked across the furniture at him.
“Something passed between us then. I knew he was considering his options very carefully. He wasn’t a stupid man. He understood that if he had one drink, he’d have another, and then another. He put the gin and the vermouth into a shaker with some ice. And he shook. And the whole time he was gazing at me, cow-eyed, as if he were about to burst into tears. And then he poured the stuff into martini glasses and handed me one. We sat on the sofa. He said, ‘ometimes it’ just too much, you know?’ I nodded. And then we drank.
“There’ not much more to tell. Things got bad very fast. He started showing up drunk to class, and was abusive to his students. One of them complained, and he nearly lost his job. But by then, of course, word of what had happened—the loss of the novel—had leaked out, or he’d confided it in someone, and the chair felt sorry for him. He let Jonah off with a warning.
“The ironic thing is, even though he could get in foul moods when he was drunk—dark, violent moods—still, I remember those last months before he died as among the happiest I’ve ever known. Never before had Jonah seemed so completely, so entirely in love with me. Nor I with him. We were husband and wife, but we were also what we had once been, illicit lovers, and we were also something new. Drinking chums. Drink really forges a bond. That’ why drunks like to hang out together. And we were classy drunks. I remember going out to the bookstore one day and rather jauntily buying a sort of cocktail cookbook. We used to read it together in bed. We’d prepare all sorts of exotic drinks for ourselves, the way other couples cook. Frozen things, things in pineapples with little umbrellas. The most divine bloody Marys. And every day I’d think, ‘Today I’m going to write to Ben and tell him to quote-unquote find the notebooks,’ and every day I’d put it off. And why not? What I was postponing was the end to my own happiness, a weird, dreadful sort of happiness, but a happiness nonetheless.
“Of course it ended anyway. It had to. The day Jonah died, I had a presentiment that something bad was going to happen. The rain was coming down in sheets. We were out of vodka. I’d suggested he not risk driving in that bad weather, but the suggestion was half-hearted, because the truth was, I wanted the vodka as badly as he did. He headed off, and I waited here, in the garden room. I watched the rain falling against the windows, listened to it drumming the roof. He didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back. I got dozy. Abstractly I imagined a car crash. But it was all dreamlike. And then the phone rang. The police.
“The shock of what had happened woke me up to what a freak I’d grown into. I realized that I might die too, if I didn’t change soon. Since that day I haven’t had another drink, or smoked a single cigarette. I feel better than I have since I was a girl.
“Does this seem horribly callous to you? I want something decent for myself. Even though I acknowledge my crime, I’m not prepared to spend the rest of my days on this planet doing penance for it. What good could come of that? Two lives ruined, instead of just one.”
She stood, picked up the tea things as well as the plate on which the cookies had rested. It was empty now except for a few crumbs. She put everything on a tray and carried it into the kitchen and then she came back, and sat down once again across from me.
That was when she said, “So what are we going to do about the notebooks?”
Thirteen
ANNE AND I stayed in touch for most of the rest of my time at Bradford. Not that we saw each other every day; on the contrary, sometimes weeks or even months would go by during which I wouldn’t hear so much as a word from her, or think about her—and then one morning, rather out of the blue, an image of her face would pop into my head, and I’d feel compelled to bicycle by her house; knock on her door. She always looked the same: curiously fresh, almost innocent, as if everything she had endured and perpetrated, rather than etching lines of age and corruption into her skin, had somehow renewed her youth. Or perhaps, like Dorian Gray, she had some gruesome portrait of herself hidden away in a cranny of that deceptively big house.
It wasn’t about sex. Sex never happened, or even came up. And though the massage fantasy lingered, at that point I wouldn’t have even considered mentioning it to Anne. She seemed too pure for that now, and anyway, I had by this point imprinted my longing, as it were, upon other women.
Sometimes we talked about the notebooks. Anne was always the one who brought the matter up. It seemed feasible to her, she said, that even at this late date they might be “found” without either of us coming under suspicion—in which case, she proposed, I could perhaps finish the novel myself (hadn’t Boyd told me his plans for the last chapters?) and she could send it to his editor, who could arrange for its posthumous publication. After all—out of kindness, she suspected—the editor had never asked that she return the money Boyd had been paid as an advance. A tax write-off, as well as a write-off to the conscience, saving the poor woman from having to live with knowing that she had forced Anne out of her home. This way, though, the debt could be erased, Anne said, in addition to which there was more money to be paid on acceptance of the manuscript, and even more to be earned from royalties—money, of course, that she would share with me. Divide with me. But I was wary of complying with the plan, not only because I feared, more than she did, being found out or accused of theft; also because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that only so long as I actually held the notebooks in my possession could I be sure of having any leverage with Anne. Yes, she had proposed that I could write the unwritten chapters—but who was to say there wasn’t another writer who could have fulfilled that task just as well? And for all I knew, Boyd might have told her everything he’d told me about the last chapters. So I demurred, changing the subject or putting her off every time the topic came up. And what could she do, when I demurred, but accept it? In a sense neither of us could really afford to make a move without the other’ cooperation—as long, that is, as the notebooks remained under my control. Once I gave them
to her, on the other hand, she could easily double-cross me, either by doubting the miraculous coincidence of their suddenly turning up, or by going further and implying that I had stolen them—in which case I would be the one who had no recourse, as of course the notebooks would by then be in her possession. That wasn’t something I was prepared to risk. So I stalled, saying things like, “I’ll have to think about it,” or, “I’m not quite ready yet.” Nor was she pushy. In fact, I suspect that despite her insistent positivity, her determination to make the rest of her life as free of taint as the last years had been marred by it, some terrible guilt still plagued her. In some ways, to forget about the notebooks suited Anne as well as it did me.
Meanwhile, wrapped in foil and paper and plastic, they sat where I had left them, in their little cave. Whenever I went home, for Christmas or during the summer, I would check on them. Once or twice I removed them from their protective casing, examined them to make sure that no damage had been done by smoke or rain or mildew. Their resistance to the elements deepened my conviction that they possessed some sort of magical properties. For it seemed that no matter how many years they sat in that sooty chamber, each time I unwrapped them they still smelled as they had the Thanksgiving when Jonah Boyd had passed them around the table. They smelled like him—just as that Thanksgiving I had thought that he smelled like them.
Then I graduated from college. I moved to New York. Anne and I lost touch.
You must believe me when I say that it was not until many, many years later that the idea of publishing Gonesse as my own work even entered my head, and by then, of course, Anne was dead, and my father was dead, and my mother. I had written three novels of my own, none of which I’d been able to sell. Oh, I’d had bites. Editors are sadists, Denny. They love to say to a young writer, “I can’t buy your book as it is, but maybe if you fix this, or alter that, I’ll reconsider.” And so you fix this, and alter that—you do exactly what the editor has suggested—and what’ the reply? “Well, if it weren’t for this or that, the novel would be perfect, but as it is, it’ impossible, it will never sell.” As you can imagine, after a while that sort of bait-and-switch can become really infuriating. And I got it again and again. Maybe things would have been easier if I’d just met with swift and merciless rejection from the start—then, in all likelihood, I would have gotten the message and given up—but now it seemed that I was doomed to be forever tantalized, to have a remote if real opportunity perpetually dangled before my eyes, only to be withdrawn at the last minute.
The Body of Jonah Boyd Page 17
