The Body Of Jonah Boyd (17 page)

And of course, when I went to Milwaukee, I brought the notebooks with me. And once there, in that funny little brick house
of ours, I had no idea whatsoever what to do with them. There was no barbecue pit in
that
backyard. I considered various hiding places—a dormant dumb-waiter and a sort of hidden shelf, way up in the back of one of
the closets—before I realized that at this point there was really no longer any need to look for a hiding place. Because of
course no one who knew about the notebooks, who knew what they were, and might have recognized them, was anywhere near Milwaukee.
And so, taking a page from “The Purloined Letter,” I started just leaving them out on my desk. Once Molly strolled in and
asked me about them. “Oh, those are the notebooks I wrote poetry in when I was a kid,” I said. “I dug them out of the house
in Wellspring before we sold it. I thought I’d read them over.” And she smiled, and said, “That’ nice,” and left the room
as obliviously as she had entered it. She had a habit, my first wife, of wandering in and out of rooms for no particular reason
that I found vexatious.

So now I was a husband and a homeowner, and I had to do something. Molly had found a job with an advertising firm most of
the clients of which were big Milwaukee breweries. Our house had cost so little, comparatively speaking, that even after buying
it I still had quite a bit of money left from the sale of the big house, my mother’ house. I told her that I was going to
give myself a year to write a new novel, and that if that didn’t pan out, I’d give up writing and get a job, and since it
seemed that now I could afford that year, she gave her assent. Now, every morning, I would sit down in front of the computer—I’d
bought myself one of the new Macintoshes, which seemed so astonishing at the time, even though these days we would find them
ridiculously slow—and gaze at the little simulacrum of a blank page that the screen offered up. Next to me, on top of my desk,
sat the notebooks. It wasn’t my intention at this point to
do
anything with them. On the contrary, I only kept them out because I hoped they might bring me luck, inspire me to write the
book that Georgiana Sleep (who had in the meantime changed jobs, moving to a bigger, more prestigious house) would actually
buy.

And then for two weeks I just sat there. It wasn’t that I didn’t have an idea—I did—I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to
depress the keys. My fingers either felt heavy as iron weights, or they felt gummy and rubbery, or they shook so badly I could
barely control them. And every one of those days, that awful virtual blank page stared out at me. I hated it. On old computers,
when you wrote, you typed pulsing green letters onto a black screen. Somehow that was easier, because it looked less like
writing in a book. The Mac’ blank page, because it was more real, was more of a rebuke.

I remember that on one of those afternoons, just after lunch, I suddenly felt, for the first time in days, that I might actually
be able to control my fingers. So I hurried to the computer and switched it on. It took an eternity to boot up, and by the
time it had, whatever surge of hopefulness or self-confidence had seized me was gone. Still, my fingers worked. I thought,
“Try typing. Just typing. To get yourself back in the mood.”

And then, more or less on a whim, I typed out the sentence, “To make love in a balloon . . .”

To make love in a balloon . . .

I blinked. I looked at the words in front of me. They looked so good to me on the screen, so fresh and—well—so
real,
that I typed out the second sentence of Boyd’ novel, too.

I smiled. This was art. This was fun.

I opened the first notebook. I checked to make sure that I had gotten the sentences down correctly. (I had.) Then I typed
out the third sentence—and just went on, until I finished the entire first chapter. And why not? The prose was so good! True,
this was typing, not writing—and yet, I reasoned, there was practical benefit to be gained even from that. Because if I ever
decided, as Anne had contemplated, to “find” the note books and then to try to arrange for their publication, of course it
would be necessary to have a presentable typescript. The very copy that Boyd himself, much to his wife’ chagrin, had resisted
making.

The next several days passed in a trance. I stopped answering the phone. In the evenings I was in such a good mood I think
my wife suspected me of doing cocaine. By night I was enthusiastic, appreciative, kind, a superb lover, a terrific cook. I
laughed out loud at the television, even at the stupidest sitcoms. We had her parents over for dinner and I charmed them.
And then in the mornings I would wake up early, vigorous, alert to the smell of coffee, eager once again to lose myself in
Gonesse.
If typing out the book was better than writing it or reading it, it was because it allowed for a degree of immersion in an
alternative and beautiful world the likes of which, in my own work, I’d never before known. Now I understood why Jonah Boyd
had grown so remote from me that afternoon at the arroyo! Why concern yourself with reality, when you had this at your disposal—this
better, richer realm?

Nor did I merely type. Oh, at first I was strict with myself; I kept myself to the role of scribe. But then as I got deeper
into the manuscript, I also got bolder. If I were to find what I considered to be a stylistic infelicity, a misplaced “but,”
or a repeat of two words within the same paragraph, or (heaven forbid) a dangling modifier, I would make a silent repair.
Or if I came to a sentence in which I felt that Boyd had chosen the wrong word or phrase, or brandished a cliche, or if I
felt I could come up with a better way of saying whatever it was that needed to be said, I would slip the change in furtively,
slyly. Like a shoplifter. The computer made this easy; on a computer screen the labor of rewriting is rendered invisible.
One would have had to consult the notebooks themselves to discover any evidence of my tampering. And this chance to clean
up, to correct, to improve, to tighten the screws, even on occasion to cut, only amplified the sense of euphoria that had
claimed me, much like the one, I see now, that had sometimes claimed my mother when she undertook her massive cleaning details.
For by making these changes, I was also putting my mark upon the novel. I was making it, in a small way, my own.

And meanwhile Georgiana called me at least once a week. “Fantastically,” I’d say when she asked how things were going—and
refuse to say more. She kept begging for clues. I think she could tell from the tone of my voice that I was onto something,
into something. “Just a description, some hint of what the novel’ about,” she’d plead, and I’d laugh, and tell her nothing.
In all honesty, it felt good, for once, to have the shoe on the other foot.

Now this is very important, and I hope you believe me: Until the very end it was my intention, if I sent out the typescript
at all, to send it out as what it was, Jonah Boyd’ lost novel, which I had discovered and completed. But then I reached the
last page of the fourth notebook. Now it was time for the most difficult part of the job—completion, the writing of the unwritten
last two chapters. Fortunately I remembered everything Boyd had told me, that afternoon at the arroyo. And yet when I settled
down to actually do the work, I decided that some of Boyd’ plans weren’t nearly as smart as he’d believed them to be. In all
likelihood, I decided, he would have changed his mind too, once he’d reached that stage. And so instead of adhering strictly
to the plan he had laid out for me, I went my own way, and produced, in a matter of days, a pair of chapters that seemed to
me in every way worthy of, if not better than, what preceded them, even if at certain key points they diverged from the creator’
master plan.

Now comes the hard part. The shameful part. The part for which I fear you will never forgive me.

I printed out and corrected the finished typescript. Then I printed out a fresh copy. Georgiana called. “How’ the novel going?”
she asked.

“I just finished,” I said.

“You finished!” she said. “Then what are you waiting for? I want to see it!”

Believe me or not as you choose, but from the morning I changed the title to
The Sky
and put my name on the title page, to the morning when I handed the package containing the manuscript across the counter at
our neighborhood post office, to the morning when Georgiana called to say that not only she but the entirety of her editorial
board—that tormenting “we"—had adored my book and that she was preparing to make an offer for it, I thought I was only doing
it to teach her a lesson.

And the lesson was this: Because I was me, I was convinced that upon actually reading the novel, Georgiana would decide to
use the occasion, once again, to slap me down, put me in my place; that she would either reject the novel out of hand, or
suggest that if I made a thousand changes she might reconsider it, and then once I had made them, reject it; and all this
despite the distinct note of enthusiasm I had been hearing in her voice. But now, when she slapped me down, at least I would
have the satisfaction of knowing at last that the problem was not with my writing; the problem had never been with my writing;
on the contrary, the problem was with the system of submissions itself, which was deeply corrupt, and manned by stooges who
would lavish praise upon the works of the already famous with the same Pavlovian predictability with which they would disparage
and dismiss the works of the hardworking but little known. And having established, once and for all, that all these years
of rejection said nothing about me or about my work, then I could quit writing, and be free. I had seen something similar
happen in an episode of
The Partridge Family
that I remembered from my childhood, in which Laurie goes to work as a substitute teacher in Danny’ class, and because he
is her brother, she flunks him on every paper. At last he turns in a story by Hemingway; she still flunks him. He reveals
the truth, she is abashed, a lesson is learned.

That was the lesson I wanted to teach Georgiana: She would reject my novel, and I, with glorious composure, would reveal that
it was not my novel at all; it was Jonah Boyd’.

Needless to say, the plan had a lot of holes. Indeed, the numerous practical difficulties inherent in it would probably, in
the long run, have stopped me from ever putting it into action. (Among other things, I would have had to explain how I had
happened upon Jonah Boyd’ manuscript in the first place.) Only, as it turned out, I never had to put it into action, because
far from responding with diffidence or disdain, Georgiana bought the book, praising me for having overcome “creative hurdles”
to become “the writer I was born to be.” And the whole time, of course, it wasn’t my book at all. Yet how could I tell her
that? How could I do otherwise than go along with her, when what she was offering me was the thing I had craved for years,
for most of my life, ever since that Thanksgiving when Jonah Boyd had come to visit and awakened in me a sense of possibility
to match my ambition? I had meant for her to learn a lesson. Now she turned the tables on me, and proved that all along her
responses had been sincere; which meant that all along the problem really
had
been with me, with what I had written. A completely private humiliation was the price I had to pay for at last getting what
I’d always wanted.

Well, you know the rest of the story. I signed a contract and was paid some money, which pleased Molly. But then, in the months
before the publication, I got cold feet; I worried that someone I had never heard of, some stranger to whom Jonah Boyd might
also have read aloud from his notebooks, might read my novel and recognize its origins. Or that you might remember, or Daphne,
or Glenn. None of you did, as it happened. Still, I was afraid, and so, under the guise of revision, I set about making a
thousand more changes to the manuscript, all toward the goal of disguising it, rendering it unrecognizable even to that theoretical
person. That person who, as it turned out, was you.

The Sky
came out. It didn’t do terribly well, which suited me fine. I didn’t want it to circulate too widely. Ironically, even the
critics who didn’t like it loved the last two chapters. Still, it served its function, because now I had a contract to write
a new novel, and on this novel I set to work in earnest. I got a job teaching at a local college. And really, Denny, it was
astonishing. Before, writing for me had been an anguished, agonized, slow procedure, marked by fits of amnesia from which
I would emerge not remembering a thing about what I had done, and fits of despair from which I would emerge wanting to drink,
and long, blank days when the sentences came out in states of arthritic contortion and I wanted to tear my hair out, or hurl
the hated Macintosh out the window. Now that Georgiana had affirmed me, though, I wrote as easily, as fluidly, as Jonah Boyd
himself claimed always to have done. The new novel was a joy to write, and perhaps for that reason, a joy to read: It was
a huge success.

As for the notebooks, I kept them close by, even though my suspicion was that by bringing me to the point at which I now found
myself, they had expended their last gust of magical beneficence. Now they were just leather and paper, paper and leather.
They had even lost much of their smell.

Still, I didn’t dare throw them out, or burn them. To do so, it seemed to me, would have been to risk some sort of cosmic
retribution. Like desecrating a corpse. Aren’t there rules about what you can and can’t do with talismans? Aren’t they indestructible?

The notebooks traveled with me all over the country. Through two marriages, and three houses, until I made my way back here.
And really, regaining this house—that was the final proof that the notebooks were magic. That was the final purpose—I thought—of
whatever spirit inhabited them, to restore the house my mother had loved into the hands of one of her children. The message
seemed clear: I should now inter them forever in the grave that fate had designated to be theirs. And so the very day I signed
the deed and took the keys and came back to this house, I returned them to the little sooty chamber from which I had removed
them so many years earlier, on the occasion of our dispossession. And there they have stayed until tonight. Now I give them
to you.