“I want to show you something.”
I rose. We crossed the front hall into the bedroom wing, then walked to the end of the corridor, where he opened the door
to the room that had once been Daphne’. It was dark in there; all the shades were drawn. I could make out a clutter of shapes,
obstructions that Ben had to navigate as he made his way to the window. He pulled up the blinds, admitting some pretty, dappled
fall light.
Then he beckoned to me. I stepped inside. Surrounding him—piled everywhere, on the bed and on the floor, in boxes in the corners
and spilling out of the closet—were copies of
The Sky.
Thousands of them, all with that familiar cover, the zipper splitting the blue, the rain beneath. Everywhere there were tottering
mountains of
The Sky,
stacks so precarious I wondered that they didn’t collapse, and conical mounds like funeral pyres.
“You see?” he said. “For years I’ve been collecting them. Every copy I could find. So far, I’ve got about fifteen hundred,
and given that the print run was thirty-five hundred, of which another fifteen hundred were returned to the publisher and
eventually pulped, that means there are five hundred copies unaccounted for. Some are in libraries. Most are probably moldering
on the bookshelves of people who have no idea they’ve got anything of value. And of course the value’ been exaggerated, it’
inflated, as a result of my hoarding. Most of the names on the waiting lists at the used bookstores—they’re mine. Pseudonyms.
I try to keep in touch with the major ones. The Strand’ never supposed to sell a copy to anyone else. When you called there,
you must have gotten someone new who didn’t know the rules. And yes, I admit, I have stolen a few from libraries, which I
don’t feel too good about—but when you think about it, it’ so incredibly easy to steal a book from a library; all you have
to do is slice out the security tag . . .”
“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.
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 care.” And I said that of course
I’d be glad to. Why not? I longed for more time with him.