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?
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 real 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.