“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?”
A
NNE 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.
One editor in particular drove me crazy. She had the extraordinary name of Georgiana Sleep, and she worked for Boyd’ old publisher.
Indeed, she seemed kind of impressed that I had known him, and had won a prize named after him. The thing about Georgiana
was that she wasn’t just vaguely encouraging without ever making an offer; she actually seemed to go to great lengths to woo
me. At first our relationship was strictly epistolary—enthusiastic, witty, occasionally flirty letters from her, to which
I would write agonized responses that strove for cleverness—but then one afternoon, rather out of the blue, she telephoned.
She had a thin, high voice. I had just sent her my second novel, and she was calling, she said, because she wanted to talk
about it with me. She proposed that we have lunch. This was unprecedented. I thought I had it made. Excited by her interest,
and in spite of her voice, I created in my own head a Georgiana who was Amazonian and beautiful, as well as hugely powerful;
imagined that over the course of the lunch, over white wine and very refined fish, she’d tell me that she and her colleagues
had been so bowled over by my novel that they were now prepared to offer me a staggering advance, at which point we’d toast
the future, and my career would be made. I even splurged and bought myself a new suit just for the lunch, even though this
was something I could ill afford. But then when I showed up at the restaurant, Georgiana turned out to be just this girl,
this wisp of a thing, with long blond hair and a freckled nose. She didn’t even drink. She was probably five years younger
than I was. And the restaurant to which she had invited me—far from some glamorous haven of luxury like the Four Seasons—was
a sort of hip lunch counter, with fifty kinds of soup on the menu. And so we sat there over split pea soup, and she proceeded
to tell me, in excruciating detail, everything that in her opinion was wrong with my book, which was pretty much everything,
and as she went on, all I could think was what a fool I felt in that suit, and was it too late to return it? What if I spilled
soup on it? Molly, my girlfriend, was always nagging at me to get what she called “a real job.” She worked for an advertising
firm, and frankly, I think that my idleness—what she perceived as my idleness—embarrassed her. I’d trumpeted this lunch as
the beginning of a new stage in my life, promised that after this I’d be able to take her on vacations to Lake Como, Fiji,
Kyoto. Now I didn’t want to contemplate how she’d react when I came home and told her that not only had I not sold my novel,
I was out three hundred dollars for the suit.
Still, even as I prayed for the lunch to end, and for Georgiana to ask the waiter for the bill, I was holding out hope that
perhaps she was withholding some surprise for the last minute—that as we stood to leave, she’d say, “Despite all of this,
you’re so promising we want to give you a contract.” But all she said was, “Despite all of this, you’re so promising that
we want to keep in touch with you, and hope you’ll send us more of your work.”
At least she picked up the tab.
Those were very difficult days for me. I’m not going to go into it, because it’ all too depressing. Don’t think that I had
any illusions about my own writing. Hope and ambition in spades, yes—but if I’m to be perfectly frank, I knew that Georgiana
was smart and right. My novels so far lacked some spark of life, that element of vitality that distinguished the work of all
the writers I loved to read. It seemed to me in those days that whatever the formula was—whatever combination of literary
prowess and instinct for the marketplace brought a writer recognition, and brought pleasure to readers—I just couldn’t put
my finger on it. Now, of course, I realize that there is no formula. I see that had I merely written what I wanted to write,
instead of constantly trying to second-guess Georgiana and the other editors, I might have gotten further. That’ what I do
now—or did, until this damned writer’ block—and people seem to love it. But when I was young, rather than writing for myself,
or for some idealized, unseen, perfectly intelligent and perfectly ignorant reader—that retired schoolteacher in Chicago whom
we writers are supposed to visualize when we work—I wrote for Georgiana and her mysterious, monolithic “we.” Her editorial
board. If I saw her as my one hope, it was because at this point she alone, of all the editors to whom I’d sent stuff, would
answer my phone calls. And not only answer them, but answer them gladly. Molly was jealous of her. She referred to Georgiana
as my “girlfriend,” or to use a British parlance of which we were both fond (we spent an inordinate amount of time watching
British sitcoms) my “bit of fluff.” She might have been right. Today it seems clear that, at the very least, Georgiana had
a crush on me. The smartest thing I could have done, I see now, would have been to marry her, or at least screw her. In any
case, by the time I got wise she was already married to another writer.
In the meantime the third novel wasn’t going well at all, probably because I’d banked so much on it. Still, I managed to bring
it to some kind of conclusion and rushed it off to Georgiana, who turned it down flat in forty-eight hours. “I just think
you’re on the wrong track here,” she told me. Correct, of course—though not what I wanted to hear.
I decided right then that the problem wasn’t with me. I convinced myself. The problem, I told Molly, was with Georgiana. In
her youthful avidity for power, she was teasing me, toying with me, taking advantage of my hunger and inexperience to feed
her own vanity. It seemed inconceivable, for instance, that she would treat an established author this way—that she would
treat Jonah Boyd this way. But of course Jonah Boyd was dead, and in truth, I had no idea how Georgiana treated established
authors. I didn’t even really know whether or not she actually had the power to acquire books. It might have been a bluff.
She might have been a glorified secretary, or the tout for a real editor who remained nameless.
It was around this time that my father was killed, and my mother summoned me back to Wellspring to help her conduct her battle
to keep the house. Believe me, Denny, I was eager to go. New York oppressed me. Things with Molly had gone from bad to worse,
her disapproval of my joblessness slowly eroding even the affectionate rapport that had grown up between us. I guessed that
it would only be a matter of time before she found herself a new boyfriend, some lawyer or banker who owned his own apartment.
So I went. Those were strange days—my mother and Daphne and her kids and me, all piled up under one roof, not to mention Phil’
trial. But they were also curiously pleasant days, and if I remember them today with fondness, it is mostly because the campaign
to keep the house, and not less than that, the arduous labor of nursing my mother through her final illness, distracted me
from the awful chore of writing. I had other things to think about now, and for all the grief that I felt, I was more at peace
than I’d been in years.
We lost the house, of course. My mother died. I thought for a time that perhaps the fact that my father had been murdered
by one of his students—and on campus, no less—might dispose the provost to look favorably upon our cause. But it did not.
Indeed, I think the provost feared that if he appeared to be offering anything in the way of compensation to Ernest Wright’
widow, we might use that kindness as leverage to ask for more. The thin end of the wedge. So we sifted through all the records
and books and furniture, divvied up what we wanted from what we wanted to sell, and got ready to move out. But you know all
this.
It wasn’t until the evening before the closing that I retrieved the notebooks from the barbecue pit. I did it under cover
of darkness. No one saw me, though when I got back into the house, Mark, who was reading in the study, did ask me what I’d
been doing outside. “Looking at the stars,” I said. By now Mark was married to his Canadian and leading his Canadian life,
and we weren’t nearly so close as we’d been in the days when he’d been a draft dodger. He wouldn’t even sleep in the house.
He insisted on staying at the Ritz-Carlton, to prove his wealth, I guess. Still, it is the older brother’ prerogative to interrogate
the younger.
Since nothing held me to New York any longer, and since I could now afford, with my portion of the proceeds from the sale,
to buy another house, if a smaller one, I asked Molly to marry me. I told her that we could live anywhere she wanted. It seemed
that during the weeks I’d been away, she too had gotten sick of New York, if not of the hypothetical lawyer or banker who
had been my replacement. A junkie had tried, rather ineptly, to hold her up in the foyer of her building, in addition to which
there were problems at the ad agency: a new boss who didn’t like her. Also, her mother had been in a car accident. She decided
that she wanted to move to Milwaukee, where she came from, and since I had no great desire to live anywhere other than on
Florizona Avenue, which was now impossible, I agreed. It was a heady feeling at last to be able to give her something, after
so many years during which, every time we’d gone out for dinner, she’d had to pick up the bill. Not that a little house in
Milwaukee was in any way going to compensate for the loss of
this
place—this fantastic place—or for the knowledge that I had failed my mother. And yet it was something: a life. So we moved.