Ben opened the file drawer at the bottom of the little desk at which Nancy used to sit when she paid her bills. He took out
the notebooks.
“Well, now you have it,” he said, “The truth. That’ what you said you came here for. And you shall also have these.”
He pushed them across the table. I didn’t touch them.
“They’re yours,” he went on. “As is my fate. What you do with them—and it—is up to you. Decide, if you want, purely on the
basis of what you believe to be right. And yet I can’t help but think that there must be
something
that you want.” He leaned in toward me. “Come on, what is it? There must be. Otherwise why would you have come?”
“But there isn’t,” I insisted—and even as I said it, I realized, for the first time, that there was.
It seemed so obvious. So beautifully obvious. What I wanted, and what he alone could give me.
Ben put his hand over mine. It was the first time in our lives he had ever touched me.
“Come on,” he said. “Tell me.”
So I told him.
209
R
EADER —OH, HOW I have looked forward to writing this sentence, hurrying my way toward it with impatience and eagerness!—reader,
I married him.
The house is mine. Ben has died, and rules are rules. It doesn’t belong to Daphne. It doesn’t belong to Mark. Despite all
Nancy’ efforts, it has ended up not in the hands of her children, or of her children’ children, but of her husband’ secretary.
The one who loaded the dishwasher wrong. The one forgotten in the will. The house is mine, and there is not a damn thing any
of them can do about it.
I sound petulant, which I don’t want to. I sound as if it was only for the house that I married him, when in truth there was
great love between Ben and me. Hadn’t he always longed for the touch of an older woman? I gave it to him, at long last completing
the work Anne had started. And Ben—well, despite my lifelong insistence that I would never marry, anyone who ever bothered
to look in my linen closet would have found the thirty years worth of back issues of
Modern Bride,
stacked neatly along with the sheets. I didn’t subscribe; I bought my porn as furtively as any teenager. And like a teenager,
I kept it hidden, a shaming late-night pleasure to be pored over while eating ice cream or ramen noodles, when no one was
around to see.
Maybe Ben recognized that behind my lifelong avowal never to marry there lay a secret longing. For when I reminded him of
the day we met—that day on which I had accidentally eaten half his sandwich at Minnie’—he said, “Well, doesn’t that prove
that we were meant for each other, Denny dear? For what was the dividing of that sandwich, if not a foreshadowing of the champagne
toast at the wedding, the bride and groom sipping from the same glass?”
It was the sweetest thing any man had ever said to me.
Minnie’, by the way, is gone. In its place on Calibraska Avenue there is now a Ralph Lauren Polo store.
He was diagnosed with a brain tumor only three months after our marriage. By then we had managed to finish furnishing the
bedrooms, and were just getting started on the landscaping. His writing block lifted, and he went to work on a new novel.
Then one afternoon (and much to my surprise) he asked me if I’d mind giving him piano lessons. Despite being his mother’ son
in so many ways, until that day Ben had never once touched a piano. And now, for some reason, he wanted to learn. And though
I was hardly qualified as a teacher, I did give him lessons, even managing to bring him to the point where he could play a
Bach musette through to the end. Of course, by then the headaches had gotten so bad he could barely focus on the score.
Brain cancer runs in families. What killed Ben was the same type of tumor that had killed his mother, and probably (though
no one is certain) his great-grandfather—amazing to him, if not to his doctors—and though the intervening years had brought
many advances in treatment, none were adequate to save his life. And so I sat by his bedside as I had sat by Nancy’, taking
notes while he explained to me how he wanted to end his new book.
That book is now finished. After he died, I spent six months cleaning up the typescript, making minor improvements for consistency,
and putting the finishing touches on the last chapters, which were incomplete—all in scrupulous keeping with his instructions.
The novel tells, after a fashion, the story of my life—everything he left out of
The Eucalyptus.
I admit, the discovery that he had chosen to narrate it from my point of view startled me at first: Strange to be typing out
an account the “I” of which, rather than me, is someone else’
idea
of me, and in which for every moment of astonishing accuracy there is another where “I” am made to do or say something I never
did or said. Still, I resisted the impulse to change or correct. Much as when I had been obliged to transform Ernest’ incomprehensible
notes into coherent English, I looked upon my task as one of ordering, of tying up loose ends. Call it the secretarial impulse,
and then decide for yourself how much it differs from the artistic one.
One thing I must admit: Until I read Ben’ last novel, I never guessed that both he and Nancy had known all along about my
affair with his father. For this shortsightedness, I am ashamed.
A few weeks before his death, Daphne flew down from Portland to stay with us. She left her children and her husband behind.
For the duration of her visit she behaved as if nothing had changed since the days when her mother had ruled at 302 Florizona
Avenue, as if I was still Denny the secretary, in the kitchen only because Nancy had summoned me to assist in some domestic
crisis. Thus when she emerged from her old bedroom in the mornings, the first question out of her lips was usually: “Is there
coffee?” She never made any herself, though intermittently she baked cookies, and then left the mess in the sink for me to
clean up. Also, she made a silent point of rearranging the dishes in the dishwasher after I had loaded it. And it was my dishwasher!
For Ben’ sake alone I held my tongue.
I don’t know what she fathomed to be at the root of my marriage to her brother—she wouldn’t tell me—only that she must have
regarded our union as fundamentally bogus, and me as some sort of predatory interloper who had entrapped Ben solely for the
purpose of robbing her of her rightful inheritance. Nor did it matter how valiantly Ben tried to dissuade her from this point
of view, to convince her that we really did love each other. She clung to her convictions as stubbornly as Nancy would have.
Of course I kept the notebooks hidden. This was as much Ben’ choice as mine. He said he never wanted to lay eyes or hands
on them again. He said it was why he could write now. And I, for my part, from the day he pushed them to me across the tulip
table until the day of his death, kept up my end of the bargain, and made sure that they remained out of his sight as well
as his reach. Their safekeeping and concealment were my responsibility, just as it was understood that once Ben died, it would
be my decision whether or not to reveal that they had never been lost. Whether or not to ruin him in order to do justice to
Jonah Boyd.
That was a hard decision to make, but I have made it at last. Like Anne Boyd, I don’t see what good is to be derived from
privileging the needs of the dead over those of the living. I am alive. And so I shall prove my loyalty to my husband, and
make sure that no one ever finds what he kept hidden all those years in the barbecue pit.
Like his mother, he died at home. At the funeral neither Daphne nor Mark would even look at me. This time they were both staying
at the Ritz-Carlton, and when I pressed them to come by the house afterward, they refused. “I just couldn’t,” Daphne said,
squeezing my hand in a way that suggested at least a lingering touch of affection. Mark, on the other hand, turned from me
without a word. Cold bastard.
That afternoon I had Ben’ colleagues from the English department over, along with some of his students. His students loved
him. There was coffee, and pie, and a festive feeling in the house that almost reminded me of Nancy’ Thanksgivings, when I
was a stray, and none of those students had even been born.
I guess what Daphne and Mark couldn’t accept, what they couldn’t tolerate, was that even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have
given them that house. Even if Nancy’ ghost had come lurching up from the underworld and stuck a red hot poker in my ribs,
I couldn’t have done it. It was out of my hands.
Yet here is the great irony: A few months after Ben died—and much to the amazement of every resident of Wellspring—the university
got a new president, a fiscal liberal who one day very quietly undid the rule that had been the bane of Nancy Wright’ life.
This means that we owners of houses built on university-owned plots are to be given the option of buying those plots for a
dollar—a decree that at once puts an end to an old and contentious policy, and also allows the university to take advantage
of some lucrative tax breaks.
Who knows what really lies behind the change, or even how the new president managed it? Perhaps some law professor was planning
a clever suit. Perhaps the board of trustees got greedy. In any case, I shall soon be the owner of this land as well as the
house on which it sits, and could leave them, if I chose, to Daphne’ children. But I think instead that I shall leave them
to Susan Boyd’ children. That family ought to get something in compensation for the life out of which her father was swindled.
So why not this house, where, after all, the crime was planned and committed?
Besides, she is a secretary.
There was only one thing left to do. I finished writing Ben’ novel in early November—all but the coda you are reading now.
Thanksgiving night was clear and brisk that year, illuminated by a mostly full moon. I had no one over. I ate, by myself,
part of a turkey breast, and some potatoes reheated in the microwave. Then around ten I stole out to the barbecue pit. I removed
the notebooks from their sooty cache, freed them from their swaddling of plastic and foil. In the middle of the hearth, under
the spit, there is a sort of charred black grate meant for holding coals or wood, and on this I arranged the notebooks, along
with a cradling of crumpled newspaper. Finally I lit a match, and dropped that in, too.
I am pleased to tell you that Nancy was completely wrong about the chimney—it draws marvelously. In the hearth the leather
covers of the notebooks yellowed and lifted and crumpled, revealing for a millisecond a few lines of blue prose. Up and up
the smoke rose, a gray-black balloon drifting out toward the Pacific, while with a stick I ground into ashes the body of evidence,
the body of the work, the body of Jonah Boyd.
David Leavitt is the author of several novels, including
The Lost Language of Cranes, While
England Sleeps,
and
Equal Affections,
as well as the short story collections
Family Dancing, A
Place I’ve Never Been,
and
The Marble Quilt,
recently brought together as
Collected Stories.
He wrote the Bloomsbury Writer and the City title
Florence: A Delicate Case.
A recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives
in Gainesville, Florida, and teaches at the University of Florida.
The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold
and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical
form for mechanical hot metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.
Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by Granjon. It was
first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.