The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,10

had only a high school diploma. Later, I would cease to be so easily impressed—I would learn that Ph.D.’ from Harvard could be blithering idiots, just as secretaries could be geniuses—but back then I was still naive. And so as I opened the door to my apartment, I found myself not only reviewing the events of the evening, but wondering whether behind the kindness the Wrights had shown me there might not lie some nefarious motive; might I perhaps have been the subject of some psychological experiment, my every action and reaction recorded, analyzed, assessed? Hidden cameras, Dictaphones in the potted plants, Glenn and Phil taking notes: Lying in bed that night, I let paranoia get the better of me. Probably the Wrights simply liked me, I reminded myself. Or felt sorry for me. I would have to get to know them better before I could say for certain.

Monday I was back at the office. I worried that Ernest might make some reference to our clinch in the kitchen, but he acted as if nothing had happened. “So I’ll be seeing you on Saturday mornings from now on?” he asked.

“If you’re home,” I said.

He was home. While Nancy and I played, he puttered around in the study, ostensibly fixing the stereo and alerting us every time one of us hit a wrong note, which was often. This time Nancy was less patient. As I would soon learn, the role into which she had conscripted me was one for which several professors’ wives had already auditioned and been turned down. Why I succeeded where they failed I still don’t know. Perhaps I simply buckled under more willingly to her domination; or perhaps she really did love me in a way she loved few others. Certainly in those early days of our friendship it seemed that her wish was to nurture and cultivate me, to bring me along in the world as if I were another daughter of that house. Nor can it be denied that each week she treated me more like Daphne. “Careful, Denny!” she’d shout, if I accidentally turned two pages at once; or if I had trouble with octaves—"It’ so simple, just look!” she’d say, and grab hold of my hands, smashing them into position against the keys. “I see now,” I’d say, and we’d try again, and again I’d fall apart.

“You’re just not concentrating. I never had these problems with Anne. We played so perfectly together, the harmonies—they were almost magical.”

“You must miss her.”

“We were the same size, we could wear the same clothes.”

“What did you talk about while you played?”

“Husbands. Things.”

There was no way I could have gotten into Nancy’ clothes. Nor could I talk with her about husbands, as I had none.

As the weeks passed, more and more Anne became the principal topic of our conversations: Anne and, more specifically, my failure to live up to Anne in almost every regard. In Bradford, she and Nancy had played five days a week—Mozart, some Brahms waltzes, a stab at Schubert’ “Grand Duo.” Because I worked, I could only manage Saturday mornings—a source of some annoyance to Nancy, though clearly not enough to induce her to go off in search of a partner with more time on her hands. Soon I began to catch on that my function was not, in fact, to improve. My function was to exalt, by my very incompetence, the true friend, Anne, swindled away by distance and Ernest’ ambitions. The race was fixed. By losing, I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and received as payoff a sense of inclusion that I pocketed as greedily as any bought jockey does the profits of his corruption.

Sometimes things got contentious between us. Nancy would ask me to help her load the dishwasher and then chastise me for not adequately rinsing the plates beforehand. “How many times do I have to tell you, Denny? If you don’t get every little bit of food off, what’ left will end up caked on. Look at what you missed.”

I made a remark to the effect that if you ended up having to wash the dishes by hand, what was the point of owning a dishwasher in the first place? This did not go over well.

“At this rate, I shudder to think what kind of household you’ll keep,” Nancy said, “that is, assuming you ever get married.”

On another occasion—a propos of nothing—she said, “Anne had such a lovely figure! Slender waist, graceful neck. You should lose a few pounds,