The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,11

Denny. Then you might get a boyfriend.”

It was the same as with Daphne and her hair—or so I told myself, as I tried to swallow back my hurt. For that was my method of justifying Nancy’ cruelty. If such abuse was simply part of how mothers treated daughters, then I should be grateful for it. This was what I had missed, and longed for. This was what it meant to be a daughter.

Still, I cannot deny that in my own subtle way, I gave as good as I got. Ernest was the linchpin in this. One Saturday in February, when Nancy had had to run out to deliver Ben to a make-up fliigelhorn lesson, he cornered me a second time, near the percolator.

“Such a plump little thing,” he muttered in my ear. “With all that filthy stuff you type for me, you must have dirty dreams. Won’t you tell me your dirty dreams?”

Of course, I could have pushed him away. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to push him away. But I didn’t. Instead I turned, placed my lips against his ear, and whispered, “I dream about you.”

Three

ONE OF MY duties as Ernest’ secretary was to edit—in fact, to rewrite—his articles and grant applications under the guise of “typing” them. He would hand me a wad of illiterate notes, and I would transform it into a coherent piece of prose, which I would hand back to him. Then he would praise my “typing” skills. At first his ineptitude as a writer shocked me—I’d always taken it for granted that to get as far as he had in academia, you’d at least have to be able to craft a decent sentence—but then I asked myself why the gift for generating ideas should necessarily go hand in hand with the capacity to express them. If I had a greater facility with English than Ernest did, it was simply further proof that my own talents were of a purely clerical—and therefore limited—sort. Only later did I come to question this assumption, to look back at those books of Ernest’ that I’d edited—no, written—and recognize the degree to which my improvements and refinements had really changed his ideas, making them as much mine as his. At the time, though, it would never have occurred to me to ask for any kind of credit. I was a secretary. “Typing” was my job.

One Saturday, after Nancy and I had finished playing, Ernest asked me to come up to his office above the garage to look over a manuscript with him. Nancy didn’t object; I suppose she thought me too fat and unattractive to take seriously as a rival. Off she went to the supermarket (a Saturday ritual for her). Ernest led me out of the kitchen and into the garage and up the narrow staircase to the converted attic where he saw his patients. This was a cramped little space under the eaves, with ceilings and walls that bled into each other, so that you could hardly say where one began and the other ended. There was an Eames Case Study daybed upholstered in nubbly red fabric—presumably it was upon this that Ernest’ patients lay while he probed their childhoods—and over it a picture of Freud, and over the desk, which faced the one window, a few model airplanes on strings. Ernest sat at the desk, and I sat on the daybed. Already we had a certain routine down for this sort of work: He would give me a manuscript, and I would read it aloud. (This one concerned Patient X, who refused ever to drink water; she even brushed her teeth with Coca-Cola.) Then I would read, and as I did, he would periodically interrupt me to amplify some thought, or grope toward a clarification—my cue to suggest, ever so delicately, a means of making his point more cleanly. Nor was it only a matter of writing; sometimes I would be emboldened to call attention to some half-baked supposition, or to propose a more persuasive interpretation. And yet between his natural ego and my natural diffidence, we were able to pretend that all I was doing was taking a complicated form of dictation. Whether privately he recognized the true extent of my contribution I’m still not sure.

After we had finished, Ernest stood up from his chair and sat next to me on the daybed. I said not a word. At this point it had been almost a month since the grope