foppish, with his bow tie and manicured mustache. In certain ways he reminded her of Clifford—who better embodied “evenness of disposition” than Clifford?—and yet in other ways he was so much less restrained, so much easier to talk to, that she found herself wondering what had induced her to marry Clifford in the first place.
They retreated to a sofa. People were watching them—colleagues, wives of colleagues, women whose husbands might tell Clifford what they had seen. She didn’t care. Boyd’ openness—his obliviousness to convention—had brought her past caring. Such openness, she knew, might have nothing to do with her. It might be a side effect of his having been a drunk, or of his being a novelist. Yet how much more pleasant if it turned out that she herself had inspired this response from him, this intuitive trust that allowed him to speak to her of things about which, with others, he would have stayed silent! If that were the case, then Anne owed it to him to be equally forthcoming.
She touched his collar. Lightly, just for a fraction of a second. Still, the gesture was noticed. She could feel a prickle of unease leap about the room. They were being watched, which both amused and emboldened her. Was he married? she asked. Sort of, he answered. Sort of? Well, he was in the middle of a divorce. This too, in Anne’ sphere, was a novelty, and she asked for details. He and his wife, Boyd said, had been married straight out of high school. They had three children. For nineteen years they had lived together in a ranch house outside of Dallas, where his wife worked for the company that published the yellow pages, and Boyd cobbled together a living out of odd teaching jobs, while devoting the principal part of his energies to drinking and writing, in that order. The house was never clean, nor were the kids. “Cat scratches on the sofa, holes in the children’ socks. It wasn’t that we were poor. Oh, we were poor—just not to that degree. We could have afforded to buy our son a new pair of socks. The problem was, we couldn’t get our act together. We were drunk all the time.”
“How awful.”
“It gets worse,” he said. “I beat her.”
Anne’ eyes widened.
“I mean, badly. I put her in the hospital twice. Broke her collarbone. The second time I felt justified, because I’d caught her with someone else.”
Now this was exciting. Had they been having this conversation thirty years later, Anne might have walked away, frightened or disgusted. According to the standards of Bradford in 1968, though, physical violence was forgivable in men, a natural response to having their virility stifled or thwarted, to the provocations of a shrewish wife. She pushed me over the edge, the hitch. Boyd had not said these words, yet if he had, Anne’ reaction—arousal, combined with surprise that Boyd, now so pinkly sincere, could have ever been capable of taking such decisive action—would only have been enhanced.
It can sometimes take very little to propel one into a fatal decision, especially when there is nothing—not children, not patience, not a sense of duty—to hold one back. Anne left Clifford the next day, and moved in with Boyd. Until their divorces came through, they shared a cheap one-bedroom apartment, in a complex with cinder-block walls near a highway overpass. Her decampment titillated the faculty wives, and worried Nancy, who seemed uncertain whether her reaction ought to be one of maternal disapproval or sisterly support. In the end, she split the difference—the wrong thing to do, as it turned out—and wrote a letter in which she both warned Anne that she ought to “think twice” and wished her well. Offended (yet she refused to explain why), Anne stopped calling. The flow of letters dwindled to a trickle. This was the thing that hurt Nancy the most. She was not invited to the wedding, which took place in January—an omission not to be taken personally, Anne assured her in a rare, rather cool letter, as in fact no one had been invited to the wedding: not Jonah’ children, nor Anne’ parents, nor any of his colleagues; only another novelist and her husband, new friends, who would act as witnesses. By way of a present, Nancy sent an expensive crystal bowl that in its very lavishness was meant to carry a message of injury and rebuke. By way of reply, she received a cursory thank-you note on lilac-scented paper. And