The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,32

He didn’t know how to dress or smile. Nor had he mastered the art, as Glenn had, of giving little Christmas gifts to the wife of the boss, or flirting with his secretary. His papers were inspired and chaotic and might have been great, had he been able to finish them. But he never could, and so his transcript was full of incompletes. We all liked Phil, and felt sorry for him. But we adored Glenn.

Glenn was handsome. He had curly auburn hair that bleached blond in the summer, and wide eyes that he set off by wearing tiny wire-rimmed glasses. No one knows this, but I had an affair with him in the months just after Daphne left him, when he had been turned down for tenure at Wellspring but had yet to find another job. As a lover he displayed the same qualities of flash and eagerness to please, as well as the slight whiff of pandering, that marked his academic career. Such an appeal, however, gets dull in a fairly short order. I think what galled Phil was the impression, personified in Glenn, that the slick and the mediocre will always win out over the clumsy and the brilliant. Glenn’ failure to get tenure was an intellectual vindication from which Phil might have taken comfort, had he only shown a little more patience.

Whenever Phil and Glenn were in the house together with Ernest, there was a palpable tension in the air. This was because Ernest played them off each other—for their own good, he insisted. I suppose he imagined that by flaunting his preference for Glenn, he might ignite in Phil some healthy competitive spirit, induce him to pull up his bootstraps and develop a manner to match his talents. But it never happened. Phil continued to stumble along, no doubt vexed by the favoritism that Ernest showed Glenn—for example, by confiding in him, that Thanksgiving, the fascinating episode of Jonah Boyd “misplacing” his notebooks. Ernest and Glenn worked together in interrogating Boyd, they made a spectacle of their alliance as mentor and disciple, which Phil was forced to witness, all the while trying to fill in the blanks for himself. Had I been more observant, I might have seen early signs of the envy that would erupt so many years later in violence—but at the time there was so much else to keep track of, I ended up more or less ignoring Phil. As I usually did. As everyone usually did.

Two hours after the readings ended—the kitchen cleaned, Glenn and Phil gone, and the Boyds put to bed—I climbed into my notoriously bad-tempered Dodge Dart, turned the key in the ignition, and found that it would not start.

Cursing, I returned to the kitchen. Nancy was sitting at the tulip table in her bathrobe, smoking a cigarette and thumbing rather listlessly through the recipe pages of Sunset.

She looked up. “What are you doing back here?” she asked.

“The car won’t start.”

“Oh, how annoying. Ernest!”

He too was in his bathrobe. Together, we went outside to look under the hood.

“Nothing wrong that I can see,” Ernest said, slipping his hand down the back of my skirt. “But then again, I’m no mechanic.”

“I’ll call a taxi.”

“No need for a taxi. I can drive you home.” He started to kiss me.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if Denny just stayed the night here?” Nancy called from the kitchen door. “She can sleep with Daphne on the fold-out bed in the study. And that way she’ll be here in the morning when the tow truck comes.”

Ernest withdrew his hand. In the dark, had she seen?

“That’ probably a better plan,” he said, moving away from me into the moonlight.

Back indoors, Nancy led me to the study, the door to which she simultaneously rapped on and pushed open. “Daphne, Denny’ car’ broken down, so she’ going to bunk with you . . . Oh.” Daphne was not in bed; she was sitting at the table near the window, in jeans and a sweater set, putting on makeup.

“Can’t you wait for a person to say ‘Come in’?” she asked.

“Sorry,” Nancy said. “Listen, I’m exhausted. Be a sweetheart and show Denny where the extra towels are, will you?” As if in compensation for her earlier brusqueness, she patted Daphne’ head rather as she might have Little Hans’. “Well, good night, girls. And thanks again for all your help today.”

“Nancy—”

“What?”

“Are you happy how things turned out? I mean, seeing Anne?”

“Oh, delighted, delighted.” But her smile was weary. “Of course, I

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