The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,39

guess.”

“Did he read you more of his novel?”

“Yes.”

“And was it as good as what he read aloud on Thanksgiving?”

“I guess.”

“Oh, it seems so awful, to lose something like that. Like losing a child, almost . . . I don’t know what I’d do if it were me. Maybe he can reconstruct it, from memory.”

“A four-hundred-page novel? I don’t think so.”

“Don’t be fooled,” Ernest said. “What people get, most of the time, is what they want.”

The phone rang. Nancy hurried to answer it. “Oh, Mark,” she said, her voice rising with a mixture of pleasure and fear she seemed barely able to contain. “Honey, are you all right? Is something the matter?”

Suddenly Ben was on his feet. “Let me talk to him,” he begged, grabbing his mother’ arm.

“Just a second, Ben! Your brother wants to talk to you. Hold on! Honey, what’ wrong? How was the Thanks giving?”

Daphne and I cleared the table. As he was wont to do when he thought no one was looking, Ernest winked at me. The turkey carcass, from which several meals had already been scraped, lay bony and denuded on its platter, surrounded by trembling flakes of gelatinized juice. Perhaps Nancy would boil it for broth, before throwing it into the trash she had earlier searched so patiently and so fruitlessly. In any case, she would get rid of it. No one wanted to look at the thing anymore. And then she would return to her piano and her crowned heads, and I would pick up my car. Daphne and Glenn would make love in his apartment. Ben would write another poem.

You see, for most of us, I could envision a future. Even for Ben I could envision a future. And yet for the life of me I could not envision what was going on inside that red Chevrolet.

I put on my coat. “I’m taking Denny home,” Ernest suddenly announced to his wife, who either didn’t hear him or elected not to answer him, so caught up was she in her conversation with Mark, and in pushing Ben off her arm.

That is as much as I knew of what happened that Thanksgiving, and as much as I would know—for almost thirty years.

Nine

THE NEXT SATURDAY morning I went, as usual, to play with Nancy. She didn’t mention Anne’ name once. During the week the ersatz guest room had been dismantled, Daphne’ frog figurines and stuffed animals and peace sign poster returned to their rightful places.

Nancy didn’t speak of Anne the Saturday after that, either, which was odd only in that during the months leading up to Thanksgiving she had spoken of little else. She was now preoccupied with Christmas, a holiday from which, at the Wright house, we strays were excluded as vociferously as at Thanksgiving we were welcomed. As Ben later explained to me, Christmas at 302 Florizona Avenue involved a sequence of private rituals in which each member of the family was required to play a specific role (Ben was the “elf"), all leading up to the climactic unwrapping of the presents, after which the rest of the day was pure letdown. Of course, that Christmas was to be like no other due to Mark’ absence, and though Nancy tried to put a brave face on things, I could tell that she was having a hard time. I myself spent Christmas alone. I went to the movies. And then it was New Year’ Eve (I spent most of that holiday in the backseat of a chemistry professor’ car), and the seventies. On Saturdays Nancy and I played, on Sundays Ernest visited me at my apartment. I stopped thinking about the Boyds, who, to the extent that they still existed for me, did so behind a sort of blackout curtain, and not merely because Nancy and Ernest, so far as I could tell, no longer talked to them; also because what had happened—a loss, despite what Nancy had said, not nearly so terrible as that of a child, but terrible enough—placed them outside any realm of experience that I could touch. Of course, I knew they went on in their exile; they had to go on. What I didn’t know was what that going on felt like.

Sometimes a letter or a birthday card arrived from Anne. Then Nancy would shake her head and say, “Remember that awful Thanksgiving? Afterward, for weeks, I kept hoping I’d find the damn notebooks, even when it became eminently clear that I never would.” From contacts in Bradford, Nancy learned