The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,44
just wonder,” she answered. But soon enough the brain tumor put an end even to wondering.
Both the local and the national media pounced on the story of Ernest’ murder. Glenn was interviewed by Dan Rather—not just because he was Ernest’ protege and Phil’ nemesis but as an authority on psychosis. His diagnosis was that under the pressure of seeing his career about to collapse, and after so many years of watching his contemporaries move ahead of him, Phil had just snapped. “There is in all of us,” Glenn told Dan Rather, “the potential to do something unspeakable. What fascinates psychologists is the question of what restrains some, while others are suddenly propelled to make fateful decisions.”
All of this is in Ben’ memoir, and much more—the “real” story behind Mark’ flight to Canada (as opposed to Ben’ fictional account), and the struggle to keep the house, and Daphne’ divorce, and Nancy’ death—and yet, curiously, there is not a single mention of Jonah or Anne Boyd, and less curiously, no mention of me. I do not appear even once. I am left out wholesale. Later I asked him why this was. “Oh, Denny,” he said, “writers always have to make choices. You can’t put everything in a book. Besides, you were never really involved in any of it, were you? You were just—I don’t know—there. On the sidelines.”
The memoir, for Ben, was the biggest success of all. He went on talk shows. To promote the book, which had been translated into something like twenty languages, he made a European tour. Back in College Park, he threatened to quit his job at the university, and in exchange for a promise to stay on, he got a reduction of his teaching load along with a substantial pay raise. Amy, unhappy that her career was not matching his, left him for a heart surgeon. Seeing no reason to stay in Maryland, now that his ex-wife was living down the street in a much grander style than he could afford, Ben put out the word that he would entertain offers from other schools, on the condition that they be willing to pay him twice what he was earning at Maryland in exchange for only one semester of teaching a year. And he could get away with that. He had become famous enough that he could write his own ticket.
It was then, to his own amazement, that he got the letter from the provost at Wellspring—the same provost to whom Nancy had made her appeal, not so long before, to keep the house, and who had rebuffed her. It seemed that a rich alumnus, a dabbler in fiction himself, had of late given the university a substantial sum of money for the purpose of endowing a chair for a writer-in-residence: For this position, Ben was now quietly encouraged to apply. He did so eagerly. A few weeks later, in Wellspring to be interviewed, he telephoned me. As it happened, I had taken early retirement a year earlier. I now owned my own house—a two-bedroom, concrete-block affair in a modest neighborhood of Springwell. The last thing I expected in those unbusy days was for Ben Wright to call, and not only to call, but to invite me to dinner.
We met at the faculty club. Amazingly, even though I had worked at the university for more than thirty years, and knew its ins and outs better than anyone alive, until that evening I had never once been to the faculty club, the scene of Nancy’ raging at poor Bess Dalrymple. Ernest had disdained the place as stuffy, and after he had been killed . . . well, who else but her boss would invite a secretary to eat dinner in a gloomy, formal room where the food was expensive and bad? For my retirement party, I’d had the choice of the faculty club or a restaurant, and had opted for a rather festive Mexican place, with sangria and flirty waiters. La Pifiata was more my speed, just as a nice, comfortable denim skirt with an elastic waist band was more my style . . . And now here I sat, waiting for Ben in a dining room hushed by heavy draperies that smelled of boiled cabbage, while around me faculty widows I recognized from Nancy’ long-ago tea parties sipped white wine and gossiped in low voices. The suit I wore was as uncomfortable as the one I’d put on decades before, that first Thanksgiving I’d spent with the Wrights.
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