who have no idea they’ve got anything of value. And of course the value’ been exaggerated, it’ inflated, as a result of my hoarding. Most of the names on the waiting lists at the used bookstores—they’re mine. Pseudonyms. I try to keep in touch with the major ones. The Strand’ never supposed to sell a copy to anyone else. When you called there, you must have gotten someone new who didn’t know the rules. And yes, I admit, I have stolen a few from libraries, which I don’t feel too good about—but when you think about it, it’ so incredibly easy to steal a book from a library; all you have to do is slice out the security tag . . .”
“How long have you been . . . doing this?”
“Oh, for years. Since I published my second book. I really hoped that someday I’d manage to get them all, and then I could have a huge bonfire . . . What luck that you, of all people, should have gotten hold of one of the very few that aren’t here in this room.”
Clearing a space on the bed, Ben sat down amid his bounty. “You know, I’ve never talked about this with a living soul, except Anne,” he said. “Not with either of my wives, never, God knows, with my parents—and now here we are on this lovely autumn morning talking about it, and you know what’ surprising? It feels completely inevitable. I’m not even nervous. I’m kind of serene. I suppose there’ some relief to be derived from being found out, especially after so many years. And who knows, maybe things would have been better in the long run if I’d been found out earlier on. Of course I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be back in Wellspring. But that might have been a blessing.”
He lifted his hands from his lap; ran his fingers through his hair. “I tried to write about this once. When I was working on the memoir. Now’ my chance, I thought, I’ll come clean, and people will be so amazed by my honesty, they’ll be so humbled by my willingness to confess entirely for the sake of art, and not just because someone’ found out or started hounding me, that they’ll forgive me completely. Then I’ll really be free. I won’t have this thing nagging at me all the time. So I sat down to write the chapter, and I could only come up with two sentences. Two sentences, and such good ones! And then I lost my nerve. You want to know what the sentences were?”
“What?”
“ ‘On Thanksgiving Day, 1969, a woman decided to teach her husband a lesson. She enlisted as her accomplice a boy of fifteen who had ideas of his own.’”
“I don’t understand. What woman?”
“Anne, of course. That’ what no one would ever guess, if they tried to put the thing together on the basis of the circumstantial evidence. Yes, I stole Jonah Boyd’ novel, and published it as my own. But I didn’t steal the notebooks. Anne stole the notebooks.”
“Anne?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.”
“I guess I might as well tell you the whole story. It’ll take a little time. Do you want to use the toilet first?”
I did. As I peed in the bathroom that joined Daphne’ room to Ben’, I wondered if he was sneaking out of the house, going back to the kitchen to fetch that knife. Part of me fully expected, when I emerged, to find him waiting for me, knife in hand.
Instead he was sitting just where I had left him, on the bed. He had cleared a space for me next to him.
I sat down, and for about two hours, he talked.
Eleven
I SHALL NOW report, as faithfully as I can, everything Ben told me that afternoon. I shall put the words in his own voice, in an effort to preserve his tone of confession. He called me his blackmailer, and in a sense, I suppose I am. Yet what is a blackmailer if not the very embodiment of conscience? Extracting a price for silence is not really that different from offering to absolve, in exchange for assigned prayers, a sinner’ blemish. The blackmailer is not really that different from the priest. Nor is he necessarily an enemy. He can be a friend, too—the only person in the world in whom his victim can confide. This was certainly true in Ben’ case. As he talked, his face itself seemed to open; the muscles of his