rules? Were there rules?
It was nearly noon. Off in the distance I could hear the piano—my mother and Anne hammering away at something, the way they did every Saturday morning. Oh, I’m sorry, that was you. And farther off, Ken Longabaugh raking leaves. And a car rounding the bend. It was odd—every noise that came to me was so much itself that today I can remember precisely what the world sounded like that morning, even though it was thirty years ago. The birds and the dryer tumbling. And then Boyd arrived at the last page of my little book, and closed it, and laid it on my lap. He looked me in the eye. I was too embarrassed to meet his gaze.
Very gently he put his arm over my shoulder.
“So what would you like to do this afternoon, Ben?” he asked.
I had a terror of tests in those days. I’ve never done well on them. Standardized tests especially were a nightmare for me, because they always seemed to represent a roadblock to my getting what I wanted—into the “mentally gifted minor” program, or into Wellspring. And now I was being asked a question for which I was sure I was expected to come up with some correct response, as in a test. And I was afraid that if I failed to come up with the correct response, I would somehow be cast out into the wilderness. Only I had no idea what the correct response should be.
That was when the idea of the arroyo hit me. At the arroyo, there was a lake with boats and nature trails that you could follow, and lining its perimeter were some good examples of thirties architecture. This meant that if Boyd wanted to sightsee, I could show him things. But if he wanted to talk more about my poems, or his novel, we could do that, too. So I suggested the arroyo, and to my relief, his smile broadened, and he said, “What a marvelous idea! We’ll go in my car.” My only clue as to how he hoped to spend his afternoon was that when lunch ended, and we got ready to go, I noticed that in addition to a Coke that my mother had given him, he was carrying the four notebooks.
Around two we drove down to the arroyo. It was one of those beautiful autumn days that are bright but a little brisk, so that you have to wear your jacket but when you turn your face to the sun it warms you. We sat on a wooden bench, and he read some of his novel aloud to me—nearly the entirety of the second notebook. It took close to two hours. I kept waiting for him to stop, and he never did. Then when he got to the last page, he asked me what I thought, and when I told him I liked it, he must have taken this as leave to go on, because he immediately picked up the third notebook and started reading from that. By now I was about to go mad from restlessness. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and we were supposed to meet Anne and my parents for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and I had to go to the bathroom. But he just kept on reading, never getting hoarse or needing water, utterly oblivious to my squirming, until finally he reached some dramatic juncture—the end of the middle section, I think—at which point he announced that he had to take a whiz and hopped up and went to look for a toilet. Even though I had to go too, I didn’t follow him, for fear that I’d be pee-shy around him. Instead I crept into the woods and went against a tree.
When he got back, to keep him from reading even more—which he would have been totally capable of—I asked him how close he was to being finished with the novel. He said that he only had two chapters left to write—and then proceeded to explain to me, in excruciating detail, just what those two chapters were going to consist of, how he intended to tie up the different plot threads, the various denouements for which he’d already been making preparations, scattering little setups all through the book, the importance of which the end would thrillingly illumine. And as he talked, he got more and more excited. He even told me what he planned for his last line, which would be