The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,65

here with his recklessness. I’m going to teach him a lesson, Ben. And I need your help.”

Suddenly her hand stopped in its motions. I looked up at her. “Help?” I said.

You may recall that earlier I mentioned her having brought her handbag with her: that huge, shapeless handbag, so typical of its era, offering in its amplitude and ugliness a sharp rebuke to the little decorative pocketbooks of the fifties, those hard-edged patent-leather cylinders and shell-shaped clutches, designed to hold a Kotex and a lighter, that my mother carried with her to weddings. Feminism, in its early years, seemed to be all about refusals—to shave under the arms, to wear makeup, to wear a bra—and that handbag in a certain sense emblemized those refusals . . . Until that moment, when Anne lugged it up from the floor, I hadn’t really registered the fact that she’d brought it with her on a journey that had required her to tiptoe all of twenty feet from her bed. Now, however, she was pulling the four notebooks from its depths; balancing them on my crotch, right on top of my hard-on. I was so close to coming, the weight of them nearly pushed me over the edge.

I looked at the notebooks. Never had they seemed so potent, so pregnant with . . . what? Malevolence? Promise? The very color of the leather seemed to have changed, to have taken on the hue of lava. I looked at them. And then I looked at her.

“I want you to do me a favor,” she said. “I’m not going to give these back to Jonah. I want you to keep them.”

“Keep them?”

“Hide them. And then tomorrow, when he wakes up and realizes that they’re missing—if he realizes that they’re missing—you’re going to pretend you have no idea where they are. No idea at all. Everyone will go mad, your mother will tear the house upside down trying to find them. Still, you won’t say anything. You’ll even help her look. But you won’t find them. No one will, because you’ll have put them away somewhere no one would ever think of checking. Somewhere perfect. I leave it to you to determine the place. Somehow I suspect you already have a place.”

“But why?”

“I told you. To teach him a lesson. It’ not enough that he should be saved over and over, and always at the eleventh hour. If he’ going to learn not to do this, he’ got to really think he’ lost them. And for a long time. A decent amount of time. Not just hours, or even days. At least a month.”

“A month!”

“Or maybe two months. I’ll decide all that. The point is, you’ll be in charge of them. I couldn’t have them in the house with me. It would be too risky. I’m not good at keeping things secret, the way you are. And so tomorrow Jonah and I will leave as usual, we’ll head north, at some point he’ll realize they’re missing. Maybe we’ll come back, maybe we won’t. And then, when all possibilities have been exhausted, we’ll go on to San Francisco without the notebooks, because he has this reading to give, and the show must go on, mustn’t it? And the show will go on. And then we’ll fly home. I’ll see how he behaves, and if he’ genuinely contrite, if I feel certain that he’ learned his lesson and that from now on he’ll start to act more responsibly, I’ll get in touch with you. I’ll call you or write to you. And that’ when—miraculously—they’ll turn up.”

“But everyone will think I stole them!”

“No they won’t. They’ll all be too happy that you’ve found them. You’ll be the hero.”

“But how can I just find them? Where were they supposed to have been all this time?”

“That’ immaterial. The point is, no one’ going to think that you took them, because what would be the point of stealing them, keeping them for a couple of months, and then giving them back? On the other hand, finding them, purely by chance, in some corner of the house where no one ever thought of looking . . . that seems perfectly logical . . . Or you can turn them in, anonymously, to the police. I’m sure by that point Nancy will have notified the police.” Anne’ eyes, as she spoke, were glazing over. It was as if the plan itself, even on a hypothetical level, had so besotted her that for the time being