were husband and wife, but we were also what we had once been, illicit lovers, and we were also something new. Drinking chums. Drink really forges a bond. That’ why drunks like to hang out together. And we were classy drunks. I remember going out to the bookstore one day and rather jauntily buying a sort of cocktail cookbook. We used to read it together in bed. We’d prepare all sorts of exotic drinks for ourselves, the way other couples cook. Frozen things, things in pineapples with little umbrellas. The most divine bloody Marys. And every day I’d think, ‘Today I’m going to write to Ben and tell him to quote-unquote find the notebooks,’ and every day I’d put it off. And why not? What I was postponing was the end to my own happiness, a weird, dreadful sort of happiness, but a happiness nonetheless.
“Of course it ended anyway. It had to. The day Jonah died, I had a presentiment that something bad was going to happen. The rain was coming down in sheets. We were out of vodka. I’d suggested he not risk driving in that bad weather, but the suggestion was half-hearted, because the truth was, I wanted the vodka as badly as he did. He headed off, and I waited here, in the garden room. I watched the rain falling against the windows, listened to it drumming the roof. He didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back. I got dozy. Abstractly I imagined a car crash. But it was all dreamlike. And then the phone rang. The police.
“The shock of what had happened woke me up to what a freak I’d grown into. I realized that I might die too, if I didn’t change soon. Since that day I haven’t had another drink, or smoked a single cigarette. I feel better than I have since I was a girl.
“Does this seem horribly callous to you? I want something decent for myself. Even though I acknowledge my crime, I’m not prepared to spend the rest of my days on this planet doing penance for it. What good could come of that? Two lives ruined, instead of just one.”
She stood, picked up the tea things as well as the plate on which the cookies had rested. It was empty now except for a few crumbs. She put everything on a tray and carried it into the kitchen and then she came back, and sat down once again across from me.
That was when she said, “So what are we going to do about the notebooks?”
Thirteen
ANNE AND I stayed in touch for most of the rest of my time at Bradford. Not that we saw each other every day; on the contrary, sometimes weeks or even months would go by during which I wouldn’t hear so much as a word from her, or think about her—and then one morning, rather out of the blue, an image of her face would pop into my head, and I’d feel compelled to bicycle by her house; knock on her door. She always looked the same: curiously fresh, almost innocent, as if everything she had endured and perpetrated, rather than etching lines of age and corruption into her skin, had somehow renewed her youth. Or perhaps, like Dorian Gray, she had some gruesome portrait of herself hidden away in a cranny of that deceptively big house.
It wasn’t about sex. Sex never happened, or even came up. And though the massage fantasy lingered, at that point I wouldn’t have even considered mentioning it to Anne. She seemed too pure for that now, and anyway, I had by this point imprinted my longing, as it were, upon other women.
Sometimes we talked about the notebooks. Anne was always the one who brought the matter up. It seemed feasible to her, she said, that even at this late date they might be “found” without either of us coming under suspicion—in which case, she proposed, I could perhaps finish the novel myself (hadn’t Boyd told me his plans for the last chapters?) and she could send it to his editor, who could arrange for its posthumous publication. After all—out of kindness, she suspected—the editor had never asked that she return the money Boyd had been paid as an advance. A tax write-off, as well as a write-off to the conscience, saving the poor woman from having to live with knowing that she had forced Anne out of her home. This way, though, the debt could be erased, Anne said,