in addition to which there was more money to be paid on acceptance of the manuscript, and even more to be earned from royalties—money, of course, that she would share with me. Divide with me. But I was wary of complying with the plan, not only because I feared, more than she did, being found out or accused of theft; also because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that only so long as I actually held the notebooks in my possession could I be sure of having any leverage with Anne. Yes, she had proposed that I could write the unwritten chapters—but who was to say there wasn’t another writer who could have fulfilled that task just as well? And for all I knew, Boyd might have told her everything he’d told me about the last chapters. So I demurred, changing the subject or putting her off every time the topic came up. And what could she do, when I demurred, but accept it? In a sense neither of us could really afford to make a move without the other’ cooperation—as long, that is, as the notebooks remained under my control. Once I gave them to her, on the other hand, she could easily double-cross me, either by doubting the miraculous coincidence of their suddenly turning up, or by going further and implying that I had stolen them—in which case I would be the one who had no recourse, as of course the notebooks would by then be in her possession. That wasn’t something I was prepared to risk. So I stalled, saying things like, “I’ll have to think about it,” or, “I’m not quite ready yet.” Nor was she pushy. In fact, I suspect that despite her insistent positivity, her determination to make the rest of her life as free of taint as the last years had been marred by it, some terrible guilt still plagued her. In some ways, to forget about the notebooks suited Anne as well as it did me.
Meanwhile, wrapped in foil and paper and plastic, they sat where I had left them, in their little cave. Whenever I went home, for Christmas or during the summer, I would check on them. Once or twice I removed them from their protective casing, examined them to make sure that no damage had been done by smoke or rain or mildew. Their resistance to the elements deepened my conviction that they possessed some sort of magical properties. For it seemed that no matter how many years they sat in that sooty chamber, each time I unwrapped them they still smelled as they had the Thanksgiving when Jonah Boyd had passed them around the table. They smelled like him—just as that Thanksgiving I had thought that he smelled like them.
Then I graduated from college. I moved to New York. Anne and I lost touch.
You must believe me when I say that it was not until many, many years later that the idea of publishing Gonesse as my own work even entered my head, and by then, of course, Anne was dead, and my father was dead, and my mother. I had written three novels of my own, none of which I’d been able to sell. Oh, I’d had bites. Editors are sadists, Denny. They love to say to a young writer, “I can’t buy your book as it is, but maybe if you fix this, or alter that, I’ll reconsider.” And so you fix this, and alter that—you do exactly what the editor has suggested—and what’ the reply? “Well, if it weren’t for this or that, the novel would be perfect, but as it is, it’ impossible, it will never sell.” As you can imagine, after a while that sort of bait-and-switch can become really infuriating. And I got it again and again. Maybe things would have been easier if I’d just met with swift and merciless rejection from the start—then, in all likelihood, I would have gotten the message and given up—but now it seemed that I was doomed to be forever tantalized, to have a remote if real opportunity perpetually dangled before my eyes, only to be withdrawn at the last minute.
One editor in particular drove me crazy. She had the extraordinary name of Georgiana Sleep, and she worked for Boyd’ old publisher. Indeed, she seemed kind of impressed that I had known him, and had won a prize named after him. The thing about Georgiana was that she wasn’t just vaguely encouraging without ever