The Body Of Jonah Boyd by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online

the provost to welcome the year’ crop of new
     faculty. Clifford, who had a cold, stayed home. Here she was introduced to Jonah Boyd. At this point, Boyd was in his late
     forties; he had just published his second novel, and it had gone down, in his own words (which Anne quoted), “like a lead
     balloon.” But then a friend had gotten him a gig teaching creative writing to undergraduates at Bradford—"as if such a thing
     could be taught,” Anne quoted him as saying. “Creative writing. What would Byron have made of such a term? What would Pope have made of it? Mockery. All ‘creative writing’ means is a chance
     for the brats to indulge themselves.”
    Anne was fascinated. She had never met a writer before, and told him so. He got her a drink. He himself did not drink, he
     explained, because he was a drunk. “Huh?” Anne said. This was back in the days when social drinking, far from being frowned
     upon, was the principal leisure activity of the academic classes, and most people who worked at universities drank like fish.
     Regenerate alcoholics had not yet become the staple of television talk shows that they are today, and former inebriates who
     had gone off the sauce were usually as reticent in their newfound sobriety as in the past they had been secretive in their
     intoxications. Yet Boyd not only admitted that until recently he had been, in his own words, a “boozer,” he seemed to take
     an almost gustatory satisfaction in describing the depths of wretchedness to which “the bottle” had dragged him. For it was
     his intention, he said, to write a great novel, and contrary to all the nonsense spouted about Hemingway, you could not write
     a great novel if you were a drunk. Great writing required an evenness of disposition that the fuzzing haze of alcohol obliterated.
     Anne listened raptly, and drank. Curiously, he seemed to have no problem with her drinking. He kept fetching her fresh gin and tonics. He was a handsome man, if oddly foppish, with his bow tie and manicured
     mustache. In certain ways he reminded her of Clifford—who better embodied “evenness of disposition” than Clifford?—and yet
     in other ways he was so much less restrained, so much easier to talk to, that she found herself wondering what had induced
     her to marry Clifford in the first place.
    They retreated to a sofa. People were watching them—colleagues, wives of colleagues, women whose husbands might tell Clifford
     what they had seen. She didn’t care. Boyd’ openness—his obliviousness to convention—had brought her past caring. Such openness,
     she knew, might have nothing to do with her. It might be a side effect of his having been a drunk, or of his being a novelist.
     Yet how much more pleasant if it turned out that she herself had inspired this response from him, this intuitive trust that
     allowed him to speak to her of things about which, with others, he would have stayed silent! If that were the case, then Anne
     owed it to him to be equally forthcoming.
    She touched his collar. Lightly, just for a fraction of a second. Still, the gesture was noticed. She could feel a prickle
     of unease leap about the room. They were being watched, which both amused and emboldened her. Was he married? she asked. Sort
     of, he answered. Sort of? Well, he was in the middle of a divorce. This too, in Anne’ sphere, was a novelty, and she asked
     for details. He and his wife, Boyd said, had been married straight out of high school. They had three children. For nineteen
     years they had lived together in a ranch house outside of Dallas, where his wife worked for the company that published the
     yellow pages, and Boyd cobbled together a living out of odd teaching jobs, while devoting the principal part of his energies
     to drinking and writing, in that order. The house was never clean, nor were the kids. “Cat scratches on the sofa, holes in
     the children’ socks. It wasn’t that we were poor. Oh, we were poor—just not to