Read The Body Of Jonah Boyd for Free Online

manuscript, and I would read it aloud. (This one concerned Patient X, who refused ever to drink water; she even brushed
     her teeth with Coca-Cola.) Then I would read, and as I did, he would periodically interrupt me to amplify some thought, or
     grope toward a clarification—my cue to suggest, ever so delicately, a means of making his point more cleanly. Nor was it only
     a matter of writing; sometimes I would be emboldened to call attention to some half-baked supposition, or to propose a more
     persuasive interpretation. And yet between his natural ego and my natural diffidence, we were able to pretend that all I was
     doing was taking a complicated form of dictation. Whether privately he recognized the true extent of my contribution I’m still
     not sure.
    After we had finished, Ernest stood up from his chair and sat next to me on the daybed. I said not a word. At this point it
     had been almost a month since the grope in the kitchen; if anything, I wondered why he had waited so long to make another
     move. I tried to make it clear, from my expression, that I was ready and willing, but he seemed reluctant to touch me, and
     finally, out of impatience, I put my hand on the back of his head and pulled his mouth toward mine. Everything happened very
     quickly then; his lovemaking, on this occasion as it would be on others, seemed to be a kind of payback for the help I had
     just given him—payback in the sense of vengeance as well as reward, for mixed into his passion were distinct tones of both
     gratitude and punishment. I didn’t mind. I’d never had much of an appetite for namby-pamby sex. Then we sat together, half
     undressed, and he talked a little: about how irritating he found Ben’ food phobias, and about Daphne’ lack of respect for
     her parents, and about what he called, using the parlance of the day, Nancy’ “frigidity.” This last accusation, I would later
     learn, is one to which husbands often resort when they feel the need to justify, after the fact, an extramarital dalliance.
     At the time, though, it was totally new to me. I took it at face value, and felt as sorry for Ernest, whose needs Nancy obviously
     refused to satisfy, as I did for Nancy, condemned by her own coldness to miss out forever on the wild pleasures of sex.
    I was always rather fond of Ernest’ office above the garage. I liked the way the nubbly red fabric felt against my back, just
     as I liked the portrait of Freud, gazing down on us like some benevolent saint, and the smell of typewriter ribbons and wood
     and paper. Indeed, we might have gone on for years like that, our affair confined to those Saturdays and that daybed, had
     not Nancy decided rather capriciously one Saturday to forego her weekly trip to the supermarket and make lunch instead. Perhaps
     she suspected something, or perhaps she was starting to feel left out, or perhaps (this seems most likely) her decision had
     nothing to do with us, and was made in response to some shift in her own cosmos of which we knew nothing. In any case, after
     that Ernest stopped asking me up to his office, and we took to meeting at my apartment, usually on Sundays. In this way Nancy
     contributed, albeit unknowingly, to the intensification of our affair.
    I suppose at this point I am obliged to offer some detailed explanation of what I felt about my situation at that time, as
     for most readers the ease with which I alternated between such seemingly incompatible functions—efficient secretary, available
     mistress, best friend to wife—must seem peculiar. For me, though, it was not peculiar at all. It was natural. Call me immoral,
     but as I typed out Ernest’ correspondence outside his office each weekday, I felt no need to block from my memory the afternoons
     we spent making love. Nor when we made love did I feel stabs of guilt in recalling the mornings I played piano with Nancy.
     I moved easily among these roles. Of course I recognized the risks—among them the certainty