THE DOORBELL OF MY COUSINS’ house in Los Angeles rang before I was expecting it to. I ran out of the side gate, and there Boyd was—short and a little heavyset, his gray hair combed back—facing the main entrance.
“Hello!” I said, louder than I normally would, to draw his attention.
He turned toward me, and I was caught off guard by the intensity of seeing Jane’s face in his. I didn’t think I knew Jane’s face that well, but the familiarity of Boyd’s could only be explained by the fact that I knew hers in some fundamental way—the roundness, the button tip of the nose, the impish grin. He was wearing a black button-down and a clerical collar.
“It’s nice to meet you!” he said, more cheerfully than I’d expected. “I got here a little early—can’t trust the 405.”
He climbed into his silver-gray Nissan and reached over to unlock my door. “This is the cheapest car you can buy with air-conditioning,” he said, still a little out of breath from the exertion, “and one of the ways you can keep the cost down is one keyhole.” I took my seat and tried to ignore the mysterious itch on my legs that started the second I got into the car. No-see-ums, I later learned—biting flies so small they’re nearly invisible.
His life was radically different from the comfortable one he had grown up in, where they stayed in the Plaza on every trip to New York. A wooden cross hung from his rearview mirror. “Forgive the costume,” he said. “I would not have dressed this way but for the fact that I have to work tonight.”
The plan was to drive up to Santa Barbara, where he was the vicar for the Anglican Church of Our Savior. It was a midweek service for Ascensiontide, Boyd explained, to mark forty days after Easter—the second of three Christian miracles, when Jesus ascended after his resurrection.
It was a two-hour ride, and we settled into the rhythm I had become familiar with from our phone calls. I would ask a question, and he’d monologue for minutes at a time. It was both of our most natural states. He reminded me of a character in an S. J. Perelman story: formal and wry and belonging to a different time. “Burying the needle,” he’d say about testing how fast his father’s Chrysler would go. The wit, the vocabulary, the references to famous people and plays and books I’d never heard of but felt too ashamed to admit. “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” he bellowed. I nodded. It kept me off balance. I had the impression that some of it was for my benefit—a kind of performance to impress me with his cleverness—and some of it was just to keep him entertained, since maybe my timid questions weren’t doing the trick. Most of all, though, it left little space for vulnerability and reflection. Boyd was never going to let himself play the role of the grieving brother that was expected of him.
“You’ll find me, if I live long enough, out in Barstow in the state veterans’ home, a cranky old man who can’t feel his feet. Now I wake up every morning, a bit annoyed that God hasn’t done it overnight.”
We talked sometimes about Jane, but mostly about everything else. Trump. LA’s war on homelessness. His childhood. “None of these people were bad. But people can wind up being bad for one another.” His poor track record with women. There was the married stripper, the spokesmodel, and the quart-a-day alcoholic. The “Bipolar Bear.” The one who woke up from a coma and thought she was “Almighty God.” The Mormon. The one with the dog that was half coyote. Maybe the last two were the same. His favorite story was about bringing home his stripper girlfriend to meet his parents. Boyd’s mother took him aside and said, trying to be encouraging, “We think Judith is very nice. Do you want my diamonds?” “No,” Boyd said. “Her husband thinks she’s very nice, too.”
We talked about his addiction history—at the height of his DJ years he drank, did coke and meth—and getting sober. His return to faith. He was forthcoming, but not sentimental. I felt I needed to ask him three questions about anything else to earn myself one question about Jane. And when he did speak about her, there was sometimes a fondness, but little softness. I asked if Jane reminded him of Dorothy Parker, as Elisabeth had said. “There were the out-of-place romances and the out-of-place intellectual, but Dottie Parker had a productive talent. My sister really did not.”
The closest Boyd got to admitting how much her death affected him was when he relayed a dream he’d had after she died. He was with his parents when Jane showed up. “I was trying to say in the dream, ‘Why is she here?’ and everybody said, ‘We don’t talk about that.’ We didn’t talk about what happened between us, and we didn’t talk about why she was back to life.”
We drove toward the ocean and then along it, two hours up the coast to Ventura and beyond.
* * *
“Here we are, La Colina.” We were in the parking lot of a Catholic high school.
He got out of the car and walked around to my side to open the door. Then he grabbed his binder of sermons from the backseat and brushed his hair with a pocket comb. For the past few years, he’d suffered from neuropathy, which made the tips of his fingers and toes tingle, so he walked carefully. He pulled out the key to the chapel, and we entered a room with wall-to-wall mauve carpeting and mauve chairs for pews and mauve kneeling blocks. The altar was made of rose-colored marble. The room smelled vaguely like incense. We walked past the pews to a hallway beyond.
“Am I allowed to come in here?” I asked.
He said yes. It was a small room, about the size of a pantry. He pulled out a loose-fitting white robe from the closet. It’s called a cotta, he said. “Since I was known as The Leakin’ Deacon by the amount I perspire, I talked the bishop into letting me wear this somewhat lighter garment.”
He unwrapped a large gold cup. The chalice. “This is called the purificator,” he said, pointing to a small white linen cloth, which he folded carefully in thirds. “This is the paten”—a shallow plate—“and then we put on top of it, the pall.” He demonstrated by covering the plate with the stiff cover.
It struck me how much Jane would have liked all this. All the vocabulary, the symbols, the hidden meanings. She wasn’t religious, but on the ride up Boyd had told me that Jane loved Roman Catholic mass because it was so full of ritual.
In another world, where Jane was still alive, she would have just gone through her own ritual: her fiftieth reunion for Radcliffe. Instead of the cotta, Jane would have worn her own robe—the crimson-and-black stripes of a doctorate. She would be processing through Harvard Yard with the rest of the class of 1967. The thirtieth reunion students would join behind them, the twenty-fifth reunion behind that, and so on, until finally, the students of the class of 2017 rounded out the line. Then the bells would chime in the distance, and as the procession snaked around, the fiftieth reunion would end up parallel to the 2017 part of the line, and future and past would be standing next to each other. (Or, if we’re being more realistic, Jane would have been in a rented convertible with Elisabeth Handler, blowing off the reunion entirely, heading to Revere Beach.)
* * *
We took the coastal highway back to LA, avoiding the back roads and agricultural lands of Ventura County.
Boyd described the pattern of his romantic life like this: “In my head, there was a bell, which basically was the bullshit alarm, and once it started ringing, you ignored it at your peril, and you couldn’t shut it off. So that spoiled some relationships. And of course the other was the invisible sign, but I’m convinced it was there—flashing on and off like bright neon—it was very visible both to good and bad women. The good were prone to avoid it, the bad were raring to go. Because it says in giant letters, CHUMP. CHUMP. CHUMP.” He could see the situation from the third person and yet was helpless to change it. Maybe part of him didn’t want to. With the wrong women, at least there was always “the escape clause,” as he called it. He could always say it had been doomed from the start.
And then, Boyd’s facade cracked for a moment: “The one thing I miss, or never got enough of, is a rare and precious quality in a relationship, and that’s tenderness. A trust, a feeling that nothing is a threat. The feeling that no demands are being made. There are no expectations. You like it the way it is.”
My heart dropped a bit. I knew that quiet feeling of happiness he was describing because I so longed for it. I had felt a version of it with Jay. He had seen all the shards of myself that I usually only let people see a fraction of at any given moment—and he held them. But it made me ache all the more with the desire to be loved by someone whom I loved in turn.
“And the real heartbreaking part of the story, well I mean it’s all heartbreaking, but the part that just adds an extra edge of horror to it is that she had really found a good guy,” I heard Elisabeth saying to me. Jane had found tenderness. The flowers at 5:30 a.m. in London. Their cots pulled next to each other in the Iranian desert. “She was really happy for the first time.”
Finally, after more than seven hours together, Boyd voluntarily turned the conversation to Jane’s murder.
“As I think about it now, my two questions are always the same: Who did it?…And, would she have been happy? Perhaps because my own deal with happiness is that it’s overrated—I find it in little pieces, in little moments, not in the grand plan—I don’t think she would have been…People did not satisfy her expectations very well.”
He turned on his headlights as we headed into the hills of LA to my cousins’ house. I asked if he would be willing to see me again before I left the city. He was unwilling to pin down a date but also didn’t say no.
“It’d be nice to look at any family photos or letters you still had, if you wouldn’t mind sharing,” I added.
“If I can find them,” he said. “I might have been in a to-hell-with-my-past mood and ditched a bunch of it.” All he had now, he said, was probably one letter from Jane in Iran, and his mother’s travel journal from their 1960 European tour.
He parked in my cousins’ driveway. “We’ll figure something out,” he said, softening a bit. He let me out of the car, and I thanked him for the day. The car door failed to shut tightly behind me.
“Slam it hard,” Boyd said, and the moment was over.