The Saddest Story

By TAMALA M. EDWARDS

Life imitates art" is a cliche, but that may be the best explanation for what happened to Gayl Jones. The writer made her name in the mid-1970s with transfixing tales of sexual violence and madness, stories of women skating the edges of insanity and the men who shoved them toward thin ice. On Feb. 20, a similar tale seemed to unfold in Jones' home in Lexington, Ky. When police tried to serve a warrant from a 15-year-old weapons conviction on her husband Bob Jones, he barricaded the couple inside their house and threatened that they would kill themselves. Three hours later, after the odor of natural gas filled the street, police, fearing an explosion, rushed the front door. They reached the 48-year-old author safely, but Bob, 51, killed himself by grabbing a butcher knife and plunging it into his throat.

As Gayl sat under suicide watch in a mental hospital, her brother attempted an explanation. "I'm sure you realize my brother-in-law was insane," said Franklin Jones. His sister, he said, had been dashing toward literary stardom "until she met him." And so it seemed. In 1975, the 25-year-old Gayl stunned the literary world with Corregidora, a fiercely written novel about incest, slavery and abuse. Jones mined the same brutal field in Eva's Man, in which the protagonist bites off a man's penis. Toni Morrison was her editor; John Updike praised her work. Another book followed. And at just 26, she was tenured at the University of Michigan. But after she arrived at the university, Gayl got involved with Bob, then known as Bob Higgins. (He would later take her name.) In 1983, Bob spewed invectives and brandished a gun at a gay-rights rally in Ann Arbor. Charges were filed. The night before his trial, the couple fled to Europe. Ten years ago, they quietly returned to her native Lexington to care for Gayl's ailing mother. Then, last month, Gayl published The Healing, her first novel in 21 years. Reviews were enthusiastic; Newsweek ran a feature on her literary comeback.

Lexington police read the story with more than passing interest. For the past year, Bob had besieged officials with claims that "racist" doctors at the University of Kentucky had kidnapped and killed his mother-in-law, who died last year of cancer. When the article disclosed that the increasingly threatening Bob Jones was Bob Higgins, the police moved quickly to serve him with the outstanding warrant.

Many of those who knew Gayl say her strange life with Bob was less about tragic accident than gothic design. "Gayl was not a puppet. She fell in love," says author and friend Nettie Jones (no relation). Since childhood, Gayl had seemed lost inside her own head. As a student, she sat in class swallowed under layers of clothes, just her face and huge eyes peeking out, speaking only when spoken to. But what she said was often brilliant. "Other students would turn to her and say, 'O.K., Gayl, what's the answer?' She always had the answer," remembers her 11th-grade English teacher, Sue Ann Allen. Gayl came to the attention of the Lexington-born poet Elizabeth Hardwick, who became an early mentor and arranged for a college scholarship. But as an adult Gayl resisted most offers of friendship. In Ann Arbor, she lived like a nun, alone in a threadbare apartment behind a grocery store.

No one is sure when Bob met Gayl, but finally someone pierced her world. "She was intoxicated. He took her out of fantasy and into his and her reality," says Nettie Jones. But Bob had a volatile background. As a student at Wayne State University, he had written a column for the campus newspaper that he signed "A. Violence." As he got older, Bob appeared to slip into dementia. In 1974, a delusional Bob fired a gun into another apartment in his building in Staten Island, N.Y. It led to a seven-hour police siege, at the end of which he jumped out the window of the sixth-story apartment, proclaiming he was God.

His disruptive presence was quickly felt in Gayl's life. Morrison's relationship with Gayl was severed in the wake of his demand that she audition to edit Gayl's fourth book. Says Morrison: "I wrote her a letter saying that editing her work was a highlight of my life but that I thought she needed an editor she could trust." Other friends and relatives also found themselves cut off. When the two ran off to Europe, Gayl left behind letters addressed to the university and Ronald Reagan, declaring, "I reject your lying, racist s___. God is with Bob and I am with him."

Neighbors knew little about the couple after their return to Lexington, except that they rarely left the house and, when they did, were usually wrapped head to toe. Gayl communicated with her editors via E-mail. Ironically, her last book, The Healing, is filled with humor and has a happy ending. Unfortunately, life doesn't always imitate art.

--With reporting by Michael McBride/Detroit and Sylvester Monroe/Lexington