Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (18 page)

I decide to leave, then, on the first of May. I have almost two months free before any child comes home to me, before summer school starts. I fly to the city where I have all this time been sending my letters. My joyful letters, my chattering and confiding letters, my apprehensive and finally begging letters. Where I would still be sending them, if I had not been clever enough to take note of your death.

The city where you lived, which you described to me wryly, but on the whole contentedly, in your letters. Full of old crocks and bewildered tourists, you said. No. Full of old crocks,
like me
, you said, making yourself out as usual to be older than you were. You loved to do that, to pretend to be tired and lazy, to stress your indifference. I thought it a pose, to tell you the truth. What I could not credit, did not have the imagination to credit, was that it might be real. You told me once that you did not care at all whether you died soon or went on living for another twenty-five years. Blasphemy from a lover. You told me that you did not think about happiness, the word did not occur to you. What pomposity, I thought, taking such things as if a young man had said, them, unwilling to strain myself to understand a man for whom these statements were flat truth, in whom some energy I expected to find was worn down or entirely forgotten. Though I had stopped dyeing my hair and learned to live, as I thought, with a decent level of expectation, I did send hope in your direction, gigantic hope. I refused, I refuse, to see you as you seemed to see yourself.

I do think of you I suppose as a warm and sentient flood
, you wrote one time to me,
and I have the normal human concerns with being overwhelmed, which is what floods do
.

I wrote back that I was nothing but the tamest little creek you could go wading in. You knew better.

How I tried to charm and mislead you, by that time, both in my letters and when we were together! Half my
concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry. What humiliating charades those were. And you, you would smile in a certain way, a gentle way; I think you were a good deal ashamed for me.

I find an apartment building close to the sea, a building dating I should think from the Twenties, creamy yellow stucco with flaking windowsills, blank medallion and indecipherable scroll above the door. Many old people, as you told me, walking past in the dazzling sea-light. I go out into the streets and walk everywhere. I don't bother to go to the cemetery. I don't know which cemetery it would be, in any case. I walk on sidewalks you may have walked on and look at things you almost certainly looked at. Windows which hosted your reflection give me back mine. It is a game. This city I find quite different from the cities I am used to. The steep streets, the pale stucco houses, so many of them flat-roofed and built in that strange filling-station style called “modern” before the Second World War. Oblong ornamental windows of thick glass bricks. Sometimes a Spanish roof, or misplaced portholes and decks. The famous gardens. Rhododendrons, azaleas, hydrangeas, in red and orange and purple colors that hurt the eyes. Tulips big as goblets, endless showing-off. And the shops so strange to anyone from an industrial/university town, someone used, in spite of shopping-center dress-ups, to some commercial modesty and functionalism. Turn-of-the-century ice-cream parlors.
WILD WEST SPORTING GOODS. HAWAIIAN CASUALS
, with palms in tubs. Tudor teashops with flimsy gables. Rope-soled sandals in a sort of cave, from which issue recorded jungle noises. Candy stores with false fronts like miniature castles. These masquerades are too various, too tiring. One day I go into a supermarket to buy some bread and oranges and the girl at the cash register is dressed in a burlap sack, her face is smeared with mud and red paint, she has a plastic bone stuck through her hair. They are promoting raisins, and beef
from Australia. But she smiles at me humanly, wearily, through the mud and paint, she reassures me; there is somebody in most of these places who can do that.

I see myself searching these streets for some memory of you as I once looked for clues in the articles you wrote for newspapers and magazines, in the books you wrote so efficiently to serve others' purposes, never your own. Amusing and informative you are, so skilled you verge on elegance, but you hold back, even from that. Is that all there is, I hear myself asking, and you laughing, indulgently; what more could there be? But I am not convinced, I keep after you, I desire revelations.

If I had to describe you, as I secretly see you, I would say that you are uncompromising. And you would say impatiently that you have compromised all your life. But that is not what I mean. I will say it: you are uncompromising, angular in some thoroughgoing way (body and spirit together), chaste, kind but not compassionate. I would emphasize that there is something chivalric about you. I do expect you, like a knight, to be capable of acts of outmoded self-sacrifice and also of marvelous brutality, both performed with the kind of style that indicates obedience to secret orders.

You, on the other hand, would describe yourself as genial, corrupt, ordinarily selfish and pleasure-loving. You would look over your glasses at me like some mild inflexible schoolmaster, put out by my extremity. We would have to consider my being in love, the way I am in love, as if it were a curable extravagance, a highhanded assumption in an essay.

From the beginning, of course, I knew that this was a dangerous way to live. At any moment the ties may be cut, have been cut, there is no knowing where the failure originated, whether it was by your wish or beyond your control; there is nobody I can complain to. Always before, at the last moment, rescue arrived. My brief wild letter, final desperation, and then your letter of humorous, somewhat tender, apology, which tells me there was never any danger. I was
on solid ground all the time, you never left me. As if this hole I fall into, which is the permanent absence of you, is nothing but a dream I scare myself with, or at worst a place from which I have only to cry out hard enough, convincingly enough, for help, and help will come.

I find myself reading articles in women's magazines. Case histories. When my faith is restored, and riding high, I skip over these lessons superstitiously; when it is low, and very low, and gone, I read them for comfort, because it is a comfort to discover that one's own case holds no particular agony, only some shopworn recognizable pain. Other women have recovered and offer encouragement. Martha T., mistress for five years to a man who deceived, mocked, and fascinated her. I fell in love with him because he seemed so gentle, she says. Emily R., whose lover was not married as he claimed. And how often talking to both men and women I hear myself in witty and rueful pursuit of this theme—how women build their castles on foundations hardly strong enough to support a night's shelter; how women deceive themselves and uselessly suffer, being exploitable because of the emptiness of their lives and some deep—but indefinable, and not final!—flaw in themselves. And further and further along this line which everybody is learning these days like an easy song. Meanwhile my heart is cracked, also like the heart in a song, it is dry and cracked like a bare bit of landscape marked with gullies. I cry with Martha T. and Emily R. and wonder what possible way they managed to cure themselves. By learning macramé? By deep breathing? Once a friend of mine—a woman, of course—said to me that since pain was only possible if you looked backward to the past or forward to the future she had eliminated the whole problem by living every moment by itself; every moment, she said, was filled with absolute silence. I have tried this, I will try anything, but I don't understand how it works.

I have bought a map. I have found your street, the block where your house is. It is not very far from my apartment.
Ten blocks or so to walk. I don't go there yet. I walk within a block or two of it and turn aside. That is a house you never meant me to see. (The places where I live are just the opposite; I deck them out and wait for them to come to life, when you visit me.) Now I can see it if I want to. I can walk past on the other side of the street, my heart pounding, able only to glance at it once or twice, then growing bolder I can walk slowly. Dusk is the time I would choose, to loiter not far from the open windows, to listen for music or voices. Imagine this real, a real house, where people wash dishes and oversleep. At night if she doesn't draw the curtains I can look into your rooms. Are the pictures your choice, or hers? Neither. Both. These discoveries cause me ordinary pain.

Once I read a story, a true story, in a magazine—it may have been one of the magazines you worked for—about a woman who had lost both her young daughters in a car accident, and every day when the other children were coming home from school she would go out and walk along the streets as if she expected to meet her daughters. But she never went as far as the school, she never looked into their empty classrooms, she could not risk that.

I go to your wife's store, that is what I can do. I don't know the name. I look up bookstores in the yellow pages of the phone book.
BARBARA
'
S BOOK MART
, that must be it. From the name I expected something self-conscious and quaint; I am surprised to find it so large, bright, busy and commonplace. No medieval or Tudor trappings; no trappings of any kind. This is a solid, year-round business, not tricked out for tourists.

I know her at once, though she has changed. Her hair is gray, grayer than mine, pulled into a bun. Features less sharp than they were, no make-up, a sallow skin, and still those flashes of vivid attractiveness; her quivering, witty, irritable style. She wears a faded purple smock with bands of Indian embroidery. She moves stiffly, having had to learn
to walk again, after the cartilage in one knee was removed. And she is heavier, as you said; she is a stocky middle-aged woman.

She has come from the back of the store carrying a couple of large art books. She goes behind the desk, puts them on a shelf, speaks to the salesgirl as if continuing a conversation started earlier.

“Well, I don't know how—invoice—phone them up and tell them that isn't the way we do things around here—whole damn lot's got to be returned.”

I remember her voice, the same voice I heard all that time ago at one or two parties—a clear challenging voice that seems to come into its own on a certain level of exasperation, a voice that excels in saying
My God what are those idiots thinking of!
Suppose she recognizes my voice, or my face? I don't think she will. She is not a person to remember people at the fringes, she is always at the center, and she has no information about me, has she? She cannot expect me here.

Nevertheless I feel conspicuous, guilty, strange. Yet I stay for a long time, I wander all over the store. It's frightening, there are so many books. I always seem to stop in front of books telling people various ways to be happy, or at any rate peaceful. You have no idea—well, maybe you do have an idea—how many books of this sort there are. I am not scornful. I think I ought to read them. Or at least some of them. But all I can do is stare at them in stupefaction. Other books deal with magic, there are really hundreds of books about witches, spells, clairvoyance, rituals, all kinds of tricks and wonders. These books seem to me all the same—the happiness-and-peace ones and the magic wonders—they don't seem like separate books at all, that is why I cannot touch them. They are all flowing together around the store like some varicolored marvelous stream, or wide river, and I can really no more understand what is inside them than I can breathe underwater.

I come day after day. I do buy a few paperbacks. I
browse, as they must think, for hours. Once she looks at me, and smiles, but it is only the quick blind smile she has for a customer, I listen to her talking to the salesgirls, laughing, carrying on a joking, also serious, feud with somebody on the phone, demanding her tea with honey, mock-righteously refusing cakes. I hear her successfully, sometimes charmingly, bully the customers. I can imagine becoming her friend, listening to her confidences. I am ashamed of such a fantasy. I feel envy in her presence, and a precarious triumph, and this frivolous desperate curiosity; I am ashamed of all this when I remember.

I come at night—the store is open till nine—but she is usually not there. One night I come and she is there by herself. No one else is in the store. She goes to the back room and comes back carrying something, comes directly to me.

“I think I know who you are.”

She looks straight into my face. She has to lift her chin, she is so much shorter than I am.

“We've all noticed you hanging around here. At first I thought you were a shoplifter. I told everybody to keep an eye on you. But you're not a shoplifter, are you?”

“No.”

She gives me what she has in her hand, a brown paper bag full of papers.

“He's dead.” She smiles at me as a teacher would who finds you fatally compromised at school. “That's why you haven't been hearing from him. He died in March. He had a heart attack, at his desk at home. I found him when I came in at supper time.”

I cannot, and should not, speak to her.

“Should I say I'm sorry to tell you? I'm not sorry. How you feel is not important to me. Not at all. I don't want to see you here. Good-bye.”

I leave the store without saying another word to her.

In my apartment I open the bag and take out the letters. They are letters, not in their envelopes. That is what I
knew I would find, I knew I would find my letters. I don't want to read them, I dread reading them, I think that I will put them away. But then I notice that the writing is not mine. I start to read. These letters are not mine, they were not written by me. I skip through every one of them in a panic and read the signature.
Patricia. Pat. P
. I go back and read them carefully one by one.

My dear love
,

You leave me so happy. I went to the park with Samantha and it was lovely. I pushed her on the swings and watched her on the slide and thought I will have to love this park forever and ever, because I went there when I was so happy and after I had been with you
.