(Dr. K-! How lucky you are, to have a little granddaughter like Lisle! So delicate, so pretty, so… angelic. I have not had a daughter, I confess. I will not have a granddaughter. If things were otherwise between us, “Jody,” we might share Lisle.)
“Jody”-what a thrill it was for me, at the age of nineteen, to call you by that name! Where others addressed you formally, as Dr. K-. That it was secret, illicit, taboo-like calling one’s own father by a lover’s name-was part of the thrill, of course.
“Jody,” I hope your first, anxious wife E--never discovered certain bits of incriminating evidence in your trouser pockets, wallet, briefcase where, daringly, I secreted them. Love notes, childlike in expression. Love love love my Jody. My BIG JODY.
You’re not BIG JODY very often now, are you, Dr. K-?
“Jody” has faded with the years, I’ve learned. With the thick wiry gypsy-black hair, those shrewd clear eyes and proud posture and the capacity of your stubby penis to rejuvenate, reinvent itself with impressive frequency. (At the start of our affair, at least.) For any nineteen-year-old girl-student to call you “Jody” now would be obscene, laughable.
Now you most love being called “Granddaddy!”-in Lisle’s voice.
Yet in my dreams sometimes I hear my own shameless whisper, Jody please don’t stop loving me, please forgive me, I want only to die, I deserve to die if you don’t love me as in the warm bath blood-tendrils seeped from my clumsily lacerated forearms; but it was Dr. K-, not “Jody,” who spoke brusquely on the phone informing me This is not the time. Good-bye.
(You must have made inquiries, Dr. K-. You must have learned that I was found there in the bloody bathwater, unconscious, nearing death, by a concerned woman friend who’d tried to call me. You must have known, but prudently kept your distance, Dr. K-! These many years.)
Dr. K-, not only have you managed to erase me from your memory, but I would guess you’ve forgotten your anxious first wife E-, “Evie.” The rich man’s daughter. A woman two years older than you, lacking in self-confidence, rather plain, with no style. Loving me, you were concerned about making “Evie” suspicious, not because you cared for her but because you would have made the rich father suspicious, too. And you were very beholden to the rich father, yes? Few members of the Seminary faculty can afford to live near the Seminary. In the elegant old East End of our university town. (So you boasted in your bemused way. As if contemplating an irony of fate, not a consequence of your own maneuvering. As, smiling, you kissed my mouth, and drew a forefinger along my breasts, across my shivery belly.)
Poor “Evie”! Her hit-and-run “accidental” death, a mysterious vehicle swerving on a rain-lashed pavement, no witnesses… I would have helped you mourn, Dr. K-, and been a loving stepmother to your children, but by then you’d banished me from your life.
Or so you believed.
(For the record: I am not hinting that I had anything to do with the death of the first Mrs. K-. Don’t bother to read and reread these lines, to determine if there’s something “between” them-there isn’t.)
And then, Dr. K-, a widower with two children, you went away, to Germany. A sabbatical year that stretched into two. I was left to mourn in your place. (Not luckless “Evie,” but you.) Your wife’s death was spoken of as a “tragedy” in certain circles, but I preferred to think of it as purely an accident: a conjunction of time, place, opportunity. What is accident but a precision of timing?
Dr. K-, I would not accuse you of blatant hypocrisy (would I?), still less of deceit, but I can’t comprehend why, in such craven terror of your first wife’s family (to whom you felt so intellectually superior), you nonetheless remarried, within eighteen months, a woman much younger than you, nearly as young as I, which must have shocked and infuriated your former in-laws. Yes? (Or did you cease caring about what they thought? Had you siphoned enough money from the father-in-law, by that time?)
Your second wife, V-, would be spared an accidental death, and will survive you by many years. I have never felt any rancor for voluptuous-now rather fattish-”Viola,” who came into your life after I’d departed it. Maybe, in a way, I felt some sympathy for the young woman, guessing that, in time, you would betray her, too. (And haven’t you? Numberless times?)
I have forgotten nothing, Dr. K-. While you, to your fatal disadvantage, have forgotten almost everything.
Dr. K-,” Jody,” shall I confess: I had secrets from you even then. Even when I seemed to you transparent, translucent. Deep in the marrow of my bones, a wish to bring our illicit love to an end. An end worthy of grand opera, not mere melodrama. When you sat me on your knees naked-”nude” was your preferred term-and gobbled me up with your eyes, “Beautiful! Aren’t you a little beauty!”-even then, I exulted in my secret thoughts. You seemed at times drunken with love-lust?-for me, kissing, tonguing, nuzzling, sucking… sucking nourishment from me like a vampire. (The stress of fatherhood and maintaining a dutiful son-in-law pose as well as the “renowned theologian” were exhausting you, maddening you in your masculine vanity. Of course, in my naiveté I had no idea.) Yet laying my hand on the hot-skinned nape of your neck I “saw” a razor blade clenched in my fingers, and the first astonished spurts of your blood, with such vividness I can “see” it now. I began to faint, my eyes rolled back in my head, you caught me in your arms… and for the first time (I assume it was the first time) you perceived your spun-gold angel as something of a concern, a liability, a burden not unlike the burden of a neurotic, anxiety-prone wife. Darling, what’s the matter with you? Are you playing, darling? Beautiful girl, it isn’t amusing to frighten me when I adore you so.
Gripping my chilled fingers in your hot, hard fingers and pressing my hand against your big powerfully beating heart.
Why not? why not try? try to collect?-that heart.
That’s owed me.
How inspired I am, composing this letter, Dr. K-! I’ve been writing feverishly, scarcely pausing to draw breath. It’s as if an angel is guiding my hand. (One of those tall leathery-winged angels of wrath, with fierce medieval faces, you see in German woodcuts!) I’ve reread certain of your published works, Dr. K-, including the heavily footnoted treatise on the Dead Sea Scrolls that established your reputation as an ambitious young scholar in his early thirties. Yet it all seems so quaint and long-ago, back in the twentieth century when “God” and “Satan” were somehow more real to us, like household objects… I’ve been reading of our primitive religious origins, how “God-Satan” were once conjoined but are now, in our Christian tradition, always separated. Fatally separated. For we Christians can believe no evil of our deity, we could not love Him then.
Dr. K-, as I write this letter my malfunctioning heart with its mysterious “murmur” now speeds, now slows, now gives a lurch, in excited knowledge that you are reading these words with a mounting sense of their justice. A heavy rain has begun to fall, drumming against the roof and windows of the place in which I am living, the identical rain (is it?) that drums against the roof and windows of your house only a few (or is it many?) miles away; unless I live in a part of the country thousands of miles distant, and the rain is not identical. And yet I can come to you at any time. I am free to come, and to go; to appear, and to disappear. It may even be that I’ve contemplated the charming facade of your precious granddaughter’s Busy Bee Nursery School even as I’ve shopped for shoes in the company of V-, though the jowly-faced, heavily made-up woman with the size ten feet was oblivious of my presence, of course.