After she realized who it was on the line, she expressed a kind of bored surprise, then an equally bored irritation, and then he confessed, lying wildly, in a kind of gallant improvisation, that he still loved her, he had always and always loved her, he was crazy abouther still, he thought of her constantly. He had, he said, built a sort of a shrine to her in his memory. That’s what he said. Oh, brother!
Her husband got on the line then and shouted at him and he surprised himself by suddenly sobbing. He hung up, got out of the booth, and sat at the bar. He’d be late for supper again, and when he got home his wife would be angry and silent and the food would be in the refrigerator already. Why go home? Maybe there was somebody else he could call. He used to know a lot of girls. How about Amelia, in the black dress, he knew her! And then there were all the other ones, the other girls he knew once.
The bartender dropped a coaster in front of him and he ordered a Fleischmann’s with beer back. The bartender paid no attention to the fact that he was still sniffling. I made some goddamn fool of myself, he said to the bartender, some goddamn fool! He banged his fist on the bar. The bartender poured a hooker of whiskey and drew a beer. You’re not gonna give me any grief, are you, champ? He shook his head. No grief, he said. He threw the whiskey down and took a sip of beer. Did you ever happen to know if a girl called Ruth ever used to come in here some time ago? he asked. Ruth? the bartender said. I don’t even know you, champ. Drink up and take a walk, ok? You’ve had plenty.
It may well be that this fool wanted to say to this woman — let’s call her Ruth, too—“Be careful! It’s my heart.”
Later that night, he thought that it would have been a good idea to remind Ruth’s loudmouth belligerent yahoo husband that love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.
His wife wasn’t home. Good news at last! He took a Tudor beer out of the refrigerator and got the bottle of Paul Jones down from the cupboard. The prince of beers, he said. The king of whiskeys. The new taste of modern luxury, old fellow! Then he sat down in the living room and lighted a cigarette. The bird of time has but a little way to flutter, Ruth, he said.
He could call Amelia. She used to wear a pearl choker with her black dress.
It has not been explained how this drunken fool got Ruth’s number, since he did not know her married name. It has, however, been commented on by an astute copy editor that neither Ruth nor her loudmouth belligerent yahoo husband asked, “How did you get this number?”
Epistolary associates
DEAREST BELOVED,
I DREAM OF YOU OFTEN, MOST RECENTLY,of the way you looked on that night when your loose gown fell from your shoulders and you embraced me with your gentle delicate arms and kissed me, so sweetly. I can still hear your lovely whispering voice, “Dear heart, how do you like this?” That was no dream, no, I lay wide awake, but now I have little more than dreams. Everything that we had together is gone, changed, because of my gentleness perhaps, a gentleness which led, curiously, to your forsaking me. And yet I still love you, for love is love for beggars as for kings, as the saying has it, and love doesn’t change because the circumstances that surround it change, no, it is like a fixed star. That is to say, my love is as it always was, even though your love has ceased to be, but, perhaps, perhaps, not ceased forever? You are my true love, you have my heart. Wake, love, to this fact, and please give yourself a moment to listen to the cheerful birds singing, singing, caroling of love! Don’t be as unkind as man’s ingratitude, or a proof that loving is mere folly. Where, where are you? And where is your heart roaming? Please come home to me.
Every wise man, and every wise man’s son, knows that love is for now, for the present, not for the hereafter. What is to come is unknown, and still unsure. When you were just twenty, and I used to say to you, “Come and kiss me, sweet,” wherever we were, at parties, the movies, in the park or on the street, anywhere, you’d blush and laugh, but you will surely recall that you always did kiss me, when I reminded you, lightly, to be sure, that youth is a quality that will not endure. I know that you remember this. You were made all of light in those days, and the pure beams of that light scorched me, I’m afraid, not that I didn’t welcome such sweet torture. I would welcome it still if you could tell me where all those past years are, where they went, those years so full of laughter and loving that are now as lost as a falling star. I still remember you as true and fair and honest, I still see the beauty of your face, like a heavenly paradise, and stupidly, often, all too often, I think that we might meet anywhere, just down the street, in the market, even next door! I thought that our love would never die, never decay, I thought that we were made, I confess it, that we were invented by such a love, I thought that our love somehow proved that we were — I don’t quite know how to put this — mysterious. Do you know what I mean?
Oh dearest, please come back to me, or, at least, please reply to this letter. Give me a little hope, allow yourself, once again, to be desired, let me tell you, once again, how sweet and fair you are. I will love you until the world ends, until it is destroyed by flood or fire, until the whole world turns to coal! But we don’t, now, have enough world, or enough time to see how, as you once said, “things will work out.” At our backs, every minute, every second, time hurries on and in front of us is eternity, like a vast desert of loneliness. So let’s devour this time, let’s put our strength and our sweetness together, as we used to do. Please write or call. As it is, I admit, openly, that your absence has displaced my mind so that it is quite hopelessly locked into endless dreams of you.
As ever, my Beloved, good night, with a soft lullaby,
Your devoted, enamored, and faithful friend.
Dear friend:
Thanks for your recent letter. I enjoyed it, and think that the writing is wonderful, just as writing. But you don’t quite engage that crucial faculty of response in me that must be engaged in order for me to respond as I feel I should respond to wonderful writing. You seem sure of yourself, but you’re not getting it across to me, you don’t manage to “jolt” me into taking a fresh view of our relationship. You, as always, have a good, though perhaps obsessive, sense of the past, and you often manage to convey marvelous emotional effect, but in the end your recollection of what we “had” together seems, I’m afraid, rather flat. I’m sorry.
In addition, your letter seems much too long, and I could not, for the life of me, unravel its real purpose, which is, perhaps, my failing. You seem, as always, obsessed with repetitions and, to be blunt, “fancy phrases,” which are not really what I’m looking for right now, verbally speaking. Despite these objections, it’s clear that what you do well you do really well, but my question, in the last analysis, is: Why did you write this? You’ve always had a talent for conversation, the “gift of gab,” as an old, wise editor I once knew liked to say — she was a spark plug of a woman, indeed, in what was a man’s world! — but I just did not feel this letter, chatty though it is. It seems full of repetitions, and for what you have to say, or plead, the letter’s inordinate length really can’t be justified. In a word, it is much too long.