She found it a little unsettling, and speaking frankly, old buddy, so did I. My first reaction, actually, was that I was glad you were taking everything almost too well. But on second reading, or what you might call reading between the lines, I found myself changing my mind. For one thing I sensed a very definite undercurrent of hostility throughout the letter, and without going into a lot of Freudian bullshit I would be less worried if the hostility were right out there in the open than the way it is in your letter, sort of hiding behind the bushes and lurking.
And that whole fantasy about the teenage girls. To tell you the truth, I did think it was amusing and imaginative on your part to invent that routine, but Frances made me realize that it was also pretty sick, and I do mean sick. According to her, you always had a tendency to live a fantasy life that was more real to you than your real life. I would not go that far, although I always felt you may have had your feet planted a little less firmly on the ground than some of the rest of us. I always just figured that this was part of being a poet, the sensitivity bit.
But Fran says that it’s almost as if you actually believe the bit with the girls from the convent school. I didn’t think that was possible but on rereading the section, I have to agree with her. If that’s the case, or whatever’s the case, maybe you’re wasting your talents as a poet, fella. Maybe you ought to write dirty books or something.
Just kidding, as I’m sure you know.
But what I’m getting at, Larry, in my usual roundabout way, is that I hope you won’t write any letters of that sort to us again. I don’t mean that we are not interested in you and don’t want to know how things are going with you, because we are and we do.
That letter, though, was very upsetting to Fran, and to me too. The remarks you made about your private life with Fran and other things like that are not the sort of thing that belong in a letter, and if the purpose was to drive a wedge between the two of us, although I don’t honestly think you had that idea in mind, to give you the benefit of the doubt, well, if that was your purpose I have to tell you it pretty much fell flat on its face.
I’m a pretty straightforward guy, as you well know, and I prefer to take your whole letter and everything else pretty much at face value as an honest attempt to let me know, and Fran in the bargain, that you’re not holding a grudge. So I’ll think of the letter that way whether that’s what you had in mind or not.
Anyway, please, no more letters like that. And if you do write, don’t refer to this letter, as I don’t intend to tell Fran I wrote to you.
9
74 Bleecker St.
New York 10012
June 22
Mrs. Laurence Clarke
c/o American Express
Cuernavaca, Mexico
Dear Fran:
I have a lot of things to tell you, but perhaps the first and most important is what great good fortune you’ve had to run off with a man who really loves you. I know Steve has always had a problem in communicating, although God knows he’s not as hopeless in conversation as he is when he takes pen in hand and tries to write something. But I have a feeling that he may not have let you know fully how he feels about you, and communication is such a problem among lovers, as you can certainly appreciate.
So for that reason I’m taking the liberty of enclosing herewith (if you’ll pardon the formal language) a Xerox copy of a letter I received from him. It’s handwritten, but I’m happy to say the writing reproduced nicely. That Xerox machine is a really wonderful thing. I’ve had some correspondence which indicates I may find it increasingly difficult to gain access to it. I hope this will all work out, however.
To return to Steve’s letter, you’ll notice that it doesn’t bear any date. I doubt this will make much difference to you, but at the moment I’m rather involved with correspondence in general, rather compulsive about the whole subject, as it happens, and it would make my record-keeping more complete if you could find out just when it was written and relay the information to me.
It should be easy for you to work it out, actually. As you’ll note from an examination of its contents, Steve’s letter was written while you were out shopping for something to cook for dinner. Since cooking dinner has never been something you do more than once or twice a week, I’m sure you can narrow things down and work out the timing for me. God knows I would appreciate it.
I want you to really read Steve’s letter, Fran. And try not to be put off by the man’s relative clumsiness with the English language. After all, he’s a photographer and not a writer, and you don’t expect photographers to be up to their asses in verbal facility. They’re far more apt to be up to their asses in darkroom chemicals, aren’t they? Besides, as everyone learns at a tender age, a picture is worth a thousand words. You might say that Steve sent me a picture, as his letter runs quite close to a thousand words. Do you suppose it’s just coincidence?
You can tell from a glance at this primitive word-picture of Steve’s that he really loves you, Fran. (Somehow I can’t bring myself to call you Frances, although Steve seems to refer to you that way a lot. Is it his idea of a pet name?) His love for you is evident in every split infinitive, in every mawkish turn of phrase. In fact I would go so far as to say that his letter to me was in fact a letter to you, a letter he lacked the self-confidence and, oh, the slick glibness to deliver to you in person. And so he writes his letter to you but addresses and mails it to me.
I can understand this, actually. I’ve been writing all these letters to various people lately and can’t entirely dismiss the nagging suspicion that I’m really writing them to myself. Or that my typewriter is writing them to me. I’ve tended to anthropomorphize my typewriter lately. This may be bad, but I feel it’s better than ignoring it.
Thus my passing this letter on to you is in a sense my method of playing the John Alden part, but this is one John Alden who will respectfully decline to speak for himself.
One interesting reason for assuming Steve’s letter was written for your benefit, Fran, is his stubborn insistence upon going to such great lengths to suggest that the whole bit with the convent girls never happened. That it was all some fantasy of mine, which I wrote to him for some nefarious purpose. Steve has known me a long time, longer than almost anyone, and he can certainly tell when I’m telling the truth, so he knows dammed well that this happened. I may have had to reconstruct some of the conversation slightly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it came within a couple of words of being a verbatim transcript of what actually went down that night. I guess he must feel that my boasting — and let’s admit it, I was boasting — reflected somehow on your femininity, as if I were not only doing a rooster strut but also comparing you adversely to the six girls.
A strut, yes; an adverse comparison, surely not. Of course we both know, we all three know, that you are a few years more than sixteen, Fran(ces), and that you will not be sixteen again unless science does something phenomenal. And while twenty-nine is also a hell of a good age, asserted by most authorities to be a woman’s sexual peak, there’s no gainsaying the fact that after a certain point in life the bloom begins to leave the rose, as the poets say. But question your femininity? Christ, I would never dream of doing that. Quite the opposite. Why, if memory serves, in that very letter I devoted quite a bit of space to unequivocal praise of your oral abilities.