by Amy Benson
The less dire part of me that enjoys a good joke, however, smiles at the uncomfortable irony of unrecalled letters—the writer who has utterly forgotten writing—and listens to the sparkling-eyed boy continue in the vein of “Jealousy.”
I think later: We are made of so many silly, clever, pathetic, touching, sincere, or boring (mostly boring) pieces, of which we cannot keep track. Every once in a while someone is keeping track of them for us. Which is either a blessing or a curse—at any moment, by a number of people I could be reminded that I’m a moral coward, reminded of the enormous curly confection I made of my hair in tenth grade, reminded how many times I’ve said I don’t want, I don’t need, a boyfriend.
I think later: When we speak, you and I, it means nothing—the venting of a few signals across the tops of our brains. But what about our brains’ deep curls and valleys, what about the dark areas on the CAT scans, and everything we’ve forgotten, the promises made, letters sent, impressions given—all dropped and lost. The effect is that I can’t turn an evening’s conversation into a lifetime of knowing. And neither can you. The nature of experience (the disconnect between the full force of our brains and histories from our selves in a moment) won’t let us.
I think later: He is apparently well loved in this life. To be that loved in a marriage must be good, gratifying, filling.
I wonder even later, though, how my letters could have so upset his wife (who has the rosiest baby, the permanent fusing of his sperm and her egg). Was it simply that they still existed? But, I tell myself, between my teeth a tiny kernel of bitterness, the sparkling-eyed boy didn’t keep the letters in a secret place in his nightstand or, safer, in his garage workbench, wrapped in a patterned paper that made his heart leap; they were forgotten in a box in his father’s basement. Was it something in the letters, then? Who could be troubled by the easily mocked words of an eighteen-year-old girl? If I had sent something deeply incriminating even a decade later, what could it have been? We’d never had sex, and I was wholly incapable of writing erotica at the time. Something more subtle, perhaps? In my head is a home movie of his boy’s body flying from the county dock into the bay, the froth swallowing him whole, wide-open eyes going under. All of that untethered joy. She has from this time in his life only two-dimensional pictures and his own version of himself. When we decide to take someone, say, a boy, for the rest of his life, we want every shining and lousy moment, not just the ones we happen to have been there for, but the tender, searching years before everything was settled. We want to have been predestined, locked into his red corpuscles since birth. But then there’s a bundle of letters from the time his blood pounded free of us against the wall of his body.
I am so smug—accusing her when I have been equally possessive in my life, if not more so. Mustn’t I admit to holding between my fingers old letters sent to my then-boyfriends by their ex-girlfriends, wondering if I had the courage to put them back unread where I’d found them. I read them, of course. I have memories of pages unfolding in my palm, weighty, saturated with meaning. I can even sense in the texture of the paper the fossil of his anticipation as he first opened it however long ago. My suspicion has always been that whatever pangs he felt then, with this other love, his heart might never precisely reproduce with me. I suppose, though, the root of this seemingly irrational jealousy is simply that the letters are evidence he has loved and been loved by others before me. This evidence makes it difficult to deny the ease with which I may myself become one of his others, or I might make him one of my others rather than my one. A bitter caveat to the mythology we must try to construct of our loves: anytime we begin again, with hope and enthusiasm and lovely, scribbled notes, we must admit to having begun before, and ended.
Still later, I wonder if he got a quiet moment with the letters when he didn’t have to protect the expressions on his face. If not, did he want to?
Later that same summer, I sorted through boxes stored in my mother’s basement, boxes I hadn’t opened since she left my dad and moved into her own house at the end of my senior year of high school. Among piles of old papers, I found two folded letters from him. I had remembered these notes but had not imagined they still existed. If my life had taken a slightly different angle, would his letters still mean more than any of the other letters I found with them? A love card with a poem from a punker boy I’d waited tables with, kissed, and asked to my senior prom just because he was strange, left roses on my windshield, and didn’t go to my high school. Or the postcard from a girl I’d been friends with in high school but hadn’t treated very well. She killed herself sometime after college. Why should his two shaky letters mean more than theirs? Our brains must use an impenetrable algorithm to decide what gets the force of our emotions and intellect. I know I felt a vague sense of obligations unmet when I read the other letters, but I felt a shock of luck and gratitude when I held this concrete evidence of the sparkling-eyed boy in my hands.
Loves that begin in letters are so different from loves that begin with swimming together, playing cards, laughing at inanities. With the latter, even if what you feel you might call love, when the time comes to write a letter, say, when you are nine hours away at college, you find you really have nothing to say, no way to put yourself onto a piece of paper. In this way, I can’t imagine what I wrote to him. Did I allow the pretensions I so desperately wanted to adopt to make it onto the page?
Sept. 5, 1989
Dear ——,
I’ve been marooned in a nearly landlocked state growing fields of the same corn stalk over and over with nauseating perseverance.
The distance from my dorm room to my classes is one unit in my separation from trees as I know them. Here, in this state, trees stand in the middle of corn fields, occasional, or tightly clasped in panicked copses.
The water from the drinking fountain is, they tell me, occasionally toxic, clouded with nitrogen runoff. I drink it anyway, not having much of a choice. I remember great gulps of well water splashing down my throat, dripping from my cheeks and chin.
I have no reference here at all for the feeling of lake or river water rippling across all of me. If I know anything about myself, it’s that I must negotiate the edges of things and must often be submerged. Thus I am very lonely, with not an edge in sight.
The stars are all wrong here. I wander around at night and lose my way where it would seem impossible to lose anything. That is, anything I wanted to lose. Do you grow impatient for a mention of yourself? Do you long to see your name circumscribed with hearts? I don’t blame you—really I don’t. I would wish for the same thing—and then some; I’ve always wanted more than I wanted to give. But if you are dissatisfied, you have misunderstood me. I have been speaking of you from the first word.
Love, Amy
P.S.: Have your short trips elsewhere taught you that your own green and blue corner—yes, quite literally, corner—of the world has a scent like no other? I know I can’t describe it so I won’t even try. But the evening that you find this in your mailbox, will you stand outside and breathe for me? I think you will know what I mean.
At that age, I couldn’t have written a purplish, grand, or even expressive letter to anyone. I’m revealing more about what I want myself to have been than what I was: I would rather have been absurdly serious than empty. And though I have taken such liberties with the details of this boy and professed such love I’ll never have to prove—in other words, though I owe him more than I could repay, I can’t stand the thought of him having some small part of me I can’t remember, imagine, or control. Letters are so vulgarly tangible! As if they are the only evidence we can trust of a moment, a mood, an entire relationship, a being. Damn it! What did I write, what did they read, how did they read it, how would I want them to read it?
Oct. 12, 1989
——!
How are you?! I know its been a while. Sorry. But there’s just been so much to do to get settled in here after our trip this summer. My friend from high school and I had a really good
time in the U.K.—a whole month—smashing, as they say! I know you thought it was silly to go, but it was a really good transition, you know, into college. We got some neat stuff there to decorate our dorm room. It’s really tiny, as you can imagine—one room for the two of us. But we’ve put up some of the things we got and it looks pretty good. We’re in an all-girl dorm—I hear they call it the “Virgin Vault.” That should make you feel assured! Our neighbors violate the rules all the time, though. They only seem to care about drinking and finding guys. I think they know we’re pretty disgusted with them.
Anyway, I’ve got tons of homework—I’m in mostly small classes and the amount of homework is large (calculus, chemistry, German, etc.). I have an Honors English class too, writing essays, and the guy who’s teaching it—I think you’d hate him. He’s very messy and he talks politics. He actually said the only reason he wouldn’t do coke is because of how many people are killed bringing it into the country. I can picture his apartment, all books, dishes, cigarettes, maybe whiskey and pieces of paper. But I really like him.
Gotta go—tons to do! Hope all is well in the North-country, Amy
How did it end, the letter writing, our hold on each other, that loyalty and gratitude for knowing each other through our most difficult years? There is often no event by which people are lost from us. We may have no red plot points for a graph. We might point to a fight, a divorce paper, an unyielding “let’s just be friends”; but we know how many barely audible sighs precede such moments, how many walks at night alone, how many times his or her face seems like a caricature of the person we loved. We realize they are no longer the extra skeleton in us that keeps us from our own weakness. They lent us an organ or two and our bodies have slowly rejected them. I’ve convicted myself for leaving him, for letting him feel left, and yet I can’t remember how I did it. Memory has trouble with things that aren’t tight narratives. Which came first—story or the brain that runs on story? How did I leave him?
Nov. 16, 1989
Dear ——,
This is a difficult letter for me to write . . . as evidenced by my full wastebasket. I didn’t realize it then, but when I left there this summer, I must have had important questions (or, perhaps, doubts) about us. Where is it that we’re headed?
I say “we,” but that pronoun conjures up a picture of us, a fingertip away from each other in the clearest air, reflected in the clearest water. But you are there and I am here and we don’t know how to mention this distance.
When I think “you,” I see the house that you are gutting and refinishing, I see you speaking to everyone—quick-tongued and glib, I see your sure and speedy fingers, I see your room with not one book in sight. When I think “me,” I think of my friend and her exacting standards, I see films like Blue Velvet, I see me alone in foreign countries, I see the need to prove myself, endlessly. What, then, would happen to “you” if you were to leave that place? Could you ever be “you” again? And more and more, “I” am only what will happen in the future—that which I cannot predict.
But for some reason, what I remember most about being fifteen is playing cards with you as my partner. We cheated shamelessly, as you may recall, our eyes telling each other what we needed to know. I remember your sparkling, devilish looks that were meant for me alone. Tell me: Is this enough?
Love always, Amy
None of these is even close, I’m sure. I’m afraid I merely sent postcards from England—a picture of St. Paul’s Cathedral with “London is great! . .. Lots of royalty buried and married here” scratched on the back. I’d worked for the trip all senior year, waitressing on the weekends until five a.m.; the sparkling-eyed boy said that going to England would be a waste of time. He wanted to spend the rest of the summer with me, as we had spent them for years now. He wanted July, August, to lie before him as the familiar idyll from which everyone had to wake come September, the idyll that allowed the coming of winter to crush only small bits of us—a thumb, shin, a bit of skin or hair—instead of the whole of us. But I didn’t listen to him, of course. He wasn’t right, of course. Not entirely. But if I had known how, I would have written: “Being around my friend makes me feel lonely sometimes; and she tries to make me feel stupid. You never make me feel lonely or stupid. But I need to be around people who make me feel stupid because that’s the only way I can be sure they’re terribly smart. And if they’re terribly smart and they wouldn’t be with just anyone, doesn’t that make me smart, too? So you see, there’s no chance for you, since you can’t make me feel bad enough.” I would add now: ”But I will grow slowly out of this and I will regret the good souls I’ve looked through like windows on something better.” I would add: ”I could write you many letters now and remember every word.” I would add: ”Forgive my assumptions that you would want to read them. There is no end to my selfishness.” I would add: ”Forgive me for not remembering. Forgive me.”
Blank
I’ll bet the sparkling-eyed boy doesn’t have the sort of frivolous paper fetish I have. He may round up scratch paper; but not hard-covered notebooks or stacks of medium-weight sheets he likes to run between his fingers. The way I remember it, he prefers wood in its less pulverized forms: trees, logs, planks. And a pen, when he wants it, is hard to find. There he is when the phone rings, fumbling with a message from the elementary school for his wife. He finds an old envelope and a black magic marker and squeaks out dramatic black letters. “Meeting on Wednesday” ends up looking like an omen on their kitchen table. He holds cartoonish construction pencils easily, but Bics slide through his fingers.
How does the sparkling-eyed boy fashion his thoughts? How does he react when he sees words strung across a page? Here is a mind so practical, so quick with jokes and agile with measurements, so different from my own that I doubt we would be able to entertain each other for long now. Musn’t we write, I want to ask, in order to think, in order to give, to be? The answer is “No,” apparently, “we musn’t.”
Even if he lacks the utensils to write, he loves words. When he is not working, he’s talking, at any rate, so one can assume that he either loves words or needs them or both. In the city, people don’t have to talk; the din of ubiquitous machine guts cancels their flapping tongues. But here, where the spaces between houses are many thousands of times larger than the houses themselves, speech is like a defense against an inhuman quiet. He tells strings of stories that usually end in laughter and shaking of heads all around. He knows his own stories; he knows the stories of his friends; he even knows the stories of the people who don’t like him very much. He is a fine gossip, an old crone, an oral historian at heart. He needs stories to make light of the heft and sweat of work, to temper the stench and spill—the insufferably empty hours—of hunting, to convince us subtly that he is, after all, a good guy.
Words pour from his mouth in a stream, and yet he writes not one line. As far as I know, he has never had to look at the evidence of his thoughts in stacked rows of sense or nonsense and been sorry or proud or laid low. And he has never offered up a record of his own heart to those who must live without it. Speech lives only for a moment and then dissipates like a scent or the sound of a cough. How does he remember what has come before or solidify the ghosts of thought that slide through the hemispheres of his brain? Does he at least indulge himself in the pleasures of description? He could invent words for woods and their grains that would change the way we touch our coffee tables, that might make us sleep, stomachs down, on bare wood floors. But I have never heard him use these words.
Here is a piece of paper:
I rub it between my fingers, less aware of the paper than of my own fingerprints grating against it. Funny how I have never thought to describe paper as vulnerable. It can crumple, tear, smear, dissolve, and yet somehow it is I who am vulnerable before it. The paper would feel different between his fingers, I’m sure, callused as they are. It would seem removed—just beyond the reach of feeling. Now between his fingers, the wide, flat sides of the construction pencil, f
reshly sharpened with a knife. This is how he makes his mark on it: short, quick whittles to expose new lead.
If I could set the paper in front of him and ask him to string words across it, what would he write? A list of supplies he needs to get in —— tomorrow? A note to his wife asking her to call her parents about when exactly they’ll be visiting—and . . . oh yes, he loves her? The lyrics of some song that’s been tumbling about his head all day? A few wry sentences about how he could write a lot better if he had gone to college like he wanted to? Would he have even a few words for me?
Perhaps it is true that the only words we say are the words we’d like to hear, that the praises we sing are the praises we would delight in, that the faces we like are in some way our own, that we touch our lovers in order to tell them how we would like to be touched. This is how we spend our lives: looking for someone to get our stories straight, to read us as we hope to be read and tell us all about it.