Four Letter Word
Page 3
Oh, and I can’t bring myself to shower. I can’t bear to wash away the smell of you, which makes me giddy, like sniffing glue. (Not that I sniff glue! Isn’t it funny, that you can write ‘like sniffing glue’ and have no idea what that feels like, yet at once be certain that you have lit upon absolutely the perfect image?)
I’m torn between telling you everything you need to know about me for pages and pages, and getting this off so that we can talk and arrange our next rendezvous. Because I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m free this very night, I’ll tear myself from this email and send it hurtling to your computer. I’ll stay in this afternoon and await your call.
Already pining,
Alisha
From: Alisha Garrison [mailto: Alisha.Garrison@gmail.com]
Sent: 14 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: Double-checking
Seymour (and I’ve been thinking about your name – ‘See more’ – it’s metaphorical, isn’t it? You make me see more, for the vividness of colour has not abated. And ‘mour’ recalls ‘amore,’ as in ‘That’s amore!’ You make me see amore!)
I hope you don’t mind my re-sending that first email a few more times over the weekend. I’ve had trouble with Google in the last several weeks; I’ve had hardly any mail at all, which is quite impossible. In fact, in the previous year several other gentlemen – who shall go nameless, since I’m not a manipulative sort of girl who would try and make you jealous! – have informed me that they never received an email that I most certainly sent. At your end, AOL doesn’t have an exactly sterling reputation for reliability, either. Isn’t it rumoured that the company is going bankrupt? Partly because customers like you are so exasperated with uneven service provision? The Internet is not nearly as sure a form of communication as we’ve been led to believe! And I should loathe for us to founder on so capricious and arbitrary a matter as a technical glitch.
Even if you did get one of the notes in bottles that I dropped into the ocean of cyberspace, maybe there’s something about that particular message that won’t send properly. I can’t say that I’m any kind of computer wunderkind, but wouldn’t it be just my luck that that email of all emails was doomed, marked like Cain for destruction! So I thought I’d send a fresh one. In case you never received the earlier one, my phone number is (020) 7274-6738. Commit that to memory, recite it as you fall asleep! (Look at me, already bossing you around like a wife of twenty years. Don’t I have cheek!)
Of course, you can’t have had time to get a new mobile yet, and I know how hard it is to find a working phone box on the street these days. They say that it’s only a matter of time before BT eliminates them altogether. And you may very well have tried to ring, borrowing a friend’s mobile or something. (I do think it’s best to keep a landline for just such emergencies as this, even if you claim that with a good price plan it’s unnecessary. Whoops! There I go, bossing you around again!) You see, while I did try to stay in for the weekend to await your call, I’m afraid I ran short of provender, and had to nip off to the supermarket for a few things on Sunday afternoon. Although my telephone provider should have recorded any message, I’ve had simply dreadful experience with One. Tel’s voice-mail service. You would not believe how many times I’ve been told later that someone definitely left a message, and I never got that interrupted dial tone indicating that it was awaiting me, much less listened to a recording of any description. The system simply eats messages for breakfast! Honestly, Seymour – See-amore, my new pet name for you! – nothing seems to work as faithfully as need be when so much depends on the successful meeting of electrical wires, the twist of mere cables!
Then again, you may just be terribly busy. I could tell how responsible you were, and however powerfully you might want to distract yourself work has to come first. Perhaps you’re saving ringing me up as a little treat for yourself. If so, think of me as a sweetie in your pocket that’s going to get all sticky and gooey if you let it sit there too long. Unwrap your little candy, darling! I can’t receive private calls at work, so I’ve taken a personal day today. And I’ve laid in so many provisions that you’d think I was a Mormon awaiting Judgment Day! (I confess: I was hoping to lure you to dinner, and wanted to make sure that I had all the fixings just in case you rang and said you wanted to call by at the last minute. Isn’t it funny, how you have to plan, even to be spontaneous?) So I shouldn’t have to leave the flat at all. That way I don’t have to depend on One. Tel!
I do hope you like smoked salmon. With wheaten soda bread, a squeeze of lemon, capers and thinly sliced red onion. As for the red onion, I’m of two minds. It provides a wonderfully sharp counterpoint to the salmon, but I wouldn’t want to spoil our breaths. On the other hand, if we both eat raw onion, doesn’t that rather cancel out the unpleasant effect? Goodness, these days to be lucky at love a girl has to be a biochemist!
Trying to be patient with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that technology is err to,
Alisha
From: Alisha Garrison [mailto: Alisha.Garrison@gmail.com
Sent: 26 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: Drop dead
Seymour – or how about See-mort?
Who do you think you are? Or, more to the point, who do you think I am? Some harlot who isn’t even smart enough to charge? Some vapid vessel for your seminal fluids, like a toilet bowl? Didn’t you appreciate that you were dealing with a woman of some cultural sophistication, so that if she stoops to a cliché like, ‘I don’t usually do this’ she’s only making that trite an assertion because it happens to be true?
I suppose you’ll also be happy to know that I kept the smoked salmon for so long that it spoilt, which I thought was metaphorical. Something that started out fresh and delicious and nourishing gradually grew slimy, rank and poisonous! So I fed the salmon to my neighbour’s Pomeranian – our lovely dinner literally going to the dogs!
It’s been two weeks! And don’t tell me you didn’t get my last email either, because I sent it at least a dozen times, and from my neighbour’s computer as well for good measure. (In case you imagine that I brutally use people, like a certain someone who shall remain nameless, I was comforting her about her dog.) I ran out of personal days, and had to ring in sick – anathema to me, since I am renowned for my integrity. That’s why the floor manager never questioned whether I was truly ill. In fact, unlike some people, he seemed very sympathetic! Which, as it happens, he should have been. Because I am sick. Of you!
Did you assume that because I was willing to slip off to Mandy’s guest room I was cheap? Could you conceivably imagine that I pour out my heart like that on a nightly basis, to just anybody? I am a very private person! And now I feel I have entrusted my innermost thoughts, my deepest yearnings and longest-lasting passions, like my love of Pooh – and that’s with an H, you dirty-minded cretin! – to a rake and a charlatan, like throwing my finery into a sewer!
So this morning I finally took a shower, and I’ll tell you I did so joyfully, I did so singing! ‘I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair!’ I belted, at the top of my lungs! I rinsed away every dandruffy flake of you, every rancid trace of sweat, every sour drop of your foul testicular emanations.
You would be foolhardy in the extreme to make use of the phone number I entrusted to your keeping. Please destroy it. I assure you that were you to ring now I would not only fling the receiver to its cradle, but direct One. Tel to change my number forthwith!
Icily,
Alisha
From: Alisha Garrison [mailto: Alisha.Garrison@gmail.com]
Sent: 31 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: Please forgive me
See-more, my dearest,
I’m terribly sorry for that last email. I fear that when I wrote last I’d had a drop too much to drink, and you know how in an information vacuum one’s mind can run rampant.
Can we just agree to draw a line, and start from scratch? I’m not saying that you like playing games any more than I do. Still, even if we touched our very souls against each other that night, in an everyday sense we know each other only so well, and you may have got the wrong impression of me. I’m usually very guarded, if anything too civil and polite, so that people take a long time to get to know me, and sometimes mistake me for frosty. You should know first-hand that I’m anything but frosty! I suppose it was such a relief to let that guard down and show my true colours – those yellows so yellow, and those blacks so black! – that I may have got ahead of myself.
Tell you what: let’s pretend I never wrote anything at all. This time around, we can take it slowly. Maybe we shouldn’t have let our passions run away with us that night. What would you say to rolling back the clock, and meeting for lunch, or a drink, or even an innocent cup of coffee? Perhaps we need to get to know each other on an ordinary level, before we see to the touching-souls part. Isn’t it funny, that I know your truest, deepest nature, but I don’t even know your middle name, what languages you speak, or whether you play the piano?
Hoping to see you soon – and on my best behaviour!
Alisha
From: Alisha Garrison [mailto: Alisha.Garrison@gmail.com]
Sent: 31 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: I’m frightening myself
Seymore – as I see less …
I know I shouldn’t be writing to you, but I don’t know to whom else to turn. I can barely drag myself out of bed, and after my taking those two weeks off work the floor manager from Asda rang to inform me that ‘my services would no longer be required’. I don’t have any appetite, and when I looked in the mirror just now I almost didn’t recognise myself. For the last two days I’ve barely eaten anything other than the last two pints of Banana Split Häagen-Dazs, and my cheeks are cadaverously sunken.
Outside the sun is beating, bright and mocking, but my head is swirling with darkness and dread. When I lean out the window I feel the summer air sucking me out; I look down and I’m drawn giddily to the vertiginous plummet to the pavement from my first-floor window. The knives in my kitchen glitter with allure like jewellery. I can’t gaze upon my top sheet without envisioning it twisted and looped from the overhead light fixture, swinging, tempting me with its release. The oven door gapes open and offers up its hot-breathed maw, except that I read somewhere that natural gas these days has had the lethal component removed, and the Sylvia Plath route has been confounded. I don’t think that’s very considerate, do you? Just because you work at Asda – or used to work at Asda – doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve a poetic departure.
I was happy before, or whatever it is you call not knowing what you’re missing. I was living on bread and water, and for one night I tasted cake. Oh, See-more, I cannot return to a prison diet once more. So if you read about me in the papers, just know that you blessed this poor inmate with one glorious night of freedom and escape. If I only truly lived for one night, so many of us sad little moths seeking out the light never live at all. I suppose that I’m lucky. But if I’m so lucky, why do I feel so doleful, so despondent, so beyond caring?
Sorry to trouble you,
Alisha
From: Sam Kaminski [mailto: skaminski2@aol.com]
Sent: 31 August 2006
To: Garrison, Alisha
Subject: Re: I’m frightening myself
look lady i dont know if this guy yr writing scammed u with a fake email address or weather yr completely whacked and he’s a fig newton of yr imagination (haha) but im a new jersey boy born and bread and u and me never spent no night together eating cake or nothing. id never have loaded yr emails to begin with what with the virus alerts and stuff cept that the subject line of the first one made me mistook it for having to do with the video game i was bidding for on ebay (dark messiah of might and magic and some dipshit beat me out). so dont stick yr head in the oven on my account especially if it dont even work. and if you don’t mind me tossing in my two cents from the peanut gallery if yr buddy ‘seemore’ did palm off a bullshit address and flee the scene of the crime so to speak the guy’s a fucking smart cookie (or fig newton haha) sam
DAVID BEZMOZGIS
Lubyanka, 2 September 1918
My dear Mika,
Though you have made it clear that you do not care for me, my heart nevertheless insists that I address you as ‘my dear’. I know this will only irritate you. It irritates me too. My love has brought neither of us any happiness. But don’t think that I resent you for this. On the contrary, I am grateful. At a time of revolution, love is a bourgeois indulgence. In rejecting my affections, you reminded of this. I am ashamed of the woman I was in Kharkov. I wanted romance so desperately that I forgot myself. For those two days, I allowed myself to imagine that I was once again a girl of sixteen. When I saw you, I saw the last man who had treated me with tenderness, spoke loving words to me, and made me feel like more than a rag dragged through the dirt. Seeing you, it was as if the twelve years of prison and loneliness had evaporated.
You will never understand, but I have lived for twelve years in permanent blackness. Even in the rare moments when my vision cleared, I saw before me only my black life in the prison camp. Many times I wished for the strength to bring about my own death. Many times I cursed myself for having survived the explosion in the hotel room. What had my survival brought me? Only misery. A girl of sixteen, half blind, imprisoned with no hope of clemency. But then came the February Revolution, the amnesty, and the doctors who restored my vision. And then, as if by fate, there you were in the street buying a newspaper. How else to explain your presence in Kharkov, standing in the street where I took my afternoon walks?
This is mere sentimentality I know, but amnesty from prison and reprieve from blindness made us foolish and optimistic. I shudder to think of the image I must have cut running towards you. I felt myself a young beauty, but what I must have looked like! Hysterical, a madwoman, coat flapping, hair wild, pale and gaunt. Like a witch from a fairy tale used to frighten children. I saw the truth in your eyes but I refused to admit it. Though now, sitting in my cell, I see quite plainly the disgust on your face. I have seen much more of it these last days. I no longer care. I accept that I am a woman who does not inspire warmth in men, and I will never again beg like a dog for a scrap of kindness.
I have no illusions, Mika. I know what awaits me. I know what to expect from the Bolsheviks. Sverdlov, Lenin’s pet jackal, has come to witness my interrogation. Naturally, I refuse to speak in his presence. They send one after another of their lackeys to pry information from me. They do not believe that I was capable of acting alone. Perhaps you also cannot believe this? But it is true. Before this letter reaches you, you will have read in the newspapers that I shot at Lenin. I do not think I succeeded in killing him. If I regret anything, it is only that. He is a traitor to the Revolution. I lay the responsibility for the treacherous peace with Germany and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly at his feet. I have told my inquisitors as much and so expect that they will not censor it from this letter. That this letter reaches you at all I have entrusted to Yakov Peters. He is the only one among them who has treated me with even a semblance of decency. In his youth, like you and me, he was an anarchist. History has turned him in one direction, me in another, and you in yet another. What will come of it all I can only speculate. But when the doctors fixed my eyes, I had hoped that I would look upon a better world. For the first days, I saw beauty all around me. I saw potential in all things, including myself. Of course this sensation did not last. It did not take long for the world to assert its true nature. The Revolution was betrayed and you confirmed my inadequacy as a woman.
For years I had consoled myself that, in prison, blindness was a sort of blessing. What, after all, is worth seeing in prison? But even liberated from the tzar’s prison I recognised that I was not fr
ee. For the workers of the world, liberty remains an unkept promise. We remain prisoners of the bourgeoisie and of the false prophets of the Revolution. And so I am not sad to say goodbye to this world. I have done what I could to further the Revolution. I will die as I have lived, a Marxist and a Socialist revolutionist.
I will end here but for one request. Mika, I know I have no claims on you and no reason to make demands, but as this is the only letter I am permitted to send, I ask that you write to my brother Berl in New York. Tell him he was right, I was not made for a long life. Tell him also that I do not want our father to recite prayers for me.
Yours,
Fanny
This letter was discovered among the papers of Yakov Peters at the time of his arrest and execution by the NKVD in 1938.
CHRIS BACHELDER
To whom it may concern:
I am writing to recommend Charles Valentine for any love-related position – professional, academic, or personal – for which he might apply or be considered. I have been a love educator at the high school level for more years than I would care to disclose, and I can say without hesitation that Charlie is the most gifted student of love I have ever seen. In comparison, all of the other students I have taught and all of the students I will yet teach in my long slow slide to retirement – my previous and subsequent recommendation letters not-withstanding – are what we in Love Ed. call Raisin Hearts. By all other reliable measures an average and uninspired student (see transcript), Charlie is, in the discipline of love, a prodigy and a genius.