Sometimes things seem so far away though it’s like you don’t really even remember them. You can start to feel crazy because part of you is so sure your life went like this and another part of you feels this panic because maybe you misread something all these years. I don’t know what I’m really trying to get at. I just think about you sometimes, especially when something like this comes up. I hope it doesn’t create bad memories or something. Where are you in the world?
Solid Gold,
-Dealer
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:14 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: a little catch-up
Dealer,
Conceivably it’d be nice to hear from you. But do you have to be so pornographic? I’m not like that any more. Let’s agree to keep our electronic reunion strictly business. You wrote me for a reason and I’ll discuss that point with you because it’s having some bearing on your life, which I don’t feel completely comfortable about. (But I’m not accepting your friend request on MySpace, and you really should write people before just adding them.)
I never told you this, but I came down with a condition while we were together. It’s somewhat rare, often misdiagnosed, leads to break-ups, divorces and single-parent children and lifelong sex phobias. So the fallout in our situation pales in comparison. We hardly even knew each other.
I was never pregnant. That was an excuse to keep from having sex because I started getting headaches. At first I thought what was causing the headaches was the screaming. I always hated HTML. I did that for you, because I very well knew you loved it. If I have a gift it’s knowing what people love. But soon there was like a lightning bolt in my head. It’s called Sexual Headache. It means a sudden excruciating headache when approaching orgasm or afterwards, also known as Orgasmic Headache. It is believed to be vascular and sudden rupture of a cerebral blood vessel can occur. So it’s dangerous.
I was stupid and insecure. I didn’t want to tell you I was getting headaches. I thought you’d hate me. On top of that the old sex-headache cliché. So I told you I was pregnant. I invented the abortion saga, carried it out for months. Those times I wept, it was because I was imbalanced. I began to hate me and to hate you. The doctor told me it was impossible to tell what caused Sexual Headache, but that he was sure if I didn’t have sex, it would solve the problem. The abortion story bought me time. When you dropped me off that day, and I ordered you not to come in, it was because I had scheduled an exam, a consultation on birth control. Nothing more. The consult took about twenty minutes, and I sat in the waiting room while you sat in the parking lot, to give you the impression it took longer than it did.
The rants that came out of me, things like, ‘I can’t live with what we’ve done’, fueled the guilt. In truth I couldn’t live with the headache I got while we were doing it. And the thing is, I’m grateful for all of it. I didn’t have the strength to break up with you otherwise. I didn’t have sex with anyone for more than a year, but when I did, it was fine, great even – and no headache. It never occurred again. The cause of my Sexual Headache was you.
I don’t want to seem heartless, Dealer. I do have nice memories of you. But honestly, the capillaries in my brain feel constricted just emailing you, like the effects of a hangover. I’m sorry to hear about your motility and I wish you and what’s her name the best of luck, but don’t write again.
Jana
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:16 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Re: a little catch-up
You always were a neurotic bitch. Thanks for fucking out my world.
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:20 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: quick question
Dear KkrazychickK,
Hey. Nice email handle. It’s got great symmetry. So yeah, this is Dealer. It’s been a while huh? I tracked you down online. Looks like you’re working for some yoga place – sounds hot!
To be honest I’m in a bit of a panic here. I’ll give you the condensed version: my new wife – yep, married – wants to have kids. We haven’t used protection in years because I guess you could say we were never really not trying. I assumed the reason nothing ever happened in the kid way was that she couldn’t have children. This made sense to me in terms of karma, that I would fall in love with a woman who couldn’t conceive. I figured I’d aborted my chances at children and now by the natural laws of the universe, I would not have them. I remember the abortion you had when we were together. That really broke me up. The funny thing is, I’ve been diagnosed with low sperm motility. In other words, my boys can’t swim. They lack umph. But I’m trying to figure out if this is something that’s happened over time, or if it’s always been this way. Obviously, it can’t be the latter, because you got pregnant when we were together. Right? Well, of course you did. We had that little scare afterwards, with the blood in the toilet. And you called the doctor and it was just a normal clot. I know this must seem weird and probably unpleasant. I’m just trying to clarify. I’ve had some disturbing revelations of late.
Hope everything’s okay in your life.
Solid Gold,
-Dealer
From:[email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:07 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: quick question
Hey you, that’s so strange. I was just thinking about you the other day. The owner of a studio I work at was interested in building a database of her clients and asked me if I knew anyone who did that stuff. I said that I did but I hadn’t talked to him in a few years.
I’m teaching Pilates and Bikram Yoga at a few places in Oakland. Do you know what Bikram is? It’s like hot yoga. So, yeah, it is hot, about 106 degrees to be exact. The poses are designed to tourniquet your body with long, low-impact stretches, which you hold, cutting off the blood flow, then release, and your blood surges through you again, rushing oxygen to every tissue. It’s the life. Nothing but good feeling from me. You’re probably right about the karma. I don’t want kids.
Listen, about that abortion back then, I’ve got to be honest with you. I wish I’d known how to get in touch with you because I’ve needed to for a while about this very thing. I ended up in a twelve-step program not long after we split. I had it coming even then. One of the steps was to apologise to everyone you had hurt and/or lied to in one way or another. You were at the top of my Had Lied To list. I was cheating on you with four or five guys. You tended to use condoms whereas they didn’t. So I doubt it was yours. In fact I can say for sure that I doubt it was yours. I know whose it was. I remember exactly when it happened. You would have been at work, which is when I would meet with this particular one. It happened just like I always imagined it would, mystically, under a tree, in the rain. But it wasn’t you. You were the only one who stepped up to the plate though. I figured because you had experience from that other girl, the one you got pregnant before me. You knew how to deal with things. Good because I didn’t want to have anything to do with that guy. You were really sweet during all of that. I’d like to send you the money you paid for it. What was it, like four hundred dollars? What’s your address?
Kisses,
Kim
From:[email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:09 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: quick question
You’ve got to be kidding me. Four or five guys? Under a tree? In the rain? Are you sure that wasn’t a movie? Or maybe you’re misremembering. Time is like that sometimes. Especially with all the pills you were doing.
The database stuff isn’t hard to learn. Well, I take that back, the query languages take some time, but the actual design of the database is pretty simple. You have a number of entities with di
fferent sets of data, but each entity shares one thing in common. That’s your primary key, which forces entity integrity by uniquely identifying entity instances. Then there’s your foreign key, which enforces referential integrity by completing an association between two entities. These keys can be as meaningless as an ID number or as meaningful as a last name.
I am still trying to picture this: you under a tree in the rain, being mystically impregnated by one of four or five men you are sleeping with during the time I am at the office learning the principle of the primary key. You could say that I feel right now like the keys connecting the associations of my life have just been blipped. It’s primary key rule numero uno, that each instance of its entity must have a non-null value. When it’s pulled out from under you, it’s a crusher.
Pilates and Yoga? You must be in great shape. Could you send me a pic? Are you born again and everything now?
Solid Gold,
Wheeler
From:[email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: quick question
Yes, it’s what happened. Time I’m very clear on. The mistakes add up quick.
I know in my heart that there’s something out there, Wheeler, something governing the universe. But I don’t believe in God. I didn’t fall for that part of it. I only fell for the part that could help me. It’s not selfishness though. I know in my heart by helping me it helps the rest of the world too. I was corrosive before. Now I am galvanic.
I don’t get any of what you said about keys.
Seriously, send me your address. I’m waiting. Atonement, at last …
Kim
ps: Here’s a shot they took for my instructor profile. It’s the Dandayamana Dhanurasana pose. I can do that shit all day long.
From:[email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:38 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: getting over it already
You look totally collapsed in on yourself there. I mean you look really good one-footed, twisted around yourself. I think I can safely say you are the hottest woman I ever went out with. You were probably my best chance at natural selection. Of course back then you were so fucked up it probably would have had some defects or something. But present wife included, you are definitely the hottest. That’s no dis to Lisa. Lisa is amazing. She’s totally ironic, and she just deflects things. And she’ll try anything but in moderation. I think she knew all along that it was me, that I was the problem. And she let me blather on about my abortions and how it had to be her. I’m still fucked over all of this. Did you ever have dreams about the kid, Kim? I have dreams about the kid all the time, and not only that one. I dream about the other one I supposedly (long story) aborted with that neurotic bitch. I’ve had such vivid dreams I woke up in the morning and thought I heard the both of them, two boys, chattering away downstairs in front of the TV. They’d be five and eight now if they ever really existed. It never bothered me. Never. Not until now. I carried them with me and that was enough, and now I find out I was carrying nothing all along. It’s like the opposite of that Jesus and footprints in the sand story. You don’t think something like that will affect you, but it does. It affects you.
Solid Gold,
Wheeler
From:[email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 02:10 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: indecent proposal
What does a guy have to do to get an invite to the Bay Area and a complimentary body tourniquet?
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 02:20 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: where we stand
Well, babe, I’ve been searching for answers. Things are confirmed: I was a dope, duped. My boys never swam, Lisa. I hereby drop my claims on the good people at Fertilocertainty. I hereby restore their good name. My abortions were fictions all these years. Those cunts. I could understand one, but two. Where do you find girls like that? It’s been a grand deception. I just thought of something funny, babe: False sense of sterility. But that’s not quite it, is it?
Solid Gold,
Wheeler
From:[email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 2:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: where we stand
Dealer,
I’ll see you tonight. We’ll make it. There are drugs to teach your boys to swim or machines to do the swimming for them. And in the end, it’s just another project of mine. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll find another project. This is how well I understand me. The ROOMBA robotic vacuum is already tempting. It’s like a puppy except instead of shitting and pissing all over the place, it cleans. It’s cute, adorable even, a little toaster-sized cross between Knight Rider and R2-D2. Don’t worry about your ex-cunts. I’m more than you could ever ask for.
xo,
Lisa
FRANCINE PROSE
Dear Franz,
Having outlived you by so many years, I often feel a bit uncertain about what you will and won’t understand. For example, what would you make of the phrase, zero to sixty in sixty seconds? That was how it was for us, my dear. One minute we were at Max’s apartment, perusing your vacation snapshots, which you handed me, sacramentally, one by one, over the table. A minute later, you were writing me letters, and then not writing, and I would write, or not write, a letter wouldn’t arrive, you’d write me an entire letter about the first letter not arriving, and so it was on, our great love affair, zero to sixty in sixty seconds.
It was all about the letters. The letters were our subject. Other couples had children, gardening, kisses, the theater. We had four hands, two typewriters, paper, two desks in distant cities.
But first, we had those snapshots: a mountain, trees, a stream, rocks, you and Max posed in some village square. I was glad to have them to look at. No one wanted me at that dinner. I was Max’s brother-in-law’s cousin, a family obligation passing through Prague en route to her Budapest sister. Not powerful, not beautiful, a secretary from Berlin. The pictures gave me some privacy, and besides, it was interesting to secretly watch you secretly watching me. Who were you? I’d forgotten your name. It wasn’t a name I’d heard. You were young, unmarried, nice looking, though other girls might not have thought so.
So many of your letters, dear, were childlike demands for truth – where did I go, what color hat did I wear, how well did I chew my food – that it seems a little strange that so much lying should have gone on. Right off, I only pretended to be interested in those (to be honest) rather boring vacation snapshots. I didn’t want to be at that dinner, but I knew no one else in Prague, and the meal was free. I knew how they felt about me, too, so that when Max pointed out that my food was getting cold while I lingered over the photos, it gave me pleasure to say I found it disgusting when people were no better than pigs, obsessed with stuffing their faces.
It wasn’t exactly a sacrifice. The food at Max’s was awful, those quivering lumps of animal fat my Prague relations ate. But when I said that about eating, you nodded wildly, and then seemed surprised to feel your own head bobbing up and down.
The conversation kept drifting to some dreary literary business you and Max had to settle. There wasn’t much I could add until someone mentioned needing a manuscript typed. It was as if I had left my body, and was watching myself hold forth on the fascinating subject of my life as a typist! I said I no longer typed any more, the firm hired girls to do that, but I saw nothing demeaning about the job, in fact I liked to type. How innocent you and Max were, dear, assuming that a woman stupid enough to like typing would be too stupid to know what effect it might have on a writer to hear that a woman liked to type.
You smacked the table and stared at me. I’ll admit, I liked the attention. So when the conversation
drifted back to this or that magazine or publisher, I took advantage of a pause to remark how hard I was working, studying Hebrew in my spare time. You had mentioned Palestine, earlier in the evening.
Hebrew! How impressed you were! A braver, bolder spirit possessed you and made you declare that you not only wanted to go to Palestine, but you were planning to go this year! And then that bold angel or devil leapt from your head into mine, and made me say I would go with you. You asked if I meant it. I nodded. We shook hands on it, then and there, comradely and businesslike, with Max’s family watching. An agreement had been reached, a deal had been transacted.
You were never going to Palestine. I understood that, soon enough. And though at the moment I meant it, I wasn’t going, either. So let me return, for a moment, to the subject of lying.
I wasn’t studying Hebrew. I’d been thinking I might want to.
Dear, every couple tells little white lies that don’t seem false at the time. They say they love something they don’t really love, only because the beloved loves it, and for a moment they do love it, because the beloved does. That’s what is known as falling in love, though how could you have known that?
And now, my dear, a question that I can only ask you: What, do you think, would be the point of a man lying to his diary?
When your diaries were finally published, you had been gone for decades, but even so I felt a chill – a chill of conscience, you might say – at reading the intimate journals of a man to whom I’d once been engaged. Not once, as you well know, but twice. I am only human, as you were always so eager to point out, so perhaps I can be forgiven for admitting that I opened the volume directly to the date of our first meeting. As intimate as our courtship had been, I still feared that I was prying. And my punishment for this tiny sin? It was instant, dear, and cruel.
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