The Perfect Letter

by Chris Harrison

  “But we’ve all had those moments, haven’t we? Moments when we begin to doubt our gifts, when our dedication to our work starts to falter. No matter how successful, how famous, a writer always doubts his latest project. That’s why the world needs editors, of course.” She brought out the manila folder that held her morning’s presentation and opened it: pages of neat type crisscrossed with her scrawled notes and edits. Even when it was her own writing, Leigh couldn’t help editing and reediting it. She was always searching for the right word, the right phrase.

  “That’s why I’m here today, to talk to you about The Perfect Letter, about how to write a perfect letter of your own. Because that’s what a book is: a letter from a writer to a reader. It’s connection. Something that reaches across the divides of time and space and brings us closer together.”

  “The perfect letter,” she began, “starts with truth. With nakedness.” A smattering of embarrassed laughter. “Now, I don’t mean physical nakedness. I mean emotional nakedness. The kind of writing that bares the soul.” A sigh went up through the crowd. “How many of you used to regularly write letters, actual paper letters, to friends and family?” A number of hands went up around the room, mostly the older crowd. This is what Leigh had been counting on. “And how many of you have written or received a personal letter in the past year?” Across the room, only five or six hands went up—again the older crowd.

  Leigh nodded in acknowledgment. “Letters used to be our main form of communication and connection. In the days before the telephone, a letter might be your only tie to a friend or loved one who lived far away, and most people devoted many hours of their days to letter writing. A day without a letter was very boring indeed. Today it would be like a day without Internet access. Horrors, right?” Another round of laughter. “But a good letter was a work of art. The best letters had the special tone and inflection of the person writing them. The unique way of speaking that belonged only to that special person, so that when you received that letter, it was like the loved one was there, in the room with you. The letter writer had to rely on the written word to convey affection, alarm, dismay, fear, love, and even anger. To take black words on a white page and make them come alive. It was truly an art form—an art form we’ve lost.

  “People used to share letters, pass the best ones around to friends and family to read and admire, like books. Jane Austen was said to have written three thousand letters in her lifetime, most to her sister. Three thousand. Now I’m lucky to get a letter summoning me to jury duty.” More polite laughter. “The art of the letter is the art of finding your voice, of revealing the most hidden parts of yourself to another person, of bridging distance and time and even death to tell something that’s so important the person receiving it simply has to read it.

  “By now you know the story of The Perfect Letter, how the narrator, Marian, composes a series of love letters to her lover, Bernard, over a lifetime. How she’s married to a man she doesn’t love, how Bernard is a newspaper reporter jumping from war zone to war zone, in agony that they can never be together for more than a few hours or a few days. The passion in those letters is what drove me to publish the story. Marian’s voice comes across in every word, every inflection. Her pain. Her heartbreak.

  “Now, you might be thinking to yourself that’s all well and good—Richard Millikin is a Pulitzer Prize winner, a genius—but it’s a genius we can all find within ourselves, if we look hard enough.” Murmurs of pleasure at the thought.

  Leigh continued: “My mother taught me at an early age that a letter, well composed, is worth more than any phone call, more than any blurb or blog post. A thank-you card in the mail. A note to an elderly relative or a faraway loved one. The time and energy it takes to write a letter is never a wasted thing. It is perhaps the most personal gift the writer can give another person: insight into the writer’s mind and heart. Something to be read again and again. To be savored, ingested. Like good food and wine, a perfect letter isn’t something you gobble and forget. It’s a taste you get hungry for, start to crave.”

  Leigh took a sip of her Bloody Mary and continued. “Some of the earliest novels were disguised as letters. It was called the epistolary form, and it was used for some of the greatest narratives in literature: Pamela. Les Liaisons dangereuses. Wuthering Heights. Even Frankenstein was written as a series of letters, and wouldn’t the world be a poorer place without that book?

  “But now people speak in sound bites. Everything is glib, manufactured. Everything is over in a hurry. A hundred and forty characters and get out. But none of that makes for a good novel, does it?” She could see their heads shaking no; she had them.

  “Even now, in the twenty-first century, we yearn for connection with other people. For experiences we haven’t had. For a sense of delight and inspiration. For those human emotions—fear and love, anger and awe—and to taste them again and again like good meals we’ve eaten, like memories.

  “If you’ve read The Perfect Letter, you know how well Richard Millikin created just those feelings in his readers. Connection. Awe. Delight. It’s not something that can be rushed through. It’s not something you can divulge in a status update. It takes time, and patience. The author took thirty years to create those feelings, and I can tell you without a doubt that none of that effort was wasted.”

  Leigh took another gulp of her Bloody Mary. “I read hundreds of books a year. No—scratch that. Thousands. Thousands of books by aspiring writers, aspiring artists just like you. My office is piled with them, piled literally to the ceiling.” Noises of dismay and surprise now; aspiring writers were always surprised by the behemoth called the slush pile. “Most of the authors who come to me, quite frankly, spend a lot of time chasing the latest trend, whatever genre is fashionable that month, and most of them, quite frankly, don’t succeed for that very reason. The author has tried to give me something they think I want, instead of writing with their own voice, their own heart and soul.

  “What I look for when I sit down with a manuscript from a new author,” Leigh said, in the closing moments of the talk, when the room was hushed and drawing in its breath, “is a return to the intimate narrative. The revelation. The confession. In a word, the letter. Stories like Wuthering Heights, in which the characters tell you everything about their secret selves—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Confession, my friends, is good for literature, and good for the soul. And nothing less than the soul should be on the page. In every word. Every letter. The perfect letter.

  “Thank you.”

  Applause. The crowd was getting to its feet, conference goers clapping extravagantly, and Leigh was glad she’d made it through, glad no one could tell how tired she was, how ill she felt, ill at ease and heartsick. She’d done it—she’d made it through the speech. Now all she had to do was get through the rest of the week.

  Saundra was at her elbow, saying, “That was lovely. They were riveted; thank you so much,” and the crowd was surging toward her, with questions, with comments, with eager, smiling faces shining with hope, with questions, with praise. She smiled at all of them, took a breath. Congratulations, they were saying, that was inspiring.

  But she didn’t feel inspiring. She felt crowded and overwhelmed. She wanted to go home, to New York. She had a new imprint to set up, a marriage proposal. She wanted to be done with strangers, to go home to her apartment, to her work. Joseph would still be there, waiting for her. Of course I’ll marry you. Of course I love you. All she had to do was say the words.

  One of the audience members who approached her was a man of maybe sixty, in a crisp white shirt and dark blue jeans, so fresh Leigh would nearly have sworn they were ironed. He had a tanned, taut face with an amused look on it, his dark hair, gray at the temples, cropped so closely and so clean, and his bearing so straight and so polite, that she knew immediately he was military, probably the Marines, probably a lifer. “Miss Merrill,” he said, holding out his hand for her to shake, “thank you so much for that speech. I suspect it was jus
t the kick in the pants many of us needed.”

  “You’re welcome. Mister . . . ?”

  “James Stephens. Call me Jim, please. I have an appointment with you tomorrow about my book.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. Her docket of pitch meetings was so full she hadn’t even attempted to learn the names of all the writers she was meeting with—it was easier to put names to faces once she’d met them in person. She looked at Jim now with what she usually felt when talking to new writers: cautious optimism. “I’ll look forward to hearing about your project.”

  Jim’s face turned mischievous. “I’ll bet you say that to all the writers you meet. Tell the truth, how often do you fall in love with a book at one of these conferences?”

  Leigh laughed. So he’d been around the block a few times. “Not as often as I’d like,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean yours can’t be one of them. I hope it will.”

  “Aha, you’re being encouraging now. I’ll bet that’s another thing you say to all the writers you meet.”

  She leaned in and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Only the good-looking ones.”

  “And flattery, too. I’ll have to keep my eye on you.”

  He stuck out his hand again for her to shake, his whole body going ramrod straight once more. That military training never really goes away, does it? Leigh thought, and then reached out to take his hand, which was warm and firm in her own. “Nice to meet you, Miss Merrill,” he said.

  “Leigh,” she told him. He gave a little nod and melted back into the crowd. At least she had something to look forward to tomorrow—a half-hour pitch meeting with someone she actually liked.

  She was sipping her Bloody Mary and nodding while someone else asked her a question when out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed the figure of a man heading toward the door, a man in a faded brown Stetson with a rattlesnake band and a plain white T-shirt, his arms brown from the sun. She caught only a glimpse of his face under the brim of his hat, the dark blue eyes and the long straight nose, the tattoo of a bat—or was it a bird?—on the back of one arm. He was a little broader than she remembered, more filled out, and his hair was cut shorter, too, no longer curling along his shirt collar but shorn close to his head. It couldn’t be him, though. She was imagining things—conjuring him up out of thin air. Jake didn’t want to see her. He was still angry with her. He would have called to tell her he was getting out of prison. He wouldn’t just show up at her talk. Would he?

  For a moment she wavered on her feet, the room growing dim and then lightening again. Saundra caught her by the elbow. “Are you all right?” she asked, and Leigh had to say she was fine, she was tired, that’s all, only a little bit. “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Saundra asked in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Leigh nearly fell over again. What a question! “God, I hope not,” she said.

  She jumped down from the stage and ran toward the door, trying to catch him—spilling red Bloody Mary on her white dress, of course—but she couldn’t think about that now, she had to get to Jake before he left. As they saw her coming toward them the crowd surged in around her once more, people wanting to speak with her, ask her more questions. There were bodies in front of her, so many bodies she could barely move. A hundred people stood between herself and the door, a hundred people admiring and hopeful, and in a minute he’d become just another in the sea of faces, a sea tearing them apart once more. She stood in the doorway picking at her tomato-stained dress, but she couldn’t see Jake anywhere. He was gone.

  She woke up that afternoon from a sleep so deep that for a moment she forgot where she was. The light in her room was the sunshine of midday, all sharp lines and angles, and in the big, soft white bed piled with pillows Leigh had dreamed she was back in college, back in the dorms where she’d spent so much time alone. Some kind of dream of running across Harvard Commons, running from someone she couldn’t see but who clearly wanted to do her harm. She’d been screaming a name at the top of her voice, but she couldn’t remember which name it had been.

  When her phone alarm went off, she sat up, fumbling for the off switch, and looked around the room in confusion. Eventually it all came back to her—Texas, the conference. She should have something real to eat. Two bites of bagel and a few sips of Bloody Mary hadn’t been enough to calm her stomach, or to ease the panic she’d felt when she thought she’d seen Jake in the crowd. It was a mistake. A mirage, that’s all, caused by too much tequila and too little sleep. If he’d been there, he wouldn’t have left without talking to her, saying hello, something. There’d be no point.

  She stood up and went to the window, standing behind the gauzy white curtain in her bra and underwear, looking at the view of the valley outside her window. She was less than fifteen miles away from Burnside, the small town where she and Chloe and Jake had spent so much time together during high school—where they’d gone to football games and dances and bonfires, sneaking beers on Saturday nights, watching the fireworks over the river on the Fourth of July—but it felt like a million. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again. Because when you get there, the home you thought you knew is gone.

  She got dressed—a little more sensibly this time; the white dress was ruined—and went down the hill to the dining pavilion to grab a salad, sitting by herself at a picnic table and reading the paper while she ate. It felt good to have a few minutes to herself, a few minutes to think. No one bothered her; no one interrupted. Still, on her way back to her cottage she found herself looking around for a familiar face under a Stetson, the tattoo of a bat on the back of an arm, but it was no use. He’d left, or else he’d never been there in the first place.

  As she opened the door to her room after lunch, she saw that housekeeping had been there: the bed was made, the towels stacked, the sink wiped. And there were two bundles of papers sitting on the dresser, tied neatly with twine. Someone must have delivered them while she had been out for lunch—slipped in with the maid, probably. She bent over, her fingers fumbling at the bundle. Letters. Someone’s idea of a joke, after her talk that morning, surely.

  But when she turned them over she saw it was her own handwriting on the envelopes. Her own words. Someone had given her a bundle of her own letters.

  Not someone. Jake.

  Here was the stationery she’d used all those years ago, here was the green pen she still favored, her own elaborate, looping handwriting. These were her letters to him—all of them from the look of it, maybe one a week for the first three years he was in prison, then gradually tapering off as she’d grown more and more frustrated that he never answered.

  On top was the first letter she’d written Jake after he’d been arrested, when he was still in the Burnside County Jail awaiting trial. Farther down in the stack were the letters she’d sent after he was convicted and sent to federal prison in Huntsville to serve his sentence. The letters were all here, all kept in the order in which she’d sent them, some of them soft and yellowed with age now, some stained and smeared with fingerprints or fold marks. She’d thought she would never see them again, never again read what she’d written to Jake while they were apart. She’d always figured he must have thrown them away, or that maybe he’d never opened them in the first place. Clearly they’d been opened, and read—often. Clearly she’d been wrong.

  Her heart squeezed. If he’d read her letters, then why hadn’t he ever written her back?

  Four years she went without a word from him. Jake had never written back to her, never called, never came out to see her when she tried to visit. So when she was about to graduate from Harvard and move down to New York, she decided to stop writing him altogether. He didn’t care about her anymore, she was certain about that. She needed a clean break, a fresh start. She needed to move on. Wasn’t that what he’d told her, the last time they’d spoken, the last day of the trial when the jury foreman had read the verdict, that awful, awful verdict? He’d leaned over to speak to her, just her, in the crowded courtroom while the bailiffs were preparin
g to take him away. She’d leaned forward in her seat to hear him, and his mouth had moved against her ear. Forget about me. I’m no good for you. Move on with your life, Leigh, he’d said. And she had. He couldn’t fault her for taking his advice.

  She opened the last letter, though she still remembered very well what it said. Dear Jake, it read,

  I’ve tried not to be so angry with you, but it isn’t easy. I didn’t expect when you said I should move on with my life that it meant you would cut off all contact with me, that you would refuse to give me a single word from you, no sense of how you’re doing, what you’re doing, if you’re coping well, or badly, or at all. If you still think about me, if you still care. I’m writing into silence here—it’s like broadcasting letters into empty space, waiting for some echo to come back to me. It’s cold, and blank, and alone. I’ve given up everything except school and these letters. I promised you I’d wait for you, and for nearly four years I’ve kept that promise, shutting myself up, shutting out the world, waiting for the day you’d get out. I have hardly any friends here, hardly any life. I don’t do anything except go to class and write to you. I don’t have any family anymore either, no one but Chloe. I think I’ve been afraid to make new friends, to let anyone else into my heart, because it’s still full of you.

  I’m starting to think it would have been better if we’d never met at all.

  I know you must be angry with me, that you must blame me for what happened, but I don’t understand why you won’t answer my letters. Are you trying to torture me? To make me suffer?

  If you are, it’s working. I’m serving a sentence, too. Maybe it’s the wrong kind of sentence—maybe you don’t think it’s fair, and it’s not—but I can’t change that now. I can’t change the fact that you weren’t the one who really killed Dale Tucker, and I can’t change the fact that you decided to tell everyone you were, and that the jury decided to believe you. We both have to live with the decisions we’ve made.