Frances and Bernard Part 6

Call me when you get this letter.

Bernard June 1, 1960 Dear Claire- Please forgive me for not having replied to your past two letters.

Bernard and I have been engaging in what might in a court of law be called an affair. I have seen him many nights for many weeks. I have slept in his bed. Claire, this person has gotten me into his bed. In a nightgown, I a.s.sure you, but into his bed. He says that he is in love with me. I believe that he thinks he is. He may actually be. I have not told him that I am in love with him. Because I don't know what I think. He says he does not mind this. He knows me, he says, and he knows that I need to get my mind around it before I start making p.r.o.nouncements. He is right. But I am scared. I am scared even to describe to you what it has felt like, the enjoyment I take in being described as something beautiful. That's right: he calls me beautiful. I want to laugh myself sometimes when he says it.

I don't know if I love him, but I do know that I love being called beautiful by Bernard. This is a confusion. I feel shame. I think I now need to be easier on my sister. I could never tell Ann about this or ask her advice. It would be like asking an alcoholic how to get off the sauce.

I don't think that there's sin here. That's not it. Not even in forgetting-perhaps forgiving-that he says he does not believe. The sin will come because I sin against Bernard's hopes. Or if I get hopes and then he sins against them. For my part, I am determined to not have hopes. I would rather be sinned against than sinning. I could not bear to hurt him. I feel like I am the only one who can know the truth about what is happening between us, and it's up to me to be on the lookout for any signs of his tiring, or his illness. Do you remember that night after we gave that party and, because Ed was genially drunk, we insisted on his staying? And then you went to bed and he insisted, genially, on kissing me, and I found that I could not refuse him? I knew he was kissing me because he was upset about losing out on the fellows.h.i.+p and confused about Ellen's demands and wanted comfort and power the only way he was used to getting it away from the typewriter: from women. It was like giving blood to the Red Cross-I let him draw what he needed from me while I waited patiently, unmoved, for it to be over, and after he left I went to the kitchen and ate a doughnut.

There's some of that here.

I find I can't say much more than this about it to you. And you are my truest friend. I'm afraid I might offend you, or annoy you and burden you with the dramatic irony of my confessions. (I said one thing, but you, Claire, knew all along that it was just the opposite. This has already happened-I wrote you a letter a while back saying that I was not in love with him. And now look.) I am just as idiotic about human love as the nuns who raised me. A normal woman would know what to feel and why she was feeling what she felt, or she'd just say, To h.e.l.l with feelings, I'll take the money and run. I don't know how these things work, and this is making me panic some. There's a part of me that thinks Bernard just might get tired of me and, come September, when he has to start teaching, pack his desire for me away. You hear about these things. I know that he is not like that, that he has to have the girl remove herself or be forcibly removed from the girl, but I do worry that I am a mirage in the middle of some spree, and this makes me hesitant.

Please advise.

Love, Frances June 10, 1960 F- For G.o.d's sake! First: He's in love with you! Let's put that question to rest. I saw the way he looked at you the night we went out to celebrate your book. Like a dog that's spent one minute too long on a chain. He also looked high-and that was long before we all got hammered. He looked like an amusing bit of mess-a mess you made. Repeat after me: Bernard is in love with Frances.

Second: Do take enjoyment in being called beautiful. We'll all be wizened apples soon enough.

Third: Please try to enjoy his attentions. Look, you're absolutely right to worry about his mental health. I'm not saying that you should bury your head in the sand on that point. But maybe I am saying that you should let him ravish you. You've spent too long looking at men suspiciously. Which is not to say they don't deserve it. But you are in New York City and you are a young woman who has published her first of many books, and to great success! This isn't The Best of Everything-you're not going to end up dead in an Upper East Side stairwell because you didn't know how to take no for an answer. Bernard is in no way like Ed, whose lovemaking you had to supplement with a doughnut. Look at Bernard like a complimentary dish of baked Alaska brought to you by a fine and appreciative dining establishment-something you didn't know you wanted but now that it's being served up to you, you find it's impossible to resist. I don't really think you know how handsome he is. I'd feel lucky enough just getting to walk in someplace and make an entrance with that man, never mind have his hands on me. In the early days of a love affair, a lady should be carefree, even greedy. These days are the best part. They are what you will have to rely on to make you fall in love with your beloved again later, when the fire's gone out-and you're already wasting them on worry. Please don't sabotage this before it's begun. You're at the last stanza of Keats's ode-Cold Pastoral-when you should be lolling around at the first-Wild Ecstasy. You only think you know what you can't handle.

This is how these things work.

I don't know what will happen between you two. I don't even know yet what I think should happen between the two of you. I might write you another letter tomorrow telling you to stay away from him. But if we all ran away from what scared us-I'm not even sure how to end that sentence, though I think we could both come up with about a dozen answers that would send you running toward what scared you, as a point of human pride.

You are to write me anytime about this. You and I have only each other to rely on in these matters, not being normal women.

Love, Claire June 30, 1960 Dear Claire- Thank you. You not only gave me advice but made me laugh, and I needed that, maybe as much as I needed advice. What you say makes sense. I will try to, per William James, act as if-as if Bernard is true.

Love, Frances July 10, 1960 Dearest Frances- I wish you had come up here to Maine with me to visit Ted. He says h.e.l.lo. "That girl," he says, "is a serious girl. That girl will take a bad joke, look at you with pity, and then make a much better one out of it." I think he is jealous of me. As he should be. A man always wants his friends to be a little in love with his beloved too.

There is a large bed here, right under a window, framed in pine branches, summer's frost, from which I can see the sea, and in the mornings I think of what your bare arms, covered in freckles, would look like in the clear bright water. In the afternoons I wonder whether the salt water heated by the sun would stain your skin and leave behind a reticulation-an Irish articulation of Venusian sea foam. Your freckles: I want to down them like oysters, having my fill on a rock that no one can find.

I've been up here thinking of your b.r.e.a.s.t.s and masturbating like a weed of a boy who's been told it could get rid of his acne. Why did you have to be virtuous and stay in the city? I would have allowed you your own room. And there would be enough people here to make a buffer between you and my avarice. These are good solid people Ted has collected from law school, and there's also a screenwriter who fled Hollywood for newspaper reporting in Boston, and so when swimming is finished and debate about the election has waned, the screenwriter can serve up gossip about who is an alcoholic and who is secretly seeing whom. Which means there are no women here to pry into what you mean to me. Ted's wife is too busy organizing a DAR luncheon to care. (I wish I were joking.) Plus, there are real oysters here that we have been downing like shots in some vinegar.

I am tempted to write a whole letter full of things that will make you blush. I am tempted to write indecent things that will make you angry. But I have the soul of a Puritan and this prevents me from letting my desires billow out in a more baroque, black-velveted, Sade-ian manner. Correction, and how could I have made that mistake: A Puritan would be content to love an absence. I am not. I can say only this very artless, sweet-hearted thing, which is that you are velvet-skinned and freckled, and I will not be able to sleep tonight because of it.

Your Bernard July 11, 1960 My love.

I'm up and looking at the moon on the ocean and I'm thinking.

The air around you is sometimes wary and chill. I think you are waiting for me to become bored with you. I think you think I have gone out of my mind a little, maybe. Please believe that I love you.

There's nothing I can say to convince you. I know whatever I say will sound like ravings. Love letters are allowed to sound like ravings, but when you have a history of raving, that pa.s.s is revoked. I can imagine how I sounded in the letter I just sent you. But it's a pleasure for me to sing to you. And to not care that it may sound like Mozart-a ridiculous fecundity of notes, and a sweetness therein. I know you hate Mozart.

I have many things to sing of because I have a friend I can call beautiful. I have always thought you were beautiful-I was stunned by your blue eyes at lunch at the colony that day, your eyes widening, laughing, listening, suspicious, fixed on me and never wandering, and I remember thinking, What a pretty neck that girl has, her arms and neck have curves that portend more alluring curves below; how open and speckled her face is, like a day lily. And everyone else there desiccated by drink, ambition, and fear. I know, that's cruel. I'm a little desiccated by drink myself. You had the radiance of someone who knew her worth and would not squander it. You did not rob anyone to feel that worth, I could tell. You came by it at birth. Like I did. But by the end of that lunch I think your final aloofness-a consequence of knowing your worth-must have put all those thoughts in the deep freeze, or maybe it was something you said about Aquinas that had me filing you away as a cla.s.smate for catechism. Actually, maybe it was what you said about Mozart-that it sounded like d.a.m.n t.i.ttering, and you preferred Bach, because it was cavernous and blackened with the soot of burned incense. And there was Lorraine, like Salome, bracelets jangling out a signal that meant she was at loose ends, slippery, available, ephemeral. What did I hear when I sat next to you? A breeze, and then heavy silence. A breeze, and then heavy silence. A sound I could wind my watch by. Self-possession, both intellectual and spiritual, and a merriness tempered by a predilection to judge. I liked it. But after all my panting for ideal love, I was in the mood for a divertimento.

Having spent hours looking at you, hours touching you, I know the many ways in which you are beautiful. But you were my friend first-not an idea about art or Tolstoy or purity or blond hair-and I think you are my friend still. I may not believe in G.o.d but I do believe that Simone Weil is right when she commands us to see people as they are and not turn them into creatures of our imagination. I am trying to look at you with love but without illusions.

I love your suspicion-it means that your mind is always sharpening itself against the many lies of this world-but right now it is killing me. So I am going to ask you to write me a letter convincing me that you believe me. You do not have to tell me that you are in love with me, and you do not have to tell me how you feel about me. You have to write and tell me that you believe I love you.

Your Bernard July 13, 1960 Dear Miss Reardon- This is Ted. How is New York? Maine has been swell. Did you not want to come because you were not sure you could get yourself to a Ma.s.s in Maine? Have you not heard that there are French Canadians, and their attendant papistry, all over the place up here?

Let me begin by saying that Bernard has not put me up to this letter. I have never before intervened in a romance, but he's like a brother to me, and I like you a whole lot, and he said something the other day that made me think you needed some a.s.surance as to the truth of his feelings. I know what Bernard is like when he is not in his right mind. This is not that. I have seen him through many infatuations. This is not that. How do I know? He talked about those girls all the time. They weren't returning his affection, so he had to talk about them to make them real. He had to do all the work, and this made him surly. He picked fights with me, with people at bars. With you-no talk, surliness, no fights. He keeps to himself about it. He seems calm. It's like he knows being calm is what you need to see how deep, solid, true, and stupid his love for you is. I almost tripped over him coming back from the beach the other day-he was asleep on the lawn, and he had your book spread over his chest, one arm flung out to the side like a flag and he was the snoring, quaking pole. The look on his face was one of complete peace. I thought: He's far gone. Rest a.s.sured that I'm telling you the truth. We lawyers don't believe in perjury.

Affectionately, Ted July 15, 1960 Bernard- You're right-I don't know what to believe. I'm sorry that my suspicion is killing you. I know what I want to believe, which is that you are not in the grip of an infatuation. I want to believe that. Very much. I will try to stop giving you a chill and wary air.

The Hudson River says h.e.l.lo. It doesn't know what you see in New England's bl.u.s.tering surf. It thinks a body of water earns its majesty by knowing how to keep its own counsel. That said, it is very secretly envious of something so effusive.

Love, Frances July 15, 1960 Dear Ted- Thank you for writing what you did. I appreciate that you were looking out for your friend. I wrote Bernard the day I received your letter.

I'd send a peach pie through the mail but I trust only Jersey peaches and it looks like they don't let them into the city.

I hope to see you again soon.

Affection returned, Frances July 20, 1960 Frances- My love. You are sly, you are charming, you are never going to do what I ask in the way I want you to, but that is charming too, and I will see you in four days, which is far too far away.

Bernard July 30, 1960 Dear Claire- Congratulations on getting that job at the Tribune! I'm sure after you've spent a year on their women's pages they'll have you trailing the cops on the South Side. That boss of yours sounds hilarious. Like a big camellia with the teeth of a Venus flytrap in a vase of gabardine and with a bosom of granite. I think I just wrote a Pica.s.so painting. "Your copy or your hide!" That would get me writing. After I stopped laughing. And she plays tennis too with that bosom? This confirms my idea about management: The compet.i.tively sporty excel. They like games; they have stamina. And you need stamina to put up with the games played by those above and below you. You played tennis too-you'll be fine. But I like to swim.

You ask me how I am feeling. I find that it is very, very hard for me to put into words what I am feeling. I know you will forgive me for being Frances. I hope Bernard forgives me for being Frances. He seems to not mind that I do not articulate my affection very often. He knows, for example, to kiss me out on the street and not in a roomful of people. He shows so much affection to me, I think he sometimes does not notice my inability to show it. Sometimes. "Frances," he said the other night after dinner, "often I think the only real evidence of your love is the amount you cook for me." He was right. I make him bread. I make him cakes. Pies. And it's summer. I am behaving the way I behave at home: standoffishly, and pies to offset the standoffishness. The bread and pies are beads on a rosary, paces to go through because I can't think how I might love of my own accord.

I am hoping that G.o.d will forgive me for being Frances.

I will try to put two feelings into words. First, when I am walking down the street to meet him and I know that I have come into his view, and his eyes, as I approach, are giving off sparks of both hunger and affection, the two fighting it out like cats in his pupils, I feel that I would do anything to have that look cast upon me for the rest of my days. I feel that I am known more intimately than perhaps G.o.d knows me. And now I have blasphemed, so please burn this letter.

Second, do you remember when we sat in that booth at McKellan's with Bob and Roger, and Roger looked at me and said: "I bet when you finally find someone who sends you, he'll be Mrs. O'Leary's cow and you'll be Chicago"? For many years now, as you know, my official position on this a.s.sessment was to be offended. Who did Roger presume to be, making p.r.o.nouncements on my womanhood-and without the excuse of flirtation, because he was courting you? Well, now I know what Roger was on about. I thank him for his prescience. Otherwise I might have mistakenly taken myself to the doctor.

Claire! I can't even say what I mean to you.

Here is one more feeling. Sometimes I look at him, searching for signs that his illness is about to erupt. Sometimes I think I see it about his face. About his apartment. Dishevelment; neglect; impa.s.sioned responses to small daily events, from a piece in the Times that seems to be vaguely conceding to the right wing, to whatever I am up to in the kitchen, to a student paper filled with exceptional insights. A mountain of dishes in the sink, cigarette b.u.t.ts floating in a pan. His dress s.h.i.+rts stuffed in the linen closet with worn bath towels-I am surprised he even has bath towels and does not dry himself off with newspaper. (He says Ted's mother gave them to him out of alarm.) No shower curtain. Papers all over his bed; when he's not sleeping in it, his bed is a credenza, with a dozen different mugs and whiskey tumblers beside it. He cut his foot a couple of weeks ago because he was hung over and forgot to steer clear of them when getting out of bed. He will call four separate times at work; I can't answer it the first three times, and the fourth time, when I pick up, he'll say: "Why didn't you pick up before? You're Florence Nightingale, you're supposed to pick up. I could be bleeding on a field in Turkey." We laugh, it's funny, but the fact remains: He has called four times in a row in the span of five minutes. "I wanted to hear your voice in the middle of this day," he'll say. Or: "What's the soonest possible hour we can meet this evening?" Or: "If I had to a.s.sign a poem from Hopkins today, what poem should it be?" It makes me want to hide from him sometimes in embarra.s.sment-I have maybe a tenth of his energy, and I often wonder when he will realize that he's in love with a slug. Whirlwinds can't love slugs. They need other whirlwinds, don't they? Or mountains.

When I was about six or seven I was convinced that my father would pa.s.s away suddenly because my mother needed him with her in what I guess I was calling heaven-I would wake up thinking, Today might be the day, and then we will have to go live with our aunts. It was a pain I woke up with many mornings. I had forgotten that I used to feel this way, but I'm feeling something like this now. I wake up every morning with an obscure worry that eventually takes the shape of this sentence: Is today the day that Bernard will disappear? Each morning I wake to think the view I see outside is a sign of storm: leaves flipped over to show their dull underside, shoved there by a wind tugging thunder and rain behind it. And then I dress and find myself on the street, in the suns.h.i.+ne, and I make my way to the subway, and the sun and the crowds soak up my worry.

I wrote this at work. I should now get back to writing my story.

My love to you- Frances August 15, 1960 Ted- I envy you, still up in Maine. I'm writing you from the colony. Which is perfectly fine, but no Ted, no ocean, no lobster. I called them up last week to see if they could give me two weeks here, because I want to get a head start on this next book before I begin teaching, and they said, "Be our guest." So I'll be spending the last two weeks of the summer here, and then back to New York, and then cla.s.ses begin.

I wish you had come with me to Philadelphia to visit Frances's people (that is what she calls them, her people) because I think they are like your people-boisterous, welcoming-only without money. I would have liked to see you tell these people they don't deserve pensions.

Just how did I get there? It began this way. "My aunts want to meet you," said Frances a few weeks ago. "I have had a phone call. They are commanding me to bring you home, because my father is too gentlemanly to make the request. Are you ready to be smothered by the loudest hospitality north of the Mason-Dixon?"

She wasn't kidding. The women, her mother's sisters and their daughters, all laugh in the same key-they throw their heads back and rasp out nine notes in rapid succession, nine eighth notes spilling down the scale. And they laugh quite a lot. They turn ruddy and have to fan themselves with their hands while wheezing out the last bits of laughter. They like to make one another laugh, but no one steps over anyone's joke to do so. Frances does not laugh, but she likes to make them laugh. I saw her sitting back, watching, eyes dancing, waiting for her chance to nonchalantly offer up the one thing that would set everyone off again, waiting in a supreme confidence that what she was about to say would of course set everyone off again-a polo player swooping in on his horse at the last moment to give the ball the winning crack.

Her father laughs too, but he laughs mostly with his eyes-I think he has given this to Frances. Where her aunts will use jokes to tell stories, he'll tease you. Though he won't tease Ann, her sister, I've noticed, who is quite beautiful. Long, strawberry-blond hair, big blue eyes like Frances's, slender, though plump in the necessary places, limbs rounded and smooth-comely fruit in a basket. When they stand side by side, in silence, you cannot see where they are sisters, their coloring and dress are so different. One is as resplendent (pink-and-white shoes intricately tooled, cl.u.s.ters of pearls in the ears, that strawberry-blond hair as proudly displayed and arranged about the shoulders as an ermine cape, all of it suggesting a child's delight in h.o.a.rding treasure) as the other is pin-tucked (chaste fabrics suitable for nightgowns; a face authoritative but shy, sheltering itself under reddish-brown bangs; feet shod in ladylike, unremarkable shoes; no jewelry but her eyes). It's like Helen of Troy next to Joan of Arc. Ann's prettiness makes her a cartoon-it makes Frances disappear for a little while-she is so emphatically a confection that it turns her into a cipher, and she may be complicit in that. She has a sense of humor, but that is overtaken by a sense of propriety. "Daddy!" Ann said in a hissing whisper like a switch on his behind when her father said, upon meeting me: "Where did you think you were going to hide him, Frances? He's as tall as Lincoln." And Frances standing next to me, smiling, smiling, smiling-a playwright standing in the wings, thrilled by her characters complying for the hundredth time.

But then when she and Ann start talking and laughing together, there's an eerily identical duet of inflections and motions that wake their faces up into resemblance. "You and your sister may be more alike than you admit," I said to her later. "Oh," she said. "That part's no different from being in a family band-we can harmonize at the drop of a hat, but I will go to my grave shaking my head over her."

A victory, one of several that day: A girl of about five, a daughter of one of the cousins, whose names I could not keep straight, asked if she could touch my hair. I lifted her up and said, "Go ahead," which gave her great pleasure. And myself, I have to admit. I can understand why certain dogs let certain children dress them in baby bonnets. She stared at me, mesmerized, grabbing two fistfuls of brush where my horns might be, scrunching her nose up to denote how serious and scientific this application of force was. Those blue, blue eyes again! I was starting to think that I had stumbled into a Celtic folktale that was going to end with one of these blue-eyed sorceresses turning me into a tree. "Kitty!" a woman said, calling out from across the crowded living room. That row home was so packed and electric with people of various ages, voices, and purposes-talking, cooking, drink-fixing, nut-eating, sport-betting, child-minding, dog-petting-it was like Was.h.i.+ngton Square on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. "Stop messing with Frances's friend's hair! You'll hurt him!" Frances came and took the girl off me. "Come on, Kitty," she said. "That man has nice hair," said Kitty as she sailed down to the ground. "Yes, he does," I heard Frances say, her back to me, before giving Kitty a kiss and sending her off into the crowd. I gloated to myself. Now if I could only get her to say those things to my face.

While sitting on the couch next to Ann, discussing baseball, thinking that I'd shown myself to be civilized enough, I asked: "Am I the only gentleman Frances has ever brought home?" Ann hesitated, and then, I believe, flat-out lied to protect her sister. "Oh, no," she said. "You're probably the third or fourth. Yes, probably the third or fourth. But you're certainly the most fun." I gave her a look that was intended to quash undue flattery. "You are!" she said. The coquette I'd heard about emerged. "What, you can't take a compliment? A big man like you?" (I know that our taste in women often diverges, but neither of us would get in a fight over Ann. The fire she has is sheer petulance and wounded vanity, I think, not true pa.s.sion.) I dared not tell Frances that I couldn't keep her aunts' names straight either. "So Frances tells us that you teach," said Aunt Helen. Or Mary, or Peggy. All nervous with purpose-paying you the utmost attention but behind their eyes troubled by a sheet somewhere that needs hospital corners. Three notes chiming together in a chord. "How do you like it?" they asked. "And you're from Boston? Why, where's your accent? What do your parents do? How do you like our Philadelphia? Frances tells us you're an only child. Have we split your eardrums yet? We bought a bottle of aspirin just for you, it's in the medicine cabinet. Frances tells us you like roast beef, so we had Mary make her special one. Frances must not be cooking for you, otherwise you'd be green around the gills." (Had she even told them about my hospitalization? She must not have, I concluded. When I asked her about it later, she neither confirmed nor denied and instead said, "That's none of their business.") Then, a joke after dinner. One of the aunts brought out a towering flaked coconut cake, set it down without ceremony, said, "Now, who wants some dessert?" and began serving. Then another aunt brought out a rectangular slab of what looked like spiced meat, gray in the main but crisped brown at the edges, set it down next to the cake, and started to carve it up. "Bernard," this other aunt said, putting a slice of this on my plate, "you're having sc.r.a.pple for dessert. Frances said you'd love it." Laughter all round. "Oh, give him the cake," someone said. I refused it. Then a husband of one of her cousins, who I believe might have been a fireman, ate some along with me in sympathy. I made a big show of enjoying it. d.a.m.ned if I had two slices. It's actually quite good. As I put the last forkful of it in my mouth, Frances gave me the most caressing look she's ever given me.

Her father drove us to the train station after dinner. While Frances was off buying a paper, he turned to me. I saw sympathy, intelligence, and curiosity in his face, as well as, I am fairly sure, approval. He's a head shorter than me but he's broad-shouldered and confident, brusque and pointed in his movements but generous and fluid in his speech, and I can sense the absolute goodness in him. He would have been a priest, I think, had he perhaps had the intractability of his daughter. Whatever makes Frances indefatigable, she must get it from him. Whatever makes her intractable must come from her mother and the aunts. "That cake is off-limits!" I'd heard one bellow from the kitchen. "I'm a.s.suming you're attracted to the idea of an early death?" I have no doubt she was talking to a man.

"I think it's nice, you two," her father said at the train station. "I think it's nice, two writers. I bet you keep each other good company." "We do," I said.

Frances returned. "Bring her home again soon," he said. "We miss her dearly."

I watched her embrace her father-she shut her eyes, the better to commit this moment to memory, I suppose, should it turn out to be their last, and hung on to him for a few long seconds in a way that made me think she'd throw herself in front of a train for him. I was, of course, jealous. I was also jealous because she had a father who was not afraid of what he did not understand and who would find a way to talk to you about it. I don't think you'll be surprised when I tell you how difficult it was to be around people who made a point to weave themselves together because they had poured out their blood among one another. They may be annoyed with each other, but they do not hate each other. They understand that annoyance is a fair price to pay for the strange protective love of family. I do not often covet what other people have, but I did find myself wis.h.i.+ng that I had known something like it.

I saw also that Frances is perfectly suited to family life, that she swims about her people like a fish in their waters, that she is happy when she bathes in their love and their noise, and I think she knows this about herself, that she could quite easily spend her days cooking, cleaning, and corralling children, that she could quite easily be charmed into a life in which she gave order to other lives, not words, and I think this is why she is so strict with herself on the point of marriage. She does not know anyone who has written and mothered, so she thinks it impossible. (I actually don't either-all the women writers I know are libertines.) But she needs to be in control, and she has chosen to be in control of the people in her stories.

We stood on the platform. "Thank you very, very much," she said. I got another caressing look. No sign of intractable Frances. Was it the exhaustion of having successfully fought her way through one of the most difficult maneuvers on the battlefield of romance-the visit home? It's one thing to be able to undo Frances in bed-and I have compromised her there, in telling you that, that's what kind of hold she has on me, that I give a d.a.m.n about discretion-but it's wholly another for her to, fully clothed and upright, make her preference for me known. Then another caressing look. I am sure she was trying to tell me that she loved me. I didn't know what to say, which alarmed me. I was exhilarated, but could not speak.

She said hardly anything on the train. But she took my hand, and then fell asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. I wanted to propose to her.

I love her. But no sign from her that she's as in love with me. If she were another sort of woman I might suspect her of having someone else in the wings. And I'm not even competing with G.o.d for her hand! That I might find acceptable.

Apologies for the length. But that's what you get for not living near me at this crucial juncture. And I had to keep writing because there's a girl from Texas here who's been giving me the eye over the past hour as I sit in the dining hall, and as long as I'm writing she won't come and talk to me. I'm trying to be worthy of my impossible love.

Love, Bernard August 15, 1960 Dear Claire- This will be a very short letter because I have to polish a story before Monday. But I wanted to tell you that Bernard paid a visit to Philadelphia last week, and he was a very big hit. The rotter.

My father, after dinner, took me out back to tell me that if he died, he would not mind leaving me in Bernard's hands. It was a little unnerving. I wanted to ask him if perhaps this was an excess of feeling due to the fact that I'd never brought anyone home before, but I think he really meant it. My aunts exclaimed over him as if he were Errol Flynn. "Jeez, Frances," said Ann. "You sure do know how to make up for lost time." (I have to admit some glee in making Ann a little jealous.) A small cousin of mine demanded to run her toddler hands through his hair, and he let her, grinning like an idiot all the while. That girl was delighted to be in his arms, and she made a big, unselfconscious fuss of showing it.

I was a little chastised. No man should give of himself the way he does to me and receive mere acquiescence in return. It was a lesson, seeing him bear up so good-naturedly under all that noise and fuss and behave as a perfect gentleman in the middle of the circus I come from. What kind of Christian am I if I can't make my appreciation known? What kind of woman?

I find I do miss him now that he's away. I'm a little bored with all the little things I do to plump my nest-do the laundry, clean the kitchen, organize my drafts, flip through cookbooks, draw up a budget, go for walks. It's all starting to seem like an old maid's cross-st.i.tching.

My love to Bill as he girds up for another tour of duty with Seneca et al.

Love, Frances August 21, 1960 Bernard- With you away it's like the Empire State Building's gone out. Come home sooner than soon.

xx Frances August 27, 1960 My love- I have your postcard resting on the windowsill in front of my desk. I read it several times a day. I slip it in whatever book I am reading by the pond to use as a bookmark and read it a few more times in the sun. Even though I have removed myself from you I am still distracted. But I wrote twenty solid lines today and know that there will be probably a hundred more before I leave, so here I am, drinking whiskey and luxuriating in the thought of you.

What I miss most of all is your face, flushed and happy, after you come. Eyes bright like a girl with a secret she can't bear to keep.

I want you flushed and happy, and then I want you on my lap afterward, naked, warmed by the sun coming through the window, both of us coming back into our speaking selves, my kiss on your shoulders as you talk of some story you saw transpire on the subway that morning.

I want you on the street in a dress an hour later, quiet, sated, taking my hand as we walk to dinner. You in your white lace dress, your hair a little damp around your cheeks, still sweaty from the bedroom and sweaty from the heat, something succulent but starched. I will wear my wrinkled khakis and a short-sleeved work s.h.i.+rt that I have refused to let you iron, and I will lead us through the carnival that is the Village, knowing that we may appear as chaste as the maiden and her unicorn but smiling in triumph because you are my secret I can't bear to keep, my beatific girl, all mine to kiss wherever and however I please.

What a perfect summer we had.

When I come back to New York, I will not let you out of my sight.

All my love, Bernard September 23, 1960 Ted- Throw this away if you can't be bothered. I wanted these thoughts and deeds on paper so I could see exactly what kind of a.s.s I have been. Then I wanted to exorcise the whole thing by destroying the evidence, but burning it seemed histrionic, and throwing it out not extermination enough-so I decided to mail it to you. You will have something to say about this, and I know what it will be, so don't trouble yourself with a reply.

I said a cruel thing to Frances. We were, of course, at a party-a party thrown by Margaret, Russell's wife. Frances does not like Margaret much-I think she thinks Margaret is an empty chinoiserie vase of a woman, too brittle and gilded for her tastes-and I think she was made diffident by having to be there.

Now, I must first blame Margaret before blaming Frances. No: I must first blame someone's wife, I don't know whose, before blaming Margaret. If this wife had not spoken, Frances might not have been moved to say what she did. I left Frances to go find us some drinks, and when I returned this wife was saying: "That's nice, a novel. I had one too, before I got married."

Said Frances: "A novel that vanishes probably should not have existed in the first place."

I knew then that the evening was officially over. I excused us by saying we had to go say h.e.l.lo to the hostess. Frances, insulted by the wife's insinuation that she was on the road to n.o.ble failure, refused to say a word to anyone who stopped to talk to us. Which angered me more and more as the night went on. I felt it was a refusal to think of how she might reflect on me, and therefore a refusal to think of herself as belonging to me. Comes along Margaret, who ignores Frances to ask if I've seen Jim Schultz lately, which I knew she was asking because she'd been sleeping with him but now he wasn't returning her calls. But Frances cannot stand being snubbed. She thinks there's a verse in Matthew with Christ forbidding it, right after he suffers the little children to come unto him.

I elegantly hedged-I hedged to make it appear as if I had seen him, when really I hadn't, just to torture Margaret. Then Frances finally spoke. "Anyone who sleeps with Jim Schultz is buying a raffle ticket to win the clap."

Margaret stiffened as if shot from behind. "Everybody out!" she shouted. "Out! Out! Thank you for coming!" Thank G.o.d the place had been loud enough that no one could detect where the offense had come from. She left us standing where we were and began shoving people in the direction of her bedroom, where the coats were. She pulled two people up from the chairs they were chatting on. A gla.s.s shattered. "No, I'm not kidding! Get your things! It is finished! Thank you for coming!"

"Whoops," said Frances as we followed the crowd to the back of the apartment to get our coats. I have to admit that even though I was angry with Frances, the scene was amusing.

Frances waited until we got a few blocks away from the dispersed partiers, until we were standing at the corner of Lexington and Sixty-Third, to speak.

"Why didn't you tell me they were sleeping together?" she said. Her voice was soggy with remorse.

"That was very row home stoop of you," I said. I wanted to punish her for having made an insufficient show of wanting to belong to me.

She grabbed my arm and turned me around to face her, stumbling a little from the effort of trying to force me, losing a shoe in the process. The city, hanging blackly cavernous about her, and this man who loves her turning on her. She bent down, picked up the shoe, and threw it at me. Then she hailed a cab. "We don't even have a stoop, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said, and got in. I fell in love with her again.

The next day, at the end of the day, I showed up at her office with the shoe in a paper bag and a red scratch down my right temple where the heel had sc.r.a.ped me. I stood in her doorway, manifesting the air of a penitent thief. She was not manifesting the air of clemency. Without saying a word, she got up from her desk and walked out the door, her skirts brus.h.i.+ng against my knees. After five minutes she came back, grabbed her purse and coat, shut the lights off with me standing there, and left. I followed her out to the elevators.

She would not look at me once we were down on the street. "I know you didn't mean what you said," she said as we walked. "You couldn't possibly." And then: "If you are excited by me throwing a shoe at you, please know that it does not excite me."

She was lying about that.

The subject was dropped.

I am finding it hard not to insult her in other ways.

October 10, 1960 Dear Claire- Bernard and I have had what I suppose you would call a fight. Well, we have had two fights. I will not tell you about the one that ended in me throwing my shoe at him.

We were at a party, two nights ago. It was crowded, and dark, and loud, and when he got tired of shouting over the crowd, Bernard started to kiss me. I stopped him. I didn't want him to kiss me in public. Bernard argued that no one would care what we did; I argued that he should care about what I thought. We argued some more-I think he may have told me to grow up. I have been feeling that he is trying to make a request of me in these two fights but he will not name it. I walked away from him in the middle of something he was saying. I put my coat on and walked out on the street and got a cab. The second time in a month. I heard him call my name. That is one of the things I love about New York. If you wish to get away from an unpleasant situation immediately, there are cabs everywhere, ready to make you feel, at least for five minutes, that you are having the last word, by way of the very satisfying sound of a slammed car door.

Bernard followed me home. He must have taken a cab too, because he got there shortly after I arrived. I was sitting on the couch reading and waiting for the kettle blow for tea when I heard a whistle from down on the street. About thirty seconds pa.s.sed. Then I heard what I thought was a coin thrown at the window. And then another. And another. I opened the window. Bernard was standing there, hands in his pockets. He was wearing the face of a child looking up at a clock that he fears might tell him that he has missed his train. "Will you let me up?" he said. I saw the child he must have been, the child of a woman who let her mother-in-law name her baby because he was a boy, not a girl, and she was too disappointed by that fact to care what he was called. I did as he asked.

I closed the door behind us. I didn't say anything. We looked at each other. "Why don't you love me?" he said.

"That's not it," I said. Silence. "Bernard, you know I did not grow up being petted," I said.

"Neither did I, Frances," he said. "Do you think G.o.d wants you to love this way?"

"No," I said.

"No one will love you like I love you," he said. What do you do when you know this is true? I'm a thirteen-year-old girl with vinegar where my blood should be. He came toward me and I found my back against the front door. He moved in closer and took hold of my arms. I thought he might shake me but he stood very still. He tightened his grip. "Marry me," he said. I couldn't believe that he didn't see that proposing to a woman when her back was literally against a wall was not a harbinger of a happy union. "No!" I said. I sounded shrill, like a patient panicked by the approach of a needle. I'm not proud of that. As if I thought raising my voice would wake him up and stop him from making this mistake. He pushed me up against the door. "Let me go," I said. He did. "I think you should go," I said, and he did.

I've called him at work and at home, but I haven't heard from him. I went to his apartment last night and rang the buzzer and no answer. I can't sleep.

Frances October 27, 1960 Dear Claire- I am writing this to you from Payne Whitney, where Bernard is now staying, while I wait for visiting hours to begin. I thought about calling you but I don't trust myself to speak coherently about this.

I stayed late at work to write two Thursdays ago and when I came home-this was about eight o'clock-I found Bernard lying on his back on the street, asleep, mouth open, outside the door to my building. I had not seen him since we'd fought. (The college hadn't seen him either, I have since learned.) I walked upstairs, called the police, and asked if they would take him home. I told them they would need a few extra men because he would probably put up a fight. Then I went back down the stairs and sat on the street beside him. He smelled like a dog who'd been drinking from a mud puddle made of whiskey and ashes. I looked at his hair. I wanted to finger some tangles loose but I thought that if stirred, he'd become violent. So I sat there listening to him breathe, praying he'd stay asleep until the police arrived. Mostly we were ignored, but one woman walking by, loaded down with shopping bags and wearing the kind of shoes my grandmother used to wear, frowned right at me and muttered, "d.a.m.n beatniks." When the police came, I stood up and backed away and they got to work. "Where is she?" Bernard said. "Where is she?" "She doesn't want to talk to you, sir," one officer said, and I wish he hadn't. He was very young, short, with jug ears and black hair slicked back with a heavy hand. I bet he had sisters who used to beat him up. They started to try to pack Bernard into the car, and, as expected, he sent someone to the ground with a punch, and then the officers clotted around him like blood in a wound, cuffing his hands behind him and wrestling him to the pavement, chest down, an officer's foot on his back. I thought of Saint George with his foot on the dragon. I noticed people gathering behind the police to watch. Then Bernard saw me. He gave me a look of pure hatred. "I am the vine," he said, "and you are my bride. You think I am the serpent but I am the vine, and because you are lukewarm I will spit you out of my mouth."