XII. Winter Letters

XII. Winter Letters

Two  things happened with the coming of the new year: one, I began to feel desperately lonely (I had held off these feelings by act of will, holding them in check while I waited for Christmas; when Christmas didn't come, the hole in me, the absence of Tina, began to gape wider and wider, and every woman, every Hollywood kiss, reminded me how much I missed her), and, two, we began to write letters.  Her letters were full of recriminations, accusing me, blaming me for her pain.  Somehow the pain had caught up with her, and now that was all she could feel about anything including and especially me.  My letters waffled back and forth between defending myself, accusing her, and falling at her feet in abject humility, pleading with her to forgive me and to love me, she was the love of my life, I could not live without her etc., etc. 

The letters provide an interesting timeline  tracing the stages of my personal growth through this period. Tina kept most of the letters, and when I went back through them in preparation for writing this chapter, I was struck, at the beginning of the correspondence, by how clueless I was, how cold and unsympathetic I was, and how totally teetering on the brink of disaster I was without even knowing it.  Tina often accused me, on the phone, of acting like this whole San Jose disaster was all about me; and I can see from the egocentric tone of many of those first letters how easy it would be to conclude that.  

However, the letters did get better, and several times I did something I had never done before--I wrote just to her; that is to say, I wrote several poems which I have would normally have kept copies of in my folder of poetry,  for posterity, for my biographers, but didn't.  I was really making an effort to show her that I had changed, and that our marriage could be a whole new beginning for both of us. Here is one I found today: 

My lady of the night, 

My Lady of the inconstant moon, today

You broke my heart again

On your desolate white peaks,

Your alluring desert,

Your Arctic, frigid, knife-sharp jags, 

Your deep, inconsolable shadows. 

 My dearest hate, while it is yet mine,

 Your despairs echo doom in my yet-hoping ears,

 Like songs of death remembered among the Paw-nee,

 As the last gasp at life's relentless disappointments. 

 It has been so long since your voice has sung

 A tender phrase, I doubt it will ever sing again;

 Your doubt is not a certainty, as your dark 

 Gives no guarantee of permanent absence. 

 Thus I live on a thread of memory—of hope

 That what once was between us is still there,

 To be inflamed by my own power to enflame; 

 I whisper a prayer each night in the secret 

 Affections of our communal angels,

 That you will remember, and come, 

 And give us back to ourselves, 

 Before I starve in desolation,

 Before I crack into irreparable moonlit shards. 

I wrote a lot of self-pitying stuff like that. I was attempting to echo the tradition of the Renaissance love sonnet, expressing my eternal love for the cold Diana, etc. But it was not just artificial manipulation of archaic idiomatic references, it was an attempt to show her, once again, that I loved her in the high old way. Here is another one:

                                          Among School Children

The title refers to the Yeats poem about the 72-year-old smiling public man who wanders through a catholic school looking at the little girls, and feeling the passion of youth surge through him like a storm. 

I have that feeling every time of think of her. 

I am amazed at the old man stuff I have begun to experience--the gray beard 

(bleaching to white, soon, bright glistening white)

the creaky joints, the gravel in the voice that tells of rage in the dark and weeping in the bright white sun.

The title is a joke for those who know me, quietly undressing high school girls in my mind, a lark, a spree,

a lost pedophiliac fantasy 

that becomes more absurd with each passage 

of nubile cello students in the hall and flowing flautist gauze,

swaying onstage to Debussy, or Botticelli, or even me, 

lost dreamer of blue herons and honeymoon rocks.

The title is nostalgia for the days when romance wasn’t anachronism dressed in black turtle pleats,

and there was hope on Redondo Beach Pier

that the girl I love

would float out of Gershwin into my arms.

Yes, she came that day, late, the first of many times,

and kissed me on the promontory of my desire as if she had meant to meet me there since before she was born.

Oh how the violins soared, and the ocean gathered its drums

into a crash of tides!

I wept in my heart for the beauty, the wild ravenous ecstacy

of it; and we kissed and forgot ourselves in each other, and

lay together in sweetest sympathy, a lilting madrigal,

protected from stop light and siren,

by something simple, elegant, and so comfortable in its  

abandon.

We loved in the high old way,

the way of Yeats, and even Joyce, even Donne,

even Homer.

But those great gates could not hold back the crush of time,

and yea the ocean gave up its ghosts in that moment

of all moments, our beginning and our ending.

The title suggests a certain literary self-consciousness, like the first kiss always must include in its arsenal of suggestions.

We all remember what tells our story best, and my story rocked with dizzy heights of poetry and song, and never touched the sullied earth all round that altitudinous orbit--

perigee of passion, destiny’s compass,

flying in an arc toward the moment 25 years later

when it all became dust,

dross,

parody,

denouement.

And that is the greatest comedy of all, 

the grin on the skull,

That I love her still, through strife and struggle, I love her still

to the same notes of violin and harp, and tympano, too,

and I still want her to kiss me in that high old way,

and forget the future that had to come, 

as tide follows eddy,

and feel my passion as firm and resolute

as a youth, emblazoned on a brass plaque,

a song written in stone.

I've always been amazed  at how young I feel. The challenge of graduate school had made me feel young, starting over in Idaho had made me feel young, and now my renewed passion for my wife made me feel like a college kid again.  Sometimes, I used to think back to  those days, and remember how madly in love I was, constantly; and I would secretly grieve for the old days of high passion, when life was intense, and really, really alive.  I guess it's like what they say about adventures--an adventure is something that when you’re having one you wish you weren't.  The pain of this whole experience  was excruciating beyond all foreseeable possibility, and yet when I stood back and watched the romance of it,  I saw that I was still young, still living an artist's fantasy, carved on a Grecian urn.

  

Tina, on the other hand, was overwhelmed by the reality that had finally caught up with her—her hurts, (all inflicted by me), her frustrations, her resentments, all of which she had been systematically repressing over the past five years. In her letters she explained that she had not been clear about how seriously damaged she had been by living with me, because, of all things, she couldn't bring herself to kick a man when he was down; I had been so distraught  and destroyed over the way graduate school had worked out, that she couldn't bring herself to criticize me and make things worse when I was already in so much pain.  She had, saint-like, taken my pain upon herself, and now, that I was doing better she was still feeling it and worse. 

I have not denied in these confessions that I have done many things to feel guilty about, many things I wish to God I had not done, many things I wish I had done.  I realize that a certain point a sinner cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for sin.  But let's face it, the biggest part of her pain was that she was couldn’t find a way to justify loving Dan Tucker and dumping me. She had used this pain to justify seducing him, she had used this pain to justify, in Dan’s mind, his acts of adultery, and now she was using this pain to keep herself from imagining a life with me, the life in Alaska we had always dreamed of together. I do not want to be too slick here, because looking back on my old self is like looking back at a bad actor doing Hamlet's mad scenes day in and day out-- there is no doubt I could be a real asshole; but her letters made it seem as though I had constantly assailed her with abusive behavior, without working with her to help her complete her many unfinished projects, with no tenderness or compassion and all-- and I know that is not so. Anyway, back to the letters. 

I wrote the letters on paper I found in an old notebook, one that she had left  behind on one of her visits.  It was in this notebook that I found out about the affair.  It was one of those college notebooks which give you two choices: you could tear the pages out of the wire binding, leaving all these messy little holes and tears along the left edge, or you could tear it off using this perforation along the left margin, giving you a neater looking page; when you did this latter way, you left a little strip of paper about half an inch wide attached to the wire of the notebook.  One night, while I was writing a letter, I ran across one of these little strips with Dan Tucker's name and phone number on it.  

It hit me like a blow.  It was like looking around in the dark for something and suddenly realizing you're touching a dead rat.  She had not so much as mentioned Dan Tucker in the three months she had been in San Jose, not even when she went to Eagle, but in that moment I knew in my heart that Dan Tucker was more to her than just a friendly fire fighter.  The next time I talked to her on the phone I asked her about it; she laughed and lied.  One thing about aspergers folk (they call us "aspies")--one thing about aspies, is that we’re terrible liars, and we can't tell when someone is lying to us; something about the inability to distinguish subtle features in the face makes all the telltale signs which allow other people to recognize lying is invisible to aspies. As I have said, I knew something was up, but her voice on the phone gave me no confirmation one way or the other, because I knew she was a master liar and could deceive me if she wanted to.  I did begin thinking back to last summer, however-- all that worry about the forest fire, all those phone calls to Dan Tucker, the trip to the Eagle in the fall that took so much longer than it was supposed to; these telltale signs pretty much confirmed in my mind that I had been betrayed, but I could not be sure.  It really was more of a psychic  vibe I got off that little piece of paper, which I scotch taped to my wall above the calendar.