An Epistolary Love Affair

Part 1

She saved their correspondence. She would print out the emails, to and from, and tape them into a notebook. She saved everything. She had always been like that, never learning her lesson, that some things should not be saved because they will come back to bite you in the ass.

She tried once to look through the notebook, on a rainy Sunday morning and only made it through two emails before the tears came. Big tears. The whole day was lost. There would be no comfortable nostalgia with this one. She never looked through the notebook again. She had been warned.

Yet she was unable to throw it away.

Subj: Fatty Arbuckle
Date: 11/11/00 6:04:03 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Moira,

I had a great time with you last night and this morning at John’s. We dominated the impromptu trivial pursuit. I am glad I met you. Here are some poems, in case you feel like reading some. You were good enough to put up with my rot about my dad and religion, so I’ve included some of that.

I just got home.

All the best,

Bert

Subj: Re: Fatty Arbuckle
Date: 11/11/00 7:02:15 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

Bert, you are a complete blast. I had a great time with you as well. I guess what I want to say is I like your brain. I’m intrigued. I also don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase the image of you acting out the plot of Middlemarch with no words – as though the whole thing could be done in mime. I was howling!! And yeah, we completely dominated trivial pursuit. Not much fun for the others, perhaps, but a hell of a lot of fun for us. I love that you know the entire sad story of Fatty Arbuckle.

Wow, just noticed that your email was written at 6 am.

Thanks so much for your poems. I’m flattered. I will print them out and read them tomorrow. If you ever do poetry readings anywhere, let me know. The NY poetry scene is completely unknown to me. I’d love to see what it was all about.

Hope to see you again sometime,
moira

p.s. The subject line of your email made me laugh out loud.

Subj: Re: Fatty Arbuckle
Date: 11/12/00 7:58:37 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

Bert, you are a marvelous writer. I was completely moved. With the first poem I experienced it almost completely in my senses. I read it, yes, but it was more about the textures, the colors, the sounds. I loved the image of the little boy thinking the music would topple over in a flutter of birds. I also liked the image of the guns and high heels – and then with the last 2 lines, suddenly tears came to my eyes. Looking back on the innocence of ourselves as children, and mourning that innocence. How we want to protect and hover over our young selves crouched on the stairs in our pajamas, because we know what comes after. Pain, heartache, rejection, loss, grief. A maternal impulse came up in me at the end. My heart went out to the little boy.

The second poem terrified me. The image of the white horse in the distance – it has haunted me ever since I read it. Why is it such a scary image? I don’t know, but it is. I just finished Moby Dick and I don’t know how long ago you read it but there’s a chapter called The Whiteness of the Whale which is a tour de force. I underlined almost every sentence. He’s talking about how the whale was terrifying because he was a big ol’ whale, yes … but there was something else going on. It was the WHITENESS that terrified and struck horror in the hearts of sailors. The whiteness of the whale. That’s what came up for me when I read that line in your poem. If I have nightmares tonight about a far-away white horse I will have you to thank.

Thank you so much for sharing these with me. You are very generous. I would love to read more if you ever care to send them along.

take care
moira

Subj: Moby Dick
Date: 11/12/00 8:26:01 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Moira,

I’m glad you enjoyed the poems. I agree about the distant white horse. It is an arresting and frightening image, but I think that is due to a combination of two things: one, a white horse against a dark valley is a crisp image. Two, it’s disjunctive. It makes no sense to answer a question that way.

The whiteness of the whale: yes, that, well Melville probably had some residue of Plato’s spirit forms in his head when he was writing that book. Moby Dick, the whale itself, is based on an actual legend of a white whale and the ramming of a whale ship by a sperm whale. The Platonic bits resonate more clearly in the Masthead chapter, when he warns the lookout not to go mad from staring at nothing all day and plunge into the water. Also, there is the mystical image of the infinite pairs of whales in processions with a great white whale, like a snowy mountain (an actual mountain visible from his study at the time he was writing), eternal and sexless. The whiteness is not an obliteration of knowledge but the absence of it. Without stimulus, the human mind cannot work. In the Counterpane chapter, he explains that we understand the world through oppositions, as in warmth of a Counterpane from the one extremity sticking out on a winter’s ight. Because the whale is white, a blankness, a tabula rasa, it can be interpreted differently by each man who encounters it. The mutinous Shakers, for instance, believe it is the Shaker God, a blind god at the center of the universe. Queequeg, the last of his people, believes it is one of his tribe’s gods. Each of the first mates has his own relationship with the whale. Ahab believes that Moby Dick is a spiteful, thinking animal, the embodiment of meaning and evil in the cosmos. Starbuck, a righteous if unimaginative man, believes this blasphemy. To this accusation, Ahab famously answers: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!”

It is a great disaster of a novel but a Great book. Unfortunately it is being replaced on high school and college curricula by books about the Middle Passage of the African slaves to North America – usually a more readable and certainly more topical choice.

I last read the book the day after my father’s funeral, in 1990. Of course I read his edition, which I still have. My parents were called in for a parent-teacher conference when I was in third grade. The teacher had taken my copy of Moby Dick, since she caught me reading it in class. To be fair, I think it was math class, but nevertheless the book has always been important to me and haunts me.

Bert

Subj: Re: Moby Dick
Date: 11/13/00 10:44:37 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

I guess I came to the right person to talk about Moby Dick! The book haunts me as well, completely. Why do you think it is a disaster of a novel? I agree with you that it is a Great Book with capital letters, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the other. Also, what, in your opinion, happens to Pip in the Castaway chapter? hat is it that makes him go mad? Is it a vision of death? Or bliss? Or endlessness? I read it 3 times, chilled with some sort of horror, not sure why it was so scary, and it seems to me that the truth of the situation remains somewhat mysterious. Between the lines. Like so much of life … between the lines. Maybe that is the terror of going mad. It lies outside of language.

Do you like Mary Oliver?

moira

Oh, and I am very sorry about your dad.

Subj: Re: Moby Dick
Date: 11/13/00 12:20:47 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Moira,

I don’t mind Mary Oliver, but my mom likes her, so I can only like her so much.

Pip goes mad because of the confrontation with emptiness. At least that’s what I think. There’s nothing for the mind to grab onto.

It’s a disaster of a novel because: it isn’t really a novel, at least not by standards of the day. You have romances, novels, things of that nature, but this is really an Odyssey. It’s a disaster, in my opinion, for these reasons:

Melville lifts whole sections out of Cetological studies and drops them into Moby Dick, though this has been viewed as a metalinguistic foray, the comparison of the knowable part of the whale to the unknowable, virtually unseen White Whale.

His mixture of Quaker religious images and classical Greek images is unstable and barely fits together.

The two main characters, Ishmael and Ahab, have no direct contact. The first person narrator is Ishmael at the beginning of the novel, but the narrator jumps without explanation to a third-person narrator and back again, since we are told of events at which Ishmael was not present.

It is likely that Ahab isn’t even aware of Ishmael’s existence. He knows he has a certain number of crew members, but he doesn’t care who they are really, aside from the first mates.

There’s no clear development of plot. There are no women, aside from the two who say goodbye at the docks at Nantucket. This absence is one of the things that inspired the book Ahab’s Wife. Melville was a violent and unabashed misogynist. On one occasion, a local preacher helped his wife to fake her own death in order to get away from him. It is highly likely that he had many homosexual encounters as a sailor.

Held up against a perfectly constructed novel like James’ Portrait of a Lady, it seems incredibly sloppy and overwrought. By today’s standards, it’s fine as a novel, so I’ll leave it alone. Its rediscovery in the thirties no doubt opened a lot of doors for novelists since. Faulkner remarked upon finishing it: “Damn, I wish I had written that book.”

Bert

Subj: Lady Lazarus
Date: 11/13/00 11:50:03 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Moira,

Have you ever heard the recording of “Lady Lazarus” that Sylvia Plath made a couple months before she committed suicide?

I’ve put a link to it here.

Somehow, I bet you’re a Plath fan, right?

Bert

Subj: Re: Lady Lazarus
Date: 11/14/00 2:09:29 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

Goddammit. That was terrifying. There was such accusation in her voice, such suppressed rage. She’s a Medusa. I felt like at any second she would burst into stormy tears and start tearing things/people to bits. Holy shit, was she pissed off. In my opinion, the most touching line she ever wrote is in one of her last poems … for her children, where she talks about leaning over her baby’s crib, and knowing that her baby looks up and sees:

“this troublous wringing of hands.
This ceiling without a star.”

I am sure that a major motivation for her suicide was to prevent her children from having a mother who was a ceiling without a star.

best to you,
moira

Subj: Re: Lady Lazarus
Date: 11/14/00 3:23:44 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

I’m glad you liked the Sylvia. I’m working on a review right now of Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets for next month. I think you might like the book a lot.

Tell Amy I said hi, by the way.

Bert

Subj: Bowery Lounge
Date: 11/14/00 8:14:38 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

My friends at Bowery Lounge just got two stars from the New York Times food critic so I’m headed down there for some chow and booze.

Talk soon.

Bert

Subj: 2 star restaurant
Date: 11/15/00 12:52:28 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

I remember that conversation we had at the party about the starring systems for restaurants. In the New York arena, 2 stars is good, correct? So congrats to your friends. Kevin is one of them, right? The Bowery Lounge is an awesome place. I used to go there all the time.

What is the only 4 star restaurant in Manhattan again? The red wine I drank last night obliterated that information.

I just reread this email and realized that every sentence was of almost equal length. It really doesn’t read very well at all because of that.

moira

Subj: Re: 2 star restaurant
Date: 11/16/00 12:19:31 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Moira,

Red wine obliterates many things.

Here’s a poem I love, by e.e. cummings.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Subj: a frail gesture, an intense fragility
Date: 11/16/00 9:33:42 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

I do not know what is going on with me right now. I read that poem, and of course I already know it, but for some reason I just feel like crying for 5 hours right now. I’ve already been crying for 10 minutes.

I have lived for quite some time like Kipling’s cat, Bert. The one who walked by himself. “He is the Cat that walks by himself and all places are alike to him, and if you look out at nights you can see him waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone—just the same as before.” Being Kipling’s cat has its advantages. But I am aware of another need right now. A need for connection, tenderness.

I feel like I want to give you something. I want to give you something in return.

Here is this, from James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:

Moreover, these flexions are taking place everywhere, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

Each is intimately connected with the bottom and the extremest reach of time:

Each is composed of substances identical with the substances of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.

moira

Subj: Re: a frail gesture, an intense fragility
Date: 11/16/00 11:02:15 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Kipling’s Cat and James Agee in the same email. It’s quite a combination.

I am happy to hear that the poem had the same effect on you it has for me.

Bert

Subj: Re: a frail gesture, an intense fragility
Date: 11/20/00 11:02:15 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

What are you doing for Thanksgiving? I’m visiting my brother. I only see him on holidays, which is a shame. The truth is, I just don’t get out of the city that much.

Best,

Bert

Subj: Re: a frail gesture, an intense fragility
Date: 11/20/00 3:17:47 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

Flying out to Chicago to be with my family. I also have a high school reunion on Saturday night which should be hysterical.

moira

Subj: something overheard
Date: 11/21/00 6:07:20 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

I was sitting in a hallway. I was writing. A guy and a girl stood next to me. She was very babe-alicious. He was clearly trying to make the moves on her, trying to have a deep meaningful conversation with her. And this is what I heard:

He: (leaning in, significant tone) Do you know about solipsism?
She: (after a brief pause) I don’t take medication of any kind.

Subj: Re: something overheard
Date: 11/21/00 9:20:03 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

That is so unbelievably excellent. Almost too good to be true.

Subj: yo
Date: 11/29/00 10:30:30 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

Bert,
I felt a connection with you when we met that I cannot quite explain. I was happy when you emailed me your poems. And the ee cummings. I don’t know you. I don’t know where you are from, I don’t know your middle name, I don’t know anything about you. But I felt a click with you. I feel a bit awkward right now. I do not know your situation. Hell, I don’t even know your phone number, but I do know that I would like to see you again. God, this sucks, doing this by email. But I figured what the hell.

Want to go drink some Guinness and play hangman and talk until 2 am?

And whether or not you can join me, I still just want you to know how much I thoroughly enjoyed meeting you that night. I’m from Chicago, and I have experienced Manhattan, at times, in comparison, as an isolating intimidating place.

So I can’t express how beautiful it was to play with you that night.

moira

Subj: Re: yo
Date: 11/30/00 3:58:53 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Moira,

I admire your style. I am currently involved with the daughter of a major book editor. I had a great time with you as well. We deserve each other, so keep me in mind for the future. Here’s a poem you inspired:

A splendid freckled girl from Ireland, or Chicago,
leaned across the table, being what she is, always,
asked me if I understood grace. I said I believe in it,
But I don’t know what it is or what it can be to us.
She smiled and shrugged her breasts toward me.
And I was gone from this world, like smoke or air.

Moira, remember me as a kind soul. I’m confused where relationships are concerned. I have been in love again and again. I don’t need anymore trouble from your sort, an intelligent and beautiful soul.

All my best. I look forward to seeing you again.

Bert

Subj: hey
Date: 12/1/00 9:31:13 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Frecklejuice
To: Bertie1999

I admire your style as well. And of course I will remember you as a kind soul. I understand what you mean when you say “I don’t want anymore trouble.” I’m Kipling’s cat, member? I have proclaimed to the universe on occasion: “Okay, that’s IT.” The universe yawns in response.

When you said to keep you in mind for the future – alarm bells went off. Basically, because I am a master at unrequited love affairs. I could hold seminars on the topic. I don’t feel a click with many people, Bert. I’m too weird and specific. But you? You would be worth the wait. But I cannot say that I will keep you in mind for the future. So I have a proposal, and I’ll just be blunt. Should your situation ever change, you should look me up. Come find me. I don’t know where I will be, or what my own situation will be at that time, of course. But I can’t, at this moment anyway, let go of the notion that whatever would happen between you and I would be worth the trip. Trouble and all.

The poem you wrote about our moment of grace moved me. The weird thing is – I keep a journal, kind of off and on. But I like to write down what I call “nuggets”. Things I want to remember. I only wrote one thing about the party where I met you, and it was about that moment. Here’s what I wrote:

And then there was the Grace moment. It was early on, still lots of people there. Everyone around the table. eople sitting, standing. Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” playing. A lot was going on, many different conversations, and I heard Bert say, to no one in particular, “Grace. Everyone knows what grace is. But no one can explain it.” This was said amongst the chaos. A little pod of quiet floating through the noise.

It felt like truth. I heard it, if no one else did. And it called to me – a magnetic pull from across the table. Amongst the chaotic random-ness of nature, 2 photons – spinning in the same direction. A universe apart. I looked at him – it was more like my gaze was dragged over to him – as though I were a piece of iron and he was a big magnet sitting there.

“That’s totally true,” I said.

He looked at me. We acknowledged the moment silently. He seemed to have something I wanted.

“What is grace?” I asked.

He said, “That’s the thing. Everyone’s felt it. But no one can describe it. No one knows what it is really.”

“But it exists.”

Bert nodded. “It sure does.”

That moment is a gold nugget at the bottom of a sieve. I don’t know why. It was perfect. Like grace is perfect.

So. I think of you with pleasure, with curiosity, and I wish you well.

I hope our paths cross again someday.

moira

Subj: Re: hey
Date: 12/5/00 4:03:26 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Bertie1999
To: Frecklejuice

Who are you? Were you even born? Where did you grow up? Go to school? What do you do everyday? Do you cook? What’s your apartment like? Tell me everything. Who was your first fuck? Have you been to Italy? What’s your favorite movie? You seem created, not born. Your voice has been echoing through my head for 4 days now.

Don’t answer any of those questions I just asked. I want to know everything about you, but I need to stop this.

You’re trouble, Moira. Big trouble.

Bert