Frances and Bernard (16 page)

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 hello. “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 breasts 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 pass 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 classmate for catechism. Actually, maybe it was what you said about Mozart—that it sounded like damn tittering, 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 God 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 Mass 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 assurance 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 assured 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 hello. It doesn’t know what you see in New England’s blustering 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 Picasso 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 competitively 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 God 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 God 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 assessment was to be offended. Who did Roger presume to be, making pronouncements 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; impassioned 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 butts floating in a pan. His dress shirts 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 assign a poem from Hopkins today, what poem should it be?” It makes me want to hide from him sometimes in embarrassment—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.