Frances and Bernard (21 page)

At the St. Regis, it took a while for her to relax. She sat on her stool like a parakeet perched on the bar in its cage. She sat holding her beauty to herself in the complacent, oblivious way old women hug their purses to their laps on the subway. All those New York women around her, thoroughbreds whinnying at the gate, and: Frances. Everything that was so beloved to me about the whiteness of her skin, pure and undulating, freckled and plush, came back in an instant as she lifted her chin to drink. I had to talk to shake it off. I told her about you, told her about teaching, told her what I was thinking of writing next, told her what I thought of her book, went on and on about her book. I felt that she was looking at me for hints of decrepitude. Looking and sipping her drink, and I realized again what I have thought many times since then, which is that she was sent by God to show me myself. “Bernard,” she finally said, finally giving up the chill, putting a hand on my arm, “you do not need to keep talking.” I brought her hand to my lips and that was the end of it. I told her to put her coat on. “Oh, no no no no no,” she said. But I dragged her by the hand again, out to the street, hailed a cab, and told the cabdriver to drive us to Coney Island and back, that I’d pay him three times the tab for his trouble, and on the return trip into the city I tried to force myself on her, but of course she stopped me. She had never let me get away with that in a cab before, and she wouldn’t let me now.

In the cab outside her hotel she started crying. She was trying to hide it but I saw tears on her face. “What’s wrong?” I said. “I didn’t know how much I would miss you,” she said. “Well, write me,” I said. “There’s no harm in writing.” “I don’t know,” she said. Then the cabdriver said: “Mister, I don’t want to have to charge you four times the fare for this trip.” She laughed. “Goodbye,” she said, and then she ran up the stairs of her hotel and into her lobby without looking back. I wondered if I had made her do something she didn’t want to do. But there was some note of query in her response to me—something leaf-green and nascent at the bottom of her deep blue reserve.

We drove to my building, and I felt an inexpressible sadness when I got out of the cab. I stood there on York Avenue in front of the apartment, reluctant to go in. I almost hailed another cab back to Frances’s hotel. I started cursing her for getting in the cab with me. I did not want to sleep next to Susan. I slept on the couch and masturbated, cursing both Susan and Frances. The next morning Susan said: “Is something wrong?” I said no, nothing. She did not believe me, but since I was coming home every night, made sure to come home every night, she let the subject drop.

I do miss her. I even miss her rigidity. It is a self-containment that to me mimics the sublime. It’s not hysterical, as Susan’s now seems—and that’s unfair, because I’ve made Susan hysterical. Looking at Frances, I had the realization that I had been both her lover and her brother. With most people, you settle into being one or the other. I feel related to her still, familial, because she knew me when I was at my most Bernard and I knew her when she was at her most Frances. We’d read each other like books we were endlessly fascinated by. Frances, of course, hiding her fascination beneath the covers of intellectual exchange and perhaps some subconscious notion that we were enacting a holy friendship like that of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.

She is—was—the familial and yet the sublime.

I am determined for once in my life not to hurt a woman if I can help it. I know I will do it again in a rage, but while I am sane at this moment, I want to be good—that insipid word which should be sacred. And yet I feel myself wanting to see what Frances is like now, see if this pliancy I sense in her is softness or sadness, and I tell myself that if I undertook this mission, it would be sacred because it’s Frances—it would be forgiven by the laws of God and man because it is Frances. If I wrote her, I know that I would be trying to get her in front of me again so I could consume as much of her as she would allow. A panic is gathering, a clutch of wild conjecture that’s sending me out walking for hours between teaching and home, and I don’t know whether it means I have to reach toward her or turn away from her, or check myself in somewhere. No, I know I don’t need to be checked in somewhere—I have a very clear sense here that I am a moral animal. I half wish that I were about to break down so I would not need to feel that burden.

Bernard

October 16, 1962

Dear Bernard—

I hope this letter finds you well. I was glad to see you. You might not have been able to tell, but I was. Very much so.

You suggested I write. I am about to start two classes on Milton. Maybe you could tell me what I shouldn’t miss in pitching my softballs to the girls at the College of Mary Pat.

Thank you for reading my book.

Yours,

Frances

November 12, 1962

Frances—

Dear Frances.

I don’t think we should write each other. Starting up a correspondence with you would be too dangerous for me.

Susan saw your return address on the envelope, which she found in a book that I’d left in the kitchen—I should have been more careful about this, it’s true, because she is a ruthless tidier—and she went out of her mind in a way that was difficult to witness.

I want to explain to you why I am saying this. Susan is extremely jealous of you. She has not been jealous of the women I have taken up with when I have been ill. She understood that those girls really were just wreckage from episodes—minor players in a nightmare—but if she thought I were about to start a dalliance with you, she would think something else entirely. She would think I had changed my mind in broad daylight, while sane, and that my love for her had truly disappeared. I remember you once wrote me that you could judge like an Irish mother-in-law. Well, Susan, I think, may have you beat there. She is hysterically jealous for this reason: When she and I had been together for five months, we were at a reading. I was off somewhere, I forget where, and Susan got stuck talking to the assistant that John had to fire because he caught her writing a novel at her desk (I can hear you now—
Doesn’t that girl know she needs to get hired by an octogenarian if she wants to keep up that sort of thing?
). This girl told Susan that she used to work for John and, not knowing who Susan was, and I think in an attempt to proffer some impressive cocktail party gossip, said that she’d once overheard Julia telling John that she’d always wished you and I would get married. And then the girl went on to say that she always thought the same thing whenever you and I would stop by the office together to say hello; she thought we looked so handsome together, and she thought it was terrible that you’d spurned me—her word—and wasn’t it tragic. Susan left the girl without saying a word and dragged me into a corner and told me to come clean about what I felt for you. “If there’s some great love you’re not over, then we need to end this right now,” she said. It did not help that I was laughing a little when she told me the story. You are both the eldest, beloved by your fathers—Jove’s gray-eyed daughters, you have known nothing but worship—and you girls do not take kindly to being in second place. My mother is one of them too. I didn’t know Susan well enough to feel for her like I should have; instead, I saw her as a character in a story, maybe one of your stories, who, while snared in the comically coincidental, was being served with the uncomfortable truth of comeuppance. “You awful child,” she said, and slapped me. It made an impression.

I sent Ted your book and your letters for safekeeping soon after. I do not have them in the house because if I’d kept them, she would think that I’d been lying to her that night. (I had John send your new book to me at Columbia and I am keeping it in my desk here, where she will never look. I am writing you now from Columbia.) I did lie to her that night, because I was ambivalent, but eventually I saw that she loved with constancy. I saw how she tended to her parents and her two brothers. And then things changed. Or, rather, I decided to love her.

I think it’s true what you said—that I needed someone to care for me and only me. I didn’t see it then but I do see it now. And Susan takes care of me. Her mind latches on to my sentences and can weed out the ones that have turned in on themselves. She keeps the house spotless so that I feel a calm I never felt before—the calm of the order of things and how an order of things radiates a peace—and can hear myself think in a way I haven’t before. She has made an art of bullying a hospital staff. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I’m thankful.

Do you remember what you wrote to me when we parted? That you wanted me to keep the well-being of your books in mind? Frances, you were right to tell me no. I would have cheated on you the way I have cheated on Susan. What would you have done about that? You said that you have had trouble writing while you’ve been taking care of your father—what words would you lose if you had to suffer adultery, which would bring indignity along with sorrow? What words would have been swallowed in locking me out of the house in the winter and then dragging me in from the steps in the morning, in calling me at Columbia to make sure I am at Columbia and not somewhere else, in coming to a bar where you have a suspicion I will be with a girl whom you suspect I have slept with, in shouting at me for days and then going silent, your voice hoarse and your heart stopped?

When John sent me your book, I read that first sentence and I thought what I have always thought:
She can do anything.
Do everything, then. Do it without me.

Love,

Bernard

November 20, 1962

Dear Bernard—

So I’m denied the privilege of resuming a dialogue with you because of your wife’s juvenile paranoia. I am once more again glad that I have never married.

You are contenting yourself to love someone who appears warm because she works with words, and words are not numbers, but she is, I think, essentially cold, colder than I ever was. I think she loves only herself, according to details that have been passed along to me, unsolicited, as if in condolence—in condolence to me and, by proxy, to you. I knew girls like her in high school. I bet she was one of those girls who pretended to like the nuns and then snickered behind their backs about how they were all probably lesbians, since none of them could summon the courage to tell the nuns straight to their faces that they were full of nonsense. She’s like the girls I saw at the nunnery: humorless beautiful girls who made a game of shifting allegiances among the other humorless beautiful girls in order to snatch more men or better jobs. It was blood sport but they were so beautiful and groomed, their hair in chignons, it looked just like ballet. What does she know about the human heart?

Also, Ted tells me she roasts a piece of meat like the Irish girl she is: by boiling it.

Don’t worry. I won’t ever write you again. If I were as schooled in blood sport as your wife, however, I would have sent this letter to your house.

December 1, 1962

Frances—

Please believe me when I tell you I asked for death several times while writing that letter. I might have written it too quickly and emphasized some feelings at the expense of others, and you might not have known how sincere I was. But you have put me in a difficult position—you are making me feel that I owe you loyalty and certain confessions, but I can’t give those things to you. Not only because of what I owe Susan, but because of what I owe you. My intentions might not be worthy of you. I might have seduced you and then asked you to keep your distance, and then where would we be?

I must still feel too many things for you if I ask that we not speak to each other.

Bernard

December 3, 1962

Frances—

I was sitting in my doctor’s office waiting for an appointment and I heard the receptionist call out two surnames, one right after the other—Francis, and then Reardon. I looked up and a tall colored gentleman and then a short overweight woman with a cane rose and headed to the back. It was something right out of your books. I felt a sort of premonition, something I have never felt before, when I heard those names, and I needed to know that you were all right.

Bernard

December 8, 1962

Bernard—

Thank you for your concern, but it’s really no business of yours any longer how I am doing.

Please do not write me again.