Frances and Bernard (24 page)

Whenever you talked about marrying Bernard, you had trepidation rumbling through you like an earthquake tremor. I had the feeling that if you did marry him, your sister’s shotgun marriage would have been happier than your freely chosen one, and that was an irony I did not want to have to watch deepen over the years. But I don’t see any of that when you talk of marrying A., and I don’t think it’s because you’ve been cutting deals with yourself. He’s very funny and he’s very wise. What was it you said he told you? “Your books need no help from me. They are for you alone.” If a man has no delusions about what he is going to be to you—and you have no delusions about what you need from him—it may be that you have a true love on your hands.

Why haven’t I said these things to you before? You didn’t need me poking around where you were sore. And I thought the right thing to do was to keep quiet, because deep down, I trusted you to do whatever was right for you. Which you did. To that I say cheers, and drink up.

All my happiest love,

C

April 20, 1966

Dear Ted—

So, that award ceremony. It left me sadder than I imagined it would. I was sadder than I thought I would be even upon seeing her. I notice, the older I get, that the sadness is coming in regularly like the tides, eroding my reserves of joy. My illness has done nothing to help this. Some days, it’s not so terrible. I feel like those dinosaurs in the natural history museum, viewed with Bess on my hand: stripped bare of defenses, ready to collapse into an incoherent meaningless heap should someone jounce it the wrong way, but somehow still standing, with a few props, and in its suggested outline still a thing to stand under and wonder at. I feel this way most often when I am in front of the students. They are paying to find wisdom at the feet of an elder. Mostly they are good, serious children. If they rubberneck, it’s in spite of themselves. I can see one girl, the best student this semester, looking away from me when she talks to me during office hours; she keeps her hands in her lap, speaks very quickly, forgets her coat or bag when she leaves, and I am fairly sure it’s because she’s heard I might put my hand up her dress, though she doesn’t want to believe it—she wants to think I am a noncorporeal oracle uncle interested only in poetry, but she knows she has to act on what might be lore in order to get home safe and not be accused of being a bewitcher herself. It’s touching to see her struggle—she is willing to go into the monster’s cave in order to clarify her thoughts on the freeing of verse. And I can’t say anything without damning myself to assure her she’s safe, and that she’s safe because she looks like Susan.

All the men I know come out of their offices rubbing their faces, looking as if they have just been unceremoniously roused from sleep. Each wife’s face is fallen and crumpled into a spider web of worry lines. Everyone looks at each other sidelong, exhausted, refusing to name the things that nail them down. I wish they would, though. I long ago decided psychoanalysis was not a long-term solution, but I do think everyone needs a talking cure now and then, especially if it’s administered by a sympathetic layperson. Even the people I used to count on to throw depth charges into the state of things prefer to steer clear of that adventure. Truth be told, it’s no longer an adventure—it’s more of an inventory of an increasingly empty larder. The other night I was out with Russell and when, after the drinks had been set down before us, I asked, in all sincerity, “How are you?” he looked at me with befuddled scorn and said, “We’re here to talk about my book.”

I am glad that Frances won this award. I didn’t read this last book, and I won’t, and I don’t think I will read the next ones, but I am still proud of her. I took a look at the first sentence and saw she was still able to tack into the wind with a sure hand. That’s all I wanted to know.

Her husband—a professor—appears to be an intelligent man. I still can’t quite believe she married a Frenchman. I suppose I always imagined Frances much too American, and much too committed to the culture of her own idiosyncrasies, to marry someone who would continuously force her into possibly destabilizing acts of translation. After we filed out of the auditorium, he shook my hand with confidence. Not prurience. She stood next to him with her hands clasped behind her back as he did so. She did not show him any more affection than she showed me when we were in a public place. I did not want to be relieved about this, but I was.

We were able to stand near each other smiling for the photographs. Near, and not next to, because she put another poet and a playwright between us. While the pictures were being taken, Susan went to the restaurant ahead of us, I think so she would not have to see how I would respond to Frances’s presence. But neither of us was interested in being alone with each other. There was nothing left to say.

To think we might have been standing together in another ceremony entirely. But here we are as ghosts to each other, the sight of the other stirring nothing but skittishness. I saw her enter the building and I tucked my head down, pretending that I needed something from my wallet. When we were finally forced to speak, I touched her arm and she pulled away.

This is what the world asks of us—to move about as the dead as penance for having dwelt in an improbable passion. The metaphors for love—metaphors of illness, of madness. In this way we pardon ourselves for our lapses in duty, hoping that no one will ever disparage us by saying that we were not sufficiently contented by the world as it is. But love is another law, too, and it will judge you if you do not bend to it when it asks. I think it has already judged her, and now it is judging me.

I hear Susan ribbing me as I write for, as she likes to say, turning tubercular with sentiment like Keats—whenever I mourn the breaking up of a pair of my students for whatever reason, Susan clucks her tongue at me. It’s better that they learn now that it’s silly to fall so hard, she’ll say. They’ve gotten it out of their systems and next time they’ll be wiser. Or if I speak without censure of friends or acquaintances who find themselves in adulterous positions, if I try to have sympathy for both parties—so long, of course, as both parties have not done anything vindictive—she’ll accuse me of being a moral relativist. (Whenever she says this, I have to bite my tongue to keep from repeating to her your theory that if a woman accuses an adulterer of moral relativism, it’s because she was never considered worth an affair in the first place.) She may also think that my sympathy with the romantically confounded is my madness at its lowest boil.

Sometimes I will see a girl on campus, or in the back of class, who has the look of one of the episodic girls. On those days, when I feel that I am Bluebeard sensing the blood pooling behind lock and key, pooling and about to creep out from under the door, I will find a confessional at my earliest convenience. A formality, but one I am glad to submit to when I cannot convince myself I am a man who means well, at least when I am sane. That’s about as far as I can go these days in giving myself credit. I leave it to Bess to make more of me than I am.

I don’t blame Susan—I blame myself for not having the courage to leave her. I think she knows that my staying with her is an attempt at atonement. Even as I say I don’t believe, I see that my higher law, when it cannot be love, is God, whose law demands self-sacrifice. It’s a form I can submit to. Even in my poetry, I cannot escape submitting to form.

After the dinner, I did what a responsible husband would do, which was to drink a great deal with other people in order to forget she ever happened and to present back at home a fulfilled and dedicated heart to my wife. If Frances is someone I will have to spend my life occasionally drinking to forget, that seems like too fair a bargain.

Bernard

June 11, 1968

Dear Bernard—

It has been a very long time. I hope you don’t mind my writing. John sent me your new book—I asked for it—and I felt moved to write to say how very much I enjoyed it. “For Bess” especially. The last two lines have followed me around for the past week or so. John might have told you, but I have a daughter now. She’s almost nine months old, and her name is Katherine, after my mother. I have read her your poem several times, and she approves.

I don’t expect that you’ll answer this letter. I’ll understand if you don’t.

My best to you.

Sincerely,

Frances

September 20, 1968

Dear Frances—

Thank you for your note. It tumbled out of a pile of mail I was picking up during some harried office hours, and I couldn’t have been happier to see your name on the left-hand corner of the envelope.

Congratulations on your Katherine. John did mention her arrival to me. I think God has favored us by giving us daughters. They are music in the house.

That poem was for Bess, but it was also for you. I had been wanting to write you a letter but couldn’t. It turned into a poem.

Keep me in your prayers, won’t you?

Yours,

Bernard

It is my incredible good fortune to have had PJ Mark and Jenna Johnson believing in this book the way they did, and thinking as hard about it with me as if it were their own. My gratitude to PJ for his early enthusiasm and his assiduous, astute readings; my gratitude to Jenna for editing me with an exceedingly sharp and imaginative eye, and for her indefatigable faith, hope, and verve. I am very lucky to have both of them on my side.

I can’t thank Houghton Mifflin Harcourt enough for their support of this book—especially Elizabeth Anderson, Carla Gray, Summer Smith, and Lori Glazer. I salute copyeditor Tracy Roe and executive manuscript editor Larry Cooper because they are exemplars of their craft.

Many, many thanks to Donna Freitas and Lauren Sandler for their crucial (and passionate!) insights.

Thanks also to Mary Ann Naples, who told me to keep going.

And to Dan and Ilona McGuiness, for teaching me more than writing.

As always, I owe more than I can say to my parents, my sister, and Mr. John Williams, who has redefined the word gentleman for the twenty-first century.

C
ARLENE
B
AUER
is the author of the memoir
Not That Kind of Girl,
described as “soulful” by Walter Kirn in Elle and “approaching the greatness of Cantwell” in the
New York Post.
She has written for the likes of
n+1, Slate, Salon,
and the
New York Times.