The Marble Quilt (22 page)

Hugs,

Tim

SUBJ:  
Re: Greg Samuels

DATE:  Wednesday, July 19, 2000, 10:52:00 AM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Tim,

While I appreciate the testimonial to Greg Samuels's good heart, I'm still very upset and angry that he would share the manuscript with
anyone
without first asking my permission. That kind of behavior, in my view, is inexcusable in a professional.

Fondly,

J.

SUBJ:  
No Subject

DATE:  Wednesday, July 19, 2000, 11:45:31 AM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:      [email protected]

Dear Mr. Samuels,

This morning I received an e-mail from Tim Kruger, who tells me that last week you gave a copy of the manuscript of my Otto Bulthaup biography to Willard Pearson. Needless to say, this came as something of a shock. When I asked you to read the manuscript, and you kindly agreed to do so, I thought it went without saying that the draft in question was meant for your eyes only. Instead it appears that you have been casually making photocopies and distributing them to all and sundry, which in my view amounts not only to a breach of civility, but of professional ethics. After all, this is only a working draft, and hence not intended for public consumption.

I believe you owe me, at the very least, an explanation.

Yours sincerely,

Jeffrey K. Witt

Assistant Professor of the Humanities

Wellspring University

SUBJ:  
Re: No Subject

DATE:  Wednesday, July 19, 2000, 12:32:12 PM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Mr. Witt,

Thank you for your e-mail of earlier this morning. Despite whatever Mr. Kruger may have told you concerning Mr. Pearson, I can assure you that the
charges you have made against me are completely unfounded. While Mr. Pearson did visit my office last Tuesday for the purposes of research, and while he did ask about your manuscript, which was sitting on my desk, aside from verifying that you had sent it to me for comment, I never discussed the matter with him, nor offered him the opportunity to look at anything more than the title page. At a certain point during our conversation, it is true, I was obliged to leave my office for approximately three to three and one half minutes, during which time Mr. Pearson might possibly have thumbed through the pages in question. Unless he is a devotee of Evelyn Wood, however, I cannot see how he would have been able to read the entire book in that brief span of time; nor did the pages appear to have been disturbed in any way during the period I was away from my desk.

I am not, nor have I ever been, in the habit of distributing photocopies of manuscripts sent to me in confidence to “all and sundry.” Indeed, I have shared your manuscript with no one, not even my wife.

Let me suggest that in future you apprise yourself of the facts before sending e-mails of this sort, or at the very least make inquiries before making accusations.

Sincerely, Gregory C. Samuels, Director,

The Hilma Meerschaum Institute for Research on the Piano

SUBJ:  
Re: Re: No Subject

DATE:  Wednesday, July 19, 2000, 12:57:01 PM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Mr. Samuels,

Thank you very much for your prompt reply to my e-mail, and please accept my apologies if in it I seemed to cast aspersions on your character. Unfortunately, I took it for granted that what Mr. Kruger reported to me regarding Mr. Pearson was true. Obviously I was mistaken. Either Mr. Kruger was misinformed by Mr. Pearson, or he misunderstood what Mr. Pearson said. I am very sorry that I jumped to conclusions, and trust that this unfortunate misunderstanding will not affect our future relationship.

Yours sincerely,

Jeffrey K. Witt

Assistant Professor of the Humanities

Wellspring University

SUBJ:  
Fwd: Re: No Subject

DATE:  Wednesday, July 19, 2000, 3:44:12 PM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Tim,

Please find enclosed a copy of a letter I just received from Greg Samuels, to whom I wrote after you told me that he had shared my ms. with Willard Pearson. If Samuels is to be believed, then Willard Pearson must have gotten the ms. from another source—Might he have read your copy? Or perhaps he only pretended to have read the manuscript. Yet if that were the case, what would have led him to
assume that I was such a gossip?

Any illumination you could provide would be much appreciated.

Jeff

SUBJ:  
No Subject

DATE:  Thursday, July 20, 2000, 6:49:31 AM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Jeff,

You should not have written to Greg Samuels. Now, as a result of your interference, my friendship with Willard—a friendship of twenty years' standing—is over. Greg wrote to Willard, who wrote to me. The fragile peace we had brokered was destroyed as he accused me of betraying his confidence not once but twice—the second time by telling you that he had read Greg's copy of your book. Now he fears that Greg will never trust him again. He also considers your hotheadedness with Greg further evidence that you are a dangerous person so far as the list is concerned. Which is to say nothing of Greg's annoyance with me!

Under the circumstances, you will understand that I can no longer possibly allow you to use my Bulthaup material, no matter what revisions you make. I shall be sending the ms. back to you shortly.

Tim

SUBJ:  
Tim Kruger

DATE:  Friday, July 21, 2000, 2:14:03 PM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Professor Pearson,

We have not met. I am the Bulthaup biographer with whom Tim Kruger recently elected to share a certain list that you and he had compiled—a decision that has provoked all sorts of ill will, and led, at least from what I gather, to the dissolution of your long friendship. Now I find myself in the unenviable position of suddenly being persona non grata with three colleagues none of whom I have ever met. Tim blames me for wrecking his friendship with you, Greg Samuels is affronted that I accused him of behaving irresponsibly, and you consider me an untrustworthy gossip—and all this thanks to a list I never asked to see, read with only the mildest interest, and erased from my hard drive no more than half an hour after receiving it.

What has happened? Initially I approached Tim Kruger only because mutual friends had told me he owned interesting photos of Bulthaup that I could find nowhere else. But now, because of the list, Tim has virtually prohibited me from ever seeing, much less using, any of his material. In addition, I appear to have offended Greg Samuels by complaining that he had shown you my manuscript. But if Greg did not give you a copy, then who did?

I hope that in writing to you this way I am not simply deepening the hole in which I find myself. My goals are simple: I want to get along with people, and I
want my book to be described accurately.

Yours sincerely,

Jeff Witt

SUBJ:  
Re: Tim Kruger

DATE:  Saturday, July 22, 2000, 8:59:47 AM

FROM: [email protected]

TO:     [email protected]

Dear Mr. Witt,

Your letter saddened me. Obviously much about this case has been misrepresented to you, most notably the part I play. I shall try to clarify things as best I can.

To begin at the beginning, it is true that about sixteen years ago Tim Kruger and I began compiling a list, mostly for our own amusement, of gay and lesbian pianists. This game had its origins in an age considerably less lenient in these matters than our own, and during which homosexual pianists assumed that exposure would lead to the decimation of their careers. In his capacity as a premier antiquarian in the field of the piano, and in mine as President of the Paderewski Society, Tim and I were privy to certain information few other people possessed, and we began to exchange knowledge. Soon the list had grown into a document of considerable size, and when e-mail came along, the labor of its tracking and honing was greatly eased.

I must emphasize, however, that from the moment of its inception, the list was
a private document. Rarely would Tim and I share it with anyone, and if one of us did, he would always ask the other's permission first. This is why his decision to send you the list took me aback: he had neglected to ask me first whether I approved.

On Tuesday, July 11, it is true, I did go to visit Greg Samuels at the Meerschaum Institute. We spent twenty minutes or so talking in his office, and in the course of our conversation I did notice the manuscript of a Bulthaup biography on his desk. As I am quite interested in Bulthaup, I inquired of Greg as to its provenance. In reply he told me who you were, and that you had sent him the book because you wanted his advice on the project.
At no time, however, did he offer to give me a copy of the manuscript, nor did I at any point ask for one, or even thumb through his
.

On to the following week: on his way back from a swap meet in Camden, Tim Kruger stopped by St. Blaise, where we had lunch at the faculty club. As we were beginning our first course, I mentioned my recent visit to the Meerschaum Institute, at which point we discussed Greg Samuels for some minutes, our conversation inevitably leading to your Bulthaup project, about which I inquired as to his familiarity. Immediately Tim became flustered and said (I am sorry to have to repeat this) that indeed he did know of the book, that you and he had of late established what he called an “e-mail intimacy,” and that he considered you to be the worst kind of gossip, a “gay radical” whose only real interest was in outing Bulthaup. In his view, you were absolutely the wrong person to write such a book, which ought to have been penned by another friend of his, a psychiatrist,
since only a psychiatrist could possibly understand Bulthaup's “childlike” nature. I listened carefully, expressing amazement and consternation at the appropriate intervals, until our entrees arrived. At this point Tim “broke down,” and announced that he had a confession to make: driven to recklessness by what he called the “romantic intensity” of your e-mail rapport, he had sent you the list. Naturally I was surprised, and after questioning the wisdom of sharing the list with someone he himself had just described as a gossip, asked him to explain his actions. In response he blurted out apologies, insisted that he would never forgive himself, and asked me if I could find it in my heart to forgive him. I told him that I could, but that I would appreciate it if he would write to you, urging you not to show the list to anyone. He agreed.

That was the last I heard of the case until this past Wednesday, when to my amazement I received an outraged e-mail from Greg Samuels, accusing me of lying and threatening to take legal action if I did not immediately retract the charge that he had given me a copy of your book. He also sent me your original e-mail to him. Deeply consternated, I wrote immediately to Tim, who telephoned by way of reply, insisting pitifully that he had never told you that I had got the manuscript from Greg, that you had invented the connection in order to destroy our friendship, etc. I did not believe him, and told him so in no uncertain terms. As you may have guessed by now, this is by no means the first time that I have found myself in this kind of muddle thanks to Tim. By nature he is a machinator—he cannot help himself—and as I have learned over the course of many years on this planet, a machinator's most dangerous skill is his capacity to
seduce others into doing his dirty work for him. Once Tim has one ensnared, in other words, one will often find oneself behaving in much the same way that he does, without even realizing that one is doing it. Sincerity and honesty become well nigh impossible. He had led me down this ugly path too often, and this time I resolved no longer to tolerate such behavior, and to end our friendship.

That, then, is what happened. I'm very sorry that Tim decided to involve you in such an unpleasant, if trivial, episode, and even more, sorry that you suffered over the case as you so obviously did: it is clear that you are a man of conscience, and to the sort of tactics Tim employs, unfortunately, those of conscience are particularly susceptible. It was not until I received your e-mail, however, that his motives in enacting such a petty drama became clear to me. As you know, Tim is both by profession and character an antiquarian: that is to say, he sees his own value mostly in terms of the things he possesses. By expressing a desire to use his material, you flattered him, yet you also set off an old fear that no one was interested in him for himself, only for what he owned, etc. This was why he set up so many hoops for you to jump through in order to win his trust. And yet I'm fairly certain that in the end he had no intention of giving you the photos, for fear that once you had them, you would lose all interest in him.

Well, that is the whole sorry story. Try not to let it bother you too much. So far as the photos themselves go, I have never seen them. No doubt they exist, no doubt they are fascinating, and yet with Tim it's often hard to distinguish between truth and bluff. He could have a trove, he could have a single snapshot.

All best,

Willard Pearson

SUBJ:     
Re: Re: Tim Kruger

DATE:Saturday, July 22, 2000, 4:03:42 PM

FROM:   [email protected]

TO:       [email protected]

Dear Willard (if I may),

Your letter came as a great surprise to me. Yes, I am comforted to know that all of this was less my fault than I thought at first. Still, the whole affair has left such a bitter aftertaste in my mouth that I can't help but wonder if, in interpreting Bulthaup's life as I have, I might simply be displaying the same will to misapprehend that you ascribe to Tim. Perhaps the book really is just souped-up gossip, as he claimed.