from The Refrigeration Series [Em’s Notebook], c. 2000

Tee wasn’t proud of this, but angry and helpless in the wake of her departure and unable to overcome his jealousy not so much of Em’s family and her work but of her success, he had stolen her notebooks after she’d left town. He still had a key to the print shop, and had simply gone in and taken the journals from her office. He was, at first, most interested in the pages about himself or in any details the pages might reveal about her husband Paul and her daughter. But as Tee found himself rifling through the notebooks on sleepless nights in his apartment, he was overcome not only by her clear gratitude to and love for him, but by the reach and openness of her curiosity, especially in light of the challenges of her marriage. She actually seemed grateful to him, to Tee himself. Accustomed to her teasing and her unsparing frankness with him, he had not expected this, and it moved him in his grief.

Paul left at last this morning, taking M. and one of her girlfriends. The girls to stay with his parents. I breathe again by late afternoon. I still haven’t told him that I found his scrapped letter & taped it together (cf. Mme. Heger finding and stitching back together C. Brontë’s love letter to her husband, those orthopedic sutures, C’s floral blue, desperate, perfect and ardent French torn carelessly by Heger and tossed into a bin, but not before he scribbled a shoemaker’s address in the margin). Well, Paul’s “person” is no Brontë. Secretary, maybe? colleague? His ridiculous scrawl to her, “Don’t worry about me, I’m used to being abandoned” &c. Good luck, sweetheart, whoever you are, is what I say. Mr. Paul Pitiful. Always the victim.

Tee reminding me later about Dickinson’s Master Letters. Love letters. Angry. V. erotic. Letters ever meant to be sent? read? discovered by one’s wife as she’s emptying the trash?

Washed the bedsheets 2X. Thrice.

Walking Sumac Trails along the river with Tee found an old refrigerator dumped upstream, now wedged in the shallows among slick roots and vines. The door long gone, hinges rust-red, upright against the bright blue sky, little stiff flags, arrow-heads. Inside: the rotted, gently bobbing capsized carapace of a pond slider. Its bottom shell, slimed with mosses, so lovely, yellowed like a skull fretted with knitted fontanel, tectonic plates . . . an abandoned house within an abandoned house, T. said.

T. is my Brother Orphan.

He fished out the shell for me and carried it back to the studio in the back of his car. Drying on a windowsill here now beside antler horn, three cicada husks, a cracked yellow water pistol silted with mud, a dried stalk of Russian sage Tee brought to me early on, a “cure for melancholy” he sd.

Buy: soy yogurt. Excedrin. Cremant.