[Autumn, 1990: Note written in Cross Campus Library]
[Excerpted letters, sent from Montana to New Haven, 1991]
January 27
And I want you to see my little shack, my stove, where I’m sitting while I write this, how you can sit in the outhouse with the door open and look at the cows. You’ll really know you’re here when you feel the cold seat of the outhouse.
February 4
When you said you didn’t think you’d see me again it wasn’t just a terrible thing to say, it was wrong. Been thinking about that time in the motel when I was on the phone with Byron and you were out of the shower, walking around nude. I’d do it again. Maybe a little differently. I want to do everyday things with you.
February 14
I’m starting to get a better idea about how I want to write—if I can get there, I don’t know. Sometimes when it’s late and cold I piss out the window.
April 17
I’m glad you’re better to me than you are in my dreams! You hurt me all the time, but its ok. Just a little note to send you this lamb’s tail. It fell off yesterday. How are things there?
April 19
You’re sadly mistaken if you think I don’t have trouble falling asleep; I was up half the night talking into my recorder, speaking what turns out this morning to be gibberish or another language.
April 21
I’ll never tire of your scratchy letters. Come west, come west. Today I saw a strange, intriguing thing: all these heifers, running in a herd, chasing a jackrabbit across the pasture. It escaped through a fence.
April 26
It’s surprising that the lamb’s tail smelled—something must have happened to it.
This was the beginning of the relationship I was spinning out of, in that summer of 1994, when I met Mrs. Abel. Reading these letters, I try to understand this person, to become again the young man moving toward, preparing for mysteries he could not foresee. Encountering my voice from 1991, I feel a similar sense of the uncanny as I did that day in the Red Cabin. No person has ever felt more familiar and simultaneously so foreign.
(Who was I, and what was wrong with me?)
There I was, trying to convince my girlfriend to help me not be alone:
[Sent from Montana to New Haven, 1991]
July 31
I’m sitting on my steps and a sparrow’s building a nest above me, dropping little pieces of mud.
August 27
Today a strand of barbed wire got loose and tore up my nose.
September 15
I want to live somewhere with a real table. What do you wish we could talk about that we can’t because everything is not more ok?
September 19
You’ve written me a lot of nice letters and they help when I’m lonely. I especially like the one about us being cows with brushes on our tails, potentially hemmed in by cattle guards painted on the highway that wouldn’t really grab our hooves. I hope we’re not like those cows. I don’t think so.
September 25
At this point, as far as writing I feel all I can do is talk tough. Meanwhile, the moon has been crazy, here, a big blue and orange hole rolling along the mountains.
October 8
I found a two-bedroom house in Livingston with a garage for $320 a month.
October 14
Sending two letters in one day is something that lovers do, I think. I’m going to get a book about how to make furniture. You do have very large and beautiful breasts; we have to find that shirt.
November 29
I don’t know if I’d say you write coldly; with authority and confidence, poise: that is true. When I read this, as usual, I am left feeling that you can put your finger on it, where you want . . .
December 6
Yesterday I went and spent some time in the house and it tickled me even more. There’s so much room—closets everywhere, drawers coming out of the wall in the bathroom. Amazing.
December 9
I even got new Montana plates for the truck, and a new driver’s license. I seek authenticity.
When she finished college and moved out to Montana, we lived in the little house with the pink kitchen and worked our jobs—me on the ranch, she at the bowling alley, then waitressing at the Livingston Bar & Grille—and played house, and tried to write. To imagine places and people, to come up with all their names. She cut her hair short, and had a Carhartt jacket, like mine, that I’d given her. A fly-fishing cap, too, and heavy boots. It is sharply, tenderly embarrassing to imagine how we must have looked. Perhaps we dressed like this to suggest or create a similarity, a uniform, to convince ourselves that we were the same or to camouflage our differences.
One day in Livingston we were grocery shopping at John’s IGA and in the checkout line we saw a little book of baby names and threw it down on the conveyor belt with our meat and broccoli and beer.
“Congratulations!” the cashier said, and we looked at each other obliviously, suddenly awkward.
“We’re writers,” my girlfriend said.
“Still,” the cashier said. “That’s great.”
I said, “It’s just that we have to make up so many names all the time, for our characters.”
In that moment, did we feel the possibility that we might have a child together, children? I don’t think I considered that possibility, consciously (September 2, 1991: Last night I dreamed we (you) had three babies in rapid succession (within a couple days, though they were not triplets and were quite different ages). It all took place in a snowy/ice field landscape and I’d walk carrying the babies, changing their names. Naming was my job . . .”); in any case, I know I wasn’t ready, probably felt that we, she and I were not ready. I knew even then that we wouldn’t have children together.
Still, I admired her, I admire her—the startling combination of her lisp that could make her seem so young and the incredibly smart things she said that made it all sound so wonderfully precocious. I remember a paper she wrote about John Ashbery (“It’s this crazy weather we’re having:/ Falling forward one minute, lying down the next . . .”); I remember holding its dot-matrixed pages in my hands and reading with envy and wonder the easy, conversational way of her intelligence: “There is no certainty that this poem is about weather as we typically understand it, yet its craziness is difficult to dispute.”
These letters—an attempt to communicate with this one other person—are far better written and more interesting than any fiction I wrote, in those years. They are where I learned to write.
To read them describes, plots the points of a relationship—beginning, middle, end—in a way that is, in hindsight, almost comical, preordained. And to excerpt them as I have here is obviously to curate a certain narrative, to leave so much out, to present a self.
Yet I’m also aware of how often I made similar choices, back then; how I left things out when writing the letters themselves. I don’t mention other infatuations or romantic possibilities. There’s no mention of Mrs. Abel at all, even though (and this surprised me) the letters revealed that not only had I fled to Wisconsin from the end of a relationship that hadn’t even quite ended, I had also, during that summer of Mrs. Abel, still been writing letters to the same girlfriend.
[Sent from Wisconsin to Toronto, 1994]
July 27
Just got off the phone and am troubled to hear you so troubled. I think as far as the move and everything you made the right choice and I’m sure it seems strange. I know (or hope) I’m cause for concern, too; I’m not sure what to say. I love you and I need to get some self-respect and impetus back. My flailing isn’t your fault, of course, and it’s not even that tragic . . . Anyway, meanwhile the rain is coming down again and my radishes are exploding upward.
August 10
I don’t know if it’s so much a need of yours to get things straight/talk things out as it’s been you who does a lot of hard work and meanwhile I wait and let you.
August 20
(I have a great aunt who always writes two letters—one normal, the other apologizing for anything in the first one that could be misconstrued.)
August 31
It’s hard to write—either it seems like I’m avoiding something by passing on news or I’m complicating an already complicated problem. I feel I’m letting you down by not being clear enough or not saying something I should have.
September 9
I’m not sure how I should explain my silence. I don’t feel too silent, but then I don’t have much to say. It’s hard to write or talk on the phone because I’m self-conscious, in the sense of being conscious of presenting a self. You say you don’t know me and you don’t know what it’s like to be me. Before when I wrote I said I was glad you knew me better than anyone and I believe that. I’m sorry I haven’t been adequately able to say or even know how I feel, however I think that’s what everyone’s working on all the time. I’m not holding anything back! I always try to be honest, I try to be a good person. Sometimes that’s not so easy to do. It hurts me to get some of your letters (like the one full of questions), it makes me feel insufficient and a little cornered. Yes, I get angry and relieved and lonely. All that’s all right. Now’s a hard time for us and I hope we can make it better than this.