I moved to California, after that summer of 1995, to work on my writing in the company of other people. It surprised me to find, in the packet of letters she sent me, that I’d continued to write to my old girlfriend during this time. Still reporting on my daily life, sending stories for her to read, needing her reassurance and intelligence, trying to maintain her interest in me.
[Sent from Palo Alto to Toronto, 1995]
September 9
Been missing you, unpacking things (like this) that have been in boxes for a year and a half or whatever. Yes! I have a new home . . . My days of searching were desperate, hopeless, not even close . . . I don’t have a real stove and my shower’s in the kitchen, but I can get with it.
October 1
It is nice in Palo Alto, almost too nice. It’s hard to know where the campus ends and the city begins; everywhere people are sitting at tables outside, eating bagels and drinking espresso. Also I saw some people walking around naked on the campus, very free and Californian. Sounds to me like you’re a success. Took one of your iron pills (packed with the spices), so perhaps I’ll follow suit.
When I met my wife, I lived in Palo Alto and she lived in San Francisco, an hour away. She had a job in a neurobiology laboratory, running tests on frogs, and I could not see her as often as I desired. I wanted to see her every day, all the time. I’d sometimes drive to her apartment and wait for her to return from work. (She’d given me a key!) I’d climb out the window of her apartment, up the ladder to the rooftop of her building; from there, I could see the swaying eucalyptuses of Golden Gate Park, twined with fog. I squinted out toward the ocean, over the rooftops, and felt that weather inside me where suddenly everything was possible. I knew that I had never felt this way about anyone, and that this might be my last chance to learn to be with another person, to not be alone.
Those days I would walk into Golden Gate Park, surrounded by others on the green grass above the playground, the Carousel. Down below, homeless people with dogs at the end of ropes walked past, pieces of bicycles in their hands; they clustered, they disappeared into the bushes and eucalyptus trees. And one man I recognized—about my age, always shirtless, wearing long tattered shorts. He shouted from the base of the hill, unhinged and beset. “Super girl! Where you at?” Bending down, he turned and looked through his legs at all of us, sitting on the hill, his face upside down and watching us, slapping his ass in time as he shouted: “Su-per Girl! Where you at, Super Girl? I love you, I love you, I love you! Su-per Girl!”
Email, back then, was something one might access at school, or at work. It wasn’t something anyone had at home. No one had cell phones, either. People were more difficult to locate, to reach.
I wrote her letters, this woman who would become my wife; I wrote her stories, in fact, of one or two pages. They were more autobiographical than anything I’d written—a way to introduce myself, to share impressive facts about my past and, by also sharing less impressive ones, to demonstrate how comfortable I was, exposing my weaknesses to her. I wrote about my family, and working on the ranch in Montana, about eccentric people I’d known. When I read through these stories now I remember things I’ve forgotten, and notice omissions. I see how I wanted my wife to understand my past, and me. In these stories I’m a dreamer with unlikely skills, a romantic who had been preparing for her, who had been traveling toward her for years and years. That’s actually how I felt, how I feel. But in these pages I’m also a person who never knew romance, never had other girlfriends, never had much to do with women at all.
It would be simpler, clearer to focus on where I am now, and with whom, not returning to those mysteries and confusions—those times, places, and people that I’ve avoided talking or even thinking about for so long, that I’ve hidden away, that I’ve evaded. And yet to avoid, to forget is a kind of betrayal, pretending that there’s no continuity between myself then and now. I feel both ways.
In these stories I sent my wife (before she was my wife) I wrote about being a security guard in the art museum where I was not allowed to touch anything or talk to anyone, where I was forbidden to sit down or write anything, where I always felt so encouraged to turn the corner and see Giacometti’s “Walking Man.” I wrote about how I sank deep into pictures and paintings, how I furtively took notes, circling the galleries, how I held as many stories in my mind as I could.
Yet I did not mention how I’d walk down the long hill from the museum, after work, to the tall house where I lived, and how I lived on the fourth floor with my girlfriend.
Just the other day, I walked down that hill while I was floating in an isolation tank twenty years later, and I walked to that tall house and went around to the side porch, where the mailbox was; inside the mailbox were envelopes addressed to me, in my own handwriting. I opened them, standing there in the fallen snow. They were rejection letters from magazines that didn’t like or “couldn’t find a place for” the stories I’d sent them.
The letters I wrote, that my old girlfriend sent me, came bundled in a black ribbon that she often wore in her hair. It seems fitting that the last letter in the bundle begins this way:
[Sent from Palo Alto to Toronto, 1997]
June 4
Hello! Hope this finds you well. I should have been in touch before now; I’ve been pretty scattered, and things are not really settling, even now. What’s up?
You may have heard that I’m getting married. That’s true. It’s still a little shocking and hard to visualize. A strange kind of levitation. It kind of overwhelms or puts into perspective everything else.
Not so long ago, my ex-girlfriend wrote to say,
I also have come to a place where I want to be direct with people, where I am (finally! At this age!) trying to be in the world as I am inside, where I have finally noticed that telling the truth and being vulnerable and not knowing are not as frightening as I have always thought.
She told me she thought I’d like a talk she’d recently given at Cornell, about the ineffable in writing; this morning, sitting here in my basement, I watched it on YouTube. There she was, tiny on my laptop screen, wearing a red shirt, her voice I hadn’t heard for so long, her hands out in front of her, gesturing with enthusiasm as they always had.
The talk was titled “Telling Secrets,” and in it she described the vulnerability, the risk-taking of putting one’s own storytelling process in view of strangers, of being turned inside out this way. She told how the writers of the television show worked together, sharing stories from their lives—memories, insights, mistakes—and combining them with other stories, turning them into something new. She describes authorship as a collection of voices, a state of being held captive together until “you begin dreaming each other’s dreams.”
While she was there in upstate New York, giving the talk, she’d returned to our old place, the house where our apartment had been. The house looked a little derelict, but had been repainted. She was perplexed about where the doors were—whether they had moved since our occupation. She sent me a picture; the mailboxes have been moved from the side of the house to the front. The long stairway that climbed to the screened porch in back had disappeared entirely.
Her questions about the doors felt crucial. All the ways of egress seemed to have shifted; escape has become difficult, return impossible. She wrote:
I wish I could have talked to you more back then about important things, and even talked about the future together, which we never really did. I think now I knew then that our future wasn’t together and it seemed unnecessary and messy and painful to discuss it. But I also think now that sometimes talking can change those things and I wish I had known how.