Adios, Scheherazade

I don’t want to tell you any more about last night. I got away from the Y, I slept in an all-night movie on 42nd Street, the gunfights kept waking me up, and today I just wandered around not knowing what to do with myself. They’ve got my car now, of course. And my manuscript, pages and pages of insanity I’ve been typing for the last ten days. And my clean underwear, I’m walking around in dirty underwear.

Everything’s getting stripped away, everything. I’ll be naked before I know it. And here I am going from department store to department store writing you a letter I probably won’t mail to tell you that I don’t know whether or not I’m coming out to see you.

Hester, I don’t think I am. The more I think about you, the more convinced I am that you’re a figment of my imagination, in real life you’re probably just a kooky girl on a spree, you don’t have any more answers than anybody else, and it would only baffle and confuse you to have your older brother pop up out of nowhere trailing a whole soap opera full of complications in his wake.

I can imagine your life. You’re probably on pot and LSD, your sex life has surely grown more complicated since last we met, you’re probably engaged in anti-Vietnam demonstrations and all that hippie business, and in its own way that’s as much conformism as any other army.

Or am I being unfair? Having made you my one hope, the finest thing on earth, here I am debunking you, guarding myself against disappointment.

Hell, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t suppose you know who I am or much care. I may come out to see you, but probably not. And I definitely won’t send this letter, so there’s no point going on with it.

     Thanks, anyway,

     Ed

It didn’t run fifteen pages! I’m cured!

Dear Betsy,

Ignore that number, it doesn’t mean anything.

I want to tell you that I understand your feelings, and that I understand that in the last analysis it doesn’t really much matter whether or not I had sex with Angie. I didn’t, and that’s God’s own truth, but it doesn’t matter, not really.

What matters is you and me, and who we were with each other, and I have to admit that who we were with each other was strangers, and I also have to admit that most if not all of the fault for that lies with me. I lived a very shallow life all my life, and it took the events of the last few days to make me suddenly wake up and look around me and see what I was doing. I was never a good husband to you, because I never opened myself up completely and said to you, “Look, here I am, this is who I am and everything I am and the whole thing belongs to you, with the warts and all.” I never did that, and I’m sorry.

The stuff that you read about you, the things I put in those chapters about you, were things that I believed at the time, and I’m as sorry about believing them as I am about you reading them. That must have been an awful moment for you, but believe me my moment was just as awful when I finally understood that I hadn’t been describing you at all. I’d reduced you in my own mind to manageable proportions, I’d robbed you of your individuality and personality so I wouldn’t actually have to deal with you. I tried to make you a sort of dumb toy, because then I wouldn’t ever have to consider your feelings or your desires about anything, and I suppose the reason I did all that was because I didn’t think I would be able to succeed if I did make the effort. It never got up to conscious thought, it was just instinctive self-protection, so all I can do is make guesses about myself and my motivations, but those guesses feel right and I think they’re probably at least close to the truth.

The question is, what now, and believe me that question hasn’t been far from my mind for a second since you left. When I first discovered that you were gone I wanted you back terribly, but that was just reflex, just the normal human desire for the status quo, the normal human terror of change and the unknown. After that began to subside a little I began to really study the question, and try to decide whether I wanted to get back together with you or not, and I didn’t know. In fact, I still don’t know. Sometimes I think I do want you back, but then other times I think that feeling is just the status quo thing and has nothing to do with the personalities involved, with who you are or who I am or who we could be together. I’d like to talk it over with you if I could, and maybe between us we could come to some sort of understanding of ourselves and our marriage.

Of course, I know that right now you’re very angry, and you never want to see me again, and all the rest of it, and I don’t blame you, but as I told myself the other day, if I really want to get through to you I think I can, I think it would still be possible for me to make you hear me and listen to me. I could be wrong about that, too, but it’s what I think.