Adios, Scheherazade

So what I want to do, or what I think I want to do, is come up to Monequois and see you. I’d send this letter first, special delivery, and then phone you when I got to Monequois, and we could maybe arrange to meet somewhere and talk. If you wanted to. Or you could say you’d meet me and then call the police instead and tell them where they could pick me up. You could do that, too, if you wanted to.

I’m still not sure in my own mind what I want to do. I might hitchhike out to California to see my sister, or I might fly out there, which would be faster, or I might do something entirely different, something I haven’t even thought of yet. I might go up to Albany and see my mother, though that seems doubtful. I honestly don’t know if I want to get back together with you or not. I don’t even know if I want to talk with you or ever see you again.

If I send you the letter, you’ll know I’ve made up my mind. I realize I’m not being politic talking this way, but I want you to understand the confused state of my mind. And I think the reason I want you to understand that is that I want you to believe that whatever pain I inflicted on you I did inadvertently and without ever wanting to hurt you. I’m sure the hurt is just as severe no matter what my intention, but I’m hoping that forgiveness will be easier if you know that I hurt you only because I’m a fool and not because I consciously wanted to bring you pain.

And I also want you to know that not only did I never have sex with Angie, I never had sex with anybody but you for the entire length of our marriage. I’ll tell you the total truth, I kissed Kay once. At a party, when we were both high. Kissed her, and that was the end of it. Felt uncomfortable about it afterwards. That was the only time I ever did anything at all outside our marriage, and that was no more than a kiss. I swear it.

I wrote foolish things in those chapters you read, and the business about Angie was the most foolish. I was feeling lousy, I had that deadline hanging over my head again, I was failing to write the November book, and after a while I was writing just anything that came into my head. Mean things, stupid things, and lying things. Some of them out and out lies, like the Angie thing, and some of them lies I thought were truths, like the stuff about you.

Did I ever love you? I think so. I can’t be sure. I didn’t love you when I married you, that’s the truth, but before that I think I did, and at times afterwards I think I did. Never enough, though, I know that. I do know it, and I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for everything. For lousing up your life as well as my own.

I don’t know if I’m going up there or not, and if I do I don’t know what you’ll do, and if we get back together again I don’t know that it won’t be a mistake.

If you get this letter, you’ll be hearing from me by phone.

     Hesitantly,

     Ed

Dear Rod,

I’m suffering from some sort of Smith-Corona psychosis, I have to type all the time, all in fifteen-page segments, and this segment appears to be letters to different people, so I thought I’d drop you a fine and let you know what’s happened since we parted company.

At the moment, by the way, I am in an office building on Madison Avenue, on the ninth floor, in the offices of something called Tex-Chem. I wandered into this building, after having been thrown out of Bloomingdale’s while finishing a letter to Betsy there, because I couldn’t think of any other handy department stores with typewriter departments. And up here on the ninth floor I found this huge office full of women typing, rows and rows of women typing, with here and there an empty desk, a typewriter lying fallow. So what I did, I walked in as though I belonged here, I sat down at one of the typewriters, and here I am writing.

The unfortunate thing, this is pica type, and I’m used to elite type, so my word count is getting screwed up. Is it still all right for me to do just fifteen pages, even when some of them are in pica type? That’s the kind of question I’m struggling with now, Rod.

I’ve wandered around today with a pad of cheap typewriter paper in a large manila envelope, going from store to store, typing gloomily at demonstration machines, not knowing exactly what I’m doing or why. I keep thinking one of these letters will be the final one, I’ll be able to end it all at last and go do something. Something other than type, I mean.

I think when I finally decide what I’m going to do, the decision will free me from this typing mania, and then I’ll just bundle up all these letters into the manila envelope and send the whole batch off to the same recipient. Maybe you. What the hell, you’ve read all the rest of this junk, except for the chapters I threw away, so you might as well read the finish. If this is the finish, which I earnestly pray it may be.