Now we come to the heart of the matter, the one that got away.
Yet, it's not quite true that she got away. I can literally call her up at any time. I can speak to the still beautiful, "real live girl" anytime that she's not traveling. I "see" her all the time on Facebook. We message there from time to time. There are limits. She is cool on the topic of a face to face visit, though we live only three hours apart by car. There are certain topics that I find difficult to broach. These will be explored here in this crazy attempt to call all demons forth and make them stand in line for spankings. Do I suppose that I'll be spanked back, knocked clear across the crowded room? Do I see a stranger? Will she be hurt that I never kissed but told? Will she be hurt that I try to shine a light on her shining light, without the shadows and distractions that existed back in the day? She still shines. She is as I write this shining. Her open heart is engaged in any number of artistic enterprises in which she takes beauty from the world around and makes it hang on collector's walls. Her steadfast heart is engaged in any number of charitable acts, trying to ease the burdens of life in this world as her own burdens multiply.
I can also call her up by looking again at the sixteen letters that she sent between 1973 and 1976 from her parent's home in suburban DC to my various locations in Boston. The calling of that person up is a little spooky. For one thing, she's not listening to me any more. Although I can read her better now in my hard won peace of mind, I cannot bring my findings back to the page in any way that makes a difference. I can see why it didn't work. I was a perfect ass. That is what the calling up of demons does. It holds up that mirror in which you see your face turned ugly, never learning anything, making bad decisions and not following through or finishing anything. She gets very restive, that former woman when confronted with this sort of bullshit. And that's where the two of them, the then and now, snap back together. Neither that woman, nor the living woman, tolerate much, if any, bullshit. That old one could sure dish it out, though. Let the spanking begin. I'll be bending over soon enough. This must be told.
Reading the letters is like being Kinbote, the Nabakov devil, looking at the purloined index cards of of John Shade's poem in search of the 'pale fire' of a story that the poet should have rightly been telling. He must have heard it told, but it had apparently gone in one ear and out the other, blah, blah, blah. For the most part, she tells of her rich life, her past love, her current obsessions and difficulties, all illustrated with cartoons, abstract expressionist drawings and told of in a measured, lovely pen hand. Rightly self absorbed and self possessed, she speaks of her life as she lives it. She recounts a rich tale of adventures on the high seas which I must try to reconstruct (or not), and she does it with charm and grace.
It's the heart of the matter, because you never really leave this stuff behind. I once sat across from a woman in a coffee shop who thought I was younger than I was. She told me about her ideal partner, the one with very little baggage. She said she had a two bag limit. I laughed and said that I was traveling light. She asked my age, begging pardon. It works better for a woman of a certain age to ask a man of a certain age. When I answered, she was taken aback. She had no idea I was that old. She soon rose and took her leave. I was left to ponder, looking out at the busy DC street scene. I was clearly over her limit just on the sell by date alone. It was true, I had loved and lost. I had loved and been unloved. I had loved and been loved and walked away. I had looked at love up one side and down the other and come up wanting. I had tried all sorts of ill advised things, but I had never so much as kissed Heidi Walker. (We held hands, it seems.)
As it is, I like the old girl better. I am not afraid of her as I am of the living woman. The youthful words and pictures can't bite back, but they can and do kick ass. The plain evidence in Heidi's letters is that I started it. It's funny: having only one side of a correspondence, one still has the ghostly image of the other side. She writes, and for legal and ethical reasons I must paraphrase,
"I bounded up the stairs and almost missed your letter."
The date on the postmark is January 4, 1976. Some of the scraps and bits inside are dated in a confusing array of months and dates, seemingly going back several years. Did she clear her desk and send me scraps? Did she have all this stuff saved up with me in mind, but had it on ice since I'd been mute for a few years? Did she find herself too busy in that time to write? Did she even know my address? Her letter thus postmarked is in an envelope that's covered with notes in hand writings I don't recognize.
"This party does not reside here."
The address that Heidi wrote (I can recognize her hand) is crossed out in green felt tip. The same green ink writes,
"Not at this address."
Was that the angry hand of Harmony? I'd left her, as you recall. She must have been in a snit. She could have walked the letter over to me if it had arrived in her box. But perhaps either one of us might have taken the name off the box, and thus the letter might have sat for a day or so on the steps. Harmony would not have recognized the handwriting or the name. She'd have recognized my name, but not that of, for all she knew, my little bimbo down on a bamboo isle. Then as a final mystery, my correct address (the Cal Crib) was pasted over part of the original zip code by means of a change of address sticker. Any historians taking notes out there? It was 70 the Fenway, apartment B-3, Boston, MA 02115.
[Yes, we're out here taking notes, but the address you mention is a pile of rubble overgrown by the hardiest of weeds. Were you thinking it would be a tourist destination like the Mozarteum? There's no MacDonalds accross the street from where you used to live. You have no idea of the fate that you will endure. Well, ok, maybe some idea.]
Her thoughts about my letter kept her awake past her bed time. In the clues of the letter she wrote back, I see that I'd babbled about tripping. I had taken an acid trip and cited Kesey and the bus. She'd taken an ocean voyage and cited "Cuckoo's Nest" as an example of...what? The gritty nature of shock treatments, the luxury of having freedoms by virtue of fitting within socially prescribed norms, the constructs of civilization that have boxed someone in (and she compiles quite the list, some items of which are from my babble about Carlos Casteneda and who knows what all else), to the point where getting on the bus and taking a literal trip is impossible for someone imprisoned in a shattered mind. In such a situation it is simply too outside the box to expect sympathy from family, friends, and neighbors, on out to local authorities and government officials. The Kesey novel is about the horrors of the shock shop and the triumph of, what?, were you going to say the human spirit? Yes. I was going to say that, but I see now that the girl is mother to the woman. Her compassion, her clear reasoning, her creativity and wit, her somewhat didactic side, it's all there. By the light of day, she's up and kicking.
But before that, she's been up late and it's all my fault. She's carped about flat tires and thunderstorms and being forced to miss a calligraphy class. Her feet are cold. Yet she can't stop thinking about my letter.
"O Cal!"
How we emoted when we were pups! Can't we get this back? Conjure this back up?
Even before that, seeming to parody the Reed Wittemore poem, she's described the contents of her desktop, including the Little Black Sambo. (Did we all grow up on that?) She looks over her things, gathering her thoughts, writing the whole time. She speaks of work and worry over work and how she became entranced by photography and the enlargement process. She's enlarging medical photos and very quickly she's barking up my tree when it comes to the godhead in the fibers of my jeans. She's looking at nerve endings and almost picturing the firing of the neurons. Almost.
"I am filled with our words, the words that we might share. I can't believe I'm still awake."
Still writing, she hits the bottom of the page and signs, but in the instant that you turn the yellowed page, no time at all really, no pause to brush teeth and maybe pee, she's climbed into bed with her notepad and continues writing in the dark. In this sense, I went to bed with her the first time: via a notebook and a faint blue line of ink. Now I think that this is the far better way to do intimacy. No muss, no fuss, just good clean fun. She leaves plenty of space and feels her way, groping, still writing. She muses about the possibility of teleportation to Boston. She stretches and reaches out to embrace. She mentions her childhood transiency as a reason for her denial of her needs and wants. (She's close, so very close.) But in the end, sleep wins out with the snake still chasing its tail.
This letter goes on and on. It's packed with poetry. It's completely illustrated. Last summer, when I reread all this stuff after thirty odd years, I had the time to really read it all and understand. This had been impossible back in the day. Understanding filled me to the brim. I dashed off a message and inquired about a few details from the time before. She thought I should turn these ancient documents into a romance novel. I liked that idea, and here I sit. I also begged her to illustrate the book. I sought collaboration. How much easier (or harder) that would be! But no, the woman demurred. She spoke of things that frankly made me blush. It was my turn to be up nights thinking of what she'd said. I cannot speak of it. I won't. I understand that life can be long and tedious, that the edge can abate and trust be bleached out by turns of events. It is as good as I can get it to write these chapters and send her the link. Oh, sure, she sees it as part of the flow on Facebook. But perhaps she needs to be invited with a direct link to this outpouring regarding her memory and its remnant.
On and on. One of the poems (or poem shaped narratives) is very shocking and earthy. It is more or less like the old Stone Ponies song about wanting freedom above all else, not to be tied down by some romantic notion, and not to be constrained in any way. Is she even writing to me? I must have wondered this as I sat there in the Cal Crib and read this stuff. On the other hand, even now my pen hand wants to fly to the page and tell her her earthiness is fine by me. Let her be a raging bitch on the rag, let her kick and shout, let all the chaos of her life and life in general pour out. It's all something I can take like a man. Now. (Maybe not so much back then.) I never think of her as one who struts her stuff, but here she struts it. I realize that I never knew her. It's not just the solipsistic barrier. I missed the point. She's struggling here to get comfortable with herself. She's not ready for external interference of any kind. I'm in, then out.
She seems at last to remember who she's writing to. It's easy to forget. I aim these words at her, both the long gone her and the reachable woman: you close not with the usual "love" but with quiet awe that I would have imparted so much. I have no idea what I once imparted, but I have a very good idea what you imparted in response. You took a scalpel and cut yourself open and bled your life onto the page directly. How did I respond to that?
She was writing this urgently in November. I didn't get this letter until January. So for a response, at first, she got silence.
