Little Casino

Epistolary associates

DEAREST BELOVED,

I DREAM OF YOU OFTEN, MOST RECENTLY,of the way you looked on that night when your loose gown fell from your shoulders and you embraced me with your gentle delicate arms and kissed me, so sweetly. I can still hear your lovely whispering voice, “Dear heart, how do you like this?” That was no dream, no, I lay wide awake, but now I have little more than dreams. Everything that we had together is gone, changed, because of my gentleness perhaps, a gentleness which led, curiously, to your forsaking me. And yet I still love you, for love is love for beggars as for kings, as the saying has it, and love doesn’t change because the circumstances that surround it change, no, it is like a fixed star. That is to say, my love is as it always was, even though your love has ceased to be, but, perhaps, perhaps, not ceased forever? You are my true love, you have my heart. Wake, love, to this fact, and please give yourself a moment to listen to the cheerful birds singing, singing, caroling of love! Don’t be as unkind as man’s ingratitude, or a proof that loving is mere folly. Where, where are you? And where is your heart roaming? Please come home to me.

Every wise man, and every wise man’s son, knows that love is for now, for the present, not for the hereafter. What is to come is unknown, and still unsure. When you were just twenty, and I used to say to you, “Come and kiss me, sweet,” wherever we were, at parties, the movies, in the park or on the street, anywhere, you’d blush and laugh, but you will surely recall that you always did kiss me, when I reminded you, lightly, to be sure, that youth is a quality that will not endure. I know that you remember this. You were made all of light in those days, and the pure beams of that light scorched me, I’m afraid, not that I didn’t welcome such sweet torture. I would welcome it still if you could tell me where all those past years are, where they went, those years so full of laughter and loving that are now as lost as a falling star. I still remember you as true and fair and honest, I still see the beauty of your face, like a heavenly paradise, and stupidly, often, all too often, I think that we might meet anywhere, just down the street, in the market, even next door! I thought that our love would never die, never decay, I thought that we were made, I confess it, that we were invented by such a love, I thought that our love somehow proved that we were — I don’t quite know how to put this — mysterious. Do you know what I mean?

Oh dearest, please come back to me, or, at least, please reply to this letter. Give me a little hope, allow yourself, once again, to be desired, let me tell you, once again, how sweet and fair you are. I will love you until the world ends, until it is destroyed by flood or fire, until the whole world turns to coal! But we don’t, now, have enough world, or enough time to see how, as you once said, “things will work out.” At our backs, every minute, every second, time hurries on and in front of us is eternity, like a vast desert of loneliness. So let’s devour this time, let’s put our strength and our sweetness together, as we used to do. Please write or call. As it is, I admit, openly, that your absence has displaced my mind so that it is quite hopelessly locked into endless dreams of you.

As ever, my Beloved, good night, with a soft lullaby,

Your devoted, enamored, and faithful friend.

Dear friend:

Thanks for your recent letter. I enjoyed it, and think that the writing is wonderful, just as writing. But you don’t quite engage that crucial faculty of response in me that must be engaged in order for me to respond as I feel I should respond to wonderful writing. You seem sure of yourself, but you’re not getting it across to me, you don’t manage to “jolt” me into taking a fresh view of our relationship. You, as always, have a good, though perhaps obsessive, sense of the past, and you often manage to convey marvelous emotional effect, but in the end your recollection of what we “had” together seems, I’m afraid, rather flat. I’m sorry.

In addition, your letter seems much too long, and I could not, for the life of me, unravel its real purpose, which is, perhaps, my failing. You seem, as always, obsessed with repetitions and, to be blunt, “fancy phrases,” which are not really what I’m looking for right now, verbally speaking. Despite these objections, it’s clear that what you do well you do really well, but my question, in the last analysis, is: Why did you write this? You’ve always had a talent for conversation, the “gift of gab,” as an old, wise editor I once knew liked to say — she was a spark plug of a woman, indeed, in what was a man’s world! — but I just did not feel this letter, chatty though it is. It seems full of repetitions, and for what you have to say, or plead, the letter’s inordinate length really can’t be justified. In a word, it is much too long.

I won’t go into any unwanted song and dance concerning my view of our past relationship and your obsessions with the past and my physical person — I always told you these things, but you never listened to me. I can only say, as objectively as possible, that your letter, much like the last unfortunate months of our relationship, is neither engaging nor exhilarating. Indeed, I found myself struggling to read it all the way through, given its inordinately “poetic” language and its needless repetitions. In a way, it’s an amazing letter, because you occasionally manage to make pain and paranoia funny as hell, but, finally, I just got bored. I’m sorry. Somehow, the gist, the real “heart” of your message cannot survive the irony of its presentation, I’m sorry to say. Perhaps it’s the repetitiveness of the themes that damages your sincerity. I believe you, I do, really, when you say that you love me, but a letter that wishes to convey such a sentiment, such a passion, should do more than just say so. It should be a virtually perfect stunner. As it is, some of your phrases tickled my somewhat perverse and perhaps even “vulgar” sense of humor, an effect that I strongly doubt you intended. But then I may be wrong, since I could not figure out the purpose of your letter: Why, why did he do this? I kept asking myself, to the point of almost obsessive repetition. You are quite successful at conveying certain emotional states, if that was your intention, but you never allowed me to take a fresh “look” at our relationship, which is presented as rather flat and tame from its very inception, although I — and you — know better. You can, however, when you wish, convey strong emotional effects, repetitious though they may be.

I’m disappointed not to be coming back to you with an offer to touch base again with you. You know that I’ve always been a big “fan” of yours, even during those times when you were obsessed with lists of “fancy phrases.” I know that I was supposed to like, or at least admire, those lists, but I was never really able to get into them. They were, of course, occasionally powerful and intriguing, but they were also somewhat paranoid and compulsive. I regret to say that I am not at all comfortable at the thought of reviving our friendship, relationship, what have you. I feel, strongly, that a decision to do so would be a disservice to both of us. Your letter, despite its length and, if I may be forgiven for saying so, its obsessive repetitiousness, has its poignant beauties, but it is also dark and claustrophobic and extremely narrow in scope. I might even go so far as to say that I found it full of a kind of disguised, benign unpleasantness. I don’t think, really, my old friend, that you desire a resumption of what you call “strengthened sweetness,” when such a relationship does not suit my particular needs at the present time.

As you will recall, I’m sure, I did all that I could for our relationship for nearly a decade, only to see it dwindle into a charade of unpleasantness on your part. Our separation, at the end of that experience, left much to be desired. I may be dead wrong, but the emotional effect of that separation was one that only a person with a perverse sense of the comic aspects of life would want to experience again. And that does not describe me, as you know. I did feel a twinge reading your letter, for although it is repetitiously obsessive and darkly paranoid, it is ashine, here and there, with your talent for expression and the mot juste. And although I am, more often than not, befuddled by your poetic phrases, they occasioned a number of emotionally wrenching memories. I have, as you know, great admiration for you still, and for your courage in writing. I regret to say, however, that I do not wish to see you again. I’m sorry. Please do not write again, unless you feel that you have something fresh and interesting to convey, a “new and different” offer, so to speak.

Sincerely,

Your friend

Although these stiff, even stilted and wooden letters are supposed to evoke a modern world that is at once badoom as well as baraboom, it may be noted, in objection, that among the fancy phrases sorely missed are “I’ll never smile again,” “Shoot if you must this old gray head,” and “I saw a groundhog lying dead, Dead lay he.” Devoted Friend forgot to add, or, perhaps, insert them.

“Harry, how about another coffee over here, OK?”

What if it were to be revealed that these stiff, stilted, and wooden letters were exchanged between Donald and Dolores?

“Here’s your coffee, friend,” Harry says, carefully noting that the friend so addressed is not Donald, who has long since moved out of the neighborhood — as has Dolores.

“I am putting a pound to win on Small Advance in the fourth at Gulf Stream,” Harry says. “Do you want to come in for another pound? At eight to five, it is a nice, comfortable price.”

Would Dolores of the dark eyes and deep-golden skin and the face of Tibullus’s Delia ever have written such a caitiff, whorish letter? Even to Donald?

NB: “These letters can only be thought of as the most elementary exercises in the epistolary. They are, even at best, stiff, stilted, and wooden. Their author, student though he or she may be, would do well to consider a career in handicapping, under the able tutelage of Harry the waiter.”