Postscript: Have you seen anything odd around Farney Road lately? Anything untoward?
Feb. 5, 2014
Dear Ms. Van Antwerp,
Thank you for bringing down the mail. Why do you ask if I’ve seen anything troubling on the street? I assume you have. Please do not hesitate to ask me for help with anything at all. If you would like to discuss a matter, you are very welcome to come by for a cup of coffee.
I have noticed you aren’t going out as much. Is there a problem with your new vehicle? You would be more than welcome to come along with me to the shops, the post office, the YMCA any time I am going out.
Your neighbor,
Theodore Lübeck
Sybil Van Antwerp
17 Farney Rd
Arnold, MD 21012
March 1
Dear Sybil,
You are stubborn, but I am a patient and persistent man. I will be back on the East Coast in April. Is there any chance of us meeting up then? If it’s my quality of character you’re unsure about, trust the judgment of the Donnelly family!
Here is my story, in short. I grew up in Wisconsin, but my family moved to Texas when I was 15 for my father’s work. He was a laborer, but through mutual contacts was connected to a wealthy ranch owner who was seeking a grounds and estate keeper and manager, and my father took the position. I went to college in Dallas, where I met my first wife, Wendy. We had one child together (my son, Amos) before she divorced me. I married again, too quickly I admit, but we did not have any children together because she didn’t want children (turned out that was a good plan), and we divorced several years ago. I’ve been happily on my own since.
In the last few years, I have found that I miss that ongoing conversation, the idle back and forth to pass in the morning, or while you walk from the car to the restaurant, or whatever it is. I love to travel, but it’s not much fun alone. I’ve tried dating, but good conversation is astonishingly difficult to come by. I retired a few years ago. I was gunning for retirement for my whole career, and then I did it, and at the end, damn it, I find myself bored! Terrifically bored. That is, I was feeling bored until you livened things up. For years Liz Donnelly has dropped your name to me. We’re the same age, you and I, I think. I’m 76. There, now we’re better acquainted.
I have gone to lengths to apologize for all levels of my malfeasance, and my contrition was, and is, genuine. Now come to dinner with me, Sybil.
Mick
Ms. Joan Didion
30 E. 71st St. #5A
New York, NY 10021
March 5, 2014
Dear Joan,
Well, here I am coming to you with my tail between my legs, unable to bring myself to readBlue Nights. For months it sat there on my desk in the small stack beside my mug of pens. I would finish a book and know yours was there to be started, but I never could, and instead I would take the one beneath it. Seeing the cover began to fill me with dread. It seems where you have found the courage to explore your feelings to the uttermost through writing on the death of your child, I have not. I cannot bear it. I’ve placed the book in a box in the linen closet at last. Perhaps one day I will have the guts to read it. Please forgive me.
My ex-husband (his name is Daan, he’s Belgian) is dying with cancer. We divorced nearly thirty years ago, and with our children grown we have no cause to maintain regular contact. However, there’s a strange loophole, and that is my best friend Rosalie is married to Daan’s brother, so I do hear things from time to time. It was Rosalie who told me about the cancer. I know cancer, at my age, is inevitable, if not for myself then for someone else, or many others, around me, but even still, hearing this news of Daan has disturbed me.
I hope you don’t mind if I get a bit of this down on the page. (I know you don’t, Joan.) We had a good marriage. Daan is a gentle, intelligent man. His soft nature is the opposite of mine, but we balanced one another and we shared a great deal in the realm of our thoughts. He was an avid reader of all things and we used to sit up nights just chatting on. He loved to read nonfiction on the history of Europe. He was born into an offshoot of some oldline of Dutch aristocracy, raised in Belgium, and he did coursework in history up to the PhD level, though he never finished once the worst happened. He was a high school teacher (one of the only people I’ve ever met who always, without fail, places a comma correctly—EVERY TIME—and English is his third language) and he did some translating, although with his intelligence I always thought he could have been much more. When Gill died I went very far inside myself, and I suppose Daan was doing the same thing, though it was Daan who continued to raise the remaining children, while I rather disappeared from the family for some time. I took a brief leave from work and I guess it was a few weeks that I stayed in my bedroom, only leaving if everyone was gone and then I would come out like a thief, listening to be sure I was alone and what I would do is go sit in the dirt in the garden with my back against the siding. It was a sweltering summer, but I would sit there for hours. Watching insects, watching the flowers grow—really! I remember scraping my fingers through the soil and the black pushing beneath my nails, in my cuticles, embedded in my fingerprints, fetid, unwashed, sweaty, and staying. And then, you know, after some time of this behavior my nature clicked back on. The garden sitting was a kind of escape or a kind of penance I was making and I didn’t deserve either, so I stopped and got back to our life. I went back to work—it was premature, a mistake I see in hindsight, but work was the thing I knew I could do. Something from that time is coming back to haunt me now, as a matter of fact, literally.
When I play it all back I am ashamed, and yet I cannot imagine having done any other thing. Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter.
We kept it going until the children were in high school, but then they were involved in their own lives and out in the evenings,so I started to stay later and later at the courthouse. I used work as an excuse. The research, finding answers to every problem, no matter how convoluted, the making sense of it and writing it all out into a sensical and watertight opinion. When my father died we’d received a substantial payout from his estate and I could have cut back, but the work became my haven from what waited for me at home. I’m sure Daan assumed I was with other men. I wasn’t, but I didn’t go to pains to convince him. I was sabotaging us. I wanted it to be over. It was so painful, you see, because Daan was—the children, he was Gill, they were all tied up together. I couldn’t cut myself away from Bruce and Fiona, but I could cut the stay to Daan, and I did. I knew exactly what I was doing.
I came home one evening when Bruce was away at college and Fiona was out and Daan was in the kitchen. He had opened a bottle of a good wine we kept in the pantry for dinners with friends, and when I walked in and saw him at the counter with the wine, a glass poured for me, I knew. He said he was going to move back to Belgium. I didn’t argue. He never liked America anyway. We drank the wine. We had sex, and it was the first time since Gill had died that I wanted to. That was the end of that. A while later he left and Fiona went with him and finished out high school there. I still loved him, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear him.
You get the one life. It’s awfully unfair, isn’t it?
With love,
