Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,44

to you and Bill. Please give Bill my love. I am very appreciative of how he smiles with us, and at us, and then drifts off to his work as if out of respect. And I am very appreciative of how he and I can sit and have coffee while you sleep and feel like friends too. He is also a whiz at finding delicious uses for the many sausages that populate Chicago. You are a very lucky woman, as I have said before.

I still feel a little ashamed of the way I refused to go on that hike when I saw the Doberman hanging around the entrance to the trail. Your car makes a nice place in which to nap. Bill was very nice about that too. Don’t tell anyone. I try to make like I have steel intestines. I don’t know what’s gotten into me about dogs.

Could you send me the recipe for that pound cake you made for dessert on Saturday? Although I have a feeling mine will turn out to be a brick the first few times—you’ve always had a lighter touch than I when it comes to baking. I am convinced it is because you don’t hold grudges.

Speaking of which. Thank you for listening to me talk about Bernard. But I reject your suggestion that I may be in love with him. When I try to conceive of who he is to me—and you know I never like to spend too much time brooding about what anyone other than family means to me, because that way lies disappointment and self-righteousness—I conceive of him as an older brother. I see him too clearly to be in love with him.

I maintain that the force of my feeling is familial—that whatever I feel for him is as protective and exasperated as what I feel for Ann, and perhaps even more intense, as it explodes with frequent awe of his brain. And with pain, when I think of his tired gray face, a face that was his but not his, steamrollered by drugs and exhaustion.

I cannot comprehend what he is going through. So my mother died when I was four—what real pain is that? I think my words and my presence offer no more solace to him than the solace offered a dog in petting his head. I’m just standing there, petting Bernard, ineffectually. Why should he want to hear from someone in, as it were, Rude Health? What could I have to say that would make any sense to him? And yet I wrote him, twice, imagining I did have something to say. I think I am starting to feel some guilt for the way I responded to him last spring. I rejected him, and yet he still calls me his favorite. He really must be crazy to do that.

Now I will confess I do think Bernard’s handsome. You’re Claire; I can’t lie to you. He has physical vigor that appeals. He swims with an obliviously sloppy love of water, as if the ocean is a piece of paper he’s ripping in half. I’ve seen him climb trees in the middle of a walk just to climb them, and I’ve seen him tear legs off steaming turkeys with no care for the heat because he could no longer wait to eat them. His brute force makes me laugh, and it makes me feel affection—affection—for him.

It was too hard, having seen this physical vigor, to see him as he was in the hospital.

I’m a little nervous at us being in close proximity when he starts teaching at Hunter College—Bernard is overwhelming even through the post—but am very glad he is returning to his usual routine.

What are you reading now? I am reading the Philip Roth you recommended. I don’t know, Claire.

Roth makes me think of Ann. Of how she might get trapped. Sometimes when I listen to her, I think she’s Yeats (prostration to an ideal despite its being a poison) and Maud Gonne (impervious to having done the poisoning) in one. It makes me want to slap her sometimes. Oh God. The older we get, the more I worry about her and her appetites. When I was younger they made me angry. She’d eat seconds when dinner was supposed to last us until next day’s lunch, borrow my dresses without telling me, take money from my wallet (at least she’d leave a note, with apologetic exclamation marks, promising to pay me back) to go out with friends after