Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,52

you should be lolling around at the first—Wild Ecstasy. You only think you know what you can’t handle.

This is how these things work.

I don’t know what will happen between you two. I don’t even know yet what I think should happen between the two of you. I might write you another letter tomorrow telling you to stay away from him. But if we all ran away from what scared us—I’m not even sure how to end that sentence, though I think we could both come up with about a dozen answers that would send you running toward what scared you, as a point of human pride.

You are to write me anytime about this. You and I have only each other to rely on in these matters, not being normal women.

Love,

Claire

June 30, 1960

Dear Claire—

Thank you. You not only gave me advice but made me laugh, and I needed that, maybe as much as I needed advice. What you say makes sense. I will try to, per William James, act as if—as if Bernard is true.

Love,

Frances

July 10, 1960

Dearest Frances—

I wish you had come up here to Maine with me to visit Ted. He says hello. “That girl,” he says, “is a serious girl. That girl will take a bad joke, look at you with pity, and then make a much better one out of it.” I think he is jealous of me. As he should be. A man always wants his friends to be a little in love with his beloved too.

There is a large bed here, right under a window, framed in pine branches, summer’s frost, from which I can see the sea, and in the mornings I think of what your bare arms, covered in freckles, would look like in the clear bright water. In the afternoons I wonder whether the salt water heated by the sun would stain your skin and leave behind a reticulation—an Irish articulation of Venusian sea foam. Your freckles: I want to down them like oysters, having my fill on a rock that no one can find.

I’ve been up here thinking of your breasts and masturbating like a weed of a boy who’s been told it could get rid of his acne. Why did you have to be virtuous and stay in the city? I would have allowed you your own room. And there would be enough people here to make a buffer between you and my avarice. These are good solid people Ted has collected from law school, and there’s also a screenwriter who fled Hollywood for newspaper reporting in Boston, and so when swimming is finished and debate about the election has waned, the screenwriter can serve up gossip about who is an alcoholic and who is secretly seeing whom. Which means there are no women here to pry into what you mean to me. Ted’s wife is too busy organizing a DAR luncheon to care. (I wish I were joking.) Plus, there are real oysters here that we have been downing like shots in some vinegar.

I am tempted to write a whole letter full of things that will make you blush. I am tempted to write indecent things that will make you angry. But I have the soul of a Puritan and this prevents me from letting my desires billow out in a more baroque, black-velveted, Sade-ian manner. Correction, and how could I have made that mistake: A Puritan would be content to love an absence. I am not. I can say only this very artless, sweet-hearted thing, which is that you are velvet-skinned and freckled, and I will not be able to sleep tonight because of it.

Your

Bernard

July 11, 1960

My love.

I’m up and looking at the moon on the ocean and I’m thinking.

The air around you is sometimes wary and chill. I think you are waiting for me to become bored with you. I think you think I have gone out of my mind a little, maybe. Please believe that I love you.

There’s nothing I can say to convince you. I know whatever I say will sound like ravings. Love letters are allowed to sound like ravings, but when you have a history of raving, that pass is revoked. I can imagine how I sounded in the letter I just sent you. But it’s a pleasure for me to sing to you. And to not care that it may sound like Mozart—a ridiculous fecundity of notes, and a sweetness therein. I know you hate Mozart.

I have many things to sing of because