Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,53

I have a friend I can call beautiful. I have always thought you were beautiful—I was stunned by your blue eyes at lunch at the colony that day, your eyes widening, laughing, listening, suspicious, fixed on me and never wandering, and I remember thinking, What a pretty neck that girl has, her arms and neck have curves that portend more alluring curves below; how open and speckled her face is, like a day lily. And everyone else there desiccated by drink, ambition, and fear. I know, that’s cruel. I’m a little desiccated by drink myself. You had the radiance of someone who knew her worth and would not squander it. You did not rob anyone to feel that worth, I could tell. You came by it at birth. Like I did. But by the end of that lunch I think your final aloofness—a consequence of knowing your worth—must have put all those thoughts in the deep freeze, or maybe it was something you said about Aquinas that had me filing you away as a classmate for catechism. Actually, maybe it was what you said about Mozart—that it sounded like damn tittering, and you preferred Bach, because it was cavernous and blackened with the soot of burned incense. And there was Lorraine, like Salome, bracelets jangling out a signal that meant she was at loose ends, slippery, available, ephemeral. What did I hear when I sat next to you? A breeze, and then heavy silence. A breeze, and then heavy silence. A sound I could wind my watch by. Self-possession, both intellectual and spiritual, and a merriness tempered by a predilection to judge. I liked it. But after all my panting for ideal love, I was in the mood for a divertimento.

Having spent hours looking at you, hours touching you, I know the many ways in which you are beautiful. But you were my friend first—not an idea about art or Tolstoy or purity or blond hair—and I think you are my friend still. I may not believe in God but I do believe that Simone Weil is right when she commands us to see people as they are and not turn them into creatures of our imagination. I am trying to look at you with love but without illusions.

I love your suspicion—it means that your mind is always sharpening itself against the many lies of this world—but right now it is killing me. So I am going to ask you to write me a letter convincing me that you believe me. You do not have to tell me that you are in love with me, and you do not have to tell me how you feel about me. You have to write and tell me that you believe I love you.

Your

Bernard

July 13, 1960

Dear Miss Reardon—

This is Ted. How is New York? Maine has been swell. Did you not want to come because you were not sure you could get yourself to a Mass in Maine? Have you not heard that there are French Canadians, and their attendant papistry, all over the place up here?

Let me begin by saying that Bernard has not put me up to this letter. I have never before intervened in a romance, but he’s like a brother to me, and I like you a whole lot, and he said something the other day that made me think you needed some assurance as to the truth of his feelings. I know what Bernard is like when he is not in his right mind. This is not that. I have seen him through many infatuations. This is not that. How do I know? He talked about those girls all the time. They weren’t returning his affection, so he had to talk about them to make them real. He had to do all the work, and this made him surly. He picked fights with me, with people at bars. With you—no talk, surliness, no fights. He keeps to himself about it. He seems calm. It’s like he knows being calm is what you need to see how deep, solid, true, and stupid his love for you is. I almost tripped over him coming back from the beach the other day—he was asleep on the lawn, and he had your book spread over his chest, one arm flung out to the side like a flag and he was the snoring, quaking pole. The look on his face was one of complete peace. I thought: He’s far gone. Rest assured that