this trip.” She laughed. “Goodbye,” she said, and then she ran up the stairs of her hotel and into her lobby without looking back. I wondered if I had made her do something she didn’t want to do. But there was some note of query in her response to me—something leaf-green and nascent at the bottom of her deep blue reserve.
We drove to my building, and I felt an inexpressible sadness when I got out of the cab. I stood there on York Avenue in front of the apartment, reluctant to go in. I almost hailed another cab back to Frances’s hotel. I started cursing her for getting in the cab with me. I did not want to sleep next to Susan. I slept on the couch and masturbated, cursing both Susan and Frances. The next morning Susan said: “Is something wrong?” I said no, nothing. She did not believe me, but since I was coming home every night, made sure to come home every night, she let the subject drop.
I do miss her. I even miss her rigidity. It is a self-containment that to me mimics the sublime. It’s not hysterical, as Susan’s now seems—and that’s unfair, because I’ve made Susan hysterical. Looking at Frances, I had the realization that I had been both her lover and her brother. With most people, you settle into being one or the other. I feel related to her still, familial, because she knew me when I was at my most Bernard and I knew her when she was at her most Frances. We’d read each other like books we were endlessly fascinated by. Frances, of course, hiding her fascination beneath the covers of intellectual exchange and perhaps some subconscious notion that we were enacting a holy friendship like that of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.
She is—was—the familial and yet the sublime.
I am determined for once in my life not to hurt a woman if I can help it. I know I will do it again in a rage, but while I am sane at this moment, I want to be good—that insipid word which should be sacred. And yet I feel myself wanting to see what Frances is like now, see if this pliancy I sense in her is softness or sadness, and I tell myself that if I undertook this mission, it would be sacred because it’s Frances—it would be forgiven by the laws of God and man because it is Frances. If I wrote her, I know that I would be trying to get her in front of me again so I could consume as much of her as she would allow. A panic is gathering, a clutch of wild conjecture that’s sending me out walking for hours between teaching and home, and I don’t know whether it means I have to reach toward her or turn away from her, or check myself in somewhere. No, I know I don’t need to be checked in somewhere—I have a very clear sense here that I am a moral animal. I half wish that I were about to break down so I would not need to feel that burden.
Bernard
October 16, 1962
Dear Bernard—
I hope this letter finds you well. I was glad to see you. You might not have been able to tell, but I was. Very much so.
You suggested I write. I am about to start two classes on Milton. Maybe you could tell me what I shouldn’t miss in pitching my softballs to the girls at the College of Mary Pat.
Thank you for reading my book.
Yours,
Frances
November 12, 1962
Frances—
Dear Frances.
I don’t think we should write each other. Starting up a correspondence with you would be too dangerous for me.
Susan saw your return address on the envelope, which she found in a book that I’d left in the kitchen—I should have been more careful about this, it’s true, because she is a ruthless tidier—and she went out of her mind in a way that was difficult to witness.
I want to explain to you why I am saying this. Susan is extremely jealous of you. She has not been jealous of the women I have taken up with when I have been ill. She understood that those girls really were just wreckage from episodes—minor players in a nightmare—but if she thought I were about to start a dalliance with you, she would think something else entirely. She would think I had changed my mind in broad daylight, while sane, and that