stoop. I paid the deliveryman once to make sure that he placed it at the very top. I read all of the articles. I read the obituaries, all of them, every day. I cook or assemble feasts for myself. I wake up and plan the day’s meals and when I have something particularly good in the house I feel happy. I roam from room to room, a ghost, a large redfaced ghost, & sometimes I stop and look at a picture on the wall, & sometimes, in a particular corner or room, a memory comes to me of my past, and I pause until it has washed over me, until I feel once again alone. Sometimes I write to you. Sometimes a piece of my own furniture will make me stop and wonder where it came from. It’s a feeling of disconnectedness: I don’t know & I have no one to ask. Mostly, though, my house has grown so familiar to me that I don’t see it.
The evening of what has come to be called, on the news, 9/11, I wrote you a letter to inquire about your whereabouts & within a week I had a letter back from you. You said you & your loved ones were fine. Whether or not you have known it you have been my anchor in the world. You & your letters & your very existence have provided me with more comfort than I can explain.
These are the things you must know about me & this is my apology for the many years I have misled you by intent or omission. The slow descent of my health & the ascent of my reclusiveness have occasionally made it difficult for me to come up with suitable material for correspondence, & the fact of the matter is that I couldn’t bear the thought of an end to ours.
In spite of everything, at heart I am still the same
Arthur
• • •
When I had finished it I held the letter in my hands before me & imagined sending it. Imagined very clearly folding it into sharp thirds & taking with my right hand the envelope & inserting with my left the letter. & then sealing it. & then inscribing it with Charlene’s address, which I know as well as my own. O you coward, you coward, I thought, if you were worth anything you’d do it. While writing it I had felt a sort of grand relief, to be unburdening myself after so long, to someone I cared for so deeply. It was the letter I had always imagined writing to her. But unsurprisingly I was too afraid to send it, & so I told myself that it was a selfish sort of honesty, the sort that Charlene didn’t need to be encumbered with anyway.
The events that prompted me to write it are as follows.
First, three days ago, the phone rang. I had been doing absolutely nothing & it gave me a very great shock. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I waited a few rings to let my breathing settle before I answered.
A voice came through the wires. “Arthur?” someone said. “Arthur Opp?”
Now I do not get many personal calls & my heart leapt at who it might be.
“Yes,” I said, I whispered.
It was Charlene Turner. I did not expect to hear her voice ever again in my life but O God I was very glad to. I nearly cried out but stopped myself. I clapped a hand over my mouth instead & bit the inner flesh of it.
It has been nearly two decades since I last saw her. The
in-person relationship we had many years ago evolved naturally into a sort of steady and faithful written correspondence. But over these many years, our letters have become inexpressibly important to me. An outsider might call us only pen pals but over time I feel I have come to know Charlene Turner as well as I have ever known anyone, & have tentatively imagined that one day we would see each other again, we would resume our relationship, & all in all it would be very natural & easy.
Still: her call unnerved me.
We talked briefly & I tried to sound quite calm and relaxed but accidentally I told an extraordinary number of lies.
I wanted to say Have you been receiving my letters—it has been nearly a year since I have heard from her, and she used to write more often than that—but instead I said “How have you