Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,5

an apple from the fruit stand on the corner—Hans Hueber chuckled aloud—and I wondered briefly if she had read someplace that apples are the thing to give a teacher. She told me she wanted to major in English. I didn’t think she would do well, but I didn’t tell her so. Whenever Hans Hueber was not in the office, our conversations turned to other things: I asked her what high school had been like for her, & what brought her to this particular university. She was footing her tuition bill herself. I once asked her why she had not chosen to go someplace closer to her home, & she looked at me incredulously & said that she couldn’t have imagined going anyplace else. It was in the city, she said. By the “city” she meant, exclusively, Manhattan, which

she worshipped & fetishized as the physical manifestation of every fulfilled dream. Furthermore, she said, she couldn’t possibly have gone anyplace with anyone she knew from high school. This I understood; I too had had a miserable experience in high school.

It was during these conversations that I came to believe she was similar to me in many ways, & also that I had something to offer her. That I could help her in some way. The semester ended & I watched her walk out of my classroom after our final class and I felt a deep and abiding fear come over me that I would never see her again.

But shortly after classes were over, in late December, I received my first letter from her. It was written out by hand—she had typed, on a typewriter, all her other papers for me; I’d never seen her handwriting before—and addressed to my office at the university. For the first time she called me “Arthur” instead of “Professor Opp.” It seemed like a conscious and strenuous decision. She said to me, Dear Arthur, This is Charlene Turner. Thank you for your class, the best class I’ve ever taken. (She had not taken any other college classes and, as far as I know, never did again.) She told me about books she was reading & things she was thinking about. Movies she’d seen. She signed it, Fondly, Charlene Turner.

I read it twice. & then I read it three more times. I had never in all my life received such a letter. I tucked the letter into my shirt pocket. I carried it around with me all day like a good-luck charm. I brought it home with me on the subway & read it again when I got home. & before I went to bed I sat down at my dining room table to write a reply—the first of the hundreds of letters to Charlene that I would write in my lifetime.

After a few exchanges, I told Marty Stein, who was my dearest friend until her death in 1997. Marty I met as a graduate student at Columbia. She was a year ahead of me, perpetually hunched over, scurrying from place to place like a mouse in glasses. It was Marty—expert on the work of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf; willfully and perhaps exaggeratedly ignorant about much of the rest of the canon—who got me a job at the college that became my home for nearly two decades. In return, it was I who convinced her to move to Brooklyn in the fall of 1979. I got her an apartment on the top floor of the brownstone next to mine, & together, platonically, we whiled away hours & hours at school & at home.

Partly I told her to make it feel real. I told Marty everything. She was drinking tea on my couch. I said, “One of my students is writing to me.”

Marty looked at me. “A woman?” she said. Marty would never have used the word girl, though that’s what Charlene was: a girl, O very girlish.

I said yes.

“What’s she saying?” asked Marty.

“Anything she wants to,” I said.

“Have you written back?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

I paused. “Five times,” I said.

“She’s written to you five times, and you’ve written to her five times,” said Marty.

“Approximately.”

“Do you love her?”

“Probably,” I said. I felt hopeless and desperate. Marty put her tea on the table so that she could throw her hands into the air and let them fall on either side of her.

She thought my friendship with Charlene was ridiculous. She thought it smacked of patriarchy. “How old is she?” she asked me, & I told her truthfully that I did