by Lore Segal
These were the years Leslie and Ilka made love, talked love, and wrote to each other. The sequence of the letters was not easy to establish for it had never occurred to either to date this or that moment. Ilka might write, “Friday midnight after the morning you left.” Leslie wrote: “Monday. Weren’t we wonderful!” She was able to arrange the letters by the paper they were written on. Leslie had used Concordance letterhead except for one two-month period—he must have come across a batch of stationery brought over from Oxford. Ilka got through her linen birthday paper in two weeks. Was it a secondary sexual characteristic that he made himself beautifully clear on a single sheet while she required pages and pages to trace her own meaning to its source in some earlier exchange between them, or something read, heard, seen—narratives that led back to some mini-trauma or to the big old one in her childhood Vienna? “Your last good letter,” and “your lovely letter,” he wrote her. Ilka marveled at his passionate courtesy. “I imagine you hefting yet another fat envelope and I wonder if it’s a chore or a thrill.” She admired Leslie’s reticence, even as she sought to undermine it. “My urge to tell you is as strong as the urge to touch you!” she wrote. “I feel like writing you the minute you leave whereas you can wait till next Monday!”
“Things are churned up by our deepest loving,” he wrote. “Just the usual junk of the unconscious—the lost child revisiting. I’m used to it, but at the time I find it troubling. Hence my discourteous tardiness in writing after we have transcended ourselves. Oh love!” he had written.
Ilka could interface one letter with another to which it must have been the answer: Her, “You talk love to me in words that of all the ways to put it most precisely suit me. I am dazzled by my luck,” had preceded his: “Luck is another word for grace,” followed by hers: “I’m dazzled by your word: Grace.” Ilka had found herself adopting his vocabulary: “What blessed fun,” she wrote, “to be allowed to borrow you to love for a while. I feel impregnable for minutes on end. How did I get to be happy! Amazing.” “Why are you amazed?” he wrote. “Isn’t it normal to love, to be loved, to be and make happy?” “No. Nature and nurture may have formed you for graced love, but I feel every love and each friendship to be a gorgeous accident, an error in my favor and in danger of correction.”
(What in hell had Ilka written in the letter that got into Eliza’s hands? What had Eliza been forced to know?)
The letters Eliza had written to Ilka from Elm Street were typed and dated and fixed the year: “Maggie going on to high school! And you wouldn’t know Teddy Bernstine. He is a new and different shape of boy. Bethy is a new shape also, grown grossly overweight.” Leslie had added, “And insufferable. One has seen this curiosity before: the parents at all times scrupulously courteous to the child who never addresses them under a shout.” Ilka returned: “Poor Bethy! She shouts because she knows her parents are sorry for her which frightens her.” They were off. Leslie wrote: “Why ‘poor’ Bethy! Is there no bad behavior that you are willing to fault?” (“Yes! Mine!” she wrote to him to the institute, meaning him to add “and mine!”) Eliza wrote: “You would make excuses for ‘poor’ Iago. Who could blame him for causing the deaths of Cassio, Desdemona, Othello, not to speak of his own wife. He was passed over for a promotion!” “I’ve always thought,” replied Ilka, “that Iago was trying to account to himself for being so terrible.” Eliza wrote, “Remind your mother that she owes me her recipe for cheese straws.” Reading this good-natured argument so many years later, Ilka experienced the void in the belly that comes when we recognize the movie we are watching: we have watched it before and know the characters inside the car are on the road to the accident.
Not yet; they had not yet turned the corner. “Even our all-night argument was happiness,” Leslie had written Ilka—they had come to be with each other in a LaGuardia motel—“how endlessly we misunderstand each other so that we must go on talking forever, thank god.”
Ilka took a piece of paper, took a pen and copied out: “How endlessly we misunderstand each other,” suppressing “we must go on talking forever” and “thank god.”
“Do you believe in god?” she had asked him. “That’s not a good question,” he replied, “like the question ‘Do you love me?’ the answer to which is, ‘No, though I did a minute before you asked me and will again the minute after.’ I believe there is something eternal outside ourselves, and that I don’t know much about it.”
Ilka, ensorcelled, had fallen in love with Leslie all over again and again and again.
Ilka had written him from a summer in Portugal: “Maggie smells of saltwater and is a dear, civilized little travel companion. She looks and takes everything in, at least I think she does. She makes it her business that I leave tips. My mother is driving us crazy. What you see as her bossiness, I see as anxiety—for us to be on time, for us to be clean and safe, even the anxiety to be agreeable.”
“Your Concordance friends,” wrote Leslie, “keep wondering why you have not married again, and I worry.” Ilka wrote: “Should I be touched by your care for me or irritated at your taking my mother’s tack. Chrissake, Leslie! This is hardly polite of you!” “I beg your pardon,” he wrote, “but I thought you understood why this troubles me.” Ilka answered: “I’m always surprised that things trouble you. You never let on.” “But you know my big, big trouble about Eliza. I’m not going to dump that on you.” “Oh dump, darling! Dump! Don’t I tell you every thought you don’t ask me anything about?” “Wonderful, and wonderful,” wrote Leslie, “that I’ll know everything you want me to know, whether I want to know it or not, and you won’t know anything I don’t want you to know, whether you want to know it or not.”
This also, leaving out the two wonderfuls, Ilka copied out onto her paper.
Ilka had heard trouble when Leslie made one of his rare phone calls. He was canceling a planned visit to New York.
“What happened to your voice? You don’t sound like yourself,” said Ilka.
“My voice closes up when I am angry. Eliza had a bad night. She is better now but has asked me to stay with her and that’s what I will do. She hasn’t often done this to me.”
“What has she done to you?”
“Deprived me of you.”
“You can hardly blame her! How can you be angry with her for that!”
“I don’t know what I can or can’t but it’s strangling me.”
“I shall miss you terribly,” said Ilka. “Tell Celie I can put Nat up when he comes to collect his National Book Award because I told him the room was not available.”
Leslie said, “I told him the institute would stand him a hotel.”
“Well,” said Ilka, “he says this time he’s left Nancy for good and needs to hole up at my place.”
“Nat and I went to hear Mostly Mozart, we went to dinner,” Ilka wrote to Leslie and Eliza at Elm Street. “He says that he is finally convinced he is the poet.” “I am glad you and Nat are showing each other a good time,” wrote Leslie, “though I doubt if Nat’s contemporaries think of him as ‘the’ poet.” Ilka wrote: “You have committed the eighth venal sin which I have just invented. The eighth venal sin is to misunderstand a friend’s irony.” Leslie wrote: “Neither Eliza nor I see the irony in your believing Nat is ‘the’ poet of our times.” “Then the two of you have missed two ironies. Mine and Nat’s.” “If you say so,” wrote Leslie, “but why the gleeful enthusiasm with which you hate my latest chapter?” “Glee! Enthusiasm! I disagree with what you say. Haven’t we always enjoyed our disagreements?” Leslie wrote: “Your poor opinion of my writing is creating a strain between us.”
In copying this Ilka changed it to: “Your poor opinion of my writing has always been a strain between us.”
Ilka had quoted Leslie back to himself: “You once wrote me, ‘How endlessly we misunderstand each other so that we must go on talking forever, thank God.’” “Our misunderstandings,” he had replied, “which used to be an intellectual pleasure and excitement turn into weapons when you
use your absolutes against me.”
Ilka copied out, “Our misunderstandings turn into weapons.”
Ilka had written Leslie, “You, with your mercilessly principled judgment on Bethy, your dismissal of Nat, are the absolutist. My natural mode resembles a game of tennis in which I cover both sides of the court. I serve myself an idea, jump over the net to return it to myself, jump back to be ready to return the return. You know what? I think it’s my doubts that swell my noise.” “Universal doubt is the recipe for nihilism. You are a nihilist. Your absolutism is to be at war with every and any belief, with belief as such.”
Ilka copied this onto the paper.
“No,” she had answered, “I’m at war with true-belief.”
He had written and she copied: “You see a true-believer behind every bush. You are the fanatic of the middle. Read your Dante and see the place to which he damns the trimmers who commit themselves to nothing.”
There had followed a week when no letter came from the institute, none from Elm Street where Ilka had finally called him. Leslie said, “The phone is right outside Eliza’s bedroom. I will write you.” He wrote: “I had hoped that a few peaceful days would permit the chunks that have been floating around in my soul to quit bumping into one another long enough for me to push and tug them into at least an ur-Stonehenge sort of arrangement. But the days have not been peaceful. I had to spend a day in the hospital for tests—everything seems all right, but it meant leaving Eliza alone and in a very fragile state. I worry how she would fare without me. I must pay attention.”
Why, at that juncture, hadn’t Ilka offered to pull out the troops? Because she did not have the sweet confidence in his refusal. “Leslie,” she had asked, “what exactly are we disagreeing about?” “I am not as strong as you think me,” he had answered, “I’m not able, right now, to manage. Taking myself out of the way now you are beginning, quite rightly, to consider other men, your finding Nat Cohn a pleasing companion—is a monumental, a physical exertion for me, together with my fear that our quarrel will get into bed with us. Let us stop before love becomes polluted and happiness turns out to have been illusion …”
Ilka stopped reading to copy out: “Happiness turns out to have been illusion.”
“… Maybe some time in the future—god knows—we can come together again but at this moment my business is to be available to Eliza, which I can hardly imagine managing if, after you and I are no longer lovers, you will not remain my dear friend.”
Ilka wrote him back her fable.
A FABLE
Once there was a man who had a wife and a woman whom he loved. The man said to his wife, “Let’s go to sea in a boat,” and to the woman whom he loved he said, “Come with us.” The three set out together. The sea was calm, the sky friendly, and they were happy. Presently the sky darkened, the sea rose up. The man saw that his wife was deathly afraid and he took the woman he loved and threw her overboard saying, “Our happiness was an illusion.” The woman went under and came up and held her hand out to the man. He called to her, “I do this for your sake so that if a boat passes with a man in it without a wife, he may pick you up!” The woman went under a second time and came up and held out her hand to the man. He called to her, “I do this so our love won’t get polluted!” She went under a third time and the third time she came up and held her hand out to him and he called, “A time may come when I can come back for you!” She went under and came up for the last time and he shook her hand and said, “I hope we shall always be friends.”
Ilka and Maggie stayed with the Bernstines. “No, you can’t come and see Eliza,” Ilka said to the child. “When you’re thirty-five years old, I’ll tell you a story.”
“How come?” asked Maggie.
Jenny Bernstine said, “You kids go out and play in the yard. Take the dog.”
Ilka said, “My mistake was to call ahead. It gave Eliza the chance to say, ‘Unfortunately I am out of town for the duration.’ I’ll call again.” Ilka dialed Eliza’s number and said, “Eliza, I have something here I want to read to you. Listen, Eliza, please. Eliza?” Ilka listened and heard the silence of nobody on the other end. Eliza had hung up. “I’m going over there.”
Ilka rang Eliza’s front-door bell. She knocked and she knocked. She walked around the house peering in the dining-room window and saw the piles of papers laid out on the table and over every surface. The paper looked dusty and dry, beginning to curl at the corners. Ilka went to the back door and knocked on it. She looked in the kitchen window. The kitchen table was covered with papers; there were papers on the counters, papers on the drain board. Ilka returned to the front of the house, parted the overgrown bushes and looked into the living room. Eliza sat on a straight chair with her back to the window. Ilka watched her pick up the water glass half full of white wine, carry it to her lips, sip and set it down. There were pages of manuscript on the seats of the two armchairs and the sofa. “Eliza!” Ilka knocked on the window. It was open an inch at the bottom and Ilka tried to push it up. It was latched on the inside. Kneeling on the ground she was able to align her mouth with the opening. “Hi, Eliza? Eliza, listen. I want to read you some things he wrote me. Listen to this: ‘How endlessly we misunderstand each other. Your poor opinion of my writing has always been a strain between us. Our misunderstandings turn into weapons.’ Does that sound hot and heavy to you?” Eliza got up. Was it Eliza, bent and gray, a hairy crone walking toward Ilka on the other side of the glass? “You asked me to help you, Eliza. Listen. He thought that I was bossy. He wrote me, ‘You are a nihilist.’ And here: ‘Your absolutism is to be at war with every and any belief, with belief as such. Read your Dante and see the place to which he damns the trimmers who commit themselves to nothing.’ Eliza, listen! ‘Happiness turns out to have been illusion. And polluted.’” Eliza unlatched the window. She pushed it all the way down, refastened the latch and walked with an unsteady gait to the chair with its back to the window. She sat down. She picked up the glass and unhurriedly brought it to her lips.
“I don’t know that she heard anything I was saying,” Ilka reported to the Bernstines. “Joe, give me Matsue’s number.” “Hello, Matsue. Yes! Ilka. Hello. I’m in Concordance for a few days. Yes, thank you. Listen, Matsue, can the reverse bug broadcast some sentences into the living room of a private house? It can! It can’t? Why can’t it? Why can’t you? I don’t understand what you are saying.” “I don’t know a thing he was saying,” Ilka told the Bernstines.
Joe said, “The lawyers have drawn up Matsue’s contract so that he is prohibited from conducting experiments in Concordance proper.”
Jenny brought Ilka a cup of coffee. Joe watched her drink it. Ilka looked out the window into the yard. Poor Bethy stood with her back against the wall watching Maggie and Teddy chase the barking puppy. Ilka said, “This wasn’t ever going to do her any good? This was nonsense from the start?”
Ilka’s mother died. Eliza Shakespeare died. Nat Cohn was dead. The Jewish year turned, and Ilka called Maggie, who was a grown-up with a life. “Remember when you put all my friends on my computer for me? Well, it’s crashed! I don’t know anybody’s address and can’t send out my Yom Kippur cards! The only people I still know in Concordance are Celie, the receptionist, remember her? And Yvette. And Mrs. Boots, the cleaning woman. I doubt if anybody ever knew her address. Alpha and Alfred are retired near Santa Fe, I think. Nancy Cohn has moved god knows where. The Bernstines are in France. I’ve lost my friends—all the people I know in America.”
“Oh, Mom! You’ve never in your life thrown away a piece of paper that had words written on it. When I transcribed your addresses onto the computer did you toss out your old address book?”
“I can’t imagine throwing an address book out.”
“Look for your old address book and you’ll find people who will know where people are.”
“I do love you.”
“Yes, dear.”
“You’re wonderfully full of common sense, which is beautiful.”
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“O.K., Mom.”
It was while she was looking for her old address book that Ilka came once again across the old correspondence. “Since the day your letter ran me over,” she had written, “I’ve learned to keep my mouth neutral while we shop for Maggie’s back-to-school jeans and shirts and shoes. How could you put an end to love by letter? Why not face to face?” “I was cowardly,” he had answered.
There followed a series of his letters written from Elm Street, dated, heartbreakingly friendly—Leslie attempting to stuff the years of passion back into the mold that had contained their easy, early friendship. Concordance chat: Cassandra had met her appropriate end. She had gone barking after a woman on a bicycle whom she must have suspected of some crime or misdemeanor. She got run over by an oncoming car—not the cyclist. Cassandra. The Bernstines have got Teddy a puppy and hope it will be less judgmental. We had dinner at the Stones’, who send their love. Nat Cohn tells me he is coming to New York to stay with you. Please write us at Elm Street.”
But Ilka continued to write him at the institute, had written reams, apologizing for the lined yellow foolscap and the pencil which could be erased, could modify, expand, interpolate to get the thing said right, clarified, explained, explained, and explained.
To Elm Street Ilka had written: “Nat was in town and has, I’m happy to say, gone home again. The problem is not Nat’s morals but his conversation, which, like himself, has grown fat.”
