by Chuck Kinder
Night after night Ralph and Alice Ann lay there in that hot dark getting sweetly sleepy together, wanting to fall asleep exactly as they wanted to die, at the same moment. Submerged in that lovely and pure isolation of love, they imagined an island called themselves, surrounded not by hot dark infinite fields of corn but by imaginary fish in a vast sea of perfectly still water, and any sound they heard outside their open windows they called a splash. But all that was when they were green and brave and beguiled by hope, back before the madness had set in. Ralph’s last memory of those two weeks of true and isolated love was a perfect portent of the times ahead. He could see them still, late that last night, two phantoms in the rain, right over there in the gravel and red-dog beside the road, shouting at the top of their lungs, waving their arms crazily in the air, stalking up and down the roadside in the rain, accusing, accusing, Alice Ann’s blue eyes turned green with anger and rage, green like those Iowa afternoon skies sometimes turned when storms were rolling in and tornado warnings crackled over the radio. Sooner or later, Ralph said to Jim, and popped the joint’s roach into his mouth, everything that comes into your life leaves it. Just passes in and passes out. Every love story is finally left unfinished. And, finally, when the lovers are dead and gone, history, and everybody who ever knew them is history, then everything just passes at last from living memory and doesn’t matter anymore, doesn’t mean dick, in the land of the currently living.
2
Later that night in Iowa City, back in the motel room (just the two of them, old Ralph and Jim, for there was no romance in store for them that night, not that either of them was really serious about getting any in the first place, which if the truth be told had been simply old salty-dog talk), Ralph had put in a call to the woman he loved, and whom he would marry only weeks before he died. Jim put in a call to Lindsay, but the line was busy. Fuck, Jim had said to Ralph, I just hope Lindsay ain’t gabbing with one of my girlfriends. Ralph said, How’s the boy, by the way? Jim said, Boy’s doing okay, I reckon. Rolf’s a good kid. He’s eating me out of house and home. His grades are real good. He’s just this big goofy, dreamy, basically good kid. I tried to teach him how to hot-wire a car the other day, but he ain’t got no mechanical abilities.
Ralph and Jim passed joints back and forth between their beds and lay there in the darkened room more or less watching television. At one point Jim said, So what do you hear from Alice Ann, by the way? Ralph said, I only mostly hear about her these days. From the kids mostly, on those occasions when they call to hit me up for cash. Alice Ann used the money I setded on her to buy the old farmhouse her mom and real dad had supposedly met at during a dance back in the Stone Age. Apparently she hired a bunch of hippie long-hairs who claimed they were master Zen carpenters to restore it so that she could establish some sort of karmic community center or something, something like that, some sort of Eastern Dumb-Nut Ideas Institute for those dropouts and drugheads and other blissed-out dopes who called themselves Zen-nicks, but the hippie board-bangers just generally ripped her off, sat around smoking dooby all day and digging their navels. So Alice Ann went belly up yet again, and now the last Ralph had heard she was back to slinging hash in some roadside truckers’ diner in the Northwest somewhere, married to some mechanic or something; something like that, anyway. Who really knew. Who really knew anything at all.
Several weeks after Ralph’s untimely death from lung cancer not a year after their last trip together, Jim returned home from campus one afternoon to find Lindsay working as usual in their back-yard garden she loved so. Who knew where Rolf was out running around. Probably at the library caressing the covers of books. Or sitting on a rock down by the river. The boy seemed to understand intuitively that every day it was both the same and a new river. The boy spent a great amount of time on his butt in the grass of hillsides considering the passage of clouds. Rolf was a big woolly-headed smart boy whose capacity for gentleness and empathy and foodstuffs astonished Jim daily.
Jim and Lindsay had bought a turn-of-the-century, yellow- brick barn of a house on a hillside in the Eastern city where Jim taught, which they called the Norman Bates Boardinghouse because it looked so spooky and haunted that neighborhood kids trembled deliciously when they skulked up the twisty, crumbly- concrete steps to trick-or-treat on Halloween. In the back-yard garden that day Lindsay was on her knees weeding among some delicate blue flowers. Jim pulled up a chair to the table on the back deck. It was the same round glass-topped table they had had on the deck back in their old North Beach days. On the table, beside a gin-and-tonic in which the ice had melted, lay a copy of Ralph’s final collection of poems. Jim picked up Ralph’s book of poems and thumbed through them, stopping here and there to read, while he sipped at Lindsay’s watery leftover gin-and-tonic. At one point Lindsay stood up and stretched, while rubbing the base of her back. She spotted Jim and gave a little wave. For a few moments they simply gazed at each other across the garden. Finally Jim raised the glass as though making a toast, then polished its watery contents off. Jim said, How about I throw some dogs on the grill tonight? Lindsay said, That would be good. And then Lindsay knelt back down to weed among those delicate blue flowers whose name Jim couldn’t recall on a bet.
What Jim had thought about as he watched his wife weed among those blue flowers was what if Alice Ann had been right all along and their lives were all locked in some crazy karmic conjunction. And in that ageless soup of seeds and ancient eggs they had, sure enough, shared countless incarnations jam-packed with lust and love and loss. And so maybe they could all carry forth the hope that they would, indeed, have other chances in other lifetimes to do better by one another.
Lost Chapters and Lost Love Letters
purloined love letters
Dearest L –
How are you keeping? Listen, I haven’t writ but a handful of love letters in my life and those years ago. Let me say I miss you enormously and keep thinking of you even when I’m supposed to be going through the motions of something else down here. I keep remembering your face, your body, your conversation, your silences – you – as well as those wordless moments when all I wanted or felt like was simply to be with you and keep quiet, and watch you move as you fixed breakfast, drew the bath or padded around the bedroom, lovely lady. Looking back I see how strung-out I was, terribly nervous, not able to really trust in the way I wanted to trust, concerned about your feelings for and trust in me, hungover part of the time, and simply zonked out with such a find – that’s you, baby. What did we get ourselves into? Or me anyway, anyway, did you quit smoking? Did you eat the rest of that fine omelette? Sorry I couldn’t do justice to that breakfast, my stomach sending me strange fright messages, mind awash with imminent loss. I still want to make love to you in that bathtub, and in the shower, and in the sea, everywhere, if you are willing. Those few days, Lindsey, were splendid, absolutely splendid and, whether you like it or not, you went right into my bloodstream. But I promise not to pester you with letters and suchlike, unless you want me to. I mean, until you tell me otherwise. Wow, I guess that sounds insecure on my part. So be it. Rough days right now, in any case. At best. But, no fooling, I intend not only to survive but thrive. What else? I fell for you, you know, but I won’t complicate your life unless you want it so. Anyway, Gary and I drove all that Friday and Friday night and arrived in Sacramento – his home – around nine o’clock Sat. morning. Had a terrible blowout in the Datsum at 80mph that about finished us off – that about two hours before I called you. Otherwise no incidents. Both of us flat broke. We each gambled a dollar in nickels at Harold’s Club in Reno at six in the morning. In Menlo Park, that home town of mine, I told Alice Ann that Saturday afternoon about what had happened in Missoula. Not all the details, of course, only that I felt I needed to change my life, that I’d gotten in over my head, that I was fond to distraction of someone up there. And the incredible thing, as I was the first to admit, and she kept reminding me, it all happened in such a short time. I can’t go into all the details of w
hat has transpired here since Saturday, day and night, eternal dialog, but I can say I’d like us to be very careful, very honest, in what we do and say from here on. Example: don’t say you’d like me to come up, unless, wow, you mean it, else you might find me one morning on our doorstep with a suitcase and a box of mss. But tell me what you’d think of my coming up for a week anyway at the end of Sept. I’m absolutely, hopelessly broke and with no prospects for any money until Sept. 25 when I collect my first Stanford fellowship check. If you are agreeable maybe we can find a few days to spend together, absolutely some time alone, eat together, sleep together, and talk, talk. But let me know, love. Maybe I’m coming on too strong, that heart on the sleeve too visible. I haven’t heard from you. But write me, if you can. And by the way, did you get that bundle of stuff, printed and in ms? I mailed it yesterday. At least I left it at a dept store, had them wrap it, postage it, address it, even (my handwriting is so bad, even shaky these days my gawd). Don’t know if it’s a very broad selection, a little of this and a little of that, mostly magazines, most things printed or accepted, the poems from a new book out next spring, no anthologies included, the heavy package too heavy anyway. And for heaven’s sake, don’t feel obliged to comment on any of it, & read it, or some of it, only when you feel like it. Okay?
Love to you, Lindsey,
R.
Dearest L –
This is just the quickest of shots – I drove over the hills to UC last night an picked up your letter (by the bye, now that I’m no longer teaching a class there I won’t have mailbox privileges much longer, but more about that later), and I carried it, unopened, to an all-night café where I took a booth and there I read it, slowly, and read it, and drank coffee, and got weepy, jaysas, I do believe I’m in love. Wanted to see you so bad. Should have called I guess but don’t know if I could have done much more htan babble madly, or blubber, or something, it two in the morning here and I thinking of your little body under light covers there, three a.m., the window open, cool air. Wow, but I’m missing you hard, right now, then. Great, great letter, letters, keep them coming, love, little fish. I dig every word. What else to say re. what you said in the letter? Goddamn I’ve read it ten times and just stopped right here to do it again, and I love it, little fish, love it, hear?
Yesterday was a long good day, highlighted, what a dumb word, by our tele conversation & yr letter, hours and hours later, that letter, but I thought about it and looked forward to it the rest of the day. On the literary and job front here some good, some great news of one sort and another. The O.Henry Prize Stories editor picked that Esq. Story, “Are These Actual Miles?” for inclusion in PRIZE’S STORIES due out next spring. Also was offered the spring quarter at Berkeley, in addition to the winter quarter. That was the reason I was in Berkeley yesterday to see Jordan, the chairman of the dept. Then we, Alice Ann and I, went to an elegant Berkeley hotel cocktail lounge and met with these FICTION mag editor-types, where I saw the blues for issue #2 out in Sept. And then saw the galleys for my story, issue #3, out in Nov., hard on the heels of #2, and a hell of a line-up there as well, and money besides. So I sat there all afternoon while everybody was being properly literary and sipping their drinks slowly and I drank double Smirnoff 100 proof and grapefruit juice, all afternoon, and everytime the conversation would slow or change gears or whatever, all I could think about was you and get dizzy with the mystery of it, the caring. And Alice Ann, who was keeping up with me on scotch, singles, she would look at me, like look at me, you know, and know what I was thinking, knowing each other so well, and altogether it’s a sonofabitch. I’m trying to tell you I love you and that we are going to get it on, you and I, but it is not going to be easy, but we are, you and I. Here I am getting jut a message from the moon here, little fish a lunar beam, mainly to tell you how moved I was, how struck I was by your letter, and to tell you I end my love, my love,
Listen, I’ll write to Buffalo Bill myself, maybe a note when I sign off here, or else tomorrow – but if I can’t get to it for a day or two, and if you see or talk with him, would you ask him to please hold onto that $50 check made out for Sept. 1 until Oct. 1, that’s important. And I know you won’t, you said you wouldn’t, but don’t show any of my letters to or tell Bill, or Kathy, how often we are writing one another. Let’s keep them guessing.
All love, little fish
R.
Dearest L –
This is just a little note, little fish. Got your wonderful letter yesterday. Sometimes I think your letters are the only things that keep me going. But I’m all right, going to get better. Things are settling down a bit, gaining some sort of control and perspective on things. No, no, you have nothing to do with all the crazy business that has been going on down around here of late. Kids have just become incredibly impudent, sassy, bummer-outers in general. My daughter suspended from school for one thing and another. Her grades have hit rock bottom. The boy is on his own trip. Both of them unable to accept any responsibility for their own actions and looking for the nearest scapegoat (s) and that happens to be their parents. Just about ready to let one or both of them go to the slammer (juvey) for a three day stay as has been suggested by a couple of school authorities. Item: the dean of women at my daughter’s school up to talk to her last week, and it ended with my daughter calling the dean an old bitch, then my dear daughter threw the telephone at Alice Ann, giving her a lump on the forehead the size of a golf ball. Whew. Would ship them both out of here off to private schools, out of the country, if there was any money. Have had some powwows lately and have told them they simply can’t take us down with them, that they’ve got our backs against the wall, that we have to survive and have lives to lead, etc., blah, blah, & so on ad nauseum. Anyway, seems to have made a little dent or impression in their collective selfishness. But it’s been a hairy month or six weeks, improving a bit now. Adolescence, ugh.
And how are you, little fish? You always sound good, in fine fettle, when I talk to you on the telephone. Me, I’m afraid lately I’ve been down when we’ve talked, trust it isn’t contagious. Feeling better now, though, as I said, feel closer to my self today than I have in a long time. For a long while, too long, have just gotten by living on my nerves and I had the distinct impression they were simply wearing out. Long to have you come down to Berkeley. Meanwhile I must get back to myself and my work or I’m not worth anything to anybody.
Love you. Dreamed about you last night, that we were making love, I don’t know where, moonlight falling on us, it wss very sweet and we were happy and relaxed, but passionate, too. Hated to wake up.
All love little fish
R.
Dearest L –
Here we go again. I won’t be coming up next weekend, and that looks definite. So sorry I seem to be bouncing back and forth like this. Forgive me if I’m creating emotional and logistical problems for you up there. Please go ahead with your plans for your trip for Thanksgiving. And then come down to Berkeley as soon as you can. I’ll hopefully have a little money soon, so we’ll be able to manage, as long as you can get the time off.
Everything seems to hit the fan around here on Sundays. (Began a story last night called “Sundays” – going to deal with some of this.) Long, hard days, those, it seems. Started off with my announcing that I intended to move in with you next summer, yes, I was very much in love with you, no, I wasn’t going to give you up under any circumstances. I wanted you and a new life. Unequivocal statements, and, I suppose, about as clear and straight as I’ve ever made my position and outlined my plans. Pretty stormy reactions, of course, and then after an afternoon’s and evening’s drinking we decided it would be better if I simply got out of the house now. So I told Alice Ann to just color me gone. That I was going to hop in my old heap and drive day and night until I got back where I belonged, which was by your side. So amid an insane scene of tears and screams and wails, I gathered up some of my sorry possessions and threw them into the car about one in the a.m. and got behind the wheel fully prepared to
getaway from this craziness forever. But the car wouldn’t start. Dead as a doornail. I tried everything. Pushed every knob, even the radio’s, even got out of the car at one point and kicked the tires before it dawned on me – dead battery! I trudged up to the phonebooth on the corner by the gas station to call you (where were you that late?) (not that I really consider it my business) (I mean I don’t doubt you – or your love, at all, really, I’m just curious, that’s all!) Anyway, walked back to the house, and we drank some more, really hit the bottle then, drank and talked, wept, and then ran out of booze and started on coffee. Around six or six-thirty in the morning Alice Ann asked me to stay through X-mas. I’ll have the apartment in Berkeley to myself, probably, by then, and I can just move up there for good, or at least before the big move to Montana and our new life next summer. She’s right of course. That that kind of transition will be much easier on everyone involved down here, X-mas trees business, X-mas shopping, etc., etc. She knows, though, that you’ll be coming down here to Berkeley when you can and what I plan for the future. Said she will “give me my freedom” if that’s what I want. So that’s where it is, and I will stay for now, feel I must, in many respects. As much as anything in all this I’ve hated and been sensitive to hurting Alice Ann’s feelings, her pride. Breaking up is not an easy thing to do, as the song goes. Going to survive this though, no question. Hope I don’t sound too callous, shallow, or analytical. Overwhelming thing now is my feeling of love and caring for you and wanting to make a life with you. Trust the gods that look after these matters will take that fact into consideration when they’re weighing and measuring these things in the years to come. They’ll have to and if they don’t or won’t, I’ll stand against them too.
