S. Read Free

trust you
not
to seek out. Your dignified useful life, of which I was an ever smaller and less significant adornment, surely will forbid any ugly vulgar furor of detectives and lawyers and warrants. Let me become truly nothingto you, at last. I will change my name. I will change my being. The woman you “knew” and “possessed” is no more. I am destroying her. I am sinking into the great and beautiful blankness which it is our European/Christian/Western avoidance maneuver to clutter and mask with material things and personal “achievements.” Ego is the enemy. Love is the goal. I shed you as I would shed a skin, with some awkwardness perhaps and at first a sensitivity to the touch of the new, but without pain and certainly without regret. How can I—we—regret a phase of life that is already dead? Are not all our attachments, in truth, to things that are already dead?
    If you decide to sell the house or any part of our joint holdings, I of course expect my legal half. If in time you wish to remarry (and I expect you will, not out of any great talent for uxoriousness but because the ferocious sea of seeking women will at some point overpower your basic indifference; the only bulwark against women is a woman, and a wife is
convenient
, especially for spoiled and preoccupied men of middling years) I will ask an appropriate settlement in exchange for your freedom. The affront, to your pride and convenience, of my desertion should weigh little, in any wise court, against the nearly twenty-two years of mental and emotional cruelty you with your antiseptic chill have inflicted on me. More than twenty-two—since I date my bondage not from that rather grotesquely gauzy and bubbly and overphotographed August wedding at King’s Chapel the year our fathers were all for Goldwater but from the moment when you, with the connivance of my parents, “rescued” me from what was so generally deemed to be an “unsuitable” attachment to dear little Myron Stern.
    But enough, my once and only husband. No grudges. Between us the scale is fairly balanced. Darkness, though theplane has moved west with the sun and given us a sunset in slow motion, has at last come, and little unknown cities twinkle below. We are descending. The human pilot has resumed the controls and the pretty little Filipino has reappeared, checking our seat belts with mock concern for our well-being. The fat man has stopped pretending to be asleep and is leaning his bulk into me, straining to see out my window. He fears for his life. In his gross voice he has the temerity to tell me I should put up my tray. I hope he reads this sentence. That is not my hand trembling, but the sudden uncongenial mixture of air and metal—the shaking of the plane. No—I am suddenly
terrified
to be without you (interruption: we have landed and are taxiing)—to be without you now that dinner hour has properly come, and our windows will be black against the yews outside, with the lights of a lone boat moving across the cove, and the automatic garage door will be grinding upward to receive your Mercedes, and rumbling down again, and the stairs up from the basement will resound with your aggressive footsteps, and there you will be, so solid and competent and trusting and expecting your quick martini before dinner. But then I realize that this happened—darkness came to you, you found the house empty, you read my horrible hasty note—hours ago, in quite another time zone.
    Love,
S.
    April 22
    Dearest Pearl—
    Perhaps by now you will have heard from your father. He was always less afraid of the transatlantic telephone—thosestrings of dialled numbers, those crackling foreign accents—than I was. My wiggles, you used to call my writing. When you were two, and we were still living in the little Brighton house, you would crawl up on my lap expecting to see a drawing on my desk as when we crayonned together, and were
so
disappointed to see just my wiggles, little crooked lines all in one