The Correspondence Artist Read Free Page A

head. Hannah was tackling me. I stumbled but managed to stay upright as she yanked at my hair and swung another punch, this time pummeling my left ear. I turned and ran toward the lobby. I heard a scream and looked back. Hannah had pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and was mercilessly clawing at her own arms and howling in my direction, “If you call her again, if you send her another e-mail, I swear to God, I’ll kill you! I saw you kiss in the car! I have a photograph! Bitch! Get the hell out of Israel!” Tzipi had rushed out of the car and was trying to hold a thrashing Hannah in her arms. I ran up to my room without looking back.
    Tzipi later told me that the hotel security had misunderstood her attempt to calm Hannah down, and thought she was attacking her. They ended up pulling the two of them apart. Fortunately nobody called the cops, but it took some talking before everyone calmed down.
    Needless to say, I didn’t do any research that night for my article. The next night I poked around a few clubs in the downtown area and got enough to fill my word count. The section on Jerusalem was a little more thorough, but as you’ll surely understand, I kind of wrote this piece on automatic pilot.
    Tzipi answered my e-mail very graciously. She said it had been a difficult few days after that scene, but that there had also been moments when Tzipi thought she saw a light at the end of the tunnel. She said she liked Hannah very much, and wanted for her to be happy. She said it was funny that I’d expressed shyness, when she so obviously had so much more to feel awkward about.
    I was glad to get back to New York. Sandro found this story pretty amusing. “Wow,” he said. “Cat fight.” I periodically checked my e-mail over the next few days, half-hoping Tzipi would pop back up, but I was mostly getting messages from the Socialist Party USA [spusa] list serve about labor abuses in
Colombia, and a variety of other spam. One evening I found myself writing a poem. I couldn’t resist sending it to Tzipi. It was a sestina, called “Coca-Cola and Violence.” It was about those e-mails I was receiving from spusa-listserv and Hannah’s blow-out in the restaurant. It basically implied we’re all implicated in violence, little and big, political and personal, even if we think we’re trying to be good.
    Tzipi wrote back saying she liked the poem. She’d been confused by the last line, which was a fragment of a torn-up love letter, but she solved the riddle for herself.

    I t’s funny, writing about Tzipi, I began to fall in love with her. Which I can do, because she’s a fictional character. With the real paramour I’m always on my guard. About a year ago I got an e-mail with the not particularly felicitous formulation: “I love you but I’m not in love with you.” As you can imagine, I found this disappointing, but when I really thought about it, honestly, I had to answer that I also felt love but I wasn’t sure I was in love. I attributed this to the fact that my lover was always holding something back. It’s difficult to abandon yourself to passion when you don’t feel safe. When I wrote that, the paramour seemed disconcerted, claiming to have fallen in love only once, in childhood. Romantic passion was a kind of foreign emotion, attractive and yet elusive. And the threat of someone else’s passionate desire was mortifying – particularly if it involved possessiveness. That seemed like a pretty pointed message.
    It’s ironic that I’ve been falling in love with my lover’s fictional manifestation, because when we were discussing what it meant to fall in love (this rather unpleasant exchange evolved into a fairly absorbing philosophical back-and-forth), I could only describe it in relation to fiction.

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    Thursday, June 7, 2007, 2:17 p.m.
    Subject: fiction
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    I knew your answer would begin with several long