Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

patch of land above the river, where students—the unmarried ones, of course—went to make halfway love in the daytime, all-the-way love at night. Nobody was there that day. It was too early in the year, the munificence of the weather had taken everybody by surprise. It was an awkward place to walk with the stroller. As you said, you had to lift it over rocks and muddy stretches of the path. Our conversation had to be hauled over similar difficulties. We said nothing of importance. We never touched each other. We became more and more uncomfortable as it became apparent that our walk was not going to accomplish what we pretended we wanted it to do—give us an hour’s easy company in the pleasure of the day—or what we really wanted it to do. This kind of tension was new to me then. I could not gauge and manipulate, as later with other men. I could not even be sure it extended beyond myself. I said good-bye to you feeling as if I had behaved awkwardly, uninterestingly, on a date. Next day, or the day after, when I was reading as usual on the couch, I felt myself drop a lovely distance, thinking of you, and that was the beginning, I suppose, the realization of what more there could still be. So I said to you, “I was in love.”
    Would you like to know how I am informed of your death? I go into the faculty kitchen, to make myself a cup of coffee before my ten o’clock class. Dodie Charles who is always baking something has brought a cherry pound cake. (The thing we old pros know about, in these fantasies, is the importance of detail, solidity; yes, a cherry pound cake.) It is wrapped in waxed paper and then in a newspaper. The Globe and Mail , not the local paper, that I would have seen. Looking idly at this week-old paper as I wait for my water to boil I see the small item, the modest headline VETERAN JOURNALIST DIES . I think about the word veteran , does it mean a veteran, someone who fought in the war, or is it a simple adjective, though in this case, I think, it could be either, since it says the man was a war correspondent—Only then do I realize. Your name. The city where you lived and died. A heart attack, that will do.
    I am in the habit of carrying around your last letter in my purse. When the next letter comes, I replace it, I put it with all the earlier letters in a box in my closet. While it is fresh in my purse I like to take the letter out and read it at odd moments, for instance if I am sitting having coffee in some little café, or waiting at the dentist’s. Later on I never take the letter out at all, I grow to dislike the sight of of it, folded and dog-eared, reminding me what weeks, what months, I have been waiting for the new letter. But I leave it there, I don’t put it in the box, I don’t dare.
    Now, however, after I have taught my class, lunched with my colleagues, met my students, done whatever else is required of me, I go home and remove this letter, this last letter, from my purse, put it with the others and shove the box out of sight. Deliberately, almost painlessly I do this, having thought the act out beforehand. I make myself a drink. I continue with my life.
    Every day when I come back from teaching I see the mailbox and to tell the truth I experience something pleasant, a lack of expectation. For two years that tin box has been the central object in my life, and now to see it go neutral again, to see it promise and withhold nothing very much, that is like feeling a pain gone. Nobody knows I have lost anything, nobody knew that part of my life, except in a general, rumored way; when you came here we did not see people. So I am able to continue, as if it never happened, you never happened. But after a while I do tell somebody, a man I work with, Gus Marks. He has recently separated from his wife. He takes me out to dinner and we drink and tell each other our stories, then mostly on my initiative go to bed. He is hairy and sad, I am frenzied. I surprise myself. A few days later he asks me for coffee and says, “I’ve been worried about you, I’ve been wondering if maybe you should—see somebody.”
    “A psychiatrist, you mean?”
    “Well. To talk.”
    “I’ll consider it.”
    But I laugh at him to myself, for I am absorbed by another plan. As soon as the term ends, in late April, I mean to go to visit you, to visit the city where you have died. I have never been there. It was never suggested. Looking forward to this trip, I become remarkably cheerful. I buy some