Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Rope-soled sandals in a sort of cave, from which issue recorded jungle noises. Candy stores with false fronts like miniature castles. These masquerades are too various, too tiring. One day I go into a supermarket to buy some bread and oranges and the girl at the cash register is dressed in a burlap sack, her face is smeared with mud and red paint, she has a plastic bone stuck through her hair. They are promoting raisins, and beef from Australia. But she smiles at me humanly, wearily, through the mud and paint, she reassures me; there is somebody in most of these places who can do that.
    I see myself searching these streets for some memory of you as I once looked for clues in the articles you wrote for newspapers and magazines, in the books you wrote so efficiently to serve others’ purposes, never your own. Amusing and informative you are, so skilled you verge on elegance, but you hold back, even from that. Is that all there is, I hear myself asking, and you laughing, indulgently; what more could there be? But I am not convinced, I keep after you, I desire revelations.
    If I had to describe you, as I secretly see you, I would say that you are uncompromising. And you would say impatiently that you have compromised all your life. But that is not what I mean. I will say it: you are uncompromising, angular in some thoroughgoing way (body and spirit together), chaste, kind but not compassionate. I would emphasize that there is something chivalric about you. I do expect you, like a knight, to be capable of acts of outmoded self-sacrifice and also of marvelous brutality, both performed with the kind of style that indicates obedience to secret orders.
    You, on the other hand, would describe yourself as genial, corrupt, ordinarily selfish and pleasure-loving. You would look over your glasses at me like some mild inflexible schoolmaster, put out by my extremity. We would have to consider my being in love, the way I am in love, as if it were a curable extravagance, a highhanded assumption in an essay.
    From the beginning, of course, I knew that this was a dangerous way to live. At any moment the ties may be cut, have been cut, there is no knowing where the failure originated, whether it was by your wish or beyond your control; there is nobody I can complain to. Always before, at the last moment, rescue arrived. My brief wild letter, final desperation, and then your letter of humorous, somewhat tender, apology, which tells me there was never any danger. I was on solid ground all the time, you never left me. As if this hole I fall into, which is the permanent absence of you, is nothing but a dream I scare myself with, or at worst a place from which I have only to cry out hard enough, convincingly enough, for help, and help will come.
    I find myself reading articles in women’s magazines. Case histories. When my faith is restored, and riding high, I skip over these lessons superstitiously; when it is low, and very low, and gone, I read them for comfort, because it is a comfort to discover that one’s own case holds no particular agony, only some shopworn recognizable pain. Other women have recovered and offer encouragement. Martha T., mistress for five years to a man who deceived, mocked, and fascinated her. I fell in love with him because he seemed so gentle, she says. Emily R., whose lover was not married as he claimed. And how often talking to both men and women I hear myself in witty and rueful pursuit of this theme—how women build their castles on foundations hardly strong enough to support a night’s shelter; how women deceive themselves and uselessly suffer, being exploitable because of the emptiness of their lives and some deep—but indefinable, and not final!—flaw in themselves. And further and further along this line which everybody is learning these days like an easy song. Meanwhile my heart is cracked, also like the heart in a song, it is dry and cracked like a bare bit of landscape marked with gullies. I cry with Martha T. and Emily R. and wonder what possible way they managed to cure themselves. By learning macramé? By deep breathing? Once a friend of mine—a woman, of course—said to me that since pain was only possible if you looked backward to the past or forward to the future she had eliminated the whole problem by living every moment by itself; every moment, she said, was filled with absolute silence. I have tried this, I will try anything, but I don’t understand how it works.
    I have bought a map.