Page 60 - WTP Vol. XII #2

Letter (continued from preceding page)
a book, knew cancer from experience. And Simone Weil, because she was French and I didn’t know who they were taking about, I’d only seen it written. They both pronounced the name “veh,” not “vile.” I would have to look her up. When I did, I understood Maris’s admiration, how she must have identified with Weil’s martyrdom, her refusal to eat. I had a word or two
to say about Cioran, I shared Sontag’s admiration. Otherwise, I didn’t know what I was doing there at the outskirts of the conversation, struck as I was by something like aphasia. I ended up apologizing for Philadelphia, with its grid of streets and containment. Where was the room for free spirits? Yet it was where I was born and felt safe, enclosed, even if I knew that the quick world of New York, only 90 miles away, was where people who were going places went.
Just allowed to be in Sontag’s presence felt a kind of boon. A critic was like a debater, I decided, as she
and Maris talked and ate, each making a vehement argument for a point. And Sontag became noticeably more friendly and more animated when we assured her that lunch was on us. I don’t think Maris was able to personally take up any more of Sontag’s time after- wards although she would have liked to, but at least it ended being a pleasant meal. Sontag, surely we called her Susan, assured me I had no reason to regret being a Philadelphian, it was just a place where you lived. As for Maris, I wondered how she liked it here. To someone new, it might seem a cold, stone city, a place of closed doors. Of course, she never said so.
I had to wonder what she really felt about anything. Did she not have a self? Was she trying on person- alities—some bland mirror of whoever she was with? Did we see in her the calculated exteriors of ourselves? Why could I not remember if she lived on Pine or Spruce? Why did I have two duplicate entries for her in my address book, several pages apart, as if I had forgotten I’d put her in? Did I always frame her in the interrogative? What had occurred in the four or five years of her life before I knew her, which she never did quite account for? Most of all, most of all, why had she not tried to call in those last awful days?
I hadn’t let her come visit at the cabin in the country where we, my boyfriend and I, spent weekends. I remembered having told her it was purposely off
the grid, away from people. It was a special, secret place for him to recover from a hectic week, and no one was to know on the chance that they might come back. But then that phone call. How did she even find the number? She was very close, they were very close, she and our friend Gary, driving on a highway
maybe an hour away. I didn’t drive, I couldn’t even give them any more direction. I didn’t know exactly how to get here myself. Anyhow it was a delicate situation, it wasn’t my decision to invite them or not. Later, even at the time, this weighed on my mind. The trouble was she was so insistent. You always felt you had disappointed her when you didn’t give in.
~
Her father was a suicide. She described his act as “be- ing summoned.” I don’t think she told me how he
did it. Her plan would be foolproof, a combination of plastic bag, liquor, sleeping pills, the gas stove turned on and unlit. I remember her apartment by the little Cinderella Pocket Park, one room, I think, a dropped ceiling, a sofa she probably slept on; not enough light, no touch of color, nothing on the wall. A big white Formica kitchen table where she graded papers and wrote. The smell of gas from the leaky stove I had noticed and told her to get checked. A furrier was
on the first floor, I’d thought always of dead animals when I came by.
If someone turns up somewhere out of the blue, knowing no one, revealing scarcely anything about her life before, what can you make of her? As if she were being born again into this strange city, this scholar’s life, gypsy scholar, we all were, l joked, we adjuncts. And it was very good, her scholarship. She had a book all ready to go to press, “Endings in Lit- erature” or “The Literature of Endings.”
Department Head
I’ll tell you what I know but I don’t know how much that is, Oliver said, and I don’t want to know any more. Ruta, in Word Processing (we didn’t
yet use computers), was a good friend of hers and she said it wasn’t anything professional, that it was personal. I couldn’t give her another year in the Department anyway. People wanted me to
let her go after the first year. She lied about the degree. And then she wouldn’t always meet class and the head of Comp was friends with her first landlord here and said she skipped on a lease. And nobody gets a Dean’s appointment renewed. You didn’t. She would come in here and drive me crazy. Couldn’t I do anything for her? She came
in with letters of recommendation, a letter from her publisher. Look, I don’t have much time. I just had a lousy weekend myself. Here’s the detective’s number. Detective Sanford. Call if you want. He
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