Page 62 - WTP Vol. XII #2

Letter (continued from preceding page)
okay as a letter. I said I thought they should keep her. That’s not what I feel guilty about. How could anyone have been so alone? I could have taken the trouble to see her more. I should have tried to get her to see a doctor. I never knew anyone else who rented furni- ture. What a bad object relationship. She was so in- terested in Melville and James. I thought she was like a character of James’s, repressed and rationalizing her way out of anything. Or like Bartleby, withdraw- ing from life.
Gary
I knew I should have given her the number in Cape Cod. But it was another world from here and my girlfriend and I had a life together for the first time
in a year. I saw Maris a lot when we taught together. We were just friends but we spent time together and talked a lot. I never wanted to go places with her, like parties. We didn’t interact that way—we weren’t a couple. I suppose something could have happened between us. There were times we talked into the night. But she just never attracted me that way. I’d come over her house to talk. I thought she needed me. She drove me home sometimes. What a driver she was. I don’t know how she escaped from killing herself in the car. She might have taken other people with her that way. I liked her but we were never all that tight, not as much as she wanted to believe. I had other friends in the Department, Lewis and Claire, a whole group. I didn’t know that she had even more. She had these wheels
of friends, satellites, they were totally disconnected and every day now I hear about a new best friend, someone I never thought she even knew. She had a queer conversation with me once. She asked me what I thought would be a good way to kill yourself. I said no way would be a good way. I wanted her to go for counseling around here at school. It would have been free. I wish I had talked her into it. I gave her a letter of recommendation for the seminar at Brown. It was all women. I thought it would be a good supporting community for her and she went.
Memorial
Peter Pan. That’s what she was, I decide. Peter Pan, because of the way she had sprung onto the scene sud- denly and full grown. Or Raggedy Ann, as I’ve said, a big child in cotton dresses and granny glasses, never meant to get older. The rest of life just a leftover.
People at school thank me for getting the memorial together. It’s in a wood-paneled room in our class-
room building, not often used. I apologize, maybe there should have been sherry. I thought of it 10 min- utes before, when it was too late. Lewis and his wife come in, dressed up and first, and sit down at the side and she immediately begins to cry. There is a big table for some unknown purpose, maybe a seminar? in the middle room of the room. Ruta comes in and I tell her it could help to have a CV so she offers to go back to Word Processing to run one off. A stocky man with red hair and a beard arrives and sits down, saying nothing. No one knows him when I ask around later.
I feel such a failure, maybe this is guilt. Maybe putting the memorial together is guilt. I leave to get George, my office mate. He says he planned to come but thought it was Thursday because Oliver had the wrong date on the Department memo. Becca who teaches at State College comes in. She has Sabbath
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“Adjuncts aren’t given their own offices. It comes to me
how we are ranked like the military or the church, titles, duties, privileges.”
dinners she invited Maris to and Maris came for the community feeling although she was not any kind of religious.
Adjuncts aren’t given their own offices. It comes to me how we are ranked like the military or the church, titles, duties, privileges. How we’re vying for accep- tance, a kind of shelter. I begin with Maris asking me for my: hairdresser, dentist, swimming pool. Where to shop. For boots like mine. The profuse thanks one day when she got home after buying a great many things and called me. Everything I’d done to help her seems so trivial. I stop speaking. No one follows me for a very long time. I actually call on someone—Becca.
I imagine she will be reading a psalm, as she has indicated earlier. She will not. She talks instead about having Maris to her family’s house in New Jersey. They were two women talking in the country on the front steps. About what? Henry James, she thinks.