Page 21 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

slightest bit comfortable. Yet he yearned for joy and pleasure, even love, as longingly, as infinitely as we all do. But for Yates it was as if having an extra pillow for your bed would cause the muse to vanish. Muses are hard to come by, but they are equally hard to lose.
Some loves never reach fruition, and because they have never existed, they can never die. Instead they diminish and fade, phone call by phone call, letter by letter. After a particularly disastrous evening at the Plaza, Dick sent me a check to pay for our very last dinner there. At the end of the evening, I had left a check on our table for dinner because he had forgot- ten his American Express card and because I had realized I would have to escape the public rever- berations of his drunken soliloquy to me, a speech that began with “I’d eat a mile of...” and ran on into something brazenly scatological and appropriate to be shared among lonely infantrymen in the bunkers of World War II, but not to be broadcast to The Plaza Hotel. This had to end.
The letter of apology was, by then, expected, and included a reimbursement check for dinner, referred to by saying “I don’t know how much you had to spend in the restaurant, but hope the enclosed check will be roughly enough to cover it.” This was so mun- dane, so bare of resonance, it made me sad, and I felt it was a little pitiful, which hurt. The letter was not one of his better efforts. He was, of course, “...wretch- edly sorry...sorrier than Jesus...”. This seemed to me to be taking it a bit far. He then went on to say,
“So I guess we’d better not try that again... Even if any future meetings were possible I could be count- ed on to lose my mind within three or four minutes after your first innocent, bright-eyed reference to your ‘beau,’ and this is a pattern that no amount
of time and forgetfulness is ever likely to change.” That and other patterns—booze and cigarettes on top of emphysema, and the end of caring whether you make a public spectacle of yourself in front of someone you care about.
I sent the check back to him with a note that must have been nice enough, because he wrote me a long letter in response that started off by saying he knew I was “too nice a girl to stay mad forever.”
It wasn’t that he was too old. It wasn’t even that I was all that practical. It was just that it became impos- sible “to stick around,” as he had thanked me for do- ing once when he was too drunk and confused to get himself anywhere quite yet. (“Oh, baby. That was real class.”) It was impossible to breathe in that smoky air,
listen to all that wheezing and coughing, witness the impossible pace of his drinking—the kind of drink- ing that is meant to alleviate life’s pains and that
only makes those unrelenting pains worse. Not that I didn’t have my share of wine. Not that we didn’t laugh a lot. We laughed at all of it as we went along trying to discover what we meant to each other in that bruis- ing bliss we call romance for want of anything more accurate to call it. It was that the air he was breathing was airless air.
There was another collection of short stories, Liars in Love, the first since Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which Dick inscribed to me somewhere in the front matter as follows:
For Margaret, With love and no lies. Richard
But really it was all told that summer evening outside the Plaza, after his scatological love song from the far away land of World War II, meant for the trenches only. I had “vanished” that evening according to a later letter of his. Not really. I had just escaped from the lobby area on Central Park South where the de- nouement of his verbally lecherous scene was being played out to no one in particular. I practically ran to the front entrance of the hotel, then to Fifth Avenue to find a cab, before anybody could tell me I had to do something about him. I’d already tried that. Even he would have agreed.
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