PEOPLE DIE BUT LOVE IS ANOTHER THING ENTIRELY

It was funny with Ted. We were interested in all the same things, but I did not find him interesting, even when we met again in Le Figaro on Bleecker and MacDougal Streets years after the poetry readings and guitar playing at the folk city and smoking weed, lighting candles and thinking Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, and Gary Snyder were the coolest people we had ever seen, practically prostrating ourselves before them. Did they like it or were they laughing at us? Once as Ted and I sat on the number 6 train to Grand Central where we’d hop on the railroad north to Cold Springs on the Hudson for some literary event, Galway Kinnell sat across the way and called me a high priestess. Again, I almost passed out the way some teens felt about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Elvis at an earlier time.

Ted told me he first spotted me in conversation with a professor. He must have been close because he overheard us and later, stopped me on the campus beneath a gargoyle. I remember because I couldn’t stop looking upward at the creature’s claws as if it would descend upon me and whisk me away to some gothic tower with chiming bells like a scene out of the hunchback of Notre Dame or perhaps, Rapunzel. I must have seemed rude, so preoccupied and I am sorry for that. Though I never felt romantically inclined towards Ted, I did think he was sweet and kind and I felt awful about not loving him back.

He was the first one in the crowd to die. Though we might’ve had a bunch of good years, I would have hated to have grown closer to him only to be left without him at an early age. There were other friends who died, too, but they were considerably older than I, alcoholic and bipolar and they died accordingly: liver damage and suicide though the means of suicide were never the same: pistols, rifles, shotguns in homage to Hemingway; inhalation of gas fumes like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; drowning in the spirit of Virginia  Woolf; jumping off a bridge like John Berryman or noose hanging like David Foster Wallace though now I jump to a new generation.

The man I fell in love with was audacious enough to use my real name in his work like a kind of branding, evidence of his ownership of me. It’s true that my name is not the most unusual. Right off the top of my head, I think of Salinger’s Franny & Zooey. Yet, it caused the most painful attention after he died. What were you doing with a suicidal lover? Was he violent? How did he do it? Were you there when he died? Was it like JFK with half his brain splattering into the air? He was a lot older than you, wasn’t he? Did you love him?

We were not together at the time. He did it with a double-barreled shotgun, the one his father had given him when he was thirteen. I imagine his brain was everywhere. I was told that he sat at a round wooden table, probably from the 1940s, painted comice –pear- green. The chair had been turned toward the window. Even with the curtains, the color of tea from too much sun for too long, he was able to see the pond. There was a rusted metal rowboat. The oars were yellow. He painted them on one of his happy days. “It matches you,” he said. “I think of you as a sunflower or a yellow rose.” When he didn’t like me, I became a wild onion weed or a water-drenched rotten potato root. He and I had often sat in the boat silently listening to the ibis, seagull, cormorant and anhinga, listening to the fish, orange and gold, gently move the water. Once a giant orange fell into my lap from the tree above us and I thought I had never smelled such sweetness like coagulated sugar.

If he hadn’t been an alcoholic, if he hadn’t been bipolar, if he had taken his lithium which he said made him feel as if he were coated in bubble wrap like something being sent off, certainly not human…so the drinking didn’t stop. The personality transformation, reminiscent of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, became too difficult for me. I would watch the alcohol as it slowly worked its magic: eyebrows that moved like snakes up and down along his brow, eyes rolling and rheumy; lips curling as words slurred, speech rhythms irregular as his breathing became shallow. Then the words themselves changed from beauty to beastly, vitriolic, stinging. I would hope he would sleep before another hateful letter was written to a friend, and left in the mailbox, scathing reviews of their books or art exhibitions that I would retrieve later when he snored. I hoped, too, that the words would contain the violence, that the anger would not supersede the boundaries of the alphabet.

Our last goodbye was a phone call. I didn’t realize when he hung up that he would kill himself. Yes, I loved him, so much and his phone call seemed like just a chat. I didn’t hear the underlying message, the allusions to Hemingway and Crane, to his friends who had ended up in institutions. His sad voice, the slur from alcohol, the poetic language all of this was normal for him. “If I close my eyes, I can create an image of you out of the shadows of light. I see you but I cannot feel you. Love is so short, forgetting so long,” he said.

“You lifted that line from Neruda,” I joked. He often used the lines of others without acknowledgment. I had learned this just as I learned he attached himself to the stories others had created, especially tragedies. Tragedies gave him permission to mourn. He had arranged mini-shrines along his mantel for all his dead, tiny photos carefully cut into hearts with flower buds and candles. So I might have guessed what would happen, but I didn’t.

“I didn’t stop loving you,” I said “but you know I couldn’t stay. How could I have stayed?”

The phone clicked or maybe it was the gun. Then, it was all gone but it is not gone at all.

Ted was lovely but he was not the man I loved. It would have been easier but things don’t always work out that way. The man I loved has been with me forever and I imagine he will be there when I die. When I squeeze my eyelids shut, he is there changing forms just as, after awhile, Dr. Jekyll was no longer able to subordinate Mr. Hyde.

Fran Blake