Running After My Hat

[Ed. Note: minor identifying details of this recently discovered letter have been obscured, to preserve the anonymity of the parties involved.]

Dear J_____,

So, you have finally finished me. I suppose I should offer not only thanks but congratulations to you — if so, then, sure: Congratulations! But I also can’t help thinking that maybe we both pulled our weight on this project.

True: you “had” the “idea” for me, twenty years ago. You’ve told the story often enough, in my presence and otherwise; it’s hard for me not to know how it went. You’d just finished reading Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, about the cantankerous elderly friends living out their lives in Wales. And you were in a bookstore — a Borders, wasn’t it? or a Barnes and Noble? — in Marlton, New Jersey, looking around for the next book to read. Maybe a classic, you thought, embarrassed as always and forever by the gaps in your self-education. And there you found it, in paperback: an edition of Le Morte d’Arthur. “I’ve never read that,” you thought. “It’s about time…!”

Well, however it came to you — you need to know: authors don’t own their ideas. Their books don’t even own their ideas. Stories are just sort of floating around all the time, in the air, waiting for someplace to tie up. An author is just a big ol’ Zeppelin mast, and a book the cable which moors the one to the other. So don’t go getting all full of yourself. Right place, right time: that’s you, for once. But that’s me, too. And that’s our big old Zeppelin.

And how’d we do, finally?

You probably have no idea at this point. I know I sure as heck don’t. But it’s been a kickin’ fun ride, hmm?

(I mean, when we haven’t been flat-out sick of each other; people who know each other as long as we have, face it, eventually run out of stuff to say and imagine there is nothing more to say. We’re always wrong about that, of course. And often the best conversations just come out of nowhere, the peculiar sort of nowhere marked by deep, prolonged silence. We had some of that, too, and plenty of those conversations.)

One thing I always enjoyed watching you do was fretting over a plot point that you knew stuck out like a misfit prosthetic. It was almost cute. (Sorry. It was.) You’d sort of write through the awkward moment, often recognizing right away that you’d have to come back later — marking it with [square brackets], and sometimes also caps and boldface and punctuation for emphasis, like [SAY WHAT?!? HAVE GOT TO FIX THIS!] If you were a hairdresser and I was the client, it’d be like a brightly colored clip you fastened to a handful of my hair. All I could do was sit there in the chair and pray that you’d remember it before (in one of your characteristic impatiences) sending me out the door. I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to remind you myself. But I didn’t need it. In the final editing passes you — wily you — had your word-processor’s text-search feature tuned to look for the square left bracket character, knowing full well that you never used it in “real” text.

So you cleaned me up, finally, and then you went through me once, twice, three times with what you hoped was an ever more finely toothed comb of language. I’d see you brought up short by a dull passage. Jesus Christ, your eyes said, If I think this is dull…! Out would come the power tools — a pneumatic jackhammer at the outset, in later phases one of those little battery-powered Dremels — and you’d go to work on the verbs and the prepositional phrases, doing that little thing you do when an adjective bugs you and turning it somehow into a phrase which said the same thing. (A character would not be satisfied, you’d think at such moments; he or she would glitter with satisfaction.)

If nothing else, then, even if you — we — didn’t always do the absolute best for the story, we always managed to keep ourselves entertained with the puzzle of presenting it.

I don’t know what any of that means, not in the big picture. (Remember, at this point I’m no more capable of dispassionate appraisal than you are.) I don’t know what comes next, not really, and am a little scared by it (as I imagine you are). I hope you continue to at least like me, even if “love” right now is a state more to be aspired to than a description of our actual relationship.

But I remember what it was to fall in love, J_____, oh yes I do. And I bet you remember it, too. I think in six months’ time, a year, five years, somewhere downstream, we’ll both be able to look back at this moment and say:

Ah, yes. That’s what I really meant when I said I wanted to love, isn’t it?

Your book, always,
S__________