684
THALIA SELZ
me sternly by the shoulders. His thin fingers dig through tho
wool of my coat.
"Listen! Can you understand me?
If
your parents ever hear
any of this-from
anyone-I'll
slap that stupid smirk right off
your face myself! OK. Now go on up to bed and try sleeping .
by yourself for a change. What do you think you look like: coming
to me like a slut tonight?"
In the morning I was fortunately still drunk enough to write
him a letter of apology. My rhetoric was high-flown
schoolgir~
but I don't remember what I said except for two things.
One.
That I would die if he didn't answer me.
Two.
P.S. That I loved
him. Now this was not really true, of course, but I was still in the
grip of an arsenic green hangover: the asphalt billowed puckishly
as I crossed the street to the mailbox.
My answer came the next afternoon, by special delivery, and
since I still have it, like all the other letters he wrote me, I'll
transcribe a little of it.
"You do not disgust me. Don't say that! Nothing you ever
do can disgust me, and I'm sorry
if
I said some hard things. I
was furious. At first I felt I had failed you, somehow, for you
to do these things, as I have failed in other ways. Later on I
remembered that you are grown and a free agent and must make
your own choices. But I think you can't really know anything
about death, though you talked so much about it the other night,
or you wouldn't
try
so hard to hurt yourself in these ways. It
is
simply not pleasant or sexy or even easy to die--so don't." There
followed a humorous paragraph about the garden and then a
"P.S. Yes, Daphne, I love you."
By the time I got his letter I was sober, twenty years old,
and yellow with embarrassment. As far as I let myself reflect on
the matter, I perceived that by traipsing drunkenly into his parlor
to confess I appeared to have been issuing another invitation.
Probably I had only our old friendship to thank for the fact that
Joshua hadn't made me right in that overstuffed armchair. Then
I remembered Sarah and Nanette and Vasiliki, and scornfully
concluded that nothing would have happened anyhow. For
of
course it never had.
Just the same, I vowed
to
reform and put the letter
away
