376
JOYCE CAROL OATES
9 November
Dear Keith:
I have the power to enter the back doors of lives. A hole
in
space, a black hole, is invisible. I can let myself in the door of your
apartment (eighth floor, but
not
facing the park, is it? very expensive
and yet antiquated and drafty, isn't it?) and wander through the
rooms, wherever I want to go. I have to imagine the carpeting in the
hall: probably new, thick, bought when you moved in a year ago.
Dark green, maybe. Dark brown. The rug on my floor is from Wool–
worth's, straggly and "modern," hunter green. I don't compare the
two of us, you with your family's money and me with nothing (my
father taught high school in Queens but died when I was a child),
you with your "prodigious talent" and me with nothing. I don't com–
pare your bedroom - with those high, elegant windows and drapes,
the expensive furniture - and this room of mine, one single room,
a bed I don't bother to make up. In your bedroom I would walk on
tiptoe, as if in a sacred place. I would go to the closet and open the
door, gently, and thrust my face into it, to breathe the odor of your
clothes, seize one of your jackets and press my hot face against it.
You,
you are present in my hands and my head, a proud prisoner in
my imagination.
You.
You cannot escape.
You refuse to answer my letters. Why?
Ought I to have typed them? But typing is so formal and imper–
sonal, so bleak.
If
you read my handwriting you are already close to
me - almost intimate with me.
Or do you sense how your silence teases me, inspires me? The
building in which I live smells of sewage, and overhead someone is
walking heavily, back and forth, a television set is blaring, children
are yelling, and yet I feel fierce tonight, strangely omnipotent. I don't
know why. I think I am transported out of my own life by the con–
templation of you. Let that bastard walk upstairs, making my ceiling
and walls vibrate, let the children yell, I am free of them tonight. I am
free because of you.
This is my theory: by reading my letters, by scanning this line
as
you are, quickly, impatiently, perhaps nervously (because you don't
know what I might say next, do you?), even by ripping open the
