In the Garden

London, October, 1970

We are across the Victoria and Albert Museum, at a hotel. Eating strawberry jamies with butter on toast and coffee. Paul spreads the jam so thick.Joce, this is clever but doesn't really belong here. 
The sun shines through in heaps and heaps on top of the small fruit jam, on top of Paul's head and through me. 

(Are you out there? Can you see me? Can you see me as I am? Shining in black against the numbing white and reaching out to you through the mistakes, through the red, will you see me whole? Will you see me as I am? Flash flash) 

J, the trouble with the edits is that we never quite see eye to eye. I am reduced to coaxing you in red pen so that you can accept the actual trajectory of this novel. Remember when we read that collection of D.H. Lawrence letters in bed and you told me, "....well, in the end Frieda was tougher on him than he was on himself." Imagine my discomfort when I found out that I would be equated with a Frieda 

in your life.  If you can only just focus the plot. Tighten it up. -P

Big pines tower above me. I wait out the night in stages.  Or rather, I shouldn't say night. I wait out the madness of the absence of light. Where does the light go? 

A few girls in beautiful dresses 

                                         spill 

out of the party in red and 



                                            blue chiffon. 


Pacing back and forth, I see them segmented. We are at a big party together out in Oxfordshire. I like to think of this time as "where it all began". There is nothing in the coming few stanzas that won't break your heart, reading it, or mine, writing it. 

Did you know "stanza" means "room" in Italian? A small compact space to breathe and live. on the page. No, don't even read this, The magic wears off, the mag


i 
c

I write to you in red, I write to you. I keep thinking of the Messenger accompanying loss, like in Rilke's Oprheus, Euridyce, Hermes:

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.

Nothing else was red.

--

she was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

As I say, I am pacing back and forth and I see the girls segmented. We are at this big party yeah? It's out in Oxfordshire. I want to have a smoke. I like to think of this time as "where it all began". There is nothing in the coming few stanzas paragraphs that won't break your heart, reading it, and that won't break mine, writing it.  I can still smell the peonies bunched together on the top of Worcester. Stacked away for convenience pushed into the smallest space of themselves by busy towns hands. Busy town hands. The euphoria of those first visits is infectious. Where did it all lead but here? Empty-handed with a pen in my hand, alone and starting over. In your mind's eye, of course. Yes yes in my mind's eye.
"How do you know Paul?" The red chiffon asks me as we are out past the smoking gentlemen near the stone balconies pouring out onto the greenest emerald lawn I have ever seen. 

"Paul is a person in my life" and I stumble a little forward, caught off balance. 

"You met in America?" asks the blue. 
"We met in another life. I call it the underneath of this shimmering life, a muted glow"

There is thunder in the distance and it illuminates the fields like a flashlight on a barren page filled with nothing but punctuation and conjugations. 

There is simply nothing there. I try to leave but the music begins. The blue and red chiffons turn their heads together like baby geese. I watch them watch the music unfold. Tenderness swells somewhere in another body but I feel it too. Paul is having a scotch far far from this moment and looks at the violins with curiosity. One of his cuff links has fallen to the ground beside him because his left sleeve is a neat mess, piling onto the forearm in blue folds with grace. So Paul. 

History repeats itself over and over and I'm doomed to just write it out because if I don't write it out, there are no defining moments in the continuum of time. The book of Time can fold upon itself and I'll collapse into Ada, Adam would become an imposing Narrator and Paul would never even  cease to exist.I can feel your warmth and laughter. I love you. 


*
Excerpt from Adam's Journal, Oxford 1881 
I see her coming from a mile away. Clothed in white, for midsummer, she cannot fathom midsummer. The darkness gathers about her alabaster skin in bunches, above and below her eyes. She is not sullied. She's marked. 

"Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience."

I see her coming. No, I don't see her going. She's coming can't you see? But it doesn't matter anyway. Ada stops to stare at the sun pointblank and I see her gold bracelet fall to her elbow and I realize all this time, how many details make up a person. How little I know her. How hopeful one can be about a loved one closed off like a bud in winter, impenetrable, forever remote, aloof, unseen fully. 

We fall in love with the rags of expression off our backs. We never fall in love. 

*

J, this was very moving but I think maybe you are trying too hard. There are too many cracks and interruptions. Why doesn't it flow? What's wrong? -P