Work Text:
Helen,
Do you remember our fourth date? You remember our fourth date. We went to see But I'm A Cheerleader, at your suggestion. I can still see you at the box office, chewing gum and wearing bell-bottom jeans and saying, it's meant to be gay and fun. Gay, yes. Fun? Oh, Helen. You couldn't have known that afterwards, back at your place, I would start hyperventilating the moment your tongue touched my clit.
As soon as the dread subsided and I could breathe again I left, so abruptly I forgot my underwear, and you called my house. Several times, actually, over several days. Eventually my roommate, whose bedroom was next to the landline, said, Carol, if you don't pick up the phone and call this Helen chick back and tell her you're not interested I swear to god I am going to flush your notepads down the toilet, so I picked up the phone and called you back and stumbled out some version of, the camp part of the movie was difficult for me, and you said, like the genre? And I said, no, the literal camp portrayed in the film, and you said, did you go through something like that, and I said yes.
We met up at a bar, and you brought my underwear in a Ziploc, Helen, which is so, so funny, even now, and it wasn't until we were a few drinks deep and standing outside and I was watching you smoke — god I loved watching you smoke back then — that you said, so were you a Megan or a Graham? I spluttered out a laugh and said, neither, actually, and you nodded, as if you had been expecting me to say that, and then you said, you totally wanted to fuck the Grahams though, right? It was so unlike anything anyone else had ever said to me about that place. You made it feel small.
It's big again, Helen. In the circumstances. Without you. I'm sitting on your grave right now. What a fucking ridiculous sentence. I know we argued about it sometimes, the recklessness for life exhibited by our respective vices, but I never really believed you would die first, let alone young. I still don't really believe it now. Come back, please. Joke's over.
They say they have your memories, and I believe them. Partly because I don't think they can lie, but also because their recall is eidetic, too eerily specific to be compiled from anything other than actual access to seven billion minds, yours included. They can bring old memories into full colour, recreate conversations and moments and meals with pinpoint accuracy. I hate the thought that they remember our fourth date better than I do. For the record, I am 100% sure of the exact moment my throat closed up. But were you really wearing bell-bottoms, or have I transposed a different fashion era onto the year 2000? Did we share a popcorn? Was our phone conversation really so pat? The memory must have faded for you too, a story we occasionally told each other, drifting further from reality every time.
On the topic of your memories: I'm writing because I have a bone to pick with you. I'm kidding, I'm writing because you're dead and I'm going insane and don't know what else to do, but also, it's me, your wife, Carol, and I really do have a bone to pick with you. I knew how you felt about Wycaro, OK? You disagreed with the Raban decision and felt the series went downhill from there — in my defence, it was Val who turned a hit into a trilogy and then demanded a fourth — and it was your right to privately feel that way, and you supported me through it anyway. A straight swap, emotional for financial, only made unequal by the issue of my public persona. I know it hurt you, and then exasperated you, and we talked about it so much in life that it feels unfair to rehash it now, when you have no right of reply. But Helen… do you remember the noughties? Anybody even vaguely famous suspected to be gay was crucified by the press, asked invasive questions in every interview they ever did. It's not my fault that things changed.
But also, you found it hot. You did! You always wanted to fuck me after tour events, and it sure as hell wasn't because of my prose. It was because you got off on being called my manager for four hours and then whisking me away in a cab. You hated it and you were into it. It's fine. Don't be embarrassed. We all have our things. Anyway, I'm not mad about Wycaro, is what I'm saying.
But Bitter Chrysalis? Page 137? It was hardly Finnegan's Wake, Helen. I know you were always quick to put down a book you weren't enjoying. "Life is too short!" you'd say, grabbing your cigarettes and heading outside to make it shorter. Your life was short, in the end, and if you didn't want to spend it reading Bitter Chrysalis, then, fine. You hurt my feelings. But I forgive you.
I do need to say that you might have learned more about me if you kept reading. I keep forgetting they don't know everything about me, which is really another way of saying I keep forgetting you didn't know everything about me. There's so much I never said to you about my time in that place. I know you read the report that came out on it, watched the documentary full of people willing to out themselves as irrevocably fucked up. Couldn't be me. I don't need to advertise that, thank you very much. Just knowing you had seen it made me feel exposed, like you were staring into the black hole at my centre. Once you asked if I had kept in touch with anyone there, and I didn't know how to explain to you that it wouldn't have been possible; that conditions in that place were too arid for relationships to thrive. I didn't need to talk about it. I didn't need solidarity. I just needed benzodiazepines. And then I needed you, taking an impossibly sexy drag of a cigarette, asking if I was a Megan or a Graham.
I know the hyperventilating was a perfect storm of my accelerating heart rate and having just seen the movie and a lot of fucked up stuff around sex with women and all that therapy bullshit. But I think there was another reason too: I was falling for you, hard. (Do you remember when that Gen Z fan wrote they were "down bad" for Raban on Goodreads, and I demanded you Google it to ascertain if it was a compliment?) And yeah, we were in our 20s and poor and it was fun and romantic and I loved it and I love thinking about it, especially now. But falling for you also meant letting go of the quasi-celibate or at least deeply underground life I had imagined, with all the limitations on future happiness that my time in that place had instilled. We barely knew each other and already I wanted more with you, a house, a cat, a kid, a life unfurling in my mind full of all the things I had been told were off limits for me, and — forever my own worst enemy, Helen, I know — I had consequently made off limits to myself.
Coming out for me has always been more about bargaining than liberation. My starting point: you cannot have these thoughts. It took a long time to graduate to having them but never acting on them; to acting on them but only in secret; to having a lover but not a wife. That's why I was so set on marrying you — because I loved you, obviously, but also as a fuck you to the incrementals. A line in the sand that, once I crossed, I could finally stop making deals with myself. (I know you're raising your eyebrows and saying "Raban?" and I'm ignoring you.) You surprised me by being so against it at first. So cynical about embracing an institution that had barred people like us for so long. It was the only time in those 25 years that I saw it written across your face, the shame of grappling with who we were at the time we did, and I wanted to go back in time and fix it, for you and not me for once, which was oddly healing. Sorry that same shame was etched permanently into my brow. I hope you didn't always want to rewind time when you saw it. I hope you knew that just being with you made it bearable. And thanks for relenting on the whole marriage thing. I know you were surprised too, that I wanted it so much, which, respectfully, was stupid. I'm a romance writer, Helen. Of course I wanted to fucking marry you.
I am sure of this memory: we wound up in bed again, after that night at the bar, and god, Helen, you were so scared to touch me. Honestly I'm surprised you didn't insist on bedside Ventolin. I very badly wanted you to kiss my clit again, and you very badly did not want me to have another panic attack, and slowly, tenderly, we figured each other out.
It's getting cold here on the pavers, but I don't want to leave you. The sun just dipped over the horizon, taking the day with it. It's one of those cloudless sunsets you always liked, said they were just as beautiful as the dramatic ones, especially in the desert. Always looked like a screensaver to me. Not even a good one. Orange and blue in Microsoft Paint. But I'm looking at it now, and trying to see it through your eyes, and, OK, Hel, maybe you have a point. Maybe I need to see it your way. Maybe I always should have.
I think what I'm trying to say is sorry, for all the ways that place stopped me from being a better wife to you. For all the times it didn't have to but I let it anyway. I was never as good at making it small as you were. I'm sorry for asking you to step into the closet with me and being a stubborn ass about it for 15 years, up to and including this letter. I regret it, Helen, OK? I regret it. I'm sorry the last thing I ever said to you was telling you to lie about me being into George Clooney. I'm sorry I wasn't there to catch you when you fell.
Love,
Carol